Robert Schumann’s Carnaval is much more than a set of character pieces and musical portraits, it is in fact also a work of ingenious orthographies. Schumann realized that the name of his fiancée's hometown, ‘Asch’, could betranslated into notes according to the German reckoning of pitch names: ‘A’ became A natural, ‘S’ (Es) E flat, ‘C’ C natural, and ‘H’ B natural. Moreover, when the letters are rearranged to S-C-H-A, they became symbolic of his ownname ‘SCHumAnn’. Each of the pieces in uses these notes and almost every section incorporates a variation of the A-S-C-H pattern.