Children unlucky enough to learn to play piano in the early 19th century were often subjected to agonizing training methods. There was the surgical operation that slit the web between the fingers to increase flexibility. There were finger springs, stretching machines, and wrist straighteners. Then there was the “finger torturer” that Friedrich Wieck, an unorthodox piano teacher, described as committing a “just outrage” upon the third and fourth digits of a pupil who used it against his advice.
Beyond the physical torments were the mental ones. Dense instruction manuals instilled hollow technical skills through the rote playing of difficult exercises. One of the most notable experts in this area was Beethoven’s best student, Carl Czerny. The title of his manual, “Forty Daily Exercises for the Pianoforte With Prescribed Repetitions for Acquiring and Preserving Virtuosity,” may give some idea of the suffering Czerny’s students had to look forward to.
The reason for this piano mania? A cultural development known as “Hausmusik.” With the rise of the middle class in Germany, musical venues began to move out of concert halls and salons and into more intimate home settings. All the respectable parents wanted their children to receive a good musical education. The reasonably priced piano sat at the center of this transformation, comfortably crowded into living rooms.
Friedrich Wieck would have none of this pedagogical madness. He raised his daughter, a child prodigy named Clara, to practice simple exercises daily, cultivate a sensitive ear, and play with feeling. Even after a star pupil named Robert Schumann whisked the young woman away to elope against Friedrich’s wishes, the father’s influence remained unshakable.
Fame and Family
The diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann chronicle one of history’s great love stories. Like Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the field of poetry, they represent a merging of romance with creativity. Robert’s genius for composition complemented Clara’s perfection of execution.The couple was fruitful in another, more literal, way: they had eight children together. It was only natural that these youngsters should inherit a musical birthright. But when their two eldest daughters, Marie and Elise, were ready to begin learning piano, Robert found the existing instruction manuals wanting. So he set out to write one himself, remembering the sensible lessons given him by his father-in-law, Friedrich.
“Album für die Jugend” (“Album for the Young”), Op. 68, was revolutionary: the first piano guide written explicitly for children. In a letter to his friend Carl Reinecke, dated Oct. 6, 1848, Robert confided that he wrote the first piece in the collection for Maria’s seventh birthday, “and in this way one after another was called forth.” The pieces in the collection “are peculiarly dear to my heart,” he wrote, and “truly belong to family life.”
Many of the songs were inspired by particular events. Robert dedicated “Humming Song” to his infant son. “First Sorrow” mourned the death of the family’s pet greenfinch. “Little Morning Wanderer” dramatizes the receding footsteps of Maria leaving on her first day to school. “Wild Rider” mimics the effect of a child riding a hobbyhorse, knocking against furniture. Each piece has the quality of a short lyric poem that imaginatively presents an idealized moment in childhood.
‘New Year’s Eve Song’
The final piece in the album is “Sylvesterlied,” or “New Year’s Eve Song.” Unlike many of the pieces in Part 1, it is not associated with a specific event in Schumann’s children’s lives. Neither, like many pieces in Part 2, does it reference other musical works or depict a scene from literature. A wholly original work, it was likely intended to be a festive capstone to the collection.
As the last piece in the adult half of the album, it is meant for an advanced beginner. The New Year’s theme suggests that the player is ready to turn over a new leaf and move onto more challenging sheet music. Since it represents the final level of training the book offers, it is appropriately celebratory in a mild (but not wild) way that reflects the gentleness of youth.
Schumann’s Afterlife
“Album for the Young” experienced unprecedented commercial success, of which Schumann himself only witnessed the beginning. In 1854, six years after it was published, he suffered a mental breakdown and entered a mental asylum. On Sept. 14 of that year, in the throes of bipolar disorder, he wrote Clara asking her to “tell me more details about the children. Do they still play Beethoven, Mozart, and pieces out of my ‘Jugendalbum'?”
Robert died less than two years later. Clara lived for another four decades, however, carrying on her husband’s legacy and successfully supporting her large family as a traveling concert pianist. Marie acted as her mother’s personal assistant, while Elise, the only one of the eight children to give public performances, played with Clara on stage.
In his “Rules and Maxims for Young Musicians,” written to accompany the album, Schumann offers this advice: “You should never play bad compositions and never listen to them when not absolutely forced to do so.”
His “New Year’s Eve Song” is a tribute to the trials of youthful accomplishment and the idea of renewal. It is also a delightful listen.
