How a Byronic hero inspired two works by Schumann, Tchaikovsky

Two Romantic era titans, Robert Schumann and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, composed works inspired by his saga. But who was Manfred?

The man evoked in Schumann’s Manfred Overture, Op. 115 (1848-49), and Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony in B Minor, Op. 58 (1885), is the tragic protagonist of Lord Byron’s 1816-17 dramatic poem Manfred. Regarded as the quintessential “Byronic hero,″ Manfred is a reclusive, brilliant and arrogant nobleman tormented by guilt over the death of his beloved, Astarte (named after an ancient Middle Eastern goddess of love, fertility and war).

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under Petr Popelka, will perform Schumann’s Overture to Manfred in concerts Sept. 17-19. 

Using his mastery of the supernatural, Manfred summons spirits while seeking forgetfulness and release from his despair. Ultimately resisting all earthly and cosmic authority figures, Manfred commands the spirits to grant him surcease, choosing to die on his own terms rather than submit to his demons. Defiant to the end, Manfred gives his soul to “neither heaven nor hell, only to death.”

Originally written as incidental music for a stage production of Byron’s poem, Schumann’s work depicts Manfred’s internal torment and stormy introspection. The full score is rarely performed nowadays, but the overture lives on in the concert hall. A massive, four-movement work, Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony is often considered his “un-numbered” seventh symphony (though it was composed between his fourth and fifth symphonies); it traces Manfred’s wanderings through the Alps, his encounters with spirits and his eventual death.

Initially, Tchaikovsky considered Manfred to be one of his best pieces. “The symphony has turned out to be huge, serious, difficult, absorbing all my time, sometimes to utter exhaustion,” he wrote to a friend, soprano Emilia Pavlovskaya (in his opinion, the best exponent of the role of Tatiana in his opera Eugene Onegin). "But an inner voice tells me that my labor is not in vain and that this work will perhaps be the best of my symphonic works.” A few years later, however, he wanted to destroy the score. 

His death, in 1893, prevented that fate.