Robert Schumann

This is probably the most popular of the nine pieces that comprise Schumann's Waldszenen, a late effort in his distinguished and considerable piano output that came in the years prior to his catastrophic mental breakdown in 1854. The composer always had been eccentric and often displayed nervous problems. Yet his malaise never seemed to spill over into his art with any detrimental effects. True, his late piano works often exhibited less freshness of invention and less rugged individualism than was typical of his keyboard music ten years before. That said, "Vogel als Prophet" (The Prophetic Bird) is anything but lacking in imagination or boldness of expression. It opens with a quirky, ghostly theme that oddly foreshadows the music in some of Prokofiev's Visions Fugitives of seven decades later. The music is ethereal in mood, seeming to playfully roam about the clouds -- or, in this case, fly about the clouds. In the middle section, Schumann presents a serene, somewhat grandiose melody of Romantic temperament that very quickly yields back to the main theme. This effort must be assessed as one of Schumann's most prescient creations, auguring not only the Prokofiev work mentioned above, but even certain aspects of Impressionism. The piece typically has a duration of three-and-a-half to four minutes.