Declamatorium: Scenes from Byron’s Manfred

The British poet and hell-raiser Lord Byron –‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’– wrote Manfred while visiting the Swiss Alps and his text is as wild and beautiful as the landscapes that inspired it. The hero of the piece is a kind of Faustus figure, but with a radical twist: Manfred does not sell his soul to the devil. Instead, his very soul itself is so guilty, so dark, so tortured as to be more powerful than any necromantic arts or spirits of the underworld. In Manfred, Byron created the ultimate Gothic hero, a character that still inhabits our screens and imaginations today (think, for instance, of Darth Vadar, Batman, etc.).

For this performance, a selection of scenes from Manfred has been combined with music by Clara and Robert Schumann, and Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn in order to recreate a 19^th-century declamatorium: a kind of one-man show with spoken text and musical accompaniment. Scenes from Byron’s Manfred: A Gothic Entertainment haunts the borderline between speech and music, exploring musical and oratorical practices of the late 19^th century. The performance is preceded at 19:00 by an introduction to the creative process behind the show by Jed Wentz.

Jed Wentz, speaker
Cecilia Bernadini, violin
Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde, violoncello
Artem Belogurov, piano