"... so merkt man ihr allerdings den achtzehnjährigen, unbeholfenen Komponisten an..."

Robert Schumann und die Wiener Rezeption von Hector Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique

Abstract

In the course of the aesthetic controversy of the 19th century over programme music, which was particularly intense in Vienna, 'conservative' as well as 'progressive' ciritcs, who wrote for the daily press, endeavoured to appropriate Hector Berlioz for their personal aesthetic convictions. Even for reviews written in the 1860s and 1870s, when Berlioz's large-scale works were first performed by leading Viennese orchestras, Robert Schumann's review of the Symphonie fantastique (1835) played a significant role. Schumann's appreciative assessment of the symphony, which was strongly influenced by his misconception that Berlioz was only eighteen years old at the time of composition of the Symphony fantastique, had a decisive influence on the journalistic discourse on Berlioz in Vienna far beyond the first half of the century, for example on Hugo Wolf and Edmund Schelle. Other critics, such as August Wilhelm Ambros and Eduard Hanslick, took Schumann's ambiguity as their starting point to validate their less positive judgements.