Schumann’s Kinderszenen is a well-known cycle of piano pieces written when the composer was 18 years old. Its best known segment is probably “Träumerei” (“Dreaming”), which Alban Berg once praised for its deceptively complex harmony, but the most disquieting (for not dissimilar reasons) is this next-to-last segment, “Child Falling Asleep,” in E minor, culminating an increasingly somber sequence with a precipitous drop into an intense Romantic microcosm lasting less than two minutes: the deepest fear and sadness of a child fading from consciousness and watching himself fade at the same time, diagrammed to the millimeter harmonically, and thus graspable by the listener, and that much more harrowing. Schumann apparently meant Kinderszenen to evoke childhood as experienced by children in childhood, without any intermediate adult sentimentality, which means the apparent playfulness ultimately gives way to its generating principles: we are happy here, but we fade. My favorite performance is the one recorded in 1988 by Mieczyslaw Horszowski, when he was 95 years old, who had begun his career as a child wunderkind a full century ago. I find it impossible to listen to this man play Schumann (or especially Chopin) without imagining the lightness of my own corpse.
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, originally intended to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25, now extended to Twelfth Night (or so).
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