Schumann: The Faces and the Masks by Chernaik Judith & Chernaik Judith

Author:Chernaik, Judith & Chernaik, Judith [Chernaik, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571331284
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Schumann knew how important it was to Clara to repair relations with her father. They joined the Wiecks in Dresden for Christmas Eve. It was true that Wieck’s support had enabled Schumann to abandon law for a career in music. But it was impossible for Schumann to forget the anguish he had suffered from Wieck’s vicious attacks on his reputation, undermining him at every opportunity. The poison still festered within.

Paradise and the Peri

Like most of his musician friends, Schumann dreamed of writing an opera. He shared ideas of suitable subjects with Mendelssohn, and later with Richard Wagner, whose first successful opera, Rienzi, was premiered in Dresden in 1842. When Clara visited her father in February 1843 on a peace mission, she attended a performance of two acts of Rienzi, and reported to Schumann that her chief reaction was one of displeasure. Mendelssohn and Schumann shared a grudging respect for Wagner, but agreed that he knew nothing about the rules of composition.

Schumann considered Byron’s verse tale The Corsair a promising operatic subject, with its Romantic plot, in which a wild Greek pirate chief is saved from certain death by the selfless love of a Turkish slave. He also thought of Hoffmann’s short story “Doge and Dogaressa,” for which he began a libretto outline, and a Shakespeare play, possibly Hamlet or Macbeth . The subject he finally chose was “Paradise and the Peri,” the second of four tales in Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance by Thomas Moore, the popular Irish poet best known for several volumes of Irish Melodies . Schumann had read the work in the summer of 1841, noting in the marriage diary that it had made him very happy: “Perhaps one could make something fine from it for music,” he thought. “Paradise and the Peri” combined fantasy with a serious moral purpose, complementary qualities that Schumann believed to be at the very center of art. He began work on the project in 1842, consulting his friend Emil Flechsig about the text, and eventually creating his own libretto, based closely on the German translation.

Moore’s Lalla Rookh became instantly popular on its publication in 1817, and was soon translated into several European languages, inspiring musical versions as songs, a masque, and a ballet. The poem is recited as a continuing entertainment for the Indian princess Lalla Rookh when she leaves Delhi for Kashmir, where she is to be married to the heir to the throne of “Bucharia.” Four separate tales are narrated by a handsome young poet who has gained admittance to the entourage. Lalla Rookh falls in love with him, only to discover when she arrives at the imperial palace that the poet is actually the prince in disguise.

Although Lalla Rookh seems to be a typical example of the Oriental craze of the time, on the model of the popular Arabian Nights , it has a serious dimension. Moore admired his friend Lord Byron for his daring, his recklessness, and his contempt for the British establishment. He also shared Byron’s political sentiments.

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