Robert Schumann – Prophet Bird

April 29, 2012 — classical, sunday

This song is rated: 1 Pill – entry-level for music novices

Dr. cheerlubber again.

I know there was a bit of a problem with the classical piece I posted last week…I investigated and it turns out the file was 14 MB! So I reduced the file size, re-uploaded, and now you should be able to listen to it~

Today’s Sunday post is a lovely, short piece by Robert Schumann, a famous and influential German composer from the Romantic era, called Prophet Bird. I first heard this when we bought an Itzhak Perlman CD after a concert of his that we went to years ago and it quickly became one of my favorites. Perlman, a world-renowned violin virtuoso, plays the piece beautifully; while I have no idea what the song title means, the piece is light and mysterious and somehow the title Prophet Bird fits.

Years later I’m flipping through some old piano books I’d never been through, and I find we have an entire Schumann compilation book. I couldn’t be happier because Schumann is a great composer, and I also discovered in that very same book was the sheet music for one of my favorite piano concertos that I had dreamed of learning for a long time (I’ll have to highlight that piece later). As I was going through the rest of the giant volume to see what other Schumann works it had, I come across one that looks nice and decide to start sight-reading it, when the melody started sounding rather familiar. Rather joyously, I realized it was Prophet Bird in its original form written for piano. I was so excited. I was actually practicing it earlier today so it inspired me to do it for today’s classical post. Enjoy!