Schumann as Manfred
The most prominent composers in Germany during the 1850s-Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Schumann-all liked to be compared to Byron.1 Berlioz thought he bore a physical resemblance to the poet and, in his youth, sought connections between their lives: he searched out Byron's acquaintances while traveling in Italy, read the "burning verse" in a confessional in St. Peter's, and threatened suicide in melodramatic manner after being rejected by Camille Moke. Both his overture Le corsair and Harold en Italie celebrate the Byronic wanderer, as do the first two books of Liszt's Annees de pelerinage, written in Switzerland and Italy in the company of Marie d'Agoult.2 Liszt's Byronic habit of persuading married women to forsake their husbands was shared by Wagner, whose Dutchman exemplifies the wanderer's threat to female virtue.3 Byron was appealing because he was a man of action as well as words, demonstrated not only by his notorious exploits as a lover, but also through his engagement with politics, consummated in what many frame as his "sacrifice" for the Greek cause at Missolonghi.4 Schumann's similarity to Byron, however, manifested itself in a quite different manner. While Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner were compared to the poet's own best hero-himself-Schumann's contemporaries aligned him with one of his fictional characters, Manfred. The comparison was significant, not least because presenting Schumann as Manfred served several purposes. It was a veiled means of discussing the composer's character and his failing health, of placing him within a particular historical context, and ultimately of questioning whether he belonged with the musicians "of the future" or with those of an earlier romantic generation. On a more general level, the comparison between Schumann and Manfred is an early example of the assimilation of the composer into the world of fiction-a tendency still very much apparent from his (and his wife Clara's) frequent appearances in films and novels today.
"The Voice Which Was My Music": Narrative and Nonnarrative Musical Discourse in Schumann's "Manfred"
Of all late-eighteenth-century musical genres, melodrama-with its coupling of declaimed speech and musical accompaniment-is surely the strangest.' Whereas song conveys poetry through music (and music through poetry), melodrama permits the spoken word a rhythm nd inflection not exclusively musical, while allowing music an autonomous nonverbal presence hat sometimes supports and sometimes competes with the words it accompanies. The experimental genre generated its fair share of controversy in nineteenth-century Germany, primarily because the relation between music This article is a revised version of a chapter f o my Narratives of "Incidental" Music in German Romantic Theater (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998). Portions of this work were presented previously at the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory in 1997 in Phoenix, Arizona, and the conference Feminist Theory and Music 4 in 1997 in Charlottesville, Virginia. I wish to thank Brian Hyer, Leslie David Blasius, Susan C. Cook, Stephen Dembski, and John Wm. Schaffer for their valuable comments and encouragement.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.