As an assistant professor of Piano and Music Theory, Dr. Louie Hehman helps Bellarmine
Music majors prepare for recitals in their junior and senior years. But this weekend,
Hehman himself will be under the lights of the Cralle Theater stage.
On Sunday at 3 p.m., he will perform a solo piano recital featuring Carnaval, the famously difficult, 28-minute masterwork of Robert Schumann. Composed between
1834 and 1835, the work for solo piano has 21 movements that collectively cover the
full range of human emotion.
“Each movement is a vignette depicting a character at an imaginary masked ball around
the time of Carnaval, or what we in America might call Mardi Gras,” Hehman said. “Some
of these vignettes represent aspects of Schumann's own personality, of which there
were several—today, it is believed that he may have had undiagnosed schizophrenia.
Other movements are musical portraits of his friends and acquaintances.
“The overall experience is one of quick contrasts that manage to fit together to create
an immensely satisfying whole.”
Many of Schumann’s works were considered unplayable in his time, and acclaimed contemporary
pianist Jon Nakamatsu has said that Schuhmann composed “without any regard to the
human hand.” Hehman spent more than a year perfecting and memorizingCarnaval.
“I started last summer with the intent of learning it in a few months, but it has
been such a challenge that it took me over a year to get it to its current level,”
he said.
He agreed with Nakamatsu’s assessment of Schumann’s writing. “Pianists always comment
on how awkward his music feels under our fingers; this is at least partly because
Schumann ruined his own hands in an attempt to strengthen his individual fingers,
so he did not actually play most of the music he wrote,” he said. “He left the playing
to his wife, the phenomenal pianist-composer Clara Wieck, who makes an appearance
as a character in Carnaval.”
The piece can sound very chaotic at times, he said, but also has moments of tenderness
and beauty. “I encourage any attendees to focus in on those moments, and then hold
on tight when the music becomes a whirlwind—even when it's chaotic, it is a lot of
fun,” he said. “To help people keep track of the 21 movements, I have a series of
images that will be projected while I’m performing. That way, each character at the
masked ball will be easy to follow as they arrive and exit in turn.”
As to how he went about memorizing a 28-minute work, Hehman said it was “a never-ending
process of repetition, listening, slowing yourself down, repetition again, reading
the score away from the piano, and then more repetition.”
“Muscle memory is important, but the most essential part of memory for the musician
is the cultivation of aural memory, or something music psychologists often call audiation.
I compare it to hearing a narrator in your head while reading a book,” he said. “Over
the course of the year-and-some-change I've worked on this piece and the other pieces
on this program, I’ve worked to cultivate a strong auditory image of the music so
that I can hear everything in my head before I even sit down to play.”
That skill takes years to master, and he is still growing it, said Hehman, who graduated
from Bellarmine in 2014. “I gave my first recital as a sophomore at Bellarmine back
in 2012, and I have tried to give at least one every year since then. Every time I
do it, every time I learn a new piece, the audiation gets a little stronger.”
Even when he was not actively working on Carnaval, it was obvious his mind was still on it, he said.
“I’ll be sitting and watching TV, and my wife will turn to me and ask me, ‘What are
you playing?’ She'll notice that my fingers are moving subconsciously—I'm not even
aware of it!”
IF YOU GO
Dr. Louie Hehman: Solo Piano Recital
Featured composers: Robert Schumann’s Carnaval will constitute the second half of the program; the first half will include Margaret
Bonds’ Spiritual Suite and several short works by Duke Ellington.
When: 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29
Where: Bellarmine University’s Cralle Theater
Free and open to the public