Manfred, Opus 58, Symphony in four scenes after the dramatic poem by Byron
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born at Kamsko-Votkinsk, Vyatka Province, Russia, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He composed the Manfred Symphony between April and October 1885, completing it on October 4 that year. The first performance was on March 23, 1886, in Moscow, at a concert of the Russian Musical Society under the direction of Max Erdmannsdorfer.
The score of Manfred calls for an orchestra of 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, tubular bell, triangle, cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, bass drum, two harps, organ, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Like many other creative artists in Russia and elsewhere, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky found in the works of English romantic writer Lord Byron a provocative source of inspiration. Poet, adventurer, revolutionary, politician, genius, millionaire, aristocrat, beauty, and highly energetic bisexual, Byron (1788-1824) was a leading cultural celebrity of the 19th century. Almost as famous for his glamorous and controversial lifestyle as for his poems (on such fictional characters as Childe Harold, Manfred, and Don Juan), Byron fashioned what came to be known as the “Byronic hero,” a symbol of an entire age and worldview. With intense sexual magnetism and a fondness for exotic locales, these restless, nomadic, enigmatic, and burnt-out destructive loners possess some dark secret in the past that torments and propels them in an endless and unsuccessful quest for inner peace. Emerging out of the cynicism and dashed hopes of the post-Napoleonic era, Byron’s despairing anti-heroes reject social norms and believe in nothing but the satisfaction of their own unbridled free will and appetites.
In his personal life, Byron titillated and scandalized English high society by carrying on numerous affairs with married ladies. One of them, the writer Lady Caroline Lamb, famously called him “Mad-bad and dangerous to know.” According to numerous sources, however, he was no less fond of male bed partners, especially in Mediterranean climes; one recent biographer claims that the love of his life was “an impoverished choirboy.” That Byron had a club-foot and was frequently overweight did not appear to detract from his sex appeal.
Persistent rumors of sodomy, and of an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh—a liaison that is believed to have produced a child—finally forced the poet to flee England (and his wife) in 1816. Shortly afterwards, stimulated by a trip to Switzerland, Byron wrote the “dramatic poem” Manfred, set in and around a gloomy gothic castle in the Alps and drawing heavily on recent autobiographical experiences. Composed in verse in three acts, Manfred traces the attempts of the title hero to come to terms with his troubled past, especially his apparently incestuous relationship with the “lady Astarte”: “I loved her, and destroy’d her.” Desperately seeking answers from various religious and supernatural sources, Manfred finds some solace in the vitality of his memories before he finally expires, declaring “’tis not so difficult to die.”
Nearly seventy years later, in late 1884, Tchaikovsky read Manfred during a trip to Switzerland. By this time, he was a well-established composer both in Russia and abroad, having completed (among other works) four symphonies, three orchestral suites, the operas Eugene Onegin, The Maid of Orleans, and Mazeppa, and the ballet Swan Lake. It was Tchaikovsky’s colleague and admirer Mily Balakirev who urged him to read Manfred, for he was hoping that Tchaikovsky would compose a new programmatic symphony inspired by Byron’s drama, imitating the model of Hector Berlioz’s Harold in Italy.
During a celebrated trip to Russia in 1867-68, Berlioz had dazzled Balakirev and other Russian composers when he conducted this 1834 work, for orchestra and viola solo, based on Byron’s Childe Harold. Under the spell of Harold in Italy, the influential critic Vladimir Stasov had even sketched out a four-movement program for a Manfred symphony that Balakirev later reworked and gave to Tchaikovsky. At first resistant, Tchaikovsky gradually warmed to Balakirev’s suggestion, and wrote what was in fact his fifth symphony in the course of five months in the spring and summer of 1885 while living in a rented house in the village of Maidanovo, near Klin, where he would settle permanently a few years later.
Tchaikovsky already knew of Byron, who exerted a well-documented influence on Russian 19th-century writers. Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin (which Tchaikovsky had transformed into an opera) responded wittily to Byronic models. Pechorin, the narcissistic hero of Mikhail Lermontov’s seminal 1840 novel A Hero of Our Times, combined features of the Byronic hero with those of the Russian high-society “superfluous man.” And besides Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, Tchaikovsky was no doubt aware of numerous other musical compositions already inspired by Byron, including the ballet Le Corsaire (1856) by French composer Adolphe Adam, whose works enjoyed considerable popularity in Russia. (In 1848, Giuseppe Verdi made an opera, Il corsaro, out of the same poem.)
Whether Tchaikovsky, a homosexual whose inclinations apparently caused him strong feelings of guilt and conflict, knew of Byron’s extensive homosexual experiences is impossible to say. But the composer, still recovering from his disastrous marriage in 1877 to a mentally unbalanced woman and often feeling intense loneliness, would likely have found a soul mate in the cursed, alienated character of Manfred. In particular, Manfred’s terrible secret of incest with Astarte—the reason for his gloomy despair and hopelessness—must have resonated deeply in Tchaikovsky. Having long harbored strong sexual feelings for his own nephew Vladimir Davydov, Tchaikovsky could have identified closely with the “self-condemn’d” Manfred, who declares himself “a living lie.”
Once he started composing the symphony, Tchaikovsky became deeply involved emotionally with the project, as he wrote in a letter of August 1, 1885. “Now I can’t stop. The symphony’s come out enormous, serious, difficult, absorbing all my time, sometimes wearying me in the extreme; but an inner voice tells me that I’m not laboring in vain, and that this will perhaps be the best of my symphonic compositions.”
In his programmatic musical setting of Byron’s poem, Tchaikovsky used Balakirev’s detailed dramatic and musical plan as a point of departure, but also made significant changes, reversing the order of the second and third movements and changing the scheme of keys. In the score, each of the four movements (Tchaikovsky labels them “scenes”) is preceded by a short descriptive passage. In the first movement (“Lento lugubre”—slow and mournful), Manfred roams the Alps, tormented by regret and seeking oblivion. In the second (Vivace con spirito), the scherzo movement, an Alpine witch appears to Manfred “in the rainbow of a waterfall’s spray.” The third (Andante con moto) is a pastorale, a scene of the “simple, poor, carefree life of the mountain dwellers.” The fourth and longest (Allegro con fuoco) takes place in the underworld kingdom of the spirit Ariman, amid an infernal orgy. Manfred summons the ghost of his beloved Astarte and is forgiven before he dies—a significant departure from the Byron original, which includes no mention of forgiveness.
In composing the Manfred Symphony, Tchaikovsky developed further the organizational principle he had used so effectively in his Fourth Symphony—the use of a recurring “fate” motif (in the Fourth, a fanfare for brass and winds) as a central unifying structural and emotional idea. Here, the two fertile themes associated with the character of Manfred are introduced and developed in the first movement and reappear at climactic moments in each of the following three. The first Manfred motif, his idée fixe (on the model of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy), is played in the opening bars by the bass clarinet and bassoons, a descending lugubrious five-bar phrase conveying resignation, accompanied by detached hammer-blow chords (fate, perhaps?) in the lower strings. The second related motif is more impassioned, even hysterical, beginning with a falling seventh (from C-sharp to D-sharp) that then rises in parallel waves. Manfred’s sorrow resounds in the first motif, his fruitless quest in the second.
The influence of another composer whose music Tchaikovsky knew well but professed to dislike—Richard Wagner—seems evident in the way these two musical ideas (leitmotifs) subsequently develop into a psychological epic/drama reminiscent of the orchestral music of the Ring cycle. (Tchaikovsky had reviewed the first full performance of the Ring at Bayreuth in 1876 for a Russian newspaper.) The lady Astarte also has a seductive lyrical theme, introduced by the first violins con sordino (with mutes) in the middle of the first movement and recalled at a climactic moment in the final movement, when Manfred encounters her ghost.
In the second movement, Tchaikovsky displays the light fantastic touch heard in Swan Lake to evoke the world of Alpine fairies, flitting about in string pizzicato. In the Trio section in D major, a simple tune for strings and harp is subjected to ingenious variations, in a manner familiar from the composer’s three orchestral suites. In the pastoral third movement, in G major, Tchaikovsky features the oboe in the first serene section, interrupted by a powerful reappearance of the Manfred material and then fading into a tolling bell sounding across the mountain valleys.
Tchaikovsky deviates significantly from the Byron original in his finale. The last act of the poem is set mostly within Manfred’s castle, with only a suggestion of the appearance of demons and spirits; the symphony gives us a full-scale witches’ sabbath, with a stomping demonic march perhaps modeled on the final infernal movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. In response to Manfred’s pleas, Astarte reappears, her theme resplendently accompanied by extensive dreamy glissandi in the two harps. But she disappears and Manfred’s despair returns in full force.
This is where Byron’s poem ends, but Tchaikovsky appends a more affirmative conclusion. The key switches from the prevailing B minor to C major as the organ enters under liturgical-sounding chords in the full orchestra. Following a statement of the Dies irae theme, heralding the death of Manfred, the orchestra returns to the tragic B-minor home key and gradually fades away, delivering a message not of triumph, but exhaustion.
Harlow Robinson
Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cineaste, and Opera News, and he has written program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera.
The first American performance of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony was given by Theodore Thomas and the Philharmonic Society of New York on December 3, 1886, at the Metropolitan Opera House.
The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of Manfred was given by Wilhelm Gericke in April 1901.