Daydreaming at the Piano with Schumann's Träumerei
The Backstory

When your fiancée calls you a big kid

People often think a famous piano piece begins with a grand commission or a flash of lightning, but Träumerei actually started because my fiancée, Clara Wieck, told me I sometimes seemed like a child. Instead of taking offense, I sat down in Leipzig in early 1838 and decided to turn her little observation into music. If someone you love says you have your head in the clouds, the most sensible reply is to write them a daydream. I had no paying patron waiting at the door, just a quiet room and a strong urge to show Clara what was going on inside my head.

Father-in-law troubles in Leipzig

Life in 1838 was anything but a peaceful reverie, because Clara and I were stuck in a painful forced separation. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was fiercely against our marriage and did everything he could to keep us apart. While he was busy acting like a storm cloud, I escaped to my piano to find a bit of calm and feel close to Clara. Writing gentle music was my best defense against a future father-in-law who would probably have preferred me on another continent.

Thirty little tunes and one keeper

Once I started writing that February and March, the ideas poured out so fast that I ended up with around thirty short pieces. On a single February day, I jotted down in my diary that I had written a little thing called Träumerei, which simply means dreaming. When I finally trimmed the collection down to thirteen miniatures for Kinderszenen, Op. 15, I gave this quiet piece the central seventh spot. It sits right in the middle of the set like the calm eye of a very affectionate storm.

Grown-up memories, not nursery rhymes

Because the whole collection is called Kinderszenen, many listeners assume I wrote these pieces for children to practice after school. In truth, I wrote them as an adult looking back on childhood for other adults, which is quite different from my later Album for the Young, Op. 68. A child is usually too busy climbing trees to sit around feeling nostalgic about being young. Only when we grow up do we look back at those simple days with the kind of warm ache you hear in these bars.

Naming the baby after it is born

I actually finished composing every note of the music before I ever came up with the title Träumerei or any of the other headings. I added those names afterward as gentle hints to help the player catch the mood, rather than instructions for a literal story. Imagine putting a label on a jar of jam only after you have tasted it to see what fruit it reminds you of. The music always came first for me, and the words were just a friendly nudge in the right direction.

A secret shared between two pianos

You will not find a grand public premiere date for Träumerei in the history books, because it did not start out in a concert hall. These pieces began as intimate musical letters that I shared privately with Clara long before the general public ever heard them. It was our own quiet way of talking to each other across the distance when her father kept us apart. Only in early 1839 did Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig publish the collection, printing it under the old spelling Kinderscenen.

Liszt loves it, Berlin misses the point

When the sheet music finally came out, it sold wonderfully well and even won enthusiastic praise from Franz Liszt. Not everyone was so charming about it, though, especially the Berlin critic Ludwig Rellstab. He attacked my titles because he assumed I had tried to paint clumsy little scenes of children first and forced the music to fit them. I could only laugh at his theory, since it is hard to base a piece on a title that you have not even invented yet.

The mystery of the speeding clock

When I prepared the score in F major and common time, I left out any written tempo words and simply marked the metronome at a hundred beats for a quarter note. Later pianists fell into the habit of playing Träumerei much slower than that, stretching the daydream out as long as possible. People still argue about whether my metronome in Leipzig was broken or if later musicians just preferred a sleepier pace. I like to think a daydream does not need a stopwatch anyway, as long as the melody keeps singing.

Strings, cellos, and the silver screen

Although I wrote every note for the solo piano, other musicians soon could not resist borrowing the tune for their own instruments. Before long, my little piece was arranged for string orchestra, violin and piano, and cello and piano, which suits its singing lines beautifully. More than a century later, it even found its way into the cinema, giving its name to a 1944 German film about Clara and me. Soon after that, in 1947, Hollywood used it to open and close a movie about our lives called Song of Love.

A quiet encore that traveled the world

For a miniature that took me a single day to write, Träumerei has traveled further than I ever dreamed possible. The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz made it his signature encore and famously played it when he returned to Moscow for a recital in 1986. In Russia, the piece is even played during ceremonies to remember the Second World War, bringing a hush to millions of people. Not bad for a little tune that started because my fiancée told me I acted like a kid.