A Text-Critical Analysis of Robert Schumann's Violin Concerto in D Minor, WoO 1, in Comparison with Other Romantic Violin Concertos

Composers of violin concertos in the nineteenth century usually relied heavily on the assistance of skilled violinists to produce works that satisfied the genre's need for technically demanding, idiomatic passages while also fulfilling the ideals of musical Romanticism. Violin concertos by Mendelssohn and Brahms, for example, underwent a long process of editing by both the composer and the technical consultant involved; the main function of these edits was to solve technical problems.;By contrast, Robert Schumann's Violin Concerto in D Minor, WoO 1, was not the product of such technical consultation, and Clara Schumann and Brahms withheld the work from publication after the composer's death in 1856. This dissertation examines the technical problems that may have prevented the work's acceptance into the repertoire. The goal in describing these is to demonstrate how subsequent reworkings of the solo part, notably by Joseph Joachim in the nineteenth century and by Paul Hindemith in the twentieth, have been aimed at recasting the work in the vein of a "virtuosic concerto," a category that prioritized the demonstration of a player's technical skill over the depth of feeling and harmonic content celebrated by Romanticism in general and Schumann's writings in particular. An additional goal is to offer suggestions about how some of the work's technical problems might be solved in order to perform the work effectively without sacrificing the composer's musical ideas. Comparison with other Romantic violin concertos demonstrates that works that are now staples of the repertoire were also originally cast as "unplayable.".