13. The oratorio year, 1843.

Between late January and early March 1843, musical life in Leipzig was considerably enlivened by the presence of Berlioz. Schumann heard Berlioz's concerts of 4 and 23 February with great interest, and although his enthusiasm for the French composer's works had cooled in the eight years since the publication of his review of the Symphonie fantastique, the Offertorium from the Requiem, Berlioz relates in his Mémoires, prompted Schumann to exclaim: ‘That beats everything!’

By this time Mendelssohn's plan to found a music conservatory in Leipzig, an idea he first broached with Schumann in November 1842, was well on the way to realization. Schumann willingly assumed his duties as instructor of composition, score reading and piano in March 1843, but by midsummer complained that very few of the school's nearly 50 students showed genuine compositional talent.

Berlioz's visit and the founding of the conservatory overlapped with the beginning of sustained work on the music for Das Paradies und die Peri. Descended from the union of a fallen angel and a mortal, and thereby excluded from paradise, the Peri in Moore's version of the tale (one of four long poems in Lalla Rookh, published in 1817) attempts to impress the guardians of the heavenly gates with the blood of a young warrior and the sighs of an expiring maiden, but only gains admission to paradise with her third offering, the tears of a repentant sinner. In a list dating from December 1840, Schumann designated the story as ‘material for an opera’, but when in the latter part of the next year, and working in consultation with Böttger, he began to transform his friend Flechsig's translation of Moore's verses into a libretto, the result seemed more appropriate for treatment as an oratorio. Although the text was essentially complete by January 1842, Schumann left it untouched until February 1843. Two of the oratorio's three parts were sketched and scored within two months, but then came a month-long hiatus probably occasioned by the birth of a second daughter, Elise, on 25 April, and the demands of the ‘annoying journal’. By 16 June Schumann had brought the work to provisional completion, although he returned to it for polishing and revision in July and September. Rehearsals with the singers began in October, and the première (4 December) under Schumann's direction was such a success (thanks in large part to Livia Frege's singing of the Peri) that a second performance was arranged for 11 December. The public acclaim Schumann garnered as a consequence of these events may have caused Wieck to send his son-in-law a formal letter of reconciliation dated 16 December.

Writing to Carl Kossmaly on 5 May 1843, Schumann claimed to be engaged in the creation of ‘a new genre for the concert hall’. The Peri lives up to this epithet on several counts. In the first place, the work effects a fusion of the sacred and secular realms, with the semi-human, semi-divine Peri herself providing an emblem for the 19th-century artist. Second, the deft transitions between the oratorio's individual numbers, no less than the balanced disposition of narrative, lyric and dramatic elements, ensures a previously unmatched degree of continuity on the large scale. A delicate web of melodic recurrences contributes to the same end. Finally, Schumann avoided a merely formulaic setting of the narrative portions of the text by means of what he called ‘Rezitativischer Gesang’, a flexibly declaimed vocal line supported by a motivically rich orchestral texture. Critics of Schumann's orchestration might be persuaded to modify their stance after considering the airily scored music for the Nile Genies (no.11) and Houris (no.18), the mellow horn choir and shimmering strings of the Part 2 finale (no.17), and the colouristic touches from the upper winds in the solo baritone's ‘Jetzt sank des Abends’ (no.21). The Peri occupies a pivotal position in Schumann's output. Soon after completing it, he wrote in the marriage diary: ‘An opera will be my next work, and I'm burning to get started’. The upheavals of the following years delayed the realization of this plan, but when, in the later 1840s, Schumann did fulfil his longstanding desire to compose dramatic music, he returned to a poetic theme first represented musically in the Peri, the notion of redemption.

Schumann, Robert