Consells per a musics joves

ADVICE TO YOUNG MUSICIANS 

 

Robert Schumann, one of the great composers of the splendid period of musical history which stretches from J. S. Bach through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Vienna’s Classicism and Germany’s Romanticism, had an extraordinary sensitivity for both beauty and human psychology. His attraction to the world of children led him to write inspired works such as Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) or Opus 68, Album für die Jugend (Album for the Young), while his masterly voice and thoughts communicate with us through this precious and instructive advice and collection of words of wisdom he also left us. It seems that he wrote down and added this advice in the margins of his music sheets while he was composing Album for the Young.
He wrote this advice in a country and during a period in which idealism had lifted philosophy, poetry and music up to a high level of development.
French music had not been reborn yet, nor had the nationalistic styles of music appeared. It was also long before the crisis in tonality at the start of the twentieth century and before the birth of jazz. In that period they had neither the sophisticated technology we have, nor the chance to record music. What would Schumann have made of all this?

 

Agustí Delgado