OVERTURE TO BYRON'S "MANFRED": Op. 115
For Byron's dramatic poem, "Manfred," Schumann, in 1848, wrote incidental music, which was first performed at Weimar under the direction of Liszt on June 13, 1852, in connection with a version of Byron's work prepared by Schumann for the stage. The overture has, not unnaturally, survived the rest of the music to the poem, and has long been a familiar number in the concert-room. It is, of all Schumann's works, says Mr. H. E. Krehbiel, "the most profoundly introspective. It is, as consistently as the prelude to Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde,' an effort to delineate soul states and struggles without the help of external things. To understand it one must recall the figure in Byron's poem—the strong man torn by remorse, struggling with himself, bending supernatural powers to his will, yearning for forgiveness and death, tortured by a pitiless conscience, living in a solitude which was solitude no more, 'but peopled with the furies,' condemned by his own sin to number
'Ages—ages—
Space and eternity—and consciousness,
With the fierce thirst of death—and still unslaked!'
"The mood of the slow introduction, into which the listener is plunged at once by the three syncopated chords at the opening, is the mood of Manfred weighed down by the reflection:
"'Old man! there is no power in holy men,
Nor charm in prayer—nor purifying form
Of penitence—nor outward look—nor fast—
Nor agony—nor, greater than all these,
"The innate tortures of that deep despair,
Which is remorse without the fear of hell,
But all in all sufficient to itself
Would make a hell of heaven—can exorcise
From out the unbounded spirit, the quick sense
Of its own sins, wrongs, sufferance, and revenge
Upon itself; there is no future pang
Can deal that justice on the self-condemn'd
He deals on his own soul.'"
"The sombreness," says Mr. Frederick Niecks, "is nowhere relieved, although contrast to the dark brooding and the surging agitation of despair is obtained by the tender, longing, regretful recollection of Astarte, the destroyed beloved one. And when at last life ebbs away, we are reminded of Manfred's dying words to the Abbot:
"'Tis over—my dull eyes can fix thee not;
But all things swim around me, and the earth
Heaves, as it were, beneath me....
Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die.'
"From the first note to the last," says Mr. W. H. Hadow, "it is as magnificent as an Alpine storm—sombre, wild, impetuous, echoing from peak to peak with the shock of thunderbolts and the clamor of the driving wind."