"No disapproval will be able to depress me and no praise will make me lose my head." So ended the letter with which twenty-year-old Robert Schumann asked Friedrich Wieck, the most sought-after piano teacher in Leipzig, for tutoring in 1830.
The following year he was living with Wieck, who had a daughter, Clara, who played the piano beautifully at the tender age of twelve. On the other hand. Ernestine, also a pupil of Wieck, was already around sixteen. And by the time Robert and Ernestine von Fricken, a native of Asch, looked each other in the eyes at length, she was eighteen. The enthusiasm did not last long, but it prompted the creation of one of the most important works in the history of the romantic piano.
Ernestine von Fricken (1816 - 1844)
Four letters
More precisely, it was the four letters of Ernestine's hometown in German musical notation (A, S, C, H) that stimulated Schumann's imagination. Such notes (A, E flat, C, B), in that order and in one or another convenient rearrangement, are featured at the beginning of most of the 21 miniatures that make up the first of his great works written for the piano, Carnaval, opus 9, from 1834-35, subtitled by the composer, in French, Scènes mignones sur quatre notes.
A romantic mystery
The motif of the four notes had already been used before (in Papillon, around 1830), so the author, in this opportunity, repeats or, as some scholars point out, relies on the laboriousness lavished in a previous experiment. What has never been clear to many is that in the midst of Romanticism, a composer evokes the beloved through the name of the town where she was born. Mysteries of the artistic sensibility of the 19th century.
Clara Wieck (1819 - 1896)
The Characters
As a whole, the goal of the piece is to make a musical representation of a creative and elaborate masquerade ball held before Lent during carnival season. It features a wide range of real-life and fictitious characters whose names are used in the titles of the miniatures. Naturally, these are the typical and unmistakable elements of the Italian commedia dell'arte popular theater: Pierrot, Arlequin, Pantaleon, and Colombina Additionally, Schumann himself, who was represented by his two alter egos: Eusebio, the dreamer, and Florestan, the realist. A tribute to Paganini and another to Chopin are also included. Moreover, Ernestina (Estrella) could not be absent. Neither could Clara Wieck (the future Clara Schumann), represented with rapture, in "Chiarina".
David's Brotherhood
The last section, the longest, symbolically portrays the members of the Davidsbünd (David's Brotherhood), a fantasy group Schumann created for the music magazine he founded around the same time. Florestan, Eusebio, Estrella, Chiarina, Chopin, and Paganini are all part of the group, according to Schumann's imagination. They play the lead role in this musical battle against the "philistines" of their time, conservatives in the arts and music. Technically, it is the most difficult section of the entire work, giving it a spectacular ending.
Dedicated to the Polish musician Karol Lipinski, its high technical and imaginative demand made it not easy to be regularly presented in public at the time. Today, on the contrary, this brilliant set of variations on a reduced core of four notes is the most performed piece by Schumann on stages throughout the world.
The excellent rendition is by the noted Hong Kong-born pianist Tiffany Poon.
[Below the video, its sections]
The 21 miniatures The following is a list of the 21 movements, pieces, sections, or whatever you want to call them. This enumeration, however, is out of the ordinary because it is necessary to point out that Schumann included a section in the score called Sphinxes between Replique and Papillons. In this section, scholars believe that the author reveals the mystery of the three or four notes on which the entire work was organized through three groups of "notes silent." They are rarely played, neither in public nor on a recording, although more than one has dared. Miss Poon doesn't.
