In 1857, the year after Robert Schumann's death, Franz Brendel, editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik since 1845, announced a new initiative for the journal: to research the means of

In saying ‘I regard it as one of the next tasks of this journal to promote this advance’, he invoked as the starting point a series of abstracts that were currently appearing in the journal – abstracts of Friedrich Theodor Vischer's Aesthetics, or Science of the Beautiful of 1846–57, the music-aesthetic material of which had just appeared in the final volume.

This series of abstracts was written by one Ernst von Elterlein, apparently a legal official in Waldheim, Saxony with amateur musical interests, of whom virtually nothing is known, and whose name is said by Riemann to be a pseudonym for Ernst Gottschald. He produced, in all, seven such abstracts, in eleven instalments, giving himself the task of ‘presenting Vischer's aesthetics, which I have studied for years in isolation, to the musician in a series of letters’.

Von Elterlein also wrote two books of analyses of works by Beethoven. Since these were published in 1854 and 1856, it is right to see them against the background of this private study.