by Martin Geck
This approach encouraged a certain monotony—a reproach that has often been leveled at the work. Although such a criticism may well be exaggerated, it is nonetheless beyond doubt that the juxtaposition of all three sections has resulted in a sequence of scenes lacking in any dramatic concept. If we may believe Schumann’s early biographer, Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski, on this point, then Schumann encouraged such a criticism when he remarked that he could imagine a complete performance “as a curiosity at best.”40 Of course, these scenes are not entirely lacking in an overriding idea, for they are imbued with the concept of a mystic release from various earthly entanglements, a concept typical of the composer.
In composing this work, Schumann drew on the world of Christian symbolism that he had avoided in the case of Paradise and the Peri. In this he seems to have been inspired by Goethe, who had struck an astonishingly sober note when discussing the subject with Johann Peter Eckermann:
You will confess that the conclusion, where the redeemed soul is carried up, was difficult to manage; and that I, amid such supersensual matters, about which we scarcely have even an intimation, might easily have lost myself in the vague, if I had not, by means of sharply-drawn figures, and images from the Christian Church, given my poetical design a desirable form and substance.41
For the first performance of “Faust’s Transfiguration” in Dresden, Schumann placed his trust in the massed ranks of the Dresden Choral Society, but for his particular favorites he used his own Society for Choral Singing with which he could “perform all the music I love in the proper way, to my heart’s content.”42 The association met for the first time in the Garden Room of the Harmony Society—the former Hoym Palace—on January 5, 1848. Fifty or sixty singers were involved. They began with a Bach chorale, and the choir’s minutes go on to record rehearsals of motets by Palestrina, Felice Anerio, and Giovanni Maria Nanino, among others. But they also worked their way through the later repertory, exploring Bach’s motets and the final chorus from the same composer’s St. John Passion, Handel’s Jephtha, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Cherubini’s Mass in C Minor, and Schubert’s setting of the twenty-third psalm. For a time, the choir also took an interest in Schumann’s own works: the enchanting Romances and Ballads opp. 67, 75, 145, and 146 and the Romances for women’s voices opp. 69 and 91 were all written with his own choral society in mind.
This was the situation when the political spotlight was turned on Dresden in the spring of 1849. On April 30, King Friedrich August II of Saxony dissolved both houses of parliament and triggered the Dresden Uprising. Prussian troops were called in to put it down and were not slow to act. Schumann seems to have been taken by surprise by the rapid turn of events and noted in his diary on May 4: “Revolution—walk with K[lara]—dead bodies in the street—the Brühl Terrace—through the town in the evening—state of revolution.”43
Clara left a more detailed account, remaining an accurate chronicler even in the face of the confused situation around her:
Thursday the 3rd. Went for lunch to the villa in the Plauen Valley and reveled in the beauties of the natural world—of course, we had no idea what was going on in the city in the meantime. We had been home for barely half an hour when drums sounded a general alarm, bells rang from every tower, and it wasn’t long before we heard shooting. [. . .] On Friday the 4th we found all the streets barricaded when we went into the city, and on the barricades stood men armed with scythes and republicans who made them build the barricades higher and higher, everywhere there was the utmost lawlessness, hatches and paving stones had been torn up, as well as the cobbles from the streets, and were turned into barricades; in the town hall the democrats gathered together and elected a provisional government, the king having fled to Königstein during the night; they were soon issuing proclamations of every kind as part of their war on the soldiers who were encamped with cannon in front of the castle and in the New Town. As we walked through the city we saw the terrible sight of fourteen dead bodies, men who had fallen the previous day and now lay in dreadful array in the hospital forecourt as a warning to others.44
Within two days it was no longer safe to leave the house: “A security patrol was formed in our street, and they wanted Robert to join. After I had twice denied that he was in, they threatened to search the house: we escaped with Marie by the garden gate to the main station.”45 From there the Schumanns and their daughter made their way by a circuitous route to the country estate of Major Friedrich Serre, a friend of theirs who lived at Maxen. But their younger children, including the fifteen-month-old Ludwig, remained behind in Dresden in the care of their nanny, and so Clara returned to the city the following day and after a particularly difficult and dangerous journey managed to reach the Reitbahnstraße. She snatched the sleeping children from their beds and took them, together with their nanny, to Maxen, where Robert was still waiting, having heard that all the men in Dresden were being forcibly recruited into the rebel army.
Unlike Wagner, who was seized by revolutionary fervor, Schumann had no desire to become actively involved in the uprising, and after returning briefly to the devastated capital, the couple sought refuge in nearby Kreischa, which was “much more pleasantly situated and has a milder climate.”46 Opinions were divided at this time, and the liberal Schumanns found themselves caught between two opposing camps, although on balance their sympathies lay with the rebels rather than those still loyal to the crown, and so we find Clara critical of some of the members of the aristocracy who had also come to Kreischa and who “spoke of the people merely as canaille and rabble, till it made one quite uncomfortable.”47 Again it is Clara who reports on events in detail and helped to save the family from imminent danger—and this in spite of the fact that she was seven months pregnant.
Schumann regained his spirits only when a copy of the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung allowed him to form a picture of the situation in Dresden. He devoured the newspapers while also finding time for composition, including the Liederalbum für die Jugend (Lieder album for young people) op. 79, which Clara was soon trying out on the piano of the Kreischa choirmaster. Other works dating from this time are the Lieder und Gesänge aus Goethes “Wilhelm Meister” (Lieder and songs from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister) op. 98a and the motet Verzweifle nicht im Schmerzenstal (Do not despair in this vale of tears) op. 93, the latter a setting of a text from Friedrich Rückert’s Makamen des Hariri with which he had long been familiar. It appears there under the heading “Der Krankenbesuch” (Visiting the sick).
By the middle of June the family was back in Dresden, where Schumann wrote his Four Marches op. 76 in quick succession: “No old Dessau marches, only republican ones,” he told his publisher Friedrich Whistling, on June 17, 1849. “I could think of no better way of venting my agitation—they were written in a veritable frenzy of enthusiasm.”48 He insisted that they must be published without delay, and they duly appeared in print the following month. Their titles—“Mit größter Energie” (With the greatest resolve), “Sehr kräftig” (Very powerful), “Lager-Szene” (Camp scene), and “Mit Kraft und Feuer” (With force and fire)—give no indication of the difficult situation in Dresden at this time, where the townspeople were groaning beneath the yoke of billeted Prussian troops financed by a levy on the population. Clara was indignant: “First they come and shoot down the townsfolk who have done nothing to them, and then we have to give them food and drink for free—it’s humiliating!”49
Her husband, conversely, was positively euphoric. Once the real revolution had failed, it continued to be fought in the provinces of the mind, and this was something to which Schumann could relate. In spite of recurrent bouts of melancholy, he used the Goethe celebrations of 1849 to present himself to the world as the precursor of a solidly authentic German art that would be effective in the public arena. On July 28, 1849, for example, he wrote to his publisher Hermann Härtel in the run-up to a performance of the final part of the Scenes from Goethe’s Faust that took place on August 29 as part of the celebrations marking th
e centenary of the playwright’s birth:
The concert should take place in the palace in the Great Park and should include [Mendelssohn’s] Walpurgis Night. At the same time—or more especially after this performance—there should be singing, music, and celebrations at various points in the park; one would like a kind of fairground atmosphere, unless the rain god decrees otherwise.50
Schumann’s Faust music was also performed at more or less the same time as part of the celebrations accompanying the Goethe centenary in Leipzig and Weimar, so Schumann had every reason to regard himself at this period as Germany’s leading composer, especially since Mendelssohn was now dead and Wagner had been forced to flee into exile in Switzerland. Would he be able to succeed Wagner as Kapellmeister to the royal court of Saxony? But before his friends and patrons could adopt a clear strategy in what—if the truth be told—was a hopeless situation, a new door opened in Düsseldorf.
Before that, however, one of Schumann’s dreams came true with a production of his opera Genoveva.
Intermezzo VII
Genoveva Is Not Lohengrin
It’s quite true about my grand opera: I’m all fire and flame, and I spend the whole day reveling in sweet and fabulous sounds. The opera is called ‘Hamlet,’ the thought of fame and immortality is giving me strength and firing my imagination.”1 Schumann was twenty when he wrote these lines to his mother in 1830, presumably well aware that at this date he was not remotely capable of writing an opera. Although this situation changed with the passage of time, one problem remained: a libretto.
There are two basic types of opera composer. First, there are those who choose their librettos without subscribing to the views that those texts contain. In setting them, they are like good actors consumed by their roles without ever becoming identified with them in the longer term. Mozart, Verdi, and Richard Strauss belong in this group, as do Rossini and Meyerbeer. The members of the other group would be happiest if they could bond forever with their heroes and with the plots of their operas. As such, they form a minority: Beethoven with Fidelio, Wagner with everything that he wrote after Rienzi, and Schumann with Genoveva, a work that remains largely unknown even if it has recently been rather more widely discussed than it used to be.
Schumann had already toyed with around fifty different operatic subjects before things finally worked out for him with Genoveva. After stumbling upon Friedrich Hebbel’s tragedy of the same name on Maundy Thursday 1847, he immediately drafted the overture and then began to refashion Hebbel’s play, while also drawing on Ludwig Tieck’s tragedy Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva (Life and Death of St. Genovefa).
“Do you know my morning and evening prayer as an artist?” he had asked Carl Koßmaly five years earlier. “It is German opera.”2 The word “German” not only referred to the language in which the work would be sung, but it also was a pointer to the nationalist cause. In international circles, there were really only two types of opera at this time: Italian opera seria and opera buffa, and French grand opera. The works that German composers had succeeded in writing were no longer singspiels, it is true, but they rarely commanded attention. As always, it is the exceptions that confirm the rule: Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), Beethoven’s Fidelio, Weigl’s Die Schweizerfamilie (The Swiss Family), Weber’s Der Freischütz and Euryanthe, Spohr’s Jessonda, Marschner’s Der Vampyr and Hans Heiling, and Lortzing’s Zar und Zimmermann (Tsar and Carpenter).
Of these last-named composers, only Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber commanded Wagner’s respect. The works of all the others were lumped together as a type of “German opera music” that he likened to a “prude,” a kind of woman who fills us “with feelings of revulsion and horror.” Or so he wrote in Opera and Drama, a polemical, programmatic work that was to create a stir only months after Schumann’s Genoveva had received its first performance. NonGerman composers suffered just as badly at Wagner’s hands: Italian opera was said to resemble a “prostitute” who “never loses control and never sacrifices herself except when she herself wants to feel pleasure or gain an advantage.” But at least she exercised the “sensual functions of the feminine sex,” whereas French opera was a “coquette” who sought only “joy for herself and satisfaction for her vanity.”3 For Wagner there was only one cure: himself.
But apart from Wagner, what was it that inspired German composers of the 1840s, such as Schumann and Mendelssohn? Borne aloft by their sense of a cultural mission, they sought librettos that took as their starting point a popular theme from German myth or history and at the same time encapsulated ethical values that were also valid in their own day.
Even in the nineteenth century, the popular medieval legend of St. Genovefa had lost none of its appeal and remained a suitable topic for treatment, most notably in the modern versions by Hebbel and Schumann. When one of Charles Martel’s followers, Siegfried, Count Palatine, goes to war against the Moors in order to check their northward advance from Spain into France, he commends his wife, Genoveva, to the care of a trusted friend, Golo, who has remained behind at court. Urged on by the wicked witch Margaretha, Golo falls victim to Genoveva’s charms and sues for her hand in marriage. Incandescent with rage at his rejection, he hatches a plot whereby Genoveva is exposed as an adulteress and sentenced to death. Margaretha admits to her complicity in the plot, preparing the way for a happy ending.
Clara knew and loved the legend, which may well have confirmed her husband in his choice of the subject and certainly contributed to the fact that in his adaptation of the material he played down the elements of “black” romanticism that had been germane to the original action, with the result that Golo now appears less in a sinister light than as a figure driven by forces beyond his control. But the “white” romanticism, too, had its brightness dulled. “I shall sing you a song of sorrow”—this was the message that the critic Eduard Krüger heard in the overture, which anticipates the action not in any programmatic way but in terms of its atmosphere and emotions. Was there substance here for an opera? Schumann’s pupil Louis Ehlert later claimed that the work contained “glorious details, [. . .] a soul-stirring orchestra, in reality an underhand continuous overture, the highest nobility of intention and of choice of material, all that one might desire; but it was no opera.”5
The title page of the vocal score of Genoveva, published by C. F. Peters of Leipzig in 1851. (Photograph courtesy of the Robert Schumann Museum, Zwickau.)
At about the same time, Wagner, writing in his own periodical, the Bayreuther Blätter, adopted a note of sneering contempt in recalling that Schumann had had no hesitation in declaring that the libretto of Lohengrin could never be set to music, while refusing point-blank to rewrite the “lamentably foolish third act” of Genoveva: “He took offense and was convinced that in offering him my advice I was wanting to spoil his very best effects. For effect was precisely what he aimed at: everything ‘German, chaste, and pure,’ but with a piquant dash of mock unchastity.”6
Wagner missed any sense of straightforwardness and immediacy in the libretto. But Schumann was capable of writing only a drama in which the inner lives of his characters were explored in detail, rather than creating a plot that was propelled forward with all the subtlety of poster art. Not only did Wagner himself expect such an approach, so too did the spirit of the age. True, interested groups were waiting expectantly for a German opera from Schumann, and yet what they wanted was no psychological navel-gazing but due regard for positive values that would bring together the people, or Volk. In a word, they wanted positive encouragement, not dark and beetle-browed brooding.
Against this background, the first performance of Genoveva in Leipzig on June 25, 1850, was relatively well received—the friendliness of the response being directed as much at Schumann as at his work—but there was also a degree of criticism that proved just short of fatal in the longer term. One writer wondered “why the genuinely vivid and at the same time dramatic course of the old and eerie legend” had not been preserved, and he slated the “in
sipid world-weariness” and “tormented characterization à la Hebbel.” Ernst Kossak, a journalist often hailed as the first feature writer in Berlin, did not even shy away from attacking Schumann in highly personal terms; the composer’s talent, he claimed, was “going downhill because of an unfortunate pathological mixture: this opera—assuming we want to retain the name that the composer has given to it—is the culmination of this evil admixture of creative imagination, sentiment, and a completely uneducated judgment. The question is whether his doctor’s advice is more needful than that of the philosopher.”7
But when Kossak also complained that the opera was really “instrumental music accompanied by human voices,” he was articulating a response that, dictated by aesthetic and generic considerations, remains valid to this day. It was not just malice that persuaded two of the nineteenth century’s leading literary figures to heap mockery on the work. While Hanslick saw “the singer disappear from sight in a fold of the inflated orchestra,”8 Bernard Shaw, who attended a student performance of the opera at London’s Royal College of Music in 1893, felt that the symphonic style of the work was “only tolerable on condition of dismissing as so much superfluous rubbish all of the actual drama shewn on the boards.”9
For a conductor as fond of experimentation as Nikolaus Harnoncourt, such a shortcoming is actually an advantage. Referring to the opera in the context of performances he conducted at the Zurich Opera in 2008, he spoke enthusiastically not just of a psychological drama but of “a single great symphony—the whole work is built up of a delicate web of leitmotifs.” These do not characterize the characters onstage but represent “attitudes, parts of a personality, facets of an individual person”—a person in whom we are intended to recognize not only the historical Schumann but also ourselves.10