New perspectives on Robert Schumann's poetic work

The editorial project “Robert Schumann's Poetic World (RSPW). Drama – Oratorio – Vocal Symphonies – Literary Works. Historical-Critical Hybrid Edition” is scheduled to run for 24 years and is funded as part of the Academies' Program. Based at the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich, and the Trier Center for Digital Humanities (TCDH), Robert Schumann's artistic oeuvre is being explored in its entirety for the first time in a historical-critical and digital format.

The project, led by Prof. Dr. Ulrich Konrad (Würzburg), Prof. Dr. Stefan Keym (Leipzig), and Prof. Dr. Anne Bohnenkamp (Frankfurt am Main), focuses on a 19th-century composer who combined music, poetry, and music journalism from a Romantic perspective. Like no other artist, Robert Schumann pursued his concept of music and language in the forms of opera, oratorio, and new vocal-symphonic genres in a determined and interconnected manner, reflecting on his work until the end in poetic and music-writing works and in constant exchange with artists of his time.

The aim of the project is to reconstruct Schumann's poetic world for the first time in its entirety by means of a historical-critical edition of his central body of writings, poems, and vocal compositions, taking into account intermedia and historical references. The various media manifestations will be presented both on an open-access platform and in printed volumes. Twenty-two volumes of sheet music and a digital edition of his poetic and literary works are being compiled. The project combines basic editorial and philological research with a long-overdue reassessment of his reception history, using an interdisciplinary approach that brings together musicology, literary studies, and the digital humanities. As part of the digital edition, the “Neue Zeitschrift für Musik” (NZfM) will also be historically and critically edited for the first time. 

The TCDH provides the technical infrastructure, forms the interface between musicology and computer science, and is responsible for implementing the digital edition. In addition to verbatim text transcription, it also carries out content indexing, links to standard data, and editorial processing of the text's genesis. Text recognition tools such as OCR are used for this purpose, as well as the “Transcribo” tool developed by the TCDH for transcribing texts and the virtual research environment “FuD.” Both are used in numerous TCDH edition projects and have already been successfully tested. All data is kept freely accessible in accordance with open access principles. The project thus offers opportunities for further projects to connect.