Carnaval, Op. 9, is a work by Robert Schumann for piano solo, written in 1834-1835, and subtitled Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes (Little Scenes on Four Notes). It consists of a collection of short pieces representing masked revelers at Carnival, a festival before Lent. Schumann gives musical expression to himself, his friends and colleagues, and characters from improvised Italian comedy (commedia dell’arte).

For Schumann the four notes were encoded puzzles, and he predicted that "deciphering my masked ball will be a real game for you." The 21 pieces are connected by a recurring motif. In each section of Carnaval there appears either or both of two series of musical notes. These are musical cryptograms, as follows:

• A, E-flat, C, B - signified in German as A-S-C-H
• A-flat, C, B - signified in German as As-C-H
• E-flat, C, B, A - signified in German as S-C-H-A.

The first two spell the German name for the town of Asch (this is now Aš in the Czech Republic), in which Schumann's then fiancée, Ernestine von Fricken, was born as well as representing the German word Fasching or carnival. Asch is also German for "Ash," as in Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. It also encodes a version of the composer's name, Robert Alexander Schumann. The grouping S-C-H-A encodes the composer's name again with the musical letters appearing in Schumann, in their correct order.

In Carnaval, Schumann goes further musically than in Papillons, Op. 2, for in it he himself conceives the story of which it was the musical illustration. Each piece has a title, and the work as a whole is a musical representation of an elaborate and imaginative masked ball during carnival season.Carnaval remains famous for its resplendent chordal passages and its use of rhythmic displacement, and has long been a staple of the pianist's repertoire.

Schumann dedicated the work to the violinist Karol Lipiński.

Both Schumann and his wife, Clara, considered his solo piano works too difficult for the general public. Frédéric Chopin is reported to have said that Carnaval was not music at all. Consequently, the works for solo piano were rarely performed in public during Schumann's lifetime, although Franz Liszt performed selections from Carnaval in Leipzig in 1840.

Heinz Dill has mentioned Schumann's use of musical quotes and codes in this work. Eric Sams has discussed literary allusions in the work, such as to novels of Jean-Paul.

Movements
Although the work has 22 sections, only 20 of them are numbered. Schumann did not number "Sphinxes" and "Intermezzo: Paganini".

Orchestrations
In 1910, Carnaval was choreographed for a ballet for a production by Sergei Diaghilev, with orchestrations by Alexander Glazunov, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Anatoly Lyadov and Alexander Tcherepnin.

Among others who have orchestrated Carnaval are Maurice Ravel (1914).

The above text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ( creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ ). It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Carnaval (Schumann)" ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval_(Schumann) ).