For much of his career, Robert Schumann was better known as a music critic than as a composer. At the age of twenty-one, he began writing for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung with a encomium to the young, unknown Chopin – ‘Hats off, gentlemen – a genius!’ Robert’s final essay ‘Neue Bahnen’ (‘New Paths’), published in 1853, similarly heralded the arrival of the young Brahms. This appeared in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the music journal Robert had established almost single-handedly in 1833–4 and edited (and managed) from 1835 to 1844. Under his decade-long control, the pages of this journal included dozens of his own essays, editorials, concert reviews, and, most abundantly, reviews of recently published music. ‘Neue Bahnen’ capped the most significant corpus of writing about music from the first half of the nineteenth century.