Instead, because 'everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of things,' 8 he postulated that children were innately virtuous and were capable of being guided to reason. Emile comprised Rousseau's rejection of the 'spare the rod and spoil the child' mentality of church-dominated school systems it soon became 'the most censored, banned, and therefore sought-after book of the century.' 7 Rousseau denied the notion that men were irreparably tainted by original sin or that children were merely imperfect adults who needed only to be whipped into conformity. These turn-of-the-century developments in educational theory, child psychology, and learning psychology were set into motion by the publication of Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762. Hausmusik fit squarely into a general constellation of Enlightenment ideas concerning self-cultivation, self-education, and civic humanism known as Bildung. The piano, the instrument of choice for Hausmusik because of its reasonable cost and its unique ability to reproduce multiple-voiced textures, soon became a ubiquitous feature of Biedermeier parlors. 5 By relying on a tripartite emphasis on home, church, and nature, Hausmusik aimed to raise the cultural literacy of its middle-class practitioners.

By cultivating specifically 'German' traits of seriousness, simplicity, and Volkstümlichkeit, Hausmusik set itself apart from that large body of aristocratic French and Italian salon music which the press criticized as being frivolous, artificial, and corruptive of good taste. Fractured into a myriad of states, the Germany of Schumann's day sought and found in the arts an affirming force for unification. 4 The development of Hausmusik coincided with the growing debate in the 1840s concerning the social dimensions of music. The sacred intimacy of the Hausmusik setting, eloquently if sentimentally preserved in the etchings of the famous nineteenth-century illustrator Ludwig Richter, contrasted starkly with the sumptuous and contrived elegance of the aristocratic salon as well as with the grandeur of large public performance spaces. Hausmusik, 3 literally music designed for playing at home, was a repertory distinguished primarily by its place of performance and only secondarily by its style or genre. This article attempts a broad evaluation of the Album by providing documentation and discussion of the following: the historical and political contexts of Hausmusik as a signature concept of nineteenth-century bourgeois sensibility, the sources of Schumann's pedagogical philosophies, the developmental history and design of the Album, the reception history of the Album, and the influence of the Album on German and American piano pedagogy. While it can be argued that the Album was and is the most widely known of Schumann's works, its significance as a historical, musical, and pedagogical document has been largely overlooked. The spectacular and instantaneous success of the Album inspired Schumann to write many more pieces for children, spawned a host of copycat publications, and most importantly, popularized a forward-looking pedagogical philosophy whose ramifications extended into the twentieth century.

68, not only revolutionized attitudes concerning music education, but also inaugurated an entirely new genre of piano literature-programmatic music written explicitly for children.

Schumann's initial essay in this genre, the Album for the Young ( Album für die Jugend), op. Therefore, in the final decade of his life, he began composing works aimed at satisfying the escalating middle-class demand for Hausmusik. 1 At the same time, Schumann was concerned about the poor quality of pedagogical piano music available for teaching his own young daughters. He regretfully conceded that the financial responsibilities of supporting a wife and family had forced him to consider not only 'artistic fruits' of his labor but also the 'prosaic' ones. In 1843, Robert Schumann noted that his highly original if slightly bizarre piano cycles of the 1830s had not endeared him to the public or to his publishers.

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