OverActing: Scenes from Byron’s Manfred, A Gothic Entertainment
with incidental music by Robert and Clara Schumann, and Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn
This performance, lecture, and Q&A are part of OverActing Festival
18:00-18:45 Lecture by Jed Wentz: Historical declamation, the actor’s craft and its relationship with musical performance practice
19:00-20:30 Performance spoken word and music — Scenes from Byron’s Manfred, A Gothic Entertainment
In partnership with Eye Filmmuseum Collections
Jedidiah Wentz declamation
Cecilia Bernardini violin
Artem Belogurov fortepiano
Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde cello
20:30-21:00 Q & A
Published in 1817, Byron’s Manfred was both a scandal and an overnight sensation. In verses of sublime poetry inspired by Goethe’s Faust, Byron tells the story of a doomed magician defiantly challenging the authority of both God and the devil. With Manfred, he created the model for the romantic anti-hero, the so-called ‘Byronic hero’: a daemonic, brooding and wounded character who causes physical and emotional suffering to everyone around him, while suffering even more greatly himself. Manfred’s magical powers arise from a terrible secret, from some guilty deed in his past, some act too horrible to even be named, and from the irremediable torture his soul endures because of it. No mortal or immortal being can conquer Manfred, for none is as guilty–nor has suffered as much–as he.
Throughout the 19th century, Manfred was performed in Britain and the United States of America as a one-man show. Using elaborate gestures and melodious declamation, a single actor read Byron’s verses, using his voice to create and animate all of the different characters. The intermittent musical accompaniment sometimes interrupted and sometimes coincided with the declamation, creating melodramatic moments of great intensity by uniting and contrasting music with text. Inspired by accounts of this lost performance tradition, the musicians of Postscript and historical actor Jedidiah Wentz have created a new, intimate chamber version of Manfred. The incidental music is made up of pieces by Robert and Clara Schumann interpolated into a revised and shortened version of Byron’s original English text. The score contains music from Robert Schumann’s Manfred: Dramatisches Gedicht in drei Abtheilungen arranged for piano trio, including the best-loved sections such as the Overture, Erscheinung eines Zauberbildes, Zwichenactmusik, Die Alpenfee, and Ansprache an Astarte. To these are added Robert Schumann’s Abendlied, the Fantasie in g minor by Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann’s Romanzen op. 11 no. 2 and op. 22 no. 1, as well as the Scène Fantastique op. 5 no. 4.
Our aim has been to highlight the most emotional scenes of the poem: the audience is invited to empathize with Manfred, to experience his torment at the death of his beloved Astarte, his scornful defiance of the authority of God and the devil, and his conviction that his sorrow, his sin and his guilt are his very essence because they give him his greatest power. To this end, we do not send Manfred to heaven in a last-minute act of divine intervention, as Robert Schumann did in his musical setting. Rather, following Byron’s original, we allow the listener to decide if Manfred has descended into eternal hell-fire, or if he has finally found the oblivion he seeks.
What is OverActing?
The Overacting Festival 2024 is a continuation of our first OverActing festival, which took place in Leiden in 2022. This first edition was a collaboration between Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht, Universiteit Leiden and the Leidse Schouwburg in celebration of Leiden European City of Science. We at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts now take up the gauntlet once more, to present a weekend of events related to acting styles and the expression of emotion on stage and in film, in celebration of the communicative power of the performing arts.
The 2024 OverActing festival will be on a much smaller scale than its predecessor, and is financed and ‘powered’ solely by The Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, but will combine, like its predecessor, performance and scholarship in a unique manner. Our aim is not only to programme high quality and thought-provoking performances in Leiden and Den Haag, but also an international academic symposium, that can serve as a think tank for future festival programming. In this way, the performers and scholars of theatre and acting practices can stay in touch with each other’s contributions to the field, thus stimulating discussion and experimentation.
We will also reach out to the audience in Leiden and The Hague through workshops and lectures with a special emphasis on students to the Koninklijk Conservatorium and Leiden University.
The motivation behind OverActing is both artistic and social: we aim to revitalize our current arts practice by learning from the past, while we put both the research methodologies and the resulting techniques at the service of artists who wish to address topics they find relevant today. Our aim is not nostalgia, but destabilization as a source of renewed artistic practices. Thus the 2024 OverActing festival will address questions of methodology through a workshop, and a lecture-performance at the Koninklijk Coservatorium Den Haag; moreover, it aims to support the LGBTQ+ community by presenting works by Lord Byron (1788-1824) and F. W. Murnau (1888-1931). This year is the bicentenary of Byron’s death, who was well-known for his bisexuality during his life time. F. W. Murnau was openly homosexual. His film Der letzte Mann, which is 100 years old this year, ends, quite daringly, with a gay wedding.