Traumerei (Continued - Schumann and beyond: The rest of the Romantics)

Besides the harmonic structure of Traumerei, it is important to look at the piece in conjunction with other music being written in the time period. While I will not go into great detail through providing specific examples and excerpts, I feel this is a big enough issue to talk about before I finish the analysis.

The theme of Traumerei is "dreaming" and its flowy composition makes that very clear. Setting aside the few suspensions, Schumann does not make use of any chromaticism in this piece, which was extremely uncommon at the time. Other composers like Liszt and Chopin were throwing chromaticism in left and right into their works and experimenting with the different implementations of the newly popular technique. Instead of adding chromaticism to the piece, Schumann keeps things very simple harmonically and instead makes the voice-leading very complex. As we saw earlier, this complexity led to recurring melodies left and right, simply being transposed and handed off from voice to voice. It is as though by the time one voice stops "singing," another has already begun taking its place.

Some compare Schumann's music to a kaliedoscope, ironically enough - but it really does make sense when you think about it. In his pieces, nothing new really starts to appear, everything just sort of moves around and takes on new shapes, which can be thought of as modulations in a sense. This is likely why Traumerei is so feared, as I stated before. In order to perform this piece well, a complete awareness of the location and direction of the ever-important melody as well as its supporting voices is absolutely vital because there is absolutely nothing there to cover up even a marginally sloppy or incorrect interpretation.

It took me a few weeks to learn the A part for my keyboarding class (the exposition and recap).... Now lets see if I can get a handle on the development. After writing this paper, it suddenly feels like it's going to be a whole lot harder than I expected!




Works Cited:


http://www.teoria.com/articulos/analysis/kinderscenen/eng/07.html

www.wikipedia.org

• Critical Excursions. Schumann (Concluded)
• Fr. Niecks
• The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 22, No. 466 (Dec. 1, 1881), pp. 623-627
• Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
• Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3358012