Source information of movement titles and the reflections of the meanings contained in them to music in Robert Schumann's Op.9 carnaval

Being an interpreter in music is a phenomenon that involves multiple analytical approach. The reason for this is the existence of various factors that forms a musical piece such as form, counterpoint or harmony. However in Romantic era, the expression of music has been carried one step further with the musicians' producing extremely subjective pieces. Composers gathering the people, situations or moods that they try to depict in their work under certain movement titles, makes it a requirement for the interpreters to have a more concrete force of expression. With this aspect, the interpreters must examine such pieces more deeply and approach them from different viewpoints. Robert Schumann is the leading musician of Romantic era who suit best to the description of subjective musician. He put the classical forms aside and gives his priority as a composer to reflect the mood in which he is living and the effects of environmental events on him to his music, The composer's piano music is studied in 3 different era. These are the early era that he has only composed piano pieces, the middle era that he has composed polyphonic pieces for piano and his late era that he has produced pieces called Hausmusik composed with Biedermeier effect. Op.9 "Carnaval", like most of the solo piano pieces he has composed in his early era, is a work of 21 movements, gathering of character pieces with certain titles under a single name as a cycle. The people and the characters depicted in this work correspond to "commedia dell'arte" characters and the composers that Schumann feel admiration and imaginary personalities he has created in his world. Besides this there are many movements with dance character that reflect the carnival enthusiasm. The purpose of this research is an in-depth investigation of source information and meaning involved in movement titles of Robert Schumann's op.9 "Carnaval" and to reveal how these content are imagined and reflected to music by the composer. The findings achieved at the end of this research are important in the way of supplying the accumulation of knowledge needed for a more equipped performance for the pianists who are going to play this piece. The analysis of input data is realized by the method of "content analysis" which is one of the types of qualitative research. The structural analysis steps which applied seperately for every movement are motivic analysis, phrase analysis, tonal analysis and form analysis. As a result of the analysis, evidences have been found that contents in the movement titles have been reflected to music with various rhythmic, tonal and motivic factors. In addition to this, it has been revealed that Sphinxes ensure unity in the piece in terms of motives and the tonal relation between the movements forge a tonal unity in the piece. The findings and results achieved from this research are qualified enough to help the pianists who deal with the piece, informing them about every element and concept in detail.