On 25th June 1850, Robert Schumann's only opera, Genoveva, received its first performance at Leipzig State Theatre. It was a much-awaited event, as Schumann, widely regarded as the leading German instrumental composer, had set his mind to the urgent task of creating a national opera. However, despite the efforts of the composer's supporters to maintain interest in the work, the opera was soon forgotten. When conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt first came across Genoveva some 15 years ago (he subsequently recorded a CD of it in 1996), he voiced the opinion that ”Genoveva is a work of art for which one should be prepared to go to the barricades”.
Harnoncourt sees the main reason why Genoveva has not been recognised as a brilliant composition and perhaps the most significant opera written during the second half of the 19th century, as having much to do with the false expectations attached to the work. ”You mustn't look for dramatic events in this opera. What it offers us is a glimpse into the soul. Schumann was not interested in creating something naturalistic - he wanted to write a type of opera in which the music had a greater say.”
Schumann - according to Harnoncourt - believed that Mozartean theatrical dialogue in opera was not a tradition that should be continued in his day. It was therefore only logical that the composer wrote - indeed had to write - the Libretto himself in order to achieve the desired link between sounds and words. Harnoncourt was convinced that Schumann, with this opera, had not only written some wonderful music but also succeeded in "rediscovering the genre of opera", and he asked his respected colleague, Germanist Peter von Matt to give his opinion on the Libretto, which - like the libretti of Schubert's operas - is usually dismissed as ”impossible”. One
of the conclusions that von Matt comes to in his analysis is that "in its deep structure the libretto is like a drama by Kleist - which is not surprising given that Schumann enjoyed reading the German author. At first glance it is Genoveva who is innocent, Golo is the wicked character and the Count the noble one. At second glance, though, everything begins to look rather different. The Count represents the rigid status quo, with its norms and laws. ’You are a German woman, do not complaint’ he calls to his wife as he leaves her. People have laughed at this statement and taken it as a symptom of the superficiality of the entire opera forgetting that Schumann, who was well versed in the works of writers such as Heine and Hoffmann and had grown up with Jean Paul, must have been aware of the ideological stupidity of this statement, The reactionary nature of this statement to his wife, in fact, characterises the real nature of the Count: He represents the forces that in 1847/48 - the year in which Europe was set in turmoil by a continental revolutionary movement and Schumann was writing his opera - represented the old world. His abrupt order to his wife toreshadows the brutality of the death sentence that he will later utter.
The legend of Genoveva was well enough known in the 19th century for it to be unavoidable that the opera should bear the name as its title. But the effect of this was to make the female role into the main protagonist and her counterpart, Golo, into a subsidiary figure. Genoveva is the saintly heroine, Golo the scoundrel who slanders and abuses her. The male role appears merely to be a dramatic device - the trivial villain in a drama about martyrdom. In fact, Schumann reverses the situation in both literary and musical terms. Golo is in reality the main figure in the opera. He is essentially the free, creative, complete artist and individual - a knight, warrior, hunter and singer - and it is as such that he presents himself in his first major aria. However this 'completeness' is split and destroyed. He could have been everything at one and the same time: artist, thinker, man of action and lover - a fulfilment of the classical dream of the 'complete person’, the idea of the individual as described in Schiller's essay On Grace and Dignity and further developed by Kleist in his essay on the Marionettentheater, in which he describes the darker aspects in his story of the boy pulling a thorn out of his foot. Romanticism is, after all, to a large extent a devastating portrayal of the failure of this dream of the complete person, a depiction of the divisions and destructiveness, the split personalities and madness, the banishment into the desert and the winter journeys. In Schumann's treatment of the story, Golo should be seen as one of the most radical figures of this type.”
Director Martin Kušej describes Golo as the one single figure in the opera from whom everything emanates, and here he sees a close link with Schumann himself. He regards the ‘poetical times‘ in which the composer sets the action as without doubt being Schumann’s own times, with the action taking place in his head and his heart, his room, his dreams, his immediate world, Clara, his rigid, hostile father-in-law: ”I see the work as being a thousand miles away from this strangely distracting crusader theme; I see it rather as being rooted in the masses of the 1848 revolution who joyously proclaimed a new freedom and a new religion - that of nationalism. That is why I am convinced that a modern production of Genoveva has to derive its justification and its interpretative approach from the concrete circumstances that arose during the time of its composition and that still affect us even in the 21st century, because they have still not been resolved: nationalism and an obsession with order, the psychological effects of a discredited image of women, motherhood and sexuality, fulfilment of duty as a betrayal of love (Siegfried-Genoveva) and, finally, the great 'world rift' (Heine), that has divided us and permanently destroyed our ’intactness’.”
According to the director the story "for presentation on the stage needs to be embedded in a context that moves it in its entirety onto a completely different plane, a completely different state of mind. I think it is necessary to find a clear temporal framework in the early 19th century ‘Biedermeyer’ period, the run-up to the 1848 revolution in Germany, or even in 'Romanticism'; at all events in the period that directly affected and surely also left its mark on Schumann. He is the sensitive artist and free-thinker in his bare, white room in Dresden. It is the year 1848 and we find ourselves in an atmosphere of indefinable darkness. Outside, the masses are gathering for the uprising. In the room are three further, strange, black-clad figures, sitting there inactively, like frozen ghosts. A man, the master of the house, a female servant, foreign-looking, menacing, and a stunningly beautiful, pale-skinned woman, on whom the main figure's attention seems to be concentrated. Everything that is about to happen springs from the imagination and feelings of these individuals, especially from the tension between the unconventional young man and the order represented by the master of the house (Siegfried). No-one is going to leave this room.”
Set designer Rolf Glittenberg has created two separate, clearly-defined worlds as a structure for the work: an inside space of dazzling, almost cutting brightness and an external world that seems to have no boundaries and is defined in terms of impenetrable darkness. The first world affects only the four main figures: Golo, Genoveva, Siegfried and Margaretha; all the others belong to the second, external world: Hidulfus, Drago, Balthasar, Caspar and with them, the entire world of servants, soldiers, huntsmen and the common people. This external world is an autonomous complex with its own dynamics, but one that again and again penetrates the white space and triggers movement or change in it.
Both conductor and director are convinced that what Schumann created with Genoveva was a drama of the soul, an entirely un-classical work that is thoroughly modern, indeed borders at times on theatre of the absurd. The opera raises questions without offering any answers. It does not intend to moralise, but rather to portray something, for one cannot cure the incurable. Schumann was concerned to portray inner states, to show the inevitability of events that at a certain point generate an inescapable dynamic. For this reason the opera takes place outside all reality and beyond all morality; the theme is the inevitability of fate and - according to Nikolaus Harnoncourt - ”the irreversible flow that is represented by the music. Once it has been set off, it can never be stopped. The opera is one single massive symphony. The entire work is made up of a subtle network of motifs that are largely derived from one single leitmotif - the chorale at the outset, which is then subject to different variations. Initially it stands for itself, as a pious chorale in the positive sense, then it takes a turn to the negative and becomes the pressure exerted on the masses; then it becomes a portrait of Golo, depicting him as a positive figure; the motif is then transferred to Genoveva and, in slightly modified form, comes to represent Margaretha. This means, of course, that an immensely strong link is created between all the characters. We are accustomed to leitmotifs characterising single individuals. But who says that has to be the case? Schumann adopts a much more sophisticated approach, maintaining leitmotifs across all the figures. By using them in a variety of different combinations, they end up not expressing one particular character but rather the endless different possibilities that lie in a single character.
It would appear that Schumann is not concerned about theatrical personalities. The figures do not explain their psychology, they are not people but attitudes, aspects of one personality, different facets of one individual. So if we start looking for theatrical characters, we are barking up the wrong tree. The aim of the composer is to portray a situation and at the same time observe its development. Everything is inevitable. Aghast, one looks in the mirror and sees in it the conscientious fool, the virginal saint and the inscrutable aspect that everyone's personality has. What is important here is not that a story is being recounted that you have to understand, but rather that you are being confronted with yourself, you are looking into a massive mirror that enables you to comprehend yourself better. For the Romantics especially, an important aspect was the immediacy and strength with which art was experienced.”
At the heart of the opera lies the scene in which Siegfried, with the help of the enchanted mirror, tries to convince himself of the guilt or innocence of his wife. Nikolaus Harnoncourt compares this scene with a psychoanalysis session with Freud: Does the individual wish to look into the past and if so, can he bear to do so? For Martin Kušej, too, the mirror takes on a new function here: in the opera it no longer serves to deceive the unwitting husband, but rather Siegfried uses it because - thrown back on his own fears and feelings - he feels deeply unsettled. His 'memory fails' - and he is no longer sure of his feelings for Genoveva; thus his imagination starts to conjure up its own pictures of Genoveva's putative adultery. He uses the mirror in order to stabilise an orderly system - which is already starting to crumble - in which he "as a husband has a right to a faithful wife" (Hebbel).
In Schumann's day the legend of the saintly Genoveva was well-known and - according to the director - "there was a special background to this. It was above all her 'holy' innocence that made the text so popular. From the year 1800 onwards a significant increase could be observed in the cult and worship of the Virgin Mary, together with a predominant discourse about the concept of motherhood which, for example, completely subordinated the sexual urge to social morality. This movement found, in the Virgin Mary (and Genoveva), an ideal figure on which to project its ideas. Mary was no longer a mediator between Man and God but rather, above all, a mediator between apparently irreconcilable maxims of sexual ideology, between purity, morality, innocence - in other words, sexual intactness - on the one hand and motherhood on the other. The virgin and mother made the impossible possible: a de-sexualised form of motherhood.
The religious interests of men and women were beginning to diverge. At the same time the 'pressure for marital harmony amongst the bourgeoisie' was growing and received its expression in the romantic ideal of love. The construct of the 'affectionate pair' or 'affectionate female partner' was regarded as a bourgeois ideal and, as such, was closely linked to patriarchy and Catholic piety. Genoveva was practically a 'brand' to which Schumann was deliberately putting forward, albeit in subtle form, a strong contrast; the opera portrays a complementary world to that of Genoveva, namely the chaos of the 'witch', who is for me a mysterious and multi-facetted figure. I see her as a sort of servant/companion both for Golo and the other two figures. In the (dramatic) literature of the time one often finds dark-skinned, wild 'slaves' or counter-figures (e.g. in Grillparzer or Grabbe) that symbolise above all the unconscious, wild, unpredictable side of the hero concerned." In 1849 Schumann wrote to Heinrich Dorn: 'Genoveva! But don't think in terms of the old sentimental figure. I think it is a piece of life history, as every dramatic poem should be."