The five composers represented in this series sit at the core of the Western art-music tradition, and have received an enormous amount of critical and scholarly attention. Beethoven and Schubert worked at the cusp between the Classical style and Romanticism; Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin formed part of what Charles Rosen called ’The Romantic Generation’, a group of composers born around 1810 who could be said to have invented musical modernity. Each of the five volumes in this series focuses on the work of one of the four selected composers, and the volume editors have been tasked to throw their nets as widely as possible, in order to capture not just the latest scholarly perspectives on this music, but also older, perhaps less fashionable, but arguably still invaluable literature. Priority has been given to items in English, but a few seminal contributions appear either in a foreign language or in new, previously unpublished translations. Extended introductions also situate the contents of individual volumes in broad scholarly contexts. This major reference series is a substantial addition to scholarly research into the work of the Early Romantic composers, providing increased access to the published literature for scholars and students and an invaluable reference source for libraries.
