Robert Schumann’s death in a mental asylum; the works written during the years of his illness, which his wife Clara, Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim kept from the public or even destroyed (!) out of a false sense of respect; the preference shown by posterity for a handful of orchestral works, concertos, Lieder and piano pieces: all this has led to the widespread neglect to this day of a significant part of the composer’s oeuvre - in particular the choral works, oratorios, the Requiem, the Missa Sacra, the opera Genoveva and the late works dating from 1852 onwards. Paradise and the Peri is one of the bold compositions from Schumann’s pen that conservative 20th century aesthetes dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders because they couldn’t be pigeon-holed - works that are only gradually achieving recognition for their innovative and progressive character. Yet Clara Schumann wrote: "I believe it is the finest thing he has ever written. He is putting his entire heart and soul into it, though, working with such passion that I sometimes fear he may damage his health. But then I am happy again to see him so involved."
The term ‘oratorio' is only superficially suited to describe the work. It is really more of a ‘lyrical story', reminiscent of Schubert’s Lazarus fragment and in its idiosyncratic concept anticipating compositions by Wagner (Tannhäuser, Parsifal), César Franck (Rédemption), Debussy (Le Martyre de St. Sebastién) and even Vaughan-Williams (The Pilgrim's Progress). The text is based on an oriental epic by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh. This book was a huge bestseller in its day and Schumann read as a child, his father having published a German translation in 1822. For a long time, the composer planned to turn the material into an opera. In 1841 he and his friend Emil Flechsig began writing the libretto, which was completed on 6th January1842; Schumann then started work on the score. But not until 19th June 1843 was he able to announce: "I completed my Paradies und Peri last Friday, my biggest work to date and i hope my best one as well. With my heart filled with gratitude to Heaven for keeping my creative powers so alive while I wrote the music, I wrote “The End" beneath the score. It is a great deal of work producing a piece like this, and in the process you really find out what it means to compose more pieces on this scale... The story of the Peri is predestined to be set to music. The whole idea is so poetic and so pure that it filled me with enthusiasm.”
In Persian mythology, a Peri is a kind of fairy. As the child produced by the union of a fallen angel and a human female, the Peri is ‘impure’ and thus cannot be admitted to Paradise. But the guardian of the gates of Paradise is moved by her longing, and says he will let her in if she can wash herself free of all sin. What he doesn’t tell her is precisely what offering she needs to make as “the gift dearest to Heaven”. Thus the Peri flies first of all to India, the beauty of which land the libretto praises amply. There, the fierce warlord Gazna is leading a campaign of conquest and a bloody battle is in progress. When the last Hindu to oppose the tyrant is slaughtered, the Peri believes she has found the gift she needs to get into Heaven: the last drop of the fallen hero's blood. Like Part One, the two following parts of the work are divided into three scenes each. First we hear about the Peri’s fate; this is followed by a description of a distant country, and then the event is depicted that is connected with the Peri’s gift to Heaven. At the opening of Part Two, the Peri is turned away: the angel guarding the entrance to Paradise tells her that her offering is not worthy. She flies to Africa and takes a cleansing bath in the (then undiscovered) source ofthe Nile. Afterwards, she follows the river northwards. But in Egypt, the plague is rife. She retreats to an oasis, where she encounters a youth who is infected and left his still healthy beloved in order to protect her. But the maiden follows him, gets infected in turn, and they both die, united in one final kiss. The Peri catches the last sigh breathed by the two lovers.
At the beginning of Part Three we enjoy a glimpse of Paradise, where the steps leading up to Allah’s throne are adorned by the most beautiful houris. The Peri again appears at Heaven’s gates, but like its predecessor, her second gift is rejected too. She won’t be put off her quest, though, and resolves to travel all round the world if needs be. Now she takes off to a third, legendary ‘Promised Land’, namely ancient Syria. On the banks of the River Jordan she meets a group of Peris, who share her fate and likewise want to gain admission to Paradise - though the music at this point is somewhat ambiguous: perhaps the other Peris only mean it ironically. At the sun temple in Baalbek, the Peri then observes a strange scene: An old sinner, wild of countenance, comes across a pretty and innocent young lad. But he refrains from violating him, for the fearless boy is kneeling in prayer. This touches the old man so that he kneels down beside him, weeps over his past wrongdoing, and prays with him. For the Peri, the aged lecher’s tears represent the key to the gate of Paradise. Nikolaus Harnoncourt has said: "A part from the splendid music, which has often been described as imperfect, it is the work’s form that moves me - the fact that each part ends with the certainty of having achieved the goal, and not with rejection. Thus each part starts in the same way as Part One, namely in a mood of despair. But the Peri won't give up her quest." Schumann himself may well have identified with the Peri for quite a while.
The composer himself conducted the first performance in the Altes Leipziger Gewandhaus on 4th December 1843, and to triumphant effect: this proved to be the turning-point in a career that had hitherto been dogged by failure. During his own lifetime, Paradise and the Peri was performed more than fifty times at home and abroad, bringing Schumann international fame. "Many of my compositions", he far-sightedly wrote to Clara on 13th April 1838, "are so hard to understand because they relate to distant interests: I am touched by all kinds of contemporary peculiarities that I then have to express in music." But he would have been horrified at the extent to which his oratorio was misrepresented in the following century. In the First World War the work was used to transfigure the 'glorious' soldiers killed in action, and in World War II Hitler’s propaganda minister ]osef Goebbels commissioned Max Gebhard, director of the Nuremberg Conservatoire at the time, to make an arrangement of the work emphazing the element of sacrificial death: this version had its première in 1943 under the baton of Kurt Barth, accompanied by Nazi propaganda. The misuse that the work suffered in the two world wars may have been one reason why Paradise and the Peri then vanished almost completely from the repertoire, like many other pieces of Classical music that the Nazis abused for political purposes. In the postwar years, the viewpoint gained currency that Paradise and the Peri was Schurnann’s rather immature ‘first oratorio’ (perhaps an attempt to repress the uses it had been put to), and this seemed to seal its fate. Not until the 1980's did a hesitant rediscovery of the work take place.
All the themes and motifs are skilfully developed. The musical form is new and 'undogmatic', as it were. It combines elements of secular music (role allocation and treatment of the chorus comparable with opera, incorporation of the art song) with traditional sacred music (chorales, a tenor narrator similar to Bach`s Evangelist, symbolism, emotions, liturgy). In the closing chorus of Part One - which Schumann's friend Mendelssohn was to use for the finale of his own oratorio Elijah - the fugal theme (no.9, bar 116) quotes the finale "Di tai pericoli non ha timor" from Mozart’s Davide Penitente, known today as the "Cum Sancto Spiritu" of the C minor Mass, which was first published in 1840.
In Part Three, no. 24 ("O heil’ge Tränen inn'ger Reue") is a major-key version of the chorale "Herr lesu Christ, Du höchstes Gut" and at the same time an echo of the Communion liturgy: "...qui tollis peccata muridi". The opening and the fugue of no. 25 are evolved from the ‘royal’ theme of Bach’s A Musical Offering, and later on the Lutheran hymn "DresdnerAmen" appears, familiar to today's music-lover from Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony, Wagner's Parsifal and Bruckner's Ninth. In the finale, no. 26, we find at the words "Schedukian's diamond towers" a reminiscence of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony, whose first performance was given in Leipzig in 1842.
Moreover, Paradise and the Peri is of great topical relevance today, something that is still underestimated: Schumann and Flechsig created a story that frees the spiritual search and fundamental existential questions from the straitjacket of Western Christianity and views them from the distant perspective of alien cultures and religions - not unlike the German writer tessing in his play Nathan the Wise. In the era of the Enlightenment, with the Church gradually playing a smaller role in bourgeois life, they wanted to arouse people’s interest in questions of faith and spiritual issues using the vehicles of the parable and popular fairy tales (e.g. the Peri’s three attempts to gain admission to Paradise). The exotic locations add to the work’s appeal, much as in Mozart's The Magic Flute, and at the same time specific symbols supply Christian connotations, as Hans-Christoph Becker-Foss has ascertained. Examples of the latter are the tear that keeps recurring when the plot takes a positive turn; the breath that can be an angel’s breath or the infectious breath of someone stricken with the plague; finally, the recurring references to water and blood (the Nativity, the Baptism of Christ, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion). The Peri makes it clear to us that Man is responsible for his own actions. The willingness to recognize and regret one’s mistakes, together with love, goodness, sympathy and devotion, points the way to salvation: an irrefutable criticism of all dogmatic religions, which on the one hand preach such lessons, but actually prove the opposite with their actions.