Kinderszenen

Riddles, fairy tales, there was seemingly no end of the parlor tricks he knew how to provide on the spur of the moment for the tots.

This deep understanding of children and their psychology was bound sooner or later to find artistic expression and lovely embodiment in music like the Kinderszenen and the Album for the Young, the one with its Träumerei, the other with its Happy Farmer.

His grown-up friends he endeavored to choose only among people who genuinely interested him and who shared his tastes.

Persons who could not partake his high-flown enthusiasm for Jean Paul or for Bach amounted almost to mortal enemies.

But grave duties rest with me too.

End of Part Two Part Three of Robert Schumann, Tone Poet, Prophet, and Critic by Herbert F. Pieser This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

The period through which we have passed witnessed the birth of many of Schumann's greatest piano compositions, the Davidsbündlertänze, the Carnaval, the F-sharp minor Sonata, the Kinderszenen, the Symphonic Studies, the Kreisleriana, the C major Fantasie, the Fantasiestücke, things which along with others scarcely less great were to become what might be called daily bread of pianists.

His circle of musical friends was steadily widening.

Art as we know it, you when you play, I when I compose, has an intimate charm that is worth far more to us than all Liszt's splendor and tinsel." They embrace with the warmth and sweetness of perfect mutual comprehension, and she prevails upon him to descend from cloudy Olympian editorial heights so far as to refresh himself with a modest Frühstück or breakfast and a brief gambol with the little ones, for he has that devotion to tiny children characteristic of all great men.

Never perhaps has any composer so thoroughly entered into childish griefs and fears and pleasures, the April shower and shine of babyhood, than Schumann in his Kinderszenen.

The consummate musician who has surmounted every difficulty, acquainted himself with every method of his art, the man who has mastered the forms of symphony, chamber music, pianoforte, and vocal music to their farthest present limits, here stands forth as the exponent of little innocent everyday emotions.

By the Fireside, Bogies, A Child's Petition, From Foreign Land, Blindman's Buff, and so on, the simple titles run.

Nobody could have imagined them but a man who had eternal youth in his heart.

The dissonances are as softly blended as if a child had actually poured forth its pure soul.

It may readily be imagined with such looks askance the composer of the Kinderszenen is favored by his academic and hidebound contemporaries.

Romanticism run mad, modernism gone crazy, discordant innovations, newfangled nonsense.