Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 11/26/2014, uploaded on 05/04/2015

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Fantasiestücke, op. 12, a set of eight pieces for piano, was composed in 1837. Schumann was greatly influenced by literature, as his father was a bookkeeper, publisher, and novelist, and the title of this work reflects that. It was largely inspired by the 1814 collection of novellas Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Other pieces of Schumann’s were also inspired by literature including Kreisleriana and Papillons.

It is not just that title, however, that was influenced by literature. Schumann had invented two fictitious characters, or alter egos, to represent the duality of his own personality. Eusebius represented the dreamy, introspective side and Florestan, the passionate. Schumann’s characters were modeled after Vult and Valt in Jean Paul’s novel Flegeljahre. Eusebius and Florestan made many appearances both in Schumann’s music and his critical writings.

Like the earlier Davidsbündlertänze, Fantasiestücke is designed as a musical dialogue between Florestan and Eusebius. Eusebius begins the work with "Des Abends" ("In the Evening") which is to represent a "gentle picture of dusk." Florestan then has his turn with "Aufschwung" ("Soaring"). The two characters alternate in each piece, until both are represented in the fifth piece "In der Nacht" ("In the Night") and in the sixth "Fabel" ("Fable"). The seventh piece, "Traumes Wirren" ("Dream’s Confusion"), is suggestive of the struggle within Schumann and describes the character of Eusebius under the influence of Florestan. Finally, the work concludes with "Ende vom Lied" ("End of the Song") and it is Eusebius that has the last word. Schumann described the final piece in a letter to his wife Clara thus: "At the time, I thought: well in the end it all resolves itself into a jolly wedding. But at the close, my painful anxiety about you returned."     Joseph DuBose

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 Selections from Fantasiestücke, Op. 12      Robert Schumann

Written in 1837, the Fantasiestücke Op.12 was dedicated to Anna Robena Laidlaw, a gifted and attractive British pianist who had visited Leipzig in 1837 and with whom, it has been suggested, Schumann might have found some consolation for his then strictly enforced separation from Clara Wieck. Whatever the nature of his relationship with Ms. Laidlaw, the thematic identity of the first piece in the collection, Des Abends, gives a clear indication that Clara was still very much on the composer’s mind: the stepwise descending line delicately traced by the right hand in the opening bars is one of many variants of a melodic message Robert and Clara both understood. Its introduction here is all the more poignant for the insecurity of its apparently triple-time rhythms in a basically duple-time meter and its two modulations from D flat major to an unlikely E major. In accordance with the ‘Eusebius’ and ‘Florestan’ duality consciously cultivated by Schumann in both his critical writings and his music at this time, Aufschwung is as impulsive as Des Abends is dreamy. Although the contrast is compounded by the strict rondo form applied to the second piece, Schumann retains a link between them by including comparatively lyrical episodes in D flat and B flat major within an urgent F minor context. There is a similar contrast between the tender Warum in D flat major – a harmonically inspired reminder that Chopin had made a memorable visit to Leipzig in 1836 – and the intermittently gruff but mainly good-humored Grillen in the same key.     (Program notes by Gerald Larne)

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.