Schumann's "Kinderscenen" has its ups and downs, as does any piece of music. But They are particularly important here, and so I present one more way in which he establishes unity between the various pieces. This is the very first thing you hear in the opening piece:
[listen]
That phrase, a sudden yearning leap upward, followed by a slow descent, is almost identical to the opening phrase of the fourth piece in the series:
[listen]
Only the rhythm has been changed to protect the innocent (there's no dotted snap on the descent).
And, like Monday's example, there are lots of similar phrases throughout. By the time we get to "Frightening" the leap and its consequent descent have been shifted until rather late in the phrase:
[listen]
Or the leap up may be itself raised to new heights of grandeur, as in "dreaming":
[listen]
As if to apologize for the excess, Schumann turns, in the next piece, to a more Spartan, abbreviated form of the leap-descent idea:
[listen]
In this case the top of the leap is coincident with the first beat of the measure, which, hasn't happened before. (By the way, he repents of this in the following phrase)
All of these moments are connected. But what effect do they have on the listener?
It is often difficult to explain an emotional experience in words. Or a musical one. But I suspect it has something to do with a sense of wonder, mixed with pain, and sentiment. In other words, nostalgia. Or something in that neighborhood. If that family of emotions is too vague, let Schumann define it for us. After all, listen to the chord he puts under the first leap:
[listen]
And if that isn't enough, the final, out-of-time soliloquy should tell us what the composer himself feels about all this:
[listen]
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