The omens could not have been better: on the one hand, here was a work which, for more than a century, has been regarded as no more than a bizarre curiosity on the very fringes of the operatic repertory, while on the other we had a conductor whose response to traditional value judgements is invariably highly personal. The encounter Genoveva and  Nikolaus Harnoncourt was bound to be absorbing.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt spent two years studying the complexities of Robert Schumann's only opera before he finally set ahout performing it at the Graz styriarte in the early summer of l996. It was while he was casting round for a large-scale vocal work to complement his existing recordings of symphonies and concertos that he alighted upon the score of Genoveva and was instantly drawn towards it:
"To begin with, I simply found the piece very beautiful. It's incredibly beautiful music. When I started to look at it in greater detail, I came across all the withering reviews that the work has elicited in the course of the last hundred years. I had the impression that each critic was merely repeating what others had written before him. They had all approached the piece with a preconceived idea of what an opera must be like. If it doesn't live up to one's expectations, the work itself is condemned out of hand. But it's the critics themselves who deserve to be condemned for not seeing what's on offer here."
For Harnoncourt, Schumann ranks alongside Schubert and Bruckner are one of the truly great geniuses of the l9th century. In consequence, it cannot be assumed that the composer was simply trying to gratify ordinary listener's expectations or conforming to prevailing conventions and taste. Like other German Romantic composers, Schumann was strenuously opposed to the Italian and French operatic tradition that predominated at this time and wanted to see something altogether different in its place. In Nikolaus Harnoncourt's view, Schumann succeeded in "reinventing opera" with Genoveva.

Steamrollered by Wagner
Composed between 1847 and 1849, Genoveva initially encountered considerable interest, not least in the light of the composer's secular oratorio, Das Paradies und die Peri, which had caused a sensation when it was first performed in 1843. Schumann himself was regarded as the great hope of German music and it was naturally expected that he would write an opera. Genoveva received its first performance in Leipzig in 1850, with Schumann himself conducting the first two performances. a further production followed in Weimar in 1855, this time under Liszt. Only now did the misunderstandings begin.
At the time that Schumann wrote Genoveva, the German operatic scene was dominated by Meyerbeer and Wagner. Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots had been unveiled in Paris in 1836 and soon took Germany by storm, while Wagner had confirmed his growing reputation with Tannhäuser in 1845. Schumann himself heard Tannhäuser in Dresden in 1845 and had been highly critical of it. At first sight there appear to be parallels between Genoveva and Lohengrin (which also received its first performance in l850). But these similarities are superficial in the extreme and go no deeper than the fact that both works share the same setting and involve a crusade.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt is convinced that Genoveva was designed as a counterblast to Wagner; who, for his part, described Schnmann's opera as "bizarre". Be that as it may, there is no doubt that Schumann`s attempts to write a "highly original, straightforwardly profound German opera" were undermined by the all-powerful rivalry of the later Beast of Bayreuth:
"That’s hardly surprising if you go about your business with the energy shown by Wagner. After all, he not only wrote these works, with that brilliant knack of his, he was also an outstanding manager. But Wagner was an opera composer, whereas Schumann was a real all-round composer, like Mozart."
It is clear from Schumann's completely different handling of Wagner's leitmotivc technique how similar the aspirations of the two antagonists were and yet how dissimilar were the results that they achieved: We're used to a particular leitmotif characterising a particular person. But where does it say that it has to be like that? Schumann adopted a far more sophisticated approach. His leitmotifs are not attached to individual characters. The whole piece is built up on a subtly textured web of leitmotifs, most of which are derived from a single main motif, namely, the chorale at the beginning of the opera, which is later reinterpreted in a whole host of different ways. Initially, it stands on its own, as a devout chorale, in a positive sense, but it then assumes a negative aspect, suggesting the sort of pressure that is placed on the people. Later still, it becomes a portrait of Golo, presenting him as a positive figure, after which the motif is transferred to Genoveva herself. Inevitably, this provides tremendous links between the different characters. By being used in the most varied combinations, these motifs do not express a particular character but suggest, rather, the infinite range of possibilities contained within any one character. I find it particularly interesting that all the motivic figures already appear in the Overture and that there is something intaglio-like about them, allowing the listener to register them clearly."

A Symphonic Floodtide as a River of Fate
In Nikolaus Harnoncourt's view, the special place that Genoveva occupies in Schumann's works is clear, not least, from the amount of time and energy that he expended on the piece:
"At no point before or later did he devote himself to a subject with the same segree of intensity that he gave to Genoveva. For him, Genoveva was the ultimate gial to which he aspired as a composer. But the work was already misunderstood even during the 19th century. Listeners expected things that it simply did not contain. There is no dialogue nor any psychological development. The characters do not talk to each other but only speak about themselves. They are magical monologues. I can well imagine all the characters as different facets of a single complex character.
"Genoveva is a psychological fdrama, completely unclassical, thoroughly modern, almost absurdist. It raises questions but without offering any answers. It does not set out to moralise but only to show us something. You cannot cure what is incurable. Schumann was concerned to depict inner states, to suggest the inevitability of certain events in his characters' lives and to show the point at which it is no longer possible to avoid being sucked under. You can't speak of guilt or morality here. Things sumply happen.
"The music embodies this all-consuming flood of emotions. The dialogue is not realistic: it is not the sort of text that the music reinforces and elucidates. Here the composer attempts to forge a completely new link between the individual word and its corresponding note: the text triggers the music, which is why Schumann had to write his own libretto, allbeit borrowing heavily from existing plays on the subject by Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Hebbel. The surreal element is already very prominent in Tieck.
"The orchestral forces are fairly constant from the first notes of the Overture right through to the end of the opera. Schumann varies his forces very little - clearly a conscious decision. The piece is like a great symphony with voices. There are some wonderful colours, every detail is incredibly finely honed, but the full orchestra is used virtually all the time. This symphonic floodtide seems to me like a river of fate. In this way, the implacable passage of time in the music - the fact that you can never turn it back, never make it stop - becomes a dramaturgical principle."

The Genoveva Theme in German Romanticism
Genoveva is the young wife of the Count Platine, Siegfried. During his absence on a crusade, their new steward, Golo, presses his attentions on her and, his impassioned advances having been spurned, accuses her of adultery. Siegfried condemns her to death. The servant ordered to kill her takes pity on her and abandons her to her fate in a rocky wilderness. For seven years she remains in the forest, keeping herself and her new-born infant, Schmerzenreich, alive by eating herbs and drinking the milk of a hind. Siegfried belatedly discovers that she is innocent and, coming upon her while out hunting, takes her back to his castle.
French in origin, this popular legend exists in countless different versions and many iconographical representations. It first appeared in Germany in the 17th century. Many adaptations followed, and by Schumann's day the subject was widely known.
The two plays that inspired Schumann's opera, Ludwig Tieck's Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva (1800) and Friedrich Hebbel's Genoveva (1843), are based only loosely on the theme of the crusades and on the religious ideas bound up with them. In their different ways, both playwrights succeeded in bringing out the human conflicts contained within the story and keeping those conflicts on a short fuse by concentrating on the way in which the characters are hopelessly embroiled in fateful relationships. Events follow one another with an inevitable logic, with evil, too, obeying its own inner laws. Guilt is no longer a moral category: we are guilty because we exist. "Thus time passes us by, coldly and indifferently," wrote Tieck. "It knows nothing of our anguish, nothing of our joys, it leads us by its icy hand. [...] It is the stars that ordain our fate and make us virtuous or vicious, so that care, sorrow and remorse are folly pure and simple."
Fron a present-day perspective such thoughts seem almost existentialist in character. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who has studied the literary sources in detail, blames old prejudices for the fact that critics have been taken in by the courtly trappings of Schumann's opera and, by neglecting to look behind its superficial setting, have failed to appreciate its true modernity:
"The piece is really quite frighteningly complex. Who decides what is sacred, what is diabolical? Who is guilty? Who is innocent? This is something that the Romantics, then and now, understand. On a latent level, there is also a pronounced psychoanalytical element. Take the mirror scene in the third-act finale: the magic mirror reveals the blackest depths of the human soul, where doubt and distrust tale root. And then there are Siegfried and Golo, who can be seen as complementary characters: the former is a man of experience, a man lacking in imagination, with a character that fits this cliché like a glove, while the latter, by contrast, has all the brilliant qualities and talents that the former lacks. At the same time, Golo is literally worshipped by the petty bourgeois Siegfried. You can follow all this marvellously through the leitmotifs. You could say that these two embody the self and longing.
"There isn't a trace of neo.medieval Romanticism. Although Schumann gives a clue as to when the action takes place - right at the beginning there is a reference to Charles Martel, and he uses the departure and return of the crusaders as an outer framework for the action - he none the less insisted that 'the time at which the piece is set is poetic time'."

The Composer as Librettist
It was originally the Dresden man of letters Robert Reinick who was to have produced a libretto for Schumann by conflating the versions of Tieck and Hebbel. When he ran into difficulties with Reinick, Schumann turned to Hebbel in person, but, as a self-confessed non-musician, Hebbel was unable to feel his way into the composer's imaginative world. At this juncture, Schumann began to wonder whether he himself might be qualified to write his own libretto: as the son of a bookseller and publisher, he had been familiar with the world of letters from an early age, while his profound admiration for Jean Paul, which had left its mark on his adolescence, had increased his literary competence to the point where he had long felt that he was more of a writer than a musician. After all, Schumann had made a name for himself much earlier as a writer than as a composer, not least as a result of his highly regarded publications in the pages of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which he had founded in 1854 with other members of his “League of David”. The German novelist Peter Härtling paints a graphic picture of this well-developed dual talent in his recent biographical romance, Schumanns Schatten.
The fact that, in the case of Genoveva, Schumann was his own librettist undoubtedly adds to the work's fascination - as long as listeners are prepared to accept his 19th-century idiom on its own terms. This is also true of many of the other German Romantic opera librettos that are nowadays routinely dismissed out of hand - although Wagner; curiously, remains the great exception. According to Nikolaus Harnoncourt, “There is something almost cruel about not taking seriously the people of this period simply because of their language and about falling around laughing at that language. Schumann, Schubert and Weber - all these composers had a great appreciation and understanding of language, all of them were active in men of letters. I can't laugh at the language of Lohengrin, I can feel only despair. But people lap it up!"
The events recounted in the French legend retailed above have been tolescoped together and substantially altered in the second part of Schumann's libretto. Here there is no mention of the child that Genoveva brings into the world and that provides an additional conflictual element in the versions of Hebbel and Tieck. Conversely, the figure of Margaretha - a composite of nurse and witch - is of decisive dramaturgical importance.
"With Schumann," Nikolaus Harnoncourt notes, "the piece ends seven years earlier. Cutting off the story in this way makes the characters even clearer and ensures that the situation is brought into greater focus. Siegfried is now immediately prepared to believe that Genoveva has been unfaithful. Schumann allows him to stumble straight into his behavioural patterns. Since there is absolutely no question of the child's father, there is not the slightest shadow of a doubt cast over Genoveva's faithfulness."