The Cat and His Music Master
ca. 9 minutes
solo piano
World premiere by myself on 13 July 2026 at Wigmore Hall
As I was writing sketches of this new piano piece, my music paper was on top of a copy of Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana op. 16, a piece which I’ve studied for many years. The paper was fairly flimsy, so when the sun struck it at an angle one day, it became faintly transparent. The strong printed ink from the published edition of Schumann bled through the page, making his text visible against my freshly penned scribbles.
It reminded me of the experimental novel by E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr with a Fragmentary Biography of Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper (1821). Murr, a cat who has learned how to read and write, pens his autobiography on the reverse side of the discarded pages of Johannes Kreisler’s diary. Kreisler (the eponymous inspiration for Kreisleriana) is a brilliant but eccentric musician who works as the Kapellmeister at the fictional court of Sieghartsweiler. He is dashing, charming, acerbicly hilarious, but also prone to episodes of darkness and deeply fears for his own madness.
Kreisler was a literary inspiration of Schumann, who sympathized with his Romantic outlook on an artistic life and the subsequent struggles for that within an indifferent society. I was struck by how current the themes felt, as the specific type of idealism espoused by Kreisler is still felt and struggled for by artists today.
On another level I also identified with the tomcat Murr, who is all too pleased with his own poetry and prose; it turns out they are often plagiarisms of great writers that he’s unwittingly regurgitated. Being a pianist who has spent virtually the entirety of my life studying ‘the canon’, putting on my composer hat can sometimes feel like being a naive cat making little scratches on the obverse side of great works.
I’ve decided to embrace this by creating a recital work that conjures Hoffmann’s phantasmagorical tale. Kreisler tears through a panoply of emotional states, while various episodes of feline music are spliced throughout (the cat meows, runs across the keyboard, and recites poetry a bit too earnestly); Schumann’s music also bleeds through the paper, painting a theatrical, postmodern tableau which pays homage to his marvelous and forward-looking music.