Schumann's C Major Fantasie Composition Techniques

Robert Schumann is the most romantic man in the romantic composers and one of the most outstanding represents of the progressive romantic art at the beginning of nineteenth century. His musical works often centers on the reflection of the real life in German, they are with the clue of personal experience on feeling and based on the thought of the literary works during the same period. The main means to display are the means with the nature of fantasy and expressing one's feelings. The woks explore personal feelings, emotional characters and psychological changes. The works on piano has the special brilliance in Robert Schumann's musical works, of course, it is related with his experience on leaning and life. The material on piano is the range of subjects which Robert Schumann is mostly good at and represents his delicate feelings and gives full play to his intellect. When Robert Schumann heard that someone would build a monument to commemorate Beethoven in his hometown, he composed C major fantasia which expresses his veneration to Beethoven and his deep love for Clara. C major fantasia is a piece of work on piano with huge structure and romantic feeling, it's one of the greatest works on piano during the romantic period. The dissertation mainly studies the structure of the melody, the form of the melody,the form of the harmony and polyphony to make people know the characters of composing and aesthetic thought of C major fantasia better, so Robert Schumann's works on piano can be understood more deeply.The dissertation is divided into three parts altogether:The first chapter summarizes Robert Schumann's life, musical works, the age background and Schumann's art career.The second chapter analyzes the creation and technical characteristic of composing C major fantasia,which is the core of this research. The first section of this part elaborates the motive and course of composing, and the evaluations on this work. The second section analyzes the musical structure and the characters of the three movement of C major fantasia. The third section clarifies the form of the melody. There are plentiful forms of the melody in C major fantasia, which embodies Robert Schumann's composing characters of the melody. The fourth section generalizes the typical characters of the rhythm In C major fantasia, Robert Schumann put the simple elements of the rhythm into the piano texture to form all kinds of complicated and original forms of the rhythm, so there are abundant variations in the rhythm of the work. The fifth section analyzes the composing form of harmony. C major fantasia is based on traditional function harmony, and maintains the structure function of the basic chord. In the meanwhile, the methods of color harmony are put into use in large-scale. The sixth section summarize the characters of tonality. The seventh section analyzes the characters of piano texture form .The third chapter mainly generalizes the art characters and aesthetic thoughts of C major fantasia. They are the aesthetic characters of fantasy and the characters of inheriting and pioneering.The study on the technique of composing C major fantasia may make people pay more attention to Schumann's work and know the development of the technique of composing music in the period of romanticism. Schumann's spirit of inheriting and pioneering showed in composing C major fantasia is also of practical significance.