Carnaval, as digressive and unconventional as it was, came closest to being Schumann's magnum opus at the time of its completion. It built on the idea of the waltz series, which had already served as the foundation for Papillons, op. 2, and the Intermezzi, op. 4. Carnaval's scale, by comparison with those works, is immense, and other later cycles would also tend to be less fragmentary, their movements more self-contained.

Perhaps most remarkable, for this study, is the way in which both the “Préambule” and the “Marche des Davidsbündler” play with the signals conventional to sonata form. In Carnaval, the “Préambule” mocks the pompous preambles of sonatas and symphonies; its later sections, which reappear as a single movement entitled “Pause” later in the work, mimic the sequential modulations of a development section. This same topos dominates the “Marche,” which starts pompously, but in triple time, and continues by developing themes that have not yet been properly introduced in the movement. The “Pause” material returns, continuing the development mode, but no recapitulation follows; instead, the movement plummets into a coda that anchors the tonality of Carnaval as a whole, and thus seems mightily out of proportion to the individual movement. Both movements exemplify the techniques of defamiliarization also displayed by Jean Paul in all of his novels, with Hesperus a particularly apt comparison. The Bildungsroman and the Trivialroman meet and collide in Hesperus just as the waltz and the sonata do in Carnaval, with both confusing and exciting results.