Conference Agenda

Published in 1838, Kinderszenen Op. 15 by Robert Schumann is widely acknowledged as a transformative breakthrough (Kühn et al, 1981). The first composition to poeticize the idea of childhood, Kinderszenen has since spawned numerous similar works by others. Its thirteen brief movements come with imagistic titles evoking youthful experiences and demand considerable musical artistry and technique from performers—characteristics a far cry from music for children up until then, which had focused on pedagogical goals (Kok 2010).

Accounts and explanations of what fueled Schumann’s innovative approach offer a partial picture at best. On the one hand, diaries and letters point to his fiancée Clara Wieck, nine years his junior, as an important stimulus (Beiche 2016, Zilkens 1996, Starobinski 2002). On the other hand, Schumann undoubtedly tapped into literary influences of his day. Starobinski, for instance, has found echoes of Jean Paul, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Justus Thibaut in Schumann’s own notes about children and childhood (2002).

With the abovementioned scholarship as points of departure, this paper offers new answers to the question of what inspired Op. 15. First, I propose another body of literature as Schumann’s system of reference: ancient Greek and Roman poetry familiar to him from intensive study in his youth (Heero 2003, Draheim 1991). I argue that the Hellenistic poetics of childhood (Ambühl 2021) underlay Kinderszenen’s conception and provides a fruitful avenue for understanding its creative ethos, aesthetics, and musical narrative. Selected Graeco-Roman writings along with their authors’ structural and rhetorical strategies will be aligned with the titles and musical details of Op. 15 and used to decipher cryptic—and as yet unexplained—remarks by the composer about Kinderszenen’s genesis. Related to these, I contend, is Schumann’s neohumanistic understanding of pedagogy, which afforded a gendered framework for his courtship of Clara Wieck, whose youth and ascendant pianistic career during the genesis of Op. 15 posed potential threats to their future domestic order. Written for Clara but finally published without a dedication, Kinderszenen playfully if also distinctly educated her about Schumann’s insecurities, fears, and disciplinary impulses through the seemingly innocuous prism of classically inspired childhood and children.

Although research on the musical cultures of Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, including the Polish context, is increasingly entering international scholarly discourse, the field of children’s musical praxis remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I present selected findings from my research on children’s engagement with the piano in early nineteenth-century Polish culture, thereby beginning to address this lacuna.

I focus on the period between the November Uprising (1830-1831) and the January Uprising (1863-1864)—the peak of the piano’s expansion in Polish society. Within the musical life of the Congress Kingdom of Poland (Królestwo Kongresowe), the piano played a pivotal role—not only as the principal instrument of salon performance and the working tool of emerging virtuosi, but also as a medium for fostering patriotic and religious sentiment, a function that gained particular significance under the partitions. One of the main channels through which the piano permeated nineteenth-century Polish culture was education. Drawing on an interdisciplinary analysis of diverse sources, I identify the moment at which pianistic instruction became enshrined in the educational canon, especially for young girls.

I present my conclusions in four thematic sections. The first examines pianistic education in child-rearing discourses, evaluating parents’ manuals and juvenile literature to trace how piano study was framed as part of proper upbringing. The second section explores the institutional frameworks of public schools, ladies’ academies, and girls’ boarding schools (‘pensje i zakłady żeńskie’) and their curricula for keyboard instruction. The third section surveys the world of private instruction—private teachers or ‘piano masters’ (‘métriers de jeu’, i.e. ‘metrowie gry’) and their role in cultivating young pupils. The final section assesses method books and treatises, analysing both home-grown works by Karol Kurpiński, Ignacy Platon Kozłowski, Jan Nowiński, Ignacy Feliks Dobrzyński, and others, alongside foreign method books—whether translated, reprinted, or newly imported. In each section, I situate my findings within their broader social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts, supported by close readings of musical examples, and conclude with a comparative perspective.

Musicologists are well acquainted with a canon of piano works by Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel that attests to a preoccupation with childhood in turn-of-the-century French musical culture (Brittan 2021, Lindberg 2011, Roberts 2003). Far less familiar, however, is the market of children’s piano music to which this canon—and many other collections of childhood-themed music by contemporaneous French composers—was intertextually related. Drawing on archival research into this repertoire alongside art-historical scholarship, this paper elucidates the piano’s leading role in domestic ecologies of childhood in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French bourgeois society.

The paper begins with an issue foregrounded by children’s own accounts of piano playing. While publishers of children’s sheet-music avoided explicitly gendered marketing more than historians might expect, the broader culture in which this music circulated confirms the piano’s primary role as a vehicle for disciplining young female bodies, as in other national settings (Daub 2014, Solie 2004, Leppert 1993). At the same time, lesser-known parodic works within the children’s repertoire (such as Albeniz’s “Yvonne en visite”) sometimes scripted acts of resistance to such disciplining.

The paper’s second part distinguishes repertorial patterns through what I call musical gaucherie—forms of cultivated “awkwardness” embedded in the stylistic tendencies of children’s music. For example, composers’ and publishers’ fixation with doll topoi reframed the simplistic jollity of commercial pièces enfantines as a marker of the “doll-like”. Echoing art historian Greg Thomas (2010), I suggest that this characterization realized in sonic terms contemporaneous commodifications of girlhood. Resituating Debussy’s and Ravel’s canonic collections in the context of commercial sheet music emphasizes how directly they engaged childhood in the formation of racial ideologies, a topic familiar from scholarship on the cakewalk and the final movement of Children’s Corner (Lassauzet 2017; Deaville 2014; de Martelly 2010). The pentatonic gaucheries permeating the inner movements of both Children’s Corner and Ma mère l’Oye mark a more sustained—and equally problematic—conflation of childhood and racial alterity. Here, the (adult bourgeois) image of the “child at the piano” becomes a living phantasmagoria, promising access to a temporal and epistemological “elsewhere” that is simultaneously domesticated and spatially contained.