Numerous scholars cite Schumann’s Album for the Young as a critical turning point in the canonization of children’s music. According to Schumann’s wife and virtuosic pianist, Clara Wieck, piano instruction books were poor and dull. Schumann would directly address said banality in his essay On Music and Musicians. While “no child can be brought to healthy manhood on sweet meats and pastry,” the lesson could not be intellectually monotonous. Inspired by the Bildung education movement, which encouraged self-motivated instruction, and his children, Schumann created the Album for the Young for his daughter, Marie’s seventh birthday. Schumann’s Album comprises forty-three songs in two parts, divided by difficulty level. This song book would erase corrupt music like salon styles or showy operatic arias, focusing rather on appropriate musical styles for children, like folk-tunes, lullabies, marches, sonatas, and hymns, in particular protestant chorales. A majority of the songs are inspired by light scenes of “familial intimacy,” nature, and domestic joys with descriptive titles to elicit a naïve charm. Instead of numerical titles, a child would read “Little Morning Wanderer” or “Happy Farmer,” accompanied by frolicking images of children rendered by Ludwig Richter. These bucolic engravings would stimulate a playful atmosphere, gesturing that childhood, and piano music, are not monotonous or complex. Ian Sharp notes that many of the pieces are purposefully constructed to be relatively simple, consisting of short, stepwise melodies contained within a singular key or emotional mood and involving ample repetition for defined practice. It is this balanced diet of “instructor and encounter,” which allowed for wide application, perpetuating Schumann’s methodology for evocative etudes as tasteful music, appropriate for young audiences. Several composers would follow Schumann’s style in their children’s music, as you will notice in other examples of the exhibit.

For further scholarship on Album for the Young see Lora Deahl, “Robert Schumann’s ‘Album for the Young’ and the Coming of Age of Nineteenth-Century Piano Pedagogy,” College Music Symposium 41 (2001): 25-42; Ian Sharp, Classical Music’s Evocation of the Myth of Childhood (Lewiston, Queenston: E. Mellen Press, 2000); Mathew Roy, The Musicalization of Romantic Childhood: Genre, Power, and Paradox (University of California Santa Barbara, 2019; and Roe-Min Kok, “Of Kindergarten, Cultural Nationalism, and Schumann’s ‘Album for the Young.’” World of Music 48, no. 1 (2006): 111–32.