Schumann gives musical expression to himself, his friends and colleagues, and characters from improvised Italian comedy (commedia dell'arte).

Carnaval had its origin in a set of variations on a Sehnsuchtswalzer by Franz Schubert, whose music Schumann had discovered only in 1827.

Schumann felt that Schuncke's heroic treatment was an inappropriate reflection of the tender nature of the Schubert piece, so he set out to approach his variations in a more intimate way, working on them in 1833 and 1834.

[1] Romanian pianist Herbert Schuch has also recorded this reconstruction, with his own editorial emendations, for the Oehms Classics label.

The four notes are encoded puzzles, and Schumann predicted that "deciphering my masked ball will be a real game for you.

These are musical cryptograms, as follows: The first two spell the German name for the town of Asch (now Aš in the Czech Republic), in which Schumann's then fiancée, Ernestine von Fricken, was born.

Each piece has a title, and the work as a whole is a musical representation of an elaborate and imaginative masked ball during carnival season.

[7] Carnaval remains famous for its resplendent chordal passages and its use of rhythmic displacement and has long been a staple of the pianist's repertoire.

Both Schumann and his wife Clara considered his solo piano works too difficult for the general public.

Six months after Schumann's death, Liszt would write to Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski, Schumann's future biographer, that Carnaval was a work "that will assume its natural place in the public eye alongside Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, which in my opinion it even surpasses in melodic invention and conciseness".

Marche des "Davidsbündler" contre les Philistins[14] (A♭ major; Non allegro) It is to be noted that although the motifs look very different on the score, recognition sometimes requires listening instead of seeing.