The novelty of Schumann’s approach to the music is strongly linked to his choice of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh. Until then, the material for secular oratorios were myths not unlike the biblical sources for sacred oratorios, or abstract poetic texts with their allegorical characters. In spite of its distinctly realistic quality, The Seasons belongs to this second category. In either case, lyricism was still controlled and highly classical; there was very little room for personal sentiment. All that was to change with Thomas Moore’s text. Lalla Rookh is English romanticism of the most excessive variety. Moore was following, through his psychological themes, oriental decor and every possible detail, the same path which had made his friend Byron one of the brightest stars in Europe’s literary firmament.

The unprecedented plot of Paradise and the Peri must have stunned audiences in 1843. Peri, a famous ballerina and semi-goddess, was an entirely original character. In Moore’s story, she is forbidden access to Paradise until she can provide the keeper of the celestial gates with “the gift heaven prefers above all others.”

She came from a land which had nothing in common with the lavish images of the orient in vogue at that time; a poet’s dreamland, ardently created as an escape from the dreariness of everyday existence. The Peri offered three gifts to the angel, but neither the warrior’s blood nor the sighs of love were of interest to him. Only the third offering, a tear of remorse wrested from a criminal by the prayers of a child, was accepted. The story does not call for operatic treatment, nor does it lend itself to the separation into “numbers” which marks earlier oratorios. Paradise and the Peri is a moral fairytale, combining a steady narrative stream with a constant subjective undercurrent. Nothing in the story is self-evident, everything is experienced through the desires, fears and setbacks of the heroine. A poem of such striking originality demanded equally innovative music. Thus Schumann created the first romantic oratorio. The sum of his experience in lieder composition was applied in his treatment of a continuous melody in which the old recitative is replaced by sung narration relying heavily on the orchestra. A multitude of astonishing colors illuminate this fantastic story of the orient. Numerical divisions disappear, internal energy impels the narrative in which themes may be identified with specific heroes and events, and as such, are the harbingers of the Wagnerian leitmotiv technique.

Paradise and the Peri enjoyed only a brief success in its day and remains little-known and unappreciated. Schumann, however, was not mistaken when he referred to it as his “most important work in every sense of the word” and thanked heaven for “preserving his life and good health throughout its composition.”

Jean-François Labie, translated by Maria Mill

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