R. Schumann, Das Paradies und die Peri

You probably know Robert Schumann for his lieder, but the German composer’s interest in literature also led him to write a large-scale work which, in its day, was an undoubted success. “It is the most ambitious project I have so far undertaken”, he wrote in a letter, continuing “it is not an opera, I believe it is well-nigh a new genre for the concert hall. It is an oratorio; not a religious oratorio, but a secular one.” Schumann sought to renew the genre: while bearing tradition in mind, he used a mythological text, developed within an agile and dramatic structure. He composed a profoundly Romantic masterpiece of inspiration and beauty in which the recitatives and arias are delicately threaded together and the orchestra is just as capable of growing in splendour when the character requires it as it is of returning to the intimacy of chamber music. Premiered in 1843 at Leipzig, it rapidly crossed borders to win the hearts of audiences everywhere, yet today the work is rarely performed and is unjustly forgotten.

The score takes its inspiration from the poem Paradise and the Peri, published in a volume entitled Lalla Rookh, by the Irish poet and musician Thomas Moore. It tells the story of the mythological Persian creature the Peri, an ethereal being banished from Paradise, who longs to redeem herself. To do this she must discover “the gift most dear to heaven”: the quest takes her on a journey to India, to a battlefield where she catches the last drop of blood of a hero who has died fighting for freedom. But this is not enough. She then journeys to Egypt, where she encounters a young man about to die of the plague. Instead of fleeing, his beloved decides to stay with him until the end. The Peri captures the girl’s last sigh at the moment of her sacrifice; but still that is not enough. Finally, she flies to Syria, where she finds a child praying and an old man who has led a life of sin and blasphemy. On hearing the child’s prayer, the old man is filled with remorse and starts to weep: the tear shed by the old man is what the Peri was seeking, and it finally opens the gates of heaven to let her in. This strikingly topical work transcends the centuries and national borders because it appeals to the deepest mainsprings of the human condition: justice, love and forgiveness.