War of The Romantics - The Leipzig Conservatives

The Leipzig Conservatives

Clara Schumann, Joseph Joachim and Johannes Brahms were early key members of a conservative Leipzig-based group of musicians. This core of supporters maintained the artistic legacy of Robert Schumann who had died in 1856. Joachim was a professor at the Leipzig Conservatoire founded by Mendelssohn, at which Robert Schumann had also been a teacher.

Robert Schumann was both an enthusiastic admirer and occasional critic of Liszt and Wagner. Schumann had been a progressive critic and editor of the influential music periodical Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which he founded in 1834. Schumann maintained exceptionally enthusiastic and artistically fruitful friendships with the emerging vanguard of radical romantics — Liszt in particular — as well as with musical conservatives such as Mendelssohn and Gade.

However, after Schumann sold the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik to Franz Brendel it became an enthusiastic supporter of Liszt and his circle. Clara Schumann had long been the more conservative aesthete in the Schumann marriage. She perceived the change as a slight against her husband’s legacy. The young Brahms, who had been very close to the Schumanns during Robert’s decline, also took up the cause. The conservative critic Eduard Hanslick was very influential on their behalf. Associated with them at one time or another were Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Friedrich Gernsheim, Robert Fuchs, and Karl Goldmark, among others.