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Jack Kelso   16/12/2003	Subject: Did Raff know "genoveva"? Message: Last Sunday evening Heidi and I experienced Schumann's opera "Genoveva". The Heidelberg opera company and "Philharmonisches Orchester" sang and played marvelously, with lots of poetry and (yes!) DRAMA! Thus, old Hanslick's critique of this great masterpiece has been laid to rest! If Raff had never heard this work I imagine he might have perused the score, for it contains top-drawer Schumann---just the type of music Raff loved and admired: long-woven melodic lines, passionate outbursts, original harmonies, abrupt rhythmic changes and syncopations. Admittedly, the "drama" is more of a psychological nature (no elephants, no flying valkyries, no battle scenes). But the production values showed that "Genoveva" is no mere song-cycle in the guise of opera. This music is overflowing with passion, brimming with long-woven melodies, developed in an almost symphonic manner, dense in expression, poetic through and through. Schumann's influence on Raff was powerful: note the opening of the 1st mvt. of his 8th Symphony and compare it with Schumann's "Fruehlings-Sinfonie"! But Raff's basic nature was more like that of a Mendelssohn: smooth, cheerful, pleasant. But Raff could also be "ugly" (as he's been called by some unsympathic critics), so comparisons with Berlioz: 4th mvt. of the "Lenore" Symphony as well as the "hunt" portion of the finale of "Im Walde" and harmonic modulations of the opening movements of several other symphonies. What does Schumann's opera have to do with Raff? Well, it gives us Raff-enthusiasts a reason to breathe in deeply. The critics were WRONG about "Genoveva"....and they've been wrong about Raff as well. Doesn't "misery love company"? Jack
Mark   16/12/2003	RE: Did Raff know "genoveva"? IP: Logged Message: Raff certainly did know Genoveva, Jack. His Op.61, No.4 of 1855 is a Capriccio in Rondo form on Schumann's "Genoveva" for Piano. FWIW I share your enthusiasm for the opera itself, although everything which I have read (including to a degree your report) attests to it being better music than drama. As for Schumann's influence on Raff, it is indeed more difficult to spot than that of Mendelssohn and Liszt. There are many works of the 1850s which take those two, and even Chopin, as their models but Schumann's influence is probably down to his aesthetic becoming almost a musical lingua franca amongst non-Wagnerian composers in the 1850s-1870s. Raff lacked the essential introspection and melancholy for it to show itself too strongly, however. I suppose that I must part company with you when it comes to the "ugly" in Raff. Not out of loyalty - there's nothing wrong with it intrinsically of course - but because it runs counter to Raff's own artistic tenets. He followed the classical or Mozartian principle that above all music must be beautiful, whatever is being expressed or portrayed. As he got older, this classicism became more promounced. So, even though the 4th. movement of Lenore, to use your example, is brash, loud and exciting and it portrays a series of ghoulish events, there is no dissonance, no "ugliness" in a musical sense. One could argue that "ugliness" would be appropriate in the circumstances, but that just wasn't what Raff believed in. Yes, you're right to take heart from a re-evaluation of Genoveva, but I suppose bitter experience leads me to say that there's a world of difference between an undervalued work by a famous composer and an undervalued work by an undervalued composer.