Schumann`s Last Piano Pieces. (Revised).

The angels that Schumann heard
Singing in the night
Were real to him,
And are all too real to us
As we sit side by side at the keyboard,
Two pianists with awkward fingers
Trying to make sense of the score.

These angel voices were perhaps the tongues
Of madness
Breaking through the stillness of the night
As he snuggled down to sleep beside his wife,
Or perhaps they were as real as he believed,
Real as his wife, his seven restless children
Curled in their cots,
The night lights flickering palely.

They were not the songs of ghosts,
But more like the ringing of Easter bells
Out over suburban gardens,
Bleak patios purple with hyacinth,
For yes, these chords are truly loud and clamorous,
They ring and shout and thunder
Beneath our struggling fingers
Like sonorous church chorales
Greeting the resurrection.

No, Schumann was not mad when he wrote this music.
It was the silence that followed, the loneliness of the asylum,
Where, cut off from his family, the laughter of his children,
He was forced to renounce the validity of his dreams.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
April 6th. - July 24th. 2018.