Volume VI,8 of the New Edition of Robert Schumann’s Complete Works combines opera of compositions for two or three voices with piano accompaniment. In these compositions Schumann utilises the many possible combinations of two or three voices singing in the same or varying registers: Included are rather unpretentious communal declamatory song, seemingly more artistic polyphonic singing that intensifies the settings, even to the point of canonic structure, as well as various forms of dialogue, with both the unanimous and the contradictory change of mood.

The New Robert Schumann Edition (RSA) is intended as a historico-critical edition of the collected works. They will be carefully studied and prepared according to present-day musicological and editorial techniques and presented in their entirety. Drafts, sketches and fragments, in short, everything that has come down to us as being authentically by Schumann and which, in most cases, has been deliberately preserved by him, will be brought together, evaluated as to its importance and documented in some form or other in the edition of the complete works.

It is the aim of the edition to reproduce authentic texts which – having corrected scribal, copying and printing errors and eradicated later additions and other textual corruptions – will approach as closely as is possible the intention of the originals.

The critical edition will form the basis of accurate performance material for Robert Schumann‘s work.