Clara once told Schumann that he often seemed like a child. He took the remark to heart, wrote about thirty little pieces in one go, chose twelve of them and called the set Scenes from Childhood — thirteen by the time it was printed. This is the seventh. The whole thing is twenty-four bars and takes two and a half minutes. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
Scenes from Childhood is not music for children
In March 1838 Schumann wrote to Clara: you once said I often seem like a child — and so, he told her, he had dashed off some thirty little things, from which he had picked twelve and called them Scenes from Childhood. Thirteen of them by the time the set was printed.
This is not music for children. Schumann was explicit about it: it is an adult looking back at childhood, written for adults. The set he actually wrote for children came ten years later — the Album for the Young, Op. 68. That one is for beginners.
The titles were added after the music was finished. Schumann called them no more than delicate hints towards performance and interpretation; he did not write to a title. "Träumerei" — dreaming — is a name he put on these twenty-four bars once they existed and struck him that way.
This piece travelled further than the rest of the set. In 1986, returning to Moscow after sixty-one years away, Horowitz played it as an encore; people in the audience are visibly in tears on the film. In Russia it has long been played at commemorations of the Second World War.
In Russia this is music for mourning
On 8 May 1945 Radio Moscow played it during a silence for the war dead. It is now Russia's music of mourning: the minute of silence on Victory Day, and every hour at the Mamayev Kurgan memorial in Volgograd.
One reaching-upward gesture, made eight times
The opening gesture is simple: reach up from low down, stop on the highest note, and let it fall back slowly. That is the whole piece — the same gesture at different heights and under different harmony, eight times over.
The first reach is comfortable. The second goes higher and sounds like it costs a little more effort. In the middle the harmony grows unsettled and you feel it wanting to go somewhere else — but every time it comes back to the same gesture.
The last one is the strange one: after the reach the music simply stops, and that silence lasts longer than any note in the piece. Only then does it land.
Nothing here is fast and nothing is loud. Twenty-four bars, two and a half minutes, and then it stops.
Twenty-four bars in which one sentence appears eight times
24 written bars plus a quarter-note upbeat, 4/4, F major; the first eight carry a repeat, so it plays as 33 bars and 481 struck notes (267 right hand, 214 left).
The design is four-bar phrases: six of them and a coda. Bars 1–4 give the original; bars 5–8 take the same phrase higher, the top note moving from F5 to A5; bars 9–16 are the middle, where the harmony leaves the home key and each phrase ends somewhere different; from bar 17 the opening returns almost note for note as it was at bar 1.
From bar 21 comes the coda: one last reach upward, a conspicuous silence, then a landing back in F major. The lowest note in the piece, a low C, arrives in the final bar.
The accompaniment is broken chords throughout, the two hands interleaving to spread the harmony — and the melody note is often not in the topmost hand but tucked into the middle, which is Schumann all over.
Few notes; the difficulty is how long to hold the silence
There are few notes and nothing fast, so the finger difficulty is modest — this piece turns up in exams and recitals at intermediate level. The hard parts are elsewhere.
First, voicing. The melody note is often not on top but buried inside the broken chords; making it emerge while everything else steps back takes control in both hands.
Second, phrase endings. How you release the last note of each phrase decides whether the piece sounds quiet or sluggish. Too quick and the line breaks; too slow and it sticks.
Third, the silence in the coda. The score has a fermata; how long to hold it is the player's decision. This version takes the written value plus a little, without stretching it dramatically.
Do not take it fast. This version uses the 60 to the quarter printed on the score; the finished video runs two minutes twenty-five.
We rate this 2 out of 5.
The other twelve of the set, and the one he really did write for children
Scenes from Childhood has thirteen pieces; this is the seventh. The first, "Of Foreign Lands and Peoples," is the one usually used to open the set; the last, "The Poet Speaks," reads like an epilogue about the adult doing the remembering.
The set he actually wrote for children to play is the Album for the Young, Op. 68, from 1848: forty-three pieces, starting from almost nothing.
For more Schumann of the same period: the Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, written in 1837, another set of short pieces.
