Byron, George (EN)

Byron George Gordon Noel, Lord, *22 January 1788 London, †19 April 1824 Missolonghi (Greece), English poet and playwright. He grew up in an aristocratic environment, in an estranged family; entangled in an unhappy marriage and love for his half-sister, a member of the House of Lords, under the influence of social boycott, he had to leave England forever in 1816. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, a contemporary of Shelley and Keats, fascinated by the culture of the Mediterranean; between 1809 and 1811 he undertook an important journey around the Mediterranean Sea. He spent the final years of his life, often regarded as adventurous, in Italy. He died of malaria while participating in the Greek War of Independence. Upon hearing of the poet’s death, G. Rossini wrote the cantata Il pianto delle muse su morte di Lord Byron.

Byron wrote lyric, occasional, and satirical poems, odes, and ballads (published in collections: Fugitive Pieces 1806, Poems on Various Occasions 1807, Hours of Idleness 1807, Poems Original and Translated 1808, Hebrew Melodies 1815), poetic tales (including The Giaour 1813, The Bride of Abydos 1813, The Corsair 1814, Lara 1814, Parisina 1816, Mazeppa 1819), poems (including Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 1812–18, The Lament of Tasso 1817, the unfinished Don Juan 1819–24), dramas (Manfred 1817, Cain 1821, Heaven and Earth 1821), classical tragedies (Marino Faliero 1820, The Two Foscari 1821) and verse political satires (including Beppo 1818, The Vision of Judgment 1822, The Age of Bronze 1823). Byron’s letters and diaries provide commentary on the history of his life and work; they also document his fragmented contacts with the music of his time, showing the poet as a lover of opera, Italian music, and popular song.

Byron’s work, determined and permeated with autobiographical motifs – an expression of rebellion against the bonds restricting the unlimited freedom of individuals and nations – had an exceptionally strong influence on the emerging Romantic movement in Europe, on literature, music, and the lifestyle of subsequent generations. “But now I’m going to be immoral,” he said in Don Juan, “now I mean to show things really as they are, not as they ought to be.” Through characters such as Childe Harold, Giaour, Conrad the Corsair, Manfred, Cain, Don Juan – eternal wanderers and loners, incurably “strangers among men,” torn by passions, in open conflict with society, proud of both their good and bad deeds, separating themselves with mystery or cynicism, in a word, “life-sick” – Byron created a type of character known as the Byronic hero. The Byronic mood – gloomy, sombre, yet vague and undefined (known as spleen, melancholy, Weltschmerz), sustained by other impulses from other writers – became the disease of the age. The Byronic local colour – most often the landscape of the Mediterranean and the Middle East as the backdrop for Byron’s poetic stories – brought to Central European Romanticism a wave of imitative interest in Italian, Greek, Spanish, and above all Oriental exoticism: Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic – treated differently than before, based on elements of autopsy, not pure fantasy. The Byronic style, referring mainly to the Ariostan tradition (according to A. Hauser: “mocking spirit and playful form”), is sometimes described as: a compositional freedom giving the appearance of noted improvisation, a technique of interrupting and suspending the thematic thread, of losing the protagonist, moving him from place to place, and of loosely associating scenes and images, often in vivid, contrasting juxtaposition; the combination of informational and phatic elements, and even with a tendency for authorial digressions to prevail over thematic narration (e.g. Don Juan); the interweaving of epic and dramatic genres with the lyrical, to the point where the author becomes part of the work, almost to the point of merging with the protagonist. In terms of versification: the destabilisation of the classical parallelism of language and verse, i.e. syntactic and metrical flow; the resulting tendency towards openness of verse and stanza, turning into a nonchalant manner in the use of enjambment; the diversification of traditional stanzas with a variety of rhyming patterns; in dramatic scenes, mixing stanzas and metrical formats as if taken from an opera libretto (especially of the Venetian-style).

Byron’s texts and themes found a strong resonance in Romantic and romanticising music, especially English music. Of Byron’s approximately 300 poems, several dozen have a melic character; some appear to have been composed from the outset for singing: 3 Stanzas for Music (published with music by Stevenson), Stanzas to a Hindoo Air, Song for the Luddites, Song to the Suliotes, and Hebrew Melodies from 1815, published in 1822 with music by J. Braham and I. Nathan. This cycle, a lyrical travesty of biblical themes, aroused the keenest interest among composers: four issues (24) of Hebräische Gesänge by C. Loewe, 3 Gesänge Op. 95 (with harp or piano) by R. Schumann, songs by F. Mendelssohn, M. Balakirev, M. Mussorgsky and F. Busoni, and a cantata by F. Hiller. Music was also written to Byron’s lyrical poems and ballads by L. van Beethoven (from Opp. 108 and 153), R. Schumann (from Op. 25), C. Gounod, H. Wolf, M. Rimsky-Korsakov and representatives of subsequent generations of English composers: E. Masson, H.H. Pierson, C.H. Parry, C. Stanford, E. Elgar, W.H. Brian, R. Quilter, J. Holbrooke and others; solo songs and songs with instrumental accompaniment, choral works and cantatas were composed; a cantata to the text Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte was also composed by A. Schönberg.

Almost all of Byron’s major works – with the exception of those that were decidedly satirical and polemical – sooner or later attracted composers. Among his poetic novels, The Corsair proved to be the most inspiring, and among his dramas, Manfred. Various genres typical of Romantic expression were used in opera, cantatas, symphonies and piano music (see list of works). Byron left a marginal mark on the history of opera, with the historical and Orientalist works of Donizetti and Verdi; he left a clearer mark on the history of vocal-symphonic music – in the dramatic scenes of Liszt (Tasso) and Schumann (Manfred), as well as in the mysteries of 20th-century composers, in reference to the dramas Cain and Heaven and Earth. Byron’s themes and characters are organically linked to the history of programme music, especially the variety whose “programme” involved a musical portrayal of the hero (Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, Tchaikovsky’s Manfred).

The influence of Byron, his aesthetics and circle of ideas on 19th-century music also extends to works not directly related to the poet’s texts and themes. The so-called lyrical hero of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique or Rimsky-Korsakov’s Antar can both be described as examples of a Byronic hero. The presence of a Byronic mood can be traced in the autobiographically oriented trend in symphonic music from Berlioz to Tchaikovsky, Karłowicz and Mahler; exotic local colour, especially Spanish and Oriental elements – mainly in Russian and French music, e.g. in numerous suites and symphonic images with specific instrumentation; a free, non-aprioristic formal principle of composition – in Liszt’s symphonic poems, fantasies and piano paraphrases; here, too, the predominance of improvisational digression over thematic threads. According to A. Hauser, the paradoxical consequence of the Byronic attitude – as a struggle ultimately ending in a turning away from reality – is, in the field of art, a tendency towards the self-alienation of the artist and the autonomisation of the work, i.e. aestheticism in England, idealism in Germany and l’art pour l’art in France; these trends also made themselves felt in the history of music.

Editions: The Works of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. R.E. Prothero, 6 vols., 1898–1901; Poetry, ed. E.H. Coleridge, 7 vols., 1898–1904; Powieści poetyckie, ed. A. Tretiak, National Library of Poland II 34, Kraków 1924; Manfred. Kain, translation into Polish Z. Reutt-Witkowska, introduction A. Tretiak, National Library of Poland II 54; Krakow 1928; Don Juan, translation into Polish E. Porębowicz, 2 editions Warsaw 1954; Z pism Byrona, ed. J. Żuławski, 4 vols., Warsaw 1953–60; Wiersze i poematy, ed. J. Żuławski, Warsaw 1961.

Literature: H. Berlioz Memoires 1803–1865, Paris 1870, Polish edition Z pamiętników, selection and translation into Polish J. Popiel, Krakow 1966; P.L. Thorslev The Byronic Hero, Minneapolis 1965; A. Hauser Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur, Munich 1958, Polish edition Społeczna historia sztuki i literatury, translation into Polish J. Ruszczycówna, afterword J. Starzyński, Warsaw 1974.