Touched by Schumann

Schumann is probably the most lovable of the great German masters, simply because his music is inextricably involved in first impressions: many children learning the piano will encounter early the pretty little pieces from his Album for the Young, moving on with enhanced delight to the easier numbers in Scenes from Childhood. Then, after headier teenage intoxications, the taste recoils to discover his two greatest contributions to the world hoard — the body of solo piano works with which he began, and the body of songs that overlapped then wholly took over.

The 24 piano works present a cavalcade of dancing, dreaming fantasy, peopled by lovers real or imagined, heroes of music and literature living and dead, brother warriors in art against the Philistines. Creatures of the night from gothic folklore and daemonic emanations from the subconscious co-exist with glittering ballrooms and fairy palaces. All is born of his own divided personality, its zigzag oscillation between euphoria and melancholy, never so vividly contrasted as in the eight movements of the Fantasy Pieces op.