The eighteen “Davidsbündler,” Schumann’s first complete piano-work, were composed in 1837. Clara contributed the first bars--a cheerful musical motto. Schumann was fond of accepting his first bars as gifts from friends. The Romancist was fond of these incursions into actuality, this poetry in the real. As the letters A B E G G had once taken his fancy, so later did A S C H. And once he wrote in Gade’s family album a piece on “Gade, Ade” (Gade, farewell). [Illustration: Clara Schumann, née Wieck.] Schumann’s music is characterised in few strokes; it is never hard to recognise its features. The interwoven melodies, the love of “anticipations,” the rollicking humour, which might almost be borrowed from old drinking songs, the contrapuntal collisions of the bass on which the light waltz flutters down, the cheerfully pensive codas, the restlessness of his syncopated rhythms, the sweet lulling romantic tone mingled with wild and vigorous march-motives, the full effect of broken chord passages of mounting fifths, the conclusions of the sections abruptly broken off by a staccato chord--all these were to be seen in spring-like freshness in the “Davidsbündler.” We have there the “einfaches stück” of Eusebius, the free recitative in No. 7 beginning with arpeggiando chords for the left hand. Next, “Florestan’s lips quiver.” Then follow the extraordinarily beautiful E flat major (No. 14) with its airy melancholy; the staccato, passing humorously over into the “Wie aus der Ferne,” and finally “Happiness speaks out of his eyes.” Nothing so wonderfully simple, so old-new, so true, so German, had been painted on the piano since Schubert. And here was a yet more modern spirit--a mind whose depths were not merely over-flowed by the streams of music, but were pictured in delicate musical emotion. The construction is clean and simple; the language refined and lofty; the whole the consolidated improvisation of a mind standing at the highest point of representative art. More perfect improvisations it did not lie in the nature of the piano to produce. It was the high-water mark of piano literature.