Lord Byron would probably have scoffed to be called an “influencer”. Yet he exemplified the role, influencing artists beyond his own country and lifetime perhaps more than any other 19th-century poet. His semi-autobiographical verse dramas featuring the “Byronic Hero” – passionate, troubled, questing, and principled – turned him into a cult icon. Anti-authoritarian, an opponent of war in a bellicose era, and a supporter of the downtrodden from English Luddites to Greeks seeking independence, Byron seems a surprisingly modern figure.
Many composers set his verse to music or turned his dramas into operas – including Rossini, Verdi, Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Schoenberg. Gooch and Thatcher’s Musical Settings of British Romantic Literature lists nearly 1,300 musical works based on Byron. These range across all musical forms, and the breadth of Europe for more than a century.
Byron enjoyed music, especially vocal. Certain songs of Thomas Moore moved him to tears. He liked to sing, bursting into song on horseback or indoors; Leigh Hunt recalled how Byron “lounged about, singing an air, generally out of Rossini”. Byron told his friend Hobhouse that Rossini “came in person to play the harpsichord” when his opera Eduardo e Cristina transfixed Venice in 1819. “The people followed him about, cut off his hair ‘for memory’,” Byron reported, “he was shouted, and sonnetted, and feasted, and immortalised...”. Rossini was in England when news of Byron’s death arrived, and wrote a Lament of the Muses on the Death of Lord Byron.
That music was adapted from a chorus in Rossini’s Maometto II (1820). When Maometto was adapted for Paris in 1826 it became Le Siège de Corinthe, its 15th-century war between Turks and Venetians becoming the contemporary one between Turks and Greeks at which Byron, who himself had written a Siege of Corinth poem, died. Byron’s passing, and Greek independence, still made good box office.
Other composers of Italian opera looked to Byron for subjects. Donizetti’s Marino Faliero (1825) and his Parisina (1833) are taken from the poetic dramas of those titles. For his 1830 sprawling 3-act biblical drama Il diluvio universale (The Great Flood), Donizetti drew upon both Byron’s Heaven and Hell and Thomas Moore’s Loves of the Angels. Donizetti’s opera semiseria Torquato Tasso (1833) draws upon several writers, including Goldoni and Goethe as well as Byron’s The Lament of Torquato Tasso. None of these works survive among the most frequently produced of Donizetti’s operas.
Verdi’s two Byron operas however, although also not from his capacious top drawer, are still sometimes staged. He said of Byron’s The Corsair, which became his opera Il corsaro (1848), that he could think of no plot “finer, more full of passion”. The hero Conrad (Corrado) is another of the poet’s self-portraits, and in at least one modern production, the tenor lead has played Corrado as Byron.
Verdi also used Byron’s The Two Foscari for his 1844 opera I due Foscari despite the fact that another composer, Cannetti, was writing an opera on the same Byron text, so had pleaded with Verdi to desist. The opera is set in Venice, where Doge Francesco Foscari is forced to resign his office by the Counsellors who had earlier rejected any resignation attempt. The Doge protests against this treatment in his closing scene Questa dunque è l’iniqua mercede (“This then is the unjust reward”). Once a favourite of recitalists, it is sung here by Leo Nucci.
How did foreign composers and librettists first encounter Byron’s work? In France the post-Napoleonic generation of Byronists learned it from Amédée Pichot’s translations into French prose, which reached 15 volumes in 1820–24. The poet was dismayed by their poor quality, yet as French was the lingua franca of Europe they were widely read, sometimes translated into other languages, so were probably the most important means for the transmission of Byron’s reputation across Europe. Even in prose, verse dramas could be admired, since characterisation of the Byronic heroes, and the plots, survive even when their poetic expression is limited.
Among French composers Berlioz, dubbed “The Byron of Music” by a biased colleague, wrote a Le Corsaire (1844) overture and a symphony Harold en Italie (1834), inspired by Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Berlioz’s Harold is represented in the symphony by a solo viola, since it was commissioned by Paganini to show off his recently acquired Stradivarius viola. Alas, he was so disappointed with the score’s limited scope for virtuosity he never played it. It features musical descriptions of Harold wandering in the Abruzzi hills, pilgrims singing an evening prayer, and an “orgy of brigands”, none of which feature in Byron’s poem. But Harold is a Romantic era Wanderer figure – the solo viola arrives on the scene after the suitably meandering music of the work’s opening, a pilgrim pausing to share a conversation with the harp:
Byron was himself a pilgrim, living abroad from July 1809 to July 1811, then again from April 1816 until his death in 1824 – the adult Byron spent just five years in England. Pilgrimage also concerned another devoted Byronist, the Hungarian pianist-composer Franz Liszt. In his early years as a travelling virtuoso he crossed Europe giving concerts, which he was the first to call “recitals”, with sensational success.
When Liszt began a liaison with Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, they left France for Switzerland, beginning what he termed his Années de pélerinage, the title of three volumes of piano pieces illustrating those “years of pilgrimage” and encounters with places and artworks. Of the Première Année; Suisse (1848–53) four of the nine pieces have an epigraph from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Liszt wrote a piano and viola transcription of Berlioz’s Harold en Italie (1836), and his “Symphonic Poems” – another quasi-literary Liszt coinage – include two from 1854 based on Byron, Tasso and Mazeppa. When touring England in 1840 he sought out Newstead Abbey to pay homage at Byron’s ancestral home.
Liszt had long-standing operatic ambitions, and considered both The Corsair and Manfred as operatic subjects and began, but did not finish, an opera based on another Byron drama, Sardanapalus (of which eleven operas are known). The impressive Act One of Liszt’s projected three-act Sardanapalo was edited in 2017 by musicologist David Trippett, and a recording issued of this marvellous torso. But Liszt did not need full operatic resources to create a drama. His orchestral Mazeppa (inspired by both Hugo’s 1829 poem and Byron’s 1819 one) was initially a piano solo, twice revised and becoming one of his Transcendental Studies. Mazeppa is a Ukrainian Cossack leader, condemned to death and bound naked to his horse, but survives the wild ride depicted in Liszt’s turbulent piano writing:
Liszt also conducted the first performance of Schumann’s main Byron-based achievement, his Manfred, a “Dramatic Poem” (1848) in 15 numbers, 6 fully musical items but 9 melodramas (text spoken over music), for Manfred does not sing but declaims. The first German translations of Byron were published by Schumann’s father, and Robert loved Manfred from his teens, identifying with the hero’s conflicted nature. Today only the splendid Overture to his work is heard, although Sir Thomas Beecham, inspired by Byron’s text as much as Schumann’s music, presented the complete work in London in the original English in 1918 and 1954. But it could be claimed that Manfred in music belongs as much to late 19th century Russia as to anywhere else.
Byronism in Russia was promoted by Pushkin, a Byron enthusiast who when asked to suggest a poetic model said “read Parisina”. His verse novel Eugene Onegin mentions Byron, The Corsair, and calls Byron’s poetry “Albion’s great and haughty lyre”. Onegin’s cold hauteur makes him a recognisably Byronic hero. Tchaikovsky’s magnificent opera Eugene Onegin (1881) stands at the head of all Byronic operas, even if at one remove from Byron’s own work. So too is his opera Mazeppa (1884), taken from Pushkin’s treatment of the tale, Poltava. But Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony (1886) shows how much he identified with the character, troubled like both author and composer by a forbidden love. The composer later disowned the symphony “with the exception of the first movement.”
With the advent of modernism in literature and music early in the last century, no Romantic poet could continue to wield such influence. In 1971 American composer Virgil Thomson put the poet himself on stage in his opera Lord Byron, portraying Byron’s scandalous life in England. But the continued relevance of Byron’s art for other creators is better shown by Schoenberg’s use of his Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, the poet’s outpouring of scorn for a fallen tyrant. Byron the anti-antisemite, whose collection Hebrew Melodies was a collaboration with Jewish composer Isaac Nathan (who set all thirty poems to music), would also resonate with Schoenberg in 1942, when Hitler still tyrannised Europe. The message is all the clearer for the setting, a speaker declaiming Byron’s English text accompanied by just piano and string quartet.
When Byron died two hundred years ago aged 36 in Missolonghi, where he had joined the Greek struggle for independence, the man became the legend. His enduring personal image and poetic work would inform art, not least music, for generations to come.
