Audio Clips Piano Concerto 2/23/2006-2/25/2006 2/24/2006

ROBERT SCHUMANN

DAS PARADIES UND DIE PERI (PARADISE AND THE PERI), Poem from Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore, OPUS 50

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 verse episodes from Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh. Although the libretto had occupied Schumann as early as 1841, he did not begin composition until February 1843. He made final revisions in July and September of that year. The work was premiered in Leipzig on December 4, 1843 (and repeated 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. These are the first performances by the San Francisco Symphony. 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; and vocal soloists disposed in these performances as follows: soprano (one portraying The Peri and The Maiden), mezzo-soprano (as The Angel and as an occasional narrator), tenor (as narrator and The Young Man), baritone (as Gazna and The Man), and a quartet of two sopranos and two mezzo-sopranos (as four Peris). Schumann set Emil Flechsig’s German. Schumann set Emil Flechsig’s German translation of Thomas Moore’s English.

You would be hard-pressed to find a work that goes more directly to the heart of musical Romanticism than Das Paradies und die Peri. It was inspired by verse in Thomas Moore’s ultra-Romantic Lalla Rookh. Schumann may have been acquainted with his source even as a teenager, since Moore’s volume appeared in a German translation in 1822 and Schumann was an avid reader. Almost twenty years later, Emil Flechsig, a friend of Schumann’s since boyhood, brought his own translation of Lalla Rookh along when he paid the composer a visit in Leipzig. Flechsig reported in his unpublished memoirs that, before he had a chance even to mention his translation, Schumann declared, “Right now I am all in the mood for composing, and I wish I could come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.”

Flechsig’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. What he had originally envisioned as either an opera or a concert piece gradually veered towards the latter.

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Schumann’s assault on the world of Romantic opera would prove elusive. In 1844, the year after Das Paradies und die Peri, 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.

He gave passing attention to about forty possible operatic subjects (including Hamlet, The Tempest, Till Eulenspiegel, the Nibelungenlied, and Tristan und 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.

Lalla Rookh thus was one among many potential opera sources Schumann scrutinized. The Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852) wrote Lalla Rookh as a prose piece into which are interpolated four extended, discrete poetic episodes. In December 1840, when Schumann set about organizing his creative schedule by laying out his aspirations in his Project Book, three of those four verse episodes were entered as “texts suitable for concert pieces,” and two were also designated as “opera materials.” The episode involving the efforts of a Peri to gain entry to heaven was cited in both categories.

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Thomas Moore was immensely popular. He 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, then fleeing to France and Italy to escape debts. 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 Robert Burns and Walter Scott.

Moore had already achieved huge 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 in three days, and by the end of the year the volume had gone through six printings. By 1842 it was available in thirty different English-language editions, in addition to translations in Italian, French, German, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, and Spanish. Apart from pandering to the European lust for Asian exoticism, it had the advantage of being erotically suggestive without going over the line.

Lalla Rookh (the name, Moore tells us, means “Tulip Cheek”) is “a Princess described by the poets of her time, as more beautiful than . . . 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, whose responsibility is “to beguile the tediousness of the journey by some of his most agreeable recitals.” Four such “recitals” ensue, all in evocative verse. Feramorz turns out to be the King of Bucharia himself; in disguise as the poet, he has accompanied his bride on her journey.

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It is the second of Feramorz’s tales that concerns us, the story of a Peri desirous of gaining entry to heaven. A Peri (pronounced “PEE-ree” in English) is an ethereal creature of Persian folklore, an incorporeal being, elfin or angelic, nurtured on scents and perfumes. Descended from the union of a fallen angel and a mortal, a Peri is burdened with a tarnished genealogy that 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” addresses 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!”

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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 work as an oratorio, although it stands apart from the mainstream tradition of Biblical, religious, historical, or mythological oratorios as exemplified by Handel, Bach, Haydn, and Mendelssohn. While working on Das Paradies und die Peri, Schumann 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.”

On February 23, 1843, an entry in Schumann’s 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. Schumann’s wife, 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 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 fifty bottles from the wine cellar.

By May 17 Schumann embarked on setting the Third Part, and a month later the work was substantially complete. The four months he had devoted to it represented the longest span he had ever concentrated on a single composition. 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.”

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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. 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 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 twenty-six 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 Symphony). 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 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!) Perhaps it is most reasonable to approach Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri 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 repertory. Das Paradies und die Peri sums up that aesthetic in a way that may be less familiar today, but it conveys the essence of musical Romanticism with gentle drama and engaging charm that justify its inclusion among Schumann’s most irresistible masterworks.

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On Disc and in Print
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 Leipzig Radio Symphony and Chorus, and soloists including soprano Magdalena Hajossyova (Berlin Classics)

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, Volume 4: The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, by Howard Smither (University of North Carolina Press)