Continued from the home page....
An essay by James M. Keller
The Peri at the gates of ParsdiseRobert Schumann tended to turn sequentially from genre to genre, obsessively exploring a medium until he felt he had reached the current limit of his abilities and curiosity, and then moving on to other musical fields. Plenty of exceptions prove the rule, to be sure, but the contours of his production are unmistakable. His first principal focus, in the 1830s, was piano music, but in 1840 he turned his attention to the lied, in 1841 to symphonic music, in 1842 to chamber music, in 1843 to oratorio, and in 1845 to contrapuntal forms.
Through much of this he was also plotting his assault on the world of Romantic opera, a genre that would prove elusive. In 1844 he did some preliminary work on an opera based on Byron's The Corsair, but abandoned it before making much headway. That same year he began an opera-like setting of Goethe's Faust, but by the time he finished it, in 1853, this would metamorphose into an opera manqué his Scenes from Goethe's Faust for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra. His 1848 setting of Byron's Manfred displayed much in common with the Faust project: neither of these vast “dramatic poems,” in their strictly literary forms, was really suited for staged production, and neither text really served as a practical libretto without substantial rewriting, which Schumann in neither case wanted to do, being fixated on the integrity of Goethe's and Byron's originals. Writing to Franz Liszt to pitch a production in Weimar (which eventually took place, marking the piece's premiere), Schumann advised that Manfred “should not be advertised to the public as opera, Singspiel, or melodrama, but as ‘a dramatic poem with music,’ ” to which he added, “That would be completely new and unprecedented.” Yet again, Schumann was falling in the cracks between established genres, a tendency that was at once a mark of his originality and a challenge to the viability of certain of his large-scale works in posterity.
He had given passing attention to about forty possible operatic subjects (including Hamlet, The Tempest, Till Eulenspiegel, the Nibelungenlied, and Tristan and Isolde) before he finally settled on Friedrich Hebbel's Genoveva, which he set in 1847-48). It was the only opera he would complete, and its ideals are so unlike most other works in its genre that the late Schumann biographer John Daverio understandably preferred to refer to it as a “literary opera,” acknowledging both its operatic aspirations and its unusual, sometimes exasperating, emphasis on the primacy of libretto over music. Genoveva never scored much of a success, but it did help Schumann clarify his distinctive objectives as an opera composer.
Fallen warriorAmong the many potential subjects he scrutinized as possible operas was Lalla Rookh, by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, a prose piece into which are interpolated four extended, discreet poetical episodes. When, in December 1840, Schumann set about organizing his creative schedule by laying out his aspirations in his Projektenbuch (“Project Book”), three of those four verse episodes of Lalla Rookh were entered as “texts suitable for concert pieces,” and two of them were also designated as “ opera materials.” The episode involving the efforts of a Peri to gain entry to heaven was cited in both categories.
It was natural that Schumann should have been aware of Moore’s work, which by that time was immensely popular. Moore (1779-1852) had led the sort of colorful life one would expect of a Romantic poet, moving from his native Dublin to London, then on to Bermuda and Canada, back to Britain but fleeing to France and Italy to escape debts incurred by one of his associates in Bermuda. Through it all he penned - and sometimes plagiarized - poetry and songs, generally catering to his audiences' hunger for folk material (however specious) and glimpses of exotic climes. (Probably “The Last Rose of Summer” and “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms“ are the Moore poems most widely remembered today.) Many viewed him as a peer of Byron and Shelley, or as an Irish counterpart to the Scottish Burns and Scott. Indeed, Byron was one of Moore's closest friends; Moore wrote a biography of him in 1830, several years after burning the manuscript of his friend's memoirs, entrusted to him on Byron’s deathbed, in order to protect Byron's reputation (or not, this being a disputed question of history).
Moore had already achieved immense popular success when he published Lalla Rookh, in May 1817, receiving from his publisher the extraordinarily large advance of £3000. The investment paid off royally: the first edition sold out within three days, and by the end of the year the volume went through no fewer than six printings. Rival editions sprouted at numerous British publishing houses, and by 1842 it was available in 30 different English-language editions, in addition to translations in Italian, French, German, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, and Spanish. The book's dramatic potential was plumbed early on, when in 1822 a lavish staging, with incidental music, was produced at the Royal Palace of the King Friedrich of Prussia, in Berlin. In short, Lalla Rookh scored a major international hit in its day. Apart from pandering to the European lust for Oriental exoticism, it had the advantage of being erotically suggestive without going over the line. Mr. Sneyd, a versifying critic, quipped:
Lalla Rookh
Is a naughty book
By Tommy Moore
Who has written four,
Each warmer
Than the former,
So the most recent
Is the least decent.
One might describe Lalla Rookh as the opposite of Scheherazade, who spent a thousand and one nights telling her bloodthirsty husband intriguing stories, always leaving him with a cliff-hanging ending to induce him not to murder her. Lalla Rookh (the name, Moore tells us, means “Tulip Cheek”) is “a Princess described by the poets of her time, as more beautiful that ... any of those heroines whose names and loves embellished the songs of Persia and Hindostan.” She is traveling from Delhi to Cashmere, where she is to marry the King of Bucharia. Among her entourage is a handsome young Cashmerian poet named Feramorz, “much celebrated throughout the Valley for his manner of reciting the Stories of the East,” whose responsibility was “to beguile the tediousness of the journey by some of his most agreeable recitals.” Four such “recitals” ensue, all in perfumed verse, and in the course of their telling Lalla Rookh finds herself falling in love with Feramorz. But this turns out to be not a bad thing when, at the nuptials, Lalla Rookh gets her first glimpse of her royal bridegroom. “Feramorz was, himself, the Sovereign of Bucharia, who in this disguise had accompanied his young bride from Delhi, and, having, won her love as an humble minstrel, now amply deserved to enjoy it as a King.”
It is the second of Feramorz's tales that concerns us here, the story of a Peri desirous of gaining entry to heaven. A Peri (pronounced “PEE-ree”) is an ethereal creature of Persian folklore, an incorporeal being nurtured on scents and perfumes. Peris have something elfin or angelic about them; or, as a contemporary dictionary put it, “One might compare them with fairies if the latter ... didn’t represent but a shadow of the complete concept of a Peri.” A Peri is descended from the union of a fallen angel and a mortal, and this tarnished genealogy effectively bars her (Moore refers to his Peri in the feminine) from passing through the gates of heaven. And yet the case is not hopeless. Moved by her tears of exile, “the glorious Angel who was keeping / The gate of Light” addressed her sympathetically:
“Nymph of a fair, but erring line!”
Gently he said - “One hope is thine,
‘Tis written in the Book of Fate,
‘The Peri yet may be forgiven
Who brings to this Eternal Gate
The Gift that is most dear to Heaven!’
Go, seek it, and redeem thy sin;
‘Tis sweet to let the Pardon'd in!”
Thus encouraged, the Peri sets off on her vague scavenger hunt, which — as befits a good fairy-tale — unrolls in tripartite form. First she stops at a battlefield in India, where a gallant Young Man, trying to defend his nation, is struck dead by the invading tyrant Gazna. The Peri captures the last drop of the dying warrior’s blood, mistakenly believing that this token of patriotic sacrifice would open Heaven's gate. Next she flies to Egypt, ravaged by plague. There she spies a Young Man about to die; his beloved embraces him, and in so doing is herself struck by the plague and similarly expires. The Peri bears this lover's last sigh to heaven, but even this gift of loving devotion is not enough to open the gates. She now flies to Syria, where she encounters an elderly criminal who, on seeing an innocent child kneel down to prayer at Vespers, joins the lad and weeps with repentance. That repentant tear, “the triumph of a soul forgiven,” proves to be the gift most dear to heaven, the Peri's ticket to “Joy, joy forever.”
Schumann, who was an avid reader and an impressionable Romantic, was probably poring over Lalla Rookh as a teenager, since it was published as early as 1822 in a German translation by J.L. Witthaus. Theodor Oelcker created a different German translation in 1839 — another opportunity for the composer to focus on Moore's book - and (as we have mentioned) the following year Schumann referred to three of the Lalla Rookh tales in his Projektenbuch. Schumann toyed with the text as a possible opera libretto in 1840-41, getting the poet Adolf Böttger involved in some of the literary drafting in August 1841. At about this time Schumann's boyhood friend Emil Flechsig made an original translation of Lalla Rookh himself, which he brought along when he paid Schumann a visit in Leipzig in 1841. Flechsig reported in his unpublished memoirs that, before he had a chance to even mention his translation with Schumann, the composer declared: “Right now I am all in the mood for composing, and I wish I could come up with something really out of the ordinary. I am so attracted to the East, to the rose gardens of Persia, to the palm groves of India. I have a feeling that someone will bring me a subject that would lead me there.” Flechsig produced his Lalla Rookh translation, as if on cue. “The whole episode,” he decided, “is a miracle — a manifestation of a sixth sense that detects invisible things in our proximity.”
Love's last sighFlechsig's story is almost too good to be true, and the chronology really does appear to reveal that Schumann was actively working on something derived from Moore's text well before Flechsig's visit. On the other hand, it is Flechsig's translation that became the basis for Schumann's eventual setting, with Schumann effecting various amendments, including most notably the addition of picturesque bits that would allow him to write music descriptive of Houris and Nile Genies. After hammering out the libretto, Schumann apparently set the project aside for about a year.
What he had originally envisioned as either an opera or a concert piece gradually veered towards the latter, very much prefiguring the ensuing histories of Schumann's Faust and Manfred. Already in Das Paradies und die Peri Schumann found himself essentially creating a form appropriate for his artistic conception, rather than tailoring his ideas to predefined forms. It is convenient and not inaccurate to refer to this piece as an oratorio, although it certainly stands apart from the mainstream tradition of Biblical, religious, historical, or mythological oratorios as exemplified by Handel, Bach, Haydn, and Mendelssohn. On its title page Schumann called this not an oratorio but rather a Dichtung, literally a “poem,” though to his friend Eduard Krüger he did describe it (on June 3, 1843, while completing the piece) as “an oratorio, though not for the chapel, but rather for ‘cheerful folk.’ ”. Its closest relatives would seem to be such contemporaneous works of similarly vague genre as Heinrich Marschner's Klänge aus Osten (“Sounds from the East,” 1842), Carl Loewe's Johann Hus (1842, which Schumann hailed in a review), and Mendelssohn’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht (“The First Walpurgis Night,” 1832 — and, tellingly, performed in Leipzig on February 2, 1843). Still, Schumann sensed that his new work was inherently different even from these. While working on Das Paradies und die Peri, he wrote to his colleague Karl Kossmaly, “At the moment I’m involved in a large project, the largest I've yet undertaken — it's not an opera — I believe it's well-nigh a new genre for the concert hall.”
When Schumann informed Richard Wagner about his new piece, he received an interesting reply. “The very knowledge that you were composing this text made me happy,” responded Wagner. “Not only do I know this wonderful story but I had thought of treating it myself. But I could not find the right musical form for it. Let me therefore congratulate you for having found it. You are right: the concert-hall, when fitted out as you people have done in Leipzig, may well become the sole place of refuge and of musical cultivation.” Prophetic words indeed from the future high-priest of the concert-hall, whose edifice at Bayreuth would become, a few decades later, the pilgrimage destination for adherents to the “secular sanctification” of the religion of music.
In any case, on February 23, 1843, precisely three weeks after the Leipzig performance of Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht, an entry in Schumann's Haushaltbuch (“Household Book”) documented that he was launched on the composition of Das Paradies und die Peri. The piece was structured in three parts, conforming to the three adventures of the Peri's quest, and by March 30 the First Part was entirely sketched and scored. Clara soon wrote in the Marriage Diary, “[Robert] has already played me the First Part from the sketch, and I think it's the most splendid thing he's done so far; but he's working with his whole body and soul, and with such intensity that I sometimes worry he might become ill.” His intense spurt of creativity carried him practically without break through the Second Part (April 6-17), after which a confluence of distractions seem to have interfered for a month: Schumann’s responsibilities with his journal (the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik), the birth of the Schumanns' second daughter, and a domestic crisis arising from the dismissal of the family’s cook, who had stolen 50 bottles from the wine cellar.
Man of crimeBy May 17 Schumann embarked on setting the Third Part, and a month later the work was substantially complete (although minor revisions would ensue). The four months he had devoted to it represented the longest span he had ever concentrated on a single composition. Wrote Schumann in the Marriage Diary: “On June 16 my ‘Peri’ was completed after several days of strenuous work. What a great joy for the Schumann couple! Except for a few oratorios by Loewe, which are basically didactic, I don't know of anything similar in the musical repertory. I don’t like to write or speak about my own works; my wish is that they will have a good effect on the world and secure for me the loving memory of my children.” And to the Hague-based composer Johannes Verhulst he wrote on June 19: “As I wrote finis on the last sheet of the score, I felt so thankful that my strength had been equal to the strain. A work of these dimensions is no light undertaking. I realize better now what it means to write a succession of them, such as, for instance, the eight operas which Mozart produced within so short a time. Have I told you the story of the Peri? ... It is simply made for music. The whole conception is so poetic and ideal that I was quite carried away by it. The music is just long enough for an evening performance.”
That evening performance arrived less than six months later, on December 4 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, a concert that marked not only the premiere of Das Paradies und die Peri but also Schumann’s debut as a conductor. Conducting would never prove to be his strong suit, but the evening went well nonetheless, and an encore performance was quickly arranged for a week later. Wrote Clara in the Marriage Diary:
On the 4th Robert performed his Peri for the first time (for the benefit of the music conservatory), and at the same time made his first debut as a conductor. The magnificent orchestration had delighted me already in the morning at the rehearsal, and anyone can imagine how happy I was in the evening—words cannot describe it at all. The applause was great, but it was enthusiastic at the second performance, which took place onThe 11th. Robert was acclaimed already when he made his appearance and found a beautiful laurel wreath on the conductor's podium, which consternated him somewhat, but must have given pleasure. He was called back after every section.
Das Paradies und die Peri was roundly praised by early critics. The report by Johann Christian Lobe in an 1847 issue of Leipzig's Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung is typical: [In this work, Schumann] “strives for truth and beauty, but distinguishes by clear, simple, generally accessible and understandable form. His largest work thus far affords the most pleasant proof ... that even the most genuine work of art can and must be popular to a certain extent if it is to reach completely its high destiny. ... Melodies run through the whole work that are not only deeply and truly felt but also immediately and generally effective because of their simple formation and often skilled repetition.” Among the rare were dissenters was the poet and critic Ludwig Rellstab, who objected to the work's lack of recitatives and its seamless, through-composed character when he heard its Berlin premiere. That got under Schumann's skin. As a critic himself, he knew better than to lock horns with reviewers; but he uncharacteristically wrote back to Rellstab: “You object to two aspects: the lack of recitatives and the connection, without breaks, of the musical sections. To me these are among the work's advantages, representing formal innovations. It would have been good to have this discussed in your review.”
This free-flowing formal fluidity is indeed the hallmark of Das Paradies und die Peri, and Schumann expends great effort in softening the edges between discrete numbers, which typically elide elegantly with what surrounds them. (This even extends, on a “macro” level, to eliding the First and Second Parts: The First ends with the Peri hopefully presenting her first gift to the Angel at the gate, but the rejection of the gift is held over to the start of the Second.) Much of the writing is song-like, and the setting largely eschews dialogue, focusing instead on monologue, narrative passages, and descriptive moments, with a few action scenes mixed in. Vocal forces shift constantly in the course of the 26 individual numbers, and subtle thematic connections help unify the luxurious structure. Schumann's mastery of large-scale form is impressive, nowhere more than in the finales, which build through several “separate” numbers to inevitable climaxes.
In its first five years Das Paradies und die Peri was produced in most of the major German musical capitals, as well as in nations beyond: in Utrecht, Amsterdam, Prague, Riga, Zurich, The Hague, even (in 1848) at the American Musical Institute in New York. It logged fifty performances in the composer's lifetime, outperformed only slightly by his Symphony No. 1 (the Spring), which was programmed 53 times. Das Paradies und die Peri was beyond question the piece that clinched Schumann's international reputation, and it remained a concert staple through the end of the nineteenth century. Tastes change, of course, and what struck the Romantics as a quintessential artistic achievement proved outrageously démodé, even incomprehensible, to listeners a century later. “The oratorio is too consistently sweet,” wrote the Schumann biographer Robert Haven Schauffler in 1945. “After an evening of it you feel as if you had taken a bath in liquid honey.” (And he was a Schumann apologist!) Doubtless it is most reasonable to approach Schumann's Das Paradies und die Peri — or Moore's Lalla Rookh, for that matter — as a period piece. But the period of which it is a piece happened to be one of Music's golden ages, the era that furnished the symphonies and operas and chamber works and lieder that to this day remain keystones of the repertoire. Das Paradies und die Peri sums up that esthetic in a way that may be less familiar today, but you would be hard-pressed to find a work that went more directly to the heart of musical Romanticism.
James M. Keller
Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony (Germany), on June 8, 1810, and died in an insane asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, Germany, on July 29, 1856. He composed Das Paradies und die Peri in 1843, using his own adaptation of a German libretto prepared by Emil Flechsig by way of a translation of one of the poetical episodes from Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh. Although the libretto had occupied Schumann as early as 1841, he did not begin the musical composition until 1843. He sketched and scored Part One in Leipzig between February 23 and March 30, Part Two from April 6-17, and Part Three from May 17 to June 16, with final revisions occupying him in July and September. The work was premiered in Leipzig on December 4 of that year (and repeated exactly a week later), with Schumann conducting the Gewandhaus Orchestra, a chorus (apparently the Leipzig Singakademie), and a roster of soloists headed by soprano Livia Frege in the title role. The first American performance took place on April 4, 1848 at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City, with Henry C. Timm conducting a choir of 120 voices from the Musical Institute, plus an orchestra of sixty players. The work proved popular in the United States, making the rounds of leading musical centers in short order: Brooklyn (1862); Boston (1863); Cincinnati (1866); Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1867); Chicago (1874); Milwaukee (1877); Baltimore (1882); St. Louis (1883); Philadelphia (1887). San Francisco Symphony History TK. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, bass ophicleide (tuba is typically the modern alternative), timpani, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, harp, and strings; a four-part mixed chorus (with the sopranos and contraltos sometimes divided into a four-part Choir of Angels or Choir of Houris); soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass soloists singing as a quartet; and principal vocal soloists disposed as follows: two sopranos (one portraying the Peri, the other the Maiden), mezzo-soprano (as the Angel and as an occasional narrator), two tenors (one as the principal narrator, the other as the Young Man), baritone (as an occasional narrator and as the Man), and bass (as Gazna).
In Print:
Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Poetic Age,” by John Daverio (Oxford)
Schumann: The Inner Voices of Musical Genius, by Peter Ostwald (Northeastern University Press)
Robert Schumann: Words and Music; The Vocal Compositions, by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Amadeus)
The Marriage Diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann, translated by Peter Ostwald, edited by Gerd Neuhaus (Northeastern University Press)
Robert Schumann: The Man and his Music, edited by Alan Walker (Barrie & Jenkins)
A History of the Oratorio, vol. 4: The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, by Howard Smither
(University of North Carolina Press).
On Disc:
John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, the Monteverdi Choir, and soloists including soprano
Barbara Bonney as the Peri (Deutsche Grammophon Archiv)
Armin Jordan conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, with soloists including soprano Edith Wiens (Erato/Teldec/Elektra)
Wolf-Dieter Hauschild conducting the Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester Leipzig, the Rundfunkchor Leipzig, and soloists including soprano
Magdalena Hajossyova (Berlin Classics).
James M. Keller is Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. This essay, in slightly modified form, originally appeared in the program books of the San Francisco Symphony to accompany performances of Das Paradies und die Peri in February 2005, and is reprinted with permission.
© James M. Keller
American Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein, Conductor
Concert Chorale of New York, James Bagwell, Director
Adrianne Pieczonka • Christine Brandes • Mark Embreebr
Kathryn Goeldner • Jason Collins • Eric Shaw
Sunday, January 29th
Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, at 3 pm