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 Flechsig reported in his unpublished memoirs that, before he had a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!”
Thus
encouraged, our Peri sets off on her vague scavenger hunt, which—as befits
a good fairytale—unrolls in tripartite form. First she stops at a
battlefield in India, where a gallant young warrior, 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 will 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.”
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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.
—James M.
Keller
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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)
|