“Blinder Naturalist […] ohne Führung”: Schumann’s op. 127 n. 5, Shakespeare, and the 19th-century “wanderer trope”

In Western musical experience and culture, there has been a kind of musical tourism which is not interested in outward events and places, in material documents and data, in tangible musical instruments and scores, etc. Such kind of musical tourism may be summarized as «the wanderer trope in the nineteenth century» (Julie Hedges Brown), whose «viaggio fantastico è molto spesso un viaggio nel sé, figurato nelle forme del fuori di sé» (Alessandro Serpieri). Robert Schumann (1810-1856) may be seen as the (Romantic) ‘musical wanderer’ par excellence. My paper will exemplify and examine Schumann’s cultural-musicological and compositional articulation of «the wanderer trope in the nineteenth century» in the Schlußlied des Narren aus Was ihr wollt op. 127 n. 5.