Kinderszenen (Scenes From a Childhood Op 15) 1838 – Robert Schumann

There are two pieces from Robert Schumann’s Scenes From a Childhood Op 15 I want to present here today namely:

No 1. Of Foreign Lands and Peoples
No 7. Dreaming

Kinderszenen Scenes from Childhood is a set of thirteen pieces of music for piano written in 1838. Schumann wrote 30 movements for this work but chose 13 for the final version. He told his wife Clara that the “thirty small, droll things“, most of them less than a page in length, were inspired by her comment that he sometimes seemed “like a child“. He described them in 1840 as “more cheerful, gentler, more melodic” than his earlier works. Movement No 1 and 7 are two of Schumann’s best known pieces.

Robert Schumann was a German composer, pianist, and music critic of the early Romantic era and his works typify the spirit of this era. Schumann was born to an affluent middle-class family with no musical connections, and was initially unsure whether to pursue a career as a lawyer or to make a living as a pianist-composer. During the 1840s, between bouts of mental and physical ill health, he composed a variety of piano and other pieces. Schumann and his family moved to Düsseldorf in 1850 in the hope that his appointment as the city’s director of music would provide financial security, but his shyness and mental instability made it difficult for him to work with his orchestra and he had to resign after three years. The following year Schumann’s always-precarious mental health deteriorated gravely. He threw himself into the River Rhine but was rescued and taken to a private sanatorium near Bonn, where he lived for more than two years, dying there at the age of 46.  

References:
1. Kinderszenen – Wikipedia
2. Robert Schumann – Wikipedia

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