Manfred Overture, Op. 115

Program notes

About the Work

Lord Byron published Manfred in 1817 and called it a dramatic poem. It was never really meant for the stage. Its hero is a nobleman who lives alone in a castle in the Alps, tormented by guilt over the death of Astarte, the woman he loved. The poem hints strongly that she was his sister and that the love was forbidden. The plot is slight, and its real subject is his inner turmoil. He rejects the consolations of faith and penance and chooses to meet his fate on his own terms. For the Romantic generation he was the model of the proud, self-tormenting outsider.

Schumann had known the poem since he was eighteen, and it never lost its hold on him. In 1848, a year of revolutions across Europe, he made his own version of the text and set it as what he called a ‘dramatic poem with music’: an overture followed by fifteen numbers, among them choruses, solo songs and passages in which the actors speak over the orchestra. He thought of it as ‘something completely new and unheard-of’, and it has remained hard to place, being neither an opera nor a concert piece.

The overture was performed first, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 14 March 1852, with Schumann conducting. The complete work followed three months later in Weimar, where Franz Liszt put it on the stage and conducted. Since then the overture has gone its own way. It is the one part of the score that is regularly played, and it is widely thought to be among the finest orchestral movements Schumann wrote. The composer Hugo Wolf said that it brought the essence of the drama to expression ‘with the simplest strokes’.

It is a portrait more than a narrative. Schumann does not illustrate scenes from the poem. He writes a movement in the form of a symphonic first movement, in the dark and unusual key of E-flat minor, whose restless themes stand for the state of Manfred’s mind.

What to Listen For

Three stabbing chords from the full orchestra tear open the curtain. A slow, sorrowing introduction follows, and the tempo gradually quickens until the music breaks into the main fast section.

The principal theme is breathless and driven, always pressing forward and never finding a firm footing. Against it Schumann sets gentler, plaintive phrases. Listen to how the ideas are pulled apart, stretched and joined together again instead of simply being repeated: the whole movement surges up towards passion again and again, and each time falls back.

There is no victory at the end. The fast music exhausts itself, and the slow introduction returns as an epilogue. The overture closes in the minor key, without the redemption a listener might expect.