Kreisleriana

Between 1829 and 1839, Schumann composed a series of solo piano works across 28 opuses that redefined the instrument’s expressive capabilities. Not even his failure to realise his dreams of becoming a world-class virtuoso stemmed the tide of his surging inspiration as he produced one remarkable collection after another, including Papillons (1831), the Études symphoniques (1834), Carnaval (1835), Kinderszenen (1838)—and Kreisleriana, eight indelible pieces subtitled Phantasien für das Pianoforte, composed in just four days in April 1838. Although ostensibly based on fictional musician Johannes Kreisler, a creation of literary polymath E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), whom Schumann described in a letter as “an eccentric, wild, and witty conductor”, the true source of the music’s wild mood changes was Schumann himself. Having already personified, in various pieces, the polar extremes of his personality as the excitable extrovert Florestan and painfully withdrawn Eusebius, in Kreisleriana he fleshes out their differences in music of startling originality and psychological insight. At the time his beloved bride-to-be, piano prodigy Clara Wieck, was so shaken by the intensity of Schumann’s imaginings she admitted to being genuinely frightened, yet today Kreisleriana is widely celebrated as one of his supreme achievements, one that can be heard resonating in the songs and symphonies of Gustav Mahler.