“Last night I dreamed that Beethoven strangled me.”
Charlie Brown, there, speaking (as the punchline of the Peanuts strip that appeared on 20th March 1951) for anyone who has ever tried to learn the violin.
A couple of months after this melancholy musical episode, a new Peanuts character made the first of many appearances. A baby, sitting on the floor, able neither to walk nor talk, Schroeder was at first a foil for the other characters (Charlie Brown, Shermy and Patty had been joined by pigtailed Violet in February that year). Now there was a baby in the strip, there were more opportunities for the older kids to show the adult side of their strangely confused personalities. This duality – grown up thoughts coming out of children’s mouths – was already establishing Peanuts in a class apart from other comics, and there’s a nice example of it in Charlie Brown’s reaction on meeting Schroeder for the first time: “I don’t know what to say. I always feel so uncomfortable near children”.
Very soon, however, Schulz seemed to realise that a silent and immobile baby offered limited scope for anything much beyond variations on that basic gag. And while Schroeder did start saying the odd word – in one strip he shouts “Kitty!” at a befuddled Snoopy – it was through music that his permanent role in the strip was established.
The image is familiar to any regular Peanuts reader – Schroeder, seated at his toy piano, pounding out Beethoven, the evidence of his activities manifested in meticulously copied music floating in the empty space above his head.
The faithful and accurate representation of the printed music was a masterstroke. For the running gag to work – tiny child playing extraordinarily mature and sophisticated music on a toy piano – it wouldn’t be enough just to have disembodied crotchets and quavers floating around, vague and contextless. The music had to be real.
Schulz found the process of reproducing the music “extremely tedious”, but his dedication to the craft of the comic strip meant it was a duty he never shirked. “I think it’s important to try to break beneath the surface in everything you are doing, rather than just drawing surface cartoons.”
The toy piano first appeared on 24th September 1951. Charlie Brown, trying to educate young Schroeder, plays. Single notes. Plink plink plink. “The piano is a beautiful instrument if played properly, Schroeder.” Plink plink plink. Schroeder retaliates with a burst of Rachmaninov (bar 20 of the G minor Prelude, Op. 23, No. 5, if you’re interested).
Peanuts fans have got so used to the toy piano conceit that they barely question it – but it is a marvellously strange and imaginative idea, and the first real hint of the magical world that Peanuts would become. Schroeder wills the music into being, imagining it with such firm belief that it’s projected into our heads. Tellingly, shortly after that first strip, Charlie Brown sits Schroeder down at a real piano, to see how well he can play it. Schroeder immediately bursts into tears. Reality is too much.
1951 sees other developments in Peanutsworld. The introduction of Violet allowed for more varied interactions between the characters, but she, Patty and Shermy remained relatively undefined and anonymous. Schulz was clearly finding his voice and developing his own style, and there was still plenty of mileage in those characters, but reading these strips now, you can’t help thinking of Schulz’s own thoughts on them, looking back with the benefit of 35 years of hindsight: “Some characters just don’t seem to have enough personality to carry out ideas. They’re just almost born straight men.”
As if sensing the limitations of the supporting cast, in 1951 Schulz gravitated towards Charlie Brown as the strip’s main character. The trademark zigzag shirt, which made its first appearance near the end of the previous year, quickly became his uniform. His eyes started to move closer together, and Schulz began to expand the range of expressions he could convey with those deceptively simple lines and squiggles.
Charlie Brown’s head also begun its evolution towards a rounder shape, and that roundness started to be a recognisable feature – in one strip, his attempt to hide behind a tree is foiled by the visibility of his ears either side of it.
A lot of the strips reflect the simple reality of childhood. In one, Charlie Brown and Shermy are struggling to play tennis. “This is getting me down… Let’s change the rules.” They meet at the net, which is several inches higher than either of them. “One point if you hit the ball, two points if you get it over the net.” The gag lands with visual and verbal aplomb.
And then, early in October, a scene of the kind that would become painfully familiar. Charlie Brown is walking with Snoopy, bemoaning his lot. “Nobody loves me! Everybody hates me! I guess you’re the only friend I have, Snoopy.”
At that moment Patty walks by, eating ice cream. The tragic inevitability of Snoopy’s disappearance in search of food is only made more agonising by Charlie Brown’s stoic acceptance of his pet’s fickleness.
He sits. He frowns.
“That’s the way it goes.”