In 1835 Robert Schumann was living in the house of his piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck and his teenage daughter, Clara. The year saw the completion of Robert's piano suite Carnaval op. 9 and Clara's Soirées Musicales op. 6. Carnaval is a set of musical portraits of places, people and ideas including 2 self-portraits of Robert - his reflective, poetic side is captured in Eusebius and his passionate, impetuous side in Florestan. Robert used these names as noms de plumes for articles in his ground-breaking music journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. In fact he published a review of Clara's Soirées Musicales signed by both Eusebius and Florestan. Robert and Clara eventually married, after a lengthy legal battle with her father, who objected to the match, on the day before Clara's 21st birthday (the date chosen to spite Friedrich.) They produced 8 children, one of whom died in infancy. I have used Robert's Eusebius and Florestan and 3 of Clara's pieces from op. 6 (Notturno, Ballade and the second Mazurka) to produce 5 new "musical offspring." This "artificial insemination" was achieved by inserting the notes from one piece into the rhythmic structure of another. The result is that we recognize the world of early Romantic piano music by it's rhythms and harmonies, but because of the particular combination it is at the same time quite unfamiliar, possibly even disturbing, but in either case fitting the lovely definition of Romanticism by Walter Pater - "strangeness added to beauty."
Carnival Evenings was composed in 2001 for Eve Egoyan, and first performed by her on September 29th at St. George-the-Martyr Anglican Church in Toronto.