Schumann: Carnaval & Papillons

Schumann was the quintessential Romantic: perhaps uniquely in his own time, certainly when the present works were written. Like most of his piano music, these pieces date from his early manhood, and all, in one way or another, exemplify his benign egotism and the fundamental generosity of his beleaguered spirit. More concerned with juxtaposing isolated ‘scenes’ than depicting cumulative plots, Schumann derived a unique form of drama from the interaction of contrasting characters. Carnaval (1835), like Elgar’s ‘Enigma’ Variations, is a spectacularly wide-ranging portrait gallery, better regarded as a masked ball than a conventional set of variations. But it was not his first. That honour goes to Papillons (‘Butterflies’), composed four years earlier and modelled on the ball scene from the novel Flegeljahre by his literary idol, Jean Paul.

Composed between Papillons and Carnaval, the magnificent, highly virtuosic Toccata – woefully-often mistaken for a kind of super-Czerny – combines Classical and Baroque influences, both formally and texturally. Sadly, it coincided with, and indeed reflects, the loss to progressive paralysis between 1829 and 1833 of the third finger of Schumann’s right hand: virtually all of this extremely difficult piece can be played without the use of that very finger.