Robert Schumann
(b. Zwickau, June 8, 1810; d. Endenich, July 29, 1856)

Incidental music to Manfred, dramatic poem by Lord Byron (1788-1824),
for solo voices, chorus and orchestra, op. 115 (1848-9)

Although blessed with a refined literary taste and one of the most fluent pens of the romantic age, Robert Schumann did not naturally gravitate toward the stage, and theater music does not bulk large in his output. Apart from an abortive opera on Byron's The Corsair (1844) and a rather conventional medieval opera, Genoveva, after Tieck and Hebbel (1851), the list of his stage works comes to an end with incidental music to Byron's "dramatic poem" Manfred. Here however his native love of poetry and his melancholy self-absorption chimed perfectly with the thinly disguised autobiographical persona of Byron's historical drama., which, it should be said, bears no relation to the historical Manfred of the Hohenstaufens, being set in the Swiss Alps and involving the title-hero's attempts to master an overpowering sense of Weltschmerz. Byron's play, with its mixture of human and supernatural characters, owes a great deal to Goethe's Faust, which he is known to have read a short time previously, and although ineffective on stage it contains some of his most powerful and heartfelt poetry of despair. It was this combination of factors that induced Schumann to produce one of his mightiest works. As he later confided to his biographer Wasiliewski, "I never devoted myself to any composition with such lavish love and power as to Manfred."

The famous Manfred Overture, a worthy successor to the Beethoven's overtures to Egmont and Coriolanus, was regarded by Schumann's contemporaries as "the most magnificent thing he ever did" (Moscheles). Later commentators have been no less unstinting in their praise of this extended essay in sustained gloom and agitation. Less familiar are the fifteen numbers he composed for the rest of the play, including his earliest exercises in the art of melodrama, that is, spoken text with musical accompaniment (see Nos. 2 and 10-12). Of the numbers he chose to set (four in Act I, seven in Act II and three in Act III), most are for denizens of the supernatural world - Spirits, Destinies, Astarte and the like - who stand out from the iambic pentameter of the human characters with their lyric verse forms. The music is kept deliberately pithy, with short ideas not subjected to mechanical development, as happens in so much of Schumann's later music. Among the most successful effects are the four bass voices in No. 3 and the concluding "Requiem aeternam" (No. 15) that Schumann added to Byron's text, providing a monastic musical backdrop to Manfred's death in the arms of the Abbot of St. Moritz.

The Manfred Overture was premièred under Schumann's baton at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 14 March 1852 and immediately recognized to be a masterpiece. It was published in score by Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig, before the year was out; arrangements for piano two-hands (by Schumann) and four-hands (by Carl Reinecke) appeared the following year. The work grew increasingly popular as the century progressed, so that by 1890 it has become "a holiday item at our orchestral concerts" (Kretzschmar), and it has never entirely left the symphonic repertoire. The incidental music has not fared as well, owing mainly to the disappearance of Byron's play into the realm of closet drama. The complete play with Schumannn's music was courageously mounted by Liszt at Weimar on 13 June 1852, but even during the composer's lifetime it was understood that the music would survive only in concert performance. Richard Pohl (1826-1896), later to become a fiery champion of Wagner, Liszt and Berlioz, supplied connecting texts to maintain the dramatic continuity in the absence of Byron's play, but even in this form performances of the Manfred music remain a rarity. It was published posthumously in a vocal score (Leipzig, c. 1860) and in full score (Leipzig, 1862). It is hoped that the present study score will help Schumann's music to the wider hearing it so richly deserves.

Bradford Robinson, 2005

Performance material: Breitkopf und Härtel, Wiesbaden