Robert Schumann: The Paradies and the Fairy

Robert Schumann's “Paradise and Peri” (1843) is one of the most original attempts of the 19th century to renew secular oratory. His ambition was to find alternatives to Baroque, Handel patterns. So when the composer wrote in a letter to Carl Koßmaly: “I am working at the moment on a big work, the biggest one I have undertaken so far — it is not opera — I think it is actually a new genre for the halls

Concerts,” he did not exaggerate. He sought solutions that allowed him to make the oratorical narrative flexible and fluid. Therefore, the division into recitatives, arias and choirs gives way here to integrals composed much more broadly. Recitatives smoothly turn into arias, and arias into monologues. The narration is entrusted to the tenor, following the example of the Evangelist of Bach's passions, but here too Schumann, paying tribute to tradition, introduces an innovation, at selected moments passing on the duty of storytelling to a whole quartet of soloists. Because of this experimental form, the work shimmers with ambiguities.

The idea of adapting a secular poem for oratory was not something unknown. Händel had already realized a similar idea a century earlier, in 1740, with the success of John Milton's “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” (1645/46). Rather, the uniqueness of Schumann's work is evidenced by the fact that its mere attribution to the field of secular works can raise doubts. A secular piece about paradise, angels and the saving power of prayer? It sounds like a paradox — and it is. It is certainly not a Christian work, but the spirituality depicted in it does not belong to any other specified and named religion. Thomas Moore, author of the poem “Lalla-Rookh” (1817), on whose part “Paradise and Peri” is based, created an evocative vision of the divine and the afterlife, combining Islam, Christianity and elements completely fantastic, unknown in any of these faiths.

Schumann thus creates, in an unprecedented gesture, a de facto work with a religious message, but not only unecclesiastical, but also unfit — by its eclecticism — to be appropriated by any religion. As Antoni Edward Odyniec teaches in his translation of fragments of Moore's work, “in Eastern mythology, they are good spirits, only inferior in rank to Angels, though equal in beauty. Once banished from paradise, they live in the air, in the water, and in the most beautiful surroundings on earth: in enchanted overhead gardens, or in crystal palaces at the bottom of the sea. They live by the smell of flowers and dew.”

The story of her search for the gift to enter Eden in an attractive way for the public of Schumann's time combined sophisticated, sensual exoticism with a religious parable and a fairy tale topped with a touching moral. It was one of the greatest successes of its author during his lifetime and a piece that brought him popularity. This happened despite the fact that Schumann did not include many orientalizing accents in his score, despite the subject matter. On the contrary, he resisted the temptation to charm listeners with invented oriental melody and instrumentation, remaining faithful to his own style, deeply rooted in the German tradition.

This eloquent divergence of “content and form” is another of the fascinating paradoxes that characterize “Paradise and Peri”: it highlights Schumann's great originality, his aversion to template musical choices and his independence of thought from fashion and the temptation to achieve easy effect.

Fig. Mark Borggreve