Goethe, Schiller and the first Romantics
Arts & Ideas
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Schumann and the Romantic Fragment
Schumann was a temperamentally a diarist who couldn't become a professional pianist because he damaged his hand. He used to sit at the piano all day long and improvise and then composed these improvisations or things into long piano suites which had a diary like character. In one work called Carnaval they referenced individual people that he knew but he'd given them fanciful names. The individual pieces in these suites are all essentially fragments they're too short to play on their own so need to lead on to the next one all the time. Schumann loved the idea of this incompleteness of something which left something to be saidSomething mysterious about it rather than grand classical forms that were self
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