Imagined Communities Made Real: The Impact of Robert Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on the formation of Music Communities in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson examined the power of the printed word in the establishment of large intellectual communities and showed how the ritualized reading of continuous publications such as daily newspapers and weekly magazines creates a sense of “imagined community” among readers. Anderson's concept of the imagined community can be used as a catalyst to explore the ideology behind Robert Schumann's creation of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and to demonstrate the impact this journal had on the formation of smaller, although no less unified, intellectual music communities during the mid-nineteenth century—namely, the Copenhagen Davidsbund in Denmark and the Neu-Weimar-Verein in Germany.