In 1839 Robert Schumann wrote in a letter to a Belgian admirer that among his works with the opus numbers 15 to 20 he loved the piece whose title “Kreisleriana” could only be understood by Germans.
“Kreisler is a character created by ETA Hoffmann, an eccentric, wild, witty conductor.
You will like some things about him.
The headings for all my compositions only come to me after I've already finished the composition.” Only with Op. 16, the eight “Phantasies for the pianoforte” dedicated to Frédéric Chopin, was it different.
If the recipient of the letter followed the hint and studied the literary sources in addition to the sheet music of the "Kreisleriana", Hoffmann's "Life Views of the Cat Murr" and "Fantasy Pieces in Callot's Manner", it could have occurred to him that
that Schumann characterized all his works here as fantasy pieces in Kreisler's manner.
Because that's how Kreisler composes: He always only knows afterwards what he has created and sometimes burns the finished score right away.
Patrick Bahners
Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".
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Schumann did not point out in the letter that he not only took the name Kreisler from Hoffmann, but also copied the title of the composition from Hoffmann, which had been fixed before composing.
The eight fantasies have the same name as a compilation of six fragments in Hoffmann's "Fantasy Pieces", which were allegedly found "on the white backs of several sheets of music" after the alleged death of the conductor or at least after his definitive disappearance from musical life.
However, this reproduction of the title cannot mean that one should understand Schumann's "Kreisleriana" as a setting of Hoffmann's bundle of texts.
Because the main theme of Kreisler's fantastic music theory in form and content is the emancipation of music from the other arts,
Beethoven is the hero
The hero of this absolute music, which Kreisler alias Hoffmann calls romantic, is Beethoven, whose "instrumental music" is discussed in No. 5 of Hoffmann's Kreisler sketches.
"Beethoven's music moves the levers of fear, shivering, horror, pain and awakens that endless longing that is the essence of Romanticism." What is interesting about this movement is the turn of the aesthetics of sublimity into the technical, the emphasis on the instrumental in the instrumental music .
On July 7, 2022, Grigory Sokolov opened his piano recital at the Ruhr Piano Festival in the historic town hall of Wuppertal with Beethoven's Eroica Variations op therefore felt as endless melody.
Three accented repeated tones in the bass then didn't break the flow, precisely because Sokolov marked them with extreme dryness.
Through the difference in the attack, he presented two opposing characters in the handling of the sound material right at the beginning: The entire variation process resulted from the contrast of organic and mechanical further processing.