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PHILIPPE BIANCONI
Papillons
prefigures many aspects of Schumann’s future development.
Don’t you think people generally underrate the importance of this op.2 at
the beginning of his career?
Oh, certainly – and I must admit that in my early days, when I tackled
Papillons
for
the first time, its richness eluded me; I was more attracted by the torments of the
Fantasie
or of
Kreisleriana
. It was only with time that I become aware of the extreme
importance of an opus which, in the first place, foreshadows those cycles of short
pieces that Schumann would write later (beginning with
Carnaval
four years later),
but which also marks the true flowering of his highly individual genius.
‘Read the last chapter of
Flegeljahre
and you will understand
Papillons’,
said the
composer. Did the masked ball scene that closes Jean Paul’s novel inspire the
work as a whole, or did Schumann try to make the text correspond to music that
incorporates a certain amount of pre-existingmaterial (perhaps deriving frombrief
pieces for piano duet)? The whole question remains somewhat mysterious. But it’s
obvious, from a psychological point of view, that there’s a very strong link between
Papillons
and Jean Paul’s masked ball.