THERE ARE NO TRANSLATIONS.” This lapidary formula, invented by George Steiner in 1958 (in the afterword to a translation of Thomas Mann's Felix Krull by Denver Lindley), has long been a source of fertile amusement to one of the editors of Music and Literature in German Romanticism. I should add straight away that it was the writer of this foreword who introduced him to it, and I should probably explain that quite apart from my own unabashed admiration for Steiner's work in general, the phrase itself has often served as a lofty (if ironic) excuse for my own incompetence in finding satisfactory renditions in English for a multitude of German expressions, not all of them connected directly to matters musical. If Steiner is right in his assertion that each language frames the world differently (“Pain is not ‘bread’ ”), how much more so is this the case between language and music. Indeed, the obvious paraphrase of Steiner's illustration in the context of this volume might be “Music is not Language.” One could add, perhaps, that this paraphrase circumscribes the debate which lies at the heart of German Romanticism itself.

The publication of this volume, which marks a vital contribution to the growing body of work that has addressed the subject of music and literature in German Romanticism within the past twenty years, is a richly significant event. In the disinterested (and increasingly virtual) world of international scholarship, Music and Literature in German Romanticism will take its place as an interdisciplinary meditation of immense value on those enduring issues and themes that have dominated our recent reception of the German literary and musical imagination. Anyone with even a passing interest in this subject will surely welcome these freshly written and authoritative deliberations on German musical aesthetics, on Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Brentano, Goethe, Hoffmann, Liszt, Novalis, Ritter, Schubert, Wagner, and Wackenroder, to say nothing of the afterlife of Romanticism in the fiction of Robert Schneider and in the sound of the theremin.