A friend who's in the process of reviewing this book for the LRB emailed me last week saying: 'I've suddenly realised that he [Schumann] is the centre of everything.' Without wanting to pre-empt his article, I thought I'd offer up that nugget to the messageboard wolves.

Has anyone read, or had a chance to look at, the Worthen book, which I think has just come out? Is it (likely to be) any good?

When I did a 2nd-year undergraduate course on Schumann the standard text seemed to be John Daverio's book:But the course I took seems to have led me to some false assumptions about Schumann's relationship to his predecessors, Bach in particular, which Ian kindly corrected me on the other week, since when I've been meaning to do some more reading around the subject.

Any thoughts on any of this?

Centre of everything? I'm not sure I'd go quite that far (I suppose Bach, Mozart or Beethoven seem rather more obvious choices for that position), but he's certainly one of my favourites. For a while I've been particularly drawn to the works of the last decade and a bit (adore Genoveva, an opera that's far to seldom produced and of which only two recordings exist (listen to it after listening to Tannhäuser!), love Der Paradies und die Peri, Manfred, Requiem für Mignon, Der Rose Pilgefahrt, and lots else), and especially the choral works (can't recommend this set enough, and it's amazingly cheap). I haven't looked at Worthen's book yet - does the guy reviewing it have any thoughts on whether it either offers new archive-based data, or any new musical, biographical, social, cultural historical perspectives? Daverio is very good, probably the best of its type in English, but Schumann scholarship hasn't been a particularly fruitful area in this language (especially in the UK). I've just got the new Cambridge Companion to Schumann, which is not bad (those Cambridge Companions tend to be extremely variable in quality. There's more stuff by Daverio in there (some of the last stuff he wrote before he died, I think), a very good article by Jonathan Dunsby on the lieder and song cycles, and various other interesting chapters by Ulrich Tadday, Scott Burnham, Joseph Kerman, Nicholas Marston and others, and a particularly interesting chapter by Jörn Peter Hiekel on contemporary works that relate to Schumann. But I haven't kept up with all the recent Schumann scholarship (I've been reading more about Clara than Robert recently) - there's far more written in German, a lot of which I'm led to believe is of very high quality. There's no English translation of the Tagebücher or anything more than a tiny selection of the writings, though the complete Robert/Clara correspondence is available in a very good translation (though vastly more expensive in English than the German volumes are). All of this stuff is of great interest. Don't touch Peter Oswald's book with a bargepole!

With respect to the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann was certainly influential in setting up a new, radical magazine of music criticism, but he did only stay as editor for nine years, after which it moved in a very different direction. Schumann could have been the figure who could bridge the distinct camps in the 'War of the Romantics' (though the way things were going in his last years, using his championing of Brahms as a retort to the different aesthetic stance of Franz Brendel, this maybe is unlikely). But I find it fascinating to imagine what might have been different if he'd lived another 20 or 30 years.

Will post some thoughts on particular works at some point.

For me, the "Scenes from Goethe's Faust" is/are superb...though I have that feeling about almost all his works...centre of everything? Needs a definition of "everything" methinks...

Certainly central to my musical life.  Schumann seems to exercise a tremendous hold on his admirers and I've always thought it stems from the Florestan/Eusebius duality that characterises his work and with which I suspect, many of us may identify.  Only Elgar equals this degree of personal association with music for me.
There is such simplicity of means in so much of his music and so much expressive content that I think he is only equalled by Schubert and perhaps Chopin, at least that's how I hear it.
The Album for the Young contains quintessential Schumann pieces, endearing and moving and can be approached by modest players, much else is difficult, as much for its expressive demands as in its technical requirements.  A day without Schumann is a poorer day.
Barthes wrote a good essay 'On loving Schumann' , well worth reading.

Dichterliebe is probably my favorite album released before 1960. Every time I go back to it (listening these days more than singing), I find something new.

You're right, even my very pared down list should have included the Konzertstück. Four chromatic horns -- what a naive fool he was!

Also, my list was not meant to be merely a best of Schumann, but more a list of pieces that combine quality with risk-of-being-overlooked. So it's perhaps consistent that you don't know these pieces. Otherwise, I'd certainly have also included op. 17

I can definitely feel sense in what you're saying there (I have Horowitz's comeback performance of the Schumann C-major Fantasy in mind when I say this).