Themes and Conclusions

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

133-134

text excerpt

I have revisited a great deal of music lately, some of it after a seventy-year interim, the revisiting therefore heavily buffeted by past involvements and discoveries of radical differences between remembered and renewed experiences. Certain songs and piano pieces by Schumann, for instance, have jolted me sharply. Schumann is the  composer of childhood (first childhood; I will not say who I think is the composer of second childhood), both because he created a children’s imaginative world and because children learn some of their first music in his marvellous piano albums. In fact I have just realized that the reason I dislike Carnaval is not, as I had supposed, that my musical personality lacks identities corresponding to the Florestan and Eusebius archtypes of all of Schumann’s music, but simply that I was told to like it as a child; and the force of these childhood atavisms is such that I am not old enough to dislike it independently even now.

excerpt from 'Themes and Conclusions' pp. 133-134 (163 words)

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