Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856) Scenes of Childhood Kinderszenen Op. 15 Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893) Album for the young Album pour enfants Op. 39...
Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856)
Scenes of Childhood
Kinderszenen Op. 15
Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893)
Album for the young
Album pour enfants Op. 39
Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)
Children's Corner
Music for children can be of two kinds. It may be intended for children to
play, in which case it must be simple in musical content and without technical
difficulty, or for children to hear, when it may make greater demands on a
performer, without overtaxing the listener. Elements that both kinds of music
share are generally brevity and ease of comprehension, the second aided by
characteristic titles. The development of the pianoforte as a common domestic
instrument, coupled with the literary tendencies of composers in the nineteenth
century, led to the creation of a multitude of piano pieces for children and for
the moderately talented amateur. Pre-eminent among these must be the Kinderszenen
and Album fürdie Jugend of Robert Schumann, pieces intended to instruct
and to entertain, in a way that Johann Sebastian Bach, a century earlier, would
hardly have envisaged for his children, to whom he made less concession. Among
works by great composers intended for children are the Children's Album
of Tchaikovsky and early in the present century Debussy's Children's Corner.
Robert Schumann must seem in many ways typical of the age in which he lived,
combining a number of the principal characteristics of Romanticism in his music
and in his life. Born in Zwickau in 1810, the son of a bookseller, publisher and
writer, he showed an early interest in literature, and was to make a name for
himself in later years as a writer and editor of the Neue Zeitschrilt für
Musik, a journal launched in 1834.
Alter a period at university, to satisfy, the ambitions of his widowed
mother, Schumann, still showing the wide interests of a dilettante, turned more
fully to music under the tuition of Friedrich Wieck, a famous teacher whose
energies had been largely directed towards the training of his daughter Clara, a
pianist of prodigious early talent.
Schumann's own ambitions as a pianist were to be frustrated by a weakness of
the fingers, the result, it is supposed, of mercury treatment for syphilis,
which he had contracted from a servant-girl in Wieck's employment. Nevertheless
in the 1830s he was to write a great deal of music for the piano, much of it in
the form of shorter, genre pieces, often enough with some extra-musical,
literary or autobiographical association.
In health Schumann had long been subject to sudden depressions and had on one
occasion attempted to take his own life. This nervous instability had shown
itself in other members of his family, in his father and in his sister, and
accentuated, perhaps, by venereal disease, it was to bring him finally to
insanity and death in an asylum. Friedrich Wieck, an anxious father, was
possibly aware of Schumann's weaknesses when he made every effort to prevent a
proposed marriage between his daughter Clara and his former pupil. Clara was
nine years younger than Schumann and represented for her father a considerable
investment of time and hope.
At first, when he lodged in Wieck's house in Leipzig, Schumann had shown
little interest in Clara, and in 1834 he became secretly engaged to Ernestine
von Fricken, a pupil of Wieck and illegitimate daughter of Baron von Fricken, a
Bohemian nobleman. It was for her that Schumann wrote his Fasching: Schwanke
auf vier Noten, a set of pieces based on the four musical notes of his name,
S C H A, which, by a lucky chance, also formed the name of the von Fricken's
home-town, Asch. It was this work that was later given the title Carnaval:
scenes mignonnes sur quatre notes. By the following summer Schumann had
discovered the secret of Emestine's illegitimacy and begun to transfer his
affections to the fifteen-year-old Clara Wieck.
Wieck was to do his utmost to prevent a marriage that can have brought Clara
little happiness, but alter considerable litigation the marriage took place and
the couple were married in the autumn of 1840, a year in which Schumann was to
write an incredibly large number of songs, before turning his attention, at his
wife's prompting to the larger forms of orchestral music.
Schumann's subsequent career took him and his wife first to Dresden and in
1850 to Düsseldorf, where he briefly held his first official position as
director of music for the city, an office in which he proved increasingly
inadequate. In February, 1854, he attempted to drown himself, and was to spend
the remaining years of his life in a private asylum at Endenich, near Bonn. He
died there on 29th July, 1856.
Schumann wrote his Kinderszenen in 1838. As he told Clara, he had
composed thirty little pieces, and from these he selected thirteen, all of them
designed to express an adult's reminiscence of childhood, or, as he said in a
letter to Clara, a reflection of her comment that he sometimes seemed to her as
a child. The music is technically undemanding, of ingenuous simplicity, the
titles self-explanatory, without the cryptic implications of Papillons
and Carnaval, an outstanding example of what Schumann was able to achieve
in forms as limited as this.
The music of Tchaikovsky, in spite of the reservations of contemporaries at
home and abroad, must seem to us both essentially Russian and essentially and
firmly in the West European tradition. In Vienna the critic Eduard Hanslick was
able to complain of the "trivial Cossack cheer" of the finale of the
Violin Concerto, but in Russia Tchaikovsky never went far enough to please the
self-appointed leader of musical nationalists, Balakirev. While by no means a
miniaturist, he nevertheless excelled in his mastery of the smaller forms
necessary in ballet, and exhibited to some extent in his piano pieces, a
necessary element in any composer's output, with a readier market than for
larger scale works. The nineteenth century was, alter all, the age of the
domestic pianist.
The son of a chief inspector of mines in Government service in Votkinsk,
Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 and educated at first at home by a beloved
governess and later at the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, in
preparation for a career in the Ministry of Justice. This he was to abandon in
1863, when he joined the newly established St. Petersburg Conservatory, founded
by Anton Rubinstein, the first of its kind in Russia. Three years later he
joined the staff of the new Conservatory in Moscow, directed by Nikolay
Rubinstein, Anton Rubinstein's brother.
Tchaikovsky, abnormally sensitive and diffident, and tormented by his own
homosexuality that seemed to isolate him from the society of the time, had
already made a considerable impression as a composer, when an unwise,
face-saving marriage in 1877 brought complete nervous collapse and immediate
separation from his new wife. In 1878 he was able to resign from the
Conservatory, thanks to the assistance of a rich widow, Nadezhda von Meck, whom
he was never to meet but who offered him both financial and moral support for
some thirteen years.
In 1893, shortly after the St. Petersburg performance of his Sixth
Symphony, Tchaikovsky died, it is thought by his own hand, compelled to this
step by a court of honour of his fellows from the School of Jurisprudence, alter
threats of exposure and scandal resulting from a liaison with a young nobleman.
His death was widely mourned both in Russia and abroad, where his music had won
considerable favour.
Tchaikovsky's Album pour enfants was written during the year 1878
between the months of February and October. Unlike Children's Corner, the
collection, described as 24 pièces faciles (à la Schumann), is designed
for a child's performance. In a letter written from Florence to his brother
Anatoli in December he asks him to tell his sister Sasha that the album has been
published. He dedicated it to Vladimir Davidov, his beloved nephew Bobik. 1878
brought Tchaikovsky a welcome relief from his duties at the Moscow Conservatory
and a continuing reliance on Nadezhda von Meck. Writing to her on 30th April he
mentions his desire to enrich the musical literature available for children,
providing short and simple pieces with titles that are attractive to them.
The titles of the pieces that constitute the Album pour enfants are a
clear indication of the nature of each little piece, the published order of
which differed from that proposed by Tchaikovsky. Morning Prayer, a
little hymn, makes a suitable opening, followed by a vigorous Winter Morning and
a lively hobbyhorse. Mamma is treated with appropriate tenderness and the March
of the Toy Soldiers with suitably brisk movement. A sad waltz marks the
illness of the doll, whose funeral is solemn enough. There is a characteristic
Waltz and then the appearance of a new doll, a lively creature. A Polish
Mazurka leads to a Russian folk-dance, while the peasant accordion player
has a limited command of the instrument. The Kamarinskaya, a Popular Song
is followed by a Polka. The Italian Song is borrowed from a song
Tchaikovsky heard sung in the street in Florence by Vittorio, a boy singer. An
Old French Song has its parallel in Tchaikovsky's opera The Maid of Orleans,
contrasted with a German Landler. Naples provides a song that also serves as a
Neapolitan Dance in Swan Lake, while the old nurse tells a sinister ghost
story. The witch is Baba Yaga, a par1icular1y terrifying figure of Russian
legend as she flies through the night, Sweet Dreams and the Song of
the Lark are succeeded by a Venetian song, played by an organ grinder and a
farewell in a very Russian church.
Claude Debussy was born in 1862, the son of a shop keeper who was later to
turn his hand to other activities, with varying success. He started piano
lessons at the age of seven and continued two years later, improbably enough,
with Verlaine's mother-in-law, who claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin. In
1872 he entered the Conservatoire, where he abandoned the plan of becoming a
virtuoso pianist, turning his principal attention to composition. In 1880, at
the age of eighteen, he was employed by Tchaikovsky's patroness Nadezhda von
Meck as tutor to her children and house-musician. On his return to the
Conservatoire he entered the class of Bizet's friend Ernest Guiraud and in 1884
won the Prix de Rome, the following year reluctantly taking up obligatory
residence, according to the terms of the prize, at the Villa Medici in Rome,
where he met Liszt. By 1887 he was back in Paris, winning his first significant
success in 1900 with Nocturnes and going on, two years later, to a succès de
scandale with his opera Pelleas et Melisande, based on the play by
Maurice Maeterlinck, a work that established his position as a composer of
importance.
Debussy's personal life brought some unhappiness in his first marriage in
1899 to a mannequin, Lily Texier, and his association from 1903 with Emma Bardac,
the wife of a banker and an amateur singer, whom he eventually married in 1908.
In the summer of 1904 he had abandoned his wife, moving into an apar1ment with
Emma Bardac, and the subsequent attempt at suicide by the former, who had shared
with him the difficulties of his early career, alienated a number of the
composer's friends. His final years were darkened by the war and by cancer, the
cause of his death in March 1918, when he left unfinished a planned series of
chamber music works, only three of which had been completed.
Children's Corner was completed in 1908 and dedicated to the composer's
daughter Claude-Emma, affectionately known to her father as Chouchou, born in
1905, three years before the marriage of her parents. His dedication reads: A
ma chère petite Chouchou, avec les tendres excuses de son Père pour ce qui va
suivre. The technical demands of the six pieces and the age of Claude-Emma
suggest that these pieces called for a maturer audience. The pianist Maurice
Dumesnil later recalled Debussy's advice on the performance of the pieces: Doctor
Gradus ad Parnassum: Not too fast, with a little humour aimed at good old
Clementi. Faster and brilliant towards the end. Jimbo's Lullaby: Play
more clumsily on the first page, stressing the wrong accents. Serenade for
the Doll: Delicate and graceful, with nothing of the passion of a Spanish
serenader. The Snow is Dancing: This depicts a mood as well as being a
tone picture: it should be misty sad and monotonous, and not too fast, not fast
at all. The Little Shepherd: Make a clear difference between the
shepherd's improvisation on his flute and the dance motif. Golliwogg's
Cake-walk. The first and third sections are very rhythmical, with a strong
emphatic rhythm: the middle part, in contrast, must be very free: there is a
suggestion of the trombone in the part marked with great emotion: do not be
afraid to overdo it here. Another pianist, Harold Bauer, mentions Debussy's
allusion to Wagner's Tristan in the last piece, with a mocking reference
to the famous Tristan chord. The titles of the pieces are self-explanatory.
Idil Biret
Born in Ankara, Idil Biret began piano lessons at the age of three. She
displayed an outstanding gift for music and graduated from the Paris
Conservatoire with three first prizes when she was fifteen. She studied piano
with Alfred Cortot and Wilhelm Kempff, and composition with Nadia Boulanger.
Since the age of sixteen Idil Biret has performed in concerts around the world
playing with major orchestras under the direction of conductors such as Monteux,
Boult, Kempe, Sargent, de Burgos, Pritchard, Groves and Mackerras. She has
participated in the festivals of Montreal, Persepolis, Royan, La Rochelle,
Athens, Berlin, Gstaad and Istanbul. She was also invited to perform at the 85th
birthday celebration of Wilhelm Backhaus and at the 90th birthday celebration of
Wilhelm Kempff. Idil Biret received the Lily Boulanger Memorial Fund award
(1954/1964), the Harriet Cohen/Dinu Lipatti Gold Medal (1959) and the Polish
Artistic Merit Award (1974) and was named Chevalier de l'Ordre du Merite in
1976.