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.
Manfred 1892 na scenie Teatru Wielkiego w Warszawie
Byron twierdził, że Manfred nie był przeznaczony na scenę, ale jego poemat dramatyczny był sporadycznie wystawiany w dziewiętnastowiecznym teatrze. W 1848 roku Robert Schumann zaadaptował poemat do wykonania scenicznego, skomponował uwerturę i muzykę incydentalną. Manfreda w wersji Schumanna wystawiono w warszawskim Teatrze Wielkim z Józefem Kotarbińskim, znanym aktorem, kierownikiem teatru i krytykiem, w roli głównej. Po realizacji rozgorzała gorąca debata w prasie. Główny spór dotyczył tego, czy „dramat metafizyczny” Byrona nadaje się na scenę i czy jest istotny dla polskiej publiczności końca XIX wieku. Celem niniejszego artykułu jest zbadanie głównych kwestii podejmowanych w tej debacie poprzez analizę recenzji tej realizacji w prasie warszawskiej. Ponieważ recenzje są z natury subiektywne, ich badanie ujawnia znacznie więcej preferencji literackich i teatralnych ich autorów niż informacji o samym spektaklu i daje wgląd we wczesne etapy rozwoju tzw. Młodej Polski, z naciskiem na indywidualizm i podmiotowość, zainteresowanie metafizyką i dominację liryzmu. Warszawskiego Manfreda z 1892 roku można więc uznać za próbę wprowadzenia do teatru wielkiej poezji romantycznej, torującej drogę teatralnym inscenizacjom polskiego dramatu romantycznego, który Kotarbiński miał wystawić jako dyrektor Teatru Miejskiego w Krakowie. Artykuł wpisuje się także w historię recepcji Byrona w Polsce.

The 1892 Manfred in Warsaw Teatr Wielki

Byron claimed that Manfred had not been intended for the stage, but his dramatic poem was occasionally produced in the nineteenth-century theatre. In 1848 Robert Schumann adapted the poem for stage performance, composing the Overture and incidental music. Schumann’s version of Manfred was staged in Warsaw Teatr Wielki, with Józef Kotarbiński, a well-known actor, theatre manager and critic as the protagonist. The production was followed by a heated debate in the press. The central controversy focused on whether Byron’s “metaphysical drama” was suitable for the stage and relevant for the late nineteenth-century Polish audience. The aim of this paper is to examine central issues in this debate by scrutinizing the press reviews of the Warsaw production. As the reviews are by their very nature subjective, their examination reveals much more about their authors’ literary and theatrical preferences than about the performance itself, and provides an insight in the early stages of the development of the so-called Young Poland movement (Młoda Polska), with its emphasis on individualism and subjectivity, interest in metaphysics, and prevalence of lyricism. The 1892 Manfred in Warsaw may be seen as an attempt at introducing great Romantic poetry in the theatre, paving the way for the theatre productions of Polish Romantic drama, which Kotarbiński was to stage as the manager of Teatr Miejski in Kraków. The article also contributes to the history of Byron’s reception in Poland.
Song and Story
Not long ago, allusions to musical narrative were likely to elicit only a few well-worn, largely pat and dismissive, formulas about program music. No more: narrative has proved to be something of a bellwether for the current rise of criticism and hermeneutics in music scholarship. It is now virtually a disciplinary subfield, with a steady presence on the American Musicological Society's convention programs and a growing bibliography. Carolyn Abbate's Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century is a highly sophisticated contribution to this new field, a book that helps to sophisticate the field itself and to enrich its critical possibilities. The book's arguments deserve the closest consideration, and its questions will remain pivotal even where its answers are themselves questionable. The foremost of these questions is deceptively simple: In just what sense can music be said to narrate? It is not a question that has been asked often enough. Work in musical narratology can be said to have concentrated on three different topics, each corresponding to a different aspect of narrative as a writing practice.' The most prominent topic, identified especially with the work of Anthony Newcomb, has been emplotment, the configuring of eventsequences into coherent wholes. The popularity of this musical reading-for-the-plot can be explained in part by the obvious importance that most Western art music accords to the