Orchestra's "Das Paradies und die Peri' (3rd

Schumann in Paradise

ROBERT ZALLER

Wolfgang Sawallisch programmed Robert Schumann until he came out of subscribers’ ears during his tenure as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s music director here, but never took the opportunity to perform Das Paradies und die Peri, the work that made Schumann’s reputation as a composer and of which he said that his “heart’s blood” was bound up in it. In fact, the Orchestra had never previously performed it, and almost no one else has either for more than a century. Aside from the odd recording, the curious listener would have had to enter Paradise himself to hear it in concert until now.

For a man of mercurial moods, Schumann was a remarkably methodical artist. He started out solely as a composer for the piano, and would reach his Op. 24 before he branched out into song. Then came the year of orchestral composition that saw his First and Fourth symphonies (the latter so called because of its late publication as Op. 120), and then another year devoted to chamber music. Paradies und die Peri was his venture into the challenging genre of the oratorio, with opera as the presumed Everest of his ascent. With its six soloists— three male, three female— and its large chorus, it was already a quasi-operatic work.

A mysterious disappearance

So, what happened? Oratorios, to be sure, have fallen out of favor, but Elgar was still writing big ones into the last century, and so was Hans Werner Henze. Mendelssohn’s trio— St. Paul, Die Erste Walpurgisnacht and Elijah— remain popular with choral groups, and the Brahms German Requiem is a cornerstone of the repertory. Only Schumann’s big dramatic settings— of Faust and Manfred, as well as the Paradies— seem to have dropped from view.

This may, as I’ve suggested, have something to do with the scope of the forces entailed, and with the scale of the work itself: twenty-six sections in all, running more than an hour and a half of performance time. No American orchestra will play that much music in a single concert, unless it’s by Mahler. Then there’s the text itself, based on Thomas Moore’s once wildly popular Lalla Rookh. Goethe or Byron it isn’t. A peri is a Persian sprite, sinful like the rest of us, and the one in question seeks admission to Allah’s paradise by offering gifts to its angelic guardians. Without belaboring the plot, the third offering proves the charm. It’s mediocre poetizing, but worse stuff has passed muster on many an operatic stage (Turandot has essentially the same plot).

A challenge to Beethoven

One explanation won’t wash. Das Paradies und die Peri is top-drawer Schumann from first note to last, and the Peri’s final assumption into heaven contains some of his most exalted writing. It challenges formidable competition here, however, in the chorale finale of Beethoven’s Ninth and in the Missa Solemnis, and, latterly, in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, which has become the standard staircase to heaven in the modern concert hall. Moore’s Oriental fantasy doesn’t offer much scaffolding against the Ode to Joy or Mahler’s gigantic earnestness. But Schumann himself said that the score was intended “not for the chapel, but rather for cheerful folk.” If it’s far from a merry diversion, it does give cheer, and a great deal of pleasure too.

Sir Simon Rattle, who has revived the work, gave it a fluent performance, and the Orchestra, particularly the strings, played most sweetly. The Philadelphia Singers Chorale gave able backing, and the soloists were in good voice, although soprano Heidi Grant Murphy (the Peri), while rising to her dramatic climaxes, seemed under strength in the tessitura. Tenor Mark Padmore projected a particularly resonant dignity as the Narrator.

This hasn’t been a particularly exciting year of programming by the Orchestra, for reasons not far to seek. Discovering the buried treasure of Das Paradies und die Peri has been the best of it yet.

To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.