More positively, taking pleasure in music is the most obvious sign of comprehension, the proof that we understand it, and we may extend that to sympa… - Charles Rosen

Beethoven is the first composer to represent the complex process of memory-not merely the sense of loss and regret that accompanies visions of the past, but the physical experience of calling up the past within the present.

Schumann's humor is rarely either witty or light: the unrealizable musical structure, the musical motto hidden and partly inaudible, must have stirred his musical fantasy.

The song cycle is the most original musical form created in the first half of the nineteenth century. It most clearly embodies the Romantic conception of experience as a gradual unfolding and illumination of reality in place of the Classical insistence on an initial clarity. The form of Schubert's song cycle is not less precise than that of a Classical sonata, but its precision is only gradually comprehended as it unfolds.