The musical narration of nineteenth century. Stories, education and childhood in Robert Schumann's piano compositions

In an attempt to identify and reconfigure a musical paradigm of educational nature or otherwise concerning childhood, the great composer Robert Schumann becomes an unavoidable starting point. In his work childhood enters, exits, returns, reappears to strengthen as the key feature of a latent musical discourse that, while it interests us as the ‘description’ of childhood, on the other hand it excites us for the bi-directionality that we can feel inside: while Schumann becomes an impressionist of images of childhood (and just think of the Album for the Young), in the meantime he draws a direction of a methodological-educational kind that coexists with the need, relentless and never concealed, to narrate; to tell stories through his music, without relying on written text but, often, reminding it through evocative and effective instrumental transpositions. The ‘suitable’ childhood images, those that ‘tell’ childhood, a certain gradation of both a semantically extra-musical content and of technical difficulty, are the elements that structure a process that, from the Album for the Young, passing through the Scenes from Childhood and connecting to the masterpieces of literature-music transposition such as Kreisleriana (from ETA Hoffmann), puts in close connection music, literature, childhood and artistic / musical training. The lesson concert on Schumann is as a theoretical proposal (addressed to scholars and colleagues), a methodological guide (to teachers) and a practical educational guide to listening and learning (for students of academies and schools of music). The conclusions derived from an analysis conducted on so few works by Schumann underline the role of the author as a point of reference considering his interdisciplinary approach that must be identified as a primary reference in music, literature and art education of the new generations.