The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music 9780748693139

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The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music

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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities Published The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts Edited by Maggie Humm

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Forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Edited by Juliet John and Claire Wood The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature Edited by Jeanne Dubino, Catherine Hollis and Paulina Pajak The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense Anna Barton and James Williams The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts Catherine Brown and Susan Reid The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecl

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The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music

Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© editorial matter and organisation Delia da Sousa Correa, 2020 © the chapters their several authors, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9312 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9313 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9314 6 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgements Introduction Delia da Sousa Correa

xi xiv xv 1

1. Intertextuality, Topic Theory and the Open Text Michael L. Klein

16

2. Secrets, Technology and Musical Narrative: Remarks on Method Lawrence Kramer

25

3. Derrida, de Man, Barthes, and Music as the Soul of Writing Peter Dayan

31

Part I: Literature and Music before 1500 Introduction Ardis Butterfield, Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach 4. Music and the Book: The Textualisation of Music and the Musicalisation of Text Helen Deeming

39

48

5. Liturgical Music and Drama Nils Holger Petersen

63

6. Intermedial Texts Maureen Boulton

78

7. Citation and Quotation Jennifer Saltzstein

86

8. Polytextuality Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach

96

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contents

9. Courtly Subjectivities Helen J. Swift and Anne Stone 10. Gender: The Art and Hermeneutics of (In)differentiation Elizabeth Eva Leach and Nicolette Zeeman

111 125

Part II: Literature and Music in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Introduction Ros King 11. Music and the Literature of Science in Seventeenth-Century England Penelope Gouk 12. The ‘Sister’ Arts of Music and Poetry in Early Modern England Helen Wilcox

147

161 167

Metrical Forms and Rhythmic Effects: Music, Poetry and Song 13. The Music of Narrative Poetry: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton David Fuller

173

14. Against ‘the Music of Poetry’ Robert Stagg

183

15. Speaking the Song: Music, Language and Emotion in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline Erin Minear

189

Performers and Performance 16. Shakespeare’s Musicians: Status and Hierarchy B. J. Sokol

195

17. Best-Selling Ballads in Seventeenth-Century England Christopher Marsh

202

18. Italian Performance Practices in Seventeenth-Century English Song Elizabeth Kenny

209

Theatre Music and Opera 19. From Tragicomedy to Opera? John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida Ros King 20. Learning to Lament: Opera and the Gendering of Emotion in Seventeenth-Century Italy Wendy Heller 21. All-Sung English Opera Experiments in the Seventeenth Century Andrew Pinnock

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219

234 249

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vii

Part III: Literature and Music in the Eighteenth Century Introduction Suzanne Aspden 22. Thomas Arne and ‘Inferior’ English Opera Suzanne Aspden

259 277

23. Phaedra and Fausta: Female Transgression and Punishment in Ancient and Early Modern Plays Reinhard Strohm

289

24. ‘When Farce and when Musick can eke out a Play’: Ballad Opera and Theatre’s Commerce Berta Joncus

296

Oratorio 25. National Aspiration: Samson Agonistes Transformed in Handel’s Samson Ruth Smith

304

26. Maurice Greene and the English Church Music Tradition Matthew Gardner

311

Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Music 27. The Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Music: Virtuous Performers and Well-Mannered Listeners Christopher Wiley 28. ‘Dreadful Insanity’: Jane Austen and Musical Performance Regula Hohl Trillini 29. Music, Passion and Parole in Eighteenth-Century French Philosophy and Fiction Tili Boon Cuillé

318 327

333

Music, Poetry and Song 30. Shelley’s Musical Gifts Gillen D’Arcy Wood 31. Performative Enactment vs Experiential Embodiment: Goethe Settings by Zelter, Reichardt and Schubert Marshall Brown 32. The Musical Poetry of the Graveyard Annette Richards 33. Of Mathematics, Marrow-Bones and Marriage: Eighteenth-Century Convivial Song Christopher Price

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340

349 360

372

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Part IV: Literature and Music in the Nineteenth Century Introduction Delia da Sousa Correa 34. Music and the Rise of Narrative Lawrence Kramer

383 395

Opera 35. From English Literature to Italian Opera: A Tangled Web of Translation Denise P. Gallo

405

36. James, Argento and The Aspern Papers: ‘Orpheus and the Maenads’ Michael Halliwell

415

37. Opera in Nineteenth-Century Italian Fiction: Reading ‘Senso’ Cormac Newark

423

Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Music 38. Stendhal at La Scala: The Birth of Musical Fandom Gillen D’Arcy Wood

429

39. George Eliot, Schubert and the Cosmopolitan Music of Daniel Deronda Delia da Sousa Correa

437

40. Music in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction: ‘You Must Not Think Me a Hard-Hearted Rationalist’ John Hughes

447

Music, Poetry and Song 41. Music in Romantic and Victorian Poetry Francis O’Gorman

453

42. The Princess and the Tennysons’ Performance of Childhood Ewan Jones and Phyllis Weliver

462

43. Tchaikovsky’s Songs: Music as Poetry Philip Ross Bullock

476

44. Wagner and French Poetry from Nerval to Mallarmé: The Power of Opera Unheard Peter Dayan

483

Part V: Literature and Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Introduction Stephen Benson

495

Music and Critical Theory 45. Nelson Goodman: An Analytic Approach to Music and Literature Studies Eric Prieto

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contents 46. Lyotard, Phenomenology and the Shared Paternity of Literature and Music Anthony Gritten

ix 522

Music and Fiction since 1900 47. Music in Proust: The Evolution of an Idea Mary Breatnach

533

48. Music in Woolf’s Short Fiction Emma Sutton

544

49. Listening in to D. H. Lawrence: Music, Body, Feelings Susan Reid

552

50. E. M. Forster and Music: Listening for the Amateur Will May

559

51. Beckett, Music and the Ineffable Eric Prieto

565

52. Jean Rhys and the Politics of Sound Anna Snaith

570

53. Music in Contemporary Fiction Christin Hoene

577

Music, Poetry and Song 54. Modernist Poetry and Music: Pound Notes Adrian Paterson

587

55. Auden’s Imaginary Song T. F. Coombes

601

56. Ivor Gurney: Embracing and Attacking A. E. Housman Kate Kennedy

609

57. Music and Contemporary Poetry: Audience, Apology and Silence Will May

616

Opera 58. Le Cas Debussy: Layers of Resonance from Literature into Music Richard Langham Smith

624

59. Britten, Austen and Mansfield Park Will May

632

60. Tippett, Eliot and Madame Sosostris Oliver Soden

638

Literature, Pop Music and Sound 61. Worlds of Sound in Louis MacNeice’s Early Radio Plays: ‘Figure in the Music’ Claire Davison

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62. ‘High Fidelity’, ‘Added Value’ and the Aesthetics of Sound Technology in Literary Modernism Sam Halliday

655

63. Words in Popular Songs Dai Griffiths

664

64. Notes on Soundtracked Fiction: The Past as Future Justin St Clair

672

Coda 65. Origins and Destinations: A Future for Literature and Music Michael L. Klein

681

Notes on Contributors Editorial Advisory Board Index

690 694 695

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures Figure 1.1 Figure 4.1

Figure 4.2a, b, c

Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2

Figure 8.1

Figure 10.1 Figure 10.2 Figure 10.3 Figure 10.4 Figure 16.1

Figure 17.1

Figure 17.2

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Chopin, Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61 (bars 148–60) Dolorum solatium (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 79, f.53v). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford Visually arresting techniques of poetic layout in London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus D XXIV, f.95r (a), and Dublin, Trinity College, MS 432, f.1r (b) and f.10r (c). By permission of The British Library Board and The Board of Trinity College Dublin Transmission of ‘Je voi ce que je desir’ (vdB1149) in (a) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.844, f. 100r and (b) Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 5198, p. 190 ‘Quant voi le douz tans venir/(IMMO)LATUS’ (motetus and tenor), ll. 6–8 in Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire Médecine, H196 ff.167v–168r Renvoisiement irai / D’Amours sunt en grant esmai / ET SUPER, after Hans Tischler (ed.), The Montpellier Codex, Part II: Fascicles 3, 4 and 5. Recent Researches in the Music of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, vols 4–5 (Madison: A-R Editions, 1978), pp. 102–3 A discort, full score J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7) repeated tenor note J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7) end of talea J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7) opening Woodcut from Giovanni Bonsignori, Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare (Venice, 1497), f. 49v. By permission of the Warburg Institute ‘The Delights of the Bottle’ (Philip Brooksby, London, c. 1672–4). Euing Ballads, 71, reproduced by permission of the University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections ‘Chevy Chase’ or ‘Flying Fame’

21

57

58

89

91

99 133 139 140 141

200

203 205

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xii Figure 18.1

Figure 18.2 Figure 18.3 Figure 18.4 Figure 19.1

Figure 19.2 Figure 20.1 Figure 20.2 Figure 20.3 Figure 20.4 Figure 20.5 Figure 20.6 Figure 20.7 Figure 20.8 Figure III.i Figure III.ii Figure 22.1 Figure 22.2 Figure 22.3 Figure 22.4 Figure 22.5 Figure 22.6 Figure 22.7 Figure 24.1

Figure 26.1

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list of illustrations Closing bars of William Lawes, ‘Come, My Daphne, Come Away’. Hilton, f.3r. Reproduced by courtesy of the British Library Board 211 Henry Lawes, ‘How Ill Doth he Deserve a Lover’s Name’. Transcribed from Hilton, f.7 212 Nicholas Lanier: final lines of ‘Tell Me, Shepherd’. Hilton, f.19v 214 ‘Take, O Take those Lips Away’. Hilton, f.56 216 The two sung parts from Robert Jones, ‘Dainty Darling, Kind and Free’, Second Book of Ayres (London: Peter Short for Matthew Selman, 1601) I1v 225 Sung parts from Robert Jones, ‘Lie Down, Poor Heart’, First Book of Ayres (London: Peter Short, 1600) C2v–C3 228–29 Monteverdi, L’Orfeo (1607), Act 2: ‘Tu se’ morta’, bars 1–15 237 Monteverdi, L’Arianna (1608): ‘Lasciatemi morire’, bars 1–6 238 Monteverdi, L’Arianna (1608): ‘Lasciatemi morire’, bars 43–54 239 Monteverdi, L’Arianna (1608): ‘Lasciatemi morire’, bars 163–75 239 Monteverdi, Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria (1640), Act 1, scene 1: ‘Di misera regina’, bars 1–11 241 Francesco Cavalli, Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona (1652), Act 1, scene 8, bars 1–5 242 Handel, Agrippina, Act 2, scene 5, accompanied recitative: ‘Otton, Otton, qual portentoso’, bars 1–8 244 Handel, Agrippina, Act 2, scene 5, aria: ‘Voi che udite’, bars 1–8 245 Antonio Vivaldi, ‘Siam navi all’onde algenti’, L’Olimpiade, Act 2, scene 5 (Venice, 1734), bars 14–30 262–67 G. F. Handel, Act 1, scene 1, recitative, Giulio Cesare in Egitto (London, 1724), bars 1–3 268 Thomas Arne, Thomas and Sally (1760), Sally, ‘My former time’, bars 5–14 281 Thomas Arne, Thomas and Sally (1760), Thomas, ‘Avast, my boys’, bars 1–4 282 Thomas Arne, Thomas and Sally (1760), Thomas, ‘From ploughing the ocean’, bars 7–10 282 Thomas Arne, Thomas and Sally (1760), Sally, ‘In Vain I Strive’, bars 1–4 282 Thomas Arne, Britannia (1755), Genius, ‘Britannia! Sov’reign of Isles’, bars 1–13 284 Thomas Arne, Alfred (1740), Eltruda, ‘Gracious Heav’n, O hear me!’ (1753), bars 95–8 285 Thomas Arne, Alfred (1740), Eltruda, ‘Gracious Heav’n, O hear me!’ (1753), bars 16–26 286–87 ‘Air 1. A cobler there was, &c.’, in James Ralph, The Fashionable Lady; or Harlequin’s Opera (London: Printed for J. Watts, 1730), p. 5. National Library of Scotland. Bute.663(7) 300 Maurice Greene, ‘Lord, let me know mine end’, in Forty Select Anthems, 2 vols (London: John Walsh, 1743), I, p. 91, bars 1–9 315

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list of illustrations Figure 27.1

Figure 31.1

Figure 31.2

Figure 32.1a Figure 32.1b Figure 32.2 Figure 32.3 Figure 32.4 Figure 32.5 Figure 32.6 Figure 32.7

Figure 32.8

Figure 33.1 Figure 33.2 Figure 33.3a Figure 33.3b Figure 33.4a Figure 33.4b

Figure 33.5 Figure 42.1

Figure 42.2

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Clarissa Harlowe’s musical setting of ‘Ode to Wisdom, by a Lady’, reproduced from the first edition of Clarissa (1747–8). Copyright © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved. Shelfmark: C71bb1 Johann Friedrich Reichardt, ‘Neue Liebe, neues Leben’, first version, in Goethe’s Lieder, Oden, Balladen und Romanzen (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1809), I, p. 14 Carl Friedrich Zelter, ‘Ruhe’, in Neue Liedersammlung, Z. 126 (Zurich: Hans Georg Nägeli; Berlin: Adolph Martin Schlesinger, 1821), n.p. Maria Theresia von Paradis, Lenore, bars 223–31 Maria Theresia von Paradis, Lenore, bars 240–7 C. W. Gluck, ‘Die frühen Gräber’ Haydn, ‘The Spirit’s Song’, bars 1–19 Haydn, ‘The Spirit’s Song’, bars 26–38 Haydn, ‘The Spirit’s Song’, bars 40–52 Haydn, ‘The Spirit’s Song’, bars 77–95 ‘The Soul Hovering over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life’. Illustration designed by William Blake, engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti, for Robert Blair, The Grave (London: R. H. Cromek, 1808), Plate 7 (facing p. 16). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection ‘The Reunion of the Soul and the Body’. Illustration designed by William Blake, engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti, for Robert Blair, The Grave (London: R. H. Cromek, 1808), Plate 13 (facing p. 32). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Luffman Atterbury (1735–1796): ‘As t’other day Susan’, bars 7–10, Canterbury Catch Club (CCC) IX, p. 44 William Hayes (1708–1777): ‘On the death of Wells’, CCC XVIII, p. 156 John Stafford Smith (1750–1836): ‘Sleep, poor youth’, bars 34–41, CCC IX, p. 32 John Stafford Smith (1750–1836): ‘Sleep, poor youth’, bars 42–6, CCC IX, p. 32 Samuel Webbe (1740–1816): ‘My pocket’s low and Taxes High’, bars 1–16, CCC XXXV, p. 70 Samuel Webbe (1740–1816): ‘My pocket’s low and taxes high’, bars 25–30: first, minor, harmonisation of the National Anthem, CCC XXXV, p. 70 Benjamin Cooke (1730–1794): ‘If the prize you mean to get’, bars 1–6, CCC XI, p. 121 Original manuscript of songs from The Princess, Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 6346, 112r, 113. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library ‘Sweet and Low’, bars 26–50, green cloth ms music book, TRC/Music/5312/2. This item is reproduced by permission of Lincolnshire County Council, UK

xiii

321

351

353 363 363 365 366 367 367 368

369

370 373 375 377 377 378

378 379

465

468

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xiv Figure 42.3

Figure 42.4

Figure 42.5

Figure 44.1 Figure 55.1 Figure 55.2 Figure 55.3 Figure 55.4 Figure 60.1

Figure 60.2

list of illustrations ‘Home they Brought him’, bars 1–15, red leather ms music book, TRC/Music/5312/1. This item is reproduced by permission of Lincolnshire County Council, UK ‘Lady Let the Rolling Drums’, red leather ms music book, TRC/Music/5312/1. This item is reproduced by permission of Lincolnshire County Council, UK ‘Home they Brought him’, Music Album, TRC/Music/5321. This item is reproduced by permission of Lincolnshire County Council, UK Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (Paris: NRF, 1914), left half of the fifth double page spread, n.p. ‘St. James Infirmary’ First verse of Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’ set to the tune of ‘St. James Infirmary’ First line of the tenth stanza of Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’ set to the tune of ‘St. James Infirmary’ Second line of the eighth stanza of Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’ set to the tune of ‘St. James Infirmary’ From Eliot’s drafts for The Waste Land, as reproduced in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). Reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd Janet Suzman ‘acting the part’ of Madame Sosostris in Elijah Moshinksy’s film of The Midsummer Marriage (1984, Channel 4/ Thames Television)

470

471

473 490 604 604 606 606

641

643

Tables Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 8.1 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 42.1

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Contexts of the refrain, ‘Je voi ce que je desir, si n’en puis joie avoir’ (vdB1149) Text, poetic structure and translation of Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485) Text and translation of En Mai quant rose est florie (MV236) Surviving examples of polytextual song before around 1400 French text of A discort Latin contrafact text for A discort Texts and translations of J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7) Alternative placements of songs from The Princess

88 90 92 102 129 131 137 463

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xiv Figure 42.3

Figure 42.4

Figure 42.5

Figure 44.1 Figure 55.1 Figure 55.2 Figure 55.3 Figure 55.4 Figure 60.1

Figure 60.2

list of illustrations ‘Home they Brought him’, bars 1–15, red leather ms music book, TRC/Music/5312/1. This item is reproduced by permission of Lincolnshire County Council, UK ‘Lady Let the Rolling Drums’, red leather ms music book, TRC/Music/5312/1. This item is reproduced by permission of Lincolnshire County Council, UK ‘Home they Brought him’, Music Album, TRC/Music/5321. This item is reproduced by permission of Lincolnshire County Council, UK Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (Paris: NRF, 1914), left half of the fifth double page spread, n.p. ‘St. James Infirmary’ First verse of Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’ set to the tune of ‘St. James Infirmary’ First line of the tenth stanza of Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’ set to the tune of ‘St. James Infirmary’ Second line of the eighth stanza of Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’ set to the tune of ‘St. James Infirmary’ From Eliot’s drafts for The Waste Land, as reproduced in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). Reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd Janet Suzman ‘acting the part’ of Madame Sosostris in Elijah Moshinksy’s film of The Midsummer Marriage (1984, Channel 4/ Thames Television)

470

471

473 490 604 604 606 606

641

643

Tables Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 8.1 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 42.1

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Contexts of the refrain, ‘Je voi ce que je desir, si n’en puis joie avoir’ (vdB1149) Text, poetic structure and translation of Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485) Text and translation of En Mai quant rose est florie (MV236) Surviving examples of polytextual song before around 1400 French text of A discort Latin contrafact text for A discort Texts and translations of J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7) Alternative placements of songs from The Princess

88 90 92 102 129 131 137 463

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost my thanks go to the Section Editors for each historical part of the Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music: Suzanne Aspden, Stephen Benson, Helen Deeming, Ros King and Elizabeth Eva Leach. Their specialist subject and period knowledge has been vital to the scope of the volume from the outset. Thank you for your hard work and for being so ready to share your expertise with a wide range of scholars and readers. Also to each and every one of the contributors: thank you for helping to put our interdiscipline on the map. For advice and encouragement at the early stages of planning the project, I would like to thank the late Daniel Albright, Margaret Bent, Peter Dayan, Josie Dixon, Katharine Ellis, Robert Fraser and Lawrence Kramer. Major thanks are due to Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press, whose pioneering idea it was to have an Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music. She has been a constant support throughout as have her colleagues Dhara Patel, Adela Rauchova, Ersev Ersoy, James Dale and Eliza Wright. Thank you also to Nicola Wood for copy editing and to Margaret Christie for compiling the index. I am grateful to the three anonymous EUP readers, whose useful and heartening reports helped to refine the project. The Open University provided funding for the volume’s cover illustration, index and for editorial support. This was undertaken by Peter Lee: thank you Peter. Further thanks to Eleanor Anderson at the OU for help with image research and to Richard Mann and Regula Hohl Trillini who read specific chapters. Thanks also go to the staff of the Bodleian library. Opportunities to attend and speak at a number of conferences during the compilation of this volume, and to publish various research and reference articles, have fed into its conception. Specifically, I am grateful to Walter Bernhart, Werner Wolf and fellow members of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), whose biennial conferences gather together interdisciplinary colleagues from across the world. Like many interdisciplinary scholars, I benefited greatly from chances to organise and participate in events under the hospitable umbrella of the Institute of Musical Research during its residence at Senate House. I am also grateful to Sally Shuttleworth and Laura Marcus for asking me to speak at the Oxford English Faculty’s Victorian and Twentieth-Century Seminars, to members of the Song Network at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and to Michael Allis, Isobel

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acknowledgements

Armstrong, Carolyn Burdett, Donald Burrows, Dino Felluga, Gail Marshall and colleagues for formative opportunities to speak and/or write on related interdisciplinary topics. I have valued the occasions for the Open University Literature and Music Research Group to run public study days as part of the Oxford Lieder Festival, where talks and discussions provided practical reminders of some of the reasons this communication between words and music matters so much. Thanks to Sholto Kynoch for entertaining the idea, to Taya Smith and colleagues, and to the contributors to these events, including stalwarts Helen Abbott, Natasha Loges, Robert Samuels, Laura Tunbridge and Richard Wigmore. Family and others were a vital source of encouragement and necessary distraction during the too many years of this volume’s gestation. Richard, Gwen and Rosamund, special thanks to you. I am grateful to my many supportive OU colleagues. Thanks go to many friends including Jane and Lynton Appel, Rosamund Bartlett, Elizabeth Clarke, Kirsty Gunn, Harriet Harris, Julia Hollander, Kathryn Laing, Marina Luttrell, Uttara Nattarajan, Francis O’Gorman, Charlotte Purkis, Tabitha Tuckett, Charles Williams and many others too numerous to name here. Grateful thanks also to Bernadette Lavery, Mary Mountford-Lister, Dennis Remoundos, Luke Solomons, Gill Stoker, Ginny Turner and their colleagues. Delia da Sousa Correa

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For David and in memory of Annelene

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Introduction Delia da Sousa Correa

Oh, if I had Orpheus’ voice and poetry with which to move [. . .] Euripides If we let music say as much as it can, if we acknowledge that it finds, among other things, the level of our deepest selves, are we not acting in the spirit of the poet Orpheus who coaxed a lost self from the underworld? For this is what we share with that legendary musician from the dawn of our sonorous age: we too have never left off discovering how music matters. Scott Burnham

T

his volume explores literature and music’s alliances over the course of nine centuries. Music and literature have an ancient affinity, indeed a common origin. These arts are deeply rooted in the physical and emotional experience of humankind. Ancient myths that we have inherited and continue to treasure tell us how crucial they have been through the ages. The lyre of the biblical poet Jubal is another version of the powers embodied in the figure of Orpheus, both ‘poet’ and ‘legendary musician’, as invoked above.1 Myths of music and poetry’s original unity have had an ongoing life in later times: as in homage to the authenticity of folksong by Rousseau and the English Romantics, or in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s celebration of the composer-poet.2 The sister arts of words and music – Milton’s ‘Blest pair of sirens’ of ‘voice, and verse’ – have also been in competition, or at odds with one another; words have resented the distractions of music and music set to words has been divided from music that floats free of them.3 But, while enjoying a relationship that may be contested as much as harmonious, it has always been the case that literature and music have needed each other: that the idea of music is fundamental to writing and that music turns to literature for topics and structures, and to words to demarcate what music is and how it matters.4 For us now, the dominant modes of thinking about music and literature’s importance to one another date back to the Romantic period and beyond. Intransigently and inspiringly, what are essentially Romantic ideals about music persist, notwithstanding the rise of firmly-grounded materialist theories of culture. ‘Music’ is still widely assumed to be what poetry, and literature in general, aims for. It is apprehended as a transcendent power, beyond meaning and beyond words: it shows us the limits of verbal language, or draws our attention to the music of words, the nonsemantic attributes that we also experience in language. Music impacts directly on the

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emotions – and this affective power has certainly been valued in it since ancient times and emulated by writers. Music in turn, which long drew on the art of rhetoric to enhance the delivery of that affective power, has, since the Romantic period, invoked the poetic as a chief measure of its worth. However, scholarship that reflects widely on relations between literature and music, as mapped and celebrated in this volume, constitutes a relatively recent field. In 1984, Lawrence Kramer’s comparative study Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After heralded a new research area that developed rapidly during the ensuing decades.5 His reflections on such study continue to be foundational. The ‘new musicology’ investigated wider cultural meanings and contexts for music, and claimed that, notwithstanding its traditional status as the most ineffable of arts, music was amenable to interpretation. ‘Music’ Kramer proposes in his 2002 Musical Meaning, ‘nearly always has potential meaning in an intersubjective or cultural sense, even if it rarely has meaning in a simple enunciatory sense’: And once this meaning is acknowledged, once it is accepted as a common experience rather than dismissed because it lacks the apparent security of the imagetext, it cuts across and counterbalances the imagetext’s cultural dominance. Musical meaning discloses what the imagetext’s richness of representational content necessarily dissembles: the radically ascriptive nature of all interpretation. It embodies the recognition – the problem, the opportunity, the danger, the pleasure – that meaning is improvised, not reproduced, performed not revealed.6 As Kramer had already pointed out, one consequence of critical theories that valued referential uncertainty in language was that ‘the resistance to signification once embodied by music now seems to be an inextricable part of signification itself’.7 His sense of the implications and possibilities that this realisation opens up for interpretation in general is also evident in the passage just quoted. For Kramer, the sense that a gap exists between what can be interpreted and what remains mysteriously out of reach is not unique to music, but can be experienced in responses to other art: it is this very gap that prompts our desire to interpret.8 This desire to interpret forges a close connection between music and literature: the compulsion to ‘read’ that underpins the production of meaning indicates that all music is to some extent ‘texted music’.9 Kramer describes himself as attempting a ‘tricky balancing act’ to defend cultural interpretations of music while acknowledging the importance of longstanding views of musical experience as noumenal.10 The experience of music as something transcendent and unsayable will always be enjoyed by those who love it, but it is possible, Kramer proposes, to ‘incorporate’ it into an understanding of musical meaning as historically, ideologically and functionally dependent.11 Although a number of writers on music have wanted to defend the idea that there are elements in musical experience that remain independent of these contexts, or have continued to advocate more formal, analytical approaches to music, the cultural study of music has transformed the discipline of musicology, encouraging approaches that understand musical meaning as arising dynamically within shared social and cultural networks. The ‘methodological goldmine’12 that musicology has found in literary theory has opened up new possibilities for the joint study of literature and music. Over the past

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few decades, musical theorists, such as Carolyn Abbate, Jean-Jacques Nattiez and others, have engaged closely with literary theory.13 Literary parallels are strongly invoked when music is analysed as sharing important features of narrative, as demonstrated by Kramer’s two essays for this volume. The influence of cultural studies has additionally increased the scope of scholarship in both disciplines, widening the range of material falling under scrutiny, the questions asked of it, and the contexts explored. As this volume shows, interdisciplinary research in literature and music is now a vibrant and still-expanding field. Topics combining work on literature and music increasingly feature on the programmes of both interdisciplinary and disciplinary conferences, and a growing number of literary scholars have explored ways in which relations with music can illuminate the critical interpretation of texts.14 Rather than forming a closely-defined field, joint research on literature and music is characterised by the diversity within its constituent disciplines as well as the multiplicity of work that is enabled when literature and music are brought together. Nevertheless, researchers in the field claim a shared interdisciplinary identity. A dedicated subject association, the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) was founded in 1997; it holds biennial international conferences and publishes its own book series, Word and Music Studies. The work presented by its vigorous branch of younger researchers, the WMA Forum, bodes particularly well for the future of an interdiscipline that attracts a growing number of researchers from early in their careers. As an ever-greater variety of work in literature and music flourishes, awkward questions arise as to whether genuinely interdisciplinary work can exist – in general, or between these two disciplines of literature and music in particular. Certainly, the breadth of the work represented in this volume demands an expansive understanding of interdisciplinary endeavour. This generosity is advocated by Lawrence Kramer, who, although he himself holds professorial posts jointly in Literature and Music, is far from insisting that work in literature and music needs to make an equal contribution to both disciplines. The practicality of any such stringent stipulation is doubtful since, as he wryly notes, if ‘extended comparative studies of music and literary works are still rare; good ones are downright scarce’.15 For Kramer it is valid to ask a broader question, ‘what can the tandem reading of musical and literary works have to offer the critical study of music?’.16 The present volume is equally concerned with the complementary investigation of what such tandem readings can bring to the study of literature. It is committed to the idea that bringing literature and music together helps us to think about each art more deeply; it is also an encouragement to extend our thoughts about how art matters to work in the humanities (and to humankind). Thus, in this volume we set about discussing the importance of words to music and of music to words in the broadest of terms. Arguably both ‘music’ and ‘literature’ may be attributions that are less determined by responses to innate qualities of works in these media than by a condition of purposeful listening and reading on the part of their audiences. (Arguably, too, few of us are genuinely entirely ready to shed the first part of that equation in the ways we interpret and evaluate art.) Complete consensus about what constitutes an art is impossible; nevertheless, the categories of ‘literature’ and ‘music’ have a sufficiently shared resonance to provide the focus for an interdisciplinary field, no matter how diverse, and for a volume such as this, no matter how various the approaches represented and the objects of its study in recent times.

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The growing field of literature and music research thrives in the face of an all-toocommon silence about music within literary criticism, and in works of critical and aesthetic theory. As Stephen Benson points out in this volume, the huge impact of critical theory on the study of music took place despite music’s general absence from the major critical and theoretical works on which it drew.17 Recently, philosophical work in the new aestheticism has finally argued for the importance of music to wider aesthetic theory. Andrew Bowie argues that although music’s non-referential content, its ‘transcendence of the sayable’, has ‘too often been used as a means of fetishising art, it is a mistake therefore to assume that the only possibility for the critic is to unmask mystifications; instead, scholars should work to reveal the ways in which music and, by extension, other arts, can bring us up against the limits of more discursive forms of articulation’.18 To Bowie, music is more important to the understanding of culture and individual psychology than is recognised by approaches that explain aesthetic experience as exclusively the product of dominant political and economic forces. While insights gained from the contextual study of the arts are invaluable, it is vital to realise ‘that there are dimensions of cultural articulation which transcend what we can say about them, which are not necessarily usable for ideological purposes, and which are crucially connected to the ways we try to understand ourselves as subjects’.19 The inclusion of music within our critical thinking is essential: ‘One of the reasons why so much recent theory, in which music plays a minimal role, is prone to misjudge aesthetic issues lies [. . .] precisely in its failure to appreciate the significance of the non-conceptual form of music for any account of the subject.’20 Kramer and Bowie might differ over whether there is any autonomous element in the experience of musical transcendence, but both their arguments imply that critics with a combined focus on music and literature may be well-placed to contribute to critical thought and practice within the humanities at large. Music’s potential value to larger cultural projects is a point also taken up by Michael Klein, who provides a further, concluding, essay for this volume. Music’s importance in this respect might be understood in the light of Kramer’s claim that ‘musical meaning is the paradigm of meaning in general’.21 Meanwhile, however, music currently remains largely absent from works of critical and aesthetic theory other than those by musicologists. Within literary criticism, relations between literature and the visual arts have continued to receive more critical attention than those between literature and music, notwithstanding the vitality of the interdisciplinary field of literature and music studies, and music and literature’s shared reference points in critical theory. This is an imbalance that our volume wishes to help redress. Some understandable hesitance about discussing music relates to the way in which it is seen as requiring specialist technical knowledge. However, while discipline-specific skills and knowledge compel respect, this need not preclude us from thinking more deeply about how music matters to the experience of writers and readers, and how literature matters to those who make and listen to music. The essays in this volume seek to make connections between literature and music a more common reference point for scholars, students and readers, as well as to represent and foster links between our fields. Over the past few decades, developments in critical practice have continued to augment the variety of work undertaken between the two disciplines. The three essays

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immediately following this introduction each reflect on important methodological concerns related to research in literature and music. The current prevailing interest in forms of intertextuality in both disciplines allows for an ever-wider variety of textual and cultural points of connection to be illuminated; a sense of what an almost limitless web of connections within and between different works might open up for readers and listeners and critics (who are readers and listeners first) has been richly productive for interdisciplinary work. In ‘Intertextuality, Topic Theory and the Open Text’, Michael Klein examines the ways in which theories of intertextuality have impacted on musical analysis. He illuminates parallels between literary ideas of intertextuality and musical ‘topic theory’ to provide a wider framework for understanding this now widely practised approach to musical analysis. The questions that intertextual approaches raise about the autonomy of authors and composers, about the idea of a unique work and art, and about the roles and subjectivities of listeners and readers, are taken up again in Klein’s closing essay for the volume.22 Lawrence Kramer’s work has continued to advance and refine cultural modes of interpreting music that pay particular attention to music’s engagement with literary forms of narrative. In his essay here on ‘Secrets, Technology and Musical Narrative’, Kramer probes the methodological complexities and challenges presented for analyses of narrativity in music, including his own essay in the nineteenth-century part of this volume. These complexities arise not least from the ways in which narrative itself eludes our attempts conclusively and coherently to demarcate its workings, forever changing its forms, including in response to new technologies. Following the burgeoning of critical theory and its subsequent cultural turn, we can observe a renewed interest in form in much recent critical and theoretical work, although this concern with form is now often inflected by close attention to historical context.23 As early as 1989, Kramer noted that formalist modes of analysis had fallen from favour in music criticism, ‘not so much as techniques but as ends in themselves’, and this also holds true of much work in literary criticism.24 Nevertheless, during the initial rise of cultural studies, scholars who combined interests in context and form risked an uncertain response from their disciplinary peers. Recently, more scholars within the interdisciplinary field of literature and music have overtly advocated approaches that combine historical and formal modes of interpretation, finding that ‘Twenty-first-century musico-literary criticism at its best’ overcomes the divide between these approaches by creating ‘formally and historically sensitive’ accounts of connections between literature and music.25 While some of the developments that I have outlined were prompted in reaction to one another, they do not form a sequential progression but constantly overlap and interact with one another, and with important critical traditions that long precede them. For some critics, a powerful strand links the values implicit in much presentday interpretive effort and the aesthetic and critical ideals of Romanticism. Relations between literature and music can be especially significant for such scholars in both disciplines. The methods at our disposal for interpreting music in the face of its referential opacity may have multiplied, but this has not closed down the question of how criticism might acknowledge qualities that we continue to value in music, as also in literature, although – or because – they elude definition; qualities that poetry has always valued and criticism might too. From this perspective, the Romantic tradition continues to be fundamental to the future of work in literature and music and beyond:

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indeed, Andrew Bowie’s proposed new aestheticism draws on the ‘best Romantic aesthetic theory, from Hölderlin to Schlegel and Schleiermacher’.26 Like the Romantics, the musicologist Scott Burnham, whom I quote at the head of this introduction, maintains that the poetic has remained the category that allows for exploration and acknowledgement of what, in musical experience, is most ‘directly and broadly vital to humanity’.27 Rather than asking ‘What is music about?’, Burnham posits, ‘We might shift our question from inherent properties of music to ways of relating to music; we might ask, “What are we about when we are about music.”’28 Critics who are open to music’s potential meanings in this spirit, who integrate an account of its affective power over them into their analysis, are essentially engaged in a poetic form of criticism: ‘the process through which one engages a non-verbal, emotional and/or aesthetic stimulus by trying to express it for oneself in words; this is a poetic act’.29 For the word and music scholar and French-literature specialist Peter Dayan, the existence of poetry may, in turn, be understood as dependent on the idea of music. An appeal to music in writing can paradoxically signal language at its most literary – thus most poetic – and the point at which words reach their limit.30 For Dayan, French critical theory best helps us to understand that literature’s engagement with music illuminates what we fundamentally care about in the experience of art – especially in the face of loss. In ‘Derrida, de Man, Barthes, and Music as the Soul of Writing’, the essay that completes our trio of methodological reflections, Dayan exemplifies as much as he explicates his commitment to this approach. He brings literature and music together to inspire us to think simultaneously about how they matter to one another and how they move us as listeners and readers. After these three essays on methodology, The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music covers relationships between literature and music from the Middle Ages to the present in five historical sections. It closes with a final essay reflecting on future aspirations for the interdiscipline. With its focus on the relationships between two artistic media and two academic disciplines, this Companion offers a genuinely bi-disciplinary resource, authored (and in several cases co-authored) by literary scholars and musicologists. A comparative element is significant for all the historical periods covered. As a one-volume resource, the volume has a dominant focus on Western music and British literature because it would be impossible, within the space of a single book, adequately to account for the breadth of current work in world literature and international music. Nevertheless, musicologists habitually range widely through European literatures and the volume also gives its readers access to some of the exciting interdisciplinary work that is undertaken by scholars working in modern European literatures other than English. The volume as a whole is structured to be straightforward and easy to navigate. Academic disciplines and their resources are chiefly organised by designated historical periods, and a historical structure was chosen as most helpful to the volume’s users. However, the contents are organised by century, rather than ‘period’; this accommodates various disjunctions between familiar literary and musical periods, disjunctions that might in themselves interest readers of the volume and encourage them to interrogate conventions of periodisation in their own areas of study. Each of the five historical parts of the volume contains an introductory editorial essay which outlines

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connections between literature and music in the timespan covered and the development of the academic study of these connections; these essays also offer significant discussions of current and future methodological directions. Together with the contributions that follow for each part, they make recent developments in interdisciplinary scholarship available to a wider readership, including those new to the field or with different historical areas of expertise. The historical range of this volume allows readers to trace shifts and developments in relations between literature and music over almost a thousand years. Cumulatively, work ranging over this timespan also illuminates points of connection that arch across the centuries: the ways, for instance, in which music’s power over the emotions has been of paramount importance within very different contexts, or the extent to which certain Romantic conceptions of poetry and music persist to the present day, as do ideas about music and national identity. Because literature most frequently turns to music of the past for inspiration and music often turns to past literature for its subjects and models, a degree of connectivity over time is conspicuous within many musical and literary genres. For example, essays in Part IV of this volume discuss how nineteenth-century opera turned to English literature of earlier periods for its libretti, and how texts from the nineteenth century were adapted in twentieth-century opera. In the twentieth century, the intermedial possibilities opened up by new media intensify the still largely unexplored question of how music and text might reach us congruently. Stephen Benson proposes that certain contemporary texts can be ‘read as potential text score and so as prompt for performance’, while the editors of Part I of this Companion recommend a similar approach to much older music: the interdependent co-existence of music and text in the medieval period should lead us to regard both musical score and written text as partial instructions towards a performance to be completed respectively by words and by music.31 Thus certain fundamental points of connection have a very long reach. The way, for example, in which textual allusions to known, or potential, song lyrics leave medieval texts ‘haunted by song and sounds’ is identified as an increasing focus for critical attention by the editors of Part I of this volume.32 A corresponding point is then taken up in a case study by Ros King in Part II where she investigates once-familiar musical and textual completions for songs indicated within Renaissance plays.33 A form of musical haunting is also fundamental to many readings of musical allusion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels. Such narratives frequently contain song lyrics for which a melody is (sometimes intentionally) hard to identify. Even where the music can be identified, a certain sense of ghostliness remains intrinsic to the experience of reading these allusions. The way in which remembered music lingers in the mind may colour the experience of reading, or perhaps the performance practices and contexts depicted have lost familiarity over time. Interestingly, this does not really change for readings of texts dating from the age of precise musical reproduction in radio broadcasts and recordings; by now, the technologies and shared musical reference points of the first part of the twentieth century have receded into a past almost as foreign to the majority of readers as the 1800s. The broad sweep of connection which I have invoked is thus not intended to suggest an undifferentiated common ground between us and former periods of literature or music. Musical and textual hauntings can remind us how tantalisingly incomplete our reconstructions of the past, of necessity, must be.

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And yet, what remains either discernible or imaginable about how these related arts were made and mattered in the past is vital to how they continue to matter to us now. In total, The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music offers readers just over seventy new research essays and introductions that both chart developments in a dynamic field and make original contributions to it. Commissioned from international scholars in literature, music and modern languages, these essays jointly represent and extend the variety of recent interdisciplinary research on literature and music and provide an overview of previously unavailable breadth. The work that is gathered here is necessarily and appropriately diverse, employing a multiplicity of approaches to illuminate the profusion of relations between literature and music under view. The majority of the contributions are brief case-study essays, with a proportion of more thematic essays. The total number of articles in each historical part reflects the current intensity of interdisciplinary work in each period. The flexible case-study format creates a focus on closely-related works, figures or motifs, enabling wider generalisations about relations between literature and music to be rooted in discussion and analysis of particular instances of connection between these arts. This format accommodates a variety of critical methods, as best befits the topic of each essay, and is fruitful for those wishing to pay attention to the particularity of aesthetics, as well as to wider context. At the same time, authors have been able to use specific cases to reflect on how their work is situated within ongoing developments in literary-musical studies and to make points of relevance to the wider scholarship of their period. All the historical introductions in this volume discuss theoretical developments that inspired and followed the development of the new musicology, which has fostered new opportunities for interdisciplinary work in every period. In their introduction to Part I, Elizabeth Eva Leach, Helen Deeming and Ardis Butterfield reflect on how the ‘cultural turn’ in the study of music has benefited work on the medieval period, stimulating scholars to expand their attention to the wider contexts for musical experience and to re-envisage the functions of still-extant musical and verbal notation. For scholarship of the Middle Ages, the rise of interdisciplinary approaches over the past few decades has revived the joint study of text and music practised by earlier scholars who often united musical and philological expertise. A return to the combined study of arts that were conjoined during the period itself promises to redress some of the disjunctions set up by the increasingly specialised discipline boundaries that have arisen over the past century. This re-engagement with the intermediality of medieval art itself has allowed scholars to think anew about the period’s ‘abundance of contact between music and words’ so as to help us to understand medieval literature as simultaneously poetic and musical.34 The interdisciplinary topics explored in this part of the volume demonstrate how reconfiguration of scholarship in the period can open up a so far little explored field of comparative research to which the essays collected here make significant contributions. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw increasing distinctions between different arts and the first development of some of the genres that were to come to prominence from the eighteenth century onwards. Nevertheless, symbiotic relationships between words and music remained fundamental during the Renaissance and beyond; thus careful attention to historical, cultural and theoretical contexts leads to illuminating results

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for close analysis of music and literature of these centuries. As Ros King demonstrates in her introduction to Part II of this volume, principles of rhetoric were applied to music as well as helping to determine (‘notate’ even) the performance of poetry. The rhetorical ‘disposition’, or detailed patterning, of the elements of music and poetry emotionally engage and entrain their audiences. A better comprehension of how this works, particularly in the interplay of poetic metre and rhythm, may be gained by experiencing properly informed performances of Shakespeare and other dramatic poetry of the period. King’s introduction demonstrates how, as proposed by Kramer, meaning – in words as much as in music – is ‘performed not revealed’.35 Notably, some of the features of music that were to interest theorists of later eras already play a role in sixteenth-century discourse; music was valued as a form of communication that can bridge cultural divisions, and indeed it facilitated the exercise of soft power by sixteenth-century explorers in winning the trust of indigenous populations. Despite the gulf of centuries, fundamentally similar views of music’s affective power and of hierarchies of primitive and civilised music were to be elaborated when nineteenth-century scientists and thinkers developed evolutionary accounts of music’s origin and purpose. During the eighteenth century, detailed evaluations of music’s persuasive and emotive powers were to come to the fore as music’s association with the art of rhetoric formed the basis for emerging cultural and aesthetic theories that continued to underpin accounts of music in subsequent centuries. For the remaining parts of our Companion, dedicated to the eighteenth century onwards, a more generic organisation holds sway. Connections between literature and music are chiefly explored with reference to the literary and musical genres that emerged during the eighteenth century, became predominant during the nineteenth, and remain the major focus for scholarship to the present day. As Suzanne Aspden explains in her introduction to Part III of this volume, opera, via the development of recitative and other elements, became the genre within which the relationship of words and music was most intensively explored during the eighteenth century; it also became the focus for growing interest in music as a vehicle for the expression and promotion of national character. The essays in this section of the volume reflect the way in which relationships between literature, music and constructions of national identity are appropriately a major concern of scholarship on this period. For work on the eighteenth century, the influence of critical theory has facilitated scholarly attention to the importance of rhetorical principles within music as well as language, and has broadened the scope of both literary texts and historical contexts under consideration. Over the eighteenth century, music’s relationship with speech, theorised according to the principles of rhetoric, became part of the emerging study of aesthetics and thus the subject of wider philosophical enquiry. If music’s association with rhetoric had given it a closer alliance with the power of rhetorical utterance to move an audience, now, as Aspden notes, music also became increasingly celebrated for its power to express emotion. Its persuasive powers notwithstanding, music’s lack of specific referential content had long ranked it below both poetry and painting – whose mutual alliance had been seen as predominant on the basis of the Horatian principle ut pictura poesis (poetry is as painting). Now, the idea of music as a vehicle for feelings beyond the capacity of words and a transcendent power, set it at the head of the aesthetic hierarchy.36 Instrumental music, free from the controlling power of words, was to become increasingly valorised. Meanwhile, music’s relationship with language remained of

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urgent interest, including to philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and later to nineteenth-century thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. Both the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parts of this volume include topics that explore significant reconfigurations of relations between literature and music in the decades straddling the turn of these centuries; with the advent of Romanticism, aesthetic principles were established that continue to resonate. The Romantic elevation of music as the art which embodies the essence of all other arts, including poetry, remained explicitly at the centre of nineteenth-century thinking, as made clear by Pater’s famous 1877 dictum that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.37 This position remains fundamental to how we often conceive relations between literature and music. My introduction to the nineteenth-century part of the volume discusses how literature, both poetry and prose, turned to music as a metaphor and model with a new intensity at this time. Meanwhile music, having shared a reference point in rhetoric with literature until the eighteenth century, turned increasingly to both poetic and narrative forms of literature as a source of inspiration and as a model for its own structural and expressive practices. The degree to which parallels with literary narrative became an important principle within musical composition and reception has helped to provide a particularly strong basis for comparative work with literature in scholarship on the nineteenth century. The music and writing of that period were the springboard for initial interdisciplinary work by Kramer and others, and subsequent work in this period has been prolific. The fifth and final part of The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music covers the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. As is commensurate with the plethora of developments following the mid-twentieth-century opening up of a comparative field, this is the most extensive part of the volume. As Stephen Benson outlines in his introduction to Part V, connections between literature and music since 1900 have been hugely varied, and have involved radical changes to how music and literature are defined, produced, reproduced, heard and read. While many continuities with earlier periods persist – Benson discusses ways in which opera, for instance, has continued to work out relationships between words and music38 – the literary and musical canons have expanded immensely, and so have the now very fluid categories of ‘literature’ and ‘music’ eligible for inclusion. Along with a greater diversity of theoretical approaches, this expansion in itself determines that the study of literature and music should be a diverse and far-reaching field; the study of literature and music now also constantly intersects with work in sound studies, which has recently developed as a related area of research.39 In his introduction to this final part of the volume, Benson observes that literature, relatively speaking, has changed less in its dominant forms and its modes of production and consumption than has music: throughout the past century, the concept of music expanded to encompass sounds and acoustic experiences not previously included in this category; huge technological changes in how sound is reproduced and disseminated reinforced this, and have, for example, facilitated the current dominance of pop music in listening experience.40 However, this disparity in their rate of change has augmented rather than diminished the rich interdependence of literature and music. As Benson observes, developments in musical recording have also offered writers ‘new possibilities for verbal

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representation and invention’ that await further exploration.41 Accounts of music in literature remain vital in the ways in which they reflect on these changes in music, for literature offers ‘the most precious and detailed recording of the life of music in the era of its technological reproduction’.42 The degree to which we need to register listening experiences in words to mark them out as music forms an important dimension of interdisciplinary criticism, just as the evident ‘endless multiplicity’ of their relations compels us ‘continually to rethink what we mean by “words” and “music”’.43 In the concluding essay to this volume, Michael Klein considers directions in which interdisciplinary methodologies in literature and music might develop, including in the light of the contribution made by this volume. For Klein, the future could potentially see work in literature and music participating in a great variety of endeavours: ‘I hope to show that a discipline devoted to literature and music has something to offer the projects of modernity, postmodernity, sociology, subjectivity, ideology, and on and on’, he writes.44 It will be crucial to future research that we communicate a considered account of how works of literature and music matter to the present alongside our investigations of the frequently alien past from which they arose: Literature and music are like a double letter tossed in time to be picked up by a self for whom they were never intended, in a time for which they were not written. But when we take up these strange letters of sight and sound, we become the proper destination for their alien message simply by considering them as if they were written for us.45 Implicitly, Klein’s concept of a musically informed subjectivity is that, much as in Lawrence Kramer’s accounts, it operates not only at ‘the level of our deepest selves’, to quote Scott Burnham, but intersubjectively – and across boundaries of both time and space.46 Klein emphasises that this ‘act of receiving literary and musical texts from the past as if they were written for us’ entails equal scrutiny of subjectivity and historical context. It requires our joint discipline to look ‘inwards’ to acknowledge individual ‘thoughts and responses’ to literature and music and their ideological bases, and also to look ‘outwards’: to history, to adjacent arts disciplines, and to ‘the greater projects of modernity and postmodernity within which it operates and to which it aspires to contribute’.47 An increasingly overt emphasis on acknowledging how literature and music matter to us now is apparent amongst scholars who advocate that critics should not ignore present aesthetic responses or simply elide these within a history of past aesthetic response. This reflects an important shift of attention to the subjectivities of listeners and readers in criticism generally, a move which need not substitute critical and historical modes of scholarly analysis but can complement these. A present and ongoing challenge is to find scholarly and rigorous modes of acknowledging, within critical analysis, the ways in which literature and music move us.48 Klein’s essay exemplifies the extent to which much of the most insightful interdisciplinary thinking on literature and music seeks to balance important elements that might sometimes have been regarded as opposed to one another. Often, this entails matching academically rigorous scholarship with acknowledgement of the aesthetic and emotional responses that draw us to literature and music. Such a combination will lead to a stronger and more meaningful mode of criticism than if either component

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were absent. For Scott Burnham, this parity involves recognising the common ground shared by academic analysis and poetic insight, ‘acknowledging the poetic content and applicability of our analytic assumptions, as well as the analytic utility of our poetic observations’.49 Andrew Bowie posits the need to balance scholarly knowing and unreflecting aesthetic response, ‘mere theoretical “knowingness” and mere unreflective aesthetic enjoyment’. Michael Klein advocates counterpoising historical knowledge with present responses.50 These varied arguments differ in ways that are not insignificant, yet all highlight how important this quest to unite analytical scrutiny and a registering of aesthetic response is to the future of scholarship and its audiences. If we want a wider audience among those who love literature and music, then it is vital to convey some sense within our scholarship of what draws us to these arts.51 This is a fundamental consideration for a volume such as this, which seeks to speak to readers for whom it offers a new combination of disciplines, as well as to those whose interests so far have been developed within a specific historical period. Implicitly, and often explicitly, the authors in this volume seek to share their scholarly expertise in a manner that also conveys how and why liaisons between literature and music are important to human experience of these arts. We want a diversity of readers to discover the riches on offer in the pages that follow. We hope that you will find much to fascinate and much that resonates with how these two arts and their interactions matter to you and matter in the world. For, however manifested and defined at different times, the interdependence of music and literature – what Stephen Benson eloquently calls their ‘mutually constituting and affirming entanglement’ – is as old as the arts themselves and an ever more valuable object of enquiry and delight.

Notes 1. Genesis 4. 21. Euripides, Alcestis (438 bc), 358; the epigraph to this chapter is quoted from The Alcestis of Euripides: An English Version, trans. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald (London: Faber, 1936), p. 30. Scott Burnham, ‘How Music Matters: Poetic Content Revisited’, in Rethinking Music, ed. Mark Everist and Nicholas Cook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 193–216 (p. 216). 2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues: Ou il est parlé de la mélodie et de l’imitation musicale [c. 1760] (Paris: Copedith, 1970). E. T. A. Hoffmann, Poetische Werke, 12 vols (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1957); for English translations, see E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: ‘Kreisleriana’, ‘The Poet and the Composer’, Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3. John Milton, At a Solemn Music (1645), ll. 1–2, in The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968), p. 162. 4. Kramer highlights how fundamentally ‘the understanding of music depends on our description of music’, Song Acts: Writings on Words and Music (Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2017), p. xvi. 5. Previous to this, pioneering studies such as Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts by Calvin S. Brown (1948) and Verbal Music in German Literature by Steven P. Scher (1968) had paved the way for this integration of literary and musicological approaches. 6. Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Towards a Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 170.

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7. Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. xii. 8. Kramer, Musical Meaning, p. 170. 9. Kramer, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical Criticism’, 1989; reprinted in Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 35–43 (p. 35). 10. Kramer, Musical Meaning, p. 5. 11. Ibid., p. 5. 12. Kramer, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, p. 35. 13. See, for example, Abbate’s Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). For work by Nattiez, see, for example, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (1987), trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). See also Kofi Agawu, Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Further examples of work in musicology with strong connections to critical theory include David Lidov, Is Language a Music?: Writings on Musical Form and Signification, Musical Meaning and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Michael Leslie Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, Musical Meaning and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Byron Almèn, A Theory of Musical Narrative, Musical Meaning and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Jann Pasler, Writing through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Robert Samuels, Novel and Symphony: A Study of NineteenthCentury Genres (New York: Pendragon Press, forthcoming). 14. Examples of work on connections between literature and music by literary scholars over the past two decades or so include: Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Eric Prieto, Listening in: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Stephen Benson, Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Peter Dayan, Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Arden, 2006); Tilli Boon Cuillé, Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Regula Hohl Trillini, The Gaze of the Listener: English Representations of Domestic Music-Making (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008); Marshall Brown, The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul: Essays on Music and Poetry (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010); Gillen D’Arcy Woods, Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Emma Sutton, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); John Hughes, ‘Ecstatic Sound’: Music and Individuality in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2016). This is but a sample of monographs published in this area. There have also been a number of special journal editions devoted to music and literature; a special edition of The Journal of First World War Studies on Literature and Music of the First World War, 2 (1) (2011) was edited by Kate Kennedy and Trudi Tate; a special edition of the Oxford journal Forum for Modern Language Studies, 48 (2) (2012) on Opera and the Novel was edited by Emma Sutton.

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14 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

delia da sousa correa Kramer, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, p. 35. Ibid. See Stephen Benson, Introduction to Part V of this volume. Andrew Bowie, ‘What Comes After Art?’, in The New Aestheticism, ed. John J. Joughin and Simon Malpes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 68–82 (pp. 78–9). For Peter Dayan, the new aestheticism signals a growing awareness of intermediality in Anglophone academia. See Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 7. Bowie, pp. 70–1, 76–8. Ibid., pp. 79–80. Kramer, Musical Meaning, p. 168. Quoted at greater length in the opening pages of this introduction. See also Michael Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Kramer himself has expressed concern that a largely welcome emphasis on the contexts in which audiences hear music has meant that inquiries about ‘how’ music is performed threaten to ‘displace’ rather than ‘complement’ questions about ‘what’ constitutes ‘the social force of the musical work’ (‘A New Self: Schumann at 40’, Musical Times (Spring, 2007), 3–17 (p. 3). Meanwhile, in literary studies there have been growing signs over the past few years of a renewed, albeit keenly historicised, interest in form. This is demonstrated by Angela Leighton’s 2006 On Form which was reviewed by Seamus Perry as indicative of a new ascendency of ‘Form’ over ‘History’, Times Literary Supplement (24 and 31 August 2006), 12. Leighton’s most recent book is Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (London: Harvard University Press, 2018). Kramer, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, p. 41. Nathan Waddell, ‘Modernism and Music: A Review of Recent Scholarship’, Modernist Cultures, 12, 2 (2017), 316–30 (p. 318). Waddell notes that ‘musico-literary scholars’ have long ‘resisted modes of enquiry that underplay or ignore how form and history reciprocally define each other’, with good current scholarship ‘characterized by theoretically informed arbitrations between formalism and contextualism’. Bowie, p. 80. Burnham, p. 212. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., p. 214. See Dayan’s ‘Derrida, de Man, Barthes, and Music as the Soul of Writing’ in this volume. See also Music Writing Literature. Stephen Benson, Introduction to Part V of this volume; Ardis Butterfield, Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach, Introduction to Part I of this volume. Ibid., Butterfield, Deeming and Leach. Ros King, ‘From Tragicomedy to Opera? John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida’ in this volume. Butterfield, Deeming and Leach in this volume. Ros King, Introduction to Part II of this volume. Another recent work on the early modern theatre that examines how dramatists depended on the musical responses of their audiences to help convey meaning is Simon Smith’s Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Kramer, Musical Meaning, p. 170, quoted at greater length in the opening pages above. See Suzanne Aspden, Introduction to Part III of this volume. Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 2nd edn, rev. (London: Macmillan), p. 140 (original emphasis). Benson, Introduction to Part V of this volume.

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39. A forthcoming volume in this area is Literature and Sound in the Cambridge Critical Concepts series, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 40. Benson, Introduction to Part V of this volume. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Kramer, Song Acts, p. xvi. 44. Michael L. Klein, ‘Origins and Destinations: A Future for Literature and Music’ in this volume. 45. Ibid. 46. Burnham, p. 216, as quoted at the head of this introduction. 47. Klein, ‘Origins and Destinations’ in this volume. 48. This is certainly not to advocate the privileging of passing subjective responses as a basis for aesthetic judgement. As Bowie comments, feelings about a concert where a listener felt sleepy and disengaged hardly form adequate grounds for defining aesthetic value; see Bowie, p. 78. 49. ‘I am asking us to recognise that we have never truly abandoned the notion of poetic significance in music. This involves acknowledging the poetic content and applicability of our analytic assumptions, as well as the analytic utility of our poetic observations’ (Burnham, p. 199). 50. Bowie, p. 80. 51. Ibid. Bowie emphasises that, since what moves those who write about art is essentially what moves anyone, we must not ‘lose sight of the reasons why we might have engaged in the first place with the works about which we theorise’.

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1 Intertextuality, Topic Theory and the Open Text Michael L. Klein

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ntertextuality, a term for any crossing of texts, from allusion and quotation to the use of conventions, is one of the most productive concepts in critical theory. Recognising that music and literature are products of intertextuality has prompted critics to reconsider the notion of the artwork as a singular unity, closed off from other works. Intertextuality opens the possibility that every work of music and literature (to say nothing of painting, sculpture, cinema, etc.) is open to other works via conventions, allusions and quotations. In turn, the idea of the open text invites us to re-examine what it means to be an author or composer. Does an author or composer really create a unique work through an act of singular genius? Or do they always shape and reshape the conventions of literature and music? Once intertextuality reorganises our thinking about authors and composers, it suggests the act of reading and listening needs reconsideration as well. Can a listener really understand a symphony by Mahler without knowing something about German Lied, the German symphonic tradition, Wagnerian harmony, or the narrative impulses of nineteenth-century music? And if these conventions are part of a Mahler symphony, then the listener is always sent outside of the symphony to understand what is inside the symphony. Thus the outside/ inside opposition around music (as for literature too) falls apart. In short, intertextuality reaches beyond a notion of the open text and contributes to a rethinking of the author, the reader, genre, interpretation, subjectivity, and on and on. Intertextuality is limitless. Since this essay cannot be limitless, we will have to confine our enquiry to a few implications of intertextuality. Our tale will begin with Julia Kristeva, who coined the word intertextualité in the late 1960s. In Kristeva’s conception, intertextuality is a typology of texts within the single text. As such, intertextuality opens literature to cultural codes and their transformations, prompting hermeneutic analysis. As is often the case, music lagged behind literary theory, coming to notions of intertextuality much later and doing so through topic theory, the study of musical conventions. Topic theory forms one path to hermeneutics in music, in opposition to an ideology that understood music as ineffable or beyond interpretation. From the hermeneutic implications of intertextuality and topic theory, this essay will move to the ideologies about literary and musical works that intertextuality challenges. Artworks are less stable than we might think, and acts of interpretation cannot hope to reach an incontestable meaning. The essay concludes with brief remarks about how intertextuality points to a different model of subjectivity.

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Kristeva’s early definition of intertextuality appears to refer only to quotation or allusion. The text is therefore a productivity, and this means: first that its relationship to the language in which it is situated is redistributive (destructive-constructive) [. . .] and second, that it is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.1 But the implications of quotation and allusion (utterances ‘taken from other texts’) were not the focus of Kristeva’s attention. Appropriately for the concept she developed, Kristeva was re-imagining Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the novel; her writing was itself a crossing of texts. For Bakhtin, the novel was a mix of different kinds of writing, or what Kristeva called ‘a typology of texts’.2 Kristeva sought to illustrate this typology and to make claims about its implications. The typology of the novel included what Kristeva called citation, which had a broad range of meanings. A citation could be dialogue, ‘speech attributed to another’, but it could also be a quotation (attributed or plagiarised), a temporal marker, a moral precept, a commonplace, etc.3 Citation in Kristeva’s conception is more than quotation; it is a general term for any token of the typology of a text. Melville’s Moby-Dick, for example, begins with an etymology of the word whale, which, the narrator tells us, is ‘supplied by a late consumptive usher to a grammar school’.4 Following the etymology are eighty extracts about whales, which are ‘supplied by a sub-sub-librarian’.5 At last the story begins with the famous line, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Later, the novel includes dialogue, description, a hymn, a script, newspaper headlines, etc., all of which form a typology. Moby-Dick is an intertextuality in Kristeva’s first sense of that word because it involves different types of writing, moving from an etymology to attributed quotations to the narrator’s direct address, and so on. In this way, we can see how the nineteenth century viewed narrative in general, and the novel in particular, as the pre-eminent mode for transmitting knowledge, because narrative was capable of bringing together various types of thinking (temporal, descriptive, dialogic, taxonomic, etc.) into a unity: a unity, we shall see, that Kristeva considered to be illusory.6 With this preliminary discussion in place, we can turn from literature to music, where our entry to intertextuality will be the musical topic, a concept that Leonard Ratner introduced in a study of eighteenth-century repertoire. Ratner’s definition follows: From its contacts with worship, poetry, drama, entertainment, dance, ceremony, the military, the hunt, the life of the lower classes, music in the 18th century developed a thesaurus of characteristic figures, which formed a rich legacy for classic composers [. . .] They are designated here as topics—subjects for musical discourse.7 Ratner offered a short list of topics in two broad categories: dances (minuet, sarabande, polonaise, etc.) and styles (military, hunt, singing, etc.). Later theorists have rendered more extensive inventories of topics, including tango, jazz, cafe music, pastoral style, machine music, etc.8 An exhaustive list would be impossible, since music is protean and its topics are always forming and re-forming themselves around culture.

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But music, like literature, has its conventions no matter how avant-garde the aspirations of the composer.9 Ratner’s brief discussion includes a topical analysis of Mozart’s Symphony no. 38 (Prague). The analysis is little more than a list, accounting only for part of the first movement; but even here, Ratner finds the singing style, the brilliant style, fanfare, the learned style, a cadential flourish, storm and stress, and several other topics within the span of about eighty bars of music.10 Mozart’s Prague Symphony adheres admirably to Kristeva’s conception of intertextuality: it unfolds a typology of texts (topics). As such, the symphony is a musical genre remarkably similar to the novel: it unfolds a variety of musical conventions within an apparent unity. But Ratner made no mention of intertextuality in his brief exposition on topic theory. It was Ratner’s student, Kofi Agawu, who realised that intertextuality was implicit in the listener’s ability to track the various topics in a single work. In an analysis of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C major, K. 467, Agawu points to the interaction of a march, opera buffa and the singing style within the first twelve bars. He concludes that in performing a topical analysis, ‘we have assumed a process of intertextuality: these measures (and the rest of the movement) comprise gestures that are common stock in the later eighteenth century’.11 Having disclosed the word intertextuality, Agawu teaches us that it is involved in topic theory. From this definition of intertextuality and its relationship to topic theory, we can turn to a methodology for recognising intertexts/topics, which will lead us to the implications of such analyses for the interpretation of musical and literary texts. For Kristeva, critical methodology involves attention to the disjunctions that are always present in the novel while being denied by the ideology that a text is closed and unified.12 The work of the literary critic is to be alert to the disjunctions that mark changes in discourse and to note the ways that the writer knits those disjunctions in the service of an apparent unity. Returning to Moby-Dick, for example, it is striking how frayed the opening is. Melville does almost nothing to connect the etymology with the extracts and the start of the tale proper. The reader cannot even be sure that the narrator for the etymology is the same as that for the extracts and the story. In contrast, the number of extracts overdetermines the whale as a theme of the novel, tying together the typology under a master signifier while dispersing the novel’s theme into prior texts. The sources of the extracts encompass a wide historical period and stylistic register, beginning with several quotations from the Old Testament, moving through poetic and literary works like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, and on to more anonymous works in a lower style, such as a quotation from a ‘Nantucket Song’ and another from something titled ‘Whale Song’. These last two extracts are examples of intermedial intertextuality: allusions/ citations in one medium (literature, in this case) that are taken from another medium (music, in this case). Examples of intermedial intertextuality are common in music, as well. In Schumann’s piano piece ‘Verrufene Stelle’ (Ill-fated Place) from his Waldscenen (Forest Scenes), Op. 82, the musical score begins with an epigraph (Melville would have called it an extract; and Kristeva would have called it a citation) from a poem by Christian Friedrich Hebbel. The poem begins, ‘Die Blumen, so hoch sie wachsen | Sind blass hier, wie der Todd’ (The flowers here, tall as they may grow | are pale as death). Thus Schumann gives the pianist a sense of the musical expression that must be invoked, and he does so through an intermedial intertextuality that quotes poetry

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within the medium of a musical score. These two examples of intermedial intertextuality assume forms of knowledge on the part of the reader or listener. Melville quotes the words of a song without its melody, a melody that may be lost to today’s reader and may have been unknown to many of Melville’s contemporaries. Schumann quotes a poem in his music, but if listeners have no access to a score, that poem is lost to them. What this suggests is that a text (literary or musical) is not as stable as we might think, an idea to which I will return. In Moby-Dick, the brief discussion of its various discourses gives way to a discovery of the novel’s strangeness, or what Michael Riffaterre calls ungrammaticality, ‘gaps that disrupt the linear sequence’ of a text and demand interpretation from the reader.13 Recognising a novel’s strangeness involves understanding the conventions of writing. The reader familiar with the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel may find nothing strange in a single epigraph. ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay’, for example, is the epigraph to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But the extracts in Moby-Dick are strange in their multiplicity, opening the novel to a hermeneutic analysis. From intertextuality, then, we have moved to hermeneutics and the codes involved in reading. The classic study of the latter concept is Roland Barthes’s S/Z, which lays out five such codes. Of these, I will concentrate on the cultural code, which Barthes defines as ‘a science or a body of knowledge’, although he admits ‘of course, all codes are cultural’.14 What Barthes fails to mention is that cultural codes are made up of a vast web of crossing texts; a cultural code is an intertextuality. Analysis of the opening line from Moby-Dick allows us to see cultural codes at work. To begin, the name Ishmael stands out for its biblical nature, requiring the reader to be familiar with the Old Testament. The name may (or may not) send the reader to a prior text, the book of Genesis, where we (re)discover that Ishmael was Abraham’s first son born of Hagar, the handmaiden of Abraham’s wife, Sarah. Ishmael means ‘God has heard’, a reference to Abraham and Sarah praying for a son even as they reached old age. The opening line gives Moby-Dick a mythical/biblical aura, as if we are about to read a tale from the time of Ishmael’s exile. But the form of address, ‘call me’, involves another code. Perhaps the narrator is being familiar with the reader, or perhaps Ishmael is not really the narrator’s name, as if he wears it as a mask. The reader might make these determinations about the narrator of Moby-Dick through the cultural codes of everyday life or by running through a mental list of other novels in which the narrator identifies himself. In Dickens’s Great Expectations, roughly contemporaneous to Moby-Dick, the narrator opens his story as follows: My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.15 The narrator might have said ‘Call me Pip’, but he leads up to the name with an explanation of it. To today’s reader, the name itself (pip: an annoyance; someone with high spirits; an ailment, etc.) has a lower-class register, suggesting that the story is unlikely to have a mythic ethos; the expectation of a high-jinx tale contributes to the pathos that comes with the tragic turn in the novel. The narrator oddly repeats his name three times in close proximity, as if he is guileless. But we must ask whether a contemporary of Dickens would have access to the same cultural code in interpreting

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Pip’s introduction. The Oxford English Dictionary lists one common meaning of pip in the nineteenth-century: ‘to defeat or beat narrowly’.16 The reference comes from a work by Thomas Hood, a poet and humorist, which suggests that to Dickens’s readers, the name might have a humorous or undignified aura, while the meaning (to defeat) projects one of the novel’s themes. The forms of address in Moby-Dick and Great Expectations stand as tokens of two invitations to hermeneutic analysis: the former gives too little information, while the latter gives too much. Both openings require the reader to understand multiple cultural codes. We see again that the nature of a text differs depending on the codes known to the reader. Unlike Kristeva, who outlined a methodology for uncovering intertexts in literature, Ratner offered no methodology for hearing topics in music. But within his brief Prague analysis, we find a hint in the claim that topics often change ‘in the shortest space and with startling contrast’.17 As with Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, topics involve disjunctions, whose recognition involves the same order of listener effort as that of understanding a written text. The listener needs to know what a topic sounds like, and what cultural entanglements it includes. The cultural codes entwined with topics are suggested by Ratner’s statement that music’s ‘thesaurus of characteristic figures’ comes from its ‘contacts with worship, poetry, drama, entertainment’, etc. Without expressing or exploring it, Ratner had discovered that music is riddled with disjunctions, that music points to the culture in which it is formed, that a listener needs to know the codes of that culture, and that topics might lead to hermeneutic analysis. This last point needs unpacking, and to do so I’ll turn to Chopin’s PolonaiseFantaisie, Op. 61. The title already suggests the intertextuality of the piece, since it refers to two genres. In Chopin’s time, the polonaise was associated with the lost national splendour of Poland, while the fantasy had a vast intertext of associations and meanings. From its use in early keyboard music, fantasy (fantasia) involved notions of imagination, caprice, or a willingness to move from one musical idea to another with freedom. The nineteenth century maintained the idea of imagination and even improvisation; a fantasy could be a potpourri of themes, often of an operatic nature. But a fantasy also could point to an expansion of form in terms of themes and expression, a rise in the subjective exploration of the artist. I’ll focus on a brief section of the Polonaise-Fantaisie (bars 148–60), where the music makes an abrupt change in texture, key, tempo and dynamics, creating a noticeable disjunction in a piece that is already riddled with topical shifts. The section begins with a chorale topic, indexical to signs of spirituality and transcendence. From here the music moves to a section that mixes features of the nocturne, a genre particularly linked to Chopin, and of the preghiera (prayer), a type of nineteenth-century aria in which the singer prays for salvation (Fig. 1.1). As with the analysis of Moby- Dick, we read the remarkable intertextuality of the Polonaise-Fantaisie not only for the cultural codes that it involves but also for the strangeness exhibited by the topics and their interaction. The chorale topic, for example, is brief and features a repeated note in the upper voice, unusual for a conventional chorale. In addition, the phrase ends with a trill in a middle voice, an embellishment completely out of character for the chorale topic. The repeated note (an intonation, a meditation) and the trill (a shimmer) send the topic out of the usual communal implications of a chorale and into a private register, as if we hear a secret thought tinged

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Figure 1.1 Chopin, Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61 (bars 148–60) with an inner glow. This reading of the chorale illustrates what Raymond Monelle calls the indexicality of a topic.18 When we hear a topic in music (a chorale in this case), it does not indicate that the music means that topic. The interpretation is not that the Polonaise-Fantaisie is about chorales. The interpretation is about what the chorale points to in a culture (its indexicality). Chorales are about communal expressions of religious sentiments, or more broadly about spirituality. In Chopin’s music, a chorale could be indexical to a desire for salvation, a gesture toward transcendence, and so on. A topic may narrow the interpretative field of enquiry, but it does not nail down an interpretation. Strangeness also marks the interaction between the nocturne/preghiera topics that follow the chorale. Again the upper voice is minimal in contour, simply alternating between two notes, perhaps indicating that the meditative aspect of the chorale continues. The bass melody is far more active and striking for its wide contour. The section

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exhibits the signs of a nocturne, which is indexical to erotic intimacy. But the erotic implications of the nocturne appear to be at odds with the sacred intimations of the preghiera. One possibility is that the section expresses the sacredness of intimacy. At the same time, the entire section from the chorale through to the nocturne/preghiera reveals an inner life that was becoming the focus of nineteenth-century music and literature. This inner life, which connects admirably to the cultural codes around the genre of the fantasy, is at odds with the public and military implications of the polonaise. Chopin brings these various topics together in a way that asks us to make sense of them. They are a demand for interpretation. A new pertinence arises from the connection between the Polonaise and the inner life of the chorale and nocturne, as if a character is dreaming of the return of Poland’s lost splendour, or as if the military implications of the Polonaise are undercut as we discover that it is all a dream of nationalist action. The jostling of topics in the Polonaise-Fantaisie brings us to a promissory note regarding the ideology of the closed text. Kristeva argued that intertextuality, as a permutation of texts, made the smooth surface of the novel an illusion, an ideology. As a consequence of the various discourses rupturing the surface of the novel, the author would bind the typology of texts into an apparent unity that was a necessary by-product of the ‘reign of market value’, necessitating a ‘reevaluation of the bourgeois social text’.19 Any ideology that maintained the literariness of a text by virtue of its closed and unified quality was simply wrong; the text is open to other texts. Further, a quest to demonstrate such a unity was blind to the productivity of intertextuality, which performed a redistribution and renewal of language. We have seen this redistribution and renewal in both Moby-Dick and the PolonaiseFantaisie. As Melville piles up citation after citation in various styles, he redistributes types of texts within his novel. Early in the list of extracts, for example, we read from the book of Job, ‘Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; | One would think the deep to be hoary.’ Later, the language changes with the ‘Nantucket Song’: ‘So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, | While the bold harpooner is striking the whale.’ This mix of textual types adheres to the entirety of the novel, renewing language because it refuses to project a singular style. A similar redistribution and renewal appears in Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie, where a chorale concludes with an ornament outside the norms of that topic, and where a nocturne interrupts the continuation of the chorale. Two topics from different stylistic registers (the chorale is communal and sacred; the nocturne is private and profane) come together to create a new musical pertinence. As for Kristeva’s reference to the ‘bourgeois social text’ and the ‘reign of market value’, she is writing about an idea that the author is a singular genius, who creates a unique language, and in so doing upholds bourgeois notions of self-determination and industriousness, guaranteeing the canonical (and economic) value of selected works of literature. A similar ideology is particularly strong in music, where the idea of the great composer is tied to the ability to create a unique, closed and unified musical work. But intertextuality prompts a re-evaluation of these ideas. Behind the apparent unity of literature and music are discontinuities that result from the necessary use of prior types of writing and composing. The author/composer does not create anew but rather re-creates through redistributing and renewing conventions, allusions and quotations.

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The artwork in this newly imagined creative space becomes less stable, less monumental, because readers and listeners bring their own practices, knowledge and cultural codes to interpret what they read and hear. Barthes even compares literature to a musical score, whose cultural codes ‘endow the text with a kind of plural quality (the text is actually polyphonic)’.20 The act of reading and listening is like the act of performing a play or a piece of music; literary or musical understanding is akin to reading a script that must be brought to life by the experiences, knowledge and imagination of the interpreter. We might stabilise the text by invoking an ideal reader or listener, a person who has a grasp of the precise knowledge of a work’s author or composer. But this impossibly utopian notion skirts the enlargement of music and literature’s possible meanings arising from an interpretative dialogue between an imperfect (human) reader/listener and an intertextual (open) work. Intertextuality and topic theory demand much of us: nothing short of a reappraisal of the text/score, the author/composer, the reader/listener and how they interact when making sense of literature or music. But the productivity of intertextuality moves beyond the issues this essay has considered. As we discover that musical and literary texts are more open than we might suspect, we may come to realise that we, too, consist of a crossing of texts. Perhaps our inner life, like an artwork, is less singular than we believe. This reconfiguration does not diminish but increases the possibilities of a person as a kind of text. We learn that to read literature or understand music is to read and understand ourselves.

Notes 1. Julia Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 36. 2. Ibid. For Bakhtin’s conception of the novel, see his essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422. 3. Kristeva, p. 45. 4. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The White Whale (New York: The New American Library, 1980), p. ix. 5. Ibid., p. x. Note that the etymology and the extracts are what Genette calls paratexts. For further reading on Genette, see Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Dubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 6. For a discussion of this view of narrative in literature and music, see Lawrence Kramer, ‘Narrative Nostalgia: Modern Art Music off the Rails’, in Music and Narrative since 1900, ed. Michael Klein and Nicholas Reyland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 163–85. 7. Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980), p. 9. 8. See Kofi Agawu, Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 43–9. 9. Implicit in this essay is that a topic is a convention of musical discourse. Danuta Mirka considers a topic a special kind of convention in which ‘styles and genres [are] taken out of their proper context and used in another one’. Later, though, she admits that this conception is developed for the study of eighteenth-century music: Danuta Mirka, ‘Introduction’,

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

michael l. klein in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 2, 43. For further reading on topic theory see the essays in this volume. On music and intertextuality, see also Michael Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Ratner, pp. 27–8. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 35. Ibid., p. 48. Michael Riffaterre, Text Production, trans. Terese Lyons (New York: Columbia University 1983), p. 88. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Noonday Press, 1993), pp. 20, 18. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: Wild Jot Press, 2009), p. 6. ‘pip, v. 3’, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) [accessed October 2015]. Ratner, p. 27. Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 17–19. Kristeva, p. 58. Barthes, p. 30.

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2 Secrets, Technology and Musical Narrative: Remarks on Method Lawrence Kramer

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arrative is notorious. It can be followed or formed by almost anyone; it is infinitely flexible; it is next to universal. Yet as an object of thought it is utterly elusive. We all know how to deal with narrative but we rarely agree on what it is and what makes it tick. This volume will not change all that, and far less will this short series of remarks. But perhaps it remains possible to clarify certain issues, or at least sharpen the focus of debate about them. My other chapter in this volume, ‘Music and the Rise of Narrative’, raises a series of methodological questions that would have been distracting to consider in situ, but that do need consideration because they have general import; they are not particular to me. The questions involve the status of narrative as a concept and a practice; the sense in which speaking of narrative in music makes (any) sense; and the grounds for thinking that narrativity in music is endemic to the music and not a secondary addition. What is a narrative and how do we know? What gives music (what music?) narrative force in the absence of language, narrativity in the absence of a story? And is narrativity in music only a theoretical fiction or is it something genuinely musical? (Are the alternatives even distinct from one another?)

Technology Narrative is a technology of knowledge. Like any technology, it changes, not least in response to other technologies. Histories of narrative genres or vehicles are common, above all accounts of the novel, but histories of narrative itself are harder to come by. There is a distinct tendency to treat narrative as a universal form with certain fixed properties, which are only exemplified differently at different times and places. But what counts as narrative varies widely with the stories available, the means of telling and transmitting them, and the cultural frames of reference in which they occur. ‘Narrative’ is a classic cover term for a variety of phenomena that do not form a coherent system. We can still read Homer’s Odyssey easily enough, but what would the Greeks who transcribed it have made of Joyce’s Ulysses? The changing character of narrative also has a certain tempo, a slow one for many centuries, but one that began to accelerate in the mid eighteenth century and has not looked back since. That more rapid series of changes should be of concern to anyone interested in the way music more and more assumed a narrative dimension along the same historical arc. Consider, for example, a familiar trend: the first movements of symphonic and chamber works in the mid to late nineteenth century operated on a

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larger time scale than their historical antecedents and with much less, if any, literal repetition. ‘Why?’ is a simple question with no simple or single answer. Certainly culture played a role. As music rose to the top of the aesthetic pyramid, time came to equal prestige and authority, as did the use of large (hence expensive) orchestral forces. But another possibility is the railway. In his classic study The Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch observes that nineteenth-century travellers looking through train windows developed a new mode of perception to accommodate the sight of the rapidly passing landscape.1 Travellers for whom the railway represented a shocking change from pre-modern forms of travel found the view chaotic. Younger or more adventurous travellers assimilated the passing scene to the model of the panoramas that were popular especially in the first half of the century. They saw the procession of changing vistas as a virtual artifice in which variety found aesthetic unity and an extended time scale through the intervention of technology. Perceptual innovations of this order cannot be confined to one location; they ripple across the entire cultural field. It is small step from the railway traveller’s power of panoramic synthesis to the concertgoer’s ability to follow constantly changing music over a long span. The configuration involved is also in tune with the lengthy and incident-rich narrativity of the nineteenth-century novel. The link to literary narrative is not entirely conjectural. The railway made it possible for the first time for people to read while travelling, which, among other things, helped counter the boredom of long journeys – as of course it still does. As Schivelbusch, again, observes, railway libraries and book stalls sprang up to meet the demand of middle-class travellers for something, above all novels, to read while they sped to their destination.2 The extended time of the railway journey literally tracked the time of narrative. It took only the right kind of music to turn the concert hall into an imaginary railway compartment. Most recently, the rapid transformation of communications systems has further changed the shape of narrative (along with everything else) in fundamental ways. The two most prominent sources of change are probably the rise of seriality and the fall of context. Serial drama, especially on television, has become a prestige genre, up from its nineteenthcentury roots as a popular medium for novels and its later low-cultural incarnation in movie serials once shown regularly in the United States at Saturday matinees (The Perils of Pauline, Flash Gordon). But consistent with digital culture, the narrative unit is no longer the episode, but the short scene; typical episodes combine multiple narrative threads by moving from one scene to the next with a minimum of exposition. Context, in the sense of a stable frame of reference to which a narrative may be referred, has given way to fictional world-making across multiple media platforms. Canonised narratives and their authors exchange traditional forms of authority for a kind of immortality by metamorphosis – realised in one emblematic case by Jane Austen’s becoming a vampire courtesy of a bite from Lord Byron (you didn’t know that about him? Seriously?), so that the two can contend against each other in the twenty-first century.3

Secrets These developments, past and present, greatly extend the primacy of narrativity over the content and the media of narratives. One might even say that the obstacles to storytelling that formerly acted in tension with it (fragmentation, temporal disjunction,

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multiplication of points of view and so on) have now simply become technologies of storytelling. Music stands out among expressive media for its ability to absorb narrativity while preserving much of that otherwise waning tension. Instrumental music may convey narrativity in sound but it rarely admits to a definite story. By sustaining this opacity alongside its narrative impetus, the music also conveys the connection of narrative to forms of mystery and secrecy that are not subject to a simple ‘reveal’. For Frank Kermode, narrative secrets provoke interpretation, sometimes by provoking frustration or exasperation. Secrets, he suggests, typically impede narrative sequence.4 But such overt secrets rest on a more primary, irreducible secrecy that is, if anything is, the primary force behind narrative in general, so to speak the narrativity of narrativity. But we need something more than a general force or principle. Narrative secrecy can become fully effective only when we hear it as entering into concrete relationships with or around narrative secrets. Music, here meaning instrumental music since the later eighteenth century, may be a vehicle of narrative force in general but it can become an object of narrative knowledge only in particular. Beethoven’s String Quartet in C major, Op. 59, no. 3, for example, famously begins in a tonal void that only slowly, very slowly, turns into the dominant seventh sonority from which the first theme subsequently bursts forth gleaming. The process, if that is the right word, is a perfect example of Kermode’s principle about secret impeding sequence. But what secret? Although no single answer will suffice, the formlessness of the introductory passage and the key of its destination offer a clue to one answer. Music in meaningless motion somehow winding its way to a sunburst in C major: that is a description of the beginning of the most famous composition of the era in Beethoven’s world, the transition from chaos to cosmos in Haydn’s Creation. The quartet’s secret, which reverberates throughout all four movements, is a desire (or a claim, or a determination, or an impossible wish) to appropriate the divine power of creation represented by Haydn to purely secular ends. The music is an attempt at affirmative profanation.

Musical Narrative In one respect, musical narrative is its own species. Addressing narrative in music requires two separate steps whereas addressing narrative in words, which is to say narrative proper, requires only one. Even when the gap between story and discourse is complex, or there are multiple and/or unreliable narrators, or some events remain indeterminate, a literary (or theatrical or cinematic) narrative is a relative given; we know in advance what it is that we have to interpret. With music we have to construct the narrative before we can interpret it. The two steps are conceptually distinct even on the rare occasions when they occur, or seem to occur, almost simultaneously. A palpable delay is more typical. This is as true of so-called programme music as of anything else, in part because virtually all instrumental music in the relevant centuries has a narrative impetus, and in part because programme music tends to treat its programme as a point of departure, not as a template. Even with vocal music, narrative construction is unavoidable. In one sense, admittedly, this requirement does not mark a real difference between musical narrative and other kinds. Even narrative given in a literary context requires

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some degree of construction and cannot be addressed without it. But there is a difference of degree that almost – and the almost is essential – amounts to a difference in kind. The question, accordingly, is not whether narrativity is present (it almost always is), but rather how to construct the relevant narrative in rewarding terms. In the introduction to Beethoven’s C-major Quartet, for example, the inner voices, on second violin and viola, move aimlessly, but the outer voices are strongly linear, the violin ascending while the cello descends. There are many ways to gloss this difference, from matter and spirit to impulse and law to chance and teleology, but at least two things stand out independent of whatever choices one makes. First, the music’s action has a strongly narrative profile; it might even be thought of as an effort to reach the point at which a narrative becomes possible. Second, the two strands of action are uneven; the outer voices prevail, and it should quickly become apparent that they will. To construct a narrative in rewarding terms, one has to account for this particular dynamism – which, as the echo of The Creation invites us to recognise, is not a matter of formal definition except insofar as it is a matter of cultural concern. But however rewarding such terms may be, are they real? If music cannot give us a narrative the way words can, why should we give it one? Is the narrative really musical at all? Is ‘musical narrative’ a contradiction in terms? The question of the musicality of musical narrative is likely to remain perennial, so it needs to be addressed. But it does not quite merit the attention it inevitably receives. ‘The Rise of Narrative’ at one point tells a certain story about the third movement of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. The story is not a happy one, and surely it is not the only story possible. In this case it is not even typical; it is even a shade heretical. It is a story of wilful, self-confessed failure. Surely, then, as only one possibility among many, this narrative attribution is less robust as an expression of knowledge than the sort of formal statement one might make about this music, for example, the statement that the recapitulation begins in medias res. (My account says just that.) The narrativity of the music, if it is there at all, remains secondary. Well, no: and for three reasons. First, as the chapter explains in some detail, there is a dimension of narrativity in such music entirely independent of story, a dimension that cannot be characterised effectively by neutral description. The statement about the recapitulation is only an observation. It is inert until we do something with it; the phrase ‘in medias res’ already begins that process, or it will if we follow up its literary implications. The statement is also significant enough to imply that something needs to be done, that is, to be said about it. Of course, alterations in ‘sonata form’ (if such a thing even exists) are perfectly common, but we need to ask what drives each one in its given instance. The answer is not always important, though it seems to be in this case. Second, real neutral description is impossible. If we scratch ‘in medias res’ and simply say that the recapitulation omits the head of the exposition, and leave things at that, we are already committed to a certain narrative and a certain ideology: of the authority of the supposed form and its autonomy as an object of aesthetic interest – a familiar and by now exhausted story but still one invoked so often that it can pass unnoticed as the expression of a contingent point of view. Third, there is always a story to be told about the stories we tell. Narrators change along with narratives and, in the large sense, narrative; storytelling involves subject

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positions and subject positions involve acculturation and ideology. A shift in perspective on music such as the Brahms movement may be desirable simply as an expansion in the possibilities of understanding, but its greater import resides in the frame of reference it evokes. Donald Tovey, for example, writing when the Fourth Symphony was still a recent work, celebrated ‘the tiger-like energy and spring’ of the movement and the ‘terseness and swiftness of [its] action’.5 I might have said something similar except to note that the tiger (about which reams could be written, starting with William Blake on one hand and the British Raj on the other) is only a stage prop or zoo animal. Tovey could not enjoy or praise such a show tiger; I can. Perhaps we could converge on something like Rilke’s roughly contemporary panther: Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte, der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht, ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte, in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht. (The easy movement of his supple steps turning in an ever-shrinking circle is like a dance of strength around a centre in which a mighty will stands paralysed.)6 But Tovey would never tolerate the paralysis. The reason, or one reason, is suggested by the sentence that introduces Tovey’s account: Within six or seven minutes Brahms’s third movement, perhaps the greatest scherzo since Beethoven, accomplishes a form which you may call either a sonata-rondo or a first movement, according to the importance you give to the fact that the first six bars of its theme return just between the short second subject and the quite fully organized and widely modulating development.7 Unlike Tovey, a writer I admire, I do not care who wrote the ‘greatest’ scherzo since Beethoven or anyone else, nor do I care much about the ‘accomplishment’ of form, or about ‘form’ at all except as a preliminary point of reference that is sometimes (and only sometimes) helpful. I care about what forces drive this hectic and lopsided music, springing tigers and all. And so, in fact, does Tovey, as his metaphors show. Partly from conviction, and partly because he accepts as well as mocks the constraints of his era’s discourse about music, he is simply unwilling to think about music without idealising it through the mediation of form. One could say of me, I suppose, that I undervalue formal mediation for reasons that escape my awareness. Perhaps so, though I do have an inkling of why, and since I spend part of my time writing music, I need to worry about technical matters all the time. But I can live with the charge. No one is immune from this sort of meta-commentary, but the key point about it is that it does not diminish the force of the interpretations it addresses but, on the contrary, expands them. But then, it would. One story expands and expands on another. That is one reason why narrative is notorious. Once started, there is no stopping it.

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Notes 1. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 55–61. 2. Ibid., pp. 64–7. 3. See Jim Collins, ‘The Use of Narrativity in Digital Cultures’, New Literary History, 44 (2013), 639–60. 4. Frank Kermode, ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’, Critical Enquiry, 7 (1980), 83–102. 5. Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis: Symphonies and Other Orchestral Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 224. 6. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Der Panther’ (The Panther), 1902; from Neue Gedichte, Erster Teil (1907) . My translation. 7. Tovey, pp. 224–5.

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3 Derrida, de Man, Barthes, and Music as the Soul of Writing Peter Dayan

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hat is music? Conventional critical wisdom is that we have no generally valid answer to this question. But why do we have no answer? The obvious reason would be this: music has no stable identity, and therefore there is no point asking in general terms what it is. Music is only what we choose to call by that name, and that varies according to cultural context. However, a very different reason for our inability to define music emerges from French critical theory. It is a reason that has deep roots in European cultural traditions stretching back centuries. It is simply this: music tells us a kind of truth which verbal language cannot convey; a truth beyond signification. Certainly, we cannot define it in language. But that is not because it has no stable identity. It is because language has its limitations. Those who (like critics generally) refuse to believe in any kind of truth that cannot be put into words will therefore not be able to see what music is. Or at least, they will not be able to allow themselves to admit they know what music is. But when they love, they know what music is, whether they admit it or not; especially, when they have loved and lost. On 18 January 1984, Jacques Derrida, then doubtless the world’s most famous living literary theorist, spoke at Yale University in homage to his friend and colleague Paul de Man, who had died less than a month earlier. Derrida’s audience was largely anglophone. He began by excusing himself for speaking in French, his language, which was the one in which he had always conversed with Paul de Man. He had not the heart, he said, to translate it. In any case, he suggested, it hardly mattered if some of those present could not understand his French. What counted, at such a time, was not really what one might say; it was for those present to feel together, ‘with voice and with music’.1 What music? How could Jacques Derrida, who was no musician, make music bringing together his friends in mourning? And why would they need music? Was not his Yale audience composed of men and women of words, rather than of music? The answer to these questions is offered through a word that emblematically, here, resists translation: ‘âme’. With it, Derrida gives us to understand why the words that bring us together are only to be understood as music. Those present at Yale on that day had, said Derrida, ‘as one says in French, “la mort dans l’âme”, death in the soul’ (p. 323). And what, precisely, in this context, might the soul be, for the great theorist who taught the literary world how to be wary of such metaphysical concepts? He gives the answer in the last paragraph of the essay. The soul he has in mind is a little piece of wood keeping two other pieces of wood

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apart, and enabling the communication of music. The soul has death in it because it is itself, whatever else it might be, a thing. He recounts how, after a jazz concert in Chicago to which de Man had taken him and his son Pierre, he had listened to the two of them talking about musical instruments, and had discovered that the word ‘âme’ means, not only ‘soul’, but ‘soundpost’, in stringed instruments such as violins or basses: I learned that the ‘soul’ is the name one gives in French to the small and fragile piece of wood – always very exposed, very vulnerable – that is placed within the body of these instruments to support the bridge and assure the resonant communication of the two sounding boards. I didn’t know why at that moment I was so strangely moved and unsettled in some dim recess by the conversation I was listening to: no doubt it was due to the word ‘soul’ which always speaks to us at the same time of life and of death [. . .] (p. 326) ‘I didn’t know why’: this expression (more commonly, in the present tense, ‘je ne sais pas pourquoi’) is frequent in Derrida’s writing, and always a vital invitation to the reader to ask, precisely, why, why Jacques Derrida did not know. Why was he moved in a manner beyond his understanding at the time? It is a matter of life and death. The soul, here, is a material, physical thing, an object. It allows (though it does not itself create) the emergence of music, the communication of music, from one sounding board to another. Derrida has already told us that ‘only music today seems to me bearable, consonant, able to give some measure of what unites us in the same thought’ (p. 325). He is speaking, not making music, but speaking is unbearable: what we need is music. Where can it come from? Only from a thing, a thing within an instrument; its soul is a thing, an unseen, vulnerable thing. Words might give the false impression that they come from a person, from the soul within a person, a soul (or, indeed, a heart) so immaterial that we imagine it might, after all, not be a thing. But music materialises the incomprehensible unity of the thing and the soul. And that materialisation is what, in the face of death, we need. Derrida did not know why he was so moved by that identification, created within his own language, between the small piece of wood and the soul. It is, indeed, what we cannot know. How can a soul be a thing? We cannot understand; but in music, we hear that it is. The genius of the great francophone theorists of the late twentieth century, including Derrida, de Man and Barthes, is that they allow us to see and think about this fact, which we cannot understand. Indeed, what they give us, if we know how to read, is the gift of music in writing; not writing as an explanation of music (that is not possible), but an actualisation in words of the ultimately incomprehensible way that music works, bringing us together in the face of death, because it is at once a thing, and possessed of (or by) a soul. Let us remember that Jacques Derrida was moved, in ways he was unable to understand, by the soul of the stringed instrument only because his son and his friend were speaking French. It would not have worked in English. That power of music to unite us all – whatever language we speak – is explained to us through something that conspicuously fails to transcend languages. Or does it? It is true that English cannot bring together for us, as French does, the soundpost and the soul. But every language offers, through its ambiguities, its coincidences of sound and of pattern, through the

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happenstance of etymology and fortuitous analogies of rhythm, opportunities to make connections between things and souls, between the real world of discrete objects and an ideal musical togetherness. Perhaps that is what we should call poetry: words taking advantage of those opportunities within a language, in order to give us an obscure understanding of what music does, bringing us together in the face of death. If we did not have music, would this be possible? Would we have poetry? Less than three years earlier, Derrida had published another text on the death of a friend and colleague: ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’. Again, it evokes music from the beginning; again, music appears as a force for bringing together, for uniting; and again, Derrida gives us to understand this force through a play on words that only works in French. The play, here, is with the verb ‘accorder’, which can mean ‘to tune’ (as when the various instruments in an orchestra tune themselves to the same pitch), or ‘to make agree’, including in the grammatical sense (as when nouns, verbs, adjectives and articles are made to agree in number). In fact, the untranslatable plays on words had begun within the very title. ‘Les morts de Roland Barthes’ might mean the several deaths that Barthes died, or the many dead people that Barthes had mourned (‘morts’ meaning either ‘deaths’ or ‘dead people’). Both senses are taken up in the essay; and music brings both together, makes them agree, tunes them to each other. Each death, for Derrida, is unique, and each is the end of the world; that became the repeated refrain of the publications of the last two decades of his life. But in music, that uniqueness of each death becomes something we can share. Every unique death can be tuned to every other. Words cannot embody that tuning, because each language is itself unique; as Mallarmé had said a century earlier, the multiplicity of languages prevents any one of them from being materially the truth.2 But thanks to music, thanks to what words (in any language) can say about music, they can evoke the mechanism of that tuning, and give us, if not to understand it, at least to feel that there is a unique direction of ideal incomprehension towards which it is worth directing our ears: incomprehension of the fact that a thing cannot be a soul. When words do this, when they evoke the incomprehensible way that music tunes life with death, they cease to operate with scientific or philosophical rigour. From the standpoint of science, a soundpost is not the same thing as a soul; a metaphor and an accident of language may bring them together, but objective truth, philosophical conceptuality, separates them. Derrida, however, finds the value of Barthes’s writing in a kind of operation that works precisely within those very accidents of language, within the material of the language, using the language as an instrument or thing, through which concepts are composed. Nor is Barthes content to use the French language as he finds it. He makes of it an instrument that only he can use, creating idiolectical terms and oppositions, and composing between them, as no one else could.3 In the manner of this composition, says Derrida, we can hear a certain music. His manner, the way in which he displays, plays with, and interprets the pair studium/ punctum [. . .] in all of this we will later hear the music [. . .] The conceptual rigour of an artifact remains supple and playful here, and it lasts the time of a book; it will be useful to others but it suits perfectly only the one who signs it, like an instrument that can’t be lent to anyone, like the history of an instrument. For above all, and in the first place, this apparent opposition (studium/punctum) does not forbid but, on the contrary, facilitates a certain composition between the two concepts.4

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Is that composition musical? It might seem not. It is words that are here are played on, as if they were instruments. The sense, in words, of composition, is also: negotiation and compromise; it is arrangement, too, bringing together of elements; and of course, it is bound by the limits of the language, not quite the same in English as in French. But music, too, as we receive it, can only be negotiation and compromise, arrangement, bringing together of elements, and not quite the same to French ears as to anglophone ones; hence, in every sense, ‘the composition is also the music. One could open a long chapter here on Barthes as musician’.5 Barthes, like Paul de Man but unlike Derrida, was a musician himself in the sense that he made music. He played the piano (and, in his younger days, sang). Much of his writing on music works with the physical experience of making music, and with a kind of sensuous listening that finds music in the body of the performer, in the grain of the voice and the fingers of the pianist (or harpsichordist), rather than in any message to be conveyed. Music, to Barthes as to Derrida, is a kind of language that is inseparable from materiality. Just as the soul of the violin is to be located in a piece of wood, so the life of a song is in the physical body of its singer. Of course we are always free, rationally free, to say that this is nonsense. We might say that a violin has a soundpost, but it does not have a soul, and if it appears to do so, that is because the music it plays comes from the heart of the player; similarly, a song does not have a life, and if it appears to us to do so, that is only because the singer is putting his or her heart into it. But what is that heart? What kind of thing is it? Where will we find it, if we look for it? Is it a physical thing, part of the musician’s body? As we seek it out, can we do any better than to reproduce that movement of emotion and incomprehension which Pierre Derrida and Paul de Man inspired in Jacques Derrida when they told him what they knew about the soul of instruments? I think that for Barthes as for Derrida, between the soul, life, the heart and the thing, there is always composition: negotiation, compromise, arrangement, a stand-off always to be reframed, a work of music always to be written. And for both of them, that work, that composition, set to work in language by music, is that which allows words to become the very opposite of a mere expression of things: the language of love, especially of love for those who cannot be with us. Barthes’s last book Camera Lucida (1980) is, in one sense, a book about the nature of the photograph, as an incontrovertible reproduction of reality. If that were all it was, it might now seem, in the era of digital photography, outdated. It is not at all outdated; it remains as poignant and as thought-provoking as ever, because its underlying theme is far more generally the relationship between representation in art and death, and also because Barthes’s considerations on this theme are inexorably intertwined with his reflections on his own reactions to the recent death of his mother. Famously, he writes at some length about a photograph of her in a winter garden which is not itself reproduced in the book. That photograph’s absence, the absence of the reproduction of the representation of his mother, is balanced by the presence of references to music as he evokes that photograph. In ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, Derrida quotes two particularly moving sentences from Camera Lucida in which music is invoked to express the nature of what passed between mother and son: ‘the Winter Garden Photograph was for me like the last music Schumann wrote before collapsing, that first Gesang der Frühe that accords with both my mother’s being and my grief at her death [. . .].6

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What could be stranger, nearer to the collapse of reason which seemed to threaten Schumann as he wrote this short and lovely piece, than to bring together, to tune together, to create an agreement between, the being of his mother, and his grief at her death? Surely there was a world of difference between her being, what she actually was in life, and his grief? But that world of difference, the difference between those we love and our grief at their loss, is, precisely, where music arises. Music does not collapse the difference. The grief and the being do not, in fact, accord with each other. Rather, it is music that accords with both. It is like a soundpost, a thing, between them, keeping them apart with its soul, but creating as it does so the space for their union, their togetherness: the space of the soul. At the same time, it creates the space for a language that, by speaking of or as music, can voice that togetherness. This language which depends on a sense of music for its very existence is the only proper language of love. The musical language of love has an enemy brother, an eternal antagonist: the language of signification, which is also the language of expression, of representation, of science, and of philosophy. That language of signification is not the one in which Barthes and his mother lived together. In a sense I never ‘spoke’ to her, never ‘discoursed’ in her presence, for her; we supposed, without saying anything of the kind to each other, that the frivolous insignificance of language, the suspension of images, must be the very space of love, its music.7 The suspension of images, the insignificance of language: every reader of Barthes’s writing on literature will recognise in this description the condition, for him, of the literary experience. Like Derrida, like de Man, like Mallarmé nearly a century earlier, Barthes perceived literature always in unstable opposition to a non-literary approach to language. The non-literary sees in words only what they signify, represent, or express. Expression is the antithesis of literature, as it is of music. Barthes’s musical ‘bête noire’ was singers who failed to appreciate this. He detested the art of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau because it was ‘inordinately expressive [. . .] dramatic, sentimentally clear, borne by a voice lacking in any “grain”’.8 Fischer-Dieskau pandered to a popular taste that accepted music and art only on condition that ‘they be clear, that they “translate” an emotion and represent a signified (the “meaning” of a poem)’.9 What Barthes wanted from a singer was not an expression: it was a voice with a grain, which speaks to us of that material thing, the body, from which, like love, it issues. Derrida had said at the beginning of his homage to de Man that it was ‘with voice and with music’ (p. 323) that those present could be together in a common thought; with voice, not with the meaning of words which, like the soul, he could not bear to translate. In the same way, the words that brought together Barthes and his mother could be words of love because their task was not to signify or to express anything; it was to bear the unique grain of a voice. What Roland Barthes knew as music was not only the space of his love and of his togetherness with his mother, but also the condition of the language of that love. Would you be kind enough not to understand, not to know why, if I were to hear in that music the origin of poetry?

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Notes 1. See The Lesson of Paul de Man, Special Issue, Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), 323–6 (p. 323). Derrida’s tribute (untitled) is given in French on pp. 13–16, and in English (translation by Kevin Newmark) on pp. 323–6. All references in brackets in this essay are to that publication. The translation, according to a note in the journal, had ‘the approval of the author’ (p. 326). 2. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crise de vers’, in Œeuvres complètes, ed. B. Marchal, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2003), pp. 204–13 (p. 208). 3. Derrida is discussing the opposition between the terms ‘studium’ and ‘punctum’ that Barthes builds up in Camera Lucida. What Barthes means by this opposition need not concern us here; my point concerns the way the opposition operates. 4. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, in The Work of Mourning, ed. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 34–67 (pp. 40–1). 5. Ibid., p. 42. 6. Ibid., p. 43. 7. Ibid., p. 43. 8. Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 179–89 (pp. 183–5). 9. Ibid., p. 185.

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Part I Literature and Music before 1500 Section Editors: Elizabeth Eva Leach and Helen Deeming

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Introduction Ardis Butterfield, Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach

History and Disciplinary History

T

he first part of this introduction will argue that music and literature are more closely linked in the Middle Ages than in many other periods of history for two reasons. First, music – or at least what we are permitted to know of it from the surviving written record – was predominantly designed to enable the sung performance of texts of various kinds. Very little instrumental music survives from the Middle Ages, and much of it is vocal music whose text has been removed (and therefore might be argued potentially to maintain a signifying presence). Second, every kind of text, from lyric to prose Bible readings, was regularly sung. This abundance of contact between music and words has proved both irresistible and challenging to modern scholars. In the brilliant flowering of scholarship on the medieval period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars such as Friedrich Gennrich and Friedrich Ludwig, trained as they were in romance philology as well as musicology, took it for granted that both the texts and the music required equal attention. Their editions remain useful to this day. Greater specialisation during the twentieth century, especially in anglophone universities, led to a disciplinary divergence that is still current, but a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century revival of interdisciplinary research into medieval music genres has begun to reshape the structure of this research in highly profitable directions.1 A new generation of scholars, alive to the methodological complexities of studying texted music, is investigating refrains, motets, troubadour and trouvère song, and insular song in ways that seek to account for the dual constraints and provocations of shaping music to words, and words to melodies. Of course, approaches to these repertoires that focus exclusively on them as ‘literature’ continue to be produced, along with analyses that are tightly musicological. Nonetheless, if, in Margaret Switten’s words, the study of medieval poetry and music together still searches to understand itself as ‘a discipline with a distinguishing ideology and approaches sanctified by use’, then it has taken some significant steps further along that path.2

Between Texts and Acts When the musicologist Richard Taruskin collected together his writing and journalism in Text and Act (1995), he was responding to the basic challenge of the so-called New Musicology of the 1980s and later.3 This movement was a reaction to the then

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conventional view that the proper subject of musicology was a musical score which, appropriately edited, represented the Urtext’s embodiment of the composer’s intentions, and which could be analysed using various technical methods. According to these assumptions, the musical work could be known better in one of its score copies than in any number of performances. For the New Musicology, however, the subject was rather wider and encompassed what ethnomusicologists began to call musicking, that is, the various acts that produce or engage with musical objects, including performance, criticism, discussion – and even the making of scores.4 Opening musicological enquiry to social and contextual questions resulted in a cultural turn in which musicology took on a political aspect. In the writing of Taruskin and his followers, the exoteric politics were liberal and egalitarian, seeking to authenticate the temporal, performed musical experience of the individual listener as a way of democratising intellectualism. The high-water mark of this approach is perhaps in Carolyn Abbate’s ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic’, which proposes acts of composing, performing, listening as the proper research focus of musicology, since ‘we love music for its reality’ rather than ‘great works as unperformed abstractions or even subtended by an imagined or hypothetical performance’.5 But imagining and hypothesising are also acts that can manifest in writing, speaking and teaching. Medieval music is emerging as one area in which this rethinking is particularly profitable. In a period for which it is impossible to do anything other than imagine or hypothesise what contemporary performances were like, it is all the more urgent – and stimulating – to reflect on the meaning, authority and hermeneutic potential of musical notation as a representation of musical sound. Renewed engagement with surviving medieval notation prompts a sense of the score as very different from an authorial Urtext. For instance, as much recent work has emphasised, in medieval culture any understanding of the function of notation needs also to take account of the role of memory, an observation epitomised in Isidore of Seville’s comment that ‘unless sounds are held by the memory of man, they perish, because they cannot be written down’.6 Medieval grammarians remind us that from the earliest times, the writing down of music was the province of grammar, of philology. It is no accident that musical notes are labelled with the first seven letters of the alphabet. As one of the liberal arts of the medieval university, musica was a specialised branch of the quadrivium; at a more elementary level correct forms of literate utterance were taught through chant in grammar schools and song schools (often the same institution, and often by the same teacher). More recent university pedagogical practice since the nineteenth century has differently categorised the teaching of arts and humanities. While music retained a special place in the curriculum, its relationship to other subjects changed as those subjects were reframed. English Language and Literature gained its first chair at University College London in 1828, but it was decades later before literature gained independent status as a degree subject, and not until 1910 that the King Edward VII chair was founded at Cambridge (and its first holder was a classicist).7 Musicology, too, was shaped by the pedagogy of classical philology, and the earliest great editors of medieval music, like those of medieval literary texts, were impelled by nationalist desires to create as distinguished an origin for their respective vernacular cultures as their classicist contemporaries were shoring up for the ancient past.8 Current approaches to medieval song have much to learn from the technical proficiency of these early pioneers and their fearless

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assumption of the skills required to edit and interpret the myriad forms of musical and literary notation in hitherto often largely neglected medieval manuscripts of chant, troubadour and trouvère song, and motets; as well as of epic, romance and chronicle. Literary scholarship on the medieval period during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first cannot easily be summarised in a sentence: the preoccupations differ according to the language (anglophone, French, German, Italian) and the relationship of the scholarship to that on other periods. Perhaps most relevant to this context are the ways in which New Criticism and New Historicism have percolated into fundamental hermeneutic assumptions about ‘lyric’. The formalist approach of New Criticism has worked its way deep into editorial as well as pedagogic practice: medieval lyrics have been (and largely still are) treated as autonomous ‘verbal icons’ ripe for individualist comment on their character as complex literary objects.9 Editors have selected the ones which conform most closely to new critical ideals, and have privileged notions of authorship and literary control.10 New Historicism, by contrast, has had a kind of negative effect on the place of medieval lyric in modern scholarship. Dominant in literary studies since the 1980s, it has effectively forced lyric out of the spotlight: lyric is not even in the index of the 2002 Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature.11 Various critical developments have changed this picture. The most significant publication in the field of text and music relations was John Stevens’s Words and Music in the Middle Ages (1986). As Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, Stevens pioneered a cross-over approach to medieval song, in which he worked with equal ease on music, French, Latin and German texts, as well as late medieval and early Tudor English song. Although not all his arguments about rhythm and number have won acceptance, the more enduring legacy of his extraordinarily broad yet detailed conspectus of song in Words and Music, from chant, troubadour and trouvère song, Latin song, sung narrative to ecclesiastical drama, is twofold. His work has focused attention, first, on the interrelatedness of words and melodies, and hence of the impossibility of considering one adequately without the other, and second, on questions of performance. He (and others of his generation) took it as axiomatic that anyone attending to medieval literature should take into account that it was performed rather than merely read silently. As his near contemporary, J. A. Burrow, put it: ‘The fundamental difference [. . .] between medieval and modern conditions can be simply stated. People in the Middle Ages commonly treated books rather as musical scores are treated today [. . .] Reading was a kind of performance.’12 Both these emphases – on song as music and text, and as a performed element of medieval culture – are receiving new reflection in current scholarship.13 Stevens’s specialist knowledge of medieval literature (in several languages), as well as music, has made him a hard act to follow, and his work has often not received direct acknowledgement as a result. Subsequent studies, especially those which fall more squarely into one discipline, have been more explicitly and conventionally influential. This is true of Sylvia Huot’s From Song to Book, published a year after Words and Music.14 Brilliantly grounded in thoughtful and original expositions of the mise en page and compilation of French manuscripts of lyric and romance, Huot traces an exclusively literary trajectory by which troubadour and trouvère lyric stops being oral and becomes ‘writerly’. A gift for literary readers of medieval texts, Huot’s argument satisfies the desire to see literariness as not only essential to those texts but

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increasingly their sole property. For Huot, performance is not sonic but abstract and visual. Concentrating on the silent, if visually expressive page, she defines it as performative in terms of its details of layout, of the visual cues it provides for the theme of the poet as singer and writer. Taking a different turn, Ardis Butterfield’s Poetry and Music looks at surviving French medieval song not as ‘literary’ but as ‘literate’, and hence at the music as literate too.15 To see song as literate involves understanding the often (to us) unexpected ways in which vernacular song is first written down: cited in a wide range of disparate genres such as romance, chronicle, didactic prose and poetry, drama and motet, collected in anthologies, broken up into or built up from short refrains and cited within other songs. From this perspective, the music (where it survives in notation) is not irrelevant to a notion of the literary, but all the more important an element in the growing literacy of song. Taking note of the music, rather than ignoring it, prompts much wider questions about the nature of performance and the layered sonic worlds of a teeming network of melodies and texts only partially visible to us through what has survived in written form. Song does not become increasingly literary; as Stevens teaches us, the literary – and the musical – are both incomplete approaches if they marginalise the other. The multiple hybrid perceptions of song and narrative in thirteenthcentury France – the dominant creative period in the growth of vernacular culture – generate new thinking about the book and its potential to represent sound and meaning. Burgeoning book production, stimulated by university and ecclesiastical pedagogy and practice throughout that century and the next, took the notation of sound to new heights. Once we break through the disciplinary barriers in which musicologists study the music and literary scholars the words, we find a field of comparative research across chansonniers, motet collections, romance and didactic compilations, allegories and school text translations, devotional reworkings of the Psalms and Marian hagiography (and much more) that still remains largely underexplored.

Poetry and Music: Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce? Because of their shared textual-performative natures, the boundary between literature and music in the Middle Ages is less pronounced than it has become in some later periods. Yet the assumptions about the nature of this boundary, and the extent to which it even exists, are closely dependent on disciplinary perspectives. Partly under the influence of Huot’s work, and partly through a view (from both sides of the literary-musical scholarly divide) of text–music relations that long precedes her work, it is often claimed that poetry and music go their separate ways towards the end of the period.16 Support for this comes (for example) from interpretations of Eustache Deschamps’s 1392 poetic treatise L’Art de dictier in which a distinction is made between natural music (that is, poetry) and artificial music (that is, the music produced by singing or playing instruments).17 This appears to pave the way for a sense of lyric for reading only (silently or aloud) as opposed to lyric that is sung. Deschamps’s remarks are elusive and obscure, and it is hard to make perfect sense out of them. He does indeed describe situations in which one might perform natural music (the verbal text) and artificial music (the melody) quite separately. But he also says that the two musics ‘married’ together create a union that is more ‘ennobled and fitting [. . .] than either would be alone’.18

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It is also often pointed out that after Guillaume de Machaut (d.1377), no poet manifests comparable control over text and music together, and the function of composer and lyricist comes instead to resemble the composer/librettist combination of later centuries. More recent arguments, for example about the motets of fifteenthcentury composer Guillaume Du Fay (1397–1474), suggest that in fact the combined function of the poet-composer might well have persisted for some time.19 Yet whether or not poet-composers can be found later than Machaut the larger question is whether lyrics that survive without musical notation were nonetheless intended to be sung. By definition this is hard to answer since the music is absent from these records. It is true that even in Machaut’s output, lyrics without musical notation far outnumber those which do possess it. It is also true that in general throughout the history of writing and into the present, far less music has been copied than words: it is a specialist activity, less widely taught than the skill of writing words, and indeed a skill that was thought necessary only relatively late in Western history. So the absence of written music need not mean per se that the words were not intended to be sung. Absent or present, musical notation is only one indication of the relevance of music to lyric texts throughout the Middle Ages. Pace Huot, ‘what continues into the fifteenth century is an increasing interest in the textuality of music as well as the musicality of the text’.20 The writing down of music increases the reach of music and testifies to a felt need to incorporate music thoroughly into the culture of the book. At the same time, the use of writing to represent sound infiltrates the culture of music. Building on the perception that song, through the wide citation of refrains, became a fundamentally hybrid, mixed and malleable form in the hands of thirteenth-century poets and composers, is a wider appreciation of the multifaceted reception and dispersal of poetry and song in their own times. As we have noted, lyrics migrated around many kinds of texts, being quoted, cited and excerpted in a dizzying array of seemingly non-musical environments, such as sermons, devotional manuals and grammar treatises, to name but a few. Though it has usually been assumed (tacitly or otherwise) that such instances rob the lyrics of any musical content or connotation they may once have had,21 newer work contends instead that these unsung texts are thereby haunted by song and sounds in ways and for purposes that are only now beginning to be explored.22 The relationship between poetry and music was, therefore, one in which one partner (the text) was more frequently and openly performed and copied than the other (the music), but it could also be a promiscuous one: numerous examples of contrafactum (the replacement of a song’s text with another one to be sung to the same tune) show that lyric unions were dissolvable. This could work both ways, with individual texts consorting with several musical settings at least as frequently as the reverse. The situation is highly complex, and becomes even more so in genres that were polytextual in performance (see below), as these involved singers and listeners in the simultaneous encounter with multiple texts and multiple lines of melody, all of which could be disaggregated and recombined in performance or in textualised transmission. It seems likely that such pieces may have been the subject of increasing knowledge throughout a person’s relatively lengthy (if not continuous) engagement with them. One might imagine, for example, a polytextual song performed for a particular occasion with explanations by the performer/composer on hand, and then the same song persisting in the repertoire of a particular court with an ongoing reception history that accrued

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more meanings through long acquaintance, some from the text itself and some via association with particular subsequent performances, readings aloud, silent readings, thinking and contemplation, and discussion.

Chant and Chanson The conjunction of literature and music in the Middle Ages, however, was not only (or perhaps even principally) to be found in courtly settings. For most medieval people, words and music came together most frequently in church, during the sung recitation of the liturgy: singing – in a breadth of musical styles of varying complexity – formed part of the experience of worship in every ecclesiastical setting, from the greatest monasteries to the tiniest parish churches. The texts of the liturgy were in many cases extracted from, or inspired by, the Bible, but were carefully ordered and structured to enact a performance of meaning specific to the Church’s doctrine for each period or festival of the liturgical year. Music, alongside the spoken word and the acts and gestures of ritual, played an integral part in the symbolic re-enactment of the Last Supper that took place at every mass; as such, the liturgy was inherently dramatic, and occasionally more explicitly so, in the form of liturgical dramas that supplemented the regular worship with further re-enactments of biblical stories or the lives of saints. Liturgical singing, commonly referred to as plainchant (or plainsong), was frequently neither ‘chant’ nor ‘plain’, in the sense that those terms are understood today. Some liturgical texts, were – it is true – chanted, more or less on a monotone, with a minimum of melodic decoration: this method of singing was used typically for the declamation of long texts, such as biblical prose passages or psalms. But other liturgical texts were animated with more elaborate music, to an extent that mirrored their position and function within the ritual as a whole. For poetic texts, such as hymns and (in the later Middle Ages) sequences, music reinforced poetic structures with repeating melodies that lodged easily in the memory, and assisted in the recollection and internalisation of sacred truths. Music destined to be sung as the accompaniment to the holiest moments of the sacred performance, by contrast, could encompass lengthy melismas (passages with many notes sung to a single syllable), whose effect could be to interrupt the declamation of text with almost wordless musical expressions of devotion. Music thus served to animate, punctuate and pace liturgical texts, heightening their affective force for worshippers. Outside the church, chanson could accomplish many of the same goals as chant, serving to make texts more memorable (for those who sang them and those who listened to them), to augment their expressive potency in performance, and to invite reflection and meditation on the texts themselves and in the spaces between.

Introducing the Essays in Part I The central theme of the textualisation of music and the concomitant musicalisation of text is explored by Helen Deeming in the first chapter. Deeming notes the similarity of the under-prescriptive nature of medieval musical notations to antique and medieval views of writing in general, which was seen, too, as unable to stand in for speech. Both, it seems, were thought to require a human interlocutor to perform the text, whether spoken or sung. The highly complex interactions of orality and writing throughout

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the Middle Ages are further explored by Nils Holger Petersen in the context of liturgical ritual. Examining the far-reaching liturgical reforms of the Carolingians, and the increasingly elaborate forms of musical animation of the liturgy throughout the following centuries, Petersen considers the place of music in medieval communal devotion, and the questions of representation and mimetic enactment raised by medieval liturgical drama in the broadest sense. The textualisation of music allowed, as the writing of text had, the transmission of songs – both vernacular ones and the Latin repertories of Christian chant – across time. The musicalisation of text had a different but related effect of enabling quoted musico-textual elements – refrains – to migrate between works (both those primarily musical and those primarily literary) as a way of highlighting and disrupting generic norms.23 Maureen Boulton surveys the formal experimentation in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French literature that produced various music–textual hybrids, with narratives in both prose and verse incorporating sung lyrics. Jennifer Saltzstein concentrates instead on refrains within motets and songs. Both insertion and quotation are linked in offering a challenge to the recognition of an origin outside the text in which they are now repeated. Nevertheless, they have been differentiated by Sarah Kay in a study of refrain quotation in Occitan texts in which she identifies insertion as a northern French sung phenomenon, designed to create a national culture, and quotation as a more southern diasporic cosmopolitanism, moralising and spoken rather than sung.24 While the geographic (and attendant linguistic) argument seems plausible, the dichotomy between spoken and sung repetition is, however, more problematic, since it rests on the assumption, questioned here by Deeming, that the sung status of a lyric citation relies on the presence of separate musical notation (that is, separate from the ‘notation’ or writing of the text that is to be sung). It also neglects the genre of the motet, which is a European phenomenon with sources from northern and southern Europe and out east into the Holy Roman Empire. Refrain quotation in this undeniably sung genre appears in a musical form that marries didacticism with generic instability and hybridity. The polytextuality of motets (and, later, that of songs) demands its own forms of recognition and reading from its audiences, and promotes polysemic, paradoxical, allegorical and self-contradictory interpretations, making it the ‘cross-over genre par excellence’.25 Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach explore in their essay the signifying power of polytextuality in both motets and songs, noting that the frequent effect of aural disruption and confusion acts, like disruption at the textual level of quotation, as a spur to contemplation – a challenge to the audience to recognise and disentangle the threads of the conversation or argument, presented – as only music can do – simultaneously. Helen J. Swift and Anne Stone pick up instead on the performative nature of subjectivity and what singing as an I might add to that performance. They pursue the nature of lyric subjectivity into narrative text, relating it to the issue of voice, and also ruminate on what the depiction of a private, particular, desiring subject in a public form of communication in language – a symbolic system of universals – might enable by way of play. This issue of the subject’s desire is pursued, too, in the chapter on gender by Leach and Nicolette Zeeman, which notes the gendered nature of desire in lyric and posits a reflection of that in the key stylistic musical materials of medieval sung counterpoint.

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ardis butterfield, helen deeming and elizabeth eva leach

As a whole, these essays pursue the tight but complex interrelations between music and poetry, and suggest that, insofar as medieval literature is poetic literature, it is a musical literature too.

Notes 1. See John Stevens’s pioneering Words and Music in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale (London: Dent, 1989) and Discarding Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Margaret Switten, Music and Poetry in the Middle Ages: A Guide to Research on French and Occitan Song, 1100–1400 (New York and London: Garland, 1995). Students of Stevens include Susan Rankin, The Music of the Medieval Liturgical Drama in France and England (New York and London: Garland, 1989); Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France from Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Mary O’Neill, Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 2. Switten, p. xi. 3. Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 4. See Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 5. Carolyn Abbate, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, Critical Enquiry, 30 (2004), 505–36 (p. 505). 6. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, III.xv.2, trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 95; on music and memory, see Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). See further Helen Deeming’s chapter, below. 7. See the very informative ‘History of the UCL English Department’ by Charlotte Mitchell: ; and Richard Smail, ‘Verrall, Arthur Woollgar (1851–1912)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [accessed 6 May 2017]. 8. See Michelle Warren, Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier’s Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Richard Trachsler, ‘“La Philologie Romane” à l’allemande’: La naissance d’un modèle européen’, in Bartsch, Foerster et Cie. La première romanistique allemande et son influence en Europe, ed. Richard Trachsler, Rencontres 64. Secteur Moyen Age. Civilisation Médiévale 7 (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), pp. 7–19. 9. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954). 10. For discussion, see Ardis Butterfield, ‘The Art of Repetition: Machaut’s Ballade 33 “Nes qu’on porroit”’, Close Readings: Essays in Honour of John Stevens and Philip Brett, ed. Tess Knighton and John Milsom, Special Issue of Early Music, 31 (August 2003), 346–60; Butterfield, ‘The Construction of Textual Form: Cross-lingual Citation in Some Medieval Lyrics’, in Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Yolanda Plumley, Giuliano Di Bacco and Stefano Jossa (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2011), pp. 41–57; and, most recently, Butterfield, ‘Why Medieval Lyric?’, English Literary History, 82, 2, Essays from the English Institute 2013: Form (2015), 319–43. 11. The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace, paperback edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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12. J. A. Burrow, Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literature 1100–1500, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 49. 13. See Performing Medieval Text, ed. Ardis Butterfield, Henry Hope and Pauline Souleau (Oxford: MHRA, Legenda, 2017). 14. Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 15. Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France. 16. Huot followed up her From Song to Book with a study of motets that did attempt to take music at least notionally into account: Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)). Her subsequent books have, however, turned back to materials and manuscripts in which a thoroughgoing literary historical approach is entirely appropriate. James I. Wimsatt’s Chaucer and his French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) attempted to attach the notion of ‘natural music’ to French and English versification more broadly in the period. 17. Eustache Deschamps: L’Art de dictier, ed. and trans. Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994). 18. Ibid., p. 127. 19. See Leofranc Holford-Strevens, ‘Du Fay the Poet? Problems in the Texts of his Motets’, Early Music History, 16 (1997), 97–165. The figure of the poet-composer re-emerges in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, notably in the form of ‘singer-songwriters’ such as John Dowland. 20. Ardis Butterfield, ‘Vernacular Poetry and Music’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music, ed. Mark Everist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 205–24 (p. 224). 21. See, for example, Sarah Kay, Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 22. Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Helen Deeming, ‘Songs and Sermons in ThirteenthCentury England’, in Pastoral Care in Medieval England: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Peter Clarke and Sarah James (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 101–22; Elizabeth Eva Leach and Jonathan Morton, ‘Intertextual and Intersonic Resonance in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour, Combining Perspectives from Literary Studies and Musicology’, Romania, 135 (2017), 313–52. 23. Pioneering literary research on refrains by Nico van de Boogaard (Rondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1969)) and Eglal Doss-Quinby (Les Refrains chez les trouvères du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (New York: Peter Lang, 1984)) is extensively developed from a literary, musical and theoretical perspective by Ardis Butterfield, ‘Repetition and Variation in the Thirteenth-Century Refrain’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 116 (1991), 1–23; ‘The Refrain and the Transformation of Genre in the Roman de Fauvel’ and ‘Appendix: Catalogue of Refrains in Le Roman de Fauvel, BN fr.146’, in Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music and Image in Paris, in Bibliothèque Nationale MS français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 105–59; and Poetry and Music, chapters 4–6, 15. 24. See Kay, pp. 13–17. 25. See Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), p. 11.

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4 Music and the Book: The Textualisation of Music and the Musicalisation of Text Helen Deeming

I

n Book 3 of his ETYMOLOGIES, a text from the early seventh century that was widely known and cited throughout the Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville makes the following statement about musical sound: ‘Nisi enim ab homine memoria teneantur soni, pereunt, quia scribi non possunt’ (Unless sounds are held in the memory of men, they perish, for they cannot be written down).1 At face value, this would seem to be clear evidence that Isidore lived in a time before the invention of musical notation, or at least that Isidore himself was unfamiliar with any such technology. Yet a system for notating melodies had existed among the ancient Greeks, though knowledge of how to decipher it had long since disappeared by Isidore’s time. The earliest surviving musical notations from the Latin West do, it is true, post-date Isidore’s writing by at least two centuries, though this is not conclusive proof against the existence of earlier musical notations, now lost to us through the vagaries of manuscript destruction and loss. On the other hand, it is possible that something else lies behind Isidore’s statement: there is something about musical sound, he may be implying, that is intrinsically ephemeral and cannot be captured in writing.2 This reading would accord with a wider mistrust of writing, ultimately deriving from Plato: He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an utterly simple person [. . .] if he thinks written words are of any use except to remind him who knows the matter about which they are written [. . .] They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing for ever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.3 The notion that writing could not stand alone as a substitute for speech, always needing a human interlocutor to ensure that its message is properly understood, was certainly still in play by the time of the earliest surviving Latin musical notations,

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dating from the ninth century. Read through the lens of modern expectations of written music, these examples seem hopelessly inadequate, being imprecise or even mute on some key musical parameters, such as the pitch and rhythm of notes. They seem to have been designed to operate in parallel with oral modes of transmission: one learnt the music, just as before, by hearing it sung and then vocalising it oneself, using the musical notation as a prop for when the memory failed and the original teacher was no longer present. These first examples of textualised music, then, might act as aide-mémoires or arbiters when dispute arose, but they could not substitute for the vocal and aural techniques for the transmission of music that had persisted hitherto. The musical traditions that were recorded using the new technology of musical notation in the ninth century were – perhaps unsurprisingly – those of the Church. Scholarly consensus has not been reached on the precise circumstances that gave rise to the desire and capacity for committing music to writing at that time.4 Some maintain that an urge to standardise and make uniform the liturgy across the vast dominions of the Carolingian empire made the transmission of music through books a necessity; others counter this claim with the evidence that the earliest notations were unable to replace the traditional methods of learning music by ear, and hence could not have served such a purpose with any greater efficiency. Whatever the explanation, the surviving sources give the impression of a decisive shift towards the creation of written copies of liturgical music from the ninth century onwards, one that continued, unbroken, right through the Middle Ages and into the age of print. The music that was notated was, for the most part, not new: though our efforts to understand the history of music before this point are necessarily hampered by the absence of musically notated sources, it seems likely that what was inscribed in the ninth century was a traditional way of singing that had endured for a considerable time beforehand. Contemporary portraits of the sixth-century pope-saint Gregory the Great claim an ancient and venerable source for ecclesiastical chant: these images typically portray Gregory with the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove singing into his ear, while the saint dutifully transcribes what he hears onto a tablet or parchment, or dictates it to his scribe who writes it down. This legend, from which the term ‘Gregorian chant’ originates, most likely tells us more about ninth-century propagandist efforts to assert the particular authenticity of one variety of Latin chant than it does about the reality of Saint Gregory’s role in the early history of chant, but it is nonetheless evidence that the first music to be committed to text was at least considered to be historic at the time of its inscription. The retrospective tendency of music writing endured, in various ways, for many centuries beyond its origins. When, for example, secular music in the form of vernacular song began to be cultivated systematically through a system of courtly patronage (first in Aquitaine and later in northern France), the written copies of these songs typically post-dated their composition by several generations. The music of the twelfth-century troubadours of Aquitaine must have been ‘held in the memory of men’ quite successfully, for it was not until the following century and in a different region altogether that musical manuscripts of their works were made. Likewise for the northern trouvères, who were responsible for this gathering of the works of their southern predecessors, but whose own songs themselves appear in late, perhaps

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nostalgic, copies. These cases, which come closer to the idea of ‘literature’ than do the Latin traditions of liturgical chant, make it clear that for much of the Middle Ages, music circulated first by mouth and ear and was only later textualised through writing. By extension, therefore, the absence of explicitly musically notated copies at any one time does not necessarily imply the absence of music, for not only were some musical traditions never committed to writing at all, and others found their way onto parchment only late in their transmission histories, but also plentiful evidence exists of the continued interaction of oral and written processes in musical transmission right through the period. In some cases, the process of textualisation of music seems to have served the purpose of canonisation, or fixing a musical tradition in order to preserve it for posterity. Such an urge may be identified behind the preparation of the large-scale and elegant manuscripts of polyphonic music from Notre Dame of Paris in the thirteenth century, and the compilation of the elusive Magnus liber organi (Great book of organum/ polyphony) that preceded them. The richly illuminated and systematically organised Florence manuscript, which may have been prepared for no less a patron than a member of the French royal house, presents itself and the repertory within it as monumental; the wide dispersal of this Parisian repertory around Europe in the thirteenth century is partly testament to the success of the strategies employed to record it in writing. Yet though such instances of musical canonisation had noticeable effects on transmission, they did not fundamentally alter the inherent variability of music, whose realisations in sound continued to be multifarious. Where multiple copies of a piece of medieval music exist, there are almost always disagreements and contradictions between them that, far from being evidence of scribal carelessness in every case, probably indicate a widespread acceptance that musical works sounded different in the mouths (or under the fingers) of different musicians. Leo Treitler’s apt observation that ‘writing fixes one text, the one that is written; it does not fix the song’,5 applies well to numerous genres of medieval music, whose written manifestations rarely indicate an unvarying stability. It has also been remarked that musical notations can contain elements of the ‘prescriptive’ or ‘descriptive’, the one setting down the inalienable parameters for future performances, the other attempting to record the nuances of one performance in particular.6 Both such elements can be found in medieval music notations, along with another, that I term the ‘suggestive’: written copies of music may offer a palette of performance possibilities that could be taken up, rejected, substituted or extended ad libitum by future performers.7 That performers of medieval music used the written text as only one member of a group of sources upon which they could draw is apparent from the continued tradition of ‘unnotated’ songbooks right up to the end of the Middle Ages. Such books, in which music is ostensibly absent, should not be too quickly dismissed as evidence of musical practice for, in many cases, such books may have been used by those to whom the music was readily available elsewhere; either in their memories, or in the voices of singers who performed the songs as their listeners beheld the books. A modern congregational hymn-book, which contains no musical notation, is no less a musical book for that: in that case, the use of well-known, memorised tunes and the support of communal singing make the realisation of their texts as music a trivial matter. This analogy is particularly fitting for late medieval vernacular songbooks, since many

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of their musical forms – like hymns – have multiple stanzas of text sung to repeating phrases of melody; singers might easily commit the music to memory while still needing the support of a written copy for the words. The ‘absence’ of music in these manuscripts, therefore, need not be read as a failure or even a lack, but rather as an indication that explicit musical notation in these instances would have been superfluous.8 Moreover, songbooks without any musical notation whatsoever can be seen merely as one end of a spectrum of musical inscription, along which stand plentiful instances of partial or incomplete notations (that inscribe only so much musical information as was necessary in a particular context), and indeed those types of medieval notations that were never designed to stand alone, without oral buttressing. Throughout the discussion so far, I have been concerned with pre-existing music that was later textualised through writing. A fascinating instance of the opposite – pre-existing text musicalised through singing – is the practice of voicing aloud classical Latin verses to new melodies. Indications of this practice exist from between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, from various regions, and are accounted for in a number of ways.9 Nearly all examples can be associated with educational contexts, and may have served as opportunities for schoolboys to become familiar with rhetorical forms and gestures through declaiming, in song, certain significant speeches in key classical texts. The prosody of authors such as Vergil and Horace could, at times, have posed challenges to young students: in some cases, singing these lines aloud may have been an aid to deciphering their metrical structures and helping those structures to lodge better in the memory. In this way, this practice of musicalisation accords with isolated traces of similar trends from throughout the medieval world. A recognition of the value of verse, especially when set to music, for encapsulating and making memorable the most important points of doctrine (of whatever kind, and in whatever language) seems to have been widespread to judge from the variety of instances of its occurrence.10 A note on the nature of pre-1500 music books in general is required before moving on to the specific case studies to be considered in the next part of this chapter. In certain categories, most notably liturgical chant and – in the later part of the Middle Ages – settings of liturgical chant in polyphony for multiple voice-parts, music was gathered into dedicated music books, designed and purposed throughout and from the outset for recording musical texts. However, in many other areas of medieval musical practice, such exclusively musical books were rare. Despite the specialist scribal skills required for musical notation, and the particular demands that it placed upon such aspects as the preparation and layout of the page, music was frequently assembled alongside other kinds of textual material. The specifics of this practice vary widely across the regions and centuries, but it is not at all uncommon to find written copies of medieval music keeping company with sermons, prayers, narrative verse, romance and treatises on doctrinal, medical, calendrical and any number of other matters. In some cases, music seems to have been added to such mixed collections more or less at random, whereas in others, it appears to have been a planned inclusion from the outset. Either way, however, such books invited their earliest readers to contemplate these different textual materials in tandem, actively seeking out associations between them. Such an invitation, though repeatedly declined by modern scholarship (which, owing to its disciplinary and linguistic divisions, has plundered these books to extract certain

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texts and leave others behind), remains open to twenty-first-century readers, who may, on accepting it, discover radically new ways of understanding music and text jointly as components of medieval culture.11

Case Studies: Music in Books from Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England The surviving manuscripts containing music from twelfth- and thirteenth-century England are especially notable examples of the practice of mixed compilation. The total corpus consists of some liturgical chant books and fragments from others; fragments preserving polyphonic music and ostensibly from dedicated books of polyphonic music (albeit none of which is extant); and miscellany manuscripts, which preserve music alongside other kinds of material. The majority of the music contained in these miscellany manuscripts is song, in Latin, French or English, both monophonic and polyphonic settings, and treating – for the most part – religious but not specifically liturgical themes.12 Unlike France in the same period, England does not seem to have had a tradition of ‘songbooks’ per se, and this meant that every decision to write down a song involved choices about the kind of book to place it in, and the kinds of text with which it should be gathered. In the midst of the diversity that this mode of transmission engendered, however, striking trends of musical gathering are apparent: almost half of these musical miscellanies contain texts of a pastoral nature (sermons, doctrinal tracts, notes and extracts for use by confessors and preachers), and only slightly fewer are united in their inclusion of historical and hagiographical documents, often pertaining to a particular church or locality.13 One musical miscellany with texts that may be linked to a particular ecclesiastical institution is Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 59. Compiled over a period of time, the manuscript consists of two major sections, each containing a single long poetic work, with many pages of shorter items (prose, poetry and music) incorporated between and around the two main texts. Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, an allegorical epic in hexameters telling the story of Nature’s failed creation of the perfect man, forms the first section of the manuscript, occupying fifty-three folios; it is followed by Boethius’s prosimetrum, The Consolations of Philosophy, occupying another forty. Surrounding both texts are numerous pages of short items on devotional and grammatical topics, copied in many different hands. Between the Anticlaudianus and the Consolations several verses in Leonine hexameters are found, including one on grammatical definitions, another summarising proverbs, and two epitaphs of Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford. Interspersed with these quantitative verses are rhythmical poems, including two prayers in thirteen-syllable Goliardic lines (Pater rerum omnium pius et fidelis and Panem nostrum hodie da cotidianum, the latter a versification of the Lord’s Prayer), and two poems in Victorine stanzas, one in praise of Christ and the other, with musical notation, in honour of St Kyneburga (Summo Deo providente and Recitemus per hec festa). This Kyneburga piece, together with the epitaphs of Humphrey de Bohun, was instrumental in establishing the likely origin of the manuscript at the Augustinian priory of Llanthony Secunda, in whose chapel of St Kyneburga the earl was interred.14 After the conclusion of the Boethius text, further short lyrics appear, using a similar range of poetic types:

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among others, a hexameter verse describing the metrical feet (Pirri spondeo pugnat iambusque trocheo) is followed by another musically notated lyric in Victorine stanzas, this time on the Virgin (Orbis honor celi scema). Three English and two French lyrics appear at various points throughout the book: after the Anticlaudianus comes an English devotional lyric Hit bilimpeiþ forte speke to reden and to singe, and two English lyrics on the Virgin are preserved after the Consolations towards the end of the book, of which the first, Edi beo þu hevene quene, is set to music. The two French items appear together before the final English item: the first is a prayer to Christ and the second a verse on the times and seasons of the year, Ici commence la reysun, De tens del an et de la seysun. The scribes of Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 59 identified the authors only of its two long texts, and their selection of unattributed shorter lyrics suggests that these late thirteenth-century compilers had no particular interest in gathering the well-known works of esteemed Continental Latin poets.15 The inclusion of items in both vernaculars alongside the Latin verses, as well as the appearance of musical notation at three points in the collection, are notable, as are the traces of many texts drafted in plummet (a stick of lead, typically used for under-drawing), which may indicate something of the way in which the manuscript was used. Most strikingly, the text of the Marian lyric Orbis honor celi scema was drafted in plummet three times on the early leaves of the manuscript, written in ink as text alone on f.4r, and appears again with musical notation on f.113r. Carleton Brown commented on the many differences between these five versions of the text (although the plummet-written versions cannot be recovered entirely), and it is tempting to imagine that they represent a poet-composer’s work-in-progress, not least because the lyric and its music are uniquely preserved in this manuscript.16 For this and the other materials drafted in plummet, the scribe may have been composing (or perhaps recalling from memory) the material in the course of writing, and wished to retain the possibility of making changes or correcting mistakes before committing it more permanently to the page; it is also possible that the drafted texts represent the traces of writing practice. The continuing utility of the manuscript as a repository for texts and drafts is clear, and this, together with its concentration of grammatical texts, led Brown to suggest that Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 59 was the personal working book of a school master.17 This being so, the evidence of the miscellany may imply the use of substantial poetic works and short lyrics alike as teaching aids: the perceived utility of songs and verses in any language for various forms of instruction is a theme that has already been touched upon in this chapter. A manuscript that is more overtly linked to practices of religious instruction, and which likewise includes verse texts in Latin, French and English, is Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 39. This manuscript is comparatively well-known in literary studies but has been neglected in musicological ones, on account of its lack of explicit musical notation, yet among its verses are several that must nonetheless be considered songs. Some of these items are transmitted elsewhere with musical notation; others self-consciously declare themselves to be songs, through their use of the vocabulary of music and singing.18 Equally telling in this respect are the many pairs of texts that share identical poetic structures, indicating that they could be sung to the same tune, one that the compiler of the manuscript lacked either the will or the resources to include in notated form. One such example is the Latin poem Gaude virgo, mater

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Christi, whose stanzas are interleaved with an English translation that matches the metrical structure of the Latin: Gaude virgo, mater Christi que per aurem concepisti Gabriele nuncio. Gaude virgo, Deo plena peperisti sine pena cum pudoris lilio. Glade us maiden, moder milde þurru þin herre þu were wid childe, Glade us, ful of Gode þine, þam þu bere buten pine,

Gabriel he seide it þe. Wid þe lilie of chastete.19

When pairs of texts such as this were included together, the scribe might rely on readers’ aural knowledge of the melody to which both could be sung; numerous other manuscripts that preface their unnotated lyrics with the incipits of other texts to indicate the tunes to which they are to be sung suggest that this practice of alluding to music by transfer from another text (whose melody was held in the memory) was widespread. For Gaude virgo, mater Christi and Glade us maiden, moder milde the task would be even more straightforward, since the texts employ a commonly-used poetic structure (sometimes referred to as Victorine stanzas) of six-line stanzas, each divided into two three-line versicles or half-stanzas, with the syllable count 887887 and rhyming aabccb. The Trinity compiler’s eschewal of musical notation for these lyrics, then, might be a signal both that their specific tune was sufficiently well known not to need transmission in writing, or if not, that any number of suitable tunes could be found among the many other songs which employ an identical poetic structure.20 As well as Latin– French, Latin–English and French–English pairs of texts, the manuscript also contains a number of bilingual macaronic items (that is to say, texts which employ two different languages in alternation); again, these texts are in all three linguistic combinations, perhaps indicating that this compiler had a particular interest in the trilingual literary culture of the day.21 Most interesting, however, are the opportunities that this manuscript affords for observing the close connections between songs or lyrics and the discourse of preachers and those involved in pastoral care. The strongest indication of these connections is found in a sermon beginning on f.34v of Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 39, which opens with a stanza of verse beginning ‘Bele Alis matyn se leva’, evidently a snatch from a longer lyric in the tradition of secular song, where the fair Alice is a stock character. A version of this same stanza appears woven into a lyric rondeau in an early fourteenth-century French songbook; this (along with other, less closely related snippets) was apparently circulating widely enough, perhaps in non-written forms, to be recognisable by those who heard the Trinity sermon preached aloud.22 The practice of quoting songs in sermons was widespread, and has been especially remarked upon in relation to Latin sermons that quote English lyrics.23 More recently, however, it has been shown that songs in all three languages could be drawn upon by preachers for the purposes of capturing their listeners’ attention, enlivening their discourse and encapsulating points of doctrine in easily memorisable form, and moreover that quotation of songs was a custom embedded not only with the sermon genre, but equally in other kinds of pastoral texts.24 The use of songs in sermons provides a tantalising hint of the ways in which written music might have reached a non-literate audience, thus bridging the perceived gap

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between the literate, written culture of clerics and the upper classes, and the illiterate, oral culture of ordinary people. Such a distinction is both difficult to sustain, since nearly all our evidence of music-making comes from written sources and therefore literate spheres, and also probably false in any case, as these musical traditions must often have collided in the sonic experience of medieval lives. A unique example of music originating from an illiterate ‘author’ being textualised by proxy, through the work of literate story-tellers, is that of St Godric, a hermit of Finchale, near Durham. The humble-born Godric retired to his remote hermitage after a career as a merchant sailor, and lived there for some sixty years, following a regime of penance and prayer. His extraordinary piety, however, soon attracted the attention of the monks of nearby Durham Priory, several of whom were moved to record the details of his life and his divine visions. It was in the context of these visions that Godric’s four songs originated, and thanks to the efforts of his monastic biographers, these songs were committed to writing and now survive as the earliest songs in the English language whose music is extant.25 The written transmission of the songs of Saint Godric was, however, a far from straightforward matter. Though the songs can be linked to specific visions that are recounted during the various versions of the saint’s Life, only one manuscript incorporates a song within the text of the Life itself. Even in this case (London, British Library, Harley MS 322), it is clear that the music was not originally planned for, but only later inserted by erasing the lines of text at that point in the narrative and rewriting them much more closely spaced so as to make room for a musical stave above the words of the song.26 The other manuscripts that preserve music for the songs of St Godric do so in contexts divorced from the Life itself. In one case (Cambridge, University Library, Mm. iv. 28), a song is jotted down on the originally blank final leaf of an unrelated manuscript, introduced by a brief paragraph describing Godric’s vision that gave rise to it; here, the English song is followed by a Latin translation, not designed to fit to the same music, but replacing Godric’s name with ‘N.’, inviting the reader to supply his or her own name in its place: Sancte Marie virgine moder Jesu Cristes Nazarene onfo scild help þin Godric onfang bring hehtlic wið þe i Godes riche.

Sancta Maria virgo mater Jesu Christi Nazareni suscipe, tuere, adiuva tuum N. suscipe, porta eternaliter tecum in Dei regnum.

This textual substitution effectively universalises the prayer which the song encodes, and suggests that the reader might equally partake of the spiritual benefits promised to Godric by the Virgin Mary in the vision described in the introductory passage. The layers of ventriloquy inherent in this example – Godric’s own song ‘voiced’ (in writing, at least) by his biographers, and then ‘revoiced’ by whomsoever should encounter it in this Cambridge manuscript – raise powerful, perhaps unanswerable questions concerning the distributed agencies of medieval song-making. The texts of Godric’s songs were much more frequently copied into manuscripts than their tunes, and this statement could stand for many medieval songs, as discussed above. One limiting factor on the writing down of music was the specialised skill-set required for musical notation and musical layout: clearly not all scribes who could write text could also write music, and plentiful examples exist of more or less disastrous attempts at music writing made by those with only an incomplete understanding

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of the principles involved.27 The music page presents special challenges to the scribe: both musical and textual material must be incorporated, and in most cases, appropriately aligned with one another.28 The two types of material are often copied in two phases, so one must be written in such a way as to leave adequate space for the other. Manuscripts of polyphonic music have to confront the problem of relating the various parts both to each other and to the text or texts to be sung. Hence, the technicalities of writing music, encompassing page design as well as notation, were not such as could be mastered by a casual amateur; these difficulties perhaps go some way to explaining the frequent occurrence in medieval manuscripts of songs whose texts have been spaced out to allow for an explicit musical notation that was never supplied. The textualisation of music at this period was not only a challenge but also an opportunity for its scribes. Especially where music was copied into manuscripts of largely non-musical contents, the very presence of musical notation on certain pages could be visually arresting, and this phenomenon was at times exploited by scribes wishing to draw particular attention to certain texts. In some of the most elegantly written musical miscellanies from twelfth- and thirteenth-century Britain, the items supplied with musical settings seem to have been especially marked out, their notation making these written texts ‘visually significant and adding weight to [their] symbolic status and rhetorical force’.29 This process would certainly appear to be involved in the recording of Dulcis Jesu memoria and Dolorum solatium (the latter shown in Fig. 4.1), two pieces believed to be the work of significant authors (Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard respectively), placed at the very heart of their respective manuscript collections and made to stand out visually and symbolically by their musical notation.30 Even poetic texts without notation could be, and often were, rendered visually catchy through such strategies as aligning the first letters of each line in a ruled column, sometimes enlarging them or writing them in different-coloured ink. There are also examples of the final letters of each line being aligned in a ruled column at the right-hand edge of the page, and several examples of scribes separating the rhyming syllables from the final words and writing them once between a pair of rhymed lines, with diagonal connecting lines linking them to both (examples of such techniques are shown in Figures 4.2a, b and c). These examples indicate that the process of textualising music could sometimes be an end in itself, above and beyond any more obviously sonic designs it might have fulfilled. It has already been suggested in this chapter that written copies of musical texts in medieval manuscripts tend to vary from one another in ways that belie the idea of an authoritative version. That these items often circulated anonymously is part of this, although even in works whose authors were known and sometimes indicated by scribes, the variations that occur between manuscript copies strongly suggest that such variation was tolerated and even embraced. Among the English musical sources of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, active recasting of songs, through substitution of their texts and reconfiguration of their musical components, was particularly prevalent. The manuscript Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 39, discussed above, contains numerous examples of alternative texts (often in different languages) being provided for already existing songs: this procedure, known as contrafactum, was practised with enthusiasm by English musicians.31 A measure of this enthusiasm is the frequency with which scribes drew attention to the contrafactum either through a rubric giving the incipit of the original song, or by copying both texts together beneath their shared

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Figure 4.1 Dolorum solatium (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 79, f.53v). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford

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Figure 4.2a, b, c Visually arresting techniques of poetic layout in London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus D XXIV, f.95r (a) and Dublin, Trinity College, MS 432, f.1r (b) and f.10r (c). By permission of The British Library Board and The Board of Trinity College Dublin

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music. Looking beyond the English sphere, contemporary musical repertories, especially in Paris, were engaged in even more extensive processes of recomposition. The genre of the motet seems to have had its origins in the supply of text to the pre-existing music of melismatic discant passages (or clausulae) from polyphonic settings of liturgical chant (or organa): in these cases, the usual order of textual composition followed by musical setting was reversed.32 Another Parisian genre, the conductus, though typically freely composed in both text and music, also incorporates a substantial minority of pieces involving some recomposition of pre-existing materials: in some cases, the melismatic closing passage (or cauda) from one conductus was extracted from its context and supplied with new text to generate an entirely new conductus (or conductus prosula), whose text might nonetheless relate – explicitly or obliquely – to the text of its musical model.33 The various kinds of recomposition seen in motets and conducti are intimately connected with textuality in a particular way. The musical notation employed in Parisian manuscripts during the thirteenth century was innovative in being capable, for the first time, of expressing musical rhythm as well as pitch. The system used, however, was suitable only for melismatic or untexted music, because it relied upon the reinterpretation of ligatures that had originally indicated the distribution of notes to syllables. Since this alignment function was not needed in highly melismatic music (whose syllables might be spread across dozens of individual notes), the ligatures could be put to a different use to indicate rhythmic patterns. But in texted music such as motets and conducti, the original function of the ligatures could not be ignored, and these pieces were notated using mainly single notes, undifferentiated in terms of rhythm. For texted pieces that ultimately derived from untexted or melismatic models, therefore, it is often the case that the texted version is notated without rhythm while the untexted original has its rhythm specified in writing. Debate has long surrounded the interpretation of this anomaly (and related conundrums to do with the notation of rhythm in the thirteenth century), but one possibility is that musicians singing the motets or conductus prosulae had access – either through their memories or by recourse to a written copy – to the rhythm of the original composition, and thus could sing the new works rhythmically even from copies that were themselves rhythmically indeterminate. The significance of the writing-down of music in these cases, then, goes well beyond matters of preservation and even of canonisation, pointing towards situations in which musical transmission – and perhaps even musical composition – became increasingly reliant on writing. Musical networks whose members include untexted, melismatic pieces (or sections of pieces) as well as several differently-texted pieces, all with shared musical content, also make it clear that not only was any specific musical entity not deemed to be anchored to a particular text, but also that it could be regarded as textual or non-textual music, depending on the context. The complex hybridity of the transmission of these musical materials, in which later versions of particular pieces can be seen to have reinfluenced even later written redactions of earlier versions, suggests that the processes of oral, aural and written learning and dissemination of music continued to interact throughout the period. These complicated processes are difficult to unpick from the written documents that are all that remain to us as the mediators of medieval music, but musicology and literary studies alike are now finding creative ways to re-examine the medieval book with a view to looking beyond its pages at the cultures that lay behind it.

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Notes 1. Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911, repr. 1966), pp. 3, 15. 2. Further discussion of the context and meaning of Isidore’s statement may be found in Blair Sullivan, ‘The Unwriteable Sound of Music: The Origins and Implications of Isidore’s Memorial Metaphor’, Viator, 30 (1999), 1–13. 3. Plato, Phaedrus, 275d, e, in Plato’s Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 158. 4. The arguments are summarised and reviewed in Emma Hornby, ‘The Transmission of Western Chant in the 8th and 9th Centuries: Evaluating Kenneth Levy’s Reading of the Evidence’, Journal of Musicology, 21 (2004), 418–57. 5. Leo Treitler, ‘Oral, Written and Literate Process in the Transmission of Medieval Music’, in With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How it Was Made (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 234. 6. Charles Seeger, ‘Prescriptive and Descriptive Music Writing’, Musical Quarterly, 44 (1958), 184–95. 7. For a detailed exploration of such a possibility, see Ardis Butterfield and Helen Deeming, ‘Editing Insular Song across the Disciplines’, in Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Anne Hudson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 151–66, especially pp. 162–5. 8. A similar point has been made by Thomas Forrest Kelly in Capturing Music: The Story of Notation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), p. 13. This notion is discussed in greater depth in Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Songs, Scattered and Gathered’, in Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context, ed. Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 271–85. 9. Jan Ziolkowski, Nota Bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). 10. See, for example, the many instances referred to in Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On the various functions of verse in religious instruction, see Siegfried Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 80–1. For an instance of music’s use as part of language teaching, see Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Learning French by Singing in 14th-Century England’, Early Music, 33 (2005), 253–70. 11. Scholarly work concerned with music in miscellanies now includes the contributions to Manuscripts and Medieval Song, ed. Deeming and Leach. 12. For an edition of these songs with introductory study and commentary, see Songs in British Sources, c. 1150–1300, ed. Helen Deeming, Musica Britannica, 95 (London: Stainer and Bell, 2013). 13. On the former, see Helen Deeming, ‘Songs and Sermons in Thirteenth-Century England’, in Pastoral Care in Medieval England: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Peter Clarke and Sarah James (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 101–22; on the latter, see Helen Deeming, ‘Record-Keepers, Preachers and Song-Makers: Revealing the Compilers, Owners and Users of Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Insular Song Manuscripts’, in Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners, and Users of Music Sources before 1600, ed. Tim Shephard and Lisa Colton (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 63–76.

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14. Implications of these epitaphs and the materials on St Kyneburga for the origin of the manuscript were identified by Carleton Brown, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Manuscript from Llanthony Priory’, Speculum, 3 (1928), 587–95. 15. Along with greater proportions of rhythmic (as opposed to quantitative) verse, this reduced interest in Continental poets is noted as a more general trend in poetic anthologies over the course of the thirteenth century by A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 237. 16. The various versions are edited and compared in Brown, p. 593. The musical setting is edited in Deeming, Songs in British Sources, no. 113. 17. Brown, p. 594. 18. The contents of this manuscript are examined and edited in Karl Reichl, Religiöse Dichtung im englischen Hochmittelalter: Untersuchung und Edition der Handschrift B.14.39 des Trinity College in Cambridge (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1973). Veni sancte spiritus (ibid., pp. 449–51) is a song found elsewhere with notation; it is edited from two of its English sources in Deeming, Songs in British Sources, nos 37 and 61. Lyrics that specifically reference singing include Nu þis fules singet (line 3: ‘Of on ic wille singen þat is makeles’; Reichl, pp. 468–9) and On hire is al mi lif ylong (line 2: ‘Of vam ic wille singen’; Reichl, pp. 470–5). 19. Edited in Reichl, pp. 332–3. The layout of the example here resembles that in the manuscript, where the Latin versicles are written as long lines, whereas the English ones are divided into their three shorter phrases, with the third phrase positioned towards the righthand edge of the column; this can be seen on the digital facsimile at . 20. One example that is relatively close in geographical and historical terms to these miscellanies is the Franciscan Red Book of Ossory, for which see The Lyrics of the Red Book of Ossory, ed. R. L. Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); but the phenomenon may also be found in ecclesiastical and secular repertoires throughout Europe during the entire course of the Middle Ages. 21. On this culture more generally, see P. J. Frankis, ‘The Social Context of Vernacular Writing in Thirteenth-Century England: The Evidence of the Manuscripts’, in Thirteenth-Century England I, ed. P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986), pp. 175–84; and T. Hunt, ‘Insular Trilingual Compilations’, in Codices Miscellanearum: Brussels Van Hulthem Colloquium, 1999, ed. R. Jansen-Sieben and H. van Dijk (Brussels: Archives et bibliothèques de Belgique, 1999), pp. 51–70. 22. The lines ‘Bele Aliz par main se leva [. . .] biau se vesti miex se para’, which bear a striking resemblance to the first two lines quoted in the Trinity sermon (‘Bele Alis matyn se leva, sun cors vesti e appara’), are found within the rondeau Vos n’alez pas in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.12786, f.80v (on this manuscript, see the 2018 doctoral dissertation by Frieda van der Heijden, Royal Holloway, University of London). The songs in the manuscript are laid out with space for music, which has, however, not been supplied. On the other songs in the ‘Bele Aliz’ network, see John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 80, 162, 177–8. On practices of citation across literary and musical genres, see Chapter 7 below. 23. David L. Jeffrey, The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975); Siegfried Wenzel, Verses in Sermons: Fasciculus Morum and its Middle English Poems (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1978); Wenzel, Preachers, Poets and the Early English Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Alan J. Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry in Late Medieval England (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998). 24. Deeming, ‘Songs and Sermons’.

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25. Helen Deeming, ‘The Songs of St Godric: A Neglected Context’, Music & Letters, 86 (2005), 169–85. 26. A plate illustrating this may be found in ibid., p. 173. 27. See Helen Deeming, ‘Observations on the Habits of Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Music Scribes’, Scriptorium, 60 (2006), 38–59 (p. 46). 28. Questions concerning the mise-en-page of music manuscripts are now beginning to receive closer attention, as exemplified by the articles gathered in two volumes of the Journal of the Alamire Foundation, 14 (2) (2014) and 15 (1) (2015). 29. This phrase was used by Sam Barrett of musical notation in certain ninth-century collections in ‘Music and Writing: On the Compilation of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, lat. 1154’, Early Music History, 16 (1997), 55–96, (p. 93). 30. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 668 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 79 respectively; on the former (including a summary of the arguments against Bernard’s authorship), see Helen Deeming, ‘Music and Contemplation in the Twelfth-Century Dulcis Jesu memoria’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 139 (2014), 1–39; on the latter, see Lorenz Weinrich, ‘Peter Abaelard as Musician – II’, Musical Quarterly, 55 (1969), 464–86. 31. See Helen Deeming, ‘Multilingual Networks in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Song’, in Language in Medieval Britain: Networks and Exchanges, ed. Mary Carruthers (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2015), pp. 127–43. 32. The compositional dynamics are, however, perhaps not as straightforward as earlier scholarship implied, and each motet-complex may need to be closely reconsidered from this perspective. For work that opens up new perspectives along these lines, see Catherine A. Bradley, ‘New Texts for Old Music: Three Early Thirteenth-Century Latin Motets’, Music & Letters, 93 (2012), 149–69; Bradley, ‘Contrafacta and Transcribed Motets: Vernacular Influences on Latin Motets and Clausulae in the Florence Manuscript’, Early Music History, 32 (2013), 1–70; and Bradley, ‘Comparing Compositional Process in Two ThirteenthCentury Motets: Pre-Existent Materials in Deus omnium/REGNAT and Ne m’oubliez mie/ DOMINO’, Music Analysis, 33 (2014), 263–90. 33. Thomas B. Payne, ‘Philip the Chancellor and the Conductus Prosula: “Motettish” Works from the School of Notre Dame’, in Music in Medieval Europe: Studies in Honour of Bryan Gillingham, ed. Terence Bailey and Alma Santosuosso (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 220–38; Philip the Chancellor: Motets and Prosulas, ed. Thomas B. Payne (Madison: A-R Editions, 2011).

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5 Liturgical Music and Drama Nils Holger Petersen

Liturgical Ceremony: Music and Text in Ritual Performance

I

n addition to the problems with the notions of ‘literature’ and ‘music’ in relation to medieval materials, which have been discussed in the introduction to this section, above, further difficulties arise in defining the boundaries of what today is often termed ‘the liturgy’, a term not used during the Latin Middle Ages and difficult to circumscribe during this period. To be sure, a general liturgical framework can safely be claimed, consisting of daily masses and, primarily in monasteries and convents, the ‘hours’ of the divine office as described in the Rule of Benedict already in the sixth century. The ‘hours’ provided a daily devotional structure with seven (shorter or longer) ceremonies during the day plus the huge night office, generally named Matins with its Nocturns. In addition to this, however, came numerous processions, partly, but not only, in connection with the mentioned liturgical offices. There were altogether many special ceremonies to be carried out on specific days (some, but far from all, will be mentioned in this essay), especially during Holy Week, but also for other parts of the year. Not all devotions were systematically accounted for in the main liturgical books. For instance, some of the larger so-called ‘liturgical dramas’ (on this term see further below) may likely have been performed as devotions outside of the traditional daily structure of masses and the hours of the divine office. Although the overall structure is well known and continued to a high degree in the Roman Catholic Church after the reformations of the sixteenth century, much depended on local customs, and changes over time were not uncommon, especially as new feast days occasioned by the cults of saints newly canonised necessitated new texts and music for celebrations. Local traditions concerning which saints were celebrated in individual dioceses or ecclesiastical houses further provided the church year and its celebrations with many variations. A universal feast introduced quite late in the Middle Ages, with important consequences also for liturgical music (and vernacular drama), was the Feast of Corpus Christi, first introduced in the 1260s, but only made universal in the Latin Church during the early fourteenth century, leading on to civic popular devotions of various kinds over the following centuries.1 All the various liturgical events had a ritual character. This is important to keep in mind in order to understand crucial aspects of the performance of music during these occasions. The way I here (as most modern scholars) use the notion of ‘ritual’ is fundamentally shaped by anthropologists (although no general consensus about the definition of the modern anthropological concept of ritual exists). The ritual character of Christian

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liturgy (and indeed that of most other religions), lies primarily in the basic claim (and experience) that ‘something’ happens to participants during a liturgical ceremony. This ‘something’ may vary according to the individual ceremony and the various sacraments called for in the context. Participants will generally receive a strengthening of their faith, possibly forgiveness of sins, spiritual purification and/or numerous other spiritual effects, expressive of the idea that participation in the ceremony in question is significant for the faithful in maintaining or developing their identity as members of the Church.2 The difficulty in applying this very basic understanding of the character of liturgical ceremonies to medieval music lies in the huge transformations that took place during the period. As will be discussed in some detail in the following section, scholars of music have in modern times generally constructed the beginnings of musical composition (as normally conceived of in early modern and modern times) as connected to the liturgical reforms of the Carolingians (around 800) and the ensuing beginnings of musical notation in the ninth century. Before this, and – depending on scholarly opinions – possibly still for centuries, music was transmitted orally, through performative instruction by cantors, lending the music a character of not complete fixation, although it is likely that traditions may have been much more stable than is easy to imagine for moderns not being used to having to rely on memory and aural transmission. In the course of the post-Carolingian centuries, however, in connection with developments in musical notation, also influenced by increased complexities of musical composition in polyphony, striving for full notational control first of pitch and later also of rhythm, musical composition altogether seems to have become ever more reliant on the techniques of musical notation in combination, of course, with practical musical experience and performance. Thus, in the construction of music histories scholars have often assumed a composer role to have emerged during the high Middle Ages in the image of ‘great composers’ from the early modern and modern period. In view of recent research this appears anachronistically independent of the integrated conditions of liturgical and musical performance. The famously ascribed composer of complex polyphony in Paris around 1200, Perotinus, about whom nothing precise is known except that his name was raised in connection with particular pieces of liturgical polyphony more than half a century after their composition, is a case in point.3 In a recent article, the musicologist Andreas Haug has suggested that we interpret musical notation in the ninth and tenth centuries not only as an abstraction from the orality of the melodies, in terms of supporting the singer, in conjunction with memory, in how to move and articulate the liturgical texts melodically. To this aspect, Haug adds another: musical notation at the time as an abstraction from the bodily qualities of the voice, something with which the Carolingian commentators (as well as earlier ones, including St Augustine around 400) were occupied, either negatively, warning against the seductive quality of the voice, or positively, ascribing to the ‘sweet’ sounds of cantors the ability to lead the faithful to God. Such an interpretation of the role of early musical notation is helpful to understand how deep and complex, as well as prolonged, the process from an oral to a written liturgical and musical culture in the Latin West must have been. For probably centuries, a ‘ritual’ fundamental orality and basic bodily vocality seems to have prevailed alongside the abstract visuality of musical notation, and hence, Haug concludes that musical notation in this context must be understood ‘not so much as the place of the nearest possible approximation to the voice but as the place of its absence’.4

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This transition from an oral ritual culture to the later hermeneutically based written culture during the high Middle Ages involved many aspects, including the production of new text and music in order to make the liturgical ceremonies – to a large extent imported from Roman traditions by the Carolingians – meaningful, if not for the congregations, then at least for the clergy, the liturgical agents. The enormous production of tropes (textual and musical additions to individual items of the mass, and to a lesser extent of the divine office) and sequences already beginning in the ninth century, shortly after the Carolingian appropriation of Roman liturgy around 800, attests to this. To a great extent, the tropes for Proper items (i.e. items pertaining to the particular feast, as opposed to Ordinary items, used repeatedly for masses during substantial parts of the church year) were ‘to expound the theme of the feast day, often by explaining the words of the Old Testament as the prophetic foreshadowing of events confirmed in the New Testament’, since many Proper songs were (primarily) based on Old Testament texts, especially the Book of Psalms.5 While tropes were closely attached to specific items, mainly of the mass, the sequences which arose, as claimed by the famous early author of sequences Notker (a monk in the monastery of St Gall around 900), in connection with the long final melismas of the alleluia chant of the mass ‘entered into a conversation with the total complex of mass songs, lessons and prayers’, albeit not dependent on specific individual mass items as was the case for tropes.6 The creative efforts of the Carolingians, the appropriation of Roman liturgy as discussed in the following section, as well as the tropes and sequences, and other songs composed in the wake of the reforms around 800, altogether led to a formidable repertory of medieval liturgical songs with intimate connections between text and music. What constitutes the most basic level of connection between text and music is not that the music interprets the text, but rather that both interpret or relate to the liturgical situation to which they belong. This can for instance be observed in the long melismas that occur in many liturgical chants, not least in the so-called great responsories of matins. Tropes and sequences, on the other hand, are generally not very melismatic, but on the whole the liturgical music of the Carolingians and their successors far from avoided melismatic singing. As pointed out by John Stevens: there are always two contrary principles at work in chant, which pull in opposite directions and affect our sense of the relation of melody to text. On the one hand there is the principle of psalmody, and on the other a principle which rather loosely one may call iubilus.7 This double aspect of music–text relations in liturgical chant seems to have a long background reaching back to St Augustine. In the discussion in Book 10 of his Confessions, he expresses his worries about music’s seductive potential in an unresolved debate with its devotional potential for moving the believers. Here, Augustine favours the ‘principle of psalmody’, recommending that the chanting of readings and prayers should have almost no melody, i.e. should be sung as psalmody. But in a different context he interprets the notion of iubilus (in his exhortations to the psalms, see especially his discussion of Psalm 32 and 99), emphasising how singing without text, i.e. melismatic singing, has a potential to express what cannot be said (and understood discursively): the ineffable God. Augustine did not discuss liturgical

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chanting (at least not explicitly) in this context, but he did contextualise the understanding of what song without words might mean to those who sing theologically and devotionally in order to point to the potential of wordless singing for praising God. Augustine’s theological understanding of iubilus was taken up in the explicit context of the final melisma of the mass alleluia by Amalar of Metz in his Liber officialis from the 820s interpreting the wordless music to the effect that without words, ‘one mind will explain to another what it has within by thought alone’.8 What is most conspicuous, broadly speaking, in the creative development of medieval liturgical music, however, is the arrival of polyphony, beginning in the Carolingian period as singing in simple organum (basically harmonious parallel movements in two voices). Before the complex developments of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries where polyphony gradually became the most important focus of musical composition and certainly came to receive the main attention of musical theorists, very little notation of musical polyphony has been preserved, and then given as individual melodies to be sung by two different voices at the same time. This is the case for the famous organa from Winchester preserved in one of the Winchester Tropers.9 Still, most music heard by ordinary people, in parish churches but also in the large monasteries and cathedrals, would have been chant, even in the later Middle Ages. Increasingly, however, monophony became the well-known (more or less) stable tradition on the background of which polyphony sparkled, but also, along the way, gave rise to new controversies, which were nonetheless reflective of old dilemmas. Most notably, elaborate and intricate polyphonic procedures in the early fourteenth century brought about papal condemnation by John XXII (1325), not least because it became difficult to perceive the words.10 This is reminiscent of Augustine’s and others’ worries about whether music would divert the attention of the congregation from the words and the liturgical contents, rather than attract the congregation to pious devotion. Already a condemnation at the Council of Meaux in 845 had pointed in the same direction; it was aimed at tropes, sequences and other ‘novelties’, liturgical interpolations of various kinds into what was construed as ‘the purity of the old’.11 Polyphony, which up to (and including) the thirteenth century mostly set texts from the Proper of the Mass, during the fourteenth century came to focus more on the Ordinary, possibly a sign of a more ‘professional’ musical focus, since settings of Ordinary texts could be used with much greater frequency than settings of Proper texts. The first known composer to set the entire Ordinary of the Mass was Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377). His famous Messe de Nostre Dame may have been composed as a Saturday mass, in honour of the Virgin Mary, for the souls of the composer and his brother Jean, who died three years before Guillaume (both were canons of the Cathedral of Reims). An inscription in the cathedral, now preserved only in an eighteenth-century copy, mentions a donation for the singing of such a mass for the souls of the brothers ‘and those present and diligently attending’. We know that the mass must have been of a grand scale (the inscription specifies the amount set aside for singing).12 Today, Machaut’s mass belongs to the relatively few medieval liturgical compositions that have achieved a secure place in the marginal part of ‘Classical Music’ which is constituted by music before the seventeenth century: not only ‘Early Music’, but very early music.13 The late-medieval mass settings, i.e. settings of the sung Ordinary of the Mass, generally of the five liturgical items, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus (including the Benedictus)

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and Agnus Dei, gave rise to a long-standing tradition of mass settings after the Middle Ages, during the early modern period and up to the present day, including settings by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Stravinsky and Arvo Pärt, to mention just a few particularly famous names. It is characteristic of modern music life in the West that liturgical music in this way has been appropriated as concert music, lifted out of its liturgical context, and even away from its original textual context since modern performances of liturgical mass settings, whether medieval, early modern or modern, leave out the Proper texts, not to mention the liturgical action, the celebration of the Eucharist which liturgically forms the main focus of the mass, and thus presents these ‘works’, in concert or in recordings, as musical (master)-works in five movements (in the likeness of a symphony). On the one hand, this has recontextualised these compositions in a radical way, but on the other hand also secured the survival of at least a select group of mass settings (as well as some few other liturgical ‘master-works’) for modern audiences. From the fifteenth century, compositions by John Dunstaple (c. 1390–1453), Guillaume Du Fay (c. 1400–1474), Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410–1497), Josquin des Prez (c. 1450–1521), Jacob Obrecht (c. 1457–1505) and others have in this way kept a place in modern listening practices; the same is true for liturgical music of the following centuries. The foundation for this modern appropriation of liturgical mass settings was laid in the late eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment.14 Liturgical polyphony thus belongs to the most well-known parts of medieval liturgical music today, but at the same time has been recontextualised so far out of its original liturgical contexts that these works have come to appear, in a sense, as modern aesthetic music practice with little connection to their original social context. Since it is not possible within this short essay to go into all the medieval genres of liturgical music, the remaining parts of this article will focus on the early Middle Ages, first in an attempt to discuss the liturgical monophonic music of the Carolingians as a new departure in Latin liturgical music performance, in which there are important clues as to the direction Western musical composition came to take in later centuries. Secondly, I will discuss another development that arose out of the creative efforts of the Carolingians and their successors: the so-called liturgical drama, a different kind of polyphony where, normally at least, the different voices that came to expression in liturgical contexts were not simultaneous, but rather spatially and temporally dispersed.

Liturgical Devotion and the Carolingians In 751, the powerful Mayor of the Palace Pippin III, the son of the previous equally powerful Mayor Charles Martel, deposed the Merovingian king, Childeric III. The papacy, well-acquainted with these powers behind the throne, was eager to establish an alliance with the new king. Increased tensions between the papacy and the Byzantine emperor in connection with the iconoclast controversy had made it necessary for the pope to secure efficient and stable military support, especially against the Lombards. An alliance with the kingdom of the Franks was established when Pope Stephen II in 754 became the first pope ever to travel north of the Alps, anointing Pippin and his two sons, Charlemagne and Carloman, at St Denis. Pippin’s interest in the alliance is less obvious, but has been seen by some scholars as connected to his need for papal recognition of his usurpation of the Frankish throne. In any case, the alliance had momentous long-term significance for the establishing of a (more or less)

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unified Christian Latin culture in Western Europe that during the following centuries gradually came to extend from Sicily in the South to northern Norway, Iceland and (areas within) Greenland, and from Portugal in the West to Bohemia and Hungary in central Europe. One main reason behind the formation of a comparatively unified musico-liturgical culture in Latin Christendom in the Middle Ages must be seen in the Carolingian efforts to establish a general liturgical practice in the realm through import of Roman liturgical procedures, texts and chants. This was not only a top-down royal policy, but in many instances already ongoing through Frankish bishops travelling to Rome and bringing back liturgical texts. Further, the Carolingian efforts were much in line with what was going on in England, through figures like Boniface and later Alcuin. Over the following centuries, as the papacy grew in power (and the Carolingian reforms were introduced in Rome), Roman-Carolingian liturgy and music was disseminated to other parts of Western Europe, outside of the Carolingian empire and (after 962) the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.15 It seems clear that Pippin and even more so Charlemagne wholeheartedly worked toward the overall imposition of ‘Roman’ liturgical customs in the kingdom, including the replacement of the traditional local ‘Gallican’ chant with ‘Roman’ chant.16 Indeed, for Charlemagne (at least), this was part of a larger politico-religious programme. Rosamond McKitterick points out how ‘Charlemagne’s programme of religious reform and expansion of Christian culture was part of an overall strategy of Carolingian rule’, characterising the purpose behind Charlemagne’s government as ‘not simply to ensure royal control, peace, stability and order, but also to create a harmonious and Christian whole of a disparate realm’.17 The emphasis on learning, writing and correct language, which has led scholars to speak of a Carolingian ‘renaissance’, must be seen in this overall perspective which included liturgical reform and the introduction of ‘Roman’ chant.18 Inscribing Carolingian (religious) culture in a Roman heritage provided authority, authenticity and sacredness, although the Carolingians also often seem to have treated the Roman heritage, they claimed, with some independency.19 Prayers and readings, as well as chants, were given authority through what was claimed to be (and to some extent also was) of Roman origin, not least pointing to Pope Gregory the Great (pope 590–604) as a sponsor and even composer of the materials found in the graduals (i.e. the choir books) for the mass.20 This is expressed in the so-called ‘Gregorius praesul’ poem which is given as a prologue to some Carolingian graduals around 800: Gregorius praesul meritis et nomine dignus unde genus ducit summum conscendit honorem qui renovans monumenta patrumque priorum tum composuit hunc libellum musicae artis scolae cantorum in nomine dei summi. (Gregory, worthy in merits and in name, bishop whence his family leads, enters into the highest honour, who, renewing the monuments of the fathers and the ancients, then composed this little book of musical art for the school of cantors in the name of the highest God.)21

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Susan Rankin has commented on the appropriation of Pope Gregory as the progenitor of the chant of the Carolingian liturgical reforms and the use of this poem in the following words: Thus the authority of the liturgical books to which this preface is attached derives not only from Gregory’s own stature, but from his being a representative – or better a ‘transmitter’ to the modern situation – of the older Christian classical world. In the face of such powerful arguments, the legitimacy of Roman chant, as contained in such books, could hardly be called into question.22 It is not entirely clear, however, how ‘Roman’ the chant resulting from the Carolingian reforms actually was. It remains a matter of discussion how the chant of the Roman cantors who had taught the Carolingians had actually been received and/or reshaped by the Carolingians, and to what extent prior traditions of Gallican chant (still) made their mark on the outcome of the music of the reforms, the Frankish-Roman chant, often referred to as ‘Gregorian chant’ in view of the Carolingian ascription to Pope Gregory (which was generally accepted well into the twentieth century). There are no extant written sources with musical notation of actual Roman chant before the later eleventh century. By contrast, musical notation as a practice connected to liturgical performance was invented at the latest in the first quarter of the ninth century by the Carolingians.23 The difficult relationship between Frankish-Roman chant, preserved from the ninth century onwards, and the actual Roman chant manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, have given rise to different theories concerning the relationship between Roman chant of the eighth century and the chant of the Carolingian reforms, theories still developed and debated in scholarship up to the present.24 The beginnings of musical notation were in themselves a remarkable result connected to the liturgical reforms. Modern discussions especially concern how melodies were transmitted and when, how and why notation began, and when the melodies of the Carolingian reforms can be assumed to have achieved stability. While one main theory (advanced by Kenneth Levy) insists that an ‘archetype’ of Frankish-Roman chant already existed in writing around 800, others maintain that there is no physical evidence of this and further that it is more likely that the chants were transmitted orally for a substantial period, even beyond the beginnings of notation. Leo Treitler, in particular, has argued that the early notations should be thought of as written realisations of chant performances which for a long time were not completely fixed in all aspects. The intricate arguments of the scholars who have taken part in these discussions, which necessarily involve a certain amount of speculation since they concern the potential existence of sources, no longer extant, as well as questions of song transmission before the existence of written sources, far exceed what is possible to discuss within the scope of this chapter.25 Since music history became an academic discipline toward the end of the nineteenth century, it has been common to take ‘Gregorian chant’ as its beginning.26 In one way, this is an arbitrary choice since there was music in Western societies long before the Carolingian era. On the other hand, it is also an understandable choice since we do not have access to the music of former times prior to written musical sources. Before the early notated manuscripts from the ninth century, we mainly have theoretical writings about music (as for instance by St Augustine around 400 and Boethius in the sixth

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century), but only very little that actually describes the music itself. The early Carolingian liturgical manuscripts with notation give adiastematic (unheighted) neumes (i.e. written signs for groups of notes) which do not give information about exact tone height (pitch), although knowledge of how to notate pitch was indeed available to the Carolingians. Notational systems in these early centuries changed according to the needs and ideas of the musicians who were to use them. The early medieval notation, however, does not seem to have been intended to provide complete information about the melodies so as to replace the need for memory; it rather presupposed that melodies were memorised as a point of departure for the use of the notation.27

The Adoration of the Cross, the Carolingians and ‘Dramatic’ Liturgy During the Middle Ages (and beyond), in all churches on Good Friday, the ceremony of the Adoration of the Cross, adoratio crucis, took place shortly after the reading of the Passion according to John. As far back as the second half of the ninth century, at least in some places, the strange and austere dialogue Popule meus was part of this ritual culmination of the already highly charged Good Friday liturgy. The ceremony contained the Trisagion (the ‘thrice holy’, known also – in a different context – from the Byzantine liturgy), referred to as the Grecum ad crucem adorandam immediately followed by the incipit Popule meus. Quid eduxi te.28 In the second half of the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury, in his ‘Prayer to Christ’, would ask: why was I not there – at the actual historical place and time – to share the sorrow of the mother of God at the cross, why was my heart not pierced by the sword which pierced the Virgin’s heart?29 The liturgical ceremonies on Good Friday (as Anselm well knew) made such a presence possible in a ritual way. The Popule meus dialogue, the so-called Improperia (‘reproaches’), represents the crucified Christ confronting his people with their share in the crucifixion of their master. To this the ‘people’, i.e. the congregation, respond with submission and admission of their sins in the three sentences of the (Greek and Latin) Trisagion, ending in the prayer for mercy. However, the words of Christ in the dialogue, sung by clerics standing on each side of the cross facing the congregation, belong to the resurrected Christ rather than the crucified, representing Christ as alive and powerful, albeit suffering. I have discussed the theological (and dramatic) contents of this ceremony elsewhere, concluding that the ceremony, while using representational techniques, is not play but ‘ritual anamnesis’.30 The ritual anamnesis at work in the Adoration ceremony, as is true for liturgical ceremonies in general, is meant to affect the senses, using auditive means (song) as well as visual (the cross and the spatial contra-positioning of the cross and the congregation, as well as the relation of the cross to the altar).31 Tactile means are also used (prostration in front of the cross).32 In 836, Einhard, the former private secretary of Charlemagne, now an abbot and a learned man, the author of the Vita Karoli Magni (The Life of Charlemagne; possibly written in the 820s), answered a question by the young monk Lupus of Ferrière, his former student, about whether to adore the cross or not. The question must be understood in the context of the iconoclastic controversy in Byzantium and the Carolingian discussions in its aftermath, especially under Louis the Pious during which Bishop Claudius of

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Turin (among others) rejected the adoration of the cross or anything material.33 Einhard concludes his discussion of the adoration of the cross referring to a letter of St Jerome which mentions the adoration of a holy woman prostrated before the cross: I think it is now evident that adoration of the holy cross should not be spurned, but rather, as Saint Jerome recalled about Saint Paula coming to Jerusalem, ‘that one, prostrated before the cross, adored as if she saw the Lord still suspended there’. And we believe that we too ought to do this, namely to prostrate ourselves before the cross and, with our inner eye open, to adore him, who is suspended on the cross.34 The adoration of the cross must be seen in the broader context of Carolingian theology of the cross, focusing on the cross and its redemption of the world: in this period the cross increasingly became a fundamental sign of the deepest mystery of the Christian faith.35 As demonstrated in detail by Michael Norton, the notion of liturgical drama was established by drama scholars in the nineteenth century and appropriated in various ways during the twentieth century (and even beyond) to denote various musical ceremonies which appeared to them as dramatic, partly because of their dialogical form, partly because of the mimetic enactment which in various degrees was involved in these devotional performances, that in the earliest preserved manuscript evidence (from the tenth century) represented the basic biblical narrative of the women coming to the empty tomb of Christ on Easter morning. Later more or less similar devotional enactments were based on Christ’s nativity and other biblical and saints’ narratives. A very large number of such enactments were part of a liturgical ceremony, performed during a procession (not least before mass) or during matins of the divine office and often found copied in liturgical manuscripts. However, especially from the twelfth century on, some larger performances do not appear in a liturgical context and are difficult to place with respect to their performance context. It seems likely that the collection of ten such large ‘liturgical dramas’ in the so-called Fleury Playbook (copied in the twelfth century) may be due to a contemporary idea that what these ten pieces had in common was their genre as enactments of devotional narratives.36 Although there is no physical record of such a tradition before the tenth century, it has been argued that the central Quem queritis dialogue of the first of these purported liturgical dramas (named after its first line, sung by an angel to ask the women: ‘whom do you seek?’), which is also found as a trope in some manuscripts from the tenth century, must have been composed before 843,37 thus belonging to the creative musico-poetic liturgical efforts of the Carolingians. In this essay, I am concerned with liturgical music, thus it is the short enactments found in liturgical manuscripts that are relevant. Such enactments are found during the Middle Ages and in some places as late as in the eighteenth century, still in ever changing appropriations and contexts.38 Since the 1960s, scholars have increasingly questioned the ‘dramatic’ terminology and, in addition, raised new questions about the meaning of this practice within liturgical developments broadly, focusing not least on the ritual meaning of local practices.39 Michal Kobialka suggested such representational practices be understood in the context of the negotiations of Eucharistic understanding from the ninth century up to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), where the doctrine of the transubstantiation was codified, and I have developed this

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idea further by looking at the development of the notion of sacrament.40 Some liturgical enactments of the Quem queritis dialogue around 1200 were put in a liturgical context on Easter morning so as to demonstrate the efficacy of the consecrated host, possibly even in order to ritually underline the idea of transubstantiation.41 More importantly, the conceptualisation of a notion of sacrament during the twelfth century introduced a division between what was now understood as sacraments, ecclesiastical means for salvation, and other sacred, but not sacramental signs, ceremonies or ‘things’. I have suggested that such a categorisation implied greater ecclesiastical control over what was seen as sacramental, which also received a greater theological focus, as opposed to sacred signs of less importance, thus giving a freer status to a liturgical genre that in the end was not included among the sacramental nor belonged to the fixed liturgical framework of the mass and divine office. Thus, it became possible for liturgical enactments to develop more entertaining sides (as long as these did not threaten the fundamental doctrinal status of the Christian faith). This may help to explain the diachronic connections between early liturgical enactments and late medieval devotional music dramatic ceremonies which include dramatic entertainment beside liturgical elements, making it possible to create historical narratives connecting medieval liturgical enactments with early modern (and later) music drama, narratives of appropriation and recontextualisation.42 Similar long-term narratives may be constructed between Carolingian liturgical music and devotional or secular music of the late Middle Ages and beyond. Further, the experimental liturgical enactments of the centuries after the Carolingian era may be seen as parallel to what also seems to be an experimental musical development: polyphony. Since musical polyphony consists of two (or more) musical melodies sung at the same time, this seems to require a conceptualisation of the melodies of the individual voices as units so that they can be planned to fit each other. Liturgical enactment requires a different planning: it is polyphonic in that several voices in terms of roles in the narrative come to expression consecutively, musically, textually, as well as in spatial disposition. The differences are obvious, but what is similar, in addition to the basic contents of several musical entities, is the necessity of planning the overall musical or narrative course, thus requiring a conceptualisation of the entities which take part in the overall structure. Conceptualisation and reconceptualisation, as well as contextualisation and recontextualisation, have been the driving albeit abstract principles of musical change since the invention of musical notation by the Carolingians. These were (and are) intellectual forces always appropriating intuitive devotional, emotional and/or other individual creative impulses and characteristic of the astonishing development of Western music during and beyond the Middle Ages.

Notes 1. For modern general overviews on medieval liturgy, see John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Éric Palazzo, Liturgie et société au Moyen Âge (Paris: Aubier, 2000); The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001). For the question of ‘liturgy’ in the Middle Ages, see C. Clifford Flanigan, Kathleen M. Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, ‘Liturgy as Social Performance: Expanding the Definitions’, in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Heffernan and

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

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Matter, pp. 695–714; Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Representation in European Devotional Rituals: The Question of the Origin of Medieval Drama in Medieval Liturgy’, in The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, ed. Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 329–60 (pp. 332–6). For saints’ liturgies and their role in the overall annual round of liturgical celebrations, see Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Memorial, Ritual, and the Writing of History’, in Historical and Intellectual Culture in the Long Twelfth Century: The Scandinavian Connection, ed. Mia Münster Swendsen, Thomas K. Heebøll-Holm and Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn (Durham and Toronto: Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University, and PIMS, 2016), pp. 166–88. For the feast of Corpus Christi, see Barbara Walters, Vincent Corrigan and Peter T. Ricketts, The Feast of Corpus Christi (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a recent discussion of the application of the term to medieval liturgical ceremonies, see Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Ritual. Medieval Liturgy and the Senses: The Case of the Mandatum’, in The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages, ed. Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud and Laura Katrine Skinnebach (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2015), pp. 180–205 (pp. 191–6). See Perotinus Magnus, ed. Heinz-Klaud Metzger and Rainer Riehn (= Musik-Konzepte, 107 (2000)), especially in this volume Jürg Stenzl, ‘Perotinus Magnus: Und die Musikforschung erschuf den ersten Komponisten. Nach ihrem Ebenbilde erschuf sie ihn’, 19–50. See also Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2005), especially the ‘Prologue: The First Great Dead White Male Composer’, pp. 9–44. See also the discussion of Perotinus’s organum Sederunt principes and its relation to the liturgical text it sets in Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Liturgy and Musical Composition’, Studia Theologica, 50 (1996), 125–43 (pp. 132–4). Andreas Haug, ‘Der Codex und die Stimme in der Karolingerzeit’, in Codex und Geltung, ed. Felix Heinzer and Hans-Peter Schmit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015), pp. 29–45 (p. 45: ‘nicht so sehr der Ort einer gröβtmöglichen Annäherung an die Stimme, sondern ein Ort ihrer Abwesenheit’). Gunilla Iversen, Laus angelica: Poetry in the Medieval Mass, ed. Jane Flynn, trans. William Flynn (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), p. 14. See also Susan Rankin, ‘Carolingian Music’, in Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 274–316 (pp. 303–13). Felix Heinzer, ‘Figura zwischen Präsenz und Diskurs: Das Verhältnis des “gregorianischen” Messgesangs zu seiner dichterischen Erweiterung (Tropus und Sequenz)’, in Figura: Dynamiken der Zeiten und Zeichen im Mittelalter, ed. Christian Kiening and Katharina Mertens Fleury (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), pp. 71–90 (p. 76). John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 304. ‘sola cogitatione mens menti monstrabit quod retinet in se’; Amalar of Metz, On the Liturgy, 2 vols, ed. and trans. Eric Knibbs (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), II, pp. 96–7 [Liber officialis, III, p. 16]. See Rankin, ‘Carolingian Music’, pp. 303–8 offering a slightly different translation (p. 305). See further James McKinnon, ‘The Patristic Jubilus and the Alleluia of the Mass’, in Cantus Planus: Papers Read at the Third Meeting, Tihany, Hungary 19–24 September 1988, ed. Laszló Dobszay et al. (Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1990), pp. 61–70; Petersen, ‘Liturgy and Musical Composition’, pp. 128–31; Petersen, ‘Carolingian Music, Ritual, and Theology’, in The Appearances of Medieval Rituals: The Play of Construction and Modification, ed. Nils Holger Petersen et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 13–31 (pp. 15–18); Eyolf Østrem and Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Music’, in The Oxford Guide to

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

nils holger petersen the Historical Reception of Augustine, ed. Karla Pollmann and Willemien Otten, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), III, pp. 1430–3. See The Winchester Troper, facsimile edition and introduction by Susan Rankin (London: Stainer and Bell, 2007). As pointed out by Rankin, this ‘contains the only extant European repertory of liturgical polyphony notated before the twelfth century’ (p. xi). David Hiley has pointed out that a rising focus on polyphony occurred in treatises by music theorists from the thirteenth century on; see David Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 476–7 and David Hiley, Gregorian Chant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 154. See Robert F. Hayburn, Papal Legislation on Sacred Music, 95 A.D. to 1977 A.D. (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1979), pp. 20–2. Iversen, Laus angelica, p. 15. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Machaut’s Mass: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 8–13. For the notion of classical music and its relation to liturgical music and biblical traditions, as well as its historiography, see Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Classical Music’, in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2009–), V (2012), ed. Choon-Leong Seow, Hermann Spieckermann et al., cols 391–7. Andrew Kirkman, The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass: Medieval Context to Modern Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), see pp. 3–25. See also more generally for the late-medieval development of musical genres, Reinhard Strohm, The Rise of European Music, 1380–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For the alliance between the papacy and Pippin III and the liturgical reforms of the Carolingians, see Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms 789–895 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977); Rankin, ‘Carolingian Music’; Rosamond McKitterick, ‘Eighth-Century Foundations’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History II, c. 700–c. 900, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 681–94; Paul Fouracre, ‘Frankish Gaul to 814’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History II, c. 700–c. 900, pp. 85–109; Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Christopher Page, The Christian West and its Singers: The First Thousand Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), esp. chapters 14–16, pp. 281–360. A very useful overview and discussion of the early medieval Latin liturgical sources is Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, trans. and rev. William Storey and Niels Krogh Rasmussen (Washington, DC: The Pastoral Press, 1986). Rankin, ‘Carolingian Music’, pp. 275–9; Page, pp. 305–60. McKitterick, Charlemagne, pp. 378–9. Ibid., chapter 5: ‘Correctio, knowledge and power’, pp. 292–380; see also Giles Brown, ‘Introduction: The Carolingian Renaissance’, in Carolingian Culture, ed. McKitterick, pp. 1–51. See the discussion of ‘Roman’ quotation in Angelus A. Häussling, Mönchskonvent und Eucharistiefeier (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1973), esp. pp. 170–2 and 299–307. The word composer should not be understood in the modern sense of the word, but as taken more literally from the Latin word componere, to put together. Text and translation quoted from Rankin, ‘Carolingian Music’, p. 277. Rankin, ‘Carolingian Music’, pp. 277–8. James W. McKinnon has argued that originally the poem must have referred to Gregory II (pope 715–31) but later was ‘misinterpreted by Carolingian cantors as referring to Gregory I’; see James McKinnon, ‘Gregorius presul composuit hunc libellum musicae artis’, in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Heffernan and Matter, pp. 613–32 (p. 630).

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23. Susan Rankin, ‘On the Treatment of Pitch in Early Music Writing’, Early Music History, 30 (2011), 105–75 (p. 112). 24. Rankin, ‘Carolingian Music’, pp. 275–9; Page, pp. 305–60; Haug, ‘Der Codex und die Stimme in der Karolingerzeit’; William T. Flynn, ‘Approaches to Early Medieval Music and Rites’, in Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), pp. 57–71 (pp. 61–5). Another recent substantial contribution, Eduardo Henrik Aubert, ‘When the Roman Liturgy Became Frankish – Sound, Performance and Sublation in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries’, in Notarum figura: l’écriture musicale et le monde des signes au IXe siècle. Actes du colloque d’Auxerre (17–18 juin 2011) (= Études grégoriennes XL (2013)), 57–160, takes issue with the overall process of Carolingian adaptation of Roman liturgy, demonstrating especially one fundamentally new aspect of liturgical documents appropriating Roman texts: ‘The central point examined is the change from a liturgy in which verbal content is paramount and stands freely per se to a liturgy that mediates, or modulates, verbal content through the sonic form of the voices of those who act in the liturgy’ (p. 150). In this way, Aubert convincingly contextualises the Carolingians’ interest in and invention of musical notation. 25. See Kenneth Levy, Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Kenneth Levy, ‘Gregorian Chant and the Romans’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56 (2003), 5–41; Leo Treitler, With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How it Was Made (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Emma Hornby, ‘The Transmission of Western Chant in the 8th and 9th Centuries: Evaluating Kenneth Levy’s Reading of the Evidence’, The Journal of Musicology, 21 (2004), 418–57. 26. Treitler, p. 212. Cf. also above at n. 3. 27. Rankin, ‘On the Treatment of Pitch in Early Music Writing’, pp. 106–10. A brief summarising statement to this effect was formulated in Andreas Haug, ‘Zum Wechselspiel von Schrift und Gedächtnis im Zeitalter der Neumen’, in Cantus Planus: Papers Read at the Third Meeting, Tihany, Hungary, ed. Dobzsay et al., pp. 33–47: ‘Neumen machen eine gesungene oder erinnerte Melodie sichtbar’ (p. 37; Neumes make a sung or remembered melody visible). See also Jan M. Ziolkowski, Nota Bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), esp. pp. 11–17, 39–51. Ziolkowski’s book primarily discusses the early notations of classical Latin authors in Carolingian manuscripts. Such notations occur as early as notation in liturgical manuscripts and thus raise further questions as to the primary purposes of musical notation. See also Sam Barrett, ‘Music and Writing: On the Compilation of Paris Bibliothèque Nationale lat. 1154’, Early Music History, 16 (1997), 55–96. 28. Antiphonale Missarum Sextuplex, ed. R.-J. Hesbert (Rome: Herder, 1935, repr. 1985), p. 97. 29. ‘Cur, o anima mea, te praesentem non transfixit gladius doloris acutissimi [. . .]’, S. Anselmi cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera omnia, ed. Franciscus Salesius Schmitt, tomus II (Stuttgart; Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1968), ‘Oratio ad Christum,’ pp. 6–9 (here p. 7). English translation: ‘Why, O my soul, were you not there to be pierced by a sword of bitter sorrow [. . .]’, The Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm, trans. and intro. Sister Benedicta Ward (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973, repr. 1984), pp. 93–9. 30. Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Truth and Representation: The Medieval Good Friday Reproaches and Modern Music’, in Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages, ed. Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 354–69 (pp. 360–5); see also Nils Holger Petersen, ‘The Role of the Altar in Medieval Liturgical Representation: Holy Week and Easter in the Regularis Concordia’, in Image and Altar 800–1300, ed. Poul Grinder-Hansen (Copenhagen: Publications from the National Museum, 2014), pp. 15–25. 31. Petersen, ‘The Role of the Altar in Medieval Liturgical Representation’, pp. 19–20.

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32. For a comprehensive study of the use of the senses in medieval liturgy, see Éric Palazzo, L’Invention chrétienne des cinq sens dans la liturgie et l’art au Moyen Âge (Paris: Èditions du Cerf, 2014). See also Petersen, ‘Ritual: Medieval Liturgy and the Senses’, where the main example for a similar synaesthetic construction of a liturgical ceremony is the socalled mandatum ceremony, the washing of the feet during the Middle Ages. 33. Einharti quaestio de adoranda cruce, in Monumenta Germaniae historica, epistolarum tomus V: Karolini aevi III, ed. Karl Hampe (Berlin: Weidmann, 1898–9), pp. 146–9. English translation in Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard, ed. and trans. Paul Edward Dutton (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1998, repr. 2002), pp. 171–4. For Carolingian discussions concerning the veneration of material objects, see Thomas F. X. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), in the context of the cross, see especially pp. 333–8. 34. Charlemagne’s Courtier, p. 174; Latin text: ‘iam liquere puto, quod adoratio sancte crucis non sit deneganda, quin potius, ut beatus Hieronimus de sancta Paula Hierosolimam veniente commemorans: “prostrata”, inquit, “ante crucem, quasi pendentem Dominum cerneret, adorabat”, hoc et nobis credamus esse faciendum, ut prosternamur videlicet ante crucem et eum, qui in ea pependit interioribus oculis intuentes adoremus’. Einharti quaestio de adoranda cruce, p. 149. 35. Noble, pp. 336–7. See further Celia Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), discussing not least Hrabanus Maurus’s In honorem sanctae crucis, a learned treatise from the first half of the ninth century containing twenty-eight so-called carmina figurata, figured poems with learned explanations, see pp. 99–118. She also discusses the In honorem sanctae crucis together with Einhard’s Quaestio in the context of the mentioned iconoclastic discussions, pp. 118–31. 36. Michael L. Norton, Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017); see also Nils Holger Petersen, ‘The Concept of Liturgical Drama: Charles-Edmond de Coussemaker and Charles Magnin’, in Lingua mea calamus scribæ: Mélanges offerts à madame Marie-Noël Colette, ed. Daniel Saulnier, Katarina Livljanic and Christelle Cazaux-Kowalski (= Études grégoriennes, XXXVI (2009)), 305–14; Nils Holger Petersen, ‘The Concept of Liturgical Drama: Coussemaker and Modern Scholarship’, in Ars musica septentrionalis: de l’interprétation du patrimoine musical à l’historiographie, ed. Barbara Haggh and Frédéric Billiet avec la collaboration de Claire Chamiyé and Sandrine Dumont (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011), pp. 59–73. For the Fleury Playbook, see C. Clifford Flanigan, ‘The Fleury Playbook, the Traditions of Medieval Latin Drama, and Modern Scholarship’, in The Fleury Playbook: Essays and Studies, ed. T. P. Campbell and Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), pp. 1–25. 37. Melanie L. Batoff, Re-envisioning the Visitatio Sepulchri in Medieval Germany (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2013), pp. 42–3. 38. See Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Medieval Latin Performative Representation: Re-evaluating the State-of-the-Art’, in European Medieval Drama (forthcoming). For the long-standing liturgical tradition in Venice (thirteenth to eighteenth centuries) in particular, see Susan Rankin, ‘From Liturgical Ceremony to Public Ritual. Quem queritis at St. Mark’s, Venice’, in Da Bisanzio a San Marco, ed. Giulio Cattin (Venice: Società Editrice il mulino, 1997), pp. 137–91. 39. In particular scholars such as O. B. Hardison, C. Clifford Flanigan, Michael Norton, Michal Kobialka, Melanie Batoff and myself. See Norton. 40. Michal Kobialka, This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); see also Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Biblical Reception, Representational Ritual, and the Question of “Liturgical Drama”’,

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in Sapientia et Eloquentia: Meaning and Function in Liturgical Poetry, Music, Drama, and Biblical Commentary in the Middle Ages, ed. Gunilla Iversen and Nicolas Bell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), pp. 163−201. Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Medieval Latin Performative Representation’ and ‘Liturgical Enactment’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance, ed. Pamela King (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 13–29. 41. Petersen, ‘Liturgical Enactment’. 42. Ibid. and Petersen, ‘Medieval Latin Performative Representation’.

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6 Intermedial Texts Maureen Boulton

T

he concept of intermediality has been the subject of considerable recent debate, but the term ‘intermedial’ to describe texts that incorporate an independent medium into a literary text is generally accepted.1 In a medieval context, perhaps the best-known example of intermediality is the combination of text and image in illuminated manuscripts. In this chapter, however, I will use the term to describe works that combine the separate media of literature and music by incorporating musical pieces into literary texts, although manuscripts of some of these works also include an important visual dimension. The creation of these intermedial texts is part of a wider trend of formal experimentation in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France that resulted in a wide variety of hybrid works. The various hybrid forms – mixtures of prose and poetry, narrative and lyric verse, song and speech – that proliferated in French literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries trace their ancestry to the prosimetrum of the late Classical world, best exemplified by Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae. This work was extremely influential in medieval France, inspiring ten separate translations between about 1230 and 1380.2 Although some translators suppressed the varied form of the Latin text, rendering it entirely into prose, one of the most popular French versions retained the alternation of passages in prose and verse: the anonymous Livre de Boece de Consolacion, which dates from c. 1350 and survives in sixty-five copies, preserves the hybrid form of the original.3 As in the Consolatio, the verse passages of the Livre de Boece express ideas and emotions that exceed the scope of prose – laments, prayers, evocations of nature and heavenly phenomena – but they were never set to music, unlike the Boethian metra.4 Thus, although the Consolatio and its translations are hybrid forms, they are not intermedial. Medieval French hybrids take a variety of forms, of which the simplest is lyriconarrative writing, as, for example, the Roman de la rose and its various derivatives. These works adopt first-person discourse typical of lyric poetry for treating the subject of love.5 Other hybrid texts exploit contrasting forms of discourse, often through the insertion of lyric poems into a narrative written either in verse or in prose. Such hybrid narratives are both numerous and varied in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Among the earliest are Jean Renart’s Guillaume de Dole and Gerbert de Montreuil’s Roman de la violette, which include known song texts in the course of the narrative in contexts where they are described as sung by the characters.6 Some prose romances, such as the Roman de Perceforest, also include episodes where characters are described as composing and performing lais (inserted into the prose, but unnotated) that grow out of and commemorate events in the plot. Other works

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(including La Chastelaine de Saint-Gilles, Baudouin de Condé’s Li Prisons d’amours, Jean de le Mote’s Regret Guillaume, Trésor amoureux) employ lyric insertions (either borrowed from the extant repertoire or newly composed for the context) to provide formal divisions in a verse narrative.7 Thus, although these works may have included sung elements when they were originally presented, the surviving manuscripts do not preserve the notation. Nevertheless, some songs might have been sung to remembered or memorised melodies. Despite the narrative emphasis on singing, neither the sole copy of Guillaume de Dole nor any of the four manuscripts of the Roman de la violette make any provision for the melodies of the inserted songs, even though the scribe of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.1374 copied Violette’s insertions in red to distinguish them from the surrounding narrative verse. Similarly, none of the manuscripts of Perceforest contains any musical notation, and later copies, particularly the printed editions, omit the lyric passages entirely. Even when musical notation survives for the lyric verse in these hybrid works in other sources, it was often omitted by scribes in these specific contexts. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 2621 includes staves for each of the fifty-one refrains in Baudoin de Condé’s Li Prisons d’amours, but contains musical notation for only three of them.8 Similarly, the manuscripts of the Roman de la poire are sporadic in their provision for the melodies of its nineteen inserted refrains: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.24431 has music for only three, while in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.2186 space has been left for it, but there is no musical notation, and staves have been drawn for only six of the lyrics.9 The insertions in the latter manuscript, however, are highlighted visually, since each one begins with a large historiated initial portraying the singer of the lyric, who is further identified in a marginal note.10 In contrast, the fact that three manuscripts of Renart le nouvel incorporate musical notation for all sixty-five refrains, while the staves of the fourth remain blank, clearly demonstrates that the copyists of this text had a strong interest in the notation of its refrains.11 Two works featuring poet-musicians as protagonists, the Roman du Castelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel and the Roman de Tristan en prose, merit some comment, even though the inclusion of music may not have been central to their composition. The Castelain de Couci, attributed to a Picard poet named Jakemes, claims to explain the lyric corpus of the eponymous trouvère, and the narrative describes the circumstances for the composition and performance of each of the poems incorporated.12 Although these poems are described as songs, there was no provision for the inclusion of musical notation in either of the manuscripts, even though the music for most of the songs survives elsewhere. The Roman de Tristan en prose includes a series of lyric lais which commemorate important events in the romance, although their composition is not described as part of the account of those events.13 A female minstrel proves her familiarity with Tristan’s composition by listing the episodes – his arrival in Ireland while suffering from the Morholt’s wound, drinking the love potion and the sojourn with Iseut in the forest of Morois – commemorated in his first three lais: ‘Et le premier lai avoit il apelé Lai de Plor, le secont le Boire Pesant, et le tierz avoit apelé Deduit d’amor’ (‘And the first lai he called the Lay of Weeping, the second The Powerful Potion and the third was called the Pleasure of Love’).14 Only the second of these is included in the romance, but it is inserted much later in the text. The musical and poetic discussion surrounding the insertion serves to remind readers of the

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essential earlier stages of the love affair, at a point when Tristan, at least, believes that it is over. The discussion also sets the stage for the periodic inclusion of lyric pieces in the remainder of the romance. Since the lais were composed specifically for inclusion in the romance, they are part of the conception of the romance. Given the sparseness of the musical evidence, however, the author’s conception may not have included notation. Of the many manuscripts of the romance, only two make provision for music: Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 2542 transmits notation for all seventeen lais, and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.776 for three. In a third copy (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.12599), the lais are copied on every other line, but there are no staves and the space seems insufficient to accommodate notation.15 Nevertheless, the text itself places heavy emphasis on the musical quality of the lais. All of the lais are described as sung, many with accompaniment on a harp. Before beginning to sing his lai mortel, for example, Tristan first tunes his harp and then begins to play to accompany his singing.16 Intermedial texts are a type of hybrid form, but since the incorporation of independent media is their salient characteristic, the musical element is integral to their composition. Thus, in works like Aucassin et Nicolete, Jean de Lescurel’s dits and Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, the music was composed as an integral part of the work. Machaut’s Voir dit is interesting in this respect, because one copy transcribes the musical notation into the body of the dit, while other copies contain rubrics directing the reader to look for it elsewhere in the manuscript. The anonymous Aucassin et Nicolete, which survives in a single manuscript from the later thirteenth century, consists of alternating passages of verse and prose. This brief work has attracted extensive scholarly attention, but it is important here for its form, which is unique in medieval French literature.17 In the only copy (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.2168), the first two and the final line of each verse section are provided with musical notation. The descriptive term ‘chantefable’ used to describe the text is clearly intermedial, but raises a series of problems: the melodies are not really lyric, but rather narrative; the stanzas are assonanced (like epic poetry), but the heptasyllabic metre is more typical of lyric, and each of these passages is introduced by the phrase ‘or se cante’ (‘now is sung’). Nevertheless, the combination of sung and spoken text, with the melody notated insistently in the manuscript, marks the work as intermedial. Jean de Lescurel’s poetic corpus – a small collection of balades, rondeaux and two dits entés – is known from a single early fourteenth-century manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.146) famous for its large collection of Ars Nova musical pieces incorporated into Chailloux de Pestain’s reworking of the Roman de Fauvel.18 The two dits (‘Gracieuse, faitisse et sage’ and ‘Gracieus temps est, quant rosier’) are both stanzaic poems, each ending with a refrain borrowed from the extant repertoire, and (like all of the musical pieces in this manuscript) accompanied by musical notation. Examples of this form of dit avec des refrains are found in the thirteenth century, but these are the first to include notated melodies.19 Both of Lescurel’s dits entés are composed in nine-line stanzas of varying metre, each ending with a different refrain. As laid out in the manuscript (ff.60r–62v), stanzas are punctuated with at least one, and up to three, musical staves. As a result, the contrast between stanza and refrain is dramatically visible to the eye, and presumably the reader of the book was invited to sing the notes presented.20

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Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune is a classic example of an intermedial text because the poems, the music and the narrative were all conceived and transmitted as a unified whole: seven of the eleven copies of the work transmit musical notation for all of the lyric pieces, another has notation for two pieces, and yet another (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.843) indicates where there ought to be music by using the rubric ‘et y a chant’ (‘and there is music’).21 In most of the collected-works manuscripts, the inserted songs are notated within the narrative only in the Remede; in other dits (the Fonteinne amoureuse and the Voir dit) the existence of music is cued through the use of rubrics, though the notations appear at other points in the books.22 This is doubtless due to the Remede’s status as an exemplary work, in which Machaut demonstrates what is needed for love, poetry and music. The narrative illustrates the dispositions required for the lover to create love songs, and showcases at least one example of each of the fixed forms available to an aspiring fourteenth-century poet, i.e. lai, complainte, chanson royale, balade, chanson baladée (or virelai) and rondeau. The inclusion of musical notation for each of these songs simultaneously illustrates the entire range of musical possibilities available to a poet-composer: old- and newstyle notation, monody as well as polyphony (in three or four voices).23 In addition, since the Remede is an early work, it was designed to circulate independently, before the compilation of the complete-works manuscripts. The artist of MS A (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.1584) highlights the didactic element of the text in his opening miniature (f.49v) portraying a young man standing before an old, bearded man who is seated – a clear image of apprentice and master. Throughout most of the Remede, the narrator is indeed taught by a master (or rather magistra), the allegorical figure ‘Esperance’ (Hope), who instructs him in the proper attitudes to love and demonstrates a variety of musical forms, as well as introducing her pupil to polyphonic music and to Ars Nova notation. By the end of the work, the narrator shows that he has internalised her lessons by producing songs in imitation of his teacher, but also in the remaining varieties of the fixed forms that she did not teach. In MS A, most of the Remede’s musical pieces fit into the two-column layout of the text pages. The exception is the lai: it begins in one column of 52r, but then occupies the full width of the next three and a half pages. The lai is an interruption in the narrative, and this interruption is represented visually on the manuscript pages where the usually columnar layout is displaced by the lyric and its musical notation. The message encoded in this piece is ‘souffisance’ (‘moderation’), and concludes with the lover’s decision to do nothing. However, the lai is more than disruptive – it actually generates the rest of the narrative when its discovery by the lady in effect speaks for the lover (though he flees without acknowledging his authorship).24 In two other copies of the Remede (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.1586 = C, and fr.9221 = E), all of the musical insertions are inscribed across the full width of the page. MS C (f.26r) further highlights the lai by introducing it with a miniature representing the narrator-protagonist in the act of composition: he is seated in an orchard with a long scroll on which he is writing, though only words rather than music.25 In Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir dit, written at the end of his career, poetry and music are combined with both narrative verse and prose letters into a complex whole. The plot begins and develops in a poetic and epistolary exchange between the ageing poet and his young admirer (Toute Belle); the initial exchange is augmented with prose letters, and the narrative verse encases and orders the collected documents. Because

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of the literary correspondence at its heart, the Voir dit orchestrates two voices, not only the lover’s but also his lady’s, and it is she who initiates the exchange.26 In all, there are sixty-three lyric poems, seven of which have musical notation.27 Since only one of the four surviving complete manuscripts places the musical notation for the songs at the points in the narrative where they occur, readers who encountered the work in the collected works codices were apparently expected to turn to the musical sections of the volume in order to find the piece with its setting. As conceived, then, the Voir dit combined music with poetry and prose, but its intermedial quality is less immediately apparent in most of its manuscript contexts, which rely on cross-references among different parts of the book. In the letters which enclose, replace or complement the poems, the narrator often sheds the diffident persona of the courtly lover for that of the master poet advising a novice. In this way, the Voir dit once again teaches the inter-related arts of love, poetry and music. Machaut augments the overt and generalised didacticism of the Remede with a teaching that is entirely personalised and specific. In the Voir dit, the roles are reversed, and the narrator is the master instructing a young (and female) poet, instead of receiving instruction from the feminine allegory of Hope. As the lovers correspond, the discussion of the poetry is a major theme of the letters (which also report the lovers’ emotions and the practical details of their daily lives). For example, Toute Belle asks Machaut to compose music for the poems he sends, and reports that she has learned the ones that do have music. On one occasion, she composes a chanson baladée in imitation of his in the hope that they may be sung together. The poet always praises the girl’s poems, but on one occasion observes: ‘je vous diroie et apenroie ce que je n’apris onques a creature, par quoy vous les feriés mieulz’ (Letter 6, ‘I would tell you and teach you what I have never taught to a soul, and you would compose them better’).28 A strong visual dimension is an additional element of complexity in the Voir dit, one that adds a different kind of intermediality. In MS A, for example, rubrics guide the reader through the exchanges; the letters are identified by writer (lover or lady) and by genre. The lyric poems that have musical settings elsewhere in the book are further marked ‘et y a chant’ (‘and there is music’) even though the scribe copied none into the work. One miniature (f.242r), however, portrays the lover seated in the presence of his lady writing music onto a scroll; ironically, the miniature is placed opposite a balade that is copied there without musical notation. In addition to the miniatures that illustrate the text, the lady sends her portrait to the poet, and this ‘image faite sur le vif’ (‘image drawn from life’) becomes an important figure in the work. The poet shuts the portrait away when disenchanted with his lady, only to take it out again when they are reconciled. At one point (in a dream), the image even complains of the cruel treatment meted out by the lover.29 Thus the image (the portrait) described in the text is visually present on the page, in a way that the music described in the text is not (except in MS E). The copy of the Voir dit in MS E (ff.171–210) exhibits a different kind of visual quality, which highlights both the structural complexity of the work and its intermedial character.30 The narrative verse is written in three columns and the inserted poems also fit into this arrangement, but the prose letters are written in long lines across the width of the written space. In addition, the scribe further distinguished the letters by writing them in a form of hybrida script derived from the chancery script

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used for issuing formal letters. The rest of the text, in contrast, is written in a formal textura. The choice of script thus underscores the functions of the different forms of discourse even as it announces them visually on the page. Musical notation offers a further disruption of the tight columnar structure of the manuscript layout. Alone of all the copies of the Voir dit, this manuscript incorporates notation for six of the poems within the narrative, and here again the scribe chose to write the music across the page. The mise-en-page of this manuscript dramatically underscores the intermediality of the text by distinguishing the elements of music, verse, lyric poetry and prose that Machaut combined in the Voir dit.31 A complete survey of medieval intermediality greatly exceeds the scope of this chapter, but the works examined here illustrate the range of possibilities in the literature of medieval France, where intermedial works constitute but a single (though varied) category of hybrid texts. As we have seen, these intermedial hybrids exhibit a considerable range. In some, the narrative is interrupted by the insertion of songs (often meant to be sung despite negligent scribes). Other works portray poet-musicians who respond to the events of the narrative by composing songs. The dits of Guillaume de Machaut are examples of first-person narrations, some of which deal explicitly with the composition of lyric and music, a process which is underscored in some of the manuscripts by the mise-en-page or by an artist’s portrayal of the poet at work.

Notes 1. For an overview, see Irina O. Rajewsky, ‘Intermediality, Intertextuality and Remediation: A Literary Perspective in Intermediality’, Intermédialités, 6 (2006), 43–64. 2. Mario Roques and Antoine Thomas, ‘Traductions françaises de la Consolatio Philosophiae de Boèce’, Histoire littéraire de la France, 37 (1938), 419–88. See Sarah Kay, ‘Touching Singularity: Consolation, Philosophy, and Poetry in the French Dit’, in The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 21–38, on the influence of Boethian texts on other French writers. 3. Glynnis M. Cropp, Le Livre de Boece de Consolation (Geneva: Droz, 2006); see pp. 1–3 for the older bibliography on the translations. 4. Ibid., pp. 52–3; on the Boethian metra, see Sam Barrett, ‘Music and Writing: On the Compilation of Paris Bibliothèque Nationale Lat. 1154’, Early Music History, 16 (1997), 55–96. 5. See Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 83–105. 6. See Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France from Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 7. Boulton, The Song in the Story, pp. 243–71. 8. See Butterfield, pp. 252–5. 9. A third manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.12786, is unfinished; none of the spaces for miniatures or musical staves has been filled in. See Huot, pp. 175–84, 191–3; Boulton, The Song in the Story, pp. 155–8, 297, 298–9; Butterfield, pp. 181–3, 246–52. 10. For example, f.27v [accessed 21 December 2016]. For a fuller description of this manuscript and the refrains, see Le Roman de la poire par Tibaut, ed. Christiane Marchello-Nizia (Paris: Société des anciens textes français, 1984), pp. xxxiv–lvi.

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11. The music has been edited and studied by John Haines, Satire in the Songs of ‘Renart le nouvel’ (Geneva: Droz, 2010); see also Boulton, The Song in the Story, pp. 105–9; Butterfield, pp. 138–41, 174–7. 12. See William Calin, ‘Poetry and Eros: Language, Communication, and Intertextuality in Le Roman du Castelain de Couci’, French Forum, 6 (1981), 197–211; Huot, pp. 117–31; Boulton, pp. 61–6, 95–7. 13. See Emmanuèle Baumgartner, La Harpe et l’épée: Tradition et renouvellement dans le Tristan en prose (Paris: SEDES, 1990), pp. 107–31; Boulton, The Song in the Story, pp. 42–51, 132–5; Boulton, ‘Tristan and his Doubles as Singers of Lais: Love and Music in the Prose Tristan’, in Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Elspeth M. Kennedy, ed. Karen Pratt (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1994), pp. 53–69; Denis Hüe, ‘La parole enchâssée: écriture de l’insertion lyrique dans les Tristan’, in Des Tristan en vers au Tristan en prose: Hommage à Emmanuèle Baumgartner, ed. Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris: Champion, 2009), pp. 43–62. 14. Le Roman de Tristan en prose, ed. Renée L. Curtis, 3 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), III, 168, § 868. 15. Les Lais du roman de Tristan en prose d’après le manuscrit de Vienne 2542, ed. Tatiana Fotitch and Ruth Steiner, Münchener romanistische Arbeiten, 38 (Munich: Fink, 1974). 16. Le Roman de Tristan, ed. Curtis, pp. 169–70, § 870. 17. The edition Aucassin et Nicolette: Chantefable du XIIIe siècle, ed. Mario Roques (Paris: Classiques Français du Moyen Age, 1967) includes transcriptions of the musical phrases, pp. xxii–xxiii. See Butterfield, pp. 196–9. For relevant bibliography, see Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Age, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink, 2nd edn (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1992), pp. 111–13. 18. See Le Roman de Fauvel in the Edition of Mesire Chaillou de Pesstain: A Reproduction in Facsimile of the Complete Manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds Français 146, ed. Edward H. Roesner, François Avril and Nancy Freeman Regalado (New York: Broude, 1990); Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Emma Dillon, Medieval Music-Making and the ‘Roman de Fauvel’ (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). In addition to the published facsimile, there is a digital facsimile on the Gallica site: [accessed 21 December 2016]. 19. See Boulton, The Song in the Story, pp. 245–54. 20. The opening of the first dit on f.60r is at [accessed 21 December 2016]. 21. See Huot, pp. 249–59, 275–80; Boulton, The Song in the Story, pp. 188–92; Butterfield, pp. 217–18, 263–6, 308. 22. In Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.9221, the musical pieces in the Voir dit also carry notation. 23. Margaret Switten, ‘Guillaume de Machaut: Le Remede de Fortune au carrefour d’un art nouveau’, Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises, 41 (1989), 101–18. 24. On the lai as a ‘texte générateur’, see William Calin, ‘Medieval Intertextuality: Lyrical Inserts and Narrative in Guillaume de Machaut’, The French Review, 62 (1988), 1–10 (pp. 2–4). 25. Dominic Leo, ‘Authorial Presence in the Illuminated Machaut Manuscripts’, PhD dissertation (New York University, 2005). For the image, see f.26r at [accessed 21 December 2016]. 26. Boulton, The Song in the Story, pp. 198–202; Boulton, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir Dit: the Ideology of Form’, in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 39–48; and Boulton, ‘The Dialogic Imagination in the Middle Ages: The Example of Guillaume de Machaut’, Allegorica, 10 (1989), 85–94; Huot, pp. 279–86; Butterfield, pp. 266–70.

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27. In addition to the rondeaux, balades and virelais, Butterfield, p. 308 lists one lai, three complaintes, one prière and (pp. 268–9) three refrains. 28. Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre du voir dit, ed. Paul Imbs, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet and Noël Musso (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1999), p. 154. 29. Ibid., pp. 682–708; MS A, f.293r has a miniature of this scene: [accessed 21 December 2016]. 30. A digital facsimile of this manuscript is available on the Gallica site: [accessed 21 December 2016]. 31. See Deborah McGrady, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and his Late Medieval Audience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 127–51.

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7 Citation and Quotation Jennifer Saltzstein

C

itation and quotation were vital to medieval music and poetry. Although modern scholars often use the terms quotation and citation interchangeably, Sarah Kay differentiates the two by defining quotation as the act of reproducing text from an outside source and citation as the act of invoking the author or title of a work without necessarily providing text from that work.1 Citation and quotation figure prominently in two of the most influential thirteenth-century romances. In the Roman de la rose, Jean Renart quotes songs within his narrative, a technique of lyric interpolation that inaugurated a new and enduring medieval literary genre, uniting poetry with quoted song. The most widely disseminated and imitated romance of the thirteenth century, also entitled the Roman de la rose, was, by most accounts, written by two authors: Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Jean de Meun reveals this joint authorship within his continuation by citing Guillaume de Lorris as the author of the poem’s first 4058 lines, and by quoting the final two lines Guillaume penned before his own narrative began. Quotation and citation were used to define authorship and to delineate and transform genre in these foundational medieval literary works. Other thirteenthcentury interpolated romances attribute quoted lyrics to known authors, citing them by name. In the Roman du Castelain de Couci, for example, all of the interpolated songs are presented as the work of a specific trouvère, the Châtelain de Couci. The romance author, Jakemes, cites the Châtelain as the author of the lyrics.2 In the Dit de la panthère d’amours, Nicole de Gavrelle quotes from the songs of Adam de la Halle and cites Adam as their author.3 The first letters of quoted lyrics could also be used in acrostics that cite the names of important figures in romances. The first letters of each of the lyrics interpolated within the Roman de la poire form an acrostic that names the lady, the narrator-protagonist and the word amors.4 In literary contexts, quotation and citation were a poetic preoccupation; citation and naming frequently appeared in conjunction with quoted song. In musical contexts, quotation was prevalent but citation was comparatively rare.5 On the whole, authorial attribution was often inconsistent or non-existent in thirteenth-century musical sources. Motets themselves are, with few exceptions, anonymous. Over half of the extant trouvère chansons are anonymous and many of the remaining songs are provided with conflicting authorial attributions in the manuscripts that transmit them.6 Quotation, however, was pervasive in medieval music. Its importance is particularly evident in the usage of refrains, short segments of music and text that were quoted intertextually across motets and trouvère songs, as well as romances, vernacular translations and a variety of other types of medieval texts.7 Refrain quotation was widespread in the vernacular motet corpus;

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some refrains circulated exclusively in motets.8 In the case of the motet enté, a subset of the motet corpus identified by modern scholars, refrains are quoted at the beginning and end of a motet voice with new music and lyrics grafted in between.9 A subgenre of trouvère song that scholars refer to as the chanson avec des refrains is defined through the quotation of refrains. Each strophe of this song type ends with a refrain that is musically and textually distinct both from the strophe to which it is appended and from the refrains used in subsequent strophes. Quotation and modelling were thus pervasive features of medieval music.10 Within these already anonymous musical spheres as well as in musical works that are attributed, however, there are few instances in which a medieval composer cites a specific author or source for a quoted refrain.11 Tracing a quoted refrain across its surviving contexts can suggest insights into medieval interpretative practices and audience reception, as well as authorial interaction and community. Exploring the intertextual network surrounding the refrain, ‘Je voi ce que je desir, si n’en puis joie avoir’ (‘I see what I desire, but I cannot have joy’; vdB1149), will illustrate some of these rewards while also underscoring interpretative challenges that medieval quotations can pose to the modern analyst.

Case Study: ‘Je voi ce que je desir, si n’en puis joie avoir’ (vdB1149) The refrain, ‘Je voi ce que je desir’ (vdB1149), is a particularly interesting example of quotation because it appears across monophonic and polyphonic works; it also traverses poetic contexts that invoke the pastourelle on the one hand and the rhetoric of fin’ amors on the other, potentially bringing the two into dialogue. The refrain appears in the fifth strophe of the chanson avec des refrains, Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73) and is also used as the refrain of the song Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485).12 Further, the music and text of the first strophe of Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485) also appear as a motet voice; the melody of this motet voice and its tenor correspond to a work written in a musical genre called the substitute clausula.13 These contexts appear in Table 7.1. Exploration of this refrain will begin with the song Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73). This song’s authorship was disputed among medieval scribes; it was attributed to three different trouvères, two within the same manuscript.15 This song is an example of a pastourelle, a popular song type in which a knight on horseback encounters a shepherdess and relays to the listener his attempt to seduce her, which may or may not be successful.16 The pastourelle was recognised as an independent song genre in the Middle Ages: the compilers of the songbook contained in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308, for example, grouped songs featuring this narrative scenario under the rubric ‘pastorelles’. This particular pastourelle is emblematic of a smaller subset of the genre that modern scholars call the bergerie. In a bergerie, the knight observes the shepherdess or her lover Robin without participating directly in the scene.17 Both traditional pastourelle and bergerie songs stress that the relationship between the shepherdess and Robin occurs on equal footing, in contrast to the encounter between the shepherdess and the knight, which is marked by class difference and potential violence.18

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Table 7.1 Contexts of the refrain, ‘Je voi ce que je desir, si n’en puis joie avoir’ (vdB1149) Type of composition MS sources14

Text

vdB1149

Textless (cl. F-106)

melody (no text) clausula in final phrase upper voice of upper voice

I-Fl Plut.29.1, ff.158v–159r

Quant voi le final line douz tans venir of text (MV235 = stanza 1 of RS1485)

single stanza motet voice

D-W Guelf.1099 Helmst, ff.247r–v F-MO H196, ff.167v–168r F-MO H196, ff.203v–204r F-Pn n.a.f.13521, f.382v

Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485)

trouvère chanson with 3 stanzas

F-Pa 5198, pp.190–1 ‘Robert de rains’ F-Pn fr.845, f.91r ‘Robert de rains’ F-Pn fr.847, ff.72v–73r ‘Robert de rains’ F-Pn n.a.f.1050, ff.135r–v ‘Robert de rains’

trouvère chanson avec des refrains with 8 stanzas

F-Pn fr.844, ff.99v–100r ‘baudes de le Kakerie’ F-Pn fr.12615, f.44v–45r ‘Ernous caupains’

final line of first strophe of text

Ier main pensis refrain of chevauchai strophe 5 (RS73)

In Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73), the narrator overhears Robin singing of his love for Marot (strophe 1). As he is singing, a young maiden overhears him and falls in love with him (strophe 2). She makes a number of unsuccessful attempts to seduce him, but her advances have no effect (strophes 3 and 4). In strophe 5, Robin sings the refrain ‘Je voi ce que je desir’ (vdB1149) as an affirmation of his love for Marot, explaining that he loves her without deception. The refrain encapsulates a common trope of fin’ amors, recalling the unrequited desire at the core of troubadour and trouvère love songs. In the context of the pastourelle, the rhetoric would be more appropriate to a knight. Yet Robin’s comportment is in keeping with the message of the refrain; he continues to demonstrate his loyalty to Marot, further frustrating the young maiden. He rebuffs her again, angering the maiden so much that she begins to insult him by calling him a shepherd and a coward (strophes 6–8). The song thereby comments on the class status of the pastoral characters. Robin is ennobled by his loyalty to Marot, which he demonstrates by singing the refrain ‘Je voi ce que je desir’ (vdB1149) in strophe 5. He is immediately reminded, however, of his true status as a lowly shepherd devoid of the courage a knight would possess. The confluence of pastoral tropes and values associated with fin’amor coincides with the quotation of the refrain.

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This shift in the poetic text is musically marked. Because the song is a chanson avec des refrains, it uses a different refrain at the end of each strophe.19 The refrain ‘Je voi ce que je desir’ (vdB1149) is also featured in the song Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485), attributed to Robert de Reims. Scarce documentation survives that would help us to ascertain Robert’s period of activity.20 Moreover, the ambiguous attribution of Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73) thwarts any attempt to place these songs in a clear chronological relationship. Yet a listener or reader familiar with both songs would surely notice the quotation of the refrain. Although the second phrase diverges, the melody for the refrain’s first phrase is nearly identical between the version of the song Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73) as transmitted in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.844, f.100r and the four chansonniers that transmit the song Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485) listed in Table 7.1.21 When compared with the melody of Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485) found in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 5198, p. 190, for example, the version of the refrain from Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73) in fr.844 is transmitted a fourth lower, beginning on a rather than d, a transposition that results in some differences in interval quality between the versions.22 As shown in Figure 7.1, the version of the refrain in Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73) includes a descending plica on its first note, a melodic detail not present in the version of the refrain transmitted in the sources of Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485). These are minor differences. The wide, stable melodic transmission of the refrain’s opening phrase increases the likelihood that listeners may have recognised ‘Je voi ce que je desir’ (vdB1149) as a quotation when hearing it within the song Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73), and that they may have brought the two songs into dialogue. Musical memory prompts readers to connect these otherwise distinct songs.23

Figure 7.1 Transmission of ‘Je voi ce que je desir’ (vdB1149) in (a) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.844, f.100r and (b) Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 5198, p. 190

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Knowledge of Robert’s song would reinforce Robin’s declaration of loyalty for Marot. The song Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485) is written in a rhetoric of fin’ amors. Robert begins with a convention that modern scholars refer to as the springtime exordium, in which the description of a springtime scene turns the troubadour’s or trouvère’s thoughts to his beloved; the contrast between the idyllic scene and the lover’s inner torment underscore the pain of his unrequited love.24 In Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73), when Robin sings the refrain ‘Je voi ce que je desir’ (vdB1149), the final line of the first strophe of Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485), the quotation could serve to reassure listeners of Robin’s loyalty to Marot. Awareness of both contexts of this refrain might signal to listeners that the maiden’s attempts to seduce Robin will be unsuccessful, predicting her frustrated response in the final strophes of Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73). Did the author of Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73) quote this song by Robert de Reims? The structure of the song form, the chanson avec des refrains, is built through quotation; its very structure thus suggests that the refrain was indeed quoted from Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485).25 The origin of the latter song, however, remains unclear, particularly in light of its transmission. In addition to appearing as a strophic song in four different chansonniers, the text and melody of the first strophe of Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485) are also transmitted as a motet voice in three manuscripts, as seen in Table 7.1. These pieces are among a small group of motets that use a trouvère song as one of their parts. Friedrich Gennrich drew attention to these motets nearly a century ago, and Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485) is one of two he located that is also transmitted as a substitute clausula.26 One of the most interesting aspects of the relationship between the song and motet versions of Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485) is that the piece is stylistically appropriate to both genres. The text appears in Table 7.2. This

Table 7.2 Text, poetic structure and translation of Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Quant voi le douz tans venir, la flor en la pree, la rose espanir, adonc chant, plour et sospir; quant ai joie amee, dont ne puis joïr. Mir ma joie sans repentir, tir a ce que ne puis sentir. [N’]assentir ne me puis por nul avoir au departir. Je voi ce que je desir, si n’en puis joie avoir.

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7a 6b 5a 7a 6b 5a 1a 7a 1a 7a 3a 7c 4a 7a 7c

When I see the arrival of springtime, flowers in the meadow, and the rose in bloom, then do I sing and weep and sigh; when I have loved joy so much, but cannot enjoy it. I contemplate my joy without regret, I draw towards what I cannot feel. I cannot accept for any thing to leave her. I see what I desire, but I cannot have joy.

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Figure 7.2 ‘Quant voi le douz tans venir/(IMMO)LATUS’ (motetus and tenor), ll. 6–8 in Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire Médecine, H196 ff.167v–168r

song features a poetic technique called echo rhyme in which the poet includes two one-syllable rhymes in lines 7 and 9 that echo the rhyme of the previous verse, as shown in the central column. Echo rhyme occurs in song genres such as in the Occitan descort and lay.27 In this context, the echo rhyme accords surprisingly well with the conventionally irregular phrase structure of the motet. In each of the three instances of echo rhyme, the echoed rhyme is preceded and followed by a rest. The first instance appears in Figure 7.2. It is difficult to establish a chronology for the song and motet versions of Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485). Gennrich asserted that because a clausula survives, the motet must have preceded the song. Other scholars have argued that not all of the substitute clausulae in the manuscript transmitting this piece predate the motets with which they share their music.28 A number of compositional scenarios for the surviving contexts are possible.29 For example, Robert could have written a new poetic text for the clausula, cleverly fitting echo rhymes into a pre-existing piece with a compatible phrase structure. Or alternatively, an anonymous composer could have adapted Robert’s song as a motet voice, and the clausula could represent an untexted transcription of this piece. Many scenarios are possible, yet it is difficult to ignore the intertextual connection between Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485) and the motet voice with which it is paired in Montpellier H196 and Paris 13521: En mai quant rose est florie (MV236).30 In this lyric, which appears in Table 7.3, Marot arises on a May morning and finds Robin. She reproaches him for having turned his back on her. He reassures her, saying that he had not turned away from her, and singing ‘If I did not come to see my lover, it was not by my will’.

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Table 7.3 Text and translation of En Mai quant rose est florie (MV236) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

En mai quant rose est florie, par matin s’est esveillie Marot, s’a Robin trove. A lui reprové la bone compaignie qu’adés li a porté[e], or li a le doz torné. Il li a dit et conté par la foi, qu’il lui doit, qu’einsi n’iert il mie: Se j’ai demoré a veoir m’amie, n’est pas a mon gré.

In May, when roses bloom, Marot woke up one morning and found Robin. She reminded him reproachfully of the companionship he had always provided her, for now he had turned his back on her. He told her by the faith he owes her that it was not so: If I did not come to see my lover, it was not by my will.

Marot’s complaint in this motet voice is generically atypical of pastourelle scenes, where Robin’s loyalty is readily assured. However, her protestations resonate strongly with the song Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73). A listener familiar with both contexts might connect the Robin character in this motet with the shepherd who was detained by an unnamed maiden in Ier main pensis chevauchai (RS73). This act of intertextual reading would conjure up a pastourelle scenario where Robin’s loyalty to Marot was tested and proven. Regardless of the chronology of quotation, the musical and textual similarities among the network of motets and songs that share the refrain ‘Je voi ce que je desir’ (vdB1149) would have rewarded knowledgeable listeners and readers.31

Conclusion The complex of songs and motets discussed above underscores that in thirteenthcentury musical contexts composers demonstrate a fascination with quotation and a resistance to citation. Moreover, the connection between citation and quotation in music remains a loose one well into the fourteenth century. Although there is an increasing focus on attribution in vernacular music manuscripts of the fourteenth century, a number of unattributed popular songs are quoted and alluded to by other composers without authorial citation.32 Even in elaborate cases of musical borrowing such as occurs in the En attendant songs, authors of the quoted material are not cited directly.33 Tracing the surviving concordances of the refrain, ‘Je voi ce que je desir’ (vdB1149), illustrates that even in the absence of citation, quotation was a productive hermeneutic device. The memory of a short phrase of melody and text could encourage intertextual interpretation across different musical and poetic

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contexts. Despite the anonymity of so many thirteenth-century musical repertories, quotation can reveal a community of composers engaged in dialogue through their music and poetry, and actively communicating with an audience of readers and listeners.

Notes 1. Sarah Kay, ‘How Long is a Quotation?: Quotations from the Troubadours in the Text and Manuscripts of the Breviari d’Amour’, Romania, 127 (2009), 140–68; Sarah Kay, Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 2. Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 117–25; Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 61; Ardis Butterfield, ‘The Refrains and the Transformation of Genre in the Roman de Fauvel’, in Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 105–59. 3. Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the Rose to the Rhétoriqueurs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 152–3. 4. Huot, p. 176. 5. On the citation of Ovid in trouvère song, see Jennifer Saltzstein, ‘Cleric-Trouvères and the Jeux-Partis of Medieval Arras’, Viator, 43 (2012), 147–64. 6. Judith A. Peraino, Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 19. 7. Refrain numbering refers to Nico van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969). 8. Jennifer Saltzstein, ‘Relocating the Thirteenth-Century Refrain: Intertextuality, Authority, and Origins’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135 (2010), 245–79; Jacques Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and Present: Quotations and their Function in Machaut’s Motets’, Early Music History, 20 (2001), 1–86. 9. Judith Peraino, ‘Monophonic Motets: Sampling and Grafting in the Middle Ages’, Musical Quarterly, 84 (2001), 644–80; Ardis Butterfield, ‘Enté: A Survey and Re-assessment of the Term in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Music and Poetry’, Early Music History, 22 (2003), 67–101; Yolanda Plumley, The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 10. See Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: Learning from the Learned, ed. Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005). 11. Jennifer Saltzstein, The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), pp. 102–4. 12. Trouvère songs will be referred to by their ‘RS’ number, as given in Hans Spanke, G. Raynauds Bibliographie des altfranzösischen Liedes (Leiden: Brill, 1955). 13. Motet voices are identified using the ‘MV’ numbering in Friedrich Ludwig, Repertorium organorum recentioris et motetorum vetustissimi stili (Halle: Niemeyer, 1910). 14. Library sigla used in Table 7.1 may be expanded as follows: I-Fl = Florence, Biblioteca MediceaLaurenziana; D-W = Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibliothek; F-MO = Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire Médecine; F-Pn = Paris, Bibliothèque nationale; F-Pa = Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

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15. In fr.12615, the song is attributed to Ernoul Chaupin on f.44v (). In fr.844, the table of contents, f.Er, attributes Ier main pensis to Jehan Erart (), yet on f.99v, ‘baudes de le kakerie’ is identified as the author (). 16. Geri Lynn Smith, The Medieval French Pastourelle Tradition: Poetic Motivations and Generic Transformations (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009). 17. The Medieval Pastourelle, ed. William D. Paden (New York: Garland, 1987), pp. ix–xiii. 18. Helen Dell, Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 73–9. 19. Concordances are extant for refrains vdB1056, vdB1149 and vdB1662. 20. Wilhelm Mann, ‘Die Lieder des Dichters Robert de Rains genannt La Chievre’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 23 (1899), 79–116. 21. The refrain vdB1149 is the second refrain here: . The version in fr.12615 has a divergent melody for vdB1149 on f.45r (see second refrain here: ). 22. See . 23. On connections between medieval musical quotation and memory, see Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Yolanda Plumley, Giuliano Di Bacco and Stefano Jossa, 2 vols (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011–13), I: Text, Music and Image from Machaut to Ariosto; II: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Medieval Culture. 24. Roger Dragonetti, La Technique poétique des trouvères dans la chanson courtoise: Contribution à l’étude de la rhétorique médiévale (Bruges: De Tempel, 1960), pp. 172–6. 25. See Suzannah Clark, ‘“S’en dirai chançonete”: Hearing Text and Music in a Medieval Motet’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 16 (2007), 31–59. 26. Friedrich Gennrich, ‘Trouvèrelieder und Motettenrepertoire’, Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 9 (1926), 8–39, 65–85. 27. See Peraino, Giving Voice, pp. 111–14. 28. William G. Waite, The Rhythm of Twelfth-Century Polyphony: Its Theory and Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); Catherine A. Bradley, ‘Contrafacta and Transcribed Motets: Vernacular Influences on Latin Motets and Clausulae in the Florence Manuscript’, Early Music History, 32 (2013), 1–70. 29. Naturally, additional contexts for this refrain may not have survived. 30. See and for ff.167v–168r; and and for ff.203v–204r, although no music was entered on the staves for the upper voice. The Paris source is online at . 31. Compare Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 151–60; Jennifer Saltzstein, ‘Refrains in the Jeu de Robin et Marion: History of a Citation’, in Poetry, Knowledge, and Community in Late Medieval France, ed. Rebecca Dixon and Finn E. Sinclair (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 173–86.

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32. Yolanda Plumley, ‘Crossing Borderlines: Points of Contact between the Late-Fourteenth Century French Lyric and Chanson Repertories’, Acta Musicologica, 76 (2004), 3–23 (p. 9). 33. See Anne Stone, ‘A Singer at the Fountain: Homage and Irony in Ciconia’s “Sus une fontayne”’, Music & Letters, 82 (2001), 361–90; Yolanda Plumley, ‘Citation and Allusion in the Late Ars Nova: The Case of Esperance and the En Attendant Songs’, Early Music History, 18 (1999), 287–363.

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8 Polytextuality Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach

Definition

A

simple definition of medieval musical polytextuality is less apparent than it might at first appear. Cognate with its use in the word ‘polyphony’, which designates all non-monophonic music, the prefix ‘poly’ in ‘polytextual’ may readily be understood to embrace any musical piece which delivers more than one text simultaneously, that is, sung in different voice parts. The locus classicus of medieval polytextuality is the three- or four-voice motet, whose upper voices carry different, simultaneously delivered texts and whose tenor part – the lowest sounding part in medieval textures – usually carries a syllable, word or phrase from a melismatic passage of liturgical chant. Other cases are more difficult to taxonomise, giving a clear indication of the spectrum of music–text relations in the Middle Ages, ranging from intra-textual polytextuality to referential intertextuality. For the purposes of this chapter, we will set aside many textural contenders for polytextuality. For instance, two-part motets with identified or identifiable chant tenors may legitimately be considered to be polytextual, even though it is both unclear whether the word of the tenor melody was sung and also arguable that the tenor text primarily served to introduce the meaningful presence of another longer text and/or textual-liturgical situation without making it sonically present in performance. By analogy, it would be possible to consider pieces that quote melodies from other identifiable pieces, but without their text, as polytextual; here, however, they will be considered instances of intertextuality or quotation and omitted from discussion.1 Similarly excluded here will be pieces that include the same texts, or parts of the same text, delivered at different rates in more than one voice of a composition. These can include pieces employing canonic musical writing or shorter periods of melodic imitation so that a single text is delivered in such a staggered way as to sound almost polytextual with itself.2 We will, however, consider an example of a similar technique when used with voices delivering different texts from one another. Finally, pieces in which the same music is sung to different texts at different times, whether because it is a strophic setting or because an alternative contrafact text is available, will not be gathered under the present definition, even though there is an argument for a meaningful intertextual purpose in both cases.3 All these excluded cases might well be amenable to consideration as polytextual, but space here is limited.

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Debates about Meaning Polytextuality is a feature most readily associated, in medieval music, with the motet, a genre that is virtually defined by polytextuality, the purpose of which has been much debated.4 If the words of multiple texts are obscured by simultaneous delivery in performance, what and how did motets ‘mean’ to those who appreciated such music in the Middle Ages? These questions involve an explicit issue about the nature of the audience of motets and an implicit issue about the extent to which ‘music’ exists in sonic performance as opposed to in other media, including the intellect. In Christopher Page’s view, earlier, overly narrow interpretations of the thirteenthcentury theorist Grocheio’s comments about the audience of the motet have allowed today’s intellectual elite (academics) to imagine (fondly and wrongly) that their kinds of strategies of happy intertextual interpretation of verbal, literate, written texts might replicate medieval interpretations.5 He instead posits a more mixed audience, and the immediate aural comprehension of the uninformed first-time listener. For Page, it is not possible to make sense in performance of what a motet’s texts appear to be about – no matter how familiar one is with the texts beforehand. Page’s analysis has thus focused on the non-semantic ‘rush of vowels and consonants’ aurally available in the moment of performance.6 In analysing the musical aspect of polytextuality, Page noted its subversion of the synchronised phrases and vowels of chant performance, its resulting sonic playfulness, and the therefore striking moments of artful togetherness. For Page, the text in performance is as much a sonic object as the music. He therefore argues that the sonorous rather than semantic quality of the words must be the important element in motet performance. While Page has argued the words are there merely for sonic delight, others have shown that the sounds themselves can bear meaning, especially through the manner in which consonants and vowels are distributed amongst the voices. In work newly buttressed by musicology’s interaction with Sound Studies, Emma Dillon illustrates how the echoes of identical vowel sounds across the voices provide a kind of soundtrack in a motet – probably by Adam de la Halle – about drunken students, who dance, sing, drink and play.7 Similarly, in a motet about a nun who is desperate to leave the convent in which she is compelled to sing matins, Lisa Colton points to repeated unisons and octaves that unmistakably signify the ringing of the bell at matins; the composer-poet seems even to have exploited the sounds of the consonants and vowels in the words to lend an extra ringing sound.8 One might also add that every now and then, the triplum voice seems to come in early, as if to emphasise the nun’s annoyance that as soon as she falls asleep, matins rings again. Sylvia Huot’s approach to the thirteenth-century motet takes reflection on textual meanings by exploring the upper-voice texts’ amplification of the liturgical moments cued by their tenor plainsong fragments. Read against a biblical reference, a kalendrical moment, and/or a liturgical action, the upper voices could analogically gloss and amplify theological and existential issues in a manner familiar from the wider repertoire of clerical reading practices.9 Suzannah Clark’s work on the thirteenth-century motet addresses Page’s concern for the musical and sonic while remaining firmly grounded in Huot’s medieval reading practices. Clark examines how polytextual motets often contain musical clues as to

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how they should be read and heard, noting that ‘in straining to hear the words, Page and others have overlooked the role of the music’, which uses a range of methods of opening up interpretative possibilities: highlighting the text with simple musical devices, exploiting musical references, citing melodies from elsewhere.10 Writing about polytextual genres other than the motet, Elizabeth Eva Leach has questioned the idea of audience, suggesting that the performers would not only have included the composer(s), but would also have made up a significant part (or whole) of the audience.11 Our contemporary assumption of composer, performers and audience as separate groups of increasing number is a product of capitalist neoliberalism, which requires the numerical hierarchy for music to exist in the monetised marketplace that supports musical performance today. Considering this, it is unsurprising that Page, whose group Gothic Voices were producers of commercially marketed CDs of the thirteenth-century motet, would argue for a large, diverse audience for the motet and, moreover, would aim for performances that would appeal to those who might have the possibility of reading the texts separately from listening to the performance but whose idea of the ontological identity of the motet would be reliant on sound alone. In dealing with the Middle Ages, however, and especially with polytextual genres, the more highly regulated ontology of music worked in tandem with music’s indissoluble link with actual live human presence, persons able to speak and interact with medieval listeners to the motet, even if they were distinct from them. The whole experience of polytextuality thus becomes a large-scale social and interactive phenomenon, showing the integration of reading, listening, talking, singing, thinking and imagining in medieval musical culture.

I: Motets A motet such as Trois serors sor rive mer / Trois serors sor rive mer / Trois serors sor rive mer / PERLUSTRAVIT captures the striking expressive power of polytextuality. It famously begins with three upper voices all singing the same words homophonically, introducing three sisters who are all ‘on the seashore singing brightly’. As each sister expresses her contrasting preferences in a man, the three voices break into polytextuality. This is precisely the power of polytextuality: multiple perspectives can be conveyed simultaneously. In other genres, such as the monophonic chanson, one expects a single, coherent thread in the dénouement of the narrative or lyric expression (however, see below for polytextual chansons). But in a motet composer-poets could, for example, juxtapose hypocrites against the honest, holy Mary against the rustic Marion; a knight who seduces versus one who does not; a raped shepherdess versus one who outwits the knight; such contrasts could even be emphasised by having different upper voices singing Latin and French at the same time. For this reason, it is as important to analyse the temporal simultaneities in the music and text of different voices as it is to scrutinise how the individual voices unfold linearly in time. Figure 8.1 gives the motet Renvoisiement irai / D’Amours sunt en grant esmai / ET SUPER following Tischler’s edition. It is uniquely found as a three-voice motet in Mo (Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire Médecine, H 196, ff.137v–139r);12 it appears as a two-voice motet, with only the duplum and tenor, in motet manuscripts W2 (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibliothek, Guelf.1099 Helmst., f.228v; new foliation

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Figure 8.1 Renvoisiement irai / D’Amours sunt en grant esmai / ET SUPER, after Hans Tischler (ed.), The Montpellier Codex, Part II: Fascicles 3, 4 and 5. Recent Researches in the Music of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, vols 4–5 (Madison: A-R Editions, 1978), pp. 102–3 f.230v) and N (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.12615, f.194v).13 It is generally assumed, when two- and three-voice versions of motets exist, that the triplum was added later, an assumption that invites a reading of the triplum found in Mo as a critical commentary on – or a playful textual counterpoint to – the pre-existent two-voice entity. The music also appears as a two-voice clausula in StV (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, lat.15139, no. 24, ff.290v–291r), a source in which the clausulae are believed to have been motets stripped of their texts, rather than being textless foundations for motets.14 Tischler’s critical edition of this motet provides a double barline at the repetition of the tenor melody and a dotted double barline at the end of the repetition, where the tenor continues with a new melodic fragment to end the motet.15 These conventional editorial indications for repetition and segmentation of tenors belie the unusual musical nature of this particular one. While motet composers frequently elongated the original chant melisma by repeating it, in this case the repetition is inherent in the original chant, and the material after the dotted double barline is also

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native to the original chant (although the version in the motet and in the Liber Usualis differ, suggesting perhaps that the composer had access to some other version of the chant). Whoever crafted the music and text of the initial two-voice motet clearly responded to this striking repetition in the tenor, and in turn the (same?) person who added the triplum responded to the original layer of the motet. The male persona in the duplum tells how Love is cruel to those who blame him, but since he (the narrator) has never blamed Love, Love has been good to him. He ends the duplum by claiming he knows love when he feels it and that he has found true love. There is, thus, a turning point in this short poem, marked by the word ‘mes’ (‘but’): others blame Love and are punished, ‘but’ (‘mes’) he does not blame Love and he is rewarded. It is precisely with the word ‘mes’ that the tenor melody begins to repeat. The full textual line at this point is ‘mes onques ne les blasmai’ (‘but I never blamed him’). Musically, it not only takes place at the repetition of the tenor, it is also the only statement in the motet bounded by rests on either side of it. Throughout the remainder of the piece, the duplum sounds during the silences that punctuate each of the tenor’s three-note ligatures. The rests draw attention to the poetic line – not because we need assistance to hear the words (in the two-voice motet, these are the only words sung against the tenor) – but because the line may be read as the moral of the story: do not blame Love, for then you shall find true love. Whoever added the triplum adhered to the underlying structure of the original motet. Observe that the rests just mentioned are maintained in the triplum. Observe also that a significant textual shift occurs upon the first tenor repeat: the triplum shifts from indirect speech of a first-person narrative to the direct speech of song, after the standard announcement ‘en chantant li dirai’ (‘I’ll say it to her in song’). Song, it must be remembered, is the most powerful vehicle through which men declare their love. Once again, therefore, the crux of the motet’s message appears at this point – in splendid polytextual display: if we read the two texts simultaneously, we see that because the protagonist has never blamed Love (as the duplum says), he gets to sing to his ‘fair and blond beloved with the pleasing body’ (‘Bele et blonde au cors plesant’) (as the triplum demonstrates). The triplum continues the song for the rest of the motet. Importantly, the duplum ends with a refrain, cast in direct speech.16 It is only through an intertextual reading of its concordances that a deeper polytextual significance begins to emerge. At the end of the duplum, the protagonist sings ‘Bien le sai: Fines amouretes ai trouvees’ (‘I know it well: I have found true love’; the refrain is in italics). We might imagine that the ‘je’ figure here is the protagonist. However, in the motet Si com aloie jouer / Deduisant com fins amourous / PORTARE, this refrain is sung to an identical melody (albeit at a different transposition) by one of three ladies, who are all frustrated by their husbands and are determined to cuckold them. The text-only concordance in another motet, Se griés m’est au cors que soie / A qui dirai / IN SECULUM, also suggests the words of the refrain belong to a lady. We may thus infer that the refrain in our duplum in Renvoisiement irai / D’Amours sunt en grant esmai / ET SUPER are not in fact the protagonist’s words, but his lady’s words, and music sung to him. Moreover, this refrain is counterpointed against a (unique) refrain that concludes his song, which is addressed to her: ‘A voz otroi le cuer de moi, douce au cler vis’ (‘I offer you, sweet, bright-faced lady, my very heart’). Perhaps it is significant, therefore, that the word ‘ai’ in the duplum is directly counterpointed against the word ‘moi’ in the triplum – though both words signal a ‘je’ figure, the two ‘je’s are different people.

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In the fourteenth century, it was still common practice to exploit polytextuality, although composers of this century were less likely to mix sacred and secular quite so flagrantly in their upper voice texts than their predecessors. Guillaume de Machaut wrote twenty-three motets, all of which are polytextual; some of the upper voices are in Latin but most are in French and virtually all of these are courtly love poetry. The disjunction between liturgical and non-liturgical source materials remains in play between the tenor part (still usually a fragment of chant) and the upper voices, inviting Anne Walters Robertson, for example, to put forward readings of Guillaume de Machaut’s motets using a similar methodology to Huot’s.17 Robertson reads them in the light of their Latin tenor fragments, which seem to have been specially chosen from outside those chants that his thirteenth-century predecessors had regularly used for the motet. Polytextuality persisted in motets up to the age of Ockeghem and Busnois. They each only wrote one polytextual motet; all others were unitextual. Indeed, Busnois seems to have broken with the tradition of writing homage motets in polytextual format when he wrote In Hydraulis to honour Ockeghem. Julie E. Cumming has uncovered that the radical transformation of the genre happened during the fifteenth century, when motets not only lost their polytextual hallmark but many other aspects of their traditional textual associations, texture and style made it difficult to define what constituted a motet.18 From the age of Dunstaple and Du Fay, then, polytextuality seems to have been associated with highbrow ceremonial or festive occasions, where perhaps an older style was called for in contrast to the newly developing propensity for unitextuality.

II: Songs Polytextuality in genres other than the motet is relatively less common and does not appear to occur until the fourteenth century when song composition is more often polyphonic.19 Song polytextuality lacks a liturgical tenor, often meaning that their polytextuality resembles more of a conversation, dialogue or argument than the act of glossing or analogical interpretation that the liturgical basis of the motet frequently adduces.20 Relatively few among the handful of surviving examples of polytextual song before around 1400 have texted tenors; more frequently, two of the upper-voice parts are texted in a three-part setting; triple-texted songs are much rarer (see Table 8.1). We would make a distinction between those songs where the tenor is texted, which are arguably more motet-like, and those where it is not. A texted tenor song can appear in pieces with a third, untexted voice, as with the three anonymous virelais, Contra le temps et la sason jolye / Hé! mari, mari!; Un crible plein / A Dieu; and Venés a nueches / Vechi l’ermite.21 Borlet’s virelai, Ma tre dol rosignol / Rosignolin, should also be included because it has a texted tenor with a repeated structure like that of Hé! mari, mari!, even though its contratenor is independently texted in one of its sources.22

Double-texted songs Double-texted songs have anything from two to four voice parts, of which two are texted while any additional parts are freely composed and untexted. Four-part doubletexted balades are the rarest; the two that survive seem directly related. Machaut’s Quant Theseus / Ne quier (B34) presents a poetry competition: two poems, ascribed to different authors, both ostensibly praise the same lady and share versification and refrain, but in their musical setting they are dramatised as Machaut’s attempt to best

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Guillaume Machaut, balade 29

Guillaume de Machaut, balade 17

Anonymous

Jean Vaillant

Sans cuer m’en / Amis / Dame

Dame vailans / Amis / Certainement

Tres doulz amis / Ma dame / Cent mille fois

Composer

De triste / Quant / Certes je di

Incipits of texted parts (in order in MS)

F-CH 564

F-Pn n.a.f.6771

*F-Pn fr.843 *F-Pa 5203 *US-PHu codex 902

F-Pn fr 1584 F-Pn fr.1585 F-Pn fr.1586 F-Pn fr.22546 F-Pn fr.9221 GB-Ccc Ferrell 1

*F-Pn fr.843 *F-Pn n.a.f.6221 (part text 1 and erased incipit of text 2) *US-PHu codex 902

F-Pn fr 1584 F-Pn fr.1585 F-Pn fr.9221 F-Pn fr.22546 GB-Ccc Ferrell 1

MSS (*text only)

3/3

3/3

3/3

3/3

Texts/ voices

Table 8.1 Surviving examples of polytextual song before around 1400

R

B

B

B

Genre

no

refrain rhyme only

yes (all)

yes (all)

Shared rhymes?

no

yes

yes (modified)

yes

Shared refrain text?

2 speakers (dame and amis) Male-female dialogue Musically rounded, equal length rondeau

3 speakers (amant, amie, clerc) Male-female dialogue

Canonic chace 2 speakers (amis and dame) Male-female dialogue

Jugement 3 speakers, all male 2 lyric je, 1 clerkly

Notes

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Composer Guillaume de Machaut, balade 34

F. Andrieu

Anonymous

Incipits of texted parts (in order in MS)

Quant Theseus / Tenor / Ne quier veoir / Contratenor

Armes, amours / Tenor / O flour des flours / Contratenor

Espoir me faut / Revien, Espoir / Tenor / Contratenor

*US-PHu codex 902

F-CA 1328 (Ca1 only) F-Pn n.a.f.23190 (index listing only) F-Sm M.222 C.22 NL-Uu 18462

*F-Pn fr.840 *F-Pn n.a.f.6221 (text 1)

F-CH 564

*F-Pn fr.843 *F-Pn fr 1584 *F-Pn fr.22545 *F-Pn n.a.f.6221 *US-NYm M.396 *US-PHu codex 902

F-CH 564 F-Pn fr.1585 F-Pn fr 1584 F-Pn fr.9221 F-Pn fr.22546 F-Pn n.a.f.6771 GB-Ccc Ferrell 1 I-Fl 2211 (palimpsest)

MSS (*text only)

2/4

2/4

2/4

Texts/ voices

R

B

B

Genre

no

yes (all)

yes (all)

Shared rhymes?

no

yes

yes

Shared refrain text?

(continued)

Same male voice in each part laments loss of Hope

Lament for Machaut’s death Texts by Eustache Deschamps

Song competition Ca1 (=Tr) text by Thomas Paien

Notes

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Composer Jacob Senleches

Grimace

Jean Vaillant

Anonymous; tenor Guido Anonymous

Anonymous

Anonymous

Anonymous

Incipits of texted parts (in order in MS)

Je me merveil / Tenor / J’ay pluseurs fois

Se Zephirus / Tenor / Se Jupiter

Dame, doucement / Dous amis / Tenor

Robin, muse / Je ne say fere / Tenor

Tres douls amis / Tenor / [Da]me de pris

Tres douche plasant bergiere / Reconforte toy, Robin / [Tenor]

[Que] puet faire / Ce ne est mie / Tenor

Rescoés, rescoés / Rescoés le feu / Tenor

F-Pn n.a.f.6771

F-CA 1328

F-Pn n.a.f.6771

F-Sm M.222 C.22

F-CH 564

*US-PHu codex 902

F-CH 564

*US-PHu codex 902

F-CH 564 F-Pn it.568 H-Bu U. Fr. l. m. 298

F-CH 564

MSS (*text only)

2/3

2/3

2/3

2/3 (4/6?)

2/3

2/3

2/3

2/3

Texts/ voices

V

V

V

R

R

R

B

B

Genre

Table 8.1 Surviving examples of polytextual song before around 1400 (continued)

no

one

no

no

no

yes (all)

yes (all)

yes (all)

Shared rhymes?

no

no

no

no

no

no

yes

yes

Shared refrain text?

Mimetic (fire of desire in heart)

Same speaker (?) laments sorrowful heart

Male-female dialogue (Robin and shepherdess)

Male-female dialogue Retrograde canon

Unclear: same speaker? female? addresses Robin

Male-female dialogue (amis and dame)

Praise of lady in third person (cf. B1 above).

Jeremiad about song composition Refrain canonic

Notes

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Borlet

Anonymous

Anonymous

Anonymous

Guillaume de Machaut Loange no. 26

Contra le temps / Hé, mari, mari! / Contratenor

Un crible plein / A Dieu / [Contratenor]

Triplum / Venés a nueches / Tenor: Vechi l’ermite

Dame plaisant / Se vostre colour

Composer

Ma tre dol rosignol / Rosignolin / Aluette

Incipits of texted parts (in order in MS)

*CH-BEb 218 *F-Pa 5203 *F-Pn fr.843 *F-Pn fr.881 *F-Pn fr 1584 *F-Pn fr.1585 *F-Pn fr.1586 *F-Pn fr.1587 *F-Pn fr.9221 *F-Pn fr.22546 *GB-Ccc Ferrell 1 *US-PHu codex 902

F-CA 1328

F-CH 564

F-Pn n.a.f.6771

B-Gra Varia D.3360 F-Pn n.a.f.6771 F-Sm M.222 C.22

MSS (*text only)

n/a

2/3

2/3

2/3

3/3

Texts/ voices

B

V

V

V

V

Genre

yes

no

no

one

some

Shared rhymes?

yes

no

no

no

no

Shared refrain text?

No musical setting exists

Texted tenor (Vechi but also labelled ‘Tenor’) Tr untexted Male-female dialogue Marriage (Robin and dame)

Texted tenor (A Dieu) Untexted Ct Marriage (complaint) Male-female dialogue

Texted tenor repeats (Hé! mari, mari!) Untexted Ct

Texted tenor repeats (Rosignolin) Birdsong Also appears in four parts in F-CH 564 with untexted Ct and Tr

Notes

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a rival male poet.23 The other four-part double-texted balade comprises two balades by Eustache Deschamps lamenting Machaut’s death, Armes, amours / O flour des flours, set to music by the otherwise unknown composer F. Andrieu.24 The anonymous rondeau Espoir me faut / Revien, espoir is the only other piece in this arrangement. Because it is a rondeau the two upper voices do not share a refrain, but nor do they share rhymes. Nonetheless, it shares with the two double balades the presentation of two texts that are not in dialogue, of which the first person is the same, and which treat the same subject. Three-part songs with two texts in their upper voices are the most numerous fourteenth-century polytextual song types to have survived. Of these, three are balades, two with shared upper-voice versifications, rhymes and refrains, as seen in the fourpart pieces above. Senleches’s jeremiad about the state of contemporary composition is close in theme to Machaut’s B29 (see below) and embeds a back-and-forth between singerly distributed cognition and the visual signs on the page.25 Of the four rondeaux and three virelais in this category, only Vaillant’s rondeau Dame doucement / Dous amis has shared rhymes (a shared refrain is not relevant/ possible in rondeau form), and like many of the triple-texted pieces, it presents an amorous dialogue: the male lover sings in the cantus that his lady has sweetly attracted his whole heart by means of her eye; she replies to her sweet friend, asking him to guard her honour because she loves him from her whole heart. The music makes full use of the largely melismatic rondeau to present the dialogue so that it is readily comprehensible, seemingly solving the objections to polytextuality. In the A section of the rondeau, Cantus 1 starts while Cantus 2 rests; then Cantus 2 starts as Cantus 1 cadences and stops for two breves; next, Cantus 2 stops again as Cantus 1 begins. The listener therefore hears ‘Dame | doulz | douz | amis’, chiastically presenting the two protagonists mirrored around their respective sweetness.

Triple-texted three-part songs All triple-texted songs have three voice parts. Guillaume de Machaut is responsible for two of them (balades B29 and B17); a third is a rondeau by Jean Vaillant, and a further song is anonymous. B29 uniquely presents three separate speakers voicing a miniature jugement on the question of the correct role of sentement in song composition. The music’s obscuring of the verbal meaning in performance imprecates the curious listener to correct study, also offering, through the hierarchies of musical counterpoint, pointers to the correct solution of the jugement.26 Machaut’s B17 presents a leave-taking dialogue between lover and beloved.27 As is commonly the case, only two individuals speak in B17. However, the first speaks twice, both initiating and closing the exchange. One contemporary source that contains only the verbal texts clarifies this in the rubrics, introducing them respectively with ‘Chanson de ioie et esplourez’, ‘Response. la dame’, and ‘Renvoy. Lament’.28 Machaut’s setting additionally dramatises the sequential written dialogue by the use of the musical technique commonly found in the chace – the musical canon – but not the usual texting practice of a chace, which generally has the same text in each of the canonic voices. Here, each voice sings its own separate three-stanza balade text,

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although the refrain texts are similar, but not identical. In having the lover and his lady sing identical melodic lines a short temporal distance apart (effectively a ‘round’ like the modern nursery rhymes ‘Frère Jacques’ or ‘London’s Burning’), the musicalisation of the dialogue symbolises at once their unity (they sing the same tune) and their difference (they sing at slightly different times, in a temporal sequence, and, most importantly, different texts – the lady replying and the lover then reaffirming, although overlapping). This proves the harmony of their relationship: by singing the same tune at different times to different words, they make consonant polyphonic music. In combination with the written sequential version of the texts, their polytextual delivery in song contributes additional layers of meaning in this amorous chase. The two triple-texted songs by composers other than Machaut both present a similar dramatisation of an exchange between lover and lady, initiated and terminated by the male lover, and thus are similar to that found in Machaut’s B17, although both lack the shared versification and the canonic technique of chace present there. While this might be thought to eradicate B17’s suggestion of the temporal sequence of the imprecation, response and ‘renvoy’, and merely to present all three simultaneously, the sequence is preserved visually in the order that the voices are copied in the manuscript. The three balade texts of the anonymous balade Dame vailans / Amis / Certainement all share two rhymes that are common to all three texts and a refrain line: ‘Estre secres vrais et loyaus amis’.29 First, the male lover addresses his lady and explains his wish to be her ‘secret, true, and loyal amis’. The voice copied second provides the lady’s response, affirming the lover as her ‘secret, true, and loyal amis’. The final voice copied is, once again, a masculine voice, but the clerkly one of the ‘on dit’: ‘one can well affirm’ that there is no better life than for the lover and beloved to love loyally and be of one will. Their master, Love, teaches that the lover must always be secret, true and loyal. This stanza does not respond directly to the lady’s response but rather broadens the issue out sententiously, with a focus on the lover, the lady and his beloved in the abstract. Although, as noted above, this is not musically a canon, short passages of imitation between all three voices disrupt any clear functional hierarchy between the voices (a feature seen in B17) and add to the idea of a mutual leading and following between the speakers, and agreement in the need to be a ‘secret, true, and loyal amis’. Jean Vaillant’s rondeau Tres doulz amis / Ma dame / Cent mille fois also points to the sequence of the conversation between the three simultaneously performed voices in the visual order of their copying.30 In addition, the music setting, while not canonic like B17’s, is so melismatic that it is possible in performance that the individual voices could make each text audible by taking it in turns to sing; although still strictly polytextual, it could sound more like a sequential, quasi-antiphonal dialogue.31 Unlike B17 and the anonymous Dame vailans / Amis / Certainement, discussed above, the voices maintain a strict functional hierarchy (in musical terms). In the voice starting ‘Ma dame’ (functionally the cantus), the lover asked to be named ‘amis’ by the lady he addresses. In the functional triplum, ‘Tres dous amis’, the lady does exactly this in her opening address. Not only does she name him ‘amis’ but she explains that this is because he is called ‘Vaillant’, a word meaning both ‘worthy’ and being the composer’s name. The ‘je’ subject of the cantus is thus interpellated by being quite literally hailed through the lady’s naming.

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Conclusion What has been noted by scholars studying polytextual music is that it seems to invite contemplation outside the performative moment. This is why the motet has provided such a clear battleground for modern debates about meaning and performance. Ultimately at stake is the definition of music and the role of sound either within or beyond the musical piece, as well as the role of things other than sound and beyond sonic performance. The often unexamined effect of present-day acousmatic listening on ontologies of music looms large. Polytextual pieces play with time. Multiple narratives or plots are told simultaneously, often with each recounting different outcomes. Temporal sequences of dialogue are packed into temporal simultaneity; equal voices – all their own ‘je’ – are hierarchised (or not) in a musical texture. Text is made sometimes audible, sometimes obscured, and the ability of melody to mean without or beyond language points to vocal music’s particular contribution to human communication.

Notes 1. The ‘Esperance’ complex is the most prominent example; see Wulf Arlt, ‘Intertextualität im Lied des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts’, in Musik als Text: Bericht über den Internationalen Kongreß der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, Freiburg im Breisgau 1993, ed. Hermann Danuser and Tobias Plebuch (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998), pp. 287–363; Kevin Brownlee, ‘Literary Intertextualities in the Esperance Series: Machaut’s Esperance qui m’asseüre, the Anonymous Rondeau En attendant d’avoir, Senleches En attendant esperance conforte’, in Musik als Text, ed. Danuser and Plebuch, pp. 311–13; Susan Rankin, ‘Observations on Senleches’ En attendant esperance’, in Musik als Text, ed. Danuser and Plebuch, pp. 314–18; Yolanda Plumley, ‘Citation and Allusion in the Late Ars Nova: The Case of the En Attendant Songs’, Early Music History, 18 (1999), 287–363; see also Jennifer Saltzstein’s chapter in the present volume. 2. Among these, we might cite Pykini’s Or tost, whose upper voice texts in close imitation are similar except for the very opening (see Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 152–6); and Matheus de Sancte Johanne’s Science a nul enemi, in which a short piece of imitation is texted in voices other than the cantus (see Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘The Singer is an Ass’ [accessed 12 December 2019]). 3. On strophic song, see Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Fortune’s Demesne: The Interrelation of Text and Music in Machaut’s Il mest avis (B22), De fortune (B23), and Two Related Anonymous Balades’, Early Music History, 19 (2000), 47–79; on contrafact texts, see Helen Deeming, ‘The Song and the Page: Experiments with Form and Layout in Manuscripts of Medieval Latin Song’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 15 (2006), 1–28. 4. Sylvia Huot, Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Gerald R. Hoekstra, ‘The French Motet as Trope: Multiple Levels of Meaning in Quant florist la violete / El mois de mai / Et Gaudebit’, Speculum, 73 (1998), 32–57; Margaret Bent, ‘Deception, Exegesis and Sounding Number in Machaut’s Motet 15’, Early Music History, 10 (1991), 15–27; Kevin Brownlee, ‘Machaut’s Motet 15 and the Roman de la Rose: The Literary Context of Amours qui a le pouoir / Faus samblant m’a deceü / Vidi Dominum’, Early Music History, 10 (1991), 1–14; Kevin Brownlee, ‘Polyphonie et intertextualité dans les motets 8 et 4 de Guillaume de Machaut’, in ‘L’Hostellerie de pensée’: Études sur l’art littéraire au Moyen Age offertes à Daniel Poirion, ed. Michel Zink, Danielle Bohler, Eric Hicks

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

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and Manuela Python (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1995), pp. 97–104; Brownlee, ‘La Polyphonie textuelle dans le Motet 7 de Machaut: Narcisse, la rose, et la voix féminine’, in Guillaume de Machaut: 1300–2000, ed. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet and Nigel Wilkins (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002), pp. 137–46; Brownlee, ‘Fire, Desire, Duration, Death: Machaut’s Motet 10’, in Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: Learning from the Learned, ed. Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), pp. 79–93. Scepticism as to the verbal subtlety of motets has been expressed in Christopher Page, Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), chapter 3, and Page, ‘Around the Performance of a ThirteenthCentury Motet’, Early Music, 28 (2000), 343–57. Suzannah Clark mediates between the musical focus of Page and the intertextual focus of Huot in ‘“S’en dirai chançonete”: Hearing Text and Music in a Medieval Motet’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 16 (2007), 31–59. Page, ‘Around the Performance of a Thirteenth-Century Motet’. Ibid., p. 343. Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 148–50. Lisa Colton, ‘The Articulation of Virginity in the Medieval Chanson de nonne’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 133 (2008), 159–88 (pp. 176–9). Huot, Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet. Clark, ‘“S’en dirai chançonete”’, p. 34. Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Nature’s Forge and Mechanical Production: Writing, Reading, and Performing Song’, in Rhetoric beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 72–95. See , , and [all accessed 24 January 2017]. See and [both accessed 21 December 2016]. See Fred Büttner, Das Klauselrepertoire der Handschrift Saint-Victor (Paris, BN, lat. 15139): Eine Studie zur mehrstimmigen Komposition im 13. Jahrhundert (Lecce: Milella, 2011). The manuscript images can be seen online, starting from [accessed 21 December 2016]. The Montpellier Codex, ed. Hans Tischler, 4 vols, Recent Researches in the Music of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, II–VIII (Madison: A-R Editions, 1978–85); the translations for motets in the ensuing paragraphs are taken from this edition. Nico van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains: du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969) has identified three refrains in this motet (vdB 242, 206, 750); only the one at the end of the duplum (vdB 750) has extant concordances. Anne Walters Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 79–186 (Part II: ‘Turned-about Love Songs’). Julie E. Cumming, The Motet in the Age of Du Fay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Arguably the two-part motet is the polyphonic song of the thirteenth century; see Gaël Saint-Cricq, ‘Formes types dans le motet du XIIIe siècle: étude d’un processus répétitif’

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20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

suzannah clark and elizabeth eva leach (PhD thesis, University of Southampton, 2009). On motets with secular song tenors as a kind of song, see Mark Everist, ‘Motets, French Tenors and the Polyphonic Chanson ca.1300’, Journal of Musicology, 24 (2007), 365–406. See Virginia Newes, ‘Amorous Dialogues: Poetic Topos and Polyphonic Texture in Some Polytextual Songs of the Late Middle Ages’, in Critica Musica: Essays in Honor of Paul Brainard, ed. John Knowles (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1996), pp. 279–306, for a preliminary study of some of the songs in Table 8.1. The last of these has an untexted triplum, suggesting it might be earlier than the other two, which have untexted contratenors. The contratenor in PR (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr. 6771) is texted, whereas the contratenor and triplum in Ch (Chantilly, Musée Condé, 564) are not. The version in PR might make it seem closer to the triple-texted pieces, but it can be differentiated by virtue of the repeating tenor, which is a cantus prius factus. See Leach, Sung Birds, pp. 146–51. See the identification of the other poet, Thomas Paien, and the analysis of the competition in Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Machaut’s Peer, Thomas Paien’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 18 (2009), 1–22. See French Secular Music: Manuscript Chantilly, Musée Condé 564, Second Part, ed. Gordon K. Greene, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 19, no. 4 (Monaco: L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1982), no. 84; for a discussion, see Elizabeth Eva Leach, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 304–12. See Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Music and Verbal Meaning: Machaut’s Polytextual Songs’, Speculum, 85 (2010), 567–91. Ibid., pp. 573–90. Ibid., pp. 570–1. Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York: Garland, 1995), p. 373 n. 87 on J (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 5203). This piece can be found uniquely in PR f.53v. For a modern edition, see French Secular Compositions of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Willi Apel, 3 vols, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 53 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1970–2), II, p. 26. Vaillant’s song is found uniquely in Ch, f.17v. See French Secular Compositions of the Fourteenth Century, I, p. 229. The tentative nature of this statement is caused by our uncertainty about the actual alignment of music and text, which is fairly approximate in the source.

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9 Courtly Subjectivities Helen J. Swift and Anne Stone

S

ubjectivity inheres in a given poem only insofar as there is a technical anchoring of expression in a grammatical first person, an ‘I’. What that ‘I’ is – what it connotes, how we characterise it, to what sphere of meaning it pertains – is wholly dependent on the context of its utterance: how it is performed, in the sense of its presentation as written or oral (sung or spoken);1 what company it keeps in a manuscript or printed book; how it appears through remaniement in intertextual citation; which agent in the production and transmission of the ‘I’ we are considering (poet-composer, performer, compiler-editor, manuscript owner or user). While grammatically singular, the ‘I’ is in fact plural: it is not unitary, but combines several points of view on the lyric utterance – the lover singing of love, the singer watching the lover singing and the collective, social experience of that utterance by an audience.2 The topic of this chapter is thus particularly slippery: how to grasp the nature of lyric subjectivity (how subjectivity relates to point of view or voice; how lyric relates to narrative);3 how to define the parameters of the courtly, both in relation to the verse output (poetry produced by, for or at a court; or poetry mobilising a particular ideology of fin’amor, or simply adhering formally to particular formes fixes characteristic of aristocratic verse) and the status of its author (a noble or a clerkly figure); and how to apprehend what medieval lyric poetry is and does: as a form of communication rather than personal private expression;4 as a mode apt to engage humorously, ironically or playfully with a range of topics rather than existing simply as plangent épanchement lyrique.5 Literary scholars addressing subjectivity concur largely on their object of study: ‘the elaboration of a first-person (subject) position in the rhetoric of courtly poetry’,6 but differ markedly as to when this first ‘emerged’ and whether it is meaningful to identify it as a nascent ‘modern subject’,7 and what it represents: can subjectivity be equated with individuality, the product of a particular consciousness?8 Is it appropriate to see it as synonymous with point of view?9 In what ways can subjectivity be connected to authorial identity and autobiography?10 Is the first-person position to be viewed as subject of its utterance or as subject to pre-existing tradition, the social codes of language, the dynamics of desire?11 To what extent, indeed, is it valid to focus analysis of the lyric on its subject?12 We present these definitional problems as questions to spur the reader’s further enquiry. Answers are far from settled, with a substantial ‘it depends’ factor relating to the author or the individual lyric under examination. The parameters of ‘the rhetoric of courtly poetry’ hang similarly dependent on the case in question, but we do well to cast a broad net, whether formally or in terms of subjectmatter and tone, with irony often playing an ambiguating role, creating an uncertain critical distance between the lyric ‘I’ and the ideology to which it gives voice.

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Diversity is one principle underpinning the following selection of poems from the troubadours through the early fifteenth century, though certain persistent concerns will be highlighted: reflexivity of varying kinds, enmeshing subjectivity and creativity, and communicating strong awareness of the poem as performance; questions of sincerity: how the authenticity of a work is to be construed; the celebration of virtuosity as a testing at once of the capacities of poetic expression and of the audience’s interpretative dexterity; the shifting relationship between lyric and narrative; how lyric moves between oral and written traditions. The rise of the luxury chansonnier, and the increasing prestige of musical notation in the preservation of lyric poetry, is one important subplot to our narrative. While mindful of the risks of teleology, we adopt a chronological presentation of individual readings for clarity, though the reader may consider the implications of possible reorderings of material and the different echoes provoked thereby.

Guilhem de Peitieu (1071–1127), Farai un vers de dreit nien Starting with the earliest known troubadour could seem straightforward. But the poetry of Guilhem, seventh count of Poitou and ninth duke of Aquitaine, problematises any attempt to define him in terms of earliness or to see him teleologically as setting down the conventions for others to follow.13 Only eleven songs survive (with one of disputed authorship), but they encompass considerable diversity, especially in the first-person postures adopted. The label ‘trovatore bifronte’ has been applied to him as a way of getting a handle on this range; however, as Frederick Goldin notes, the inadequacy of this model lies in its assumption that one of the two faces is genuine.14 What is in fact at stake is the play of performance, with sincerity of expression determined more collectively as a relationship between singer, song and audience. Guilhem masters an extensive role-play repertory ‘because he is a performer’.15 The poem that has most perplexed scholars is song IV: Farai un vers de dreit nien (‘I will make verse out of utter nothing’).16 Disrupting radically any sense of a conventional symbiotic relationship between amar and cantar, it presents a bewildering anaphoric sequence of negation: the ‘I’ does not rhyme about love, youth, or anything else (‘non er d’amor ni de joven, | ni de ren au’ (ll. 3–4)), does not know key events in his own life, has never seen his lady whom he loves, and has no clue about whom or what he has composed his verse (‘fait ai lo vers, no sai de cui’ (l. 43)). There is undeniable display of virtuosity in this paradoxical celebration of creativity, issuing an irresistible challenge to interpretation. As Laura Kendrick remarks, ‘everyone wants to solve its riddle’,17 and everyone has indeed tried, yielding diverse interpretations,18 though with some recent convergence on key points: that there is a kind of riddle or guessing game (devinalh), but that the point is not to seek a single solution; that the tone is comic; that reflecting on performance context is fruitful.19 An important dimension of Farai un vers is its reflection on lyric performance, on the role of the ‘I’ as singer of love, and on the love-lyric as love-letter,20 as communication towards and with an audience rather than individual expression. Alongside denying biographical knowledge about himself, presenting himself as a blank counter, the ‘I’ emphasises repeatedly his self-definition at the hands of others: he does not know when he slept or woke, or how he feels, unless someone tells him (ll. 14, 20). Guilhem thereby invokes the audience’s role in composing his identity:

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its implied ‘back story’21 and its emotional state. That he has not set eyes on his lady does not necessarily compromise the poetic integrity of his lyric-lover performance; he alludes to a script of lovesickness that he could proceed to deliver, but shrinks from elaborating that narrative here: ‘non aus dire lo tort que m’a, | abans m’en cau’ (ll. 39–40) (‘I dare not tell of the wrong she has done me; rather, I keep silent’). Use of deixis reflects the ‘I’s shifting vantage point on his predicament: a lover mired ‘enaissi’ (l. 11): (‘in this situation’); a singer detachedly observing the lover’s sorry state; and a performer on a stage, choosing when to take his leave from ‘sai’ (l. 41): (‘here’). As Kendrick notes, the verb trametre (‘send’) is used three times in the poem’s closing envoy,22 casting the lyric’s production as residing properly in its reception.23

Bernard de Ventadorn (fl. 1130/40–1190/1200), Can vei la lauzeta mover When troubadour songs were collected in manuscripts they were most often organised by composer, and in the most elaborated of the manuscripts each composer section was headed by an illuminated initial portrait and, in some manuscripts, short prose narratives giving either biographical detail about the composer (vidas) or about the composition of the specific song (razos).24 While these narratives purported to offer true accounts, their historical veracity is debated by scholars; it is clear that some of the vidas have some basis in fact, but in others the vidas seem to be after-the-fact inventions based on the material of the songs. At times, the narrative reinforces the courtly subject of the lyric, but at others it complicates that subject. One of the most puzzling of these is a razo for the widely-circulated lyric Can vei la lauzeta by Bernard de Ventadorn, a song that according to one scholar ‘defines lyric subjectivity for the troubadour canon’.25 The song begins with the beautiful image of a lark soaring ecstatically against the sun, then contrasts the lark’s joy with the poet’s sorrow: Can vei la lauzeta mover De joi sas alas contra’l rai, Que s’oblid’ e’s laissa chazer Per la doussor c’al cor li vai; Ai! tan grans enveya m’en ve De cui qu’eu veya jauzion Meravilhas ai, car desse Lo cor de desirer nom fon. (ll. 1–8) (When I see the lark move its wings | With joy against a ray of sun, | Then forget itself and let itself plunge | With the sweetness that invades its heart; | Oh! Such great envy do I feel | For the one I see in such ecstasy | That it is a wonder that right then and there | My heart doesn’t melt with desire.)26 Later stanzas explain that the poet has become disillusioned because of the bad treatment he has received at the hands of his lady, and has decided to renounce the world and live in a convent.27 If we read the song against the backdrop of Bernard’s vida, it is easy to regard it as a largely autobiographical outpouring of chaste love sentiments of the low-born

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troubadour toward his noble lady: the vida relates Bernard’s humble birth, as the son of a servant of the Count of Ventadorn, and it tells how he rose in society because of his musical gifts. Bernard first fell in love with the Countess of Ventadorn and later, when he was sent away from the castle by the suspicious count, he served, and loved, the Duchess of Normandy, Eleanor of Aquitaine. When she married Henry II of England, he despaired and entered a convent.28 Yet the unity of subject position between song text and vida is troubled by a third narrative, a razo about the song that elaborates on Bernard’s relationship with the Duchess of Aquitaine in a rather startling way: Bernard called [the Duchess of Aquitaine] ‘Lark’ because of her love of a knight who loved her, and she called [the knight] ‘Ray’. And one day the knight came to the duchess and entered the bedroom. The lady [. . .] lifted up the side of her coat and put it around his neck and let herself fall onto the bed. And Bernard saw all this, for one of the lady’s young servant girls had secretly shown it to him; and it is for this reason that he composed the song which says: ‘When I see the lark move with joy against a ray of sun’.29 The eroticised reading of the lyric text calls into question the courtly tone of the song and, therefore, the position of the subject. Is the poetic je a sincere alter-ego of Bernard the chaste poet who loves his courtly mistress? Does the razo undermine the sincerity of the poem in a capricious reading that opposes the courtly voice? Or does the razo merely underscore the instability and artificiality of that voice that was present all along? Was it a normative reception of a courtly song, or was it atypical? The canso is one of the approximately 250 troubadour songs to survive with a melody. Like texts, melodies can be quoted or reused, and the new context provides another opportunity to witness the early reception of the original. Bernard’s melody for Can vei la lauzeta was borrowed and set to new texts a number of times, and each retexting potentially complicated the voice, now informed by a composite of old and new lyrics. One of the most amusingly dissonant retextings occurred in an Old French jeu-parti, or debate song. Found in one early fourteenth- and two late thirteenthcentury manuscripts from northern and eastern France, the song consists of a dialogue between the voices of a woman and a man in alternating stanzas, debating a question of sexual prowess: Amis, ki est li muelz vaillans: Ou cil ki gist toute la nuit Aveuc s’amie a grant desduit Et sans faire tot son talent, Ou cil ki tost vient et tost prent Et quant il ait fait, si s’en fuit [. . .]? (ll. 1–6) (Friend, who is more worthy: | The man who lies all night | With his beloved in great delight, | Yet without accomplishing his desire, | Or the one who arrives quickly and takes quickly, | And when he is done hastens off [. . .]?)30 One can imagine a knowing audience being treated to a delightfully ironic experience: hearing the courtly voice and tone of the original song in the melody, with the

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debate over the nature of sexual pleasure in two different voices overlaid, as a kind of proto-burlesque. In the end, the presence of so many disruptions to the canso in the form of the vida and razo, and the reuse of the melody, causes us to question the sincerity of the lyric je, and to regard the fin’amor sentiments expressed in the poem as contingent and provisional, entirely dependent on its reception at any given time or place.

Gace Brulé (c. 1160–1213), Quant fine amors me prie que je chant Thinking about reception is particularly important when approaching Gace Brulé, a prolific first-generation trouvère and knight whose abundant output can frustrate the modern reader: first, despite his significant influence on other poets, we know so little about his life, quite unlike the well documented Guilhem de Peitieu or the later, highranking trouvère Thibaut IV, Count of Champagne and King of Navarre.31 Thibaut is also seen to satisfy where Gace disappoints in a second regard: the perceived sameness of Gace’s work in terms of topic, discourse and register – the ‘I’ as faithful servant of fin’amor articulating his joys and (mostly) woes, through chansons d’amour.32 Gace is, however, a good case in point for appreciating the positive value of conventionality and consistency in lyric expression.33 While we cannot trace precisely Gace’s movement between courts, it is evident from the material record of his work that he had several patrons amongst the highest nobility, which demonstrates his success in satisfying contemporary audiences: meeting their taste for chansons d’amour expressing unyielding adherence to the twin imperatives of loving and singing, even to the point of death:34 Quant fine amours me prie que je chant, Chanter m’estuet, car je nou puis laissier [. . .] Morir m’estuet amorous en chantant. (When true love asks me to sing, | I must sing, for I have no choice; | [. . .] | I must die while loving, as I sing.)35 It would be wrong to deduce from such uniformity the sincerity of Gace’s verse as an emanation of personal sentiment, without first pluralising the subjects involved. On the one hand, there is plurality within the ‘I’, taking account of the role of the performer communicating melodically and no doubt gesturally, as well as verbally.36 On the other hand, there is plurality in the social experience of the verse, since its reception is by an audience which itself plays a constitutive role in its production, specifically as regards the conviction of feeling evoked in the audience as if it is an emotion shared with the lyric ‘I’.37 The conventionality of the texts of Gace’s songs may also be understood in terms of their non-particularisation of the ‘I’, both their lack of contingent historical reference, and their generalised poetic discourse (his douces dames have no individualising traits).38 This, it transpired, in the thirteenth and very early fourteenth centuries, rendered him notably citable in romances with lyric insertions which wished to conjure up, through such citation, the ideology of fin’amor and/or the figure of the lover-poet to suit a particular circumstance in the narrative.39 The practice of intertextual quotation as part of the reception history of courtly lyric further destabilises any

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simple approach to poetic sincerity, and reinforces emphasis on the determining role of context of reception.40 We specify carefully the conventionality of the texts of Gace’s songs: in the performance context of each lyric as a series of unique live events, ideas of uniformity have no pertinence, since ‘each performance of an individual song involved a renewal or re-creation of that song’.41 The earliest extant witnesses of trouvère song are thirteenth-century chansonniers which thus post-date Gace’s life.42 As with troubadour manuscripts, the usual organising principle of these songbooks arranges lyrics by author, with rubricated headings such as ‘les chansons Gace Brulé’.43 Huot sees this privileging of author identity to be less a concern with biographical origins and more ‘indicative of the self-reflexive quality of the lyric’.44 Chansonnier compilers illuminated initials with images of trouvères in several roles (knight, king, clerk, minstrel), perhaps thereby reflecting graphically the different first-person postures (such as experiential lover or critical viewer) presented in their poems. Huot notes a visual valorisation of the clerk in particular, and thus of a figure responsible for the transmission of literary texts over and above the characters who engage in the courtly deeds celebrated therein.45 Indeed, one may remark more broadly on a clericalisation of courtly culture in the thirteenth century, manifested in a shift from noble to non-noble authorship of lyric song, and a transformative impact, by clerics, on the Old French vernacular itself and its literary forms.46

Anonymous, Cest quadruble / Voz n’i dormirés jamais / Biaus cuers / FIAT 47 The Old French literary tradition was heavily musical – while only about one-tenth of surviving troubadour lyrics have melodies, the vast majority of the trouvère corpus is transmitted with melodies copied into the manuscripts along with the texts. In addition to the abundance of monophonic songs, the Old French tradition cultivated the polyphonic genre of the motet, which had its heyday in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and provided a locus for extended play with juxtaposition of personas.48 The motet featured two or more different texts performed simultaneously – in French, Latin, or a combination of the two – composed over a tenor, a voice whose melody was often a fragment of a plainchant (the multiple incipits of these simultaneously delivered texts are separated here by an oblique stroke). The temporal simultaneity of these voices, plus the secular/sacred juxtaposition inherent in the use of plainchant, provided the opportunity for the interplay of a variety of lyric subjects. The two (or three) texts, for example, could be in dialogue about the same subject so that the motet was mimetic of conversation; or the relationship could have an implied temporal disjunction, so that the composition of the motet itself could be enacted.49 Just as in the Old French lyric corpus, the topic of song composition was frequently thematised, generally in the context of the speaker proclaiming that he was either starting a song or refusing ever to sing again because of love. The voice of the lover-poet in a few cases very interestingly morphs into the voice of the composer of one of the musical parts of the motet, raising fascinating questions about compositional process, and the degree to which thematisation of the creation of the musical work can be taken. One of the most intriguing of these is the anonymous Cest quadruble / Voz n’i dormirés jamais / Biaus cuers / FIAT, transmitted in the rich collection of motets known as the Montpellier Codex (Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire Médecine, H 196), dating

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to the turn of the fourteenth century.50 This motet is among those that contain three different texted voices above the tenor. The duplum and triplum (second and third voices) are in dialogue; the duplum is in the voice of a man and the triplum in the voice of a woman, and they are clearly addressing each other, humorously at cross purposes.51 The man happily addresses the woman as ‘douce desirée, sans fiel et sanz gas | pleine de solas, beauté tres bien née | tailliée a compas’ (ll. 7–11) (‘sweet beloved, devoid of malice and of derision, | full of comfort, high-born beauty, | sculpted to perfection’), and asks: ‘hé, doz Dieus, | quant dormirai j’avec vous,| entre voz dous bras?’ (ll. 12–14) (‘oh sweet God, when will I sleep with you, sleep in your sweet arms?’ (refrain text italicised)). The triplum, in the voice of the woman, begins with a refrain that negates this possibility, ‘vos n’i dormirés ja mais,| vilains tres chetis et lais’ (ll. 1–2) (‘you will never sleep there, | you dastardly, miserable scoundrel’), and continues to excoriate her addressee (understood because of the motet’s juxtaposition of voices as the duplum’s male persona) throughout the text. This highly amusing scene, played out in the motet’s performance of these two voices over the tenor, is joined by a peculiar fourth voice, a quadruplum, clearly in the voice of the composer: Cest quadruble sans reason N’ai pas fet en tel saison Qu’osel chanter n’ose. (ll. 1–3) (I did not make this quadruplum [part] | without reason in such a season | that even the birds don’t dare sing.) The diegetic disjunction between this voice and the other two is almost filmic: it is as if the film’s director has wandered on screen by mistake, mumbling to himself about his own creation, while the characters continue to play their roles, oblivious to his presence. The reference to the ‘quadruble’, rather than just the ‘song’, insists on a greater degree of self-reflexivity than usual – this speaker is the composer of the very voice part that he is singing, rather than the customary lover who has taken to singing to express his feelings. If we take the quadruplum’s text literally, then we must imagine that it was in fact composed at a later point to be added to the existing motet, fictionalising its own creation in the process. Whether it was composed by a different person altogether is impossible to know. But this quadruplum voice foregrounds several features of lyric identity that will be pursued by poet-composers in the following century: a speaker identifying himself as a composer by using technical language (quadruble); thematising the craft and technology of writing; and elaborating the ‘I sing because I love’ paradigm by metafictionally inscribing the product of his singing onto the manuscript page.

Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377), Le Remede de Fortune In the fourteenth century, new developments in musical notation permitted a new kind of expression of lyric subjectivity: that of the composer expressing himself in notational terms. Machaut’s two narrative poems (dits) with musical interpolations, Le Remede de Fortune and Le Livre dou voir dit, take the process of thematising musical composition to greatly elaborated lengths. Machaut’s Remede is a clear and expansive

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early example of this: it is a didactic love treatise but also a notation primer in which all genres of polyphonic song are exemplified.52 The poetic je is here amplified by narrative, and further enriched by its material circumstance. The earliest manuscript in which it is found (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.1586, hereafter C) is a sumptuous luxury manuscript compiled c. 1350 and thought to be closely related to the patronage of the composer by Bonne of Luxembourg, who died of the plague in 1349. As well as the likely patron of the manuscript, she is thought to be the real-life source of inspiration for the lady in the Remede.53 The Remede tells the story of a young poet-composer and his love for this lady, and the story is punctuated throughout with songs that, in manuscript C, are provided with musical notation. The notation, further, proceeds from an antiquated to a modern style, and the songs move from monophonic settings of older lyric genres to mostly polyphonic settings of more modern dance forms.54 Thus the Remede is not only a narrative of a courtly love story, but a kind of compendium of musical genres and a survey of the recent history of song set to musical notation. It is a song, moreover, that generates the story: the lady hears the narrator recite a lay that he has written in her honour, and, not realising who wrote it, asks the name of the author. The narrator is tongue-tied and, instead of replying, flees the court and finds himself in a garden. There he is visited by Hope, who comforts him, and he finds the strength to return to the court, profess his love to the lady, and take part in courtly festivities. Near the end, he takes his leave of the lady, singing as he goes, and comes upon a courtly tournament. This moment is depicted in manuscript C in an extraordinarily rich way, in a spectacular bifolio in which text has been all but displaced by illumination on one side and musical notation on the other.55 While the design of the entire manuscript renders it rich with musical notation and illuminations, this opening is unique in the way in which non-verbal ‘text’ dominates. The half-page illumination on the left of the opening, f.56v, illustrates the scene described by the rubric, ‘how the lover went on his way singing’. The narrator, on horseback, holds a scroll and has his mouth open, the customary means of depicting oral communication. He is off to the side of the image, whose middle is dominated by a knightly tournament, with a stand of female spectators looking on. The narrator’s singing is visually juxtaposed with the knights jousting in a suggestive way: he is oblivious to the scene he is wandering into, intent on his singing, in a manner reminiscent of the lyric persona of the quadruplum voice in ‘Cest quadruble’ discussed above. The right-hand side of the opening, f.57r, is entirely devoted to the text and musical notation of the song, the rondelet ‘Dame, mon cuer en vous remaint | Comment que de vous me departe’ (ll. 1–2) (‘Lady, my heart stays with you | Although I myself must leave you’), and its presence reinforces the lyric persona’s identity as a composer of song above all.56 It is almost as if the verbal text has been displaced by the various non-verbal means of telling the story: the picture of the narrator singing on the left, and the precise encoding of what he is singing on the right.

Alain Chartier (c. 1385–1430), ‘La Complainte du prisonnier d’amours’ The manuscript presentation of the Remede in manuscript C manifests an interest in courtly subjectivity as material performance that is thematised in the texts of

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Machaut’s dits, especially Le Livre dou voir dit, not only in terms of musical composition, but also as regards the very basics of putting together a book about composing songs about love. A particular characteristic of this thematisation is how it foregrounds the figure of the ‘clerkly trouvère’, who evokes the activities of writing and bookmaking as part of the circumstances of poetic composition, and struggles to marry together the twin impulses of loving and writing. It is impossible not to see the promotion of a learned, bookish ‘I’ to have been informed by the hugely influential Le Roman de la rose, begun by Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1238) and continued to its rose-plucking conclusion by Jean de Meun (c. 1265–78).57 The kinds of authorial self-awareness and first-person multi-layering that we saw already being practised by troubadours and trouvères are thus channelled in a new direction that highlights a written tradition of lyric poetry, at the same historical moment as those early lyric poets are being compiled into anthologies and themselves transformed into a new performance context, that of the manuscript.58 Alain Chartier, secretary to Charles VII, is most famous for his debate poem La Belle Dame sans mercy, which itself provoked excitable debate about courtoisie.59 In addition to narrative poems and prose works, Chartier penned a number of ballades and rondeaux; fourteen of the latter, shorn of their refrain repeats, are printed together as an amalgam in the late-medieval printed anthology Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique, under the title ‘La Complainte du prisonnier d’amours faicte au jardin de plaisance’.60 The Jardin is the only exemplar of Chartier’s verse to feature the rondeaux in this particular order, collected into an implied monologue.61 The opening line of rondeau III casts the ‘I’ as ‘pouvre prisonner’ (‘poor prisoner’), but the prison image is not explicit in any other rondeau/stanza.62 In the first two rondeaux, the ‘I’ appears trapped by his inability to communicate with his lady. In rondeau I, he relays how he dries up (‘mon propos m’emble’ (l. 6)) in his lady’s presence: Pres de ma dame et loing de mon vouloir, Plain de desir et crainte tout ensemble, Le cuer me fault et le parler me tremble Quant dire doy ce qu’il me faut vouloir. (ll. 1–4) (Close to my lady and distant from what I want, | full of desire and fear both together, | my heart fails me and my speech falters | when I have to say what I must surely want.) He is far from where he would like to be, partly in the sense that, paralysed by fear, he is a long way off being able to satisfy his desire for his lady, but also, more significantly here, because being near to her makes him ill at ease to the point of doubting whether he actually wants what he should want as a lover, which at the same time he needs to want to fuel his love poetry: ‘mon vouloir’ opposed to ‘ce qu’il me faut vouloir’. Distance, solitary introspection and indirect communication seem preferable to this writerly ‘I’, but, as rondeau II articulates, even thinking and writing from afar require some daring: Comme oseroit la bouche dire Ce que le cuer pas penser n’ose? Comment requerray je la chose Que je n’ay hardement d’escrire? (ll. 1–4)

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helen j. swift and anne stone (How would my mouth dare to say | what my heart dare not conceive? | How will I request the thing | that I dare not write?)

The ‘I’ is gently parodied as a quivering wreck, prisoner of his anxiety, which is overplayed through the situational irony of his protestation, in writing, that he dare not even write. The bookishness of Chartier’s persona and his preference for retreat from social communication should not, however, lead us to assume that the poet’s lyrics were conceived of as divorced from contemporary song. Several of Chartier’s poems were set to music or had their text drawn upon by contemporary and later-fifteenth-century composers such as Binchois, Busnois, Ockeghem and Caron.63

Conclusion Demonstrating diverse handlings of first-person positions in the rhetoric of courtly poetry may seem less satisfyingly to furnish a definition of lyric subjectivity than a neat, pithy statement beginning ‘courtly subjectivity is . . .’, but such a statement would instantly misrepresent an entity whose essential quality is its mobility. For instance, the movement of ‘I’ from song to book in no way renders it more stable, and there is indeed no straightforward transition from a context of oral performance to one of written presentation. Furthermore, several written contexts may exist for the same lyric, whether cited in a romance, gathered in a single-author manuscript, or compiled in a print anthology. Such different contexts also play a role in the ever-shifting relationship between lyric and narrative modes.64 Similarly, while each lyric subject professes sincerity, the framework within which this quality is most appropriately construed by an audience is complicated by authorial playfulness or riddling, and by the layering of voices accumulated through citation, interplay with narrative, or juxtaposition with other poems in a new material context. A chronological sampling of ‘I’ activity attests to certain general movements in poetic production: from a culture that is more oral to one that is more predominantly, and often quite self-consciously, written. But few neat progressions or developments can be traced; the handling of the first-person position is sophisticated from its inception, and it is noteworthy that, in the present selection, it is the earliest experiment with subjectivity that is in many ways the most elaborate and disconcerting.

Notes 1. For a discussion of the scope of ‘orality’, see Mary O’Neill, Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France: Transmission and Style in Trouvère Repertoire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 53–5. 2. On the musical properties of monophonic love song that make of it a polyphony of voices, see Judith A. Peraino, Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3. On point of view, see Sophie Marnette, Narrateur et points de vue dans la littérature française médiévale (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 21. On voice, see Peraino, pp. 28–9. On lyric/narrative, see Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the Rose to the Rhétoriqueurs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 155–60; Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction,

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4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

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1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). The paradox that the lyric is a secret missive addressed to a single lady, but is also destined for public performance: Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 18. Simon Gaunt, Troubadours and Irony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 183–4. Kay, Subjectivity, p. 1. A. C. Spearing considers the differing views of Michel Zink, Sarah Spence and François Rigolot, who argue respectively for emergence in the thirteenth, twelfth and sixteenth centuries: Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 31–4. On the discernibility of ‘a modern subject’ in earliest troubadour lyric, see Fidel Fajardo-Acosta, Courtly Seductions, Modern Subjections: Troubadour Literature and the Medieval Construction of the Modern World (Tempe: ACMRS, 2010), pp. 128–9. One could oppose the views of Michel Zink, La Subjectivité littéraire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), p. 8, who takes subjectivity to be ‘le produit d’une conscience particulière’ and Spearing, pp. 1–34, who sees it specifically not to be anchored in or to presuppose a single subject-consciousness. For Marnette, p. 21, point of view (focalisation) is but one of three types of subjectivity. Kay, Subjectivity, p. 48, intervenes between Paul Zumthor’s structuralist evacuation of the ‘I’ to a purely grammatical unit (Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972)) and the personal ‘I’ of Zink evolving ‘une poésie de l’anecdote du moi’ (La Subjectivité littéraire, p. 1), to instate a concern for the autobiographical as recording ‘a particular coincidence of the intertextual with the historical’. Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 30; Kay, Subjectivity, p. 2. Kay advances a psychoanalytic approach in ‘Desire and Subjectivity’, in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 212–27. David Fein, in a structuralist vein, promotes the ‘I’’s syntactic role in elaborating a network of relationships revolving around it, rather than being a site or centre of interest itself (David Fein, ‘The Use of the First Person in the Chansons d’Amour’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 83 (1982), 112–17); Maria Luisa Meneghetti, ‘Intertextuality and Dialogism in the Troubadours’, in The Troubadours, ed. Gaunt and Kay, pp. 181–96; Spearing (pp. 33, 247) insists on ‘subjectless subjectivity’ and the ‘I’ marking the absence of a human subject. See Gaunt, Troubadours, pp. 19–31; Philippe Ménard, ‘Sens, contresens, non-sens: réflexions sur la pièce Farai un vers de dreyt nien de Guillaume IX’, in Mélanges de langue et de littérature occitane en hommage à Pierre Bec (Poitiers: Université de Poitiers, 1991), pp. 339–48; Stephen G. Nichols, ‘The Early Troubadours: Guilhem IX to Bernart de Ventadorn’, in The Troubadours, ed. Gaunt and Kay, pp. 66–82. Referring to troubadour verse more generally, Jelle Koopmans asserts a norm of textual and generic instability that undermines any attempt at a grand narrative: ‘Contre-textes et contre-sociétés’, in Texte et contre-texte pour la période pré-moderne, ed. Nelly Labère (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2013), pp. 53–61 (p. 56). Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères, ed. and trans. Frederick Goldin (New York: Anchor Books, 1973), pp. 6, 17. Lyrics, ed. Goldin, p. 6. On Guilhem’s performance style, see Laura Kendrick, The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 163–5.

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16. In Poesie, ed. Nicolò Pasero (Modena: S.T.E.M.-Mucchi, 1973). Subsequent references to this edition will be incorporated in the text. Translations are mine. 17. Kendrick, p. 20. 18. For summaries of these up to 1990, see Gaunt, Troubadours, p. 27; Ménard. For some subsequent interpretations, see Rouben C. Cholakian, The Troubadour Lyric: A Psychocritical Reading (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 20–3; Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 81–3; Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 145–52, 157–9. 19. Gaunt, Troubadours, pp. 28–9; Kay, Courtly Contradictions, pp. 143–52; Kendrick, pp. 19–21. 20. Kendrick, p. 19; Spearing, p. 183. 21. What Zumthor called a ‘récit latente’: ‘Les Narrativités latentes dans le discours lyrique médiéval’, in The Nature of Medieval Narrative, ed. Minnette Grunmann-Gaudet and Robin F. Jones (Lexington: French Forum, 1980), pp. 39–55 (p. 41). 22. Kendrick, p. 38. 23. For material aspects of reception, see William Burgwinkle, ‘The Chansonniers as Books’, in The Troubadours, ed. Gaunt and Kay, pp. 246–62. 24. The vidas and razos are edited in Biographies des troubadours: Textes provençaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. Jean Boutière and A. H. Schutz (Paris: Marcel Didier; Toulouse: Édouard Privat, 1950). English translations of the vidas are found in Margarita Egan, The Vidas of the Troubadours (New York: Garland Press, 1984), and for the razos, in William Burgwinkle, Razos and Troubadour Songs (New York: Garland Press, 1990). 25. Nichols, ‘The Early Troubadours’, p. 68. 26. Edition from The Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn: Complete Texts, Translations, Notes, and Glossary, ed. and trans. Stephen G. Nichols and John A. Galm (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. 166; translated by Burgwinkle, Razos, p. 3. 27. The ordering of the stanzas differs significantly in the various manuscripts in which it is transmitted; for an interpretation, see Simon Gaunt, ‘Discourse Desired: Desire, Subjectivity and mouvance in Can veh la lauzeta mover’, in Desiring Discourse: The Literature of Love, Ovid through Chaucer, ed. James Paxson and Cynthia Gravlee (Selinsgrove: Sequehanna University Press, 1998), pp. 89–110. 28. Biographies des troubadours, ed. Boutière and Schutz, pp. 20–8; English translation, Egan, pp. 11–15. The vida survives in two slightly different versions, one of which is attributed to the troubadour Uc de Saint Cirq, an attribution that perforce gives a strongly authoritative identity to its voice. 29. Burgwinkle, Razos, p. 3. 30. Eglal Doss-Quinby et al., Songs of the Women Trouvères (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 100. 31. For the limits of this knowledge, see The Lyrics and Melodies of Gace Brulé, ed. and trans. Samuel N. Rosenberg and Samuel Danon, music ed. Hendrik Van der Werf (New York and London: Garland, 1985), pp. xiii–xix. For Gace’s influence on others, see Van der Werf, pp. xxvi–xxviii; O’Neill, pp. 3–4. 32. Plus a single example each of the pastourelle, jeu-parti and aube. Gace’s most recent editors remark on the homogeneity of his corpus (Lyrics and Melodies, ed. Rosenberg and Danon, p. xix). When comparisons are made with Thibaut’s verse, which covers a wider range of genres and topics (such as chansons de Croisade), Gace is most often eclipsed as the ‘poor relation’, his alleged monotony set off against his successor’s complex personality. It is unfortunate that when Dante cites Gace, he attributes the lines to Thibaut (O’Neill, p. 4). 33. It is often held that the trouvère ‘inheritance’ of troubadour lyric predominantly distilled it into a single theme, fin’amor, and a more restricted range of forms, privileging the grant

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34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

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chant courtois (see Chansons des trouvères: Chanter m’estuet, ed. Samuel N. Rosenberg and Hans Tischler, with Marie-Geneviève Grossel (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1995), pp. 10–12). This must be understood carefully as selectivity rather than simplification; it is not the case, for instance, that troubadour irony was succeeded by trouvère plangent melancholy. We must also bear in mind that our grounds for deducing distillation are the extant material witnesses of the songs, so while the chansonniers, dating from no earlier than the fourth generation of trouvères, preserve the grant chant above all, it would be unsafe to infer that their compilers were not themselves being selective in what they chose to record. O’Neill (p. 132) also argues for seeing the trouvère song tradition as an ‘opening out’ in relation to troubadour predecessors. Cf. Maria Luisa Meneghetti, Il pubblico dei trovatori: ricezione et riuso dei testi lirici cortesi fino al XIV secolo (Modena: Mucchi, 1984), p. 169. Text and translation from song no. 32 in Lyrics and Melodies, ed. Rosenberg and Danon, ll. 1–2, 7. Gaunt, Troubadours, pp. 25, 184; Peraino, pp. 26–30. Patricia Mayer Spacks, ‘In Search of Sincerity’, College English, 29 (1968), 591–602, usefully addresses sincerity (albeit in relation to later texts) as ‘a quality of [the poem’s] effect on the reader’, constituted by ‘authenticity of conviction and feeling’ (p. 591). In a medieval context of lyric performance, see O’Neill, pp. 56–8. We refer here to the stanzas forming the main body of a chanson d’amour; for the envoys, see O’Neill, pp. 59–61. See Boulton, p. 292; for citations of Gace specifically: pp. 26, 27, 29, 31, 36, 38, 55, 61. Ibid., pp. 277–8. O’Neill, pp. 58, 65. On the manuscript tradition of trouvère lyric, see ibid., pp. 13–52. Ibid., p. 18; Huot, From Song to Book, p. 47. Huot, From Song to Book, p. 48. Ibid., p. 48. Peraino (pp. 123–54) posits a thematisation of the shift from noble to non-noble authorship to be traceable through the compilatio of F-Pn fr.12615 (trouvère T), which moves from Thibaut de Champagne to the Artesian cleric Adam de la Halle. See also O’Neill, pp. 132–73. Jennifer Saltzstein, The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013) discusses the relationship between clerics’ appropriation of the vernacular and practices of intertextual refrain quotation across various song genres. See also Alastair J. Minnis, Magister Amoris: The ‘Roman de la rose’ and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 63–80. This title comprises the incipits of each of four differently texted voices, as explained below. For an overview of the genre see Mark Everist, French Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry, and Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); for the interplay between sacred and secular voices, see Sylvia Huot, Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: Sacred and Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); for the role of refrains in motet texts, see Saltzstein, The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular. For more on polytextuality in the motet, see the chapter by Clark and Leach in the present volume. Modern edition in The Montpellier Codex, ed. Hans Tischler, 4 vols (Madison: A-R Editions, 1978), I, pp. 56–8. The dating of this manuscript and its contents is contested. For a recent appraisal and further bibliography, see Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 296–305; Alison Stones, Gothic Manuscripts 1260–1320: Part One, 2 vols (London: Harvey Miller, 2013), II, pp. 48–53.

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51. The two texts are further linked structurally by the fact that each is built upon a refrain that is treated in the same manner: the first line of the refrain starts the motet text, then it is amplified with new text, and each text ends with the completion of the refrain. See Saltzstein, The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular, pp. 59–67. 52. Guillaume de Machaut, Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune, ed. and trans. James Wimsatt and William W. Kibler (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988). For a recent discussion of the Remede that integrates its lyric insertions into a broader analysis of its literary significance, see Elizabeth Eva Leach, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 138–64. 53. See Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 25–6, for an overview of Machaut’s possible patronage by Bonne. 54. The exception to this pattern is the monophonic virelai sung by the narrator after his reentry into society. For a recent reading of this moment in the Remede, see Peraino, pp. 236–44; Leach, Guillaume de Machaut, p. 159. 55. These images may be seen via Gallica: f.56v and f.57r [both accessed 28 August 2014]. 56. Music edited by Rebecca Baltzer in Le Jugement/Remede, ed. Wimsatt and Kibler, pp. 431–3. 57. We must be careful with chronology: the Rose appears alongside the continuing output of later trouvères and the composition of romances with lyric insertions, but is also contemporary with the production of anthologies of earlier trouvère poetry as well as troubadour chansonniers. 58. Simon Gaunt, ‘Orality and Writing: The Text of the Troubadour Poem’, in The Troubadours, ed. Gaunt and Kay, pp. 228–45 (p. 244). 59. See Le Cycle de ‘La Belle Dame sans mercy’, ed. David F. Hult and Joan E. McRae (Paris: Champion, 2003). 60. Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique: Reproduction en fac-similé de l’édition publiée par Antoine Vérard vers 1501, ed. Eugénie Droz and Arthur Piaget, 2 vols (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1910–25), I, ff.161r–162r. Vérard’s is the earliest known edition; seven others survive. 61. Gaunt, ‘Orality’, pp. 246–7. Twenty-three rondeaux are extant; see The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, ed. James C. Laidlaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 371–3. 62. In The Poetical Works, ed. Laidlaw, l. 1. Subsequent references to this edition will be incorporated in the text. Translations are mine. Rondeaux I to III, discussed here, correspond to the first three stanzas in the Jardin’s amalgam (f.161r). 63. David Fallows, A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 729. These items include rondeaux V, XIV and XXIII. It is also the case that poems set to music appear ascribed to Chartier in anthology manuscripts (such as the widely copied song Je, Fortune), which suggests that he was not perceived at the time as a poet of the non-sung song. 64. Boulton, pp. 173–4.

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10 Gender: The Art and Hermeneutics of (In)differentiation1 Elizabeth Eva Leach and Nicolette Zeeman

T

he language of gender and sexual identity permeates medieval ethical thought. Immoral or dangerous social relations and desires are often figured as a disruption of the masculine/feminine hierarchy according to which an ordered society is governed by men and an ordered subject is governed by its ‘masculine’ rationality. Such disruptions may be figured in terms of masculine desire for the feminine, but also in terms of men participating in the disordered desire of the feminine, that is, types of desire associated in various ways with the feminine. This desire might be described as irrational, excessive, too bodily, same-sex, amorous or simply pleasure-seeking. Insofar as the subject is masculine, the effect of such desire is ‘feminising’ due to the fact that it brings about a destabilisation of the gender boundaries on which the ordered society and subject are predicated. When the language of gender appears in medieval ethics, therefore, it often signals both the possibility of the ‘wrong’ kinds of desire and also, perhaps most problematic of all, the possibility of gender indifferentiation. For this reason, women who express desire in ‘masculine’ ways are equally anxiety-making. And yet, interestingly, these same masculine-feminine imbrications are also in the later Middle Ages the objects of pleasure and fascination, as well as the means of new forms of self-awareness and articulacy. Later medieval love song, secular romance and devotional literature not only often address the nature of gender, but also cultivate the exotic and intensificatory pleasures that derive from the blurring of sex/gender boundaries in the context of intense desire or love. Notions of feminisation and of gender ambivalence, in other words, have both negative and positive valences. Unsurprisingly, this ambivalent valuation of the sex/gender divide can be found in the language of medieval song, intensified by the fact that one of the most characteristic subject-matters of medieval song is desire (whether erotic, amorous or religious). However, exactly the same ambivalent valuation of the sex/gender divide also appears in descriptions of the sung music: music commentators use the language of gender and sex identity to critique the intense pleasures provided and expressed by music, not to mention the suggestively ‘keen’ way later medieval music often figures various versions of the desire for resolution; they also use this terminology to attack the ‘dangerously’ fine-tuned degrees of tonal and melodic differentiation found in the later medieval Ars Nova. And yet, these same features of later medieval music are also the object of intense cultivation, in particular those that tend towards ever finer melodic and tonal distinctions: polyphony, polytextuality, hocketing and its associated use of rests, musica ficta, new forms of ornamentation and its concomitant cultivation of dissonance. The

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terminology of sex/gender also allows us to access central, and valued, features of late medieval music and its texts. The Galenic medical view was that masculine and feminine genitalia were identical (merely inversions of each other).2 Doctors saw biological sexing as subject to variable conditions, acknowledging same-sex desire (mainly for men), as well as the categories of the ‘virile woman’, the ‘effeminate man’ and the hermaphrodite.3 Other medieval writers were predictably more anxious about sex/gender instability. On the one hand, misogyny represented a concerted attempt to insist on sex/gender differentiation; but, on the other hand, erotic and amorous desire meant that masculinity was always imbricated in the feminine – if women were supposed to be less rational and more carnal than men, this was largely because they were being asked to stand in for the desires and affections that heterosexual men found problematic in themselves.4 In fact, many medieval writers acknowledged this complicity, describing male sexual and amorous desire, whether heterosexual or homosexual, as ‘feminising’. For Isidore of Seville, ‘excessive love’ is itself femineus; if the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum merely considered excessive sexual activity to be harmful, several of its vernacular translations claimed that it was conducive to ‘wommannys condycionys’; the lovers’ disease of ‘amor hereos’ was ‘unmanning’ in the sense that it disempowered and infantilised men.5 Heightened sexuality was also, of course, associated with the ‘effeminisations’ of same-sex sexuality and cross-dressing: it was not just misogyny that was at stake here, in other words, but a more pervasive concern about the blurring of the masculine and the feminine.6 Other writers were interested in this blurring and possibility that sexuality and love make the lover more like the beloved. Secular song and romance constantly document how the love of women renders men passive and draws them away from more masculine activities: one might think of the posture of helpless disempowerment adopted by the troubadour towards ‘midons’, the lady understood as his alternative feudal ‘lord’, but also Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot and Perceval, at the mercy of passing knights while entranced at the thought of the beloved, or his Yvain and Erec, struggling with the conflicting demands of marriage and chivalry.7 A homoerotic variant appears in the prose Lancelot, which narrates the love of Galehaut for Lancelot; and the abyss into which knights who love ‘young men more than young ladies’ will fall in Gerbert de Montreuil’s Continuation de Perceval is an extreme example of a pervasive romance meditation on the latently erotic dynamics of its all-male communities.8 However, sex/ gender instability is equally central to the devotional discourses that, from the eleventh century onwards, figure the male devotee as Christ’s ‘beloved’, who speaks in the feminine voice of the erotic Song of Songs.9 At the same period, moreover, writers were exploring the paradox of Christ’s redemptive victory through ‘defeat’ on the cross by describing him too in the feminising terms of passivity and erotic abjection, but also of nurturing ‘motherhood’; this in turn made for new gender complexities for women ‘lovers’ of Christ.10 In both secular and religious texts the frisson of sex/gender indifferentiation seems to contribute to the description of especially intense forms of love. Psychoanalysis, with its assumptions about the inevitably incomplete nature of sexual identity, intriguingly parallels some of these claims.11 According to Freud, the uncertainty of sexual identity is exaggerated by the identificatory narcissism of idealised affect, or ‘love’, as it dissolves the boundaries between subject and the object of desire.12 Insofar as he locates it within the Symbolic, Lacan claims that ‘courtly love’,

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with its endless bars to satisfaction, and the lady configured as ‘Other’, describes the detours of desire and the impossibility of the sexual relation; it is at best a form of ‘courage’ in the face of ‘exile from the sexual relationship’.13 Insofar as he also locates ‘courtly love’ in the imaginary, however, Lacan considers it ‘fundamentally narcissistic’; it is here that the lover, divided at the point of entry into culture, comforts himself with consoling fantasies of identity and unity with the beloved.14 Kristeva concurs, pointing out the parallel with Christianity, which, she says, understands love as a fantasy ‘homologisation’ with God or the neighbour.15 Like the medieval theorists, then, psychoanalysts describe love as the fantasy of merging with, and completion by, the other, dangerously and exotically blurring the boundaries of identity and sexual difference.16 This sex/gender instability is repeatedly played out in the language of medieval erotic and religious song. Indeed, its effects are so pervasive that in Latin and French texts they can even be seen to affect the treatment of grammatical gender: despite the fact that grammatical gender is conventional and formally unrelated to the categories of biological sex or social gender, the destabilising dynamics of the language of ‘love’ are such that often they seem to co-opt grammatical gender into their own logic. These fantasies and the ambivalent valuation of the sex/gender divide are reflected in medieval music theory. Many later writers took their cue from Augustine’s ambivalence about listening to music and sought to impose strictures on what they viewed as feminine and feminising excesses in performance. The twelfth-century writer John of Salisbury criticises the ‘lightness and dissolution of dainty voices designed to achieve vain glory in the feminine manner’ when singing the divine office.17 John cautions: Thou wouldst think that these were the most delicious songs of very pleasing sirens – not of men – and thou wouldst marvel at the lightness of voice, which cannot be compared in all their measures and pleasing melodies to those of the nightingale or parrot, or any other more clear sounding bird that might be found.18 The effeminacy and feminising powers attributed to these male singers are stronger and all the more worrisome on account of their virtuosity. John describes the singers as more eloquent than two natural avian practitioners, but says that their sound would make a listener mistake them for sirens – women–bird hybrids – rather than men. Rationality is the defining feature of the human soul, masculinity and musica, and differentiates men from both beasts (including birds) and women. Here, by contrast, vocal prowess and the kind of music sung to exhibit it are understood to deprive the singers of both their humanity and their masculinity, making them effeminate, monstrous, unnatural. By the fourteenth century the gendering of terms within music theory had begun to focus on a new kind of sequence of two linked sonorities. In this succession of sonorities, a first sonority – a tense, tonally unstable, so-called imperfect sonority – would raise expectations of, and be resolved by, a second, stable, ‘perfect’ sonority. Theorists increasingly recommended that the two elements in this special type of ‘directed’ progression be connected by the smallest available interval in the medieval gamut – the semitone.19 Since the music theory of the ancient Greeks, small intervals had been considered feminine and were associated with the chromatic genus, which

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was explained as being coloured and beautiful. Although the chromatic genus had no practical meaning by the fourteenth century, the femininity of the semitone, and its centrality to the new kind of succession of sonorities, led in this period to the animation of music through the ambivalent valuations of the sex/gender divide. Some theorists note that the semitone is necessary or even beautiful, attributions that are neutral or even approving.20 But sometimes praise of the beauty of small intervals shades into implicit criticism: for Arnulf of St Ghislain, the ability of women singers to perform sub-tonal intervals makes them into earthly sirens who ‘enchant the bewitched ears of their listeners, and they steal away their hearts, which are [. . .] lulled by this kind of intoxication, in secret theft’; the listeners are enslaved, shipwrecked by the beauty of their musical prison – an ‘earthly Charybdis in which no kind of redemption or ransom is of any avail’.21 The reliance of Arnulf’s text on Alan of Lille’s earlier homophobic Complaint of Nature supplies a strongly anxious subtext to claims about the beauty of such intervals. Writing in the mid-fourteenth century, music theorist Johannes Boen attributes the rise of interest in the irregular placement of semitones within the gamut (the diatonic collection of pitches used in chant, which admitted only B flat) to the boredom of young men, led by greater lascivia, to make more subtle placements of the notes. Whether one translates lascivia as wantonness, lasciviousness or playfulness, the potential for a negative, sexualised resonance remains. Despite his implicit reservations, Boen ultimately argues in favour of this musical development, which he links to the Christian idea of the linearity of time and forward progress (as opposed to the heretical Pythagorean idea of the cyclical Great Year).22 The imperfect element of the directed progression – and in particular the semitone adjustment that made listeners experience the progression’s first element as tending strongly to its second – in some contexts also earned a more positive explanation through the co-option of ideas from Aristotelian physics: according to the Aristotelian explanation, the imperfect seeks its perfection by approaching it as closely as possible.23 We propose, however, that to describe the directed progression in terms of gender (and psychoanalysis) inevitably foregrounds its contingent and provisional nature.24 The musicological idea of ‘resolution’ is, after all, a qualified and technical one (a parallel might be a mechanic saying that a certain component ‘fits’ into a space within an engine); resolution does not provide a direct, inviolable and unproblematic connection, but merely a practical and to a certain extent a conventional one. But the ‘resolution’ of the ‘directed progression’ cannot satisfy the desire that brings the listener to song in the first place. Like the imagined homologisation of lovers, constructed upon the impossible Lacanian sexual relation, musicological resolution can only ever provide a fantasy teleology; it is the imagined objet petit a, the object-cause that stands in for the end-point of musical desire. And, just as objet petit a participates in both the imaginary and the symbolic – and is therefore also ‘the portion of emptiness that my demand presupposes’, the apparent point of rest provided by musicological resolution can only ever be contingent and illusory.25 The discussions that follow are specific to the songs cited, but are also meant to be exemplary: we suggest that similar analyses could be made for much other later medieval song.

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A discort and its Latin Contrafact The French text of this song lacks its third stanza in two of the three manuscripts in which it occurs. The text in Table 10.1 is based on the edition of Willi Apel, who adds Table 10.1 French text of A discort 1. 2.

A discort son[t] Desir et Esperance Dedens mon cuer, ne s’en pueënt partir;

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

La s’entregagent liquelz a plus pesance. Nul pooir n’ai; tout me convient soufrir Lur volenté. Mais je puis bien gehir Que se ma dame ne fait dedens l’acort, Riens ne me puet tant valoir com la mort.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Desir si vot tirer a sa plaisanche, Mais Esperanche ne s’i vuet assentir; Ains dist Desirs: ‘En quoi as tu fianche Que vous ensi trestous biens acomplir?’ Desirs s’esmaie et me fait bien sentir Que se Fortune ne me fait aucun deport, Riens ne me puet tant valoir com la mort.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

[‘]Helas, Desir, je n’ay nulle valanche En moy por quoy je puisse garentir; Si me merveille qu’avés sur moy doutanche[;’]26 Quar vraiement je vos dich sans mentir, Que se Pitiés ne me feit avenir Confort [. . .] Riens ne me puet tant valoir com la mort.

Desire and Hope are in debate | in my heart and cannot leave off; | they are challenging each other as to who has more force. | I have no power; so I must completely suffer | their will[s]. But I can firmly attest | that if my lady does not make peace within, | nothing can be of more value to me than death. Desire thus wants to draw things to his pleasure, | but Hope does not want to assent to this; | so Desire says, ‘Why do you believe | that you will be able to obtain all good things?’ | Desire is distressed and really makes me feel | that if Fortune does not grant me some joy, | nothing can be of more value to me than death. [‘]Alas, Desire, I have no capacity | in myself by which I can guarantee this; | but I wonder that you doubt me[;’] | for truly I tell you without lying, | that unless Pity brings comfort to me [. . .] | nothing can be of more value to me than death.

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the third stanza from the copy that is now Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, 1846 (6 E 37), although one line (l. 20) is illegible there too.27 On the one hand, the masculine amorous subject of A discort is divided; on the other, he fantasises being submerged in the embrace of two feminine others – the seemingly interchangeable lady and ‘la mort’. The song’s opening words announce this split (though they simultaneously link it with the feminine embrace by rhyming discort with the lady’s acort and ‘la mort’). The initial division of the subject is itself gendered, as the figures who are ‘in dispute’ in his heart as to who has most power over him are masculine Desirs (who ‘si vot tirer a sa plaisanche’), and feminine Esperance. At one level, Esperance represents the cultural imprimatur that refuses his desire – Esperance ‘ne s’i vuet assentir’; part of the Lacanian Symbolic, we might say, she is that ‘highly refined way of making up’ for the absence of the sexual relation.28 But at another level, Esperance is the one who holds out to the lover the evidentially ungrounded fantasy of merging and selfcompletion in ‘trestous biens’: when Desirs asks, ‘En quoi as tu fianche | Que vous ensi trestous biens acomplir?’, she, mere ‘Hope’, can only hold out an expression of surprise that he doesn’t trust her: ‘Helas, Desire, je n’ay nulle valanche | En moy por quoy je puisse garentir; | Si me merveille qu’avés sur moy doutanche’. It is not just that the masculine singer is feminised by his passivity before these two combatants (‘me convient soufrir | Lur volenté’), then: at the end here Esperance seems to be dominant.29 If this were not enough, he is also subject to the actions of a series of other feminine figures, ‘la dame’, Fortune and Pitiés; if these fail him, the only thing of any worth will be all-engulfing, feminine, death. Such exquisite slippages of gender are not limited to secular verse. In fact, we can see a rather different version of them in the Latin contrafactum to this very piece (equivalent to one stanza of the French only; see Table 10.2). In a very different way, this religious text also exemplifies how the affective fantasy of fusion destabilises gender. Here, the presumably masculine singers beg Mary to take them into her tutamen and be their consolamen. If in the first section (sung to the music of the A section) the singers are the ones actively making an object of Mary by singing her praises, by the time that we get to the last section (sung to the music of the refrain), they are asking her to act and merge them eternally with the inhabitants of heaven. Even Mary’s son here is described with feminine nouns, as prolis and via. In this, as in so many Marian texts, moreover, the appeal to Jesus has been displaced by the appeal to his mother – that she, ‘full of grace’, will include the speakers in that grace. It is not surprising that the second section (sung to the music’s B section), which contains a brief narrative of his active life, is encased by two in praise of Mary, just as she ‘encased’ and ‘bore’ him. The song’s singers too ask to be infantilised and encased within the feminine, ‘homologised’, to use Kristeva’s term, with a divine imagined as the pregnant Mary. The musical structure of the balade stanza in A discort (Fig. 10.1) uses several of the available resources associated with sex/gender categories in the music theory of the period, and a consideration of the general contrapuntal aspect of the music is potentially revealing. Although the piece is structured round a series of directed progressions, which bring with them the effect of leaning toward and desire for closure, its effect is in fact one of constant deferral. Although the piece is in three parts, tenor, cantus and contratenor, only the first two of these are central to the contrapuntal structure. Indeed, in a later keyboard arrangement of this piece now in Faenza, the

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Table 10.2 Latin contrafact text for A discort Virginem mire pulchritudinis sole illustratam, ac matrem summi luminis, ex regali progenie natam, prophetis olim predicatam, collaudemus canticorum melodia dulcique cum symphonia, cum cythare prosodia. Casta Maria, cum prole pia ac preclarissima, Jesu, qui es vera via: Quem presentaverat Symeon in ulnis altari dominico, hic postmodum hos[t]i iniquo predam abstulit et die quadragesima in celum tulit, discipulos elegit, quos quadriferiali instruit officio. O benedicta es inter mulieres, plena gratia, propicia, ferens tutamen; sis consolamen ut cum celicolis in eternum psallamus: Amen Let us praise together the virgin of wonderful beauty, | illumined by the sun, | and mother of the greatest light, | born from a royal line, | foretold long ago by the prophets, | with the melody of our songs | and with sweet consonance, | along with the sound of the harp. | Chaste Mary, | with your merciful | and splendid offspring, | Jesus, who is the true way. He whom Symeon had brought | in his arms to the Lord’s altar | afterwards seized the prey | from the evil enemy, | and took it into the heaven | on the fortieth day; | he chose his disciples, | whom he furnished | with fourfold duty. Oh, you are blessed | among women, | full of grace, | benign, | provider of our defence; | be our consolation, | that we may sing | psalms eternally | with those who dwell in heaven: Amen

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Figure 10.1 A discort, full score 6252_da Sousa Correa_Part I.indd 133

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piece is rendered only in these two parts.30 Of these only the cantus carries the text. The fundamental contrapuntal relationship is between the tenor, which is the harmonic basis of the piece, and the cantus, which carries the text. The directed progression that ends line 1, setting the word ‘Esperance’ (bar 8) is – normatively for French song of this period – to the octave D/d, here the sonority type that will form the ouvert cadence (bars 21–2, first time, end of line 2) and thus will be the secondary and subordinate tonal goal of the piece. The primary tonal goal – that which sounds at the end of both main sections (the A section, line 4 and the Refrain, line 7) – is to the octave C/c and, because it is the final sonority of the piece, it sets the refrain rhyme word ‘mort’ (bar 50, line 7). The tonal goals afforded by the structural closes of the open and closed endings of the repeated A section of the song (lines 2 and 4, respectively) effectively give the two most important tonal goals of the piece, clearly hierarchised and associated with two of the central ideas of the verbal text: the final and thus most important tonal goal (C/c) is associated with death – paradoxically, the music thus only comes to rest as the text returns to the fantasy of dissolution; the secondary or subordinate tonal goal (D/d) is the one associated with Hope (bar 8, line 1). But, significantly, the two octave tonal goals of C/c and D/d are not the only important tonal goals of the song: there is a third. The very first phrase, setting the first four syllables of the text, presents something quite different – a cadence using a directed progression with an F sharp to unison G/G (at ‘sont’, bar 4). At this unison G (and again paradoxically, given the completely concordant status of any unison sonority), the two singers of the tenor and cantus draw together to sing notes at the same pitch (G/G). This could be read as a musical depiction of indifferentiation in which the two separate voice parts cease to maintain their usual differentiation of function by range and ambitus (with the cantus voice singing higher than the tenor); but it can also be read in a manner that perhaps reflects the words more closely, as a musical depiction of homologisation and its ultimate failure (since the unison is the same pitch but still audibly sung by two different voices – the closest thing to a musical identity, which is ultimately not physically possible with two singers). The significant cadential directed progressions to these three tonal goals of the piece are boxed and labelled in Figure 10.1. This third tonal goal – G unison – suffers continual frustration in the course of the song: its use as a cadence is undermined because its articulation never forms the ends of musical sections and therefore suffers constant impermanence. The most telling instance of this is the end of the B section, before the refrain starts (line 6, bar 38). The sonority that ends the B section is not a perfect sonority, but an imperfect one, the very imperfect sonority (F sharp/a) that ought to resolve to G unison: the singer says his lady must make accord in his heart, with the word ‘accord’ set to a ‘tendency’ sonority that is crying out for musical resolution. Another piece might use a directed progression from such a sonority across the section end to connect the end of the B section into the refrain, making G unison into a powerful structural marker, but that doesn’t happen here. Instead, the resolution is delayed (see the small boxed X under the tenor staff G in bar 39 in Fig. 10.1); the cantus first rises instead of falls (bar 39) and only resolves at the caesura of the refrain ‘Riens ne me puet’ (bar 40), after which the cantus rests. This means that the G unison is again displaced from a

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major structural articulation and forms merely a local tonal goal. And its text is also revealing here: in their full context these three words are part of the overall refrain line (‘Nothing can be of more value to me than death’), but as an isolated string of four words, they locally mean ‘I am able [to do] nothing’. The other two places where directed progressions to G unison appear to augur structural importance for this tonal goal which is then withheld are the two identical melismatic phrases that end the two main sections of the song (the A section ending, lines 2 and 4 in bars 16–22, and the refrain itself, line 7 in bars 44–50). Both phrases are introduced by a successful cadence to G unison (bars 16 and 44 respectively), which is immediately repeated (bars 17 and 45), and then used in what appears to be the end of the phrase (bars 20 and 48), but actually immediately precedes the real phrase ending, which abandons G for one of the other goals (D in bar 22 the first time through the A section; C in bar 22 the second time through the A section, and bar 44, in the refrain). Moreover, these melismas are two of the four places in the song where the tenor is subjected to a technical notational feature known as ‘imperfect coloration’, effectively a shift in the metrical organisation of the notation which fixes notes written in red ink at their binary (imperfect) value when they would normally be ternary (perfect). Although these periods of musical coloration result in metrical dissonance between the two voices, the new duple rhythm of the lower part nevertheless also begins to force the cantus to group its short rhythmic-melodic motives as if it too were in imperfect time (although it remains in perfect time). The result is a combination of rhythmic conflict and drawing together, difference and identification. It is interesting that, in order to fix the value of the tenor notes at the imperfect relations (duple relations between all notes) rather than the triple relations that the rest of the piece and other parts show, the scribe writes them in red rather than black ink, enhancing the beauty of the notation. Red was a colour associated in particular with the description of the physical beauty of women in the lyric poetry of this period. The unsettled rhythmic aspect of these closing phrases neatly depicts the unsettled nature of the protagonist’s fantasies of the end of division, whether between Desire and Hope, himself and his beloved, or himself and death. The rhythmic disruption adds weight to the tonal disruption in which insistent directed progressions to the unison G are left without sectional, phrasal or even metrical emphasis. Ultimately the melisma returns at the end of each stanza as the je returns to the urge to dissolution, ‘la mort’. In the three-part version of the song, the additional voice – the contratenor – effectively furthers the patterns already present in the two-part core of cantus and tenor. The unison directed progressions not only collapse the pitch differentiation between the cantus and tenor voices, but they leave no space for the contratenor to occupy its normative place (in pitch terms) between them. The contratenor thus persistently and audibly undermines the directed progressions to G unison by singing a pitch below that of the other two voices. Not only does this increase the idea that the tenor’s desire for unity with the cantus is disturbing normative arrangements (because the contratenor should not have the lowest overall pitch and nor should the tenor and cantus occupy the same pitch), but specifically the contratenor sings the C below the G unison at all these points, shading the desire of the core duet for vocal unity (represented by

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directed progressions to unison G) with a reference to C, the dominant tonal centre associated with the tonal final and, verbally, with death. Thus even the fantasy of unity with the feminine beloved – the unison of (pitch) identity – slips aurally into the tonal area associated with death. The octave G/g resolution between cantus and tenor in the opening phrase, setting the word ‘Desir’ in the opening line of the first stanza (bar 5), similarly prompts the contratenor to turn a resolution to G into a sonority grounded in C. Even though there is theoretically space for the contratenor between the other two voices in this case (a resolution to G/d/g could be envisaged), the contratenor part seems voluntarily to give an early aural clue to the association between desire and death that the refrain will confirm.31

Guillaume de Machaut, J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7) In Guillaume de Machaut’s motet J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7), in which both the upper voices (triplum and motetus) sing feminine-voiced texts, the de-gendering mechanisms run from feminine to masculine and back (see Table 10.3). As in A discort, in the opening lines of the triplum the singer signals a divided sexual identity; but the conceit of the opening lines makes clear that this is not just the random effect of grammatical gender – ‘she’ has refused the man whom she now loves through the machinations of a series of masculine ‘betrayers’, her orgueil and her ‘felons cuers’. Internal to the feminine subject, then, are a series of male deceivers whom she has believed and loved rather than him (‘creü, | Et tenu cher’). Modelling her inner life on a common romance scenario, the singer excuses her failure to love by blaming it on an inner version of the social threat of the masculine court betrayer. In contrast, love is once again described in sex- and gender-identity-disrupting terms. Underlying the whole motet, after all, is the tenor, expressing the amorous dissolution of the subject in the other/death, ‘Ego moriar pro te’; the words come from the lament of King David for the death of his son Absalom (II Samuel 18. 33). Similarly, in the triplum the singer says that once her beloved loved her ‘plus que li’, but now it is he and his new beloved who seem fused in mutual porosity, ‘il aimme autre que mi, | Qui liement en ottriant merci | L’a reçeü’. And love will now also make the feminine singer break the boundaries of ‘mesure et sens’ (order, rationality, perhaps meaning itself?), upsetting social convention by addressing him, in the masculine manner, as if he is a woman. In fact, just prior to this, the beloved and his love seem suddenly to have been associated with the feminine, as reference to ‘La soie amour’ becomes in subsequent lines part of a flurry of feminine and rhyme-linked nouns that join the singer, now possessing both masculine and feminine parts (‘ma folour’, ‘ma dolour’, ‘amoureuse chalour’, ‘ma langour’), with him, ‘la joie qu’est parfaite doucour | A savourer’. He has become something passive to be sensually consumed. At the same time, however, in the motetus the feminine voice is now problematised by an extended self-identification both with Narcissus (famously beautiful, like Absalom) and with Echo, whose love of Narcissus has wasted her away to nothing but an echoic voice. Narcissus’s love of his own reflection could here have been described as same-sex or same-person, but is instead simply described as the love of an amorphous, feminine ombre – this love is, of course, not an alternative to death, but death itself. For Echo

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Table 10.3 Texts and translations of J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7) TRIPLUM 1. 2. 3. 4.

J’ay tant mon cuer et mon orgueil creü, Et tenu chier ce qui m’a deceü, Et en vilté ce qui m’amoit eü Que j’ay falli

5. Aus tres dous biens dont Amours pourveü, 6. A par Pitié maint cuer despourveü, 7. Et de la tres grant joie repeü, 8. Dont je langui. 9. Lasse! einsi m’a mes felons cuers trahi, 10. Car onques jour vers mon loyal ami, 11. Qui me servoit et amoit plus que li, 12. N’os cuer meü

TRANSLATION [Exposition] I have believed my heart and my pride too much, held dear that which has deceived me, and [held] vile the one who has loved me, so that I have lost the very sweet goods that Love has by Pity purveyed to many unfurnished hearts, filling them with the very great joy for which I languish. (ll.1–8) Alas! Thus my felonious heart has betrayed me, for I did not urge my heart any day towards my loyal friend, who served and loved me more than himself, so that it might have made him the grant of my love. Now I know well that he loves another than me, who in joyously granting him merci has received him. (ll.9–16)

13. 14. 15. 16.

Que de m’amour li feïsse l’ottri; Or sai je bien qu’il aimme autre que mi, Qui liement en ottriant merci L’a reçeü.

17. 18. 19. 20.

Si le m’estuet chierement comparer, Car je l’aim tant c’on ne puet plus amer; Mais c’est trop tart: je ne puis recouvrer La soie amour.

[Development] So I must dearly compare myself to him, for I love him so much that no one could love more. But it is too late; I cannot recover his love. (ll.17–20)

21. 22. 23. 24.

Et s’ay paour, se je li vueil rouver, Qu’il ne me deingne oïr ne escouter Pour mon orgueil, qui trop m’a fait fier En ma folour.

And I fear that if I ask it of him he will deign neither to hear nor to listen to me because of my pride, which made me so arrogant in my folly. (ll.21–4)

25. Et se je li vueil celer ma dolour, 26. Desirs, espris d’amoureuse chalour, 27. Destraint mon corps et mon cuer en errour 28. Met de finer.

And if I wish to conceal my sorrow from him, Desire, burning with the heat of love, constrains my body and brings my heart to the point of dying in error. (ll.25–8)

29. 30. 31. 32.

S’aim miex que je li die ma langour Qu’einsi morir, sans avoir la savour De la joie qu’est parfaite doucour A savourer;

33. 34. 35.

Et dou dire ne me doit nul blasmer, Qu’Amours, Besoins et Desirs d’achever Font trespasser mesure et sens outrer.

[Conclusion] So I would rather tell him my languor than die in this way, without having the taste of the joy that is perfect sweetness to taste. And for speaking [of this] none should blame me, whom Love, Need, and Desire of fulfillment make to go beyond measure and exceed sense. (ll.29–35)

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Table 10.3 Texts and translations of J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7) (continued) MOTETUS 1. 2. 3. 4.

Lasse! je sui en aventure De morir de mort einsi dure Com li biaus Narcysus mori, Qui son cuer tant enorguilli,

5. 6. 7. 8.

Pour ce qu’il avoit biauté pure Seur toute humeinne creature, Qu’onques entendre le depri Ne deingna d’Equo, qui pour li

TRANSLATION Alas! I am at risk of dying a death as hard as the one that the beautiful Narcissus died, who made his heart so proud because he had such perfect beauty – above that of any human creature – so that he did not deign to hear the plea of Echo, who on his account received a dark and bitter death. (ll.1–9)

9. Reçut mort amere et obscure. 10. Mais Bonne Amour d’amour seüre 11. Fist qu’il ama et encheri 12. Son ombre, et li pria mercy,

But Good Love made him love and cherish his shadow with a steadfast love and beg it for merci so that in praying he died of burning. (ll.10–13)

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Alas! I too fear such a death because I never had a care for my sweet friend, when he loved me from the heart; now, I love him and he hates me – Oh me! (ll.14–17)

Tant qu’en priant mori d’ardure. Lasse! et je crien morir einsi, Car onques de mon dous amy Quant il m’amoit de cuer n’os cure; Or l’aim et il me het, ay mi! Telle est des femmes la nature.

Such is the nature of women. (l.18) TENOR

TRANSLATION

Ego moriar pro te.

Would that I might die for thee.

Tenor Source: Historia of Kings, itself deriving from II Samuel 18. 33 Rex autem David cooperto capite incedens lugebat filium, dicens: Absalon fili mi, fili mi Absalon, quis mihi det ut ego moriar pro te, fili mi Absalon?

King David, greatly moved, mourned his son with his head covered, saying: My son Absalom, Absalom my son! Who would grant it to me that I might die for thee, my son Absalom!

too, love is death, imagined as a relinquishment of the illusion of autonomy, echoic immersion in the words of the beloved. Whatever we make of such moves to imbricate the singer, Narcissus, Echo and death, however, they render entirely ambiguous the last words of the motetus: ‘Telle est de femmes la nature’!32 The music’s polytextuality complicates the picture further. The woman who seems to voice both the triplum and motetus texts is very literally divided in that these parts are sung simultaneously by two different – and probably male – singers.

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Figure 10.2 J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7) repeated tenor note

These voices use a rhythmic organisation that relates all of their note values to the others in some multiple of two (minor prolation, imperfect time). A third singer sings the tenor part, which is organised conversely with a large-scale triple ratio (major modus). The sequence of twenty-one pitches (the ‘color’)33 is sung twice through with the rhythms organised in three groups (the ‘taleae’) of fourteen notes. This entire arrangement is then repeated in rhythmic diminution, with the tenor being sung twice as fast. An unusual musical feature of the motet is that repeated notes in the tenor, followed by a tenor rest, serve to disrupt and weaken a number of directed progressions so that they lose their force and forward thrust (Fig. 10.2 gives an instance from the start of the second talea). Other directed progressions between two voices have their resolutions delayed or even completely masked by the third voice either ornamenting or evading its proper resolution. Together these features serve to make the music rather more dependent on the repeating structure of the taleae, with each of the first three talea ends augured by a passage which stands out aurally as a syncopated passage introduced by a short hocket and ended by a tailpiece in which the masculine tenor voice is silent (Fig. 10.3). In counterpoint of this period, the tenor normatively maintains a functional relationship with the upper voices for directed progressions and cadence points. In M7, however, the tenor function frequently migrates to one of the upper voices, so that the sense of hierarchy is slippery and insecure.34 The very opening directed progression, at the end of the triplum’s first text line, has tenor function migrating almost immediately to the motetus, who declares ‘Lasse je sui’, making clear her gender as she takes early control of the musical texture (Fig. 10.4). To all intents and purposes the feminine voice of the motetus has become the functional tenor, the voice to which the other voices listen in order to perform the interval content of their lines so as to form progressions from imperfect to perfect sonorities correctly. Figure 10.4 shows the full musical texture on the top three staves and presents three further staves below these, which show the underlying dyads present between each pair of voices (perfect consonances are shown with open note-heads, imperfect

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Figure 10.3 J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7) end of talea

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Figure 10.4 J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE (M7) opening

consonances with filled note-heads, and dissonances as crossed note-heads). Ordinarily both pairs involving the tenor (tenor–motetus and tenor–triplum) would make proper counterpoint; here the boxed part of the tenor–motetus pair shows parallel fifths, which are not proper in counterpoint, while the motetus–triplum pair – not normally ‘in counterpoint’ – takes over to provide a perfect contrapuntal duet and a directed progression to c/g. The arrow shows the migration of tenor function to the motetus. Such complications and interweavings among the various musical voices, in other words, reinforce the interplay of gender and the urge to indifferentiation effected by the language of affect; such instabilities can only be intensified by the lures of the imagined resolution that is offered in equal measures by music and love.

Notes 1. The authors would like to thank Simon Gaunt, J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Leofranc HolfordStrevens and Helen J. Swift for their help with aspects of this chapter. 2. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 34–5. 3. Cadden, pp. 202–6; William Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapter 5. 4. Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 85–101. 5. Isidore cited in Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 13, 65; see also pp. 151–2. Secretum secretorum, ed. Robert Steele, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, fasc. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), pp. 83, 95; for the Anglo-Norman version, see Secretum Secretorum: Nine English Versions, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, Early English Text Society, OS 276 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I, p. 135. 6. Vern L. Bullough, ‘On Being a Male in the Middle Ages’, in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 31–45 (p. 35).

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7. On the ‘gender indeterminacy that lies at the heart of courtliness’, see E. Jane Burns, ‘Refashioning Courtly Love: Lancelot as Ladies’ Man or Lady/Man?’, in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 111–34 (p. 129). On ‘midons’, see Kay, p. 86. 8. See Roberta L. Krueger, ‘Questions of Gender in Old French Courtly Romance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 132–49 (pp. 144–5); Burgwinkle, chapter 5. 9. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 135–46. 10. Ibid., chapter 4. 11. Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, gen. ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–74), VII, pp. 123–243 (p. 136); Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 161–89; Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 42–3, 67, 89–91. 12. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, Standard Edition, XIV, pp. 73–102 (pp. 90, 94, 100); Rose, pp. 180–2. On religious equivalents, see Freud, ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, Standard Edition, XXI, pp. 57–145 (pp. 64–73). 13. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink, in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Book 20 (New York: Norton, 1998), chapters 6, 11; citations pp. 144–5; also Rose, pp. 174–8; Sarah Kay, ‘Desire and Subjectivity’, in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 212–27. 14. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter, in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, book 7 (London: Routledge, 1992), chapter 11 (p. 151). 15. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 6, 33–6, 139–69. 16. See also Nicolette Zeeman, ‘The Gender of Song in Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 29 (2007), 141–82. 17. See Ioannis Sarisburiensis Policraticus I–IV, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, CXVIII, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio mediaeualis (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), book 1, chapter 6 (pp. 48–9) and the discussion in Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘“The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly while the Fowler Deceives the Bird”: Sirens in the Later Middle Ages’, Music and Letters, 87 (2006), 187–211 (pp. 188–9); Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 203–9. 18. See Policraticus, I.6; Leach, ‘‘‘The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly”’, pp. 188–9; Leach, Sung Birds, p. 153. 19. The term ‘directed progression’ was coined by Sarah Fuller and is used in preference to its medieval term, ‘cadentia’ (cadence). This sequence of sonorities is known by contemporaries as a cadence. In modern music theory, a cadence is specifically a closural gesture. While closure is normally signalled by the use of a directed progression in the fourteenth century, the progression can also be used to begin musical phrases and to connect elements within phrases. See Sarah Fuller, ‘Tendencies and Resolutions: The Directed Progression in Ars Nova Music’, Journal of Music Theory, 36 (1992), 229–57. 20. See the examples noted in Sarah Fuller, ‘Concerning Gendered Discourse in Medieval Music Theory: Was the Semitone “Gendered Feminine?”’, Music Theory Spectrum, 33 (2011), 65–89. Arguing against Leach, Fuller attempts to disprove the femininity of the semitone in part by citing positive comments about it; but this represents a failure to recognise the dual

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21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

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valuation of the feminine in this period. See the response to Fuller in Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Reading and Theorizing Medieval Music Theory: Interpretation and its Contexts’, Music Theory Spectrum, 33 (2011), 90–8. See Christopher Page, ‘A Treatise on Musicians from ?c.1400: The Tractatulus de differentiis et gradibus cantorum’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 117 (1992), 1–21 and the comments in Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Gendering the Semitone, Sexing the Leading Tone: Fourteenth-Century Music Theory and the Directed Progression’, Music Theory Spectrum, 28 (2006), 1–21; Leach, ‘“The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly”’; Leach, Sung Birds, pp. 238–73. See Leach, ‘Gendering the Semitone’, p. 16. See David E. Cohen, ‘“The Imperfect Seeks its Perfection”: Harmonic Progression, Directed Motion, and Aristotelian Physics’, Music Theory Spectrum, 23 (2001), 139–69; David Maw, ‘Redemption and Retrospection in Jacques of Liège’s Concept of Cadentia’, Early Music History, 29 (2010), 79–118. For Lacan’s critique of the notions of sexual fulfilment that underpin Aristotelian philosophy, see On Feminine Sexuality, p. 82. On objet a, see ibid., pp. 72, 86, 126; for the translation ‘portion of emptiness’ (c’est ce que suppose [. . .] de vide’), see Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991), p. 174; see also pp. 165–78. The classic case of compromised musicological resolution is Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, in which the cadential resolution at the very end of the work is critically undercut by the drama, revealing the impossibility of any real satisfaction. We have attributed these words, very much ‘in character’, to Esperance; if one continues the attribution to the end of the stanza, they stress even more the precariousness of hope, as well as the mapping of the poem’s subject onto this feminine personification. French Secular Compositions of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Willi Apel, 3 vols, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, vol. 53 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1970–2), II, p. xxi. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 69. See note 26 above. We don’t know whether the contratenor is part of the original conception of the piece: often those pieces in widest circulation (like this one) are those that work in two parts and whose third part is not only optional but has a number of options. The Faenza intabulation (Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale, 117) might be thought to offer some indication that a two-part rendering is at least acceptable; A discort has a different contratenor in the later keyboard intabulation in the Buxheim organ book (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. 3725 d). The closeness of the theme and lexis of the poem to Machaut’s two-part virelay En mon cuer a un discort (V24/27) might also support the idea of an originally two-part version, although the Machaut piece could have been intended to have a triplum at some stage, judging by the blank staves in manuscripts Vg (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ferrell 1) and its copy B (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr.1585). It would be tempting to ascribe some particular significance to the one octave G/g resolution in bar 28. Unfortunately, the text–music co-ordination in the manuscripts for the B section is not prescriptive enough to make it clear what the text should be at this particular point – perhaps ‘volenté’ (will), which would be temptingly significant to place there. It should be noted, too, that this resolution is neither the end of a section nor the end of a phrase, and is thus probably not the end of a poetic line; it is brief, soon abandoned, and set within a contrapuntal emphasis on imperfect sonorities and avoided progressions. Kevin Brownlee reads this motet differently in ‘La Polyphonie textuelle dans le Motet 7 de Machaut: Narcisse, la Rose, et la voix féminine’, in Guillaume de Machaut 1300–2000,

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ed. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet and Nigel Wilkins (Paris: Presses de l’Université de ParisSorbonne, 2002), pp. 137–46. 33. NB: The ‘color’ (pitch sequence used structurally) of a motet is not related in this usage to the use of rhythmic ‘coloration’ (here, red notes), which affects the metrical aspect of the notation’s interpretation. 34. Voice crossing in itself can be significant (on the semantic significance of voice crossing in Machaut’s motets on Fortune, see Anna Zayaruznaya, ‘“She has a Wheel that Turns . . .”: Crossed and Contradictory Voices in Machaut’s Motets’, Early Music History, 28 (2009), 185–240). In M7, voice-crossing is made more significant because of the shift in contrapuntal function.

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Part II Literature and Music in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Section Editor: Ros King

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Introduction Ros King

Moving the Passions: Musical Poetics in Early Modern Europe

T

here was broad agreement in early modern Europe that the purpose both of music and of poetry (including drama) was to move passions in the listener. This idea accordingly forms a thread running through the different chapters of this part of The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music. The notion that music has emotive power is familiar to us. But the precise means whereby pure sound, whether musical or linguistic, aids communication, complicates meaning, and conveys or evokes emotion separate from any words that may be involved (or even whether it actually does), remains resistant to scientific proof.1 There are too many variables for it to be easily testable: pitch; pace; audience preconceptions; context; and quality of performance all affect the data. This introduction therefore asks whether there are technical aspects of the construction of both literature and music in this period that might help us understand what practising artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thought they were doing. It considers the prevalence of humanist education in Europe, and the experience many composers had as school teachers. And it suggests that some Elizabethan poets had intuited important insights into the rhythmic properties of the English language through their education in Latin, combined with their knowledge of music. It thus argues that the classical arts of rhetoric and oratory informed the writing and performance of both music and poetry during this period, and that the practices of music and poetry influenced each other. Throughout the period, however, any ‘praise of music’ as music theory, or as poetic trope, remained bound up with the notion that practical music was the audible earthly counterpart to that perfect music supposedly made by the motion of the planets. This echo of perfection was the main argument in the defence of music and poetry against the equally long-lived charge of frivolity and wastefulness, even immorality. The leading Italian theorist Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590) took it as a given that the world is made of music, as are ‘our souls’, and that through the distant sounds of heavenly harmony, souls might therefore almost be aroused to virtue: ‘il Mondo esser composto musicalmente [. . .] e l’Anima nostra con la medesima ragione formata [. . .] e per li suoni distarsi, e quasi vivificar le sue virtu’. Moreover, he claims that music underpins all the liberal arts, and it is with musical accents and tempi that speakers are able to delight their listeners: ‘gli accenti musici a i tempo debiti, porge maravigliosa dilettatione a gli ascoltanti’.2 On the other side of Europe, and of the Reformation, Martin Luther (1483–1546) thought the same. He had had a traditional education in the quadrivium (arithmetic,

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astronomy, geometry and music), and believed passionately that every child should learn music and the other mathematical sciences. He fought to keep the established German choir schools operating, despite the change in religion, and cajoled local reformist rulers to provide continued funding: ‘He who despises music, as do all the fanatics, does not please me. For music is a gift and largess of God, not a gift of men. Music drives away the devil and makes people happy’ (Unfinished treatise, ‘Concerning Music’).3 His training in logic, however, should perhaps have told him that simple assertion is not enough, for, as Thomas Mace put it in 1576: as Conchording unity in Musick is a lively and very significant simile of God, and Heavenly joyes and felicities, so on the contrary, Jarring Discords are as apt a simile of the Devil, or Hellish tortures.4 The continuing vexed definition of what constituted concordant and discordant intervals was therefore also a matter of salvation. Nevertheless, despite enduring theoretical conventions, practical Western art music was, by the middle of the sixteenth century, on the cusp of enormous change. Composers were beginning to explore beyond the medieval hexachords (the overlapping scales of six notes starting on G, C, or F), and there were several attempts to introduce a system of tuning which would for the first time make it possible to play both thirds and fifths in tune starting on any note. The most famous of these was set out in The Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music (1581) by Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1525–1591), who later proved his point by writing a large body of dances for lute, organised in sets for each of the twelve semitones in an even-tempered scale, and including pieces written in both the ‘minor’-sounding Dorian mode and the ‘major’-sounding Ionian mode for each semitone.5 His son, the astronomer Galileo, reputedly helped him in his experiments to discover the ratios for tension of a string which (as well as length, as set out by Pythagoras) determine its pitch. In their defence of the value of music and poetry, however, writers continued to fall back on copious reference to earlier authority. In the two prefatory letters to The Principles of Musik (1636), dedicated to the six-year-old future Charles II, for example, Charles Butler, like many writers before him, cited Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian, as well as Homer, Boethius, St Augustine, the Venerable Bede and Alfred the Great (among many others) while conjuring the myth of Amphion ‘whose music drew stones to the building of the walls of Thebes [. . .] as Orpheus tamed wilde beasts, and made trees to dance after his harp’. Music is a force of nature, although he is insistent that it must be tempered with art: ‘Merely to speak and to sing, are of nature; and therefore the rudest swains of the most barbarous nations doe make this dubble use of their articulate voice: but to speak well, and to sing well, are of art.’6 Nothing should get in the way of trade, however, and ‘rude’ music had its practical and commercial uses. Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations contains several instances of music being used as a tool for managing crews and enticing the ‘savages’. Setting out for Newfoundland in 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert reports: We were in number in all about 260 men: among whom we had of every faculty good choice, as Shipwrights, Masons, Carpenters, Smithes, and such like [. . .] Besides, for solace of our people, and allurement of the Savages, we were provided

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of Musike in good variety: not omitting the least toyes, as Morris dancers, Hobby horsse, and Maylike conceits to delight the Savage people, whom we intended to winne by all faire meanes possible. And to that end we were indifferently furnished of all pety haberdashrie wares to barter with those simple people.7 Similarly, in his search for the northwest passage in 1576, Martin Frobisher had used music to help communicate across language barriers with people of ‘Meta Incognita’ (Baffin Island, Canada): These people [. . .] will teach us the names of each thing in their language which wee desire to learne, and are apt to learne any thing of us. They delight in Musicke above measure, and will keepe time and stroke to any tune which you shall sing, both with their voyce, head, hand and feete, and will sing the same tune aptly after you.8

Emotion and Gesture Aristotle had first referred to the affective power of music and its capacity for catharsis in his Politics (8.6.1341a24). He promised he would expand on the meaning of that word in the Poetics, his study of tragedy, but the explanation, if indeed he wrote one, did not survive, and the precise significance therefore remains cause for debate. It is usually understood as a ‘purging of emotion’, perhaps imperfectly so, since emotions have to be evoked before they can be ‘purged’. The Poetics itself begins with the idea that most forms of poetry – epic, tragedy, comedy and dithyramb – and most music for the aulos (double-reeded double flute), and kythera (lyre), can ‘be described in general terms as forms of imitation [mimesis] or representation’, and all use different combinations of rhythm, language and music ‘to represent men’s characters, and feelings, and actions’. But Aristotle’s mimesis does not signify the simple imitation of reality. As his definition builds through Poetics it implies the evocation of a deeper truth, one which strikes an affective chord in spectators, and recognises the ‘pleasure’ to be had in the ‘pity and fear’ roused by tragedy (1453b). This is not simply a moral lesson (1453a). Possibly the most important, but also the most neglected passage in Poetics is therefore that a poet should prefer ‘probable impossibilities’ to ‘improbable possibilities’ (1460a –1461b). In other words, the writer’s skill is to create a coherent world populated by psychologically convincing characters, no matter how strange or ‘unreal’ they may be. Across Europe, writers and composers were exploring ways in which emotional truth can be conveyed by non-semantic means, going far beyond the simple onomatopoeic tricks of ‘word painting’, robustly rejected by Vincenzo, and by Thomas Morley among others. Vincenzo was Zarlino’s pupil, but likewise rejected his conjecture that the medieval church modes were identical with ancient Greek modes. Instead he developed ideas about ancient Greek monody, a single voice with lute accompaniment, which would allow the development of stile rappresentativo, dramatic style or recitative. In such a style, the chosen shape of the written line, and the juxtaposition of sounds and harmonies are meaningful, even gestural. These written elements are designed to encourage further gestures in the performer’s phrasing, tonal and facial expression, and bodily movement. Gesture, now sometimes referred to as ‘embodied cognition’, is an essential aspect of human communication, and therefore of all

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kinds of dramatic writing and performance, although it has only recently been overtly explored in music theory.9 But the rediscovery and widespread printing and dissemination of works by writers like Cicero, Quintilian and Aphthonius in fact meant that rhetoric and its performative aspect, oratory, were part of every sixteenth-century schoolboy’s education. Boys would be expected to imbibe an intimate understanding of rhetorical style, as well as an ability to manipulate received stories, through the process of double translation from Latin (sometimes Greek) into the vernacular and then back again into as close an approximation of the original as possible. University students progressed to their degrees through public disputations, while the organised holiday recreation of many school and university students was to perform plays in both Latin and English. Indeed, play performance at the Tudor court until the 1580s was most frequently provided by the children of the Chapel Royal and St Paul’s choir schools. The ability to move an audience through speech is an essential skill for public life. Quintilian therefore devotes much of book 6 of his Institutio Oratoria to the effective use of emotion in public speaking and advocacy and, significantly, prefaces the book with a moving, personal account of his feelings of loss and grief at the successive deaths of his wife and two young sons. In a chapter indebted to Cicero and others, he explains that the skilled orator is able to turn the idle, ‘mental vice’ of ‘daydreaming’ into vivid description (enargeia), that presents the person or event that is his subject ‘before the eyes’ of his audience, claiming: ‘Emotions will ensue just as if we were present at the event itself.’ Like an actor (although ideally with more of a sense of decorum), the orator must also appear to feel the thing he is describing by imagining it vividly, or by finding similar feelings within himself: Let us not plead the case as though it were someone else’s, but take the pain of it on ourselves for the moment. We shall thus say what we would have said in similar circumstances of our own. I have frequently seen tragic and comic actors, having taken off their masks at the end of some emotional scene, leave the stage still in tears.10 The idea that the orator needs something of the actor’s skill in delivery is commonplace in treatises on rhetoric, but great oratory that moves the listener is that rare combination of: extensive knowledge of the subject; judicious choice of words; wit, sometimes even humour; and supreme physical control of gesture, look, and voice. On its own, language is worse at conveying information than we tend to assume: words have multiple meanings; listeners and readers misunderstand, or can be misled. Shakespeare knew this and exploited it: ‘A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit, how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward’ (Twelfth Night, III. 1. 11–13). As an actor he knew too that, without words, gestures are likewise open to interpretation; his late play The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610) is an extended exploration of the dramaturgical potential of variously combining and isolating words and movements.11 Rhetoric is customarily described in terms of elocutio, style of speaking (including tropes and figures), pronuntiatio, manner of delivery and dispositio. This last aspect is usually translated as ‘form’ and understood as the four or five expected parts of an argument, although that slides (perhaps too easily) into ‘genre’, which gives

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the impression of something fixed, given or normative. Disposition in the sense of ‘arrangement’, however, allows for a sense of different parts, consciously juxtaposed, whether in agreement or contrast, to achieve a specific effect. But while the contrast and variation of linked elements into patterns of sound, shape, colour and rhythm are clearly the building blocks of non-semantic art forms (paintings and instrumental music) and of song, they are neglected aspects of poetry, and even more of prose. We can be beguiled by the semantic meaning of words and fail to notice how those other elements (of pattern, structure, sound and delivery) are also being made to work on us. The least important part of rhetoric, elocutio (the use of tropes or figures), is unfortunately the very aspect which has come to stand in for the whole. Equally, we are only slowly rediscovering the influence of the art and theory of rhetoric on music composition. Literary scholars may indeed be entirely unaware that the principles of rhetoric were applied to music in this period, while musicologists have tended to downplay the fact, regarding it as simply a mode of thinking resulting from universal classical education.12

Musical Poetics: Finding the Subject Adding to Boethius’s concepts of musica speculativa (theory) and musica practica (performance), and the idea that music was a branch of mathematics, a succession of Northern European theorists, several of them church cantors and also school teachers, began to introduce the term musica poetica. The word ‘poetica’ derives from the Greek Ποιη (make or do), in this context signifying the work of the composer, just as in Elizabethan English ‘maker’ customarily signifies ‘poet’. Nicolaus Listenius (in Rudimenta Musicae (1533) and Musica (1537), both published in Wittemberg) seems to have been the first person to use the term, briefly connecting it to the use of ‘figures’ and the variation of a measure through prolation or proportion (figuralis, quae mensuram variat secondum signorum ac figurarum inaequalitatem, cum incremento et decremento prolationis, 1533, A4r). It was taken up by Heinrich Faber (c. 1548) and by Gallus Dressler, who in a famous series of lectures stated that setting the tone (i.e. note) of a piece was analogous to the opening (exordium) of a rhetorical argument: ‘so we in music, whose relationship with poetry is great, express the tone in the exordium itself’.13 Aristotle had stated that above all a drama must be coherent, with a beginning, middle and end, and so, therefore, should music.14 Similarly, in his settings of Petrarch’s sonnets, Netherlander Adrien Willaert (c. 1490–1562), Master of Music at St Mark’s Venice, takes a single idea from each poem (rather than painting individual words or phrases) in order to devise a musical soggetto (subject) that might convey the affective meaning he found in the poem as a whole, thus demonstrating that the successful musical setting of a poem is an act of literary criticism as well as of musical invention. In developing this soggetto, he anticipates, imitates, or proportionately alters it in each voice in turn, exploiting the accidentals and intervals of the modal system, thereby introducing intimations of tonality.15 Zarlino probably derived his own discussion of mathematical and proportionate soggetto from Willaert’s practice.16 But it was Joachim Burmeister (1564–1629), composer and church cantor, who taught Latin grammar in Rostock’s gymnasium, who gave the fullest theoretical description of the relevance of rhetoric for music. His three treatises, culminating in Musica Poetica (Rostock, 1606), adopt

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and adapt terms for numerous rhetorical figures in order to describe how a single musical idea can be developed.17

Repetition and Metaphor Burmeister is, significantly, selective in the rhetorical terms he borrows, with the majority relating to aspects of repetition: for example, pallilogia (saying again); or anaphora, which he uses to mean repetition of a pitch pattern in some but not all voices.18 In both music and literature, the judicious ‘disposition’ of repetition – whether a single sound, sequence of sounds, idea, phrase or subject – can tie the work together aesthetically, making different parts of it speak, as it were, in counterpoint. The new European musical forms of the sixteenth century (madrigal and dialogue songs and, in instrumental music, fantasias and fugues) all depend on the rhetoric of repetition. The repeated idea thus becomes the ‘subject’ or ‘topic’ of the piece, and its variation allows the development of extended musical or literary experience. Repetition also entrains the listener: one comes to expect the repetition; it seems part of a recognisable pattern conveying a sense of deliberation or design; and any variation may therefore appear significant. A repetition with difference creates two states of being, the same but different. This in turn is a definition of that often vividly pictorial rhetorical figure, metaphor.19 It opens up the possibility that there might be other things that are the same but different in the listener’s experience and memory, and these likewise become metaphors for the poem or music (and vice versa). The effect is to make listeners make comparison, both within and outside the work. Now there are numerous samenesses in play, similar but distinct, even strange or ‘impossible’, but nevertheless ‘probable’ (to take up Aristotle’s advice) because they have been linked. The listener will have gained the impression not only that there may be meaning to be had but also that she is taking part, or is invested, in the conversation. She is engaged in a creative and critical act. Meanings are set against each other, triangulated; they are set free, but not set loose, and a reader’s, listener’s, or spectator’s active attempts to make sense result in emotions being roused, partly because memories and intellects are actively engaged.

Poetry and Musical Proportion This attempt to make music and poetry make sense of each other was not a one-way street. In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), English poetic theorist George Puttenham, while also advocating fitting the style to the ‘subject’, devoted the entire second book to proportion (the essential component of all music theory since it governs both pitch and rhythm), stating: ‘the Philosopher gathers a triple proportion, to wit, the Arithmeticall, the Geometricall, and the Musical. And by one of these three is every other proportion guided’. He goes on: Poesie is a skill to speake and write harmonically: and verses or rime be a kind of Musicall utterance, by reason of a certain congruitie in sounds pleasing the eare, though not perchance so exquisitely as in the harmonicall concents of the artificial musicke [whether vocal or instrumental].20

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Paying attention to etymology, he explains that in supporting himself on his staff – the group of lines that make a ‘stanza’ (Italian, ‘resting place’) – a poet combines syllables into ‘feet’ that variously run, walk or march. But he is acutely aware that because of the preponderance of monosyllables in the English language, English poets, unlike their classical or Italian counterparts, face great difficulty in making lines ‘run’: ‘this rithmus of theirs, is not therfore our rime, but a certaine musicall numerositie in utterance’. Since rhyme and rhythm share the same Greek root, he presumes they must be performing similar functions and concludes that the rhyming that characterises English verse is the equivalent of metrical rhythm in classical languages: ‘For wanting the currantnesse [i.e. running quality] of the Greeke and Latine feete, instead thereof we make in th’ends of our verses a certaine tunable sound.’ Rhyme is ‘tunable’; a ‘proportion in concord’; a ‘symphonie’.21 Latin prosody depends on syllable length. A vowel is considered long if it occurs before two consonants (whether in the same word or consecutive words), and length can therefore be manipulated by changing the position of the word in the sentence. The much-reprinted Latin Grammar by humanist school teacher William Lily (c. 1468–c. 1523, father of the playwright John Lyly), contains a final section on prosody, which explores the multiple ways in which Latin syllables can be elided in order to fit a given metre.22 Readers of Latin poetry thus need to cope with two rhythms at once: the ordinary prose pronunciation of the words; and the often complex metrical pattern to which they have been fitted by the poet through both the elision and the artificial lengthening of syllables. In English, position (rather than case ending) governs meaning, and speakers reinforce that meaning through stress or accent. The same word in different contexts can therefore have subtly different lengths of vowel, since it is difficult to impose a stress without adding length. In ordinary spoken English, stress tends to occur at roughly regular intervals, with varying numbers of unstressed syllables in between. It is, as we might now say, ‘stress timed’. Unfortunately, Puttenham devoted much of his section on proportion to the making of poems in different geometric shapes, but the poet George Gascoigne, writing ten years earlier, seems to have intuited this rhythmic stress feature of the English language. He explains English prosody in terms of proportion familiar from music theory, whereby three beats may be played against two in the same measure:23 beyng redde by one that hath understanding, the longest verse and that which hath most syllables in it, will fall (to the eare) correspondent unto that whiche hath fewest syllables [. . .] and likewise, that which hath in it fewest syllables, shalbe founde yet to consist of woordes that have suche naturall sounde, as may seeme equall in length to a verse which hath many moe syllables of lighter accents. Richard Edwards (c. 1525–1566), poet, dramatist, actor, composer, teacher and Master of the Chapel Royal, had demonstrated exactly the same understanding in practice more than ten years before that. His one known surviving play, Damon and Pythias, consists of rhyming couplets in which individual lines, usually with four main stresses, may consist of as few as four or more than twenty syllables. This is not just accident or incompetence, but deliberate dramaturgy, as it simulates real speech. Occasionally characters split a couplet between them, refusing to rhyme with each

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other, signalling their disagreement; or they might adopt a regular stanzaic form as when one character evokes the Muses – who duly appear, singing! Conversely, Edwards’s occasional and lyrical verse, which appears to modern eyes (and ears) in print as relentlessly turgid strings of regular twelve- or fourteen-syllable lines, sometimes survive in musical settings (possibly by Edwards himself), which not only provide some delicious suspended harmonies, but reveal the verse as containing lively proportional rhythms.24 English metrical prosody likewise consists of two rhythms: the metre (most usually at this period the alternating short/long iambic) and the varied stress patterns generated by the rhetorical disposition of words and tropes. The schoolmaster Holofernes in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost knows this. He is not just a pedant, but an almost endearing old fusspot; we see him enraptured by the memory of a line from Mantuan, and singing a tune using solmisation ‘Ut, re sol, la, mi fa’ (IV. 2. 94–9). When his friend the priest ‘Sir’ Nathaniel starts reading the poem that is brought to them by the clown, he snatches it from him thinking to show him how it should be done, but soon realises with disdain that no amount of elision or ‘apostrophus’ will rescue it from its unrelieved iambics; it is merely ‘numbers ratified’, and lacks (caret) the hallmarks of real poetry: ‘You find not the apostrophus, and so miss the accent. Let me supervise the canzonet. Here are only numbers ratified, but for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy – caret’ (IV. 2. 120–3).25 Modern readings of Shakespeare would benefit from greater attention to Holofernes’s approach. A typical Shakespearean line commonly riffs on its underlying iambic pentameter measure, creating varied rhythms through: consecutive stresses; varying numbers of unstressed syllables; and caesuras or silences placed in metrically stressed positions.

Notated Silences Despite the fact that reticentia or aposiopesis, a pause in the midst of speech, is a recognised oratorical technique, silence as a rhythmic and affective property in poetry has received insufficient attention. Ellen T. Harris likewise claims that musicologists have wrongly believed that ‘the expressive potential of silence was only developed in the classical era’. She explores Handel’s frequent and dramatic use of notated silence, and traces its antecedents back through Corelli’s trio sonatas to a ‘strong tradition of word-painting silences’ in renaissance madrigals such as Carlo Gesualdo’s ‘Sospirava il mio cor’ (Third Book of Madrigals, 1595), where a short rest is repeatedly written between the first and second syllables of ‘sospirava’ in all parts, thus imitating the sigh which is the subject of the song.26 Notated silences in Shakespeare, however, continue to be obscured by editorial practices that attempt to regularise his verse according to metre. A notable example is when Virgilia comes with her mother-in-law and son to the Volscian camp where her husband Coriolanus is exiled to plead with him for clemency for Rome. Her startling observation that the family’s sorrow has changed their appearance, and that this has made him think that he is not looking at them in the same way, is a double expression of the effect of emotion on both body and mind which defies adequate exegesis. It certainly brings him up short, and he compares his inability to speak to the excruciating

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silence that occurs when an actor forgets his lines. Modern editions, however, preserve an eighteenth-century relineation and print it thus: CORIOLANUS These eyes are not the same I wore in Rome. VIRGILIA The sorrow that delivers us thus changed Makes you think so. CORIOLANUS Like a dull actor now, I have forgot my part, and I am out, Even to a full disgrace. Best of my flesh, Forgive my tyranny; but do not say For that ‘Forgive our Romans.’ O, a kiss Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge! (Coriolanus, V. 3. 38–45) In this emendation, Coriolanus immediately fills up his wife’s half line, and continues seamlessly and syllabically, although not rhythmically, and with no room for the painful silence implied by his metaphor of himself as a ‘dull actor’. The 1623 Folio, however, the only evidence we have for the text of the play, prints lines 39–42 as follows: VIRGILIA The sorrow that delivers us thus changed Makes you think so. CORIOLANUS Like a dull actor now, I have forgot my part, And I am out, even to a full disgrace. Best of my flesh, Here Virgilia’s half line is left hanging, providing metrical space for a pause before he speaks, and thus embodying his description of the actor’s ‘dry’. It also prints an unusually large gap after ‘disgrace’, indicating that this over-long, fifteen-syllable line in fact appeared in the manuscript as an eleven-syllable line followed by a standalone separate half-line. The result is also wonderfully rhythmic: five main stresses in each complete line, but probably with two sets of consecutive stresses (on ‘dull act-’, and ‘out, ev-’) and irregular numbers of unstressed syllables between the other stressed syllables. His own half line can now be heard as space for more silence, followed by an entirely metrical answer to hers as he recovers his equanimity. In this interpretation of the evidence, words, sounds, ‘notated’ silences and the gestures they would encourage in the actor, all painfully reinforce each other.

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: A Case Study in Musical Poetic Structure At the start of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Orsino is listening to music. Something in the shape of the line, its pace and direction of successive intervals and harmonies, speaks to his feeling of being in love. He calls for a particular phrase to be repeated:

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‘That strain again’. His words are a metaphor: they pun on strain (strand or line), and a straining in the shape of that line and its underlying harmonies – or perhaps in this case, its gorgeous straining dissonances. Then, in another metaphor, he seeks to explain why the strain strains: ‘it had a dying fall’. Perhaps the line ascends or strains upwards before falling. But when the musicians play again, he stops them, disgusted that it has ceased to have its effect on him. He proceeds to explain to himself in a series of metaphors that link sound to smell – sense impressions both conveyed by movements of the air although (as we now know) they are constructed and interpreted in the brain: O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour. (I. 1. 5–7) Here, a series of long vowel sounds, occasionally stressed consecutively, with concomitant strings of two or three unstressed syllables, ‘strain’ proportionately over the underlying metre. A metaphor of sound as both ‘sweet’ and which ‘breathes’ piles on one derived from observation of the natural world (since the scent of sweet violets does indeed seem to come and go). This combines with imagination of the anthropomorphised action of the breath of wind/sound that first captures and then releases the scent. His words become a sonic metaphor for the music they describe. This in turn sets up a string of further metaphors: the ebb and flow of ‘stealing and giving’ prefigures the action and sound of waves on a beach. The sea here, and commonly in renaissance iconography, was thought of as containing counterparts for everything on land; in its rage it steals from the land, and later throws up its booty. Orsino thinks it mirrors the depths of his love, ‘hungry as the seas’ as he later says (II. 4. 99); but in the next scene, disgorged from the sea after shipwreck, enters the woman who will, in the end, become his beloved, but who will spend the rest of the play in various counterparts to herself: a ‘eunuch’ who plans to sing to Orsino in many types of music (I. 2. 52–4); a boy he can advise on taking a wife, but whose ‘rubious’ lip and ‘pipe’ or speech organ he finds ‘semblative a woman’s part’ in its sensuality (I. 4. 31–4); a servant he employs as his go-between in his suite to Olivia; and an image of her own brother. These extended variations on a theme are introduced, as the first tiny word in the play, by the massively conditional ‘If’ – ‘If music be the food of love’. This is no theoretical explanation of the power of music to effect emotional changes, but a tour de force demonstration in words that it does so. Taken out of context, that first line has acquired a life of its own as a trope in language; while the speech as a whole has been dismissed as Orsino in love with love. But the body of the speech, which requires extensive footnotes to explain its classical and other references, is an essential part of the play’s soundscape. Its lush richness has an aural effect on listeners, in addition to any actual music being played, and ideally will be enhanced by the actor’s tone of voice and gesture. Non-semantic rhythm and sound contribute to the semantic meaning of the passage. It draws on listeners’ memories: shared experiences of waves; of violets; of being in love. In its language (and images of stealing and feigning), its gesture and structure (those three parts of rhetoric), it creates a sense of boundaries illicitly and dangerously crossed. Like a piece of music, it is best understood, and felt, in performance.

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Chapters in the Part All the chapters in this part of the volume are in their different ways exploring the affective power of music and literature, whether separately or together. Themes running throughout include: aural aspects of poetry; the grammar of intervals and rhythmic progressions in music; practitioners’ cognisance of the ‘sister’ art form; the extent to which theory and practice crossed social and national boundaries; and the affective power of performance. Several contributors (Wilcox, Gouk, Fuller and Stagg) suggest that the conventionally celebrated relationship between music and poetry was an allegorical trope, often acknowledged as problematic in practice. Penelope Gouk points out that Boethius was still a statutary text at Oxford and Cambridge, although it is doubtful whether many undergraduates were still reading him, and that Francis Bacon regarded music theory as being more about ‘Mystical Subtilties’ than truth. She nevertheless demonstrates that the search for a mathematically more satisfactory method of dividing the musical scale led Newton to apply principles of harmony and ratio to his work on light and colour, resulting in the numerically harmonious and symbolic, albeit erroneous, idea that the rainbow consists of just seven colours. Helen Wilcox demonstrates that Milton’s ‘At a Solemn Music’ creates an idea of harmonious proportion by linking the words: ‘concent’; concert; consort. Sin, however, is ‘disproportioned’, manifested as (and aurally punning on) cacophonous ‘din’. She compares this with Marvell’s idea that creation in the form of the word of God tuned the previously homogeneous, single or ‘solitary’ sound of chaos – the ‘jarring winds’ and ‘murmuring fountains’ amorphously mixed together. David Fuller takes inspiration from the critical writing of more modern poets to explore the ways in which poetry of this period, like music, uses sound for emotional affect. But every proposed step forward is fraught. Poetry cannot rely on simple sounds, particularly vowel sounds, for its meaning; poetry from the past would be incomprehensible since pronunciation has changed. And yet while poetry depends on the ‘physicality of language’, ‘Assent to the idea that in poetry sound is sense is often more notional than real’. He demonstrates that the evocation of apposite rhythm is more than mere word painting. The great poets of the period – Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton – use the rhetorical skills they first learned at school to create the patterned sounds, and telling, impassioned, structural complexities of their poetry. As he points out, ‘[T]here is never a single right scansion of Milton’s regulated freedoms. Competent readers may well see different possibilities, and read lines differently, with different expressive effect.’ Robert Stagg takes up this theme, adding rhyme to rhythm. Homophony makes meaningful connection between semantically dissimilar words. It punctuates and points up thought. Just as music can remind listeners of other previously associated words even in their absence so, as he shows in Shakespeare’s reuse of a song by Richard Edwards in Romeo and Juliet, verbal homophones can be used to create a soundscape which contributes to the emotional tenor of a scene before its significance can be cognitively understood. Erin Minear observes that in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline spoken verse is ‘haunted’ by a memory of music; the dirge, spoken rather than sung at Imogen’s supposed funeral by her lost and unrecognised brothers, Arviragus and Guiderius, is heralded by a strange and amorphous sound. Minear observes that music ‘does not signify in any clear way; it lends itself to frivolous abuse; and it can arouse unpredictable

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affective responses in its listeners’. Guiderius is very wary of ambiguity, but it is Shakespeare’s stock in trade. B. J. Sokol is also concerned with the ambiguity of music and music making in connection with the many professional and amateur musicians of all ranks who populate Shakespeare’s plays. He sets these characters against both historical and cultural records, likewise charting hierarchies between different types of music and of musical instrument, concluding that Shakespeare ‘subverted received ideas’. Christopher Marsh outlines his major project on the top hundred ballads in circulation during the period, pointing out that ballads were both literature and music, and migrated across social class.27 They were intended to be disposable – printed on flimsy paper and sold cheaply in market places – but penetrated homes across the social spectrum; most only survive because they were collected by wealthier men like Samuel Pepys. Renowned lutenist and theorbo player Elizabeth Kenny explores the neglected contribution that performers made to the nature of the music that audiences actually heard. In order to attract the widest book-buying amateur musicians, composers would publish only the bare outlines of their song settings, expecting that more accomplished or professional performers would increase emotional intensity by adding their own ornamentation. The Hilton manuscript in the British Library shows how this could be done. It was probably used for teaching, and preserves extensive notated ornamentation descriptive of emotional states, but on neutral syllables so as to allow significant words to be heard clearly. The method is similar to that set out in Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (Florence, 1602), and in his opera Euridice (1602). But it seems that practising English musicians had translated his precepts according to the different demands of the English language long before the theory itself was translated in the 1664 edition of Playford’s A Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick. Indeed, the boy choristers of St Paul’s are recorded as singing remarkably well in the ornamented Italian style by a group of foreign tourists as early as 1602. My chapter on John Marston’s tragicomedy Antonio and Mellida (c. 1600), which was written for them, analyses the extensive musical demands of that play, including: flourishes and sennets; dances; dumbshows; set-piece songs; and snatched sung quotations from two ballads. It newly identifies songs published in 1600 and 1601 by the composer Robert Jones, the lyrics of which not only fit the dialogue of the play, but contribute to our understanding of the affective motivation of the characters, and also supply clues, even instructions, as to staging. Tragicomedy has a long history in English drama. The first designated example, Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pythias (1564), a vehicle for satire against tyranny as well as experimental prosody (see above), also includes the first example in England of a sung lament, the arresting ‘Awake, ye Woeful Wights’. Wendy Heller’s chapter ‘Learning to Lament’ explores the lament in early Italian opera as intended to ‘inspire in their listeners the same emotional responses that had so moved Greek audiences in ancient times’ but which also provided ‘characters with the opportunity to transgress traditional codes of behaviour’. She argues that ‘Without the lament – the passionate outpourings from the solo singer – opera, as we know it, might not exist.’ She explores the development of different forms of lament – from lyrical song to recitative, to recitative plus aria, to aria alone – the differences in theatrical time that these changes bring

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and the differences in theatrical effect achieved by lamenting characters of different gender; and by male characters sung by different voices, tenor or castrato. Andrew Pinnock explores the early development of all-sung opera in pre-Restoration England. He considers Cowley’s experiments in finding an English counterpart to the sound of classical metre, and argues that ‘it was the absence of royal patronage, and dearth of opportunity for elite musicians during the interregnum’ that made experiments in all-sung opera possible. He then turns his attention to the four works staged later in the reign of Charles II, which bear striking resemblance to the iconography of paintings commissioned for his court palaces. The essays in this part of the volume also demonstrate that the music and poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were permeable to different ideas about class, gender and nationality.28 Plays, narratives and operas are mostly set in any time or place other than the time and place of their production. But while the prescripts of artistic construction were indebted to classical theorists, the practical considerations and experiences of writers and composers pushed the boundaries. Even in cases where the resulting art is a thinly disguised reference to the ruler, the fact of mythological setting or classical precedent insists that there is ‘a world elsewhere’ (Coriolanus, III. 3. 135).

Notes 1. See Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory; Research; Applications, ed. Patrick N. Juslin and John Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Tom Cochrane, Bernardino Fantini and Klaus R. Scherer, The Emotional Power of Music; Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Musical Arousal, Expression and Social Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. Gioseffo Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche (Venice, 1558), p. 4. 3. Walter E. Buszin, ‘Luther on Music’, Musical Quarterly, 32 (1) (1946), 80–97. 4. Thomas Mace, Musick’s Monument (London, 1576), p. 3. 5. ‘Libro d’intavolatura di liuto’ (1584), Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, Ms. Fondo Anteriori di Galileo 6. 6. Charles Butler, The Principles of Musik (London, 1636). 7. Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s ‘Voyage to Newfoundland’, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (London, 1600), III, p. 148. 8. Ibid., p. 94. 9. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King, Music and Gesture (London: Routledge, 2006). 10. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, The Orator’s Education, Books 6–8, ed. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6.2.26–35. Compare Cicero, De Oratore, 1.16–19. As Quintilian also demonstrates, vivid description (enargeia) is best achieved by the use not of adjectives but of verbs, since these imply movement and encourage gesture in the speaker. 11. See Ros King, The Winter’s Tale (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 12. Claude V. Palisca, Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 51. Compare Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 156–93; Jonathan Gibson, ‘“A Kind of Eloquence Even in Music”: Embracing Different Rhetorics in Late Seventeenth-Century France’, The Journal of Musicology, 25 (4) (Fall, 2008), 394–433.

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13. Sion M. Honea, ‘Nicolaus Listenius’s Musica (1537) and the Development of Music Pedagogy’, Journal of Historical Research in Music Education, 40 (1) (2018), 10–33; Nicolaus Listenius, Musica, trans. Albert Seay (Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music Press, 1975); Gallus Dressler, Praecepta musicae poëticae, trans. Robert Forgács (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007) pp. 173–4. 14. Aristotle, Poetics, 1450b. 15. Timothy McKinney, Adrian Willaert and the Theory of Interval Affect: The Musica Nova Madrigals and the Novel Theories of Zarlino and Vicentino (Farnham: Routledge, 2010). 16. Zarlino, pp. 28–9. 17. Joachim Burmeister, Musical Poetics, trans. Benito V. Riviera (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 18. Ibid., pp. 162–84. 19. See also http://wyntonmarsalis.org/videos/view/harvard-lecture-1-music-as-metaphor; Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (Farnham: Routledge, 2003; first French edition 1975; trans. Robert Czerny, 1977); Douglas Berggren, ‘The Use and Abuse of Metaphor I’, The Review of Metaphysics, 16 (2) (December 1962), 237–58. 20. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), pp. 18–19, 33, 35, 50, 53. 21. Ibid., pp. 55, 57, 63. 22. Lily’s Grammar was published before 1513. Only later editions contain the final section on prosody and the subsection on quantity; see Institutio compendiaria totius grammaticae (London: Berthelet 1542), T4 r–v. 23. George Gascoigne, Poesies (London: Richard Smith, 1575), T3v. See also Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London: Peter Short, 1597), p. 54. 24. Ros King, The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in SixteenthCentury England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Other contemporary settings of syllabic verse from The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576) can be found in Consort Songs, Musica Britannica, 22, ed. Philip Brett (London: Stainer and Bell, 1967, rev. 1974). 25. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 26. Ellen T. Harris, ‘Silence as Sound: Handel’s Sublime Pauses’, The Journal of Musicology, 22 (4) (2005), 521–58 (p. 522). 27. See also Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 28. Cf. Gender and Song in Early Modern England, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014).

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11 Music and the Literature of Science in Seventeenth-Century England Penelope Gouk

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usic, or more specifically harmonics, had been classified as a mathematical science since antiquity because it had been established, reputedly by Pythagoras, that the basic consonances of music (unison, octave, fifth and fourth) can be characterised by simple numerical ratios (1:1, 2:1, 2:3 and 3:4) – demonstrable by dividing a string according to these proportions. The critical thing about this discovery, which was one of the first natural laws ever established, is that Pythagoras and his followers concluded that the universe was made up of numbers, and was inherently musical. Indeed, Plato argued that both the universe and the soul of man are constructed according to the harmonic proportions that constitute the musical scale. One influential source of this speculative tradition is Boethius’s De musica, a sixthcentury work which was the university set text for music in the Middle Ages. It was also thanks to Boethius that arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, together with music, were identified as the mathematical sciences of the quadrivium that were to be studied as propaedeutic to philosophy. Although by the sixteenth century most European universities had dropped the De musica from the arts course (and in fact had also dropped music altogether from the curriculum), it is striking to note that Boethius was still a statutory text at both Oxford and Cambridge in the seventeenth century. It is not clear whether undergraduate students ever read this work, but a few scholars such as Newton who went on to study mathematics, mechanics and natural philosophy in more depth were well aware of the relevance of music to their broader scientific and philosophical concerns, as we shall see. In 1626, Francis Bacon asserted in his highly influential Sylva Sylvarum that the theory of music was in bad shape, having little to say about the nature and causes of musical sound and being reduced to ‘certaine Mystical Subtilties, of no use, and not much truth’.1 This may have been a snide reference to the English physician and Rosicrucian Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi [. . .] historia (1617–19), or history of the macrocosm and microcosm, a voluminous work that took as its starting-point the Pythagorean-Platonic conception of universal harmony and asserted that the arithmetical proportions of the Pythagorean musical scale were found in man and throughout nature, as well as determining the tuning of instruments. Critics of Fludd argued that not all instruments were tuned to Pythagorean proportions, and Bacon was among those who believed that universalist models that worked from the top down were too simple and did nothing to advance knowledge about the complexities of musical sound.

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In the Sylva, Bacon outlined a series of acoustical experiments that were intended to discover the causes of harmony and the properties of various musical instruments, as well as to address the nature of sound more generally. He gave an idea of how these activities might be developed in practical ways in the last section of his unfinished New Atlantis (1626), a ‘science fiction’ story in which the narrator is shipwrecked and washed up on the remote island of Bensalem, where he is introduced to its manners and customs as well as to its scientific and technological achievements. The governor of Bensalem describes to the narrator various parts of the research institute known as Solomon’s House, including those dedicated to the sense of hearing: We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds.[2] Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.3 Bacon’s call to ‘joyne the contemplative and active part’ of music together was soon taken up by the French philosopher and priest Marin Mersenne, who devoted years to the study of musical phenomena and published several treatises on harmonics along with related works on mechanics and optics. His Harmonie Universelle; contenant la théorie et la pratique de la musique (1636), which addressed the mathematical and physical foundations of music in great detail, was bought by Robert Hooke in 1675 and seems to have made a positive impression on him. Like Bacon, Mersenne believed that Fludd’s cosmic model was flawed, but unlike Bacon he nevertheless defended the view that the universe is harmonically constructed, and that the sounds of music are physically grounded in the same harmonic proportions. One of his most important conclusions was that musical sounds are explicable in terms of the mechanical vibrations of the air that strike the ear when a sounding body is put into motion. Mersenne was able to demonstrate that the pitch of a musical string is determined by the frequency of its vibrations, which in turn depends on its length, tension and thickness or cross-sectional area. In other words, pitch can be precisely quantified, not simply in terms of string length ratios as discovered by Pythagoras, but in terms of several other variables. Furthermore, Mersenne suggested that the phenomenon of consonance is the result of the frequency with which the vibrations from two sound sources coincide with each other – the more frequently they coincide, the more consonant the interval perceived (e.g. in the octave with a frequency ratio of 2:1 there is a coincidence every second pulse). This coincidence theory was taken up by theorists throughout the seventeenth century because it provided a demonstrable link between the external realm of physics

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and the inner realm of sense perception, a link that might be applied to senses other than the ear, especially that of sight. Furthermore, in a way analogous to modern string theory, Hooke argued that all bodies contain particles that vibrate like musical strings, according to their size, and that all sensations, not just those of musical sound, are caused by vibrations striking the senses more or less regularly. The foundation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in 1662 institutionalised Francis Bacon’s method of practising science. This new science relied on collaboration and the exchange of information, and understood that reliable knowledge about the world – i.e. natural philosophy – could be acquired through observation, experiment and the application of mathematics. One of the society’s most enduring achievements was the establishment of the first scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions, a literary publication, which from its earliest years contained occasional articles and reviews concerned with music. These included three contributions in 1698 by the clergyman, cryptographer and Oxford mathematician John Wallis, mostly on the proportions of the musical scale and the differences between ancient and modern music. Thanks to the records that were kept by the society’s Secretary, Henry Oldenburg, we also know that there were a number of Royal Society meetings where musical experiments were performed and discussed as part of their proceedings, the majority of these taking place in the 1660s and 1670s under the guidance of the society’s Curator of Experiments, Robert Hooke. We also have some manuscripts of Hooke and Isaac Newton from this period that reveal the significance of music to their scientific work, particularly in relation to optics and mechanics. Music was thus integral to the new, experimental, philosophy as it developed in Restoration England and not just to the newly emerging science of acoustics that Francis Bacon had anticipated in the Sylva Sylvarum (1626). The fresh approach to science did not affect the way that the word ‘science’ itself was customarily used to denote a body of learning, usually in the form of texts, devoted to a particular art or practice. This arts–science division did not correspond to modern classifications of knowledge. We can see this in the case of music, which in the seventeenth century was still classified as a mathematical discipline: an art complemented by a body of theoretical texts that constituted its science. These included introductory manuals by professional musicians (such as Samuel Pepys’s music teacher, John Birchensha) who were trying to introduce their pupils to the basic principles of singing, playing and composing music. However, the science of music was not only concerned with practical considerations, but still dealt with what the composer Thomas Morley in his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) called speculative music, which ‘by Mathematical helps, seeketh out the causes, properties, and natures of soundes by themselves, and compared with others proceeding no further, but content with the onlie contemplation of the Art’.4 The problem with the mathematical division of the scale, however, is that the proportions between tones and semitones vary according to the scale in question. Earliest discussion of this issue is attributed to the third century bc Greek mathematician Euclid;5 a more recent model was Descartes’s Compendium musicae. Written in 1618, and soon circulating in manuscript, it was not published until after his death in 1650. An English translation soon appeared, accompanied by a series of detailed ‘animadversions’ by ‘a person of honour’, now known to be Viscount William Brouncker, who later went on to be a president of the Royal Society.6

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Brouncker disagreed with Descartes’s claim that the consonances have their basis in arithmetic, and instead argued that it is the geometrical relationship between musical pitches which gives rise to the perception of consonances. Brouncker was also the first English mathematician to apply logarithms (invented c. 1614) to the division of the musical scale. Newton had obviously read this book while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge (c. 1664–6), and it prompted him to explore several different ways of dividing the scale, including the use of a logarithmic ‘common measure’ of an equal half-note against which all other intervals could be judged.7 Although these early musical calculations remained tucked away in his student notebooks, they were later to provide him with a basis for establishing the division of the spectrum into discrete colours, and even into his work on planetary motion. Newton in fact sought to connect the harmonic principles governing the production and perception of musical sound to those of light and to the structure and movement of the heavens – thus demonstrating that despite Bacon’s distaste for it, the Pythagorean-Platonic conception of universal harmony continued to flourish in the seventeenth century. Although Newton is not now remembered for his musical speculations (and he certainly was no music lover), it is clear that he was regarded as an authority on music in his own times; the Reverend Thomas Salmon proudly proclaimed in A Proposal to Perform Musick, in Perfect and Mathematical Proportions of 1688, that he had Newton’s backing as well as Wallis’s for his attempts to enable musicians to play according to the proportions of the ideal musical scale. Wallis was no musician either, but in 1682 published a Latin translation and edition of the Harmonics by the second-century Greco-Roman philosopher Ptolemy, to which he added an appendix that compared ancient harmonics with modern harmonics, and cited a number of relevant modern authors including Descartes and Mersenne. This appendix was the basis for the three articles on music that he published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1698. Newton also came back to thinking about musical phenomena a decade after his earliest notes on musical division. This was in the context of the prism experiments he made between the late 1660s and 1675, which showed that white light was made up of a spectrum of colours. His central goal was to find mathematical laws which would accurately describe the physical motion of light and the nature of colours, in the same way that the laws governing musical pitch had already been established (by Mersenne). This theoretical aim proved elusive, and hence delayed publication of his findings, but Newton’s description of the correspondence he had found between the colour spectrum and the musical scale eventually found expression in his Opticks (1704), a work that was to be very popular in the Enlightenment. However, it was in a paper sent to the Royal Society in December 1675 that Newton first suggested that the sensations of different colours are produced in a similar way to sensations of particular tones, and that the length of the spectrum can be divided up into ratios corresponding to the notes of a musical scale. Thus, while soundwaves emitted from sounding bodies are transmitted through the air and strike the ear with different frequencies according to their size (wavelength), Newton argued that light is propagated through an ethereal medium, which having been put into wave-like motion eventually strikes the optic nerves and sets up corresponding vibrations in the nerves that transmit them to the sensorium or common sense where they are perceived as different colours. These observations remained

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purely conjectural, however; and in the end Newton confined his analogies between colour ‘harmonies’ and musical sound to the speculative section of the Opticks. As he wrote in Query 14: May not the harmony and discord of Colours arise from the proportions of the vibrations propagated through the fibres of the optick Nerves into the Brain, as the harmony and discord of sounds arises from the proportions of the vibrations of the Air? For some Colours are agreeable, as those of Gold and Indigo, and others disagree. Despite the lack of experimental evidence for it, the fact that we now assume that the rainbow is divided into seven colours is a direct legacy of Newton’s determination to find out harmonic laws underpinning the movement of light based on the principle of the laws already discovered for musical sound. Indeed, it was Newton who first offered a coherent mathematical explanation of the transmission of sound through air. This was in the most important scientific work of his age, the Principia mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, first published in 1687 but going through several editions thereafter. Newton was the first philosopher to demonstrate that all bodies from planets to apples are subject to the same universal laws, and to suggest that the same mathematical laws apply to invisible media such as air and ether. To underpin his calculations for sound, he visualised air as an elastic medium through which forces including sound could be transmitted dynamically in all directions. (He also tentatively suggested that light and maybe even gravity were propagated through a much finer medium or ether that was diffused throughout the cosmos.) Although Newton did not say so explicitly, he made an analogy between particles of air and tiny pendulums that oscillate backwards and forwards with each one obeying the mathematical laws of simple harmonic motion, laws which had already been established through Mersenne’s experiments and which were later taken up by Hooke in his cosmological speculations. In this brief survey I have explained why music occupied a distinct niche in seventeenth-century English scientific literature from Bacon to Newton. In the first place it constituted a field of philosophical investigation in its own right, being treated by individuals such as Wallis, North and Salmon as a branch of the mathematical and physical sciences. Secondly, the laws of musical vibration, discovered by Mersenne, also proved to be an inspirational source of scientific models for English natural philosophers such as Hooke and Newton. Both these individuals conjectured that the transmission and reception of (musical) sound took place through the vibration of sounding bodies putting air or some other elastic medium into harmonic motion, which in turn regularly struck the organ of hearing, giving rise to the sensation of consonance. At the same time they argued that a similar mechanism underpinned the transmission of light and the perception of colours, although whether light travelled through a vibrating medium or struck the eye directly was an ongoing source of controversy. Hooke’s speculations were never properly published (he was always too busy thinking up new experiments to perform for the Royal Society), and so it was chiefly through Newton’s Opticks and the second edition of the Principia that music’s place in the new experimental philosophy became established for the eighteenth century.

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Notes 1. Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum: Or a Natural History, in Ten Centuries (1626), Century 2, § 101. 2. It is not known exactly where Bacon gained his knowledge of quarter-tones and smaller intervals, but at court or on his travels he may well have come across an example of Nicola Vincentino’s ‘archicembalo’ with thirty-six keys to the octave that was designed to play contemporary enharmonic music based on ancient Greek practice. 3. Francis Bacon, ‘New Atlantis: A Worke Unfinished (1626)’, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath, 14 vols (London, 1857–74), III, pp. 125–68 (pp. 162–3). 4. Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, Set Downe in Forme of a Dialogue (London: Peger Short, 1597), ff. J–Jv. 5. The Division of the Canon, a Pythagorean text attributed to Euclid; Euclid discusses mathematical proportion in Elements, book 5. 6. Renatus Des-Cartes Excellent Compendium of Musick (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1653). 7. Cambridge University Library Add MS 3958(B), f.31r, CU Add MS 4000, ff. 105v–106.

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12 The ‘Sister’ Arts of Music and Poetry in Early Modern England Helen Wilcox

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n the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England, poets recognised a close correlation between music and literature but disagreed as to how it worked in practice. The poet Richard Barnfield, for example, wittily likened it to a partnership of mutual love between siblings, punning on the musical ‘agreement’ of concordant harmonics or tuned strings: If Musicke and sweet Poetrie agree, As they must needs (the Sister and the brother) Then must the love be great twixt thee and me, Because thou lov’st the one, and I the other.1

Barnfield shamelessly uses the metaphor to advance the speaker’s relationship with the addressee; as sister (or brother) arts, music and poetry must work closely together, and in a reference to Apollo, whose lyre symbolises both lyric verse and its harmonious accompaniment, he affirms ‘One God is God of both’. Barnfield’s younger contemporary, John Donne, was not so sure about this apparently cosy relationship between the two arts. In his poem ‘The Triple Foole’, the poet complains that his carefully constructed verse has been ruined by ‘Some man’, a musician who ‘doth Set and sing my paine’, and whose only apparent interest is to show off his own ‘art and voice’.2 The poet-composer Thomas Campion, by contrast, perhaps because he was more often in control of the musical setting of his verse, represented the partnership between the text and its musical expression with the utmost optimism – indeed, in celebratory and profoundly sensual terms. He suggested that words and music are not siblings, as in Barnfield’s poem, nor enemies, as in Donne’s, but metaphorical lovers. In Campion’s vision, it is the role of the composer of airs to ‘couple [the] Words and Notes lovingly together’.3 There is no mistaking the eroticism of the vocabulary in this particularly clear statement of shared purpose. The cause of this assumed intimacy between ‘Words and Notes’ – whether their partnership was welcomed or resented – is not difficult to discover. In the early modern period it was widely accepted that poetry was in itself musical, sharing and mirroring music’s origins, structures and effects. ‘Poetry is in truth a kind of music,’ wrote Dudley North in 1610, and George Herbert referred to his own lyrical verses as ‘My musick’, and his art in writing them as ‘singing’.4 The basis for these comments, and many others like them in the period, was not only the parallel melodic, rhythmic and

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harmonious skills displayed in both art forms, but a basic shared ideal: proportion, the early modern principle of aesthetic perfection. Sir Philip Sidney defended poetry as a form of ‘words set in delightful proportion’, while Thomas Robinson defined music in 1603 as ‘a perfect harmony whose divinity is seen in the perfectness of his proportions’.5 Harmonious and delightful ‘proportion’ is here interpreted as a sign of ‘divinity’, indicating that all these definitions are based upon a spiritual reading of the world: the created beauty and expressive power of both music and poetry are Godgiven. As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in 1642, ‘there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion’, and even when this proportion is experienced through the human senses, it is none other than ‘that Harmony, which intellectually sounds in the eares of God’.6 It is not surprising, then, that the creation itself was also repeatedly referred to as musical in essence. The source of this idea is biblical: in the Book of Job, the metaphor used for the joyous creation of the world is that ‘the morning stars sang together’.7 Thomas Browne, among many others, reflected this idea when he asserted that the music of the endlessly-circling heavens, ‘the musick of the spheares’, does not give any actual ‘sound to the eare’, yet strikes ‘a note most full of harmony’.8 Philip Sidney too described verse simply as ‘the planet-like music of Poetry’, while the conventional praise for a seventeenth-century air was that it matched that ineffable harmony of the heavens.9 If music and poetry were divine, what was their relation to the fallen world in which they found themselves and to which they inevitably gave expression? Thomas Browne, for one, seemed to have no problem with earthiness in music, acknowledging that ‘even that vulgar and Taverne Musicke’ could lead him into a ‘deepe fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer’.10 Browne suggests, in Platonic tradition, that it is possible to hear notes of the divine within these art forms, however distant that sound may be and however much the original perfection has been spoiled by intervening vulgarity. Even the earth-bound Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest (III. 2. 139) could hear and relish the ‘Sounds, and sweet airs’ of the island. But were the harmonies of music and verse imperfect echoes of a perfection lost in the fall, or were they an antidote to the sad effects of that fallen world? Was the idealised relationship of words and music the promise of a partnership to be restored? Did their interaction mirror the prelapsarian love of Adam and Eve, or the fatal sibling rivalry of Cain and Abel? Some answers to these questions may be revealed by a reading of two of the most famous mid seventeenth-century English poems on the subject of music, divinity, perfection and fallenness: John Milton’s ‘At a Solemn Music’ (dating from around 1633 and published in 1645); and Andrew Marvell’s ‘Music’s Empire’ (published in 1681 but probably written between 1650 and 1652). The title of Milton’s poem suggests that it was inspired by music heard at a divine service or ‘solemnity’, possibly choral evensong in a college chapel or a church. The opening lines are an expression of praise for the apparently divine (and memorably alliterative) partnership of the singing ‘Voice’ and the poetic ‘Verse’: Blest pair of sirens, pledges of heaven’s joy, Sphere-borne harmonious sisters, Voice, and Verse, Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ

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Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce, And to our high-raised phantasy present, That undisturbed song of pure concent [. . .]11 Milton begins by honouring the perfection of the relationship between voice and verse, and it is striking that he calls upon both the positive sibling metaphor for this partnership (favoured by Barnfield) and the imagery of marriage or conjugal love (preferred by Campion). According to Milton, music and poetry are ‘harmonious sisters’ in their nature, and they are urged metaphorically to ‘Wed [their] divine sounds’ (emphasis added). His ‘sphere-borne’ sirens are not the purveyors of tempting songs portrayed in the Odyssey, but the Platonic ‘celestial sirens’ depicted in his Arcades, probably written in the same year as ‘At a Solemn Music’.12 The sirens of Arcades ‘sit upon the nine enfolded spheres’ and sing in the hope that their music will keep ‘the low world’ in harmony with ‘the heavenly tune’.13 The blest sirens in ‘At a Solemn Music’ are thus a means of linking heaven and earth; they are ‘pledges’ or assurances of the heavenly joy to come, and together, like Orpheus, they can bring ‘dead things’ alive by the power of their music. Theirs is an ‘undisturbed song of pure concent’ sung before the throne of God, and the ambiguities behind and within the word ‘concent’ sum up the all-encompassing effect of their song. In Milton’s 1645 Poems, this word is printed as ‘content’14 – the utmost happiness of heaven – but the manuscript reading is ‘concent’, implying the agreement of hearts and minds, words and notes, at the heart of the sirens’ song. Hidden within ‘concent’ is a pun on ‘concert’, the harmonious working together of sounds. This leads in turn to the word ‘consort’, a noun meaning either a marriage partner, or an ensemble of similar-sounding musical instruments, yet also containing within it a verb, the action of combining sounds or people in harmony. The whole array of positive implications for the relationship of words and music is condensed into this word. As we might perhaps expect from Milton, the poem quickly moves from a celebration of music-making in heaven – complete with ‘uplifted angel trumpets’, ‘immortal harps’ and choirs singing ‘hymns devout’ – to a lament for the loss of these paradisal sounds on earth: That we on earth with undiscording voice May rightly answer that melodious noise; As once we did, till disproportioned sin Jarred against nature’s chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair music that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed In perfect diapason [. . .] (ll. 17–22) The idea of the melancholic ‘jarring’ sounds of human weakness and sorrow may well be a recollection of John Dowland’s searingly discordant setting of the phrase ‘jarring sounds’ in his song ‘In Darkness Let me Dwell’.15 The contrast here is likewise painful for Milton: the fall of Adam and Eve put everything out of joint, including music itself, whose aesthetic principle of proportion is undone by the entry of ‘disproportioned’ sin into the world (l. 19, emphasis added). The whole creation – nature, human and other creatures, and the ‘motion’ of the heavenly spheres – had been a ‘fair music’ in

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complete concord (‘diapason’) until the discordant sounds of human sinfulness ‘Jarred against nature’s chime’ leading to a world in which ‘sin’ can only rhyme with ‘din’. As Milton’s poem ends, it is clear that there might be a possibility of restoring perfect harmony, but only in the future: O may we soon again renew that song, And keep in tune with heaven, till God ere long To his celestial consort us unite, To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light. (ll. 25–8) These closing lines imply that the best to be hoped for on earth is to ‘keep in tune with heaven’, though inevitably at a distance; only after death will it be possible to ‘unite’ once again with the already existing ‘celestial consort’. In an evocative recollection of the earlier wordplay on ‘concent/concert/consort’ (l. 6), Milton’s final prayer is that we may be able to join this heavenly concord of sounds, the concerted harmony of musicmaking in the unbroken consort of eternity. Marvell’s ‘Music’s Empire’, written about six years after the publication of Milton’s ‘At a Solemn Music’, offers an account of the birth and growth of music which, fascinatingly, moves in the opposite direction from that of the earlier poem. Where Milton begins with the ‘divine sounds’ of heavenly music which preceded the ‘jarring’ noises of sin, Marvell starts with the strange music heard as the world was in its infancy: First was the world as one great cymbal made, Where jarring winds to infant Nature played. All music was a solitary sound, To hollow rocks and murm’ring fountains bound.16 The soundscape of the beginning of creation, according to Marvell’s sombre account, might properly be described as disconcerting: we hear only the ‘solitary sound’ of ‘one great cymbal’, the absolute negative of Milton’s ideal of the concerted interaction of musicians making joyous and, above all, chiming sounds together. Whereas Milton considered ‘jarring’ discords to be the disruptive consequence of the fall, Marvell starts with the music of ‘jarring winds’ and shows music gradually becoming more harmonious, thus building up its ‘empire’. The first stage of this musical evolution involves making ‘the wilder notes agree’ (l. 5), recalling the vocabulary of well-tuned harmony in the opening of Barnfield’s sonnet, in which ‘music and sweet poetry’ are said to ‘agree’. According to Marvell’s allegorical narrative, the figure who achieves this control over the ‘wilder notes’ is Jubal, known from the Bible as the father of all who play the organ or harp.17 Jubal was a descendant of Cain, the first murderous sibling in biblical history, and is thus still tainted by what Marvell implies is the ‘sullen’ inheritance of original sin. As music’s history unfolds, Marvell, like Milton, associates the repair of sin with the idea of a ‘consort’, used in this later poem in both its marital and musical meanings: Each [echo] sought a consort in that lovely place [the organ’s city]; And virgin trebles wed the manly bass. From whence the progeny of numbers new Into harmonious colonies withdrew. (ll. 9–12)

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The marriage metaphor used by Campion and Milton for the relationship between verse and voice becomes, in Marvell’s hands, the wedding of the gendered elements of music, marrying each other to establish music’s empire. Poetry is not far away, however, since the ‘progeny’ of these marriages are ‘numbers’, the term also used for metrical lines of verse in this period.18 Thus, as Marvell imagines the growth of music’s ‘harmonious colonies’, he evokes the interweaving of words and melodies, the ‘eloquent’ sounds of wind and string instruments, and the voices of choirs both on earth and in heaven (ll. 13–16). Eventually, . . . Music, the mosaic of the air, Did of all these [sounds] a solemn noise prepare: With which she gained the empire of the ear, Including all between the earth and sphere. (ll. 17–20) At this point, the penultimate stanza, Marvell’s account of music’s progress seems to have reached the situation with which Milton’s poem began: music is no longer ‘jarring’ but ‘solemn’, and has absolute sovereignty over the soundscape between earth and heaven. Milton’s word-play with ‘concent’ seems to find an echo in Marvell’s teasing connection of ‘music’ with ‘mosaic’. Here the ‘muse’ of both poetry and music is transformed into a material work of visual art,19 yet this mosaic still has the delicacy of the insubstantial ‘air’, with its pun on ‘ayre’ or ‘song’. The triumph of this ‘mosaic of the air’ is celebrated in Marvell’s final stanza: Victorious sounds! Yet here your homage do Unto a gentler conqueror than you; Who though he flies the music of his praise, Would with you Heaven’s hallelujahs raise. (ll. 21–4) Music’s own ‘Victorious sounds’ are imperceptibly merged with those of Marvell’s own verse, which offers the metaphorical ‘music’ of ‘praise’. The mystery in these closing lines is the identity of the ‘gentler conqueror’ to whom the praise is offered. He might seem to be Christ himself, the original author of words and music who shunned the imperial manner and showed strength in weakness and triumph in humility. However, Marvell’s circumstances in the early 1650s might suggest that the poet had a more mortal victor in mind, one to whom the poem was perhaps sent when first written – possibly either Major-General Fairfax or the Lord Protector Cromwell himself. This context of patronage casts Marvell’s closing lines in a more earthly imperial light than Milton’s conclusion, transforming Marvell’s allegory of music’s movement from discord to harmony into a form of political flattery. Nevertheless, the prevailing conceit of music’s ever-expanding empire tells us a great deal about his sense of this ‘mosaic of the air’ and its relation to the history of creation and the nature of poetic ‘numbers’. As these two occasional poems by Milton and Marvell have shown, the poets shared a fundamental acceptance of the power of music and its closeness to the art form which they themselves practised. While both set music against an all-encompassing backdrop of earth and heaven, past and present, they approached it in significantly different ways, belying any idea that the relationship between poetic rhetoric and music was

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uniform or straightforward in this period, although both the ‘sister’ arts were seen ideally as expressive of the harmony of creation through their perfection of proportion. While Milton perceived the loss of paradise in terms of a failure of harmony and the introduction of discordant ‘jarring’ sounds in voice and verse, Marvell constructed a history in the opposite direction, expressed as a progression from disorder to concord. Despite this contrary motion in their narrative structures, both poets concluded on a note of optimism, in which words and music together created ‘heaven’s hallelujahs’ to be sung in an ‘endless morn of light’.

Notes 1. As published anonymously in The Passionate Pilgrim (London: W. Jaggard, 1599), B2r. First published in Richard Barnfield, The Encomion of Lady Pecunia (London: John Jaggard, 1598), E2r, entitled ‘To his Friend, Master R. L., in Praise of Musique and Poetrie’. 2. The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985), p. 59. 3. Thomas Campion, ‘To the Reader’, in Two Bookes of Ayres (London: Thomas Snodham, 1613), A2v. 4. Dudley North, On Style, in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: Sources and Documents of the English Renaissance, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 685; George Herbert, ‘Vertue’ and ‘Easter’, in The English Poems, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 316, 139. 5. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 113; Thomas Robinson, The School of Music, from Kinney, p. 674. 6. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici 2.9, in The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 149–50. 7. Job 38. 7, Authorised King James Version (emphasis added). 8. Browne, p. 149. 9. Sidney, Apology, p. 142; cf. various prefatory verses to John Gamble, Ayres and Dialogues (London: William Godbid, 1656). 10. Browne, p. 149. 11. Milton, ‘At a Solemn Music’, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1971), pp. 162–3. All further references are to this edition, by line number. 12. Milton, Arcades, in Complete Shorter Poems, p. 159. This masque-like entertainment for the Dowager Countess of Derby was written for performance in 1633. 13. Ibid., p. 159, ll. 63–73. 14. Milton, Poems (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1645), B3v. 15. Dowland’s song was published by his son, Robert Dowland, in A Musicall Banquet (London: Thomas Adam, 1610), song X, F2v–G1r. 16. Andrew Marvell, ‘Music’s Empire’, in Poems, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 150. All further references are to this edition, by line number. 17. Genesis 4. 21. 18. John Donne, for example, refers to ‘Griefe brought to numbers’, or ‘fettered’ in verse, in ‘The Triple Foole’, l. 10 (Donne, p. 59). 19. On Marvell’s ability to make ‘the insubstantial solid’, see Donald M. Friedman, ‘Marvell’s Musicks’, in On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), p. 8.

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METRICAL FORMS AND RHYTHMIC EFFECTS: M U S I C , P O E T RY A N D S O N G

13 The Music of Narrative Poetry: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton David Fuller

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music before everything: thus Paul Verlaine in ‘Art poétique’. But the idea is everywhere in the writings of twentieth-century poets on poetry, for example Seamus Heaney: ‘poetry depends for its continued efficacy on the play of sound [. . .] in the ear of the reader’.1 Similarly Ezra Pound: ‘that melody of words which shall most draw the emotions of the hearer toward accord with their import’;2 and elsewhere, ‘the proportion or quality of the music [in poetry] may, and does, vary; but poetry withers and “dries out” when it leaves music, or at least imagined music, too far behind it [. . .] Poets who will not study music are defective’.3 Less polemical than Pound, T. S. Eliot was similarly explicit about the central relationship between poetry and music. The music of poetry may be local: rhythm; rhyme; alliteration; assonance; rhetorical shaping – the kinds of effects that writers trained in classical rhetoric in Elizabethan and Stuart grammar schools and at the universities so copiously exploited. The music of poetry may be structural: ‘a question of the whole poem’; ‘A poem [. . .] has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it, and [. . .] these two patterns are indissoluble and one’:4

‘

A MUSIQUE AVANT TOUTE CHOSE’,

Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness.5 Eliot’s ‘secondary meanings’ include all the ways in which words signify apart from their primary semantic content: the contextual flavours they carry; the history of their meanings; and how all these interact with the overtones (to adopt a musical term) of other words in the line, the stanza, the paragraph and ultimately the poem or sequence of poems as a whole. And these too are auditory, ‘a musical pattern’. Sound, local and structural, constitutes a poem’s ‘music’, and for the reader that music should play a central part in meaning and affect. In Eliot’s account this is because ‘the poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist’;6 because poetry deals with

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‘feeling which we can only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the eye and can never completely focus’. In poetry we therefore ‘touch the border of those feelings which only music can express’.7 To approach these frontiers of consciousness the poet engages the ‘auditory imagination’, that is, ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling’.8 This argument, taken up by Seamus Heaney,9 was developed by Ted Hughes with an exploration of the kind of meaning that can be heard in the sounds of poetry: In our own language verbal sounds are organically linked to the vast system of root-meanings and related associations, deep in the subsoil of psychological life [. . .] It is the distinction of poetry to create strong patterns in these hidden meanings as well as in the clearly audible sounds [. . .] The audial memory picks up these patterns in the depths from what it hears at the surface.10 Similarly, it is with a view to realising the importance of sound in poetry that Wallace Stevens discusses a quality he calls ‘nobility’ – that is, ‘intelligence and desire for life’ that ‘resolves itself into a number of vibrations, movements, changes’.11 Stevens claims that in poetry, nobility in this sense inheres in the sounds of words. Stevens does not tie down his meaning; the account is a search, not a statement. But for those who have ears to hear, this nobility is to be listened for in discipline of structure (every aspect of formal shaping) combined with precision and intensity of language, at once denotative and connotative, semantic and musical. For all these poets, then, poetry variously approaches or aspires to some of the conditions of music; and the reader must attend to the sounds of a poem as a major aspect of its meaning. Can the Pound-Eliot-Stevens-Hughes-Heaney view be pressed too far? Possibly. Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound – long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to each other, which are like instrumental colour in music.12 If Basil Bunting is here correct, if the musical effects of poetry depend on ‘the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to each other’, is not the music of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton almost as lost as the music of Virgil? If Bunting is right, we cannot be confident that we hear the music of poetry written much more than a century ago as the poet or the first audience heard it: the music we find must be in part a mixture of our own creation and the gift of chance. Between the sounds of the language as spoken by Shakespeare and Milton, and that of any modern reader, there is a great gulf fixed. Its precise contours cannot be known (let the over-confident historical linguist consider the non-native speaker of any foreign language who has never lived among native speakers); and in any case pronunciations natural to a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century reader or audience can now sound only unnatural, or quaintly antiquarian. But no: the music of poetry depends primarily not on those aspects of the sounds of language that differ from one system of pronunciation to another, but on those that are broadly constant. Above all the music of poetry depends on an expressive interaction of different modes or structurations of language: prose or colloquial syntax cutting across the formal shapes of verse; speech rhythms interacting with metrical or rhetorical patterns; the sounds of the shapes of syntax (speech) interacting with the sounds of the shapes of form (song).

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And yet. What Bunting’s comments point to, perhaps with an over-emphasis understandable in relation to what is so often ignored, is the importance to poetry of the physicality of language. Assent to the idea that in poetry sound is sense is often more notional than real. It is not easy for criticism to discuss what Eliot elsewhere calls ‘the inexplicable mystery of sound’13 and yet keep in sight the issues of meaning and beauty to which that mystery is fundamental. The process that begins with delight or the burden of the mystery too readily ends with routines of analysis from which a sense of the ineffable is at best a distant prospect. But while the mystery of sound in poetry may not be entirely graspable by the critical mind, ‘frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail’ can nevertheless become present to the whole person if they are realised fully on that mind–body organ through which the word is made flesh, the tongue. By learning to read poetry with a full appreciation of its sounds we can have the experience and the meaning, if not discursively then practically. Readers who do not actually read aloud, however, seldom really hear, even in the mind’s ear, a poem’s sounds. Still less do they give those sounds that vital life of beauty and meaning that realisation in the physicality of voice can have for the whole intellectual-emotional being. A reader cannot develop a full and complete relation with the sounds of a poem’s words through the eye. Bunting is right that to do this the reader must realise the sounds of words, and the sounds of the shapes of form and syntax, in the physicality of voice. In discussing what the poet Peter Levi has called ‘the noise made by poems’14 there is no avoiding detail about sound and structure. This need not be unmitigated dry biscuit so long as the reader bears in mind the aims of the Pound-et-al. view of poetry as verbal music: pleasure in beauty; active participation in complex and subtle feeling. Pound’s view of poetry’s necessary relation with music was fully realised in the culture of Spenser and Shakespeare. Theirs was the age of England’s greatest poet-composer, Thomas Campion, and more generally of the madrigal and lute-song books. Spenser began by presenting himself as the poet-singer-piper, Colin Clout. Shakespeare’s songs were written not speculatively but for actual musical performance, sometimes, it may be (as with Desdemona’s Willow Song, or the mad songs of Ophelia), to pre-existing melodies. Milton’s father was a composer, and Milton himself enjoyed consort singing, and played the organ and the bass viol. The direct connections between poetry and music desiderated by Pound were variously and continuously present in Elizabethan and Stuart culture, and specifically for its major narrative poets. Spenser’s debut, The Shepheardes Calender (1579),15 presented him as a poet-singer – engaged in song contests, performing (or having performed) songs of praise and lamentation, each of which ostentatiously exhibits pleasure in beauty of form. ‘Ye Dayntye Nymphs’ (April, ll. 37–153) is a shapely metrical invention, with symmetrically varied lengths of line (in largely iambic feet: 525255224), rhythms emphasised by alliterative sounds, and rhymes adjacent and interlocking (ababccddc). In total contrast to this dancing, celebratory sound-scape (‘tuned unto the Waters fall’) is the gravely formal lament, ‘Up then Melpomene’ (November, ll. 53–202), even more grandly patterned in rhythm (6555544252) and rhyme (ababbccdbd), with multiple musical and rhetorical sub-structures and echoing variations. But the masterpiece of Spenser’s craft as a pastoral singer is the sestina, ‘Ye Wastefull Woodes’ (August, ll. 151–89). The musicality of this demanding form (six, six-line stanzas, and an envoi, with end-words repeated in a fixed sequence) is heightened with alliteration, assonance, inter-linear parallelisms and syntax which, running across line and stanza endings, plays flexibly against the

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strict form. In ‘How I Admire ech Turning of thy Verse’ (that is, the masterful deployment of the fixed sequence of end-words), a listening shepherd models the well-tuned ears of an ideal audience. This is Eliot’s local music – the meaning, feeling and pleasure of the shapes of rhetoric, rhyme and rhythm. The Faerie Queene has this too, in abundance, particularly in its great set pieces: the emblematic figures in the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins (I. iv. 18–36), the Masque of Cupid (III. xi. 1–25), and the pageant of Mutability (VII. vii. 28–46); the symbolic environments of Despair (I. ix. 33–54), Care (IV. v. 32–46) and the Bower of the temptress Acrasia (II. xi. 43–62).16 But the art of The Faerie Queene, extended over a very wide canvas, is not only the art of lyric. Here Eliot’s ideas of structural music are also relevant. Most obviously significant for the varied movement of the poem are the ways in which its demandingly interwoven stanza, with just three rhyme sounds in nine lines (ababbcbcc), can be divided up, and especially how the central fifth line is connected – whether backwards to round off the opening quatrain with a couplet (ababb), or forwards into a new quatrain concluded with a couplet (bcbcc). These mutually exclusive variations (ababb | bcbcc) can be endlessly mutated, though always with the all-important alexandrine at the end giving a sense of closure of the stanza unit. Stanzas from the description of the central symbolic location of the Book of Chaste Love, the Garden of Adonis (III. vi. 31–40), show typical variations of the pattern, sometimes divided after the first quatrain, sometimes later; sometimes divided into two parts, sometimes into three; the alexandrine sometimes woven into the final group, sometimes isolated for a more emphatic conclusion. 31: 1–4 | 5–7 | 8–9 32: 1–5 | 6–9 33: 1–4 | 5–8 | 9 34: 1–6 | 7–9 35: 1–4 | 5–9 36: 1–5 | 6–9 37: 1–5 | 6–9 38: 1–9 39: 1–6 | 7–9 40: 1–4 | 5–8 | 9 This schematic outline of syntactic patterns is further varied by rhythm (presence of alliterative emphasis, placing of caesurae), and by sub-structures of the syntax (lines or groups of lines that are run-on, not end-stopped; rhetorical parallelisms within or across groups). The result is that even when stanzas have broadly similar outline syntactic patterns, they are actually varied in precise movement. Analysis can only point to a variety of pattern that must be found by the ear. For readers who listen to its sounds, rhythms and structures of form and syntax, Spenser’s stanza, as he uses it, has a wonderfully various music. The fundamental effect is that the overall movement of the poem is broadly consistent, the repeated shape brought to a close – aurally hypnotic, with continuities appropriate to reverie and letting the imagination play. It is also locally varied: precise movement and constant variation keep attention alert. This broad movement is frequently intensified for special effects, comparable to those of the Shepheardes Calender lyrics, during which narrative is suspended – as in

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the Song of the Rose in the Bower of Bliss (II. xii). This is sung as part of a sequence of devices designed to warm up Guyon-Temperance for his climactic temptation: sex with the enchantress Acrasia (incontinence, intemperate pleasure). Insofar as two stanzas of some thousands can, these may be taken as representing in one form the full musical resources of Spenser’s art. Ah see, who so faire thing doest faine to see, In springing flowre the image of thy day; Ah see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee Doth first peepe forth with bashfull modestee, That fairer seemes, the lesse ye see her may; Lo see soone after, how more bold and free Her bared bosome she doth broad display; Loe see soone after, how she fades, and falles away. So passeth, in the passing of a day, Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre, Ne more doth flourish after first decay, That earst was sought to decke both bed and bowre, Of many a Ladie, and many a Paramowre: Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime, For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre: Gather the Rose of loue, whilest yet is time, Whilest louing thou mayst loued be with equall crime. (II. xi. 74–5) ‘Ah see [. . .] Ah see [. . .] Lo see soone after [. . .] Loe see soone after’, and within that structure of invitation rising to incitement, the ‘bold [. . .] bared bosome [. . .] broad’ (voiced plosives) diminuendo to (voiceless fricatives) ‘fades, and falles’. Chiming sounds are everywhere: passeth, passing; life, leaf; flower, flourish; loving, loved – and more. The pleasures of love – prepared in three lines, flourished in two, ended in one in the first stanza – in the second are contracted to a firm half-line – leaf, bud, flower. This is a prelude to the fundamental invitation-imperative – gather the rose whilst yet . . . gather the rose . . . whilst yet . . . (extended parallels enforce the urgency); and finally the climactic rhyme, ‘crime’, simultaneously completes the formal expectation and explosively intrudes an antithetical viewpoint from which the whole seductive sequence is revalued. Beautiful, but in its final moral volte-face there is a shudder: the vividness of allure and the surprise of the sudden jolt are both in part effects of the music. This is not the simple neoclassical doctrine that ‘the sound should seem an echo to the sense’ – as when (witty as it is) Pope writes an alexandrine ‘that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along’ (An Essay on Criticism, l. 357). As Samuel Johnson magisterially warned (Rambler, 2 February 1751), in finding sound echo sense in poetry, often ‘we make the sound we imagine ourselves to discover’. Pound’s account of a ‘melody of words’ that ‘draw[s] the emotions of the hearer toward accord with their import’ recognises that sound and sense interact, and that words are heard as melodious or (as ‘crime’ is here) dissonant on the basis of sound and sense combined – here, that ‘crime’ at once by its sound fulfils the form and by its sense overthrows the beauty the form was apparently designed to embody.

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‘With the exception of Spenser’, wrote Coleridge, Shakespeare ‘is the most musical of poets’, possessing an ‘exquisite sense of beauty [. . .] exhibited [. . .] to the ear in sweet and appropriate melody’.17 Coleridge’s subject was Shakespeare’s narrative poems; but though he here brings Spenser and Shakespeare together, the musicality of their poetry draws on very different resources. When Ben Jonson objected that ‘in affecting the ancients [Spenser] writ no language’, he drew attention to the archaism of diction Spenser derived from earlier English poetry, which supported that characteristic sound of his verse, its combination of rhyme with alliteration.18 Shakespeare is much more up-to-date, learning his craft in the public theatre, writing non-dramatic narrative verse only while the theatres were closed because of plague. But the craft Shakespeare exercised in his narrative poems was also based on the rhetorical techniques taught in Renaissance education, and analysed in the handbooks of Thomas Wilson (1567), Henry Peacham (1577/1593) and George Puttenham (1589). It may be that one of Shakespeare’s main uses for his grammar school education was as a source of jokes – as in the figure of Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost – but it was also a training for the ear, the scales and studies as a basis for real music-making. In the narrative poems he made serious use of it, with effects of subtle art as well as brilliant artifice. Like The Faerie Queene, the two narrative poems of Shakespeare are stanzaic, but each uses a different stanza, and uses it with different effects.19 The sixain of Venus and Adonis, rhymed ababcc (quatrain plus couplet), is more fast-moving than the stanza of The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s language is much closer than Spenser’s consciously archaic diction to current speech. But what Shakespeare’s dedication describes with conventional modesty as ‘unpolished lines’ also ostentatiously exhibits rhetorical art – as in Adonis’s rejection of Venus’s love as lust: Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, But lust’s effect is tempest after sun; Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain, Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done; Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies; Love is all truth, lust full of forgèd lies. (ll. 799–804) This shows one typical use of the sixain, with balanced antitheses (love/lust) implying a resolution. The quatrain has alternating contrasted parallels; the couplet likewise, but in half the space. For Adonis this is the sound-structure of reason, but it is flexible. For Venus the form can be pulled about to serve the torments of passion, as in her denunciation of Death (ll. 931–54). Proceeding by cameos, the form can be narrative, as in the stages of the hunting of Wat the hare (ll. 679–708). To extract a general truth it can also be polished to a concluding epigram (‘Danger deviseth shifts, wit waits on fear’ (l. 690)). The poem is a myth of origin: why is love unhappy? Because, balked in love herself, the goddess of Love laid on love a curse, ‘that all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe’. This climactic prophecy, an elaborately patterned arioso on lost love and loss in love (ll. 1135–64) adducing the central significance of the myth as Shakespeare tells it, draws on all his arts of verbal music. Appositional antitheses and balanced paradoxes,

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elaborately built up, and pointed by alliteration, assonance and rhetorical parallels: it is the kind of sound that Stevens gesturally calls ‘nobility’ – the intense and simultaneous operations of intelligence and passion. Similar techniques are even more grandly deployed in the more weighty rhyme royal stanza (seven lines rhyming ababbcc) of The Rape of Lucrece – in the agonised Lucrece’s arraignments of Night (ll. 764–805) and of Opportunity (ll. 876–924), with a denunciatory rhetoric of accusatory parallels built up and varied over many stanzas: ‘Thou mak’st [. . .] | Thou blow’st [. . .] | Thou smother’st [. . .]’; ‘Thy secret [. . .] | Thy private [. . .] | Thy soothing [. . .]’; ‘Guilty of perjury [. . .] | Guilty of treason [. . .] | Guilty of incest [. . .]’. The climactic arraignment of Time (ll. 925–1001) is developed through even more extended parallels, at times the aural frame for an intensity of verbal pressure in which Lucrece’s sufferings are portrayed by grim puns denoting a mind in turmoil, hammering relentlessly on every thought: Disturb his hours of rest with restless trances; Afflict him in his bed with bedrid groans. Let there bechance him pitiful mischances, To make him moan, but pity not his moans. Stone him with hardened hearts harder than stones, And let mild women to him lose their mildness, Wilder to him than tigers in their wildness. (ll. 974–80) The difficulty of enjoying this dark poem is in part that of being attuned to this formal rhetoric and (congruent with it) stylised characterisation. ‘O rash false heat, wrapped in repentant cold’; ‘This dying virtue, this surviving shame’ (ll. 48, 223): paradox is a miniature epitome of the drive for pattern: ‘Mingling my talk with tears, my grief with groans, | Poor wasting monuments of lasting moans’ (ll. 797–8). Talk, tears; grief, groans; monuments, moans – the lasting that wastes, the wasted that lasts: the mellifluously mournful music is mixed with sententious wit. But the sounds are not only those of patterned rhetoric and sententious wit. What the eye may see as apparently monolithic, the ear should discover can actually be made to sound polyphonic. The reader is at times prompted to imagine the sounds of a speaking voice – its tone and its precise articulations. ‘She puts the period often from his place, | And midst the sentence so her accent breaks | That twice she doth begin ere once she speaks’ (ll. 564–7); ‘Three times with sighs she gives her sorrow fire, | Ere once she can discharge one word of woe’ (ll. 1604–5). These sounds of intense feeling are made present to the ear by manipulations of structure, climactically with Lucrece’s suicide: Here, with a sigh as if her heart would break, She throws forth Tarquin’s name: ‘He, he’, she says, But more than ‘he’ her poor tongue could not speak, Till, after many accents and delays, Untimely breathings, sick and short assays, She utters this: ‘He, he, fair lords, ’tis he, That guides this hand to give this wound to me.’ (ll. 1716–22)

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The name Lucrece ‘throws forth’ is not included in the speech: the difficulty of saying it is imaged by the voice as reported actually not saying it; then the emphatic and broken repetitions of ‘he’ (six times in the one stanza) conclude with the simplicity of monosyllabic diction and the rhythm of recovered resolution, ‘That guides this hand to give this wound to me’. The formal rhetorical arts Shakespeare mocks in Love’s Labour’s Lost he works for all they are worth in the narrative poems; but he also deploys in these poems something of the tone of passionate speech learned from writing for the stage. The verbal music of Paradise Lost is profoundly different – blank verse, an ‘ancient liberty recovered’ (as Milton’s manifesto has it) ‘from the [. . .] modern [that is, postclassical] bondage of rhyming’, in which ‘true musical delight [. . .] consists only in apt numbers [appropriate rhythms]’ and with ‘the sense variously drawn out from one verse [line] into another’.20 In the kind of verse paragraphs Milton composed (the form unmarked by the chime of rhyme and stanzaic patterns of recurrence; the syntax rarely aligned with form in extended sentences), the characteristic music, consistently exalted in tone, tends to the sublime.21 For the reader, intonation – actual or imagined – plays a far greater role in eliciting the shapes of syntax than in rhymed stanzas (shorter units, often subdivided by end-stopping, with syntax rarely extending beyond the single unit). Intonation is key to revealing the shapes of Milton’s syntax, while not losing the sound of the formal elements that are essential to its exalted tone, particularly the rhythmic patterning of the line. One fundamental art of discovering the music (especially in the more extended units) is to find the syntactic centre and establish how everything else in the sentence is related to that – subordinated to it, balanced around it, in trajectory towards it or away from it. The necessary alertness to complexities of sense misses the experience if it is not combined with a sense that the free rhythmical recurrence of the verse and the extended structures of syntax combine to make this a form of peculiarly passionate utterance. Hearing the rhythms of any poem – but particularly poetry of the combined structural complexity and freedom of Paradise Lost – is an art, not a science. The reader is listening for a musical quality, but not one that corresponds with the precisely regular beat of Western musical notation. The rhythms of all poetry, but particularly of Miltonic blank verse, are more free and irregular. Freedom and irregularity are essential as vehicles of its heightened feeling – as is the underlying pulse or beat from which the actual rhythms vary. In hearing rhythms it is important to understand that there is not just one degree of stress: stressed and unstressed are relative, not absolute qualities. And words can assume a degree of stress when part of fundamentally regular metrical patterning, which they would not bear in prose (when no regular pattern of stresses is established or implied).22 The rhythms of all poetry are tendencies and relativities: the usual notation (simply differentiating stressed and unstressed syllables) is, and can only be, a rough guide. In poetry, rhythm is not like a mechanism (a clock, a metronome); it is like the heartbeat, the pulse, the breathing – a bodily, human measure, responsive to feeling, subject to variation in periodicity and in force. Accordingly, there is never a single right scansion of Milton’s regulated freedoms. Competent readers may well see different possibilities, and read lines differently, with different expressive effect. A reading of Miltonic blank verse fully responsive to its rhythms is usually a negotiation between metrical pattern and normal spoken stress, and should come naturally once the ear is attuned to the poetry’s basic metrical patterns and syntactic structures.

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These are, within the limits of the poem’s formal unity, highly various – most syntactically complex broadly in the invocations (I. 1–49; III. 1–55; VII. 1–50; IX. 1–47); most dramatic at particular moments in the speeches of the characters driven by human passions, Satan, and the fallen Adam and Eve. With Satan, as when short simple utterances indicate recovered resolution (‘What though the field be lost? | All is not lost’), by contrast with syntax that colloquially totters as he wakes in horror on the burning lake of Hell (I. 84–94). With Eve, as when rhythms of colloquial speech mark her emphasis of penitent self-accusation: ‘me, sole cause to thee of all this woe, | Me, me only just object of his ire’ (X. 935–6). With Adam, teetering on the verge of a self-justifying accusation of God in Milton’s brilliant extension of the syntax given by his source in Genesis: ‘This woman whom thou madest to be my help, | And gavest to me as thy perfect gift [. . .] | [. . .] | She gave me of the tree’ (X. 137–43; Authorised Version, 3. 12). In the second of a pair of essays once read as primarily critical of Milton, T. S. Eliot praised ‘his ability to work in larger musical units than any other poet’ as ‘the most conclusive evidence of [his] supreme mastery’.23 Eliot went on to quote – as a great critic deaf to this – Samuel Johnson: ‘Blank verse, said an ingenious critic, seems to be verse only to the eye.’ This (as Eliot says) is nonsense – albeit interesting nonsense; and surely Johnson cannot have been thinking fully when he wrote it. (It is hard to imagine that Johnson could not hear the structure of the dramatic blank verse of Shakespeare.) In any case, the comment shows, as Eliot says, ‘the judgement of a man who had by no means a deaf ear, but simply a specialized ear, for verbal music’ (italics in the original). It is an interesting judgement because it shows what may be the very much diminished effect of the music of Milton’s verse, especially insofar as that depends on Milton’s rhythms, for an ear trained – as Johnson’s acutely was – to hear rhythm only when its structures are regular and are brought out by rhyme. It shows that even an appreciative ear may be seriously defective. Contradicting Johnson, Eliot concluded that ‘outside the theatre’, Milton is ‘the greatest master in our language of freedom within form’; and that his verse is ‘continuously animated by the departure from, and return to, the regular measure’. In this, Eliot echoed his own account of thirty years earlier of the virtues of the real freedoms hidden under the battle-cry of vers libre: the ‘contrast between fixity and flux [. . .] which is the very life of verse’.24 In Eliot’s praise of his music, Milton emerges as a proto-modernist.

Notes 1. Seamus Heaney, ‘The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber, 1980), pp. 61–78 (p. 78). 2. ‘The Wisdom of Poetry’, in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber, 1973), pp. 329–32 (p. 330). 3. ‘Vers libre and Arnold Dolmetsch’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1954), pp. 437–40 (p. 437). 4. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry’, in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), pp. 26–38 (p. 33). 5. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, ‘Burnt Norton’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1963), V, p. 194. 6. Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry’, p. 30. 7. Eliot, ‘Poetry and Drama’, in On Poetry and Poets, pp. 86, 87.

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8. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber, 1933), pp. 118–19. 9. Seamus Heaney, ‘Englands of the Mind’, in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971–2001 (London: Faber, 2002), pp. 77–95. 10. By Heart: 101 Poems and How to Remember Them, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 1997), p. xv. 11. Wallace Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sounds of Words’, in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Random House, 1951), pp. 3–36 (p. 34). 12. Basil Bunting, ‘A Statement’, in Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal: Conversations with Basil Bunting, ed. Jonathan Williams (Lexington: Gnomon, 1968), n.p. 13. T. S. Eliot, ‘To Walter de la Mare’, Collected Poems, p. 233. 14. Peter Levi, The Noise Made by Poems (London: Anvil, 1977). 15. The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 1–213. 16. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Longman Annotated English Poets (London: Longman, 1977); 2nd edn, rev. Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow: Pearson, 2001). 17. R. A. Foakes (ed.), Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p. 21 (notes for lecture 4, 1 April 1808). 18. Ben Jonson, Discoveries, ed. Lorna Hutson, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, gen. eds David Bevington et al., 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), VII, p. 559. 19. Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 20. The Poems of Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler, Longman Annotated English Poets (London: Longman, 1971), p. 457. 21. See Donald Davie, ‘Syntax and Music in Paradise Lost’, in The Living Milton, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Routledge, 1960), pp. 70–84. 22. William Lily’s Latin Grammar, in use in sixteenth-century grammar schools, advises students to recognise the interplay of two distinct rhythmic patterns in Latin poetry: the normal prose accent of the words and the artificial metrical pattern; see Ros King, The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 50. 23. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, pp. 158, 160. 24. Eliot, ‘Reflections on “vers libre”’ (1917), in To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber, 1965), pp. 183–9 (p. 185).

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14 Against ‘the Music of Poetry’ Robert Stagg

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riters frequently yoke poetry and music into one popular phrase: ‘the music of poetry’. Indeed, in this volume David Fuller cites its ubiquity ‘in the writings of twentieth-century poets on poetry’ – including T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Music of Poetry’ (1942).1 Writing some years after Eliot, Wallace Stevens thought the phrase was ‘old hat’ yet proceeded to celebrate a ‘music of poetry’ in Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ – as though there was something inescapable about the phrase, however mouldering it might be.2 But ‘the music of poetry’ is much older hat than Eliot. In the English Renaissance, writers defined poetry with musical terminology (and vice versa). While George Puttenham initially kept music at an adjectival distance from poetry – writing of ‘lyrique poets’ – Philip Sidney elided the two art forms: in the Defence of Poesy (c. 1579) he became the first English writer to refer to a poem and a poet as a ‘lyric’.3 Elsewhere Puttenham made similar elisions: throughout The Arte of English Poesie (1589), he refers to poems as ‘tunes’ or ‘concords’, ‘symphonical’, ‘harmonical’ and ‘melodious’, rounded by ‘cadences’, sharing tropes and textures with music. Henry Peacham compared music’s ‘passionate airs’ to the rhetorical ‘Prosopopoeias’ (figures of personification) that we might find in verse drama, and William Scott described poetic metre as ‘that musical kind of number’.4 Poets modelled their verse forms on songs, like the contrafacta or ‘sacred parodies’ which originated in psalm settings.5 Musical settings of verse accorded one note to one syllable, principally in the interests of clarity but also to imply that the minutiae of a text could be replicated in the music itself. That is, poetry was increasingly regarded as a musical utterance; there seemed to be a harmony between poetry’s ‘music’ and music’s music – not a resemblance or a similarity, with room for slippage and exception, but an exact equation of poetry’s acoustics with music’s. C. S. Lewis grew wary (as well as weary) of this equation: ‘[H]owever happily married to their notes in the end, the poems had a rhythmical life of their own before the marriage, and it is their “music” in that sense that the literary critic is concerned with.’6 Lewis separates poetry from music with sceptical quotation marks because poems have ‘their own’ rhythmical existence, divorced from music’s. Literary theory often reaches the same conclusion. Roland Barthes heard in any song setting a ‘friction between the music and something else, which is the language’.7 For Theodor Adorno, ‘the “musical” language of Swinburne or Rilke’ – those quotation marks again – was an ‘imitation of musical effects’ that masked ‘remoteness from true musicality’.8 Musicality could only be achieved should the poet ‘renounce music’.9 Writers sometimes do renounce or repudiate ‘the music of poetry’, if not music as such. Because

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it invokes the patron saint of music, we might expect John Dryden’s ‘Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day’ (1687) to be a poem that evinces music by incorporating it in some way. Yet the poem’s rhymes exist on the brink of sonic plausibility, challenging any attempt to sing them (‘clangour’/‘anger’, ‘move’/‘above’), so that the poem reads like a gauntlet thrown down to Handel, who would later set it. We might expect rhyme to be a hallmark of ‘the music of poetry’ since both songs and poems sport rhyme. Critics have long tried to locate rhyme’s mysterious origins in a combination of poetry with song (in the development of Latin hymnody, for example).10 Yet poetry’s rhymes are different from song’s. A rhyme can be the closest a poem gets to (something like) musical harmony, but a song can achieve musical harmony at plenty of times other than when it rhymes. As a result, a rhyme in a song setting can quickly lose its distinctive or pre-eminent quality as it becomes muffled or overwhelmed by other harmonies. Another putative hallmark of ‘the music of poetry’ is rhythm. Yet, again, we find rhythmic effects in music that cannot quite be matched or attained in poetry (and vice versa). One of the resources available to music, but not to poetry, is melisma: ‘the prolongation of one syllable over a number of notes’ (OED). Thomas Campion exploited this difference in setting his poem ‘When to her Lute Corinna Sings’. In the poem, Campion fashions a difference between the effect of Corinna’s voice upon her lute and upon the speaker’s heart: her voice ‘revives the leaden strings’ of the lute whereas, at the end of the poem, ‘Ev’n from my heart the strings do break’. Campion’s musical setting survives in Philip Rosseter’s Book of Ayres (1601). There he endows ‘revives’ and ‘the’ (in the grammatical unit ‘the strings’) with melisma. The melisma on ‘revives’ is mimetic – we can hear it shaking the word awake. The melisma on ‘the’ draws attention to its noun (see Elizabeth Kenny’s contribution to this volume, pp. 212–17), but is anti-mimetic; it sounds more like a plucking of the strings than an outright breakage, which would result only in unmusical noise then silence.11 If we consider Campion’s text in its capacity as a poem, we can hear some metrical inspiration for this melisma. There is an iambic lift on the second syllable of ‘revives’, which Campion matches across three notes (an effect that strikes this listener, at least, as a crudity made out of a subtlety). It seems as though ‘the music of poetry’ has found a way to bridge the difference wrought by melisma. Yet there is nothing in the text to suggest melisma upon ‘the strings’. In fact, Campion’s melisma over-compensates for an absence of sonic effect in his text: ‘Ev’n from my heart the strings do break’ establishes only a poetic, non-musical eye-rhyme (albeit perhaps stronger in seventeenth-century pronunciation) with ‘But if she doth of sorrow speak’. Campion’s music reaches for sound to convey his poetry’s silences. Melisma is one of many musical features that stray from ‘the discursive quality of words as words’ and thereby threaten the alleged harmony between music and poetry.12 The psychologist P. E. Vernon once assembled an audience to listen to a Campion song. Without his audience knowing, he substituted its words for nonsense verses of ‘equivalent syllabic value’. Only six per cent of the audience noticed.13 Vernon’s experiment provokes us to wonder whether, when listening to a song, we are hearing its words or, rather, its syllables. This has contemporary resonance. We often mock people who mishear song lyrics (like those who mistakenly, albeit helpfully, hear Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘There’s a bad moon on the rise’ as ‘There’s a bathroom on the right’) even though their mishearing, according to Vernon’s experiment,

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can be a function of the music as well as of its auditors. The Renaissance proponents of a ‘music of poetry’ likewise mocked those listeners who ‘Content themselves with Ut, re, mi’ rather than the ‘words, and sense’ of a song.14 We might wonder in riposte whether we ever really hear the setting of a text (a poem, a song lyric, a psalm) or whether we are hearing something more like an imitation of instrumental music. Eliot ends ‘The Music of Poetry’ nagged by the thought ‘that it might be possible for a poet to work too closely to musical analogies’, as though aware that many Renaissance writers had thought of music and poetry not as analogically or metaphorically or symbolically related but as actually identical.15 Many Renaissance texts existed somewhere in between music and poetry, never quite settling into either. Richard Edwards’s ‘In Commendation of Music’ appears both as a poem in a literary miscellany (the Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1576) and as organ music in the Mulliner Book, a manuscript replete with music from songs (BL Add. MS 30513). In the Paradise, Edwards’s text is rendered in sixteen-syllable lines. Although there are no words to accompany the tune, it is clear that the Mulliner Book conceives of the text in tetrameters; the lines have been split down their caesura so that they are, or appear to be, more easily singable (if only because they appear more obviously breathable). Of course, these reconceptions of the text’s verse form – from sixteener to tetrameter – might be the result of an inaccurate transmission, or an attempt to correct for some reason the printing of Edwards’s poetic text in the Paradise. They might be a meaningless or neutral or casual shift from a long line to another line that is half its length or, alternatively, a reconception of the text for a freshly musical application and audience, whether by Edwards or others. Henry d’Isle’s preface to the Paradise already advertises its ‘ditties’ as ‘aptly made to be set to any song in five parts, or sung to instrument’, and Edwards could easily have imagined his poem’s sixteeners halved into a song’s tetrameters. Even when printed as a poem, then, ‘In Commendation of Music’ is latently a song. Two snatches of ‘In Commendation of Music’ appear in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595), strangely in relief from the noise of IV. 4 (sometimes conflated with IV. 3).16 In the scene, Juliet has been presumed dead by her family. A group of musicians then talk with Peter, the Capulets’ serving man. He asks them to play ‘Heart’s ease’, a sweetly mournful song of the period or, contradictorily, a ‘merry dump [song/melody]’, but the musicians refuse (ll. 126–47). In response, Peter and the musicians trade insults. Peter recalls words from ‘In Commendation of Music’: ‘When griping griefs the heart doth wound, / Then music with her silver sound’ (ll. 148–9). The scene ends with a couple of curses and Act V begins. Even though it recapitulates the servants’ brawl in the opening scene of the play, this exchange can seem somewhat pointless, a gnomic piece of knockabout, a bit of idle stage business or, worse, a windbaggery that risks taking the air out of the play’s ending. In the First Quarto of the play, we have an additional line from Edwards’s song: ‘And doleful dumps the mind oppress’ (whoever prepared the manuscript for Q1 obviously knew the song). The line may be absent from the Second Quarto and Folio texts as a result of suggestion rather than omission – Peter’s snatch of song can elliptically call to mind Edwards’s ‘doleful dumps’ without having to explicitly sing or state them (Peter after all goes on to quote another line which is not in Q1). These ‘doleful dumps’ supply ample rationale for the scene, especially in Q2 and F. Earlier in IV. 4 characters have been speaking or chanting a non-musical equivalent of ‘doleful dumps’ (dirges,

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funeral songs) over Juliet’s body. Both Capulets speak in six-line segments, as does the Nurse. Each segment is topped by a matching line: Lady Capulet’s ‘Accursed, unhappy, wretched, hateful day!’ (l. 69) segues into the Nurse’s ‘O woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day!’ (l. 75), for example. They seem stilted, formal exercises that have not – unlike the play’s many sonnets and lyric stanzas – been integrated into the verse drama. They read like the strophes and refrains of a song, but without the music to rescue them from wooden banality, they sound rigid and obtuse. Edwards’s song, then, is parodic of the scene it inhabits; and it fashions that parody by dividing music from poetry, even as it draws upon both. It helps us chuckle at the Nurse’s awkwardly effusive grief, and helps us scorn the overblown grief displayed – rather than felt – by Paris and the Capulets (ll. 39–90). If we do not pay attention to Edwards’s song, ‘the occasion and the characteristic speeches’ will seem ‘so little in harmony’, at least in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s disappointedly (un)musical hearing of the scene.17 Like the Mulliner Book, Shakespeare (aided by whoever arranged and assembled the three texts of Romeo and Juliet) renders Edwards’s words in easily singable short lines and places them in a musical context. They are here treated as part of a song, unlike the earlier refrains and strophes of the Capulets and their acolytes. It makes sense for Peter to sing Edwards’s words. Yet poetry’s acoustics are also at work, as well as music’s. They come in the sound of a rhyme or half-rhyme: ‘wound’/‘sound’. Shakespeare coaxes the wound/sound rhyme to audibly revisit an earlier moment in the scene – so it becomes part of his verse drama as well as part of a song. Trying to wake Juliet, the Nurse thinks she is ‘sound’ asleep (l. 34). If we read the scene from the musicians backwards, we can hear the dramatic ironies more loudly. Juliet is not ‘sound’ asleep but suffering, or so the Nurse thinks, from a death ‘wound’, a ghost rhyme that Edwards’s words trail back through the scene. As an audience, we know that Juliet is neither ‘sound’ asleep nor dead from a ‘wound’ but in a medically-induced ‘swound’, a ‘fainting-fit’ (OED 1a). We see and hear in the letters of ‘swound’ Shakespeare’s later combination of ‘wound’ and ‘sound’, a combination reeled through Edwards’s text. It is tempting to claim that the rhyme is Edwards’s, and belongs to song more than poetry, since it comes direct from ‘In Commendation of Music’ which is, here, probably sung. Yet it is as true to say that the rhyme is Shakespeare’s, and his poetry’s, since it is only by choosing to set out Edwards’s text in tetrameters that the rhyme can be heard clearly at the ends of Edwards’s lines rather than more murkily through their innards. By choosing this kind of versification (whether he encountered the tetrameters in a song setting of Edwards, or whether he hewed them from the sixteeners of the Paradise), Shakespeare employs Edwards’s text as a song. Yet in so doing, he isolates and detaches the song’s rhymes for the purposes, elsewhere, of his poetry. He dilates the song’s rhymes back across the scene so that they cast a retrospective significance upon what might at first look like nothing more than the Nurse’s babble. Shakespeare finds in this song both the ‘silver sound’ of music and the golden resource of a specifically poetic rhyme. We might think this privileges poetry and abjures music as a parasitic art, leeching from poetry’s acoustics, especially as Romeo has already spoken in verse of ‘silver’ and ‘silver-sweet sound’ (II. 1. 151, II. 1. 211), but Shakespeare’s ‘wound’/‘sound’ rhyme is not, as we have seen, entirely his own and, as importantly, it leaves the scene’s musicians looking more sane, decent and sincere than its rather bombastic, bogus poets, the Capulet family.

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‘The music of poetry’ makes more sense if, like Shakespeare, we contrarily emphasise its final word: ‘the music of poetry’. Stressed this way, the phrase stops foisting musical paradigms upon verse (as in ‘the music of poetry’) and allows a notional – though only a notional – music to emerge from within poetry’s particular sonic resources. The phrase stops advancing a forced ‘harmony’ between music and poetry, preferring to accept – tolerantly – their myriad differences. Shakespeare’s plays and poems, among others’, always set the word ‘harmony’ amid a broader vocabulary: of ‘concord’, ‘accord’ and ‘concent’ (or ‘consent’). These are words whose etymology does not, as harmony’s does, suggest a ‘joining’ of sounds that can ‘fit together’ (the Greek ἁρμόζειν). They suggest, rather, an ‘agreement’ of discrete entities. The verb-nouns of ‘concord’, ‘accord’ and ‘concent’ are truer to the relations between poetry and music, both in the Renaissance and in other periods. They do not insist on an equation between the arts, but inspire an apprehension of their similitudes and dissimilitudes, and their subsequent capacity for coalition. We cannot recreate music in words nor words in music; that is one reason why we go on trying to do so. They are two arts, ‘both alike in dignity’, aspiring (as Walter Pater might have said) to the condition of each other; arts that can meet, mingle, but never quite meld.

Notes 1. David Fuller, ‘The Music of Narrative Poetry’ in this volume. 2. Wallace Stevens, ‘Effects of Analogy’, in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), pp. 107–30 (p. 125). 3. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), 1.11.20; Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in The Major Works, ed. Katherine DuncanJones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 212–50 (p. 230). OED reads Sidney 230 as personification and accords the first instance of ‘lyric’ referring to a poet to Louis le Roy, Of the interchangeable course [. . .], trans. Robert Ashley (London: C. Yetsweirt, 1594), p. 69. 4. Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London: John Legat, 1622), p. 103; William Scott, The Model of Poesy (1599), ed. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 13. 5. See Gavin Alexander, ‘The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum: Robert Sidney’s “French Tune” Identified’, Music and Letters, 84 (2003), 378–402. 6. C. S. Lewis, quoted in John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 39–40. 7. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 273. 8. Theodor Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Music, trans. S. Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 3. 9. Simon Jarvis, ‘The Truth in Verse? Adorno, Wordsworth, Prosody’, in Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 84–99 (p. 84). 10. For a discussion of this erroneous tradition, see Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime: An Essay on the Aesthetics of Sound (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1931), pp. 106–13. 11. Elizabeth Kenny, Italian Performance Practices in Seventeenth-Century English Song in this volume, pp. 209–18. 12. Timothy Steele, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), p. 209.

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13. W. H. Auden, ‘Notes on Music and Opera’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 465–74 (p. 473). 14. Edmund Waller, prefatory poem to Henry Lawes, First Booke of Ayres (London: John Playford, 1653), ll. 27–8. 15. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry’, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 113–14. 16. All references to the play correspond to the Oxford text, ed. Jill Levenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, quoted in The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 519.

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15 Speaking the Song: Music, Language and Emotion in Shakespeare’s CYMBELINE Erin Minear

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t is possible to divide critical responses to music in Shakespeare’s plays into two loose categories. The first approach would consider music and poetic speech as more or less analogous; the second and more recent approach points out crucial differences between the two, and suggests that Shakespeare himself was interested in these differences. ‘In his most skeptical moments,’ argues Joseph Ortiz, ‘Shakespeare seems to suggest that music is nothing like language.’1 From such a perspective, music – performed and experienced, rather than merely contemplated from a philosophical or mathematical point of view – cannot be reduced to a symbol of harmony and universal concord, or understood as a euphonious expression of meaning parallel to poetry. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare seems almost to have anticipated this critical debate since the characters themselves must decide whether to speak or sing, and the audience has to decide whether their choice makes a difference. The dirge, ‘Fear No More the Heat o’th’ Sun’, is spoken over the seemingly dead Imogen by her long-lost brothers, Guiderius and Arviragus. Brought up in the wilds of Wales under the names of Polydore and Cadwal, the two are ignorant of their royal birth. To add to the confusion, they believe the disguised Imogen to be a boy named Fidele. Arviragus, the younger, suggests that they sing the same song that they once sang over their mother’s grave. But Guiderius objects: ‘I cannot sing,’ he says flatly. ‘I’ll weep and word it with thee’ (IV. 2. 241).2 ‘We’ll speak it then,’ his brother agrees (l. 243). The decision to ‘word’ the song may point to practical circumstances – perhaps the actors could not sing well, or perhaps their voices were breaking. On the other hand, a refusal to sing when confronted with untimely death seems to have been something of a convention on the Renaissance stage. Commentators point to passages in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge where mourners speak dirges when they consider the situation too discordant for music.3 Nevertheless, these two examples differ significantly from the corresponding episode in Cymbeline. Kyd’s and Marston’s mourners speak dirges that were never meant to be sung. In the Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo gives a long speech in Latin over the body of his son, because ‘singing fits not this case’.4 In Antonio’s Revenge, the mourners similarly replace song with an ‘honest antic rhyme’ translated from Seneca.5 The ‘dirges’ in both plays are clearly conceived as speeches. In contrast, Shakespeare invents a musical history for his spoken dirge. The lyric has been sung before, in an imaginary, unstaged past, by the very characters who decide to speak it now. Shakespeare imbues the song with imaginary music even as this

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music is stripped away. Two young boys sang it over the body of their dead mother. Now it is spoken by two young men, but the performance is haunted not only by their younger selves, but also by the music that is no longer present. Guiderius claims to be too grief-stricken to sing, but the events leading up to the speaking of the song suggest another reason for his refusal. Unlike Kyd’s Hieronimo and the mourners in Antonio’s Revenge, Guiderius does not believe that music has become impossible because the world is out of tune; rather, he seems to feel that too much music might be a dangerous thing. Indeed, the song is preceded by a strange, wordless music that disturbs Guiderius considerably. His younger brother, having discovered the ‘corpse’ of Imogen/Fidele offstage, sounds the ‘ingenious instrument’ created by their foster father, which has apparently been silent since the death of the boys’ foster mother. The sound is as unexpected for the audience as it is for Guiderius, though for different reasons. After all, the boys and their foster father are living in a cave in the wilderness, and all three repeatedly emphasise the roughness and simplicity of their lives. In this context, the sudden manifestation of ‘solemn music’ must suggest supernatural origins until Belarius identifies the tones of his ‘ingenious instrument’. In some ways, a less naturalistic explanation would make more sense. There are no indications in the text as to the specific nature of this instrument (and its sounds may have been realised in production by anything from an organ to recorders to a consort of strings).6 But an ‘ingenious’ mechanism that produces music whenever someone ‘give[s] it motion’ (IV. 2. 189) is a strangely aristocratic conceit, a marvel belonging to a courtly hall or garden. Belarius, who seizes every possible occasion to denounce ‘the art o’th’ court’ (III. 3. 46), seems an unlikely fabricator of such an artificial, ‘ingenious’ device. A sound that first strikes the audience as eerie and seemingly sourceless turns out to come from a source that complicates our sense of the absolute opposition between the pure, simple wilderness and the corrupt, artful court. The last music in the play was the aubade ordered by the villainous Cloten in the hopes of seducing Imogen. Is this new music entirely free from these earlier, dangerous associations? It is not the fact of the music that seemingly disturbs Guiderius, however, but the reason – or lack of reason – for its performance. What does he mean? Since death of my dear’st mother It did not speak before. All solemn things Should answer solemn accidents. The matter? Triumphs for nothing and lamenting toys Is jollity for apes and grief for boys. Is Cadwal mad? (IV. 2. 191–6) Here we get a sense of the dangers of music: it does not signify in any clear way; it lends itself to frivolous abuse; and it can arouse unpredictable affective responses in its listeners. Arviragus means the music to ‘say’: ‘something terribly sad has happened; our friend is dead’; but Guiderius has no idea what he means until he enters carrying Imogen’s body. Guiderius demands to understand the meaning, ‘the matter’ of the music, as well as the ‘matter’ to which the music responds; but the latter cannot be immediately apparent precisely because the sound lacks ‘matter’ in the sense of verbal

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and explanatory content. Guiderius clings to the idea of the music as speaking – ‘it did not speak before’ – but his agitation acknowledges that the term can be only figuratively applied. Music does not signify as words do. Indeed, the music initially seems to ‘answer’ another, far less solemn event. It sounds just as Guiderius finishes describing, derisively, his disposal of Cloten. He has killed him, decapitated him and tossed his head into a convenient brook: I have sent Cloten’s clotpoll down the stream In embassy to his mother. His body’s hostage For his return. Solemn music (IV. 2. 185–7) In this context, Guiderius’s unnerved response to the music becomes thoroughly understandable, as his sarcastic remark is immediately answered by the sweet and solemn sounds that he associates with the death of someone he actually cared about. The music invests Cloten’s summary decapitation and grotesque ‘embassy’ with inappropriate dignity. When Orpheus was torn to pieces his head too was borne down a stream, and it sang as it floated.7 The parallel with the revolting Cloten is disturbing. If music speaks, it does not speak clearly, and its great emotive powers render its inherent ambiguity all the more dangerous. For Guiderius, the music that played at his mother’s death has become alien and strange in its untimely iteration; and so the following dirge must speak, even if this means transforming it into something that is no longer musical. Speaking the song eliminates the possibility that the funeral rites may become like the music of the ‘ingenious instrument’ – a haunting sound stripped of clear meaning and referent. Spoken, the words will not be in danger of being overwhelmed by the destabilising affect of their music, or of becoming anything other than a lament.8 Guiderius’s concern resonates with the contemporary controversy over the dangers of music in general, and the place of music in sacred worship in particular. Many people feared that music, particularly rich or complicated music, might distract attention from the words it was supposed to reinforce and complement. ‘And in matters of religion also,’ wrote Richard Mulcaster, ‘to some it seemes offensiue, bycause it carieth awaye the eare, with the sweetnesse of the melodie, and bewitcheth the minde with a Syrenes sounde.’9 John Calvin had urged the pious to beware ‘“that our ears not be more attentive to the melody than our minds to the spiritual meaning of the words”’.10 Any such stark opposition between words and music is complicated, however, by the fact that ‘Fear No More’ is actually the second eulogy that ‘Fidele’ receives. The first is an impromptu poetic set-piece offered by Arviragus, a speech that Guiderius condemns quite as much – and in quite similar terms – as he initially condemned the playing of the ‘solemn instrument’: Prithee have done, And do not play in wench-like words with that Which is so serious. Let us bury him, And not protract with admiration what Is now due debt. To th’grave. (IV. 2. 230–4)

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He perceives his younger brother, once again, as trifling with solemnity. Such trifling is here explicitly labelled as ‘wench-like’, effeminate. In fact, over the course of the scene, Guiderius rebukes his brother three times, and on all three occasions, for behaviour that he perceives as unmanly: once for playing the solemn instrument without proper cause; once for his elaborate catalogue of the flowers that he will lay upon ‘Fidele’s’ grave; and once for his suggestion that they sing the funeral dirge. Arviragus himself brings up the issue of masculinity in the last instance, proposing: ‘And let us [. . .] though now our voices | Have got the mannish crack, sing him to th’ground’ (IV. 2. 236–7). Though his explicit concern is that their voices are no longer as attractive or as secure as when they were younger, his words also recall a common Renaissance perception that music itself is effeminate, the proper mode of expression for boys or women only.11 To sing the dirge would be playing, wench-like, with words, which is another reason why Guiderius may prefer to speak it. Yet such ‘playing’ can occur even when literal music is absent. Indeed the second rebuke – the complaint about wench-like words – has no direct connection to music. A number of critics have noted the lyricism of Arviragus’s speech,12 and so it is tempting to refer to it as ‘musical’. But such a term dangerously blurs the line between speech and music, which – as the scene itself makes clear – are very different things: Guiderius may want the ingenious instrument to ‘speak’, but it does not; and it is important that the brothers ‘say’ their song rather than sing it. Yet the parallelism of Guiderius’s rebukes suggests that the speech does have something in common with music – or at least, with certain qualities that the play associates with music. With fairest flowers, Whilst summer lasts and I live here, Fidele, I’ll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose; nor The azured harebell, like thy veins; no, nor The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander, Outsweetened not thy breath. The ruddock would With charitable bill—O bill, sore shaming Those rich-left heirs that let their fathers lie Without a monument!––bring thee all this, Yea, and furred moss besides, when flowers are none, To winter-gown thy corpse. (IV. 2. 219–30) This is certainly not the most conventionally ‘manly’ speech that might be imagined. (In Shakespeare, catalogues of flowers are generally reserved for female characters.) If music is effeminate and if the speech is effeminate, that may be what links them; in that case there would be nothing necessarily ‘musical’ about the speech itself. Yet there are several ways in which the speech replicates the effects of the music of the ingenious instrument. For one thing, it does not unequivocally follow Guiderius’s axiom that solemn things should answer solemn accidents. As Anne Barton notes, ‘Arviragus appears to wander off the point in ways of which true grief, even in a verse play, ought to be incapable.’13 There is more than one way to express ‘true grief’ – even in a verse play – but Arviragus’s speech certainly wanders, and it seems to find some consolation in its

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wandering. The speech is focused on commemoration; but ironically, it increasingly forgets what it is supposed to be commemorating. At first Arviragus declares that he will sweeten the grave with flowers, but the speech transforms the boy into a bird with the subtle revision: ‘the ruddock would [. . .] bring thee all this’ (IV. 2. 221–8). The speaker and his grief vanish altogether. There is an excess in the speech that confuses occasion and identity as the speaker gets lost in the long elegy, and almost forgets the reason for the elegy, wandering off to consider the ruddock’s bill, rich-left heirs and dead fathers. The speech drifts away from the reality of death, as Guiderius feared that the solemn music, unanchored from its proper context, might drift away from seriousness. It sweetens the situation, as the flowers would sweeten the grave: it sweetens by forgetting, and it forgets by imagining an act of remembrance. The process prefigures an explicitly musical moment in The Tempest, in which Ariel’s song ‘remember[s] [Ferdinand’s] drowned father’ (I. 2. 409) while allaying the Prince’s grief and placing him in a receptive state of mind for a romantic encounter with Miranda. In Cymbeline, the sound of the ingenious instrument similarly recalls a mother’s death; but Guiderius’s appalled reaction suggests that it simultaneously may erode this memory. ‘Do not play,’ says Guiderius, ‘with that which is so serious.’ ‘Playing’ implies both a lack of seriousness and an interest in the words themselves rather than the object that has instigated them – perhaps even an interest in sound over sense. The word also hints at dissimulation: such elaborate expressions of grief cannot be true. Yet music, by its very nature, must be ‘true’ in order to be music at all. A false note is an unmusical note and vice versa; and Guiderius refuses to sing partly because ‘notes of sorrow out of tune are worse | Than priests and fanes that lie’ (IV. 2. 242–3). A ‘false’ note would falsify the grief; but as Guiderius simultaneously suggests (in unknowing agreement with Anne Barton), genuine sorrow ‘cannot sing’. Guiderius must ‘weep and word’ the dirge: the weeping necessitates the wording, and the apparently grim world in which the characters live necessitates the weeping. As the words of the dirge make clear, the dead are to be envied because they have nothing more to fear. Yet as Belarius’s pagan funeral customs, and the bleak words of the song itself remind us, Guiderius and the Christian audience inhabit different worlds. His insistence on facing the stark reality of death – ‘to the grave!’ – admits of no possibility of amelioration. In a Christian universe, death is not, after all, ‘so serious’, and the sweetness Guiderius refuses as false consolation may in fact express a truth that goes beyond the finality of the song the brothers speak. Indeed, ‘solemn music’ again appears in the play when the ghosts of Posthumus’s family come to petition Jupiter on his behalf. In Cymbeline, as in Shakespeare’s world in general, music occupies contradictory roles. It is a pure expression of the underlying order, the truth and harmony of the world; at the same time, it is a dangerous and seductive game, playing with truth, playing with feelings. No wonder Shakespeare finds it so irresistible a subject.

Notes 1. Joseph M. Ortiz, Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 3. For accounts of the critical history, see Ortiz, pp. 2–6, 15–17; Erin Minear, Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton: Language, Memory, and Musical Representation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 3–8.

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2. Shakespeare is cited from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard and Katherine Eisaman Maus, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 2008) but reverting to the name ‘Imogen’ from the 1623 Folio text of the play. 3. See G. K. Hunter, ‘The Spoken Dirge in Kyd, Marston, and Shakespeare: A Background to Cymbeline’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 11 (1964), 146–7. 4. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), II. 5. 66. 5. John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, The Second Part of Antonio and Mellida, ed. G. K. Hunter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), IV. 3. 95. 6. See David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Thomson, 2006), p. 136. 7. See Joan Carr, ‘Cymbeline and the Validity of Myth’, Studies in Philology, 75 (1978), 316–30; David Armitage, ‘The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Mythic Elements in Shakespeare’s Romances’, Shakespeare Survey, 39 (1986), 123–33. 8. Lindley suggests that ‘to sing the words might actually be to ameliorate their bleakness’ (p. 183). 9. Richard Mulcaster, Positions (London, 1581), p. 37. 10. Quoted in William Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 225. 11. For the early modern connection between femininity and music, see Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘“Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie”: Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England’, Music and Letters, 74 (3), 343–54. See also Austern, ‘“Sing Againe Syren”: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 420–48; Leslie C. Dunn, ‘Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine’, in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 50–64. 12. Maurice Hunt, for instance, refers to its ‘ravishing lyricism’ in ‘Dismemberment, Corporal Reconstitution, and the Body Politic in Cymbeline’, Studies in Philology, 99 (2002), 404–31 (p. 420). 13. Anne Barton, ‘Leontes and the Spider: Language and the Speaker in Shakespeare’s Last Plays’, in Shakespeare: The Last Plays, ed. Kiernan Ryan (London and New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 22–42 (p. 31). In Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Russ McDonald uses this speech as an example of language that would have been characterised as ‘feminine’. These supposedly feminine qualities include extravagance, repetition, ornamentation and ‘ostentatious auditory patterns’ (p. 245).

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PERFORMERS AND PERFORMANCE

16 Shakespeare’s Musicians: Status and Hierarchy B. J. Sokol

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n Shakespeare’s time the social standing of most occupational musicians was shaky, at best. The English Reformation had partially, but not fully, deprived professional musicians of opportunities for highly respected Church employment.1 The Elizabethan Statute of Artificers and the two Elizabethan Vagrancy Acts had grouped ‘common Players of Enterludes and Minstrelles wandering abroade’ with ‘Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars’ demanding that professional musicians serve apprenticeships (at least in theory), and that they be in the service of great men, or else work under local licences.2 Various local musicians’ guilds and a London Company of Musicians (longstanding, but only chartered in 1604) tried to enforce even more restrictive regulations, so that the music industry would not be overwhelmed by outsiders.3 The profession of musicianship, however, seemed resistant to control. Many semi-amateurs, like the twenty-four shearers described as good ‘three-man-song-men’ in The Winter’s Tale (IV. 3. 40–4), augmented other sources of income by doing gigs – ignoring guild regulations and national laws.4 But over the course of the sixteenth century the hospitality and respect that traditional unlicensed minstrels had formerly commanded was transformed into frequent derision and hostility.5 Thus in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio threatens Benvolio with: ‘What, dost thou make us minstrels? | An thou make minstrels of us, look to hear nothing but discords. | [Touching his rapier] Here’s my fiddlestick; here’s that shall make you dance’ (III. 1. 45–8). Later in the same play a visiting musician’s question ‘What will you give us?’ draws a choleric servant’s reply ‘No money, on my faith, but the gleek. I will give you the minstrel’ (IV. 4. 139–41). Nevertheless much of Elizabethan England was not only receptive to, but even wildly enthusiastic for traditional musical fare, and also, judging by book sales and manuscript circulation, the wonderful late Renaissance music newly produced by English and continental composers. The Elizabethan appetite was fed gratis by the weekly outdoor playing of London’s city waits,6 England’s first public concerts, and this boon may be reflected in Stefano crowing in The Tempest: ‘This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing’ (III. 2. 147–8). Such tastes, running through most of society, were in many instances self-fed. Thus, Shakespeare’s plays reflect the amateur musicianship prevalent from the level of

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patrician-born Desdemona, through that of the middling-rank daughters of Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew, and on to ‘Our tradesmen singing in their shops’ (Coriolanus, IV. 6. 8) and the singing gravediggers in Hamlet. It is particularly interesting that the catch singing shared by two inebriated knights and a minstrel in Twelfth Night reflects actual joint music making by diverse ranks of society.7 At the top of society, Queen Elizabeth was a competent instrumentalist, as was Mary, Queen of Scots. It is no surprise that courtly Signor Benedick in Much Ado insists that any wife for him must be ‘Rich [. . .] Wise [. . .] Virtuous [. . .] Noble’ and ‘an excellent musician, and her hair shall be of what colour it please God’ (II. 3. 29–34). Gentlemen also sang and played musical instruments by choice (although conduct books warned them not to be showily expert in this). Indeed the popularity of friends or families singing or playing together led to the development of a flourishing market in printed scores and songbooks. An unknown but significant number of Elizabethan musicians found employment as resident musical teachers in middling or upper echelon households.8 This context makes it mysterious when Hamlet attacks his erstwhile friend – who intends to ‘play upon me [. . .] pluck out the heart of my mystery [. . .] sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass’ – by alleging that the false and spying Guildenstern can play an instrument. Thus, the angry Hamlet asks pointedly if Guildenstern can play what he calls within a few lines both a ‘recorder’ and ‘pipe’ (III. 2. 332 and 339). When asked ‘Will you play upon this pipe?’, Guildenstern replies, as Hamlet expects, ‘I cannot [. . .] I know no touch of it [. . .] I have not the skill’ (III. 2. 338–50), which leads to Hamlet’s bitter rejoinder: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. (III. 2. 351–60) A partial explanation of the anger in this is that Hamlet formerly stated that those who can be played like a simple ‘pipe’ are conformist and shallow (cf. III. 2. 68–9), and so is offended that Guildenstern thinks he can be easily gulled. But why does Hamlet hold pipe-playing to be a dishonourable accomplishment of a gently educated young man, perhaps in some way commensurate with spying on a friend under the guise of fellowship? The answer is that not all musical skills were held to be equal in terms of status, and indeed piping and other wind playing were frequently seen as demeaning. Correspondingly, John Hollander noted that in the graphic arts: the Platonic notion of the World-Soul (as well as the individual psyche) considered as a [musical] tuning, or harmonia, finds figurative expression in the image of the World-Lyre, or the stringed instrument of the human soul. One seldom sees, during the Renaissance or Medieval periods, any such figure employing a wind or percussive instrument.9

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Some of the reasons for this are offered by authors well-known to Shakespeare. In North’s Plutarch, for instance, the young Alcibiades refuses to learn to play ‘the flute or recorder’, saying: to playe on the vyoll with a sticke, doth not alter mans fauour, nor disgraceth any gentleman: but otherwise, to playe on the flute, his countenaunce altereth and chaungeth so ofte, that his familliar friends can scant knowe him. Moreouer, the harpe or vyoll doth not let him that playeth on them, from speaking, or singing as he playeth: where he that playeth on the flute, holdeth his mouth so harde to it, that it taketh not only his wordes from him, but his voyce.10 Plutarch then describes Alcibiades’ aversion becoming widespread, allegorising the birth of a cultural attitude. Many subsequent texts also find wind playing ungenteel, including Castiglione’s crucially influential Book of the Courtier and the important Elizabethan text The Praise of Music.11 Shakespeare knew that the breath control and embouchure required for playing wind instruments may produce a tensed mouth, corded neck, furrowed forehead, rounded cheeks or even protruding eyes. With some exaggeration the crude Ajax in Troilus and Cressida commands a ‘villain’ military trumpeter to: crack thy lungs and split thy brazen pipe. Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek Outswell the colic of puffed Aquilon. Come, stretch thy chest and let thy eyes spout blood. (IV. 6. 7–10) However, this grotesque image does not encompass all that Shakespeare’s culture found objectionable in wind-players. The issue of social rank plays directly into this. Christ’s Hospital, a charitable school founded in 1552 which ‘tried to place its children as apprentices and servants’, was described in 1587 as teaching the children ‘to singe, to play uppon all sorts of instruments, as to sounde the trumpet, the cornett, the recorder or flute, to play uppon shagbotts, shalmes, and all other instruments that are to be plaid upon, either with winde or finger’.12 Aspiring servants and apprentices could benefit from such skills, but other musicians had higher standing in their sights. John Ferne’s The Blazon of Gentrie (1586) even allowed the musician ‘a coate of Armes [. . .] that thereby he is made a Gentleman’. Although condemning ‘a certaine sort of bastard and mechanicall’ musicians who are mere ‘minstrels, wanderers, and vagrants’, Ferne cites Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and others as champions of the ‘heavenly science’ of music which can alter men’s affections, tame wild beasts, cure diseases, inspire warriors and serve divine worship.13 In his autobiography the musician Thomas Whythorne also defended musicians, with similar exceptions. The non-graduate Whythorne noted the tradition most highly praising philosophical music theorists, ‘musicians that be named speculators [. . .] that become musicians by study, without any practice thereof’. But Whythorne claimed that equal esteem was due to some professional practitioners of music ‘that have set forth as great mysteries in music as ever did any doctor or bachelor of music’. Below those he ranked skilled musical amateurs of high birth, and next below them teachers

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or performers of music employed in churches or great houses. He placed lowest ‘those who do use to go with their instruments about the countries to cities, towns and villages [. . .] markets, fairs, assemblies, taverns, alehouses and suchlike places’, and urged stricter enforcement of the laws that would punish such ‘minstrels’. Giving an account of himself employed first by the relatively wealthy, and eventually by a high churchman, Whythorne insisted that musicianship was ‘one of the trades and exercises appointed and allowed for such gentlemen to live by as were younger brothers, and neither lands nor fees nor goods to maintain them’.14 Yet hired-in musicians in Romeo and Juliet are presented unflatteringly when a household servant mocks them for playing cheaply, not for gold (if ‘Then music with her silver sound’ is thus interpreted, IV. 4. 155–66). Their poverty is borne out, for although these wind-playing musicians first intend to ‘put up our pipes’ when the wedding ‘festival’ is converted to ‘funeral’, hunger prompts them to ‘tarry for the mourners and stay dinner’ (IV. 4. 71). The embarrassment of an itinerant musician may motivate Feste’s evasive quibbling when a stranger greets him with: ‘Save thee friend, and thy music, | Dost thou live by thy tabor?’ Feste replies: ‘No, sir, I live by [= near] the church’, dodging acknowledgement that he sings and jests for a living, seeking hand-outs (Twelfth Night, III. 1. 1–2). The itinerant performer Feste, whose encounter with Viola shows that he does not wear the livery of either of the great households that he visits, ranks higher than the vagabond mountebank singer Autolycus of The Winter’s Tale. But Shakespeare complicates this by giving Autolycus the same name as resourceful Odysseus’s grandfather, and by indicating Autolycus’s trajectory from Prince Florizel’s ‘servant’, through bailiff, exhibitioner of apes and puppets, cutpurse ballad peddler, pretend courtier and finally acceptance by the Clown, a new made ‘gentleman born’ (V. 2. 127–73). Despite Shakespeare’s serio-levity here (similar in sentiment to Dowland’s peddler’s song ‘Fine Knacks for Ladies’), and despite many Elizabethan apologies for music, recent scholars describe a widespread contemporary moral dubiousness about musicians, often associating music with lustfulness. For instance, poetry- and music-despising Hotspur says he is attracted to a (married) singing ‘Welsh lady’s bed’ (1 Henry IV, III. 1. 125–31, 238). In Two Gentlemen of Verona and in Cymbeline musicianship certainly serves immorality when the would-be seducers Proteus and Cloten hire musicians to serenade unwilling women, one engaged and one married (both of these men later attempt rape). Proteus uses his own singing voice and stringed instruments for false wooing (IV. 2. 55–60). Revolting Cloten similarly calls for ‘horse hairs and calves’ guts’, but also (being wholly unmusical himself), ‘the voice of unpaved eunuch’ (II. 3. 28–9). He demands that his hirelings help him to ‘penetrate [Imogen] with your fingering [. . .] we’ll try with tongue too’ (II. 3. 13–14). The erotic power of strings is deplored by love-defying Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing: ‘Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?’ (II. 3. 57–9). Less darkly, Dumaine in Love’s Labour’s Lost, having become love’s convert, finds love ‘as sweet and musical | As bright Apollo’s lute strung with his hair’ (IV. 3. 318–19). In the light of such repeated Shakespearian associations between stringed instruments and wooing, and given that Cassio hopes for reconciliation with Othello via Desdemona (on Iago’s malign advice), why does Cassio employ players of ‘wind

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instruments’ (III. 1. 6)? Why does he fail to provide alluring strings or voices, although he seems infinitely more refined than Cloten and less puerile than Dumaine or Benedick? This anomaly leads into deep waters. After Cassio’s street musicians blare out ‘Good morrow, general’, Othello’s servantClown enters bantering: ‘Why, masters, ha’ your instruments been in Naples, that they speak i’ th’ nose thus?’ (III. 1. 3–4). Most modern editors interpret this by citing confidently one or both of the two hoary glosses summarised in the New Cambridge edition: ‘The Clown may mean that the music has an ugly nasal twang like the Neapolitan accent, but there is probably also a reference to venereal disease, which attacked the nose.’15 But H. H. Furness also identified another, almost wholly forgotten 1795 reading by Wolstenholme Parr, suggesting that nasal wind instruments noted by the Clown resemble the voice of the Neapolitan commedia ‘mask’ Pulcinella who ‘speaks through the nose’. Parr added that ‘the man who plays this puppet puts into his mouth a reed similar to that which is placed in the orifice of the haut-boy’ or oboe.16 The plausibility of Parr’s reading is enhanced because the standard explanations are unfounded: neither were the Neapolitan language or dialect nasal, nor does the ‘Neapolitan disease’ (syphilis) cause nasal speech. By contrast, thanks to rich harmonics, Cassio’s nasal-sounding wind instruments would be very penetrating in sound, as was the raucous voice of the Pulcinella (Punch) figure. Indeed the voice of the violent Punch character (today produced by the use of a reed-like ‘swazzle’) is typically unapologetic, demanding, uncivil and uncouth. So is Cassio unapologetic and uncouth, and very strangely so, just after his exhibition of extreme shame and chagrin for drunken misbehaviour (II. 3. 256–9). It has been proposed that Cassio offers newly married Desdemona and Othello a ‘second form of charivari [. . .] an Italian mattinata’.17 This could resemble actual Elizabethan practices such as invading bridal chambers in friendly riotousness. But, if so, ‘cashiered’ Cassio would be making a desperate mistake in attempting such behaviour at this point, having no warrant to assume the personal or community closeness that licenses such intrusions. It seems that, through Iago’s manipulations (and contrary to his usual disposition) Cassio has been transformed into a crude Iago-like swaggerer, and worse still, a noisy shameless Punch. Just so, transmogrified Othello displays a brutality that ‘would not be believed in Venice’ (IV. 1. 242) when overwhelmed by an Iago-like paranoid sexual jealousy (imposed or elicited by Iago’s cunning projections). The intrusive musicians hired by Cassio very likely played loud oboe-like hautboys. Those instruments resembled the double-reeded classical aulos, an instrument that featured in very famous ancient myths. In numerous Renaissance representations of those myths the aulos often became other loud wind instruments, including bagpipes. Those same complex myths, I have argued, are deeply embedded in the imagery and fabric of The Merchant of Venice.18 Those myths – comprising in outline Athene’s invention of the aulos, her rejection and cursing of it, its adoption by the satyr Marsyas, Marsyas provoking a contest between his aulos and Apollo’s kithara (lyre), and the deadly outcome of that struggle for musical pre-eminence – were referred to hundreds of times in texts available to Elizabethans, and were illustrated equally prolifically by visual artists (with a possible peak in the sixteenth century (Fig. 16.1). It is impossible to explain briefly how certain psycho-sexual aspects of that nexus meshed with deep structures in The Merchant of

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Figure 16.1 Woodcut from Giovanni Bonsignori, Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare (Venice, 1497), f.49v. By permission of the Warburg Institute

Venice, but touching on one way in which Marsyas’s story echoes in the play can conclude the present discussion of Shakespearian ambiguities about musical hierarchies. The vignettes, viewed counter-clockwise, show Athene mocked when playing her aulos at a feast; Athene seeing her distorted face reflected in water; the contest between Marsyas and Apollo; the flaying of Marsyas by Apollo; and Marsyas’s skin hanging in a temple. Many retellings of Marsyas’s story maintain that aulos playing is disfiguring or degrading, and that challenging a god is disgraceful. The Merchant of Venice, however, aligns itself with more subtle readings of Marsyas’s story. Not simply decrying Marsyas’s crudity or insubordination, many (including Ovid and numerous Renaissance painters) deplored Marsyas’s terrible punishment. Others, including Plato’s Alcibiades (unlike Plutarch’s), Dante and possibly Chaucer, even found Marsyas charming or admirable. Statues of the outspoken Marsyas stood in Roman fora as symbols of liberty, and provided venues for protest demonstrations. Moreover, numerous classical sources suggest that Apollo cheated in his contest with Marsyas. These describe Apollo fabricating tricky new rules mid-contest, or reveal that the contest’s judges are secretly Apollo’s allies. Although Shakespeare’s characters often name Apollo with reverence, caustic Thersites refers to ‘the fiddler Apollo’ (Troilus and Cressida, III. 3. 293–4), and Florizel in The Winter’s Tale brackets him with lustful deities who become bestial (IV. 4. 25–31). Shakespeare’s Shylock twice subtly echoes notions that wind-instrument playing is disfiguring and unpleasing. Yet when Shylock brashly provokes a contest with Antonio he comes to resemble Marsyas. For, like Marsyas, Shylock is defeated due to

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a combination of legalistic chicanery and suborned officialdom (e.g. Portia’s hidden connection with Antonio). And, like Ovid’s Marsyas, in the end Shylock is stripped of his identity. So Shakespeare often subverted received ideas about the hierarchy of musical instruments and players. It is worth considering if his fascination and sympathy with the changing status and conditions of contemporary musicians was provoked in part by his own engagement with a new, dynamic, often condemned, hierarchy-challenging art form – that of the playhouse which moved, quite contrary to the rules of hierarchy, between commercial theatres in London, temporary spaces in English provinces and abroad, great houses, the Inns of Court, and the royal court itself.

Notes 1. See Suzanne Lord, Music from the Age of Shakespeare: A Cultural History (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003), pp. 73–92. 2. 5 Eliz.c.4 (‘Artificers’) and 39 Eliz.c.4a renewing 14 Eliz.c.5' (‘Vagrancy’). 3. See H. A. F. Crewdson, The Worshipful Company of Musicians (London: Charles Knight, 1971). 4. See Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 107–72. All quotations from Shakespeare taken from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, electronic edn). 5. See Timothy J. McGee, ‘The Fall of the Noble Minstrel: The Sixteenth-Century Minstrel in a Musical Context’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 7 (1995), 98–120. 6. Crewdson, p. 32; David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), p. 55. 7. Marsh, Music and Society, offers many examples, including pp. 58, 163–9. 8. See Katie Nelson, ‘Love in the Music Room: Thomas Whythorne and the Private Affairs of Tudor Music Tutors’, Early Music, 40 (2012), 15–26. 9. John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 44. 10. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (London, 1579), p. 211. 11. Baldasarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561 (London: J. M. Dent, 1974) p. 101; John Case (ascribed), The Praise of Musicke (Oxford: Barnes, 1586), pp. 32–3. 12. Quoted from John Howes (1587), in Bruce Pattison, Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 11. 13. John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie (London: Maunsell, 1586), pp. 55, 50, 51, 53–4. 14. Thomas Whythorne, Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 205, 193, 205, 194–5, 203. 15. Othello, ed. Norman Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 121. 16. Wolstenholme Parr, The Story of the Moor of Venice (London: Cadell and Davies, 1795), p. 36. 17. François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 288–9. Cf. Rosalind King, ‘“Then murder’s out of tune”: The Music and Structure of Othello’, Shakespeare Survey, 39 (1987), 149–58. 18. For details and references see Sokol, ‘Shylock and Marsyas’, Shakespeare, 11 (2015), 337–61; Sokol, Shakespeare’s Artists: The Painters, Sculptors, Poets and Musicians in his Plays and Poems, The Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 179–211, 220–1.

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17 Best-Selling Ballads in SeventeenthCentury England Christopher Marsh

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roadside ballads were both literature AND music. Indeed, the very distinction between the two categories is undermined by the manner in which these single-sheet publications defy classification. Most ballads presented to the world a title, the name of a suggested tune, one or more simple woodcut pictures, and a text of between eight and twenty-four verses. Ballads were printed on one side of a piece of paper and sold for a penny each. Their texts covered a variety of themes, including religion, politics, crime, history and, most notably, gender relations. Before 1695, virtually all ballads were printed in London and then distributed within and beyond the capital by itinerant singer-sellers. These flimsy song-sheets were often first encountered in marketplaces but they subsequently found their way into a wide variety of contexts, covering the full range from common cottages and alehouses to the sophisticated homes of collectors such as Samuel Pepys (Fig. 17.1). Musical performances covered a similar spectrum, connecting the bawling balladseller, at home in the open air, with the highly-trained musician, happiest in the comfort of an aristocratic interior. Without the collecting instincts of Pepys and others, we would know precious little about ballads, for many ended up as wrapping paper (if they were lucky) or toilet paper (if they were not). The multimedia status of ballads – literature and music but also art – enabled them to enjoy greater reach than all other forms of print. The mixing of media within ballads also encourages modern scholars to study them from an interdisciplinary perspective. Arguably, no other approach can do justice to such a boundary-busting genre.1 This chapter will focus on the intersections between music and literature, gathering its evidence predominantly from a ‘top 100’ of the period’s most successful ballads.2 There are no surviving sales figures, and popularity therefore has to be estimated by considering a range of indicators: evidence of registration with the Stationers’ Company, including in particular the substantial lists of best-selling songs that were occasionally compiled by the leading ballad publishers in order to protect their copyright; the number of known editions (and the rapidity with which they appeared); the number of extant copies; the survival of songs into oral tradition in the decades and centuries after 1700; and the capacity of individual songs to generate new titles for old tunes, a rough and ready sign of their commercial success. None of these criteria is perfect for this purpose but it is reassuring that the indicators tend to reinforce one another. The literature of balladry encouraged musicality in a variety of ways, inviting sellers and other readers to imagine themselves as performers. In general, the words fit

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Figure 17.1 ‘The Delights of the Bottle’ (Philip Brooksby, London, c. 1672–4). Euing Ballads, 71, reproduced by permission of the University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections

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the surviving tunes remarkably well, though it is obvious that singers were expected to think on their feet, adding upbeats and subdividing notes when necessary. The opening lines of many ballads called for the attention of passers-by (‘Men and Women listen well’) and thus supported the singer in the task of gathering an audience. Ballad composers also aided performers by providing user-friendly lines such as ‘I wish I could sing it out louder’ or lively refrains that drew people in and made them part of the performance. In 1689, ‘A New Song’ appeared. Despite the unimaginative title, it was a sing-along success and has been known ever since by the mock-Irish words of its refrain – ‘Lil-li Burlero Bullen a-la [. . .]’ – which occupy a full three-quarters of the time required to sing the song, and remain infectious to this day.3 The intertwining of literature and music is also reflected in numerous textual references to singing, ringing and the playing of instruments. The literature of balladry is suffused with music, and in several cases, songs or other performances occupy a pivotal position within textual narratives. In ‘The Rarest Ballad that Ever was Seen’, for example, the blind beggar of Bethnal Green reveals his true aristocratic identity by singing an autobiographical song at his daughter’s wedding. His mastery of the ‘dainty lute’ suddenly makes sense.4 In other cases too, instruments represent something beyond themselves. Trumpets signify either aristocratic power, warfare or divinity, and they also establish interesting cross-currents between these themes.5 Fiddles, in contrast, are connected with sex, most strikingly in ‘The Nightingales Song; Or The Souldiers Rare Musick’. Here, a soldier sweet-talks a young maiden and persuades her to walk in ‘a merry green-wood’ with him: And having thus done, he took her about the middle, And forth of his Knap-Sack, he pull’d a rare Fiddle, And plaid her a fit, made the Vallies to ring, ‘Oh now’ (quoth she) ‘I hear the Nightingal sing.’ The metaphor is sustained for a further two verses, during which the maiden persuades the soldier to play his tune ‘over again and again’ because she likes ‘both the setting, | and tuning the string’. The musical jokes are a crucial feature of this song and presumably help to explain both its success in the seventeenth century and its resilient survival within the vernacular repertoire.6 Textual content played a vital role in turning literature into music but nothing was more important in this process than the tunes to which the words were set. The vast majority of ballads included an instruction that they were to be sung to one or more named melodies. The sheets embodied the expectation that interested parties would either know the tunes already or, in the case of brand new melodies, learn what they needed to know from the ballad-sellers or from musical friends. The tunes were not generally notated on the ballad-sheets but in many cases they can be recovered from instrumental music, both printed and in manuscript. The melodies to which the most successful ballads were set tell us something about contemporary musical preferences: a majority were in triple time or had beats of three units; tunes in what we

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Figure 17.2 ‘Chevy Chase’ or ‘Flying Fame’ would recognise as minor modes or keys slightly outnumbered those characterised by major tonality; melodies with four musical lines formed the largest group; and the vast majority required a vocal range covering an interval no wider than a major tenth. In the ‘top 100’, the most commonly occurring melody, ‘Chevy Chase’ (or ‘Flying Fame’), was used for eight separate songs and, not surprisingly, it has the dominant characteristics in each of the categories outlined above (Fig. 17.2). More unusually, it is a circular tune that never reaches a conventional musical close but instead invites continual repetition. In many respects, the tunes were relatively homogeneous but when it came to the structural patterns into which they fitted there was remarkable variety. The only patterns that recurred in impressive numbers were the four-line formats abcd and aabc. Beyond this, the best-loved tunes fell into no fewer than twenty-seven different formats. Since singability and memorability were the essential characteristics of a successful ballad melody, we can assume that early modern musical minds were not put off by structural variation. Surviving sources, chiefly instrumental music, demonstrate that many tunes evolved constantly. There was no correct form; instead the melody was an idea, a template, with which musicians and singers were free to experiment.7 For this reason, it is likely that individual tunes sometimes evolved out of one another. ‘Rogero’ and ‘The Ladies Fall’ seem related, and both melodies also reveal affinities with later folksong tunes such as ‘Now Ponder Well’ and ‘Barbara Allen’.8 Tune titles changed too, as publishers attempted to cash in on the popularity of recent songs set to established melodies. Thus ‘Fortune My Foe’ also became known as ‘Aim Not Too High’ following the success of a moralising song that opened with these words, and the Elizabethan tune, ‘In Pescod Time’ was called ‘The Ladies Fall’ in the wake of a notably popular, tragic ballad.9 Tunes were also diverse in their origins. Of course, it is often impossible to locate a first source but it can be said with certainty that these melodies had not all travelled the same road before being named on ballad-sheets. Some seem to have borne the hallmarks of rusticity and may have emerged from medieval vernacular singing (‘Chevy Chase’, for example). Others, in contrast, were built around fashionable continental chord progressions of the sixteenth century (‘Greensleeves’ and ‘Rogero’). Titles such as ‘The Spanish Pavan’ also implied courtly and international connections.10 Several tunes, particularly in the Restoration period, escaped from the theatres to take up a place in ballad culture more generally (‘The Delights of the Bottle’). These were trendy ‘new playhouse tunes’ but others had been in use for over one hundred years by the close of the seventeenth century. ‘Troy Town’, for example, appears to have originated in the 1560s and was still in use over a hundred years later.11 In the 1680s, the ‘Lilli Burlero’ ballad was set ‘to an Excellent Irish tune, much in request’. Of course, this may have

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been a piece of clever marketing; the tune bears a strong and intriguing resemblance to a pre-existing English dance tune called ‘Hockley in the Hole’.12 All in all, it seems clear that the musical eclecticism of early modern balladeers ensured a healthy measure of variety and helped to prevent a genre – which, paradoxically, relied upon formulae and repetition – from growing stale. One key task was to fill people with the urge to sing – in other words to help them make music from literature – and the publishers sometimes suggested more than one tune in order to ensure that everybody had options. ‘Young Jemmy’, for example, was set ‘To a pleasant New Play-house Tune. Or, In January last, Or, The Gowlin’. The first two melodies originated in the theatre and both were quite long and complex, comprising eight musical lines and ranging over one and a half octaves. The last tune was simpler in structure and narrower in compass: it comprised only four lines so that each verse of text required a full repetition, and it spanned an interval that was only just over an octave. ‘The Gowlin’ was also much older than the other tunes and thus more likely to have been known to listeners already. If they wanted familiarity and a comparatively easy task, they could use this melody; if they felt more adventurous, they could choose between two other possibilities.13 This constant juxtaposition of novelty and tradition is a very striking feature of early modern balladry. As melodies migrated from text to text, both within and beyond the ‘top 100’, they gathered associations and so came to contribute to the meaning of the words not only through their musical mood but through the baggage that they carried with them. Some melodies built up a potent connection with one particular theme and rarely strayed beyond it. ‘Cupid’s Courtesy’ was, as the title suggested, strongly linked to songs of love, and provided the setting for many romantic ballads during the last four decades of the seventeenth century.14 Robin Hood, another great hero of the genre, also had his own tune – a distinctive creation with five lines – and few seventeenthcentury listeners can have heard it without thinking of the outlaw (there are seven separate Robin Hood songs to the tune in the Pepys Collection alone).15 In other cases, the existing associations of a melody were apparently called upon more inventively in order to add an extra layer of significance to a new text. In the 1670s, for example, ‘The Catholick Ballad’ invited Protestants to throw in the towel and admit that they had been defeated by the adherents of ‘Popery’. The intention was, of course, satirical, and a contrary purpose was wittily suggested by the selection of the Elizabethan tune, ‘Eighty-Eight’, for the song. This was a melody with associations that were playful, patriotic and Protestant. It served to remind listeners of the ill-fated Spanish Armada during the run-up to its centenary year, and it left no doubt as to the ballad-writer’s purpose.16 There were also ballads in which the existing associations of a melody were purposely inverted in order to serve a contradictory purpose. The best-selling ballad, ‘The Delights of the Bottle’, heaped praise upon ‘love & good drinking’ as the primary ‘bonds that fasten us all’ (Fig. 17.1). This was an anti-sermon and the author had no time for the moralising of kill-joy reformers: ‘Let the Puritan preach against wenches, and drink, | He may prate out his Lungs, but I know what I think.’ Subsequently, however, the ballad’s ‘Admirable new Tune, every where much in request’, was also called upon by the creators of ‘The Prodigal Son Converted’. This song, not one of the best-sellers, urged listeners to heed the tale of a young man who passed through a fifteen-year phase of lascivious living before realising that

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Debauches are sorrows, And robs us of rest, Tis the temperate man With enjoyment is blest.17 This was a deliberate attempt to ensure that the melody would follow the prodigal son in his conversion to respectability. The tune’s on-going history suggests, perhaps not surprisingly, that it managed to retain its primary associations with unrestrained good fellowship, despite the intervention of this enterprising balladwriter.18 In the early modern age, broadside ballads were publications with literary, musical and artistic aspects, and publishers were well aware of the need to appeal to the ears as well as the eyes. One highly successful broadside included two songs about ale personified, the first dealing with ‘Sir John Barley-Corn’ and the second introducing ‘Master Mault’. The two pieces were set to the same tune, but in a neat juxtaposition the first was marketed as something for people ‘to Sing Evening and Morn’ and the second as an object for them ‘to look upon’.19 During the seventeenth century, compositions such as this one travelled the land in the ballad-singer’s knapsack, continually veering between silence and sound as he or she arrived at and departed each new location. Ballads were sometimes transcribed without tune direction into commonplace books, suggesting perhaps that they had lost something musical in the translation from print to manuscript. Much more often, however, the tune designations were carefully preserved by those pushing the pens.20 It is equally significant that the Barley-Corn ballad, along with at least twenty more of the best-sellers, survived to become part of the ‘folksong’ repertoire that was explored by its champions in the early twentieth century. During the long intervening period, the story of these songs appears to have involved continual movement between print and performance or between literature and oral culture.21 The notion that the former partner in each of these pairs posed a deadly threat to the latter has come to seem hopelessly simplistic. Early modern ballads fed and sustained vernacular singing-from-memory across several centuries, but the genre can also be seen as the originator of modern ‘pop’ music, with its commercial imperatives and its basis in urban centres. These, then, were its main musical legacies. Its literary legacy, mediated through ‘folksong’, can be detected most prominently in the unsung ‘lyrical ballads’ of the Romantic period.22 The institutional organisation of modern academic life encourages scholars to classify and segregate, distinguishing between literature and music. Early modern broadside ballads have sometimes been treated as one or the other, and sometimes as neither one nor the other. It is surely more stimulating to see and hear them as both.

Notes 1. See Natascha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550– 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Angela J. McShane, Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011).

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2. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the research project, ‘Hit Songs and their Significance in Seventeenth-Century England’ (also involving Angela McShane and the Carnival Band). 3. ‘The Woman to the Plow and the Man to the Hen-Roost’ (J. Wright and Associates, 1681–4); ‘The Catholick Ballad’ (Henry Brome, 1678); ‘A New Song’ (A. B., 1687?). All the ballads cited in this chapter were printed in London. See English Broadside Ballad Archive . 4. ‘The Rarest Ballad that Ever was Seen’ (W. Thackeray and T. Passinger, 1686–8). 5. ‘A Lamentable Ballad of Little Musgrave’ (J. Clark and Associates, 1684–6); ‘A Turn-Coat of the Times’ (F. Coles and Associates, 1665); ‘The Brides Burial’ (H. G[osson]., 1601–40?). 6. ‘The Nightingales Song’ (J. Wright and Associates, 1681–4). 7. Four different versions of ‘Derry Down’ are included in Claude Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1966), pp. 172–6. 8. Simpson, p. 612 (‘Rogero’), p. 368 (‘Ladies Fall’), p. 103 (‘Now Ponder Well’); Bertrand Harris Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, 4 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–72), II (1962), 328–9, version 14 (‘Barbara Allen’). 9. ‘An Excellent Song, Wherein You shall Find, Great Consolation for a Troubled Mind’ (F. Coles and Associates, 1663–74); ‘A Lamentable Ballad of the Ladies Fall’ (F. Coles and Associates, 1674–9). For tunes, see Simpson, pp. 227, 368. 10. Simpson, pp. 97, 271, 612, 679. 11. Ibid., pp. 171, 588. 12. ‘A New Song’; Simpson, p. 450; The Complete Country Dance Tunes from ‘Playford’s Dancing Master’, ed. Jeremy Barlow (London: Faber Music, 1985), p. 25, no. 40. 13. ‘Young Jemmy, Or, The Princely Shepherd’ (P. Brooksby, 1672–96?). For tunes, see Simpson, pp. 366, 463, 809. 14. The source of this tune name was the hit ballad, ‘Cupids Courtesie’ (F. Coles, 1650?). For the tune, see Simpson, p. 148. 15. For the tune, see Simpson, p. 608. 16. ‘The Catholick Ballad’; Simpson, p. 392. Cf. Angela McShane, Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography (Abingdon and London: Routledge, 2011), no. 472. 17. ‘The Delights of the Bottle’ (Philip Brooksby and R. Burton, c. 1672–5); ‘The Prodigal Son Converted’ (R. Burton, c. 1672–5). For the tune, see Simpson, p. 171. 18. See, for example, ‘The Young Gallants Tutor’ (F. Cole and Associates, 1675–9). 19. ‘A Pleasant New Ballad to Sing Evening and Morn’ (John Wright, 1602–46?). 20. Compare versions of these songs transcribed in the Folger Shakespeare Library manuscript V.a.345 (c. 1630) with those from the manuscript behind The Shirburn Ballads 1585–1616, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907). 21. For example, the history of ‘Barbara Allen’s Cruelty’ can be traced via the Roud Folksong and Broadside indexes and The Full English digital archive, [accessed 21 October 2014]. 22. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (Bristol, 1798).

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18 Italian Performance Practices in Seventeenth-Century English Song Elizabeth Kenny

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ong writing can be seen as a tussle – or a finely-achieved balance – between the needs of poet and composer. In this essay I wish to look at a third party who can enhance or disrupt this relationship: the performer. I focus on British Library Additional Manuscript 11608 (a collection of songs mostly copied out by composer John Hilton during the 1640s and 1650s), and a selection of publications by John Playford. Together these demonstrate the gulf between what a score might look like, and how it could sound in performance. The Civil War had brought with it the destruction of the kinds of court and church institution which had provided training and career opportunities for generations of composers, singers and instrumentalists. There was a perceived gap in the musical tradition and most of the period’s leading composers have since been consigned to the second rank – lauded by contemporaries, but often blamed by later critics for being too deferential to the poems they were setting. Poet Edmund Waller, for instance, had praised the clarity of Henry Lawes’s text setting, free from ‘division’ or ornamental flourishes: For as a window thick with paint Lets in a light but dim and faint, So others with Division hide The light of sense, the Poets Pride, But you alone may truly boast That not a syllable is lost [. . .]1

As Bruce Pattison put it, ‘poets liked Lawes because his music has insufficient intrinsic interest to distract attention from their verse’.2 The Hilton manuscript, however, complicates this narrative.3 John Hilton (1599–1657) is most often remembered as the prime mover behind Catch That Catch Can; Or A Choice Collection of Catches, Rounds & Canons for 3 or 4 Voyces, published by John Playford in London in 1652. 4 This anthology, designed to facilitate social music making among friends, contains catches and rounds by Hilton himself and by other star musicians of the Stuart court: Henry and William Lawes; John Wilson; Simon Ives; and others. Here, and in other collections printed by Playford, such as Select Musicall Ayres (1652), the musical settings appear very simple, even rather sketchy. The Hilton manuscript consists of music by many of these same composers, including biblical dialogues and theatre music dating back to the 1630s, as well as a

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concluding section of lightweight repertoire. But in contrast to other known versions of many of its songs, the settings here are highly ornamented. It therefore appears to reflect the activities of a group of singers – most likely professionals – adapting what appear to be simple songs to a more virtuosic and expressive idiom.5 Some professionals, Lawes and Charles Coleman among them, survived the interregnum by teaching, but moved to reignite their public performing careers in the late 1650s as the restoration of some form of monarchy looked increasingly likely. For them, the ability to transform a simple setting in performance was an essential skill, as Coleman, praising Lawes, observed: How greedily do the best judgements throng To hear the Repetition of thy song? Which still they beg in vain; for when re-sung So much new Art and Excellence is flung [. . .] As makes the newly-ravish’t ravish’d more:6 In other words, Henry Lawes never sang the same way twice. In both style and content, the Hilton manuscript offers a glimpse into this musical milieu. The opening song is a dialogue, ‘Come, my Daphne, Come Away’, by William Lawes which reveals how he and his brother might have managed to have so much ‘new Art’ up their sleeves (Fig. 18.1). Below the final line, where Daphne and Strephon finally sing together in chorus, are several versions of what might be added to the final cadence. The second two, for Daphne, have so many notes that, presumably, Strephon waited in a gentlemanly fashion for her to finish before embarking on his D of ‘Deity’. Almost hidden beneath the flourish of William Lawes’s signature is a suggestion for Strephon to embellish the opening bar of the top line: basses could get in on the act, too. Elsewhere in the manuscript two different scribes made similar additions, adding experimental roulades and figures after songs, or in the gaps between the staves. One of the most common of these gestures is a scale sweeping the voice up an octave, a flourish that appears most often in the songs by Henry Lawes, and which is one of his signature ‘moves’. A second type of ornamentation is most frequently encountered in songs by Hilton himself, but also in Henry Lawes’s setting of Carew’s ‘How Ill Doth he Deserve a Lover’s Name’ (Fig. 18.2). These are embedded in the musical text and at first sight do not look like additions. Lawes’s autograph version of this song (BL Add. 54723) shares with this one the sighing rests before ‘but’ and ‘burn’ – reinforcing a sense of spontaneous drama – but in a manuscript compiled for his own use there would be no need to write down the sort of roulades added in Hilton in bars 4 and 8. Hilton shows singers learning how to sound like the master. The frequency of dialogues, and often of brief chorus endings to solo songs, in Hilton illustrates nicely the twin functions of sociable singing and of a taste for smallscale scenes or dramas.7 Roger North had described the intimate performance at court of Nicholas Lanier’s setting of the story of Hero and Leander in Italian-style recitative: ‘The King was exceedingly pleased with this pathetick song, and caused Laneeare [sic] often to sing it, to a Consort attendance, while he stood next, with his hand upon his shoulder.’8 There are twelve songs by Lanier in the manuscript; during the interreg-

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Figure 18.1 Closing bars of William Lawes, ‘Come, My Daphne, Come Away’. Hilton, f.3r. Reproduced by courtesy of the British Library Board

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Figure 18.2 Henry Lawes, ‘How Ill Doth he Deserve a Lover’s Name’. Transcribed from Hilton, f.7 num, Lawes’s house concerts provided a similar performance setting, for gatherings of pro-Royalist poets and musicians.9 It is not surprising to find Lanier, with his Italian pedigree, and Lawes, with his interest in recitative, using methods of arousing extreme emotion that chime with a source that had long been familiar to their circle of English professional singers: Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (Florence, 1602). A translation of parts of this work, Directions for Singing After the Italian Manner, was first revealed to amateurs in the 1664 edition of Playford’s A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick (remaining a feature of subsequent editions), and was advertised as ‘written some time since by an English Gentleman who lived many years in Italy’.10 Caccini is known now as a leading light of the Florentine Camerata as well as an innovative composer of opera with his 1602 Euridice. His singing technique involved spotting places in the written text that invited passionate gestures – such as the sighing rest (in Fig. 18.2 above) which could turn into an ‘exclamazione’, a sudden outpouring at the start of a note followed by a diminishing and increasing of the voice. It meant finding dramatic ways to end a phrase or a piece, or to increase vocal intensity during it, choosing the words on which to introduce ‘graces’ – trills, relishes, backfalls, ‘gruppi’ (a two-note trill with final turn) and so on. Significantly, Playford’s Introduction supplies Thomas Brewer’s ‘O that Mine Eyes could Melt into a Flood’ as an example of a song especially suited to this treatment. The song also appears in the Hilton manuscript. Playford’s version might be seen as a ‘before’: a simple tune and bass with crosses marking three cadence points that might be suitable for a trill to be attempted.11 The Hilton version functions as an ‘after’ with as many as seven notated ornamentations.

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This approach to ornamentation was designed to move the ‘affections’ of the listener. It differed fundamentally from madrigalian word-painting of individual words as advocated by Thomas Morley decades before.12 Nor did it much resemble instrumental division-writing; tastelessly-applied divisions infuriated almost everybody from John Dowland to Waller (above). Oddly, where we might expect emotionally significant words to be highlighted with ornaments, the Hilton scribes often chose more neutral syllables. Figure 18.3 shows carefully-wrought ‘tryouts’ for both voices: bold flourishes on ‘ing’, ‘doth’, ‘&’ and most strikingly on ‘not’ twice, leaving the more obviously dramatic ‘Gods’ as a plain high C. Under the most daring bars ‘Mr Gibbons’ is written in very small letters. This is likely to be Christopher Gibbons, son of the great Orlando, who, finding that opportunities he once enjoyed in the Chapel Royal at Westminster Abbey and as organist in Winchester Cathedral had collapsed with the Royalist cause, was teaching and working in London on incidental music for low-key theatre productions, notably with Matthew Locke on Cupid and Death (1653). If the octave scale up was Henry Lawes’s ‘meme’, holding a high note (with a Caccini-esque messa di voce) and plunging headlong downwards on a wave of very fast notes seems to be Gibbons’s. Less spectacular but equally telling examples abound, such as in Robert Ramsey’s ‘What Teares, Dear Prince’ (f.26), where the words ‘woe’ and ‘funeral’ seem to cry out for the ‘passionate’ treatment; instead we find the now-familiar inserted cadence option for the word ‘thy’. These and many other examples indicate a search for ‘singable’ words with which to give the emotional power of the voice itself some room. To do this on important words would risk distorting the meaning and syntax: ornaments between them on shorter syllables enhance the text’s emotional implications rather than merely projecting its sense. This power of voice alone is important to those Hilton songs that have theatrical provenance, including several by Robert Johnson. Johnson wrote music for the King’s Men and is famous for his settings of songs for Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). Johnson began his court career as a lute player in Prince Henry’s household, subsequently joining elite musical groups at the courts of James I and Charles I: the ‘Private Music’ and the ‘Lutes and Voices’. His song, ‘Woods, Rocks and Mountains’ (Hilton, f.15v) has flourishes within the text on the conventionally expressive words ‘miserable’ and ‘hunger’, but the final cadence is subject to repeated experimentation in a second hand. The word ‘a’ rather than ‘tear’ is embellished and the word ‘and’ is extended experimentally, leaving ‘die’ clear of ornamentation for maximum impact. Since ‘A’ is the classic ‘singing’ vowel, we can see in action the process which Lawes described as making English ‘smooth’ for singing. He noted – as has almost every singing teacher before and since – that Italian vowels are made for singing: I confesse the Italian Language may have some advantage by being better smooth’d and vowell’d for Musick [. . .] and our English seems a little over-clogg’d with Consonants; but that’s much the Composer’s fault, who by judicious setting and right tuning the words may make it smooth enough. Lawes went on to make a more radical point: that the smoothing process to which English words had to be subjected for satisfactory results when set to music and sung was a shared responsibility. Skilled composers did everything they could to ‘right tune’

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Figure 18.3 Nicholas Lanier: final lines of ‘Tell Me, Shepherd’. Hilton, f.19v

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the words through judicious setting,13 but they handed over to performers reasonably expecting them to take the work further. Perhaps the most famous song in Hilton is John Wilson’s setting of ‘Take, O Take those Lips Away’ (f.56), the song performed by a musical boy in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (IV. 1. 1–6).14 In a play fraught with moral ambiguity, musical performance is subject to complex scrutiny: Mariana is keen to distance herself from the possibly extravagantly virtuosic performance, telling the boy to ‘break off’ and ‘haste away’. But she does admit to the emotional pull exerted by his performance: I cry you mercy, sir; and well could wish You had not found me here so musical: Let me excuse me, and believe me so, My mirth it much displeased, but pleased my woe. (ll. 1805–9) Duke Vincentio, as so often in plays, gives a critique of the performance as well as reflecting on its ability to stir morally ambiguous passions: ’Tis good; though music oft hath such a charm To make bad good, and good provoke to harm. (ll. 1810–11) Such singerly ‘showing off’ goes to the heart of our unease about projecting text: the singer is ‘in character’ as a forlorn lover, but is also highlighting his role as a performer in a way that sat more easily within seventeenth-century theatre conventions than our own. A poet might prefer the suspension of disbelief indicated by a simple setting, but a performance involving cascades of notes raises intriguing questions: how sad can a lover be if he can simultaneously exert such technical control, and is he therefore manipulating his audience’s emotion rather than sincerely expressing his own? Where might such manipulation lead? Do the notes also indicate music’s breaking out of the sense of the words in a way that can arouse admiration or even awe as well as sympathy? The twin dangers of music-inspired love and the solipsistic music-inspired enjoyment of one’s own melancholy make such encounters as this and the famous opening of Twelfth Night so rich: this manuscript example gives a sense of how a musician might draw out or even contradict the implications in the text, and have an emotional effect on an audience of which the poet might not be in full control. The Hilton manuscript often flouts the universally agreed rule that long syllables require long notes, and short ones short (Fig. 18.4).15 It frequently makes short syllables last longer than their prosody warrants, sometimes so long that the music is also gloriously distorted: the bass player (or singer) has to wait until the semi-quaver exuberance has finished. John Milton noted Henry Lawes’s ability to resist temptation in this regard, at least on the page: Harry, whose tuneful and well-measur’d song First taught our English Music how to span Words with just note and accent, not to scan With Midas ears, committing short and long [. . .]16 Extending innocuous syllables such as ‘to’, ‘the’ and so on would indeed seem at first glance to be an egregious case of Midas showing off to an admiring, if ignorant, audi-

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Figure 18.4 ‘Take, O Take those Lips Away’. Hilton, f.56

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ence. Caccini had also recommended that only long rather than short syllables be extended with passionate ornaments. Such syllables in Italian allow more room for the voice to ‘bloom’ when singing them. English musicians, on the other hand, found that smaller monosyllables were better suited to vocal acrobatics, leaving the important words clear. When music ornamented in Hilton is heard rather than seen on the page, the vocal effort expended on these effects directs the listener’s attention to the contrasting unadorned syllables which carry the sense and story. The persistent embellishment of the ‘wrong’ sort of word and the ‘wrong’ sort of syllable is a phenomenon which has striking parallels with word setting in Venetian opera in the 1640s. For English performers this seems to be a way of having one’s cake and eating it: not distracting from a clearly expressed text and yet harnessing the emotional power of sheer vocal beauty and virtuosity. The Italians offered a different rationalisation: ornamentation as the expression of nothingness, stressing the negative, transient power of beauty itself.17 This philosophical concept plays an important role in Giambattista Marino’s monumental poem L’Adone (Paris, 1623). Against a backdrop both of competition between Poetry and Music, and the idea (which can be traced back to Augustine’s De Musica) that the nightingale’s wordless music symbolised natural inspiration, Marino (Canto VII) has Mercury tell of a competition between a lutenist-singer and a nightingale (shades of Apollo and Marsyas here). The trills and roulades of her imagined song echo the trilli, gruppi and cascades of scales which we have seen in Hilton and which were a feature of Venetian opera. In the poem the unfortunate nightingale dies brutally: her heart explodes with the effort of all that virtuosity expended on syllables with no poetic meaning.18 As was often the case, some English musicians adopted Italian practice with alacrity, while the theory suffered a time-lag: Caccini’s music appeared in English sources soon after its Italian publication, but his instructions waited another forty years, by which time Italian theories of voice and word setting had changed. Hilton’s circle – and by now we can be confident they represent the most skilled professionals in 1650s London – used Caccini’s techniques but abandoned the rationale of long and short syllables behind them, recognising that English and Italian need to be set to music in different ways. It is this recognition that proved groundbreaking and liberating for the setting of English words in larger-scale dramatic contexts after the Restoration.

Notes 1. Edmund Waller, ‘To Mr Henry Lawes, who had then newly set a song of mine in the year 1635’: commendatory poem in Henry Lawes, Ayres and Dialogues (London: John Playford, 1653), bv. 2. Bruce Pattison, Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance (London: Methuen, 1948), p. 198. 3. See Murray Lefkowitz, William Lawes (London: Routledge, 1960). Ian Spink, while revising his formerly stern critique of mid-century songwriters in English Song: Dowland to Purcell (New York: Scribners, 1974), still distinguishes between text-oriented and musicoriented settings in Henry Lawes: Cavalier Songwriter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): ‘There are types of song where the musical element is not so much to interpret the text as to project it’ (p. xvi). 4. A facsimile is published by Da Capo Press (New York, 1970). See entries on John Hilton and John Playford in Grove Music Online.

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5. Mary Chan, ‘John Hilton’s Manuscript British Library Add. MS 11608’, Music and Letters, 60 (4) (1979), 440–9. 6. Charles Coleman, commendatory verse to Henry Lawes, The Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues (London: John Playford, 1655), b2v. 7. See Basil Smallman, ‘Endor Revisited: English Biblical Dialogues of the Seventeenth Century’, Music and Letters, 46 (2) (1965), 137–45. 8. Roger North, The Musical Grammarian, BL Add. MS 32533, 165v–166v; cited in Nicholas Lanier: The Complete Works, ed. Gordon Callon (Hereford: Severinus Press, 1994), p. xiii. 9. See Spink, Henry Lawes, pp. 94–113. 10. John Playford, A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick (London: John Playford, 1664), pp. 57–77. Playford states that the ‘graces’ described are not a new invention but ‘known to Gentlemen of His Majesties Chappel above this 40 years’ (p. 76). 11. Ibid., p. 78; also English Songs, 1625–60, in Musica Britannica, ed. Ian Spink (London: Stainer and Bell, 1971), XXXIII, item 104. 12. Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London: [printed for the author], 1597); ed. R. Alec Harman (London: Dent, 1952), pp. 290ff. 13. Henry Lawes, Preface, ‘To all Understanders or Lovers of Musick’, in Ayres and Dialogues (London: John Playford, 1653), n.p., italics in the original. 14. See John Cutts, La musique de scène de la troupe de Shakespeare (Paris: Éditions de Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1959), p. 1. 15. See Morley, Introduction; Thomas Campion, Observations in the Art of English Poesie (London: Andrew Wise, 1602). Campion – at least in theory – espoused the application of Latinate rules of quantity to English poetry and its musical setting. 16. John Milton, ‘To my Friend Mr Henry Lawes’: commendatory poem prefacing Henry and William Lawes, Choice Psalmes put into Musick (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1648). Also printed in Poems of Mr John Milton (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1646) and in Milton, Poems, &c. Upon Several Occasions (London: Thomas Dring, 1673). 17. For an analysis of this phenomenon in Italy, see Mauro Calcagno, ‘Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early Venetian Opera’, Journal of Musicology, 20 (4) (2003), 461–97. I am grateful to Valeria de Lucca for directing my attention to this article. 18. Andrew Dell-Antonio alerted me to Marino’s poem. See Canto VII, ‘The Nightingale and the Lute Player’, trans. Harold M. Priest, in Adonis: Selections from L’Adone of Giambattista Marino (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 116.

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19 From Tragicomedy to Opera? John Marston’s ANTONIO AND MELLIDA Ros King

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arston’s ANTONIO AND MELLIDA is a play full of music. Entrances and exits are marked by flourishes and sennets; there are dances and dumbshows; seven setpiece songs and snatched sung quotations from two ballads. Characters also use music as a spoken metaphor for desires, thoughts and feelings. But the songs are identified only by stage direction – cantat or cantant, he or they sing. Without their lyrics, let alone their settings, it has been impossible to evaluate their function.1 This chapter identifies a number of songs by Robert Jones (c. 1577–1617) whose lyrics closely match the dialogue and scene structures surrounding song spaces in the play. These songs offer indications for staging and explication of plot elements that appear in the printed playtext as merely inconsequential, incomplete, or just bizarre. And, reunited with their theatrical context, they reveal unsuspected capacity for ironic commentary. I argue that Marston was using music in a much more sophisticated way than previously supposed, exploiting both the vocal sounds of the company of boy players for whom he wrote, and the peculiar features of English tragicomedy with its mix of extreme emotion, gruesomeness, hilarity and satire.2 This chapter thus offers new insights into the phenomenon of boys’ company theatre, an art-form that has proved more difficult to reimagine than we may have supposed. John Marston (1576–1634) first appeared in print in 1598 with two collections of verse satires: The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image and The Scourge of Villanie. Both were censored and burnt under the ‘Bishops’ Ban’ (4 June 1599). He began writing plays for the newly re-established St Paul’s boys’ company at about the same time, supplying them with Jack Drum’s Entertainment, Antonio and Mellida and its tragic sequel Antonio’s Revenge, and What You Will. From about 1602 to 1605, he was a sharer in the Children of the Queen’s Revels for whom he wrote The Malcontent, The Dutch Courtesan, The Fawn and Sophonisba. A relatively early play, The Insatiable Countess, was left unfinished to be completed by others when he sold his shares and retired to an inconspicuous life as a country priest. A few statements about the two boys’ companies are regularly recycled: they sprang from the choir schools of St Paul’s and the Chapel Royal; the performers must therefore have been musical; performances included musical interludes between acts to cover the trimming of candles that lit their indoor, ‘private’ theatres (in St Paul’s

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churchyard and the old Blackfriars monastery complex, respectively). Apart from stage directions within the play texts, two pieces of evidence are customarily evinced. John Webster’s Induction to his revision of Marston’s The Malcontent for performance by the adult King’s Men (Shakespeare’s company) states that his additions were intended ‘to entertain a little more time, and to abridge the not-received custom of music in our theatre’ (Malcontent, Induction, ll. 84–5).3 And a diary entry for the Duke of StettinPomerania’s visit to England in 1602 records an hour-long concert given before the start of a play at the Blackfriars, when the boys performed on a variety of instruments (organs, various lutes, pipes and viols), and one sang to the bass viol ‘in voce tremula’ – that is, a highly ornamented Italian style.4 But this concert was not part of the play. The consensus is that music, while plentiful and accomplished, was an add-on.

Male Voices: Playing Women In earlier manifestations of the two children’s companies before 1590, the actors were, with the occasional addition of their masters or other adult choir members, identical with the ten or so boy choristers who formed their respective choirs.5 But when the St Paul’s company was reconstituted in the late 1590s, the exact correlation with the choristers was broken; as the young actors aged, they were sometimes retained.6 This chapter argues that Marston used music to exploit the peculiar dislocation of actor and role in this theatre. The very in-betweenness of these actors – cocky child, angelically voiced child, youth somewhere between male and female, all crossing age as well as gender gaps – is reflected in the choice of music and sound design, which variously, and sometimes simultaneously, underscores, undercuts, transcends and parodies the emotions portrayed in the drama. Marston is clearly aware that theatre works best when audiences are enabled to collude consciously with the fiction. His Induction to Antonio and Mellida flatters his audience’s understanding by exploiting the relative ages and vocal sound qualities of his actors in a show of their supposed ineptitude (sometimes too readily interpreted by critics as the actual ineptitude and inexperience of the recently reconstituted St Paul’s company). The actors of the principal male characters enter with parts in their hands and cloaks over their costumes to discuss their various roles. The actor playing Alberto (a Venetian gentleman, courtier to the usurping Duke Piero), who also doubles the ousted Duke Andrugio (Antonio’s father), seems more experienced than the rest, and gives performance advice to the others. The actor playing the title role of Antonio then complains that he is required to play, ‘Faith, I know not what – an hermaphrodite, two parts in one’. This, it later turns out, is not strictly true. He has only one part, a male role, but the character spends most of the play in disguise, first as an Amazon (a mythical female warrior), and later as a sailor. ‘Antonio’ seems concerned because his voice has broken – ‘I, a voice to play a lady! I shall ne’er do it.’ While this may comically reflect the adolescent actor’s anxiety about vocal instability and desire for manhood, the phenomenon of post-pubertal male actors convincingly acting and singing female parts, either because they naturally possess high, chest or ‘modal’ voices (tenor altino), or by using their head voices (falsetto), has been neglected. Male altos, whether falsettists or (more rarely) countertenors, are still a distinctive feature of English church music, and in the modern performance of operatic roles originally written for castrati. The plangency of the voice can be hauntingly

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beautiful, drawing the emotion of a part into the sharpest focus. Falsettists also regularly feature in modern pop and rock bands, with different, but equally emotional, and clearly sexual affect.7 ‘Alberto’, however, simply comforts ‘Antonio’ with an appeal to verisimilitude: ‘O, an Amazon should have such a voice, virago-like’, and then, more in the manner of a bossy head chorister than adult teacher, scoffs that if he can’t ‘play two parts in one’, he is no actor, but an ‘idiot’, and should leave ‘the world’s stage’ (Induction, ll. 65–73). ‘Antonio’ is not to be comforted. He worries that having got used to playing a woman he’ll forget how to ‘truss his hose’ when it comes to revealing his true character as male lead. There follow a few jokes about women wearing the breeches, and then the actor playing Mazzagente (one of Antonio’s rivals in love) absurdly adopts the ‘thunderclap’ vein of Tamburlaine to declare that he will ‘defend the feminine to the death’ (Induction, ll. 80–3). With some actors claiming to be quite unclear how to play their parts; others variously promising ‘more than, I hope, any spectator gives faith of performance’; or complaining of being treated by the author like a performing ‘baboon’; and with the possibility that the actor playing Antonio was visibly older (or at least more mature) than the actors playing his bombastic rival, or his father, the scene has engaged its audience in a metatheatrical tour de force, where what we find convincing may be very different from what is ‘realistic’.8 We, the audience, will have enjoyed the fiction of the backstage conversation, and will probably have found the ‘actors’’ desperate seriousness and anxious gender stereotyping funny. It will have set us up for the unreal realities in the play that is to follow, thereby allowing us autonomy to question the social norms and abuses it depicts (Induction, ll. 60–1, 110–25). Antonio may not be a woman, but the character is paralysed by circumstances, and by the fact of being in female disguise in a hostile court. In the speech that opens the play proper, he laments the supposed death of his father in battle against Piero, and consequently the inevitable loss of his promised bride, Piero’s daughter, Mellida. It now becomes apparent that the real business of playing is not so much the imitation of gender, as the expression of emotion: Have I outlived the death of all these hopes? Have I felt anguish poured into my heart, Burning like balsamum in tender wounds, And yet dost live?’ (I. 1. 20–4) His ungovernable feelings, on display throughout the play, are partly an expression of the anguish of lost love, ubiquitous in poetry and songs of any period, and of the loss of both family and agency. They also partly contribute to the things that go wrong in this play. They are simultaneously, therefore, both immensely affecting and slightly ridiculous.

The Sound of Cornets One particularly characteristic sound of the indoor theatres is their use of cornets rather than trumpets for battles, and royal or ceremonial entrances. Linda Phyllis Austern observes that trumpets would have been too loud for the relatively small inside spaces of the private theatres.9 But it is not just a matter of volume. A renaissance

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cornet or cornetto is a simple, though usually curved, leather-covered wooden pipe with a small cup-shaped mouthpiece. It has the reputation of being the closest of all instruments to the human voice, and it is Monteverdi’s choice of instrument to accompany female laments, the hallmarks of passion in his operas.10 Cornets etherealise the play’s trumpet calls. Like the young or falsetto male voice, crossing age and gender, they make strange the sounds of the world. The opening stage direction to the play proper ‘The cornets sound a battle within. Enter Antonio, disguised like an Amazon’ (I. 1. 0) is therefore worthy of careful unpacking. Musical ‘battles’ such as Clément Janequin’s onomatopoeic madrigal ‘La Guerre’ (published 1528), Andrea Gabrieli’s `Aria della Battaglia’ (1587), or William Byrd’s ‘The Battell’ (keyboard version printed 1591) are glorious, extended pieces that euphoniously represent the different stages of military encounters from the marshalling of troops to retreat from the field. The sight and sound of the effect here, however, combine in an androgynous expression of both power and weakness; Amazons were supposed to be fearsome female warriors, but, further exploiting the dislocation of actor and role highlighted in the Induction, this ‘Amazon’ is a man on the run. The multiple layers of this fiction again allow audiences space for independent thought. We can laugh and empathise simultaneously. When the cornets then ‘sound a flourish’, they both embody and satirise the ways in which the tyrant ‘Piero’s triumphs beat the air’ (I. 1. 30). Almost immediately, the cornet players are busy again with a sennet to signal the imminent arrival of Piero and his train. Modern editions of early modern plays tend to elide flourish and sennet with the single annotation ‘fanfare’, but the frequency with which the two words collocate in the same stage event (e.g. ‘Trumpets sound a flourish, and then a senate’),11 suggests that different effects were intended. A flourish implies something exuberant, or ‘flowering’; a sennet is, literally, a ‘sign’, usually of rank. In these first thirty lines, the three types of music played on the cornets – battle; flourish; sennet – tell the offstage progress of Piero’s story, while punctuating Antonio’s lament in antithesis to his expressed emotions. They mock his estranged, disguised status. But Venetian Piero’s pride in making ‘Genoa quake’ is premature. His troops enter to take up an aggressive stance in ‘divided files’ on either side of the stage. Felice calls a halt. Maybe there is a rumbling sound effect made by the trough and cannonball used for thunder, perhaps supplemented with a low drum roll. Maybe his observation that the ground shakes is simply a sardonic comment on the sound of the soldiers’ stamp. Either way (and both could be comic) Piero is alarmed that his metaphor is materialising in a real earthquake. This prompts the fool Balurdo, who is always ready to jump on a bandwagon driven by his betters, to ‘smell a sound’, while Felice uses the resulting consternation to moralise on the belching hell of Piero’s corruption: FELICE: Stand! The ground trembleth. PIERO: Ha, an earthquake! BALURDO: O, I smell a sound. FELICE: Piero, stay, for I descry a fume Creeping from out the bosom of the deep, The breath of darkness, fatal when ’tis whist In greatness’ stomach. This same smoke, called pride [. . .] (I. 1. 42–8)

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Synaesthesia of sound, sight and stink will supply a running gag through the play, and spectators can delightedly hope that pride might have a fall, but with his cronies flattering him, Piero is not to be daunted. A ‘fresh triumphal flourish’ announces the arrival of Galeazzo and Mazzagente, sons of the dukes of Florence and Milan respectively, who have come to do Piero homage. Piero exits purely that he may return to greet them with ‘more ample waste of love’ (with possible pun on ‘ample waist’), and orders ‘volleys’ of artillery fire to ‘play prodigal’. Then a sennet signals the entrance of Mellida and her ladies above. They watch as Galeazzo enters to be met by Piero in dumbshow as ‘cornets sound a flourish’. The ladies joke about his unsuitability as a lover, while Mellida regrets the loss of Antonio. The cornets again sound a sennet. Something in its composition, or the manner of Mazzagente’s entrance – perhaps wreathed in tobacco smoke or ‘whiff’ (OED n. 2 a) – prompts the witty Rosaline to exclaim, ‘Saint Tristram Tirlery Whiff, i’faith!’ Piero then re-enters to embrace him, prompting another flourish of cornets. They stand, exchanging ‘seeming compliments’ in dumbshow, while the ladies above pour scorn on the youth’s appearance. He is far from being Tamburlane: He is made like a tilting-staff, and looks For all the world like an o’er-roasted pig.

(I. 1. 124–5)

Piero and the others exit to a flourish of cornets and a ‘peal of shot’, leaving the disguised Antonio, who all this while has been loitering round the edge of the stage, to be spied by the ladies. The staging has occupied two levels, with offstage (and perhaps understage) sound effects, while the required music, intended by Piero to celebrate his victory and his political aspirations, has prompted ribald satire from the ladies, and both voiced and silent expressions of despair from Mellida and Antonio severally. The audience has been treated to a multi-dimensional, multi-sensory experience, and a succession of verbal and musical metaphors, which have again mixed high emotions with comedy.

The Power of Song The dialogue and characterisation of this play are emmeshed in sound effects and instrumental music. This allows the possibility that its songs can be traced through lyrics. Although facts about the children’s actual musical repertoire are scanty, we know that composers Philip Rosseter and Robert Jones were later, along with Marston, sharers in the Children of the Queen’s Revels, the successor to the Blackfriars boys’ company. Rosseter was court lutenist to James I and published a volume of songs with Thomas Campion. Jones’s six song books, published between 1600 and 1610 in flexible format so ‘that all the parts together, or either of them severally may be sung to the lute, orpherian, or viol de gambo’, as stated on the title page to the first book, make him one of the most prolific and popular of all Elizabethan song-writers.12 His apparently simple settings lend themselves to embellishment by professional singers skilled in the art of ornamentation, and in making words and music fit emotionally. Songs from Jones’s first two books (both published with the ‘assent of Thomas Morley’, a former St Paul’s chorister) contain linguistic and musical features that potentially fit all seven song spaces in Antonio and Mellida.13

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In Act II, Mellida’s gentlewoman Flavia enters in haste, carrying a ‘rebato’, a metal rod for setting a ruff – suggestively termed a ‘poking stick’ by Autolycus in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (IV. 4. 223). The two pages Dildo and Cazzo (both words, slang for penis) ask her to stay and sing. She replies, ‘I am not for you at this time. Madame Rosaline stays for a fresh ruff [. . .] Sweet away,’ but they insist on hearing the ‘descant’ she ‘made upon our names’, at which point they sing (II. 1. 35–49). Jones’s saucy song, ‘Dainty Darling, Kind and Free’, with its refrain ‘What I will do, with a dildo’ seems made for this scene. Scored for ‘Cantus’ with lute tablature, and with a ‘Bassus’ singing part and bass lute tablature on the facing page, the musical repetitions and ascending scales, particularly in bars 11–22, create a sense of rivalry between the two singers, while the lyrics (such as the injunction to ‘be still’) also imply action from the woman being addressed (Fig. 19.1). Other ‘dildo’ songs simply use the word as a nonsense refrain,14 but this song’s explicit invitation to a ‘pretty, witty’ woman to ‘but stay | Only till I can display | What I will do | With a dildo’ exactly reflects the cue for song in the play and gives ample opportunity for suggestive stage business, including with the rebato. The exuberance of the performance then brings other characters on stage: ‘Ferabosco with two torches, Castilio singing fantastically, Rosaline running a coranto pace’ (three light, running steps followed by a hop, which fits this music well); and lastly, Felice ‘wondering at them all’ – as well he might. The song’s sense of major tonality is intensified by modulation from what we would now call C major to the supertonic D major at the end of the second phrase (bar 5) – a device recommended by Thomas Campion.15 This entrance is all in preparation for Piero. Ferabosco gives the torches to Dildo and Cazzo who stand holding them for at least the next one hundred lines, a visual echo of the earlier ‘rebato’, and with similar potential for lewd play. Rosaline’s ‘servant’ lovers are also Piero’s sycophants, and she continues Felice’s image about the stink of this court, covering it with a joke about smelly socks. But Felice cannot cope with the way she seems to admit these fools and parasites into her service, and comments on the scene being played out before the two torch-bearing pages: ‘cry out for lantern and candlelight. For ’tis your only way to find your bright-flaming wench with your light-burning torch; for most commonly these light creatures live in darkness’ (II. 1. 55, 139–42). Finally, Piero enters; Felice and Castillio (and presumably the pages) make a rank for him ‘to pass through’. Potentially, cornets might play the ‘Dildo’ tune in march tempo, but the staging itself shouts, ‘this guy’s a prick’. Music and tone went hand in hand in the ‘Dildo’ song. But the two-men-wooing-amaid scenario is now repeated with three trios of dancers. Mazzagente and Galeazzo lead out Mellida, supporting her on either side; Rosaline is flanked by Alberto and Balurdo; and Flavia by Felice and Castilio. Piero orders music, gloats on Antonio’s death, and invites his visiting ‘Amazon’ to sit and admire in ‘contentment’. Perhaps significantly, he has to command the music again, remarking, ‘Beauty and youth run descant on love’s ground.’ This observation, which becomes a platitude in Piero’s mouth, is both strangely at odds with the ill-assorted trios of lovers on the dance floor, and an accurate description of the musical ideas of ‘ground bass’ and ‘theme and variation’ which they represent. Musically, the dance may be a passamezzo, an elaborate or choreographed pavan, with a recognisable chord progression which repeats to form a harmonic ground.16 Dramaturgically, the constancy of Antonio’s and Mellida’s love

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Figure 19.1 The two sung parts from Robert Jones, ‘Dainty Darling, Kind and Free’, Second Book of Ayres, I1v

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for each other is the ‘ground’ for the improvisations in proprietary lust of the other characters. As her suitors flatter her and insult each other, Mellida weeps for Antonio, but comforts herself by remarking: O music, thou distill’st More sweetness in us than this jarring world; Both time and measure from thy strains do breathe, Whilst from the channel of this dirt doth flow Nothing but timeless grief, unmeasured woe. (II. 1. 190–4) Antonio, whose blood, he tells us, is curdled with ‘boiling rage’, now falls, ironically enough, to the ‘ground’ in despair (II. 1. 95–200). Meanwhile Rosaline teases her inept suitor servants, reserving her right to sleep with whom she pleases; and Flavia banters with Felice about men’s and women’s constancy. The ‘time and measure’ of the music thus throws into relief the various conflicted, immeasurable and out-of-time (both disordered and potentially unending) emotions of the characters onstage. Finally, as Piero and the court retire to bed to the accompaniment of cornets, Antonio summons up the courage to accost Mellida and reveal himself to her.

Music for Change The power of music to ‘distill’ emotion and perhaps, thereby, to effect change now affects Antonio’s ousted father, Andrugio. Accompanied only by a page, and by his trusted adviser, Lucio, who tries in vain to calm him, he despairs at Piero’s perfidy. He too throws himself on the ground, beating it, and demanding to be swallowed up, then wildly rages that the rightness of his cause is itself ‘an army all invincible’ (III. 1. 39–86). Nevertheless, he commands his page to ‘sing [. . .] despite of fate’. Afterwards, the page weeps. But he has sung well. Indeed, Andrugio says the boy could only have been more affecting if he had personally experienced Andrugio’s suffering (caused by division in the state). Then, he would have ‘struck division [with its pun on ‘musical ornament’] to the height | And made the life of music breathe’. Earlier, Andrugio had attacked nature for her indifference, saying she was no better than a cunning painter who creates ‘seeming breath | And [. . .] appearance of a soul’ (III. 1. 31–2).17 Now it seems that it is music, not visual art, that has power to awaken the soul, for Andrugio ends the scene by stoically resolving not to try to regain his former state but to show himself as he truly is. Beforehand, he had exclaimed, ‘I’ll not trust my blood’ (i.e. my closest relatives). Afterwards, he is resolved: ‘I’ll show myself myself, | Worthy my blood’ (i.e. ‘worthy both my inheritance and my character’: III. 1. 98, 113–14; my emphasis). The final song in Jones’s Second Book of Ayres, ‘Come Sorrow Come’ contains both language and musical shape to mark such a change. Rendered in print for treble and bass voices with lute tablature, two long-drawn-out descending scales invoking sorrow are answered by an ascending scale to a ‘heavenly place where virtue sitteth smiling’. The play’s stage direction is ‘cantant’, and Lucio, perhaps played by an adult actor or the music master, might take the bass line. The second verse banishes pleasure as ‘bait’ for ‘sorrows everlasting’ and ends with the thought that ‘wise griefs have

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joyful turnings’. The song required by the play similarly marks a wise turning for Andrugio, with nothing but the song to prompt the change. Meanwhile back at court, it is still early morning, and a sleepless Felice continues to voice his complaints of the previous evening. Castilio enters, his page sprinkling him with scent, and announces his intention to sing: ‘I will warble to the delicious concave of my mistress’ ear and strike her thoughts with the pleasing touch of my voice’ (III. 2. 33–4).18 Jones’s song ‘When Love on Time and Measure Makes his Ground’ from his First Book would offer a courtly and ironic counterpart both to Mellida’s appeal to ‘time and measure’ in the dance (II. 1. 193), and to Andrugio’s refound essential self. In this attractive song, love is nebulous, ‘between a shadow and a sound’, and superficial, ‘not in the heart but in the eye’. Tears are but ‘outward streams’, while ‘False hearts can weep, sigh, swear, and yet deceive’. In a possible nod to the hour of the scene, love ‘is a morning’s favour and an evening’s frown’. Scored for treble voice with lute tablature, plus parts for alto, tenor and bass voices, its sentiments could be voiced happily by Castilio, ironically by the page, and bitterly by Felice. Afterwards, the scene continues as an extended riff on deceit and appearance: Felice exposes Castilio’s supposed love letter from Rosaline as something he has written to himself on an old tailor’s bill; and in dumbshow, Balurdo and Rosaline apply makeup, and practice ‘setting of faces’ in a mirror. Then Piero makes a surprise entrance, and a letter from Antonio to Mellida outlining an escape plan is dropped. He picks it up. In the ensuing hue and cry, Felice supplies Antonio with disguise as a sailor; Antonio, so disguised, is then ordered by Piero to pursue Antonio; and Mellida, dressed as a page, makes her escape, dancing. Flavia then tells Piero that Mellida is not safely locked up, as he had thought, prompting further chaos; and Felice sings the old ballad ‘And Was Not Good King Solomon’ (1559).19 This, with its refrain ‘Lady, Lady [. . .] my dear lady’ ironically (and in this case, also aptly) outlines the stories of those like Leander and Pyramus who have died for love and beauty, or like Jupiter, who have disguised themselves in their pursuit. In the next scene, Antonio ‘in his sea-gown’, feels himself to be entirely lost, ‘his spirit slipp’d away’. He likens the memory of Mellida to the faint scent of a rose once held in the hand. He falls on the ground. Andrugio, Lucio and the page enter, complaining that they are reduced to eating roots. Andrugio, who seems reconciled to no longer being king, is still distraught with loss of his son. Antonio, hearing his name, starts up, and they recognise each other (IV. 1. 1–100). Andrugio suggests that they retire together to a hovel where each in turn may tell his misfortunes while the other weeps in response: ‘and we’ll such order keep, | That one shall still tell griefs, the other weep’ (IV. 1. 126–7). This expression of sorrow in consort has the same formal qualities of response and imitation ubiquitous in sixteenth-century art song. Antonio promises to follow his father, but first asks the page to sing a song, a ‘strain [. . .] groaning like a bell | That tolls departing souls’, that will make him weep while he lies ‘grovelling on the earth’. In an enigmatic stage direction, the boy ‘runs a note’ and Antonio ‘breaks it’, speaking two more lines about his grief before commanding the boy again to sing. The stage direction is plural: they sing. The song ‘Lie Down, Poor Heart’ from Jones’s First Book contains lyrics that fit the dialogue exceptionally well, and an arrangement of parts that suggests a mise en scène not apparent from the dialogue alone (Fig. 19.2). The song is printed as a treble solo with lute tablature, but also with parts for bass, tenor and alto voices on the facing page. Parts and tablature supply an almost, but not quite identical setting.

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Figure 19.2 Sung parts from Robert Jones, ‘Lie Down, Poor Heart’, First Book of Ayres, C2v–C3

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Antonio’s tolling bell rings out throughout Jones’s song in the ‘D’s recurring particularly in the alto voice. This repeated note conjured (for the composer at least) possible aural puns on bell/hell and ‘D’/die (in Elizabethan pronunciation) in the song’s refrain, ‘And this is all can help thee of this hell, | Lie down and die’. The strange stage direction would be satisfied with the boy singing the treble ‘Lie’ (D5), and with Antonio attempting, but failing, to join in with the alto’s G4 (bar 3). Musically, a ‘break’ would signify an ornament, but G4 is the top note in the usual baritone range (the commonest male voice) and, if the actor were indeed a young man rather than a boy, it might be high for his chest voice, causing his voice to break or, as the character excuses himself, crack with emotion. At the second attempt, Antonio could take the tenor line since Mellida is available for the alto. She had entered, still disguised as a page, just as he was asking Andrugio’s page to sing. She has heard his protestations of love for her, but is standing separately, ‘out of sight’ of the others, looking on. In the tablature setting of this song, each voice enters in turn with a falling interval of a fourth or fifth, but the sung alto part enters on the off-beat, repeats the injunction to ‘lie down’, and has step-by-step movement. It is more like a series of sighs and, sung by Mellida, would supply a heartfelt commentary on the scene being played out by Antonio and the page (Fig. 19.2). Potentially, there are singers for all four parts, since Lucio could still be lingering at the rear of the stage; there is no exit marked for him when Andrugio leaves earlier, although he re-enters with Andrugio at the end of the scene. But even as each character stands ranged across the stage, the song, with its various voices imitating and interweaving sounds indicative of despair, would express that they are all indeed ‘infected with misery | Seared with the anguish of calamity’ as Antonio demands (IV. 1. 152–3). Words, musical phrases, staging and performance all combine. It is genuinely affecting. Then, berating Mellida-as-page for traducing Mellida’s beauty – she had declared, ‘she hath a freckled face [. . .] and a lumpish eye’ – Antonio suddenly recognises his beloved beneath her boy’s clothes, and breaks into Italian. His four thirteen- or fourteen-syllable lines, all ending in the name Mellida, are balanced exactly by four lines from her, ending in Antonio; then four lines alternately, rhyming; and finally three rhyming lines each (IV. 1. 181–98). The page jokes that a ‘confusion of Babel is fallen upon these lovers’, but also observes that it is ‘an error easier to be pardoned by the auditors than excused by the authors’. ‘Auditors’ is the operative word, for it is an aural rather than a semantic effect. Readers might worry whether they had accurately translated the Italian. Auditors will register the prose rhythm of the words, balanced in both speakers, the loving repetition of the other’s name and the mutual rhyming, and will easily get the gist. It could even lend itself to being sung as recitative.20 English church choristers are skilled in singing syllabic music that follows the rhythms of speech, and the stylised control that this demands of performers can have transcendent effects on listeners. As the page observes, ‘some private respect may rebate the edge of the keener censure’. He invites us to find it both absurd and moving. The lovers separate, and almost immediately Mellida is captured by her father. The next time we see her is at the singing contest that marks her forced marriage to Galeazzo, where she is already, and rather shockingly, dressed ‘in night attire’. The contest comprises two songs performed by pages – the first, Rosaline says, in a thin ‘high-stretched minikin voice’ (minikin being the thin top string of a lute or viol), the second, according to Piero, in a ‘good, strong mean’. Balurdo rushes in with a third

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song, which he follows with a parody of the popular song ‘Monsieur Mingo’, effectively demanding that he be given the prize (V. 2. 6–33). The contest is briefly rendered in print in stage directions and a few lines of dialogue, but in performance, it would allow ample time to observe Mellida’s silent grief. Since the dialogue also suggests that the music (both content and performance) has been at best questionable, the total effect is to question the situation in which her father has placed her – forced marriage was a recognised abuse in Marston’s England.21 A number of Jones’s songs complaining about women’s fickleness and men’s torments in love would fit the situation and point up, by contrast, Mellida’s constancy. But two songs found together as numbers three and four in his First Book seem particularly apposite. The relatively high pitch and limited vocal range of ‘She Whose Matchless Beauty’, with its many short-stanza-ed complaints about a woman’s disdain, would serve well for the first page, and the more inventive, but still misogynist ‘Once Did I Love’, scored for a lower, alto voice, for the second. The two together tell a story, which reflects the situation, since the second recognises that the singer has lost his lady to a rival. Moreover, the song ‘Fond Wanton Youths’, which immediately precedes these two in Jones’s book, would be a particularly good choice for Balurdo’s competition piece. It derides young men who merely think they are in love, and each of its six stanzas ends with a refrain condemning marriage as ‘of all our follies chief | Our woe to woo, to wed our grief’. Balurdo has, absurdly, been wooing Rosaline throughout the play, and this song abjuring marriage would explain why she, who has claimed the right to judge the event, and has announced her intention never to marry, should award him the prize of the golden harp – a decision which is otherwise inexplicable. Balurdo then proceeds to blow the harp as if it were a whistle, further sending up the event. But the play’s earlier laments now bring results. Andrugio enters as himself, dressed in full armour to offer up his head to Piero, thus challenging him to the moral high ground. Then Lucio ushers in a funeral procession. It seems Antonio has lain down and died indeed; maybe the ‘mournful sennet’ played by ‘still flutes’ is a recurrence of that tune (V. 2. 180). As soon as he hears Piero’s apparent change of heart, however, Antonio leaps out of the coffin. He and Mellida kiss: she in her night shift; he, presumably, in his winding sheet; two wraiths from the grave. Visually, the happy ending of this tragicomedy prefigures the gothic horror that will be its sequel: Antonio’s Revenge. Aurally, it is almost as much concerned with the question as to which of her many suitors Rosaline might decide to marry. Balurdo asks Piero to put in a good word for him; he agrees, and again calls for music: ‘Sound Lydian wires, once make a pleasing note | On nectar streams of your sweet airs to float’ (V. 2. 270–1). Again, this is both platitudinous and synaesthetic, this time conjuring taste out of hearing to vaguely sexualised effect and maintaining a certain whiff of corruption. There would be some in the audience who would know that Aristotle following Plato had considered the Lydian mode to be weakening or effeminising; it takes balance and ethos (which Piero lacks) to ensure its otherwise gentle, healing effects.22 The language of Antonio and Mellida is imbued with musical terminology, and actual music underscores, prompts and counterpoints onstage action. That much can be gleaned from the stage directions and dialogue. But the dialogue as printed is incomplete. It needs the music to complete its story-telling. While the songs identified in this chapter cannot with certainty be said to be those originally intended, their

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lyrics and settings offer explanation for what appear to be oddities or lacunae in the playtext; they point to conflicted emotions, supply stage directions, create a commentary on the action, and fully realise the heightened emotion and therefore the satirical potential of the English tragicomic tradition. The single composer also raises the possibility that song themes might be echoed in the play’s many instances of instrumental music, unifying its structure aurally, while reminding audiences of earlier lyrics, images and contexts. As Steven Spielberg has famously said of composer John Williams’s scores, ‘he’s made my films look better’.23 In short, one might turn to the plays of John Marston and, almost certainly, Robert Jones for the first stirrings of English opera.

Notes 1. Michael Shapiro counts an average of 4.5 songs in children’s company plays, as opposed to 1.5 in those written for the adult stage: Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 233–55. Paradoxically, R. W. Ingram (‘The Use of Music in the Plays of Marston’, Music and Letters, 37 (1956), 154–64) singles out Marston’s Sophonisba (printed 1606) with just one song, as his most musical since its stage directions are unusually full, specifying the instruments to be played for each entr’acte. Matthew Steggle, ‘Varieties of Fantasy in What You Will’, in The Drama of John Marston, ed. T. F. Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 45–59, describes that play in terms of the ‘repetitions, variations, and improvisations’ of musical fantasias (p. 56). 2. Ros King, ‘In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not to Lose your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England’, in Tragicomedy, ed. Raphael Lyne and Subha Mukherji (Woodbridge: Boydell Brewer, 2007), pp. 84–100. 3. Three versions of The Malcontent, including Webster’s revision, were published in 1604. David Mann, ‘Reinstating Shakespeare’s Instrumental Music, Early Theatre, 15 (2) (2012), 67–91, argues that Shakespeare plays too were musical. Quotations from the plays are taken from John Marston, The Malcontent and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 4. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), II, pp. 46–7; Harold Hillebrand, The Child Actors (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), pp. 165–6. On Italian musical ornamentation in England, see Robert Toft, With Passionate Voice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Elizabeth Kenny, Italian Performance Practices in Seventeenth-Century English Song’ in this volume. 5. See Ros King, The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 87–9. 6. Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Brandon Centerwal, ‘A Greatly Exaggerated Demise: The Remaking of the Children of Paul’s as the Duke of York’s Men (1608), Early Theatre, 9 (1) (2006), 85–107. 7. [accessed 26 February 2017]. 8. Single gender casting at London’s Globe theatre (both all-male, and more rarely all-female) demonstrates that audiences quickly accept that characters are who they purport to be. Puppets, cartoons and CGI have similar power and effects. 9. Linda Phyllis Austern, Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992), p. 64. 10. Cf. Wendy Heller, ‘Learning to Lament: Opera and the Gendering of Emotion in SeventeenthCentury Italy’ in this volume.

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11. Thomas Dekker (and probably John Marston), Satiro-Mastix (London: Edward White, 1602) sig. F4r. 12. See David Brown, ‘Robert Jones (ii)’, in Grove Music Online, [accessed 22 July 2017]. 13. Robert Jones, The First Book of Songes and Ayres (London: Peter Short, 1600); The Second Book of Songs and Ayres (London: P. S. for Matthew Selman, 1601). Edmund Fellowes, The English Lute-Songs (London: Stainer and Bell, 1925) edits them as solo songs with keyboard transcriptions of the tablature. There are facsimile editions by David Greer (Menston: Scolar Press, 1971). 14. Edward Doughtie, Lyrics from English Airs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970, p. 145) prints the lyrics from Christ Church, Oxford, MS 439, pp. 80–1, a ‘pedlar’s’ song, which lists both ‘rebatoes’ and ‘potinge sticks’ among other haberdashery items and has a ‘dildo, diddle, dildo’ refrain. 15. Modulation to the supertonic is allowed in Thomas Campion’s A New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counterpoint (c. 1610, sig. D5r), and was also used by Rosseter, but it does not sound ‘close’ to modern ears, and may account for suggestions that Jones’s harmonic writing is inept. 16. Giuseppe Gerbino and Alexander Silbiger, ‘Passamezzo’, in Grove Music Online, [accessed 24 July 2017]. Cf. n. 12 above. 17. A later comic scene between Balurdo and a painter denies this power in art: ‘O lord, sir, I cannot make a picture sing’ (V. 1. 37). 18. His name, recalling Castiglione, author of The Courtier, is one that Marston uses in his satires, particularly a prefatory poem ‘In Lectores Prorsus Indignus’ (‘To Totally Unworthy Readers’) in The Scourge of Villainie (1598), where a ‘perfum’d Castilio’ addresses his mistress as ‘sweet lady, fair mistress, kind heart, fair coz’ and is laughed at for his ‘wit’s poverty’. Marston is one of those who adds a commendatory verse to John Weever’s Epigrammes (1599), where Weever’s own poem to his ‘Lectores’ seems indebted in multiple words and phrases both to Marston’s poem and to this scene. 19. ‘The Pangs of Love and Lovers Fitts’ (London: Lant, 1599). 20. Without further analysis of the play’s music, G. K. Hunter described this passage as ‘operatic’ in his edition of the play (London: Edward Arnold, 1965, pp. xx–xxi). 21. Compare George Wilkins’s play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607; reprinted 1611, 1629, 1637). Robert Cecil made considerable income for himself and for the Crown under Elizabeth I and James I through the practice of wardship and concomitant forced marriage. Parliament would attempt to outlaw this abuse when negotiating James’s bid to unify the laws of England and Scotland. 22. Claude Victor Palisca, ‘The Ethos of Modes During the Renaissance’, in The Emotional Power of Music, ed. Tom Cochrane, Bernardino Fantini and Klaus R. Scherer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 103–14. 23. [accessed 20 July 2017].

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20 Learning to Lament: Opera and the Gendering of Emotion in Seventeenth-Century Italy Wendy Heller

All great amusements are dangerous for a Christian life; but among all those the world has invented none is to be more feared than the theatre. It creates a representation of the passions so natural and so delicate that it excites them and gives birth to them in our hearts [. . .]1

W

ith this revealing comment, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal provides a sobering reflection on the pleasures and perils of theatre in the seventeenth century. Although Pascal was not speaking specifically of opera, his observations about theatre’s subtle and natural representation of human emotion – and the implicit dangers therein – certainly apply to the musical arts, and underscore the triumph of the new aesthetic espoused by poets and musicians in late sixteenth-century Florence that ultimately led to the creation of the new genre. The problem of representing human passions was of utmost concern to the inventors of opera, who self-consciously – and with more than a touch of naivety – looked for innovative musical techniques that might inspire in their listeners the same emotional responses that had so moved Greek audiences in ancient times.2 At the heart of this endeavour was the operatic lament. Many were monologues in recitative form, written in versi sciolti, a sort of blank verse with seven and eleven syllables and irregular rhymes that inspired composers to write primarily speech-like, syllabic music that followed closely the rhythms and contours of the poetry. In other instances, poets wrote lament texts with even-length lines and regular rhyme schemes that were set as arias – lyrical song-like expressions in which musical parameters (regular phrases and melodies, motivic development, florid singing) tend to dominate. Laments are usually associated with the abandoned heroines of the classical world, such as Ariadne, Dido and Medea.3 Yet, women were not the only ones to lament; and in fact the use of an exaggerated, heightened rhetoric to mark some kind of rupture in the normal fabric of society was central to the very different ways in which both male and female characters – in accordance with early modern gender ideologies – expressed themselves on the operatic stage.4 Audiences were certainly moved by other elements of the genre – stage spectacle, virtuosic singing and sensuous love duets. Laments, however, not only provided characters with the opportunity to transgress traditional codes of behaviour, but they were also a locus of innovation for composers

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and poets, and as such provide insights into the changes that the genre would undergo in Italy during the seventeenth century. Without the lament – the passionate outpourings from the solo singer – opera, as we know it, might not exist.

The Solo Singer The importance of the lament in musical theatre and opera in the early seventeenth century was the result of a fortuitous convergence of a number of factors that included changes in aesthetics, shifts in musical style, and in particular the much-cited notion that modern music and theatre should emulate the communicative and emotional power of ancient music.5 Of particular significance for our purposes was the new emphasis on the expressive intensity of the solo singer during this period, not only on the stage, but also in church and chamber settings.6 Once poets, musicians and producers became fascinated by the possibility of producing a drama that was entirely sung, the focus naturally fell on solo singers, who, embodying various characters, could express joy or sorrow as required.7 Ensemble singing was typically relegated to airs and choral dances, and in particular diegetic music that expressed the shared emotions of the community. What made opera so revolutionary was the ‘invention’ of a kind of heightened speech – variously called stile recitativo or stile rappresentativo (called recitative today) – that provided the connective tissue between sung sections, making it possible for individuals to express in music the kind of shifting emotions that had formerly been reserved only for speaking. The composer Jacopo Peri described his process of composing in this style in the preface of the printed score of Euridice (1601), one of the first sung dramas set to a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini:8 I realized, similarly, that in our speech some words are intoned in such a manner that harmony can be founded upon them, and while speaking one passes through many other words which are not intoned, until one returns to another that can move to a new consonance. And taking notes of these manners and these accents that serve us in grief, joy, and in similar states, I made the bass move in to these, now faster, now slower, according to the emotions.9 We can glean two essential points from Peri’s discussion. The first has to do with the flexibility of tempo – the notion that the music might move slower or faster according to the passions. The more subtle point has to do with the treatment of sonorities, namely he implies that one might pass through any number of dissonant or harsh sounds before arriving on a consonant or more pleasant sonority. Expressivity was thus a result of creating a style of music more akin to speech in terms of rhythm, but heightened by a new freedom in the use of dissonance.10 It is precisely this style of composition that both Jacopo Peri and Claudio Monteverdi used in their respective settings of the Orpheus (Orfeo) tale.11 In L’Orfeo (1607), following the model of Peri and Rinuccini, Monteverdi and his librettist Alessandro Striggio the Younger crafted an opera in which neither the audience nor Orfeo witness Euridice’s untimely death from an asp’s bite; rather, he learns of it from the sorrowful recitation of the Messenger. The emotional power was thus firmly anchored in the aural rather than visual realm. In recounting his version of the myth, Ovid merely tells us that Orpheus lamented: ‘When Orpheus, the Thracian

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bard had indulged his grief to the full to the air above, he felt he must also appeal to the shades, and dared descend to the River Styx through the Taenaran gateway’ (Ovid, Met. 10.10–13).12 Following the model established by Ottavio Rinuccini, Monteverdi’s librettist Alessandro Striggio provides a text for that lament, which reads as follows:13 Tu se’ morta mia vita, ed io respiro? Tu se’ da me partita per mai più non tornare, ed io rimango? No, che se i versi alcuna cosa ponno n’andrò sicuro a più profondi abissi, e, intenerito il cor del Re de l’ombre meco trarrotti a riveder le stelle: o se ciò negherammi empio destino rimarrò teco in compagnia di morte, addio, terra; addio, cielo, e sole, addio.

(You are dead, my life, and I breathe? You have left me, never to return, and I breathe? No, if verses can do anything, I will surely go to the most deep abyss And charm the heart of the King of the shadows and bring you back with me to see the stars: oh if evil destiny were to deny me this, I will remain with you in the company of death, farewell earth; farewell, heavens and sun, farewell.)

Monteverdi escorts the listener through the various stages of Orfeo’s emotional progress: from the outset unexpected rests break the first line into melodic fragments, evoking Orfeo’s irregular respirations and apparent disbelief that he could continue to breathe while Euridice was dead; dissonances (such as the F sharp against the G in the bass in bar 2) express his anguish and Monteverdi’s emphasis on the word ‘tu’ heightens the textual parallelisms built into Striggio’s poetry (Fig. 20.1). But as Orfeo’s despair turns into acceptance and, finally, a resolve to rescue Euridice, Monteverdi changes the musical language in subtle ways: the melodic line becomes somewhat more lyrical and less fragmented, and the use of text painting (a low C for his description of the ‘più profondi abissi’ in bar 11 and an upper E and D to represent the stars that Euridice will see on her return in bar 14) seems to suggest that the bard has sufficiently recovered to revel in his own rhetorical skills, and has become emotionally stable enough to set off on his now iconic epic adventure to rescue his beloved from the underworld. As we know, Orfeo’s quest will ultimately fail: the operatic hero, like his classical model, fails to heed Pluto’s warning, turns back to look at his beloved and loses her a second time. Although Striggio’s published libretto for the opera concludes with Orfeo’s condemnation of women as he awaits his inevitable destruction by the Bacchantes, Monteverdi’s published score from 1609 – our only surviving music for the opera’s conclusion – ends not with punishment but redemption: Orfeo ascends to the heavens with his father Apollo, who offers guidance and consolation in his son’s moment of distress.14 Their virtuosic duet that concludes the opera evokes a kind of elevated response in the listener that arguably belongs far more to the sacred rather than the profane realm. Although Orfeo’s lack of self-control might have caused him to lose Euridice a second time, there was no punishment for such an unabashed expression of emotion in the world of opera.

Feminine Complaints Emotional excess came more naturally to female characters. Indeed, for poets and composers wishing to represent the laments of mythological or historical women on the operatic stage, there were numerous models from which to choose. In the

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Figure 20.1 Monteverdi, L’Orfeo (1607), Act 2: ‘Tu se’ morta’, bars 1–15

Heroides, the imaginary letters from a dozen abandoned heroines, Ovid had provided a vivid exploration of a whole range of female responses to failed love affairs – anger, guilt, self-loathing, vengeance and depression.15 Librettists also had at their disposal many of the same sources that Ovid would have used, from the Greek tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles to the plays of Seneca, the Homeric epics and even Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Dido (modelled in no small part on Euripides’s Medea and Catullus’s Ariadne) was first given voice.16 It is perhaps a fortuitous coincidence that the lengthy monologues of the classical heroines, so notable for the expression

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of extreme emotions, would so perfectly suit the recitative style developed by Peri, Caccini, Monteverdi and their colleagues in the first half of the seventeenth century. They not only provided a platform for the female singers who had become increasingly popular in the early modern period, but also fit quite well into contemporary ideologies about gender.17 We can see the difference between notions of male and female lamenting with Monteverdi’s next opera, Arianna (1608), presented in Mantua in honour of the wedding of Francesco Gonzaga and Marguerite of Savoy. A lament may seem ill-suited to a wedding, but in fact a number of the Ovidian myths that were dramatised during the festivities featured female characters who, after having lamented abandonment, found happiness with an appropriate spouse; Arianna, having been abandoned by Theseus (Teseo), finds love in the arms of the god Bacchus (Bacco). Unfortunately, the score to the complete opera is lost, and the lament is in fact the only portion to survive.18 Monteverdi uses the same basic procedures to set this versi sciolti monologue as he had for Orfeo’s lament; nonetheless the poetic and musical expression accorded the two characters is quite different. Instead of shock and disbelief, followed by heroic determination, Arianna’s emotions are more varied: anger, regret, guilt, the desire for vengeance, death, and as compared with Orpheus, represent a notable lack of resolve. The opening of the lament, for instance, where Arianna sings only the words ‘lasciatemi morire’ (‘Let me die’) is expressed musically as a series of failed attempts to ascend the scale. She begins with a mere half step (A–B flat), sustaining the dissonant B flat against the A in the bass, only to sink lower for the mention of death. She then attempts to ascend by half-step, now pushing upwards through the B natural to C, C# to D, only to plunge down the octave in despair, as if an unseen force were pulling her downward (Fig. 20.2). Later in the lament, her despair will be transformed into anger and outrage expressed with repeated short-value notes, dissonance and an obsessive calling out of the name of her lover, as she recalls the sacrifices she made for him: ‘She who left her homeland and kingdom for you, and who, on these shores, will leave her bare bones as for wild and pitiless beasts, O Theseus [. . .]’ (Fig. 20.3). The differences between Orfeo and Arianna are particularly evident toward the end of their respective laments. Arianna, about to curse Teseo, is overwhelmed by guilt: ‘It is not I who uttered those terrible words; my fear spoke, my sorrow spoke; my tongue yes, but not indeed my heart.’ Her agony is once again manifest in the dissonances (bar 164), fragmented, disjointed phrases separated by rests, and a descending vocal

Figure 20.2 Monteverdi, L’Arianna (1608): ‘Lasciatemi morire’, bars 1–6

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Figure 20.3 Monteverdi, L’Arianna (1608): ‘Lasciatemi morire’, bars 43–54

Figure 20.4 Monteverdi, L’Arianna (1608): ‘Lasciatemi morire’, bars 163–75

line (see Fig. 20.4). Rather than heroic resolve, Arianna, unlike her mythic model, not only refuses to curse her lover, but also silences herself.19 Arianna’s efforts to quiet her own voice, however, did nothing to suppress the power of her lament. Unlike Orfeo’s, Arianna’s lament circulated widely as an independent composition: Monteverdi himself arranged it as a five-voice madrigal and as a lament for the Virgin Mary, and the work was widely imitated throughout the century.20 Arianna’s lament thus played a role in codifying a veritable catalogue of devices appropriate for representing the common symptoms of female unhappiness: obsessive thinking and erotic fixation (returning to the same motive); loss of identity and disorientation (tonal instability); suicidal ideation and depression (chromaticism, dissonance, descending melodic lines); and fury and desire for vengeance (irregular phrases and repeated notes with short values). Monteverdi was certainly well aware of the differences necessitated

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by gender. In an oft-cited letter, he compared two of his most famous operatic characters by observing: ‘Ariadne moved us because she is a woman, and Orpheus, because he is a man, not a wind.’21 While Monteverdi’s primary purpose in this instance was to explain how difficult it was to compose music appropriate for non-human characters to sing (in this case, the winds), implicit is the notion that considerations of gender were an integral part of his compositional process. The accurate and truthful representation of men and women was thus necessary to move the passions.

Gendering Laments on the Venetian Stage Monteverdi was no less clear about gender differences in the operas that he wrote late in his life for Venice, where public opera, initiated in 1637, became a crucial vehicle for conveying ideas about men, women and sexuality. Opera, an essential part of the way in which the Republic represented herself to the world, was also part of carnival and thus linked in the minds of visitors and citizens with the many freedoms and pleasures for which La Serenissima was so renowned. Women on the operatic stage – whether suffering or making love – were no small part of that attraction.22 We can see some of the subtle differences among Monteverdi’s lamenting women when we compare his representation of Arianna (who was also revived for the Venetian stage in 1640) with that of Penelope in his penultimate opera Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria (1640).23 Awaiting the return of her eloquent and heroic spouse Ulysses (Ulisse) from the Trojan War after a twenty-year absence, Penelope sings a lament in the opening scene of the opera; indeed, one senses that this is a daily occurrence for the unfortunate queen. The versi sciolti monologue supplied by librettist Giacomo Badoaro traces the ebb and flow of Penelope’s own lengthy interior monologue which – like Arianna’s – moves from the consideration of the past (the misdeeds of the Trojans that caused the war in which her husband was fighting) to her own worth (the contrast between her own chastity and Helen’s lack thereof) and the impossibility of her current situation, her vulnerability, the sameness of her existence, her solitude and desire for Ulisse’s return.24 Both women are obsessive, but where Arianna’s fixation expresses itself in the repeated cries of ‘lasciatemi morire’ and reiterations of Teseo’s name, Penelope will return to a refrain ‘Torna, deh torna’, which unifies the lengthy monologue musically and dramatically, endowing her musical characterisation with a kind of immutability. Penelope is not so much distraught or suicidal as depressed; yet, there is a hint of optimism in her pleadings: her goal is survival, not death, and the yearning, with the ascending chromaticism that so aptly characterised Arianna’s desire for death and sensual appeal, is replaced here with a monotonal declamation in the lower register, with halting phrases and an almost breathless despair (Fig. 20.5). Of note as well is the relative austerity of the musical language, particularly as compared with the easy flowing lyricism of Penelope’s servant Melanto in the subsequent scene, who not only attempts to persuade Penelope to succumb to love, but is eager to enjoy its pleasures herself. In other words, where chastity seems to constrain Penelope’s singing voice, Melanto expresses herself without restraint.25 Restraint, however, is not a quality that Monteverdi would have expected his audience to associate with loquacious Ulisse. He, too, is abandoned: like Ariadne, he awakens to find himself left on a beach by the Phaecians, and he rails against

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Figure 20.5 Monteverdi, Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria (1640), Act 1, scene 1: ‘Di misera regina’, bars 1–11 them, unaware that they have actually dropped him off near to his home in Ithaca. Thus, while his recitative monologue in Act I, scene 7 resembles those of Arianna and Penelope stylistically, his emotional range is entirely different. His initial moment of disorientation is transformed quickly into anger at the Phaecians, and he does not hesitate to question the gods nor does he apologise for angry outbursts, as do female lamenters.26 He is not depressed or obsessed. The monologue, as Ellen Rosand describes, ‘gives the impression of an overall increase of intensity’, expanding from the small melodic units at the opening (reminiscent of Penelope’s first utterances) to a climactic expression of his anger. That the monologue, as Rosand notes, lacks an overall structure only heightens our impression of Ulisse’s strength and force; he is not sufficiently obsessed to sing a refrain.27 The role of Ulisse was sung by a tenor; however, by the mid-seventeenth century the majority of heroic roles were played by castrati, who often seem to have had more difficulty pursuing their epic quests when love was an option. Nonetheless, the laments of even these lovesick heroes differed profoundly from the complaints of abandoned heroines. Thus, for instance, in Francesco Cavalli’s Giasone (1649), the abandoned Hypsipyle (Isifile) laments her abandonment by Jason (Giasone) in two lengthy recitativemonologues, while Giasone’s primary complaint – in the form of a sensuous aria – is that he is too exhausted from making love to Medea.28 In Cavalli’s Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona (1652), Delio, one of the leading alto castrato roles, bemoans his tragic fate and torment in a G-minor aria that seems decidedly mournful; the listener quickly learns, however, that he is lamenting the fact that his beauty makes him too attractive to women (Fig. 20.6). It is no small wonder that it is the Queen Veremonda, not Delio, who manages to lead the Spanish to victory over the Muslim army.29

Virtue, Virtuosity and the Aria Both Giasone and Delio did their lamenting in arias rather than in recitative monologues. By the second half of the seventeenth century the lament-monologue had become increasingly rare, even for female characters. This was in some respects a

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Figure 20.6 Francesco Cavalli, Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona (1652), Act 1, scene 8, bars 1–5 result of the regularisation of the musico-dramatic rhythm of opera: speech-like recitatives in versi sciolti were followed by arias (with more regular rhyme schemes and line lengths). What had made recitative monologues so dramatically compelling was their ability to represent a series of emotional states, often in rapid succession, usually with little in the way of text repetition except for the occasional refrain. With arias, the emotional impact was located not so much in the close bond between speech and musical sound unfolding in a dynamic process, but rather in the sustaining of single affects through musical expansion. This meant that the poetic text had to be much shorter; an ideal aria text was one in which the affect was relatively straightforward, lent itself to repetition, and contained words with imitative properties that the composer could exploit. The proliferation of arias had considerable impact, not only on laments specifically but on the entire pacing of an opera. During a recitative-monologue, the dramatic clock seems to keep ticking; time passes in a somewhat more realistic fashion, akin to what one experiences in the spoken theatre; arias, on the other hand, all but bring the dramatic clock to a complete halt. Instrumental interludes or ritornelli articulate the section of the aria and can enhance the mood; musical expansion means that the listener waits while the singer moves not merely from one to another line of poetry, but from syllable to syllable. And with the standardisation of the da capo aria, in which the music and poetry of the A-section was repeated after the B-section (albeit with ornaments), the dramatic rhythm became almost circular, as the form of the aria required singers to return to their initial mood or idea.30 How might all of this have influenced the lament? First of all, the focus on the aria and vocal virtuosity meant that the most chaste women had the opportunity to express both joy and sorrow with lyrical and often quite florid singing, even in those situations that might have previously inspired recitative monologues. Second, arias may also have reduced the difference between male and female characters so apparent in the earliest operas. Some of the musical characteristics that we associated with lamenting women – the sensual chromaticism, poignant dissonances, abrupt harmonic changes and obsessive repetitions – became part of a shared musical language of despair that could be used by both men and women, sometimes interchangeably. One particularly vivid example of the annexation of this tragic mode of expression by a male character is the aria and recitative ‘Otton, Otton, qual portentoso [. . .]

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Voi che udite il mio lamento’, sung by Otto (Ottone) from Act II, scene 5 of Handel’s Agrippina (1709), Handel’s only Venetian opera. The scene opens with a section in versi sciolti, in which Ottone, insecure and unhappy, expresses his misery: Otton, Otton, qual portentose fulmine è questi? Ah, ingrate Cesare, infidi amici, e Cieli ingiusti: ma più del Ciel, di Claudio, o degli amici ingiusta, ingrata ed infedel Poppea! Io traditor? Io mostro d’infedeltà? Ah Cielo, ahi fato rio! Evvi duolo maggior del duolo mio?

(Otho, Otho, what portentous bolts of thunder are these? Ah, ungrateful Emperor, unfaithful friends, unjust heavens! But more than the injustice of the heavens, Claudius, or friends, Poppea is unfaithful and ungrateful! I a traditor? I a monster of infidelity? Ah Heavens, ah dreadful fate! Is there any sorrow greater than mine?)

Handel, as to be expected, sets this as recitative using many of the same rhetorical strategies that we have seen in recitative monologues sung by female characters (Fig. 20.7): dissonances (especially bar 1); jagged phrases with abrupt skips; chromaticism; and sudden harmonic shifts. But he also heightens the drama by adding orchestral accompaniment – something eighteenth-century composers often did for recitatives in highly dramatic (and usually unhappy) situations. Strings accompany the voice, and emphatic repeated chords punctuate his utterances (note the furioso marking in bar 4). Nonetheless, the treatment of word and tone follows the model established by Monteverdi and his colleagues for seventeenth-century laments. The difference, however, is both the fact that it is far briefer, and that it is followed by an aria. Time slows down in the aria that follows; Handel expands the first two lines of text so that they fill the entire first section of the aria (Fig. 20.8). On the surface it seems that the emotional volatility has passed, and that Ottone has become somewhat more stable; but at the same time the aria pulls us further into Ottone’s psyche, expanding and defining the misery that had inspired the initial recitative outburst. The text for the aria, shown below, consists of six lines of poetry; yet most of the emotional weight is expressed in the first two lines, which Handel expands to fill the entire first section, which given the da capo form, will be heard a second time, after the B-section. Voi che udite il mio lamento, compatite il mio dolor! Perdo un trono, e pur lo sprezzo; ma quel ben che tanto apprezzo, ahi che perdolo è tormento che disanima il mio cor.

(You who listen to my lament, take pity on my sorrow! I love a throne, and don’t care; but, alas, that I lose the one who means so much to me is a torment that so discourages my heart.)

The instruments, which in the recitative had served primarily to enhance the already expressive text declamation, take on a far greater role in the aria and are in fact central to its emotional power. Although this is among Handel’s briefest orchestral introductions, it establishes the mood without words. There is an introspective quality to the

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Figure 20.7 Handel, Agrippina, Act 2, scene 5, accompanied recitative: ‘Otton, Otton, qual portentoso’, bars 1–8 imitative passage introduced by the first violin, and the sense of lament is also invoked in the half-step motion from C to D flat (bar 1), which creates a poignant dissonance with the Cs in the viola. When the voice enters in the second measure, imitating the first violin, it is subsumed in the contrapuntal texture in a way that parallels Ottone’s own inability to separate himself from his misery, while the oboe, entering in bar 4 on the

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Figure 20.8 Handel, Agrippina, Act 2, scene 5, aria: ‘Voi che udite’, bars 1–8

high G, seems to be wailing along with our protagonist. Ottone’s emotional insecurity is heightened by the omission of the continuo in the opening measures: the keyboard and low bass instruments enter only in bar 5, intoning the same melody with the half step and repeated note figure. Later, Handel combines the expression of grief with vocal virtuosity, ornamenting the words ‘lament’ and ‘dolor’ with melismas. At the beginning of the B-section Ottone, expressing his willingness to sacrifice the throne, attempts to throw off his misery, but nonetheless settles into lamentation. The repetition of the A-section, required by the da capo form, in this instance is a manifestation of obsession. There is none of the heroic resolve shown by Orfeo or Ulisse; instead Ottone’s unabated sorrow is in fact closer to Arianna’s and Penelope’s, albeit expressed with a rather different musical language. Ottone, moreover, is not unique; in fact, he is only one of many of Handel’s castrato heroes, who – when abandoned or rejected – did not hesitate to lament their fate with the same or greater passion as their female counterparts. We might wonder whether this was a function of a shift in

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gender ideology or evidence that the castrato was sufficiently feminised to have access to the world of lament.31 But regardless, by the early eighteenth century the growing comfort with the genre and the delight in the expressive power of later baroque was such that even the most heroic of men could not be denied the privilege of suffering through music. If the story of opera’s first years might be understood in part as the development of the solo aria, then the role of the lament in that tale is of critical importance. Laments taught audiences how sorrow might be expressed through music, and demonstrated the appropriate kinds of rhetoric for different types of characters: a demi-god with insufficient self-control; a Cretan princess who betrayed her family to follow her lover; a chaste and long-suffering wife; or an impatient hero ready to return home. Orfeo might have been the first opera hero to move the emotions of his listeners, but we cannot underestimate the influence of those first lamenting women, who remind us that the most extreme expressions of sorrow and misery – so painful in real life – would always bring great pleasure on the operatic stage.

Notes 1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. J. A. Krailsheimer, rev. edn (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 232. 2. See Claude Palisca, The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989); Nino Pirotta, ‘Early Opera and Aria’, in Music and Theater from Poliziano to Monteverdi, ed. Nino Pirrotta and Elena Povoledo, trans. Karen Eales, Cambridge Studies in Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 237–80; Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 3–33; Tim Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre (New Haven: Yale University, 2002), pp. 17–46; Wendy Heller, Music in the Baroque (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), pp. 39–46. 3. William V. Porter, ‘Lamenti recitativi di camera’, in Con che soavità: Studies in Italian Opera, Song, and Dance, 1580–1740, ed. Tim Carter and Iain Fenlon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 73–110. On female laments, especially Dido, see Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 82–135; Ellen Rosand, ‘The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament’, Musical Quarterly, 65 (1979), 346–59. On classical laments, see Gail HolstWarhaft, Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (London: Routledge, 1995); for a similar phenomenon in English Renaissance theatre, see Katherine Goodland, Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005). 4. See Merry E. Weisner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 5. In Dialogo della musica antica, e della moderna (1581), Vincenzo Galilei (father of the astronomer) proposes that the ‘sole aim’ of modern music is ‘to delight the ear, while ancient music is to induce in another the same passion that one feels oneself’; see Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, ed. Leo Treitler and Margaret Murata (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 464. 6. Laments could also be sung polyphonically, as was the fashion in the late sixteenth century: Leofranc Holford-Stevens, ‘“Her Eyes Became Two Spouts”: Classical Antecedents of Renaissance Laments’, Early Music, 27 (1999), 379–93. Nor should the power of the solo voice in pre-1700 music be underestimated. See in particular Angelo Poliziano’s discussion in 1488 of the performance by the young Fabio Orsini, cited by Robert Toft in With

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

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Passionate Voices: Recreating Singing in Sixteenth-Century England and Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 2–3. For an excellent overview of the solo song in early seventeenth-century Italy, see Margaret Murata, ‘Image and Eloquence: Secular Song’, in The Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Music, ed. Tim Carter and John Butt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 378–425. Peri’s Euridice was performed first in May 1600 at the Pitti Palace and then again in October as part of the wedding festivities for Maria de Medici and Henry IV; see Tim Carter, ‘Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1600): A Contextual Study’, The Music Review, 43 (1982), 89–103; Kelley Harness, ‘Le tre Euridici: Characterization and Allegory in the Euridici of Peri and Caccini’, Journal for the Society of Seventeenth-Century Music, 9 (1) [accessed 16 April 2015]; Tim Carter and Richard A. Goldthwaite, Orpheus in the Marketplace: Jacopo Peri and the Economy of Late Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Jacopo Peri, Le musiche di Iacopo Peri [. . .] sopra L’Euridice (Florence: Marescotti, 1601; reprinted New York: Broude Brothers, 1973). For the full text with English translation, see Composing Opera from ‘Dafne’ to ‘Ulisse Errante’, ed. Tim Carter (Krakow: Musica Iogellonica, 1994). The passage is also translated and excerpted in Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, p. 660. Claudio Monteverdi’s brother, Giulio Cesare, famously described this as the ‘seconda prattica’ that justified the use of dissonance for text expression; see Massimo Ossi, Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi’s Seconda Prattica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 27–32. On L’Orfeo, see Tim Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 109–37; Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); John Whenham, Claudio Monteverdi: Orfeo. Cambridge Opera Handbook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Ovid, Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation, trans. David Raeburn, intro. Denis Feeney (London: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 220. Gary Tomlinson, ‘Madrigal, Monody, and Monteverdi’s “via actuale alla imitatione”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 34 (1981), 60–108. On the two endings of Orfeo, see Iain Fenlon, ‘The Mantuan “Orfeo”’, in Orfeo, ed. John Whenham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 1–19; Barbara Russano Hanning, ‘The Ending of L’Orfeo: Father, Son, and Rinuccini’, Journal for the Society of Seventeenth-Century Music, 9 (1) [accessed 29 March 2017]. On the use of Ovid’s Heroides in early opera, see Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker, ‘Production, Consumption and Political Function of Seventeenth-Century Opera’, Early Music History, 4 (1984), 254–9; Wendy Heller, ‘Hypsipyle, Medea, and the Ovidian Imagination: Taming the Hero in Cavalli’s Giasone’, in Readying Cavalli’s Operas for the Stage: Manuscript, Edition, Production, ed. Ellen Rosand (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 167–86. Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, especially chapter 3. Margaret Murata, ‘The Recitative Soliloquy’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 32 (1979), 45–73. See Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘“There was not one lady who failed to shed a tear”: Arianna’s Lament and the Construction of Modern Womanhood’, Early Music, 22 (1) (February 1994), 21–41; Tim Carter, ‘Lamenting Ariadne?’, Early Music, 27 (3) (August 1999), 395–405; also Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, pp. 82–5; Porter; Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 362–7; Heller, ‘Rescuing Ariadne’, Early Music, 45 (3) (August 2017), 377–91.

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19. Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, pp. 84–5. 20. See Porter. As Rosand notes (Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, pp. 362–88), not all laments were constructed as recitative monologues. Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa, for instance, which is scored for three male singers and a solo female voice, represents an opposite strategy. It is organised by means of a repeated chromatic descending tetrachord in the bass; Monteverdi used this technique in explicitly erotic, but not necessarily tragic situations. Rosand also discusses the numerous strophic laments that became particularly popular in the second half of the seventeenth century. 21. The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi, ed. and trans. Denis Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 117. 22. Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, pp. 6–9. 23. There is an extensive bibliography on Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. See especially Ellen Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 24. For a detailed analysis of text and music of Penelope’s Act I, scene 1 monologue, including a modern edition of the entire scene, see Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, pp. 251–68. 25. On the relative lack of lyrical singing in Penelope’s music, see Tim Carter, ‘“In Love’s Harmonious Concert”? Penelope and the Interpretation of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 5 (1999), 395–405; for a similar phenomenon in the lament of Octavia (Ottavia) in L’incoronazione di Poppea, see Heller, ‘O delle donne miserabil sesso: Tarabotti, Ottavia and L’incoronazione di Poppea’, Saggiatore musicale, 7 (2000), 5–46. 26. On Ulisse’s monologue, see the detailed analysis in Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, pp. 278–86, to which this discussion is indebted. 27. Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, p. 284. As Rosand notes, by the end of the Act, Ulisse is singing a strophic aria that demonstrates clearly his recovered equilibrium and confidence: ‘His dependency conquered, he is already on the move toward his goal, a changed, or at least transformed, man. She stands still, waiting’ (p. 287). 28. Heller, ‘Hypsipyle’, pp. 168–72. 29. Wendy Heller, ‘Amazons, Astrology, and the House of Aragon: Veremonda tra Venezia e Napoli’, in La circolazione dell’opera veneziana del Seicento, ed. Dinko Fabris (Naples: Editoriale Scientifiche, 2005), pp. 147–62. Heller’s critical edition of Cavalli’s Veremonda, l’amazzone d’Aragona is currently under preparation for Bärenreiter. 30. Nathan Link, ‘Continuities of Time in Handel’s Operas’, in Word, Image, and Song: Volume 2, Essays on Musical Voices, ed. Rebecca Cypess, Beth L. Glixon and Nathan Link (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013), pp. 46–71. 31. Roger Freitas, ‘Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato’, Journal of Musicology, 20 (2003), 196–249.

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21 All-Sung English Opera Experiments in the Seventeenth Century Andrew Pinnock

That Sir William Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes was the first Opera we ever had in England, no Man can deny [. . .]1

C

onsidering the central importance of the court masque to royal imagemakers in early seventeenth-century England, William Davenant was pushing his luck when he experimented with masque-inspired ‘opera’ four years before the Restoration. His motives have been misunderstood. Davenant saw The Siege of Rhodes not as a ‘Commonwealth subterfuge’, sung only because spoken delivery of the same lines would have been unlawful,2 but as a masque derivative from which politically inexpedient elements had been stripped away. He aimed to develop a new audience for progressive art, hoping to improve his patrons’ taste and even improve their behaviour while selling them entertainment and spectacle.3 Davenant adopted a hybrid verse form for his Siege of Rhodes libretto, intermingling regular heroic couplets with freer ‘Pindaric’ sections very likely inspired by Abraham Cowley’s Pindaric Odes. These were published in 1656, the year of The Siege’s first production; Cowley and Davenant were friends and professional associates.4 To illustrate: Cowley Stop, stop, my Muse, allay thy vigorous heat, Kindled at a Hint so Great. Hold thy Pindarique Pegasus closely in, Which does to rage begin, And this steep Hill would gallop up with violent course, ’Tis an unruly, and a hard-mouth’d Horse [. . .]5 Davenant Alphonso. Tear up my wounds! I had a passion, coarse And rude enough to strengthen jealousy; But want that more refined and quicker force Which does outwrestle nature when we die. Turn to a tempest all my inward strife: Let it not last, But in a blast Spend this infectious vapour, life!6 (Entry V, 256–63)

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Cowley hoped to anglicise or naturalise a particularly expressive form of classical poetry, encouraging his readers to think about the sound of the poetry as it might have been read aloud in ancient Greece and to accept that in seventeenth-century England that sound was irrecoverable: ‘we must consider that our Ears are strangers to the Musick of his Numbers, which sometimes (especially in Songs and Odes) almost without any thing else, makes an excellent Poet [. . .]’.7 Davenant took Cowley’s thoughtexperiment further, working with expert composers and vocal performers to construct an English sound-world matching Pindar’s for vigour and variety, and inviting English audiences to step into it. None of the vocal music written for The Siege of Rhodes survives. Simple tunes would have been provided for all the obvious lyrics (for multi-stanza songs and choruses spaced apart from other text). Because of its metrical fluidity, the rest of the libretto could only have been satisfactorily set in speech-like stilo recitativo. Davenant switched from heroic to Pindaric and back again not to signal changes in the emotional temperature on stage (kept high throughout) but to avoid poetical monotony, and the musical monotony to which he feared that might lead. Paradoxically it was the absence of royal patronage, and dearth of opportunity for elite musicians during the interregnum that made the first English opera possible. Davenant’s team of singers and instrumentalists went back to work at court as soon as they could, so from 1660 onwards, experiments with opera could continue only on terms agreeable to Charles and his advisers. Two commercial theatres reopened for business in 1660, both with royal licences and both subject to close court oversight; Davenant managed one. He adapted The Siege of Rhodes for non-operatic production early on, bulking out the original libretto with 130 extra lines and grafting a whole new Second Part of The Siege of Rhodes onto the first (because his newly-recruited actors spoke at a faster pace than singers sang, getting through their words quicker). Contemporaries recognised The Siege of Rhodes both as the first opera we ever had in England, and as the Restoration’s archetypal rhymed heroic play: it served as a pattern for the rising generation of poet-playwrights pitching scripts to the rival theatres. Thanks to The Siege of Rhodes, as Nancy Klein Maguire comes close to saying, all-sung opera was a possibility latent within heroic drama, buried beneath it perhaps, waiting its moment to re-emerge.8 Efforts to revive the Jacobean-Caroline court masque tradition might have been made earlier in Charles’s reign had succession issues not proved so intractable. Charles married in 1662, but fathered no legitimate heirs. His brother James, Duke of York, did better: two daughters by his first wife survived to maturity, later to become Queen Mary and Queen Anne. Not a textbook perfect but an adequately functional royal family existed by 1674 therefore, capable of representing itself in a masque and possibly expected to do so. Calisto was their vehicle: a five-act rhyming play scripted by John Crowne, allotting major speaking roles to Mary and Anne, and giving Charles’s dashingly attractive bastard son James, Duke of Monmouth, opportunities both to dance, and to display his manly presence in tableaux vivants. Following the commercial theatre’s tried-and-tested ‘semi-opera’ formula, musical episodes were supplied by court singers and instrumentalists barely overlapping with the acting cast.9 After six months of rehearsal, Calisto was performed several times in Whitehall Palace’s private theatre, to audiences well enough connected at court to be allowed in.10

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Production records for Calisto have been exhaustively studied. Calisto’s playtext, published in 1675, has received nowhere near as much attention. Even Andrew Walkling understates its ingenuity as a propaganda vehicle simultaneously celebrating Stuart fecundity, Stuart virtue embodied in the chaste duchesses, and Stuart magnetism embodied in the athletic Monmouth, while accommodating Charles’s well-known lecherousness – and quietly apologising for its consequences.11 From a normally-adjusted, modern male perspective, let alone a feminist one, Calisto is a deeply unpleasant piece of writing, mocking Queen Catherine’s childlessness in a vicious way, and plunging its juvenile cast – mostly teenage girls – into a hyper-sexualised morass: predatory male behaviour is expected, condoned and even applauded. But Crowne, obviously not addressing modern audiences, had judged the tone perfectly. He used keen-edged, superficially playful satire to bridge the by now unignorable gap between royal promise and royal performance: what the restored Stuart monarchy could and should have been, and what regrettably it had become. His method – ironic idealisation we could call it – was taken up by other court writers when required to say flattering yet believable things about Charles II, simultaneously to the king’s face and to a court audience. Charles starred in Calisto as his flawed but unapologetic self.12 Several of Charles’s mistresses sang in Calisto, redeeming his most notorious fault through art and through their own artistic daring. Calisto celebrated royal sleaze: it was a brilliant achievement, and one on which the creators of all-sung, masque-inspired, royal opera nearly a decade later would be able to build. Charles emerged triumphant from the ‘Exclusion Crisis’ of 1678–81.13 He survived two assassination plots, one invented, the other real, but botched in its execution. For aesthetic relief he turned away from court theatre to more permanent-seeming palace development initiatives – first the Windsor Castle ‘Great Works’ of 1674–85, then (starting in 1683) a frenzy of work on brand new Winchester Palace.14 As the Windsor Great Works neared completion and Winchester Palace reached roof height, Charles thought to mark his achievements both as a political survivor and as a builder for the future by commissioning a group of operas in which he and his grands projets would figure largely: Albion and Albanius, Dido and Aeneas, King Arthur and Venus and Adonis. All four made inventive use of visual imagery instantly recognisable to members of Charles II’s court, lifting key characters and symbols from the newly-painted ceilings in Charles II’s remodelled Windsor state apartments.15 Charles appeared in the middle of the ceiling of the King’s Drawing Room, pictured as Phoebus riding in the chariot of the sun. Poets honouring Charles in 1660, at the Restoration, had made predictably extensive use of new-dawn, sun-kissed spring renewal metaphors; the Windsor ceilings made these visually explicit. In Charles’s Presence Chamber, Venus appeared twice: as a star shining above the throne (labelled ‘Sydus Carolinum’, Charles’s Star); and again – more arrestingly – as the naked goddess Venus, riding in a sea-car drawn by nereids and tritons. A star wrongly but widely identified as Venus had been seen in the sky at noon on the day of Charles’s birth: his lecherous proclivities were predestined. In St George’s Hall, the great hall of Windsor Castle, a large star of the Order of the Garter filled the central ceiling panel, set off by Garter regalia in other wall and ceiling panels. The Order of the Garter was, to British minds, the world’s foremost order of chivalry. Charles presided over it much as King Arthur led the Knights of the Round

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Table in Britain’s mythic past. Arthurian allegory had of course featured frequently in Jacobean and Caroline court masques: Charles II’s Winchester Palace picked up the thread, and made Arthurian allegory concrete by annexing the great hall of otherwise ruined Winchester Castle, on one wall of which hung ‘King Arthur’s’ Round Table.16 (It is still there.) In May 1682, the two theatre companies that had since 1660 been competing away each other’s profits agreed to merge. The United Company thus created ran two theatre buildings but only performed in one at a time. Opera rehearsal and set construction could happen in one theatre while routine play production continued in the other and while play tickets continued to sell. Opera experiments that would have looked impracticable till then could now proceed – and the king himself determined that they should. In August 1683 Charles sent United Company manager Thomas Betterton17 to Paris on an unrealistic but ominous mission, instructed to ‘carry over the opera’ – a whole French ensemble – presumably to perform as guest artists in the United Company’s spare venue. While Betterton was away, Charles started his poet laureate, John Dryden, working on King Arthur, a royalist semi-opera set in the distant British past but foreshadowing seventeenth-century political events, and Charles-as-Arthur’s triumph over political adversaries. John Blow’s exemplary all-sung English opera Venus and Adonis, setting an anonymous libretto, was performed before the king some time in 1683.18 (Blow was by then the senior court composer.) Dryden’s poetical protégé, Nahum Tate, and Blow’s younger colleague, Henry Purcell, planned and began to write an all-sung English sequel to Venus and Adonis, meant first for court performance in the manner of Venus and then (perhaps) for public theatre production: Dido and Aeneas was the eventual result. This collective effort by English court musicians, pointedly timed and clearly designed to prove their ability to get any sort of opera that Charles wanted written and well performed, should have seen the foreign competition off. It failed in its immediate aim. Betterton returned from Paris not with a visiting French troupe but with Louis Grabu promising once again to show the English how to do things properly. Grabu had served as Charles II’s Master of the King’s Musick from 1667 till 1673: his job then was to impose Parisian orchestral discipline on English string players used to older, laxer ways. Now he was back to do much the same with opera. Blow’s Venus and Adonis and the Tate–Purcell Dido and Aeneas followed Crowne’s satirical example, idealising Charles in Calisto’s highly ironic manner. Both aimed to entertain court insiders who knew the man too well to take un-ironic representation seriously. But Grabu’s brief was public-facing: he had to work with Dryden and with Betterton on a new, commercially producible piece praising Charles without reserve. Dryden’s nearly-finished script for King Arthur was their starting point. As initially conceived by Dryden, following suavely sycophantic French and Italian models, it was to open with an all-sung prologue glorifying Charles, and then take the form of a conventional semi-opera in which acting scenes alternated with masque-like singing and dancing. But at Charles’s request, Dryden tripled the length of the Prologue (‘adding two acts more’), producing a three-Act English opera libretto, Albion and Albanius, suitable for all-sung setting. Dryden filed the rest of draft King Arthur away.

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Albion and Albanius, the twin heroes of the Dryden-Grabu-Betterton co-creation named after them, were singing avatars for Charles and James respectively, in thinly veiled references to the Exclusion Crisis and botched Rye House Plot. Albanius goes into exile (like James at the height of the Exclusion Crisis): the opera includes an agonised scene in which Albion and Albanius sing their farewells, and (later) a scene of joyful homecoming when James/Albanius returns. The Rye House Plot is reviewed in interpretative dance. The City of London, epicentre of political opposition to Charles, is personified as Augusta: she repents past crimes and swears final allegiance to her royal commander. Like Calisto a decade previously, Albion was rehearsed over and over again while Charles watched. All documented rehearsals happened in the lavish apartments provided both at Windsor Castle and at Whitehall Palace for his principal mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth; there, he could relax and enjoy the experience more than would have been possible in other surroundings. It seems likely that several of Charles’s mistresses took singing roles in Albion, just as they had in Calisto. Mary Davis in particular excelled. She had created the role of Venus in Blow’s Venus and Adonis, in which Lady Mary Tudor, her daughter by Charles, sang Cupid, thus arguably constituting the whole opera as the musical outcome of Davis’s real-life affair with Britain’s Sun King. Dido in Dido and Aeneas may have been another role written with Davis in mind: it opens with a prologue in which Venus and Phoebus partner up, Phoebus representing Charles, and Venus the wandering star under which he had supposedly been born. Venus also appears close to the end of King Arthur, to sing a sublimely memorable number, balancing love of country with love or lust for easily available sexual partners (free sex presented as a benefit of British citizenship). And Venus is one of the main female protagonists in Albion and Albanius. Undoubtedly, therefore – however casting finally worked out – Mary Davis was the original voice-ventriloquist for Windsor-ceiling Venus, bringing hyperbolic visual allegory authentically to life on the operatic stage. Following French operatic practice Grabu set Dryden’s Albion text mainly in recitative. An authentically Parisian tragédie lyrique resulted,19 though with English words and an English cast possibly struggling to catch the idiom. In performance, the words were, or should have been, easy to make out: Grabu avoided distractingly busy instrumental accompaniments with which the singers would have had to compete. He respected Dryden’s verse structure as well as the words individually. There is a high degree both of metrical and of detailed rhythmic congruence between Dryden’s words and Grabu’s music. Natural speech rhythms largely define musical rhythm. Grabu’s word painting is restrained yet effective: lightly-applied musical ornamentation colours the words without smothering them. Sometimes Grabu’s music has a pantomimic quality turning villainous characters into figures of fun. On the page, Democracy and Zelota [Zeal] deliver crassly-worded threats: ‘Spare some [snakes] to fling | Where they may sting | The Breast of Albion’s King.’20 They mean to bring Charles down: he and the audience ought to worry. But threats set to camped-up music lose their menace – Democracy and Zelota would probably have been laughed off stage. ‘Bad’ poetry gave strong comedy performers some excellent material with which to build. In short – though the point is important – Grabu and Dryden worked successfully together to evoke powerful, politically affirmative audience responses to Albion and Albanius. Dryden expected readers to be less impressed.

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In his 1685 Albion and Albanius preface, Dryden paraphrases parts of Davenant’s 1656 preface to The Siege of Rhodes, the original rule-book for all-sung English opera. To illustrate: Davenant You may inquire, being a reader, why in an heroic argument my numbers are so often diversified and fall into short fractions, considering that a continuation of the usual length of English verse would appear more heroical in reading. But when you are an auditor you will find that in this, I rather deserve approbation than need excuse: for frequent alterations of measure (which cannot be so unpleasant to him that reads as troublesome to him that writes) are necessary to recitative music for variation of airs.21 Dryden Tis no easy matter in our Language to make words so smooth, and numbers so harmonious, that they shall almost set themselves [. . .] for there is no maintaining the purity of English in short measures, where the Rhyme returns so quick [. . .]22 Just as Davenant’s Caroline then Carolean poet laureate mantle had descended to Dryden, so had responsibility for the future development of English opera as a legitimate if headily impure branch of English literature. He took that responsibility very seriously. Albion and Albanius did manage a brief public theatre run after Charles’s death. It is hard to see who could have performed satisfactorily in this fully-staged version, other than singers and instrumentalists already familiar with Grabu’s music through long exposure to it. Albion must have been a formal collaboration between Charles II’s court musical establishment and the United Company under Betterton; the court musical establishment enlarged to include adult female sopranos not trained up through the usual Chapel Royal chorister route. It was an astonishing ensemble achievement, triumphantly vindicating Davenant’s faith in the possibility of all-sung English opera and just as triumphantly realigning English opera with the Royalist cause. Triumph turned to dust when its royal dedicatee dropped dead. Operatic celebrations of the late king’s political victories while they were unravelling must have looked wildly incongruous. Albion championed divine right kingship and orderly royal succession obeying the will of heaven, while in real life the House of Stuart was tearing itself apart. James, Duke of Monmouth – a loyal participant in Calisto – upstaged Albion by invading England on the day of the opera’s public première. No one with a creative stake in Albion could possibly have seen this coming, nor could they hope to retrieve the situation. Albion closed after six performances. It had to wait until 1997 for its first complete revival. Still it would be wrong to imagine that Albion led nowhere. A step-change in English operatic capability had occurred. Betterton harnessed that hard-won company expertise to brilliant effect in the early 1690s, working with Henry Purcell on three semi-operatic blockbusters (Dioclesian, 1690; King Arthur, 1691; The Fairy Queen, 1692) and on dozens of lower-budget plays-with-music vitally enhanced by music.

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Dryden’s King Arthur script, dropped in favour of Albion seven years previously, finally reached the stage in 1691. Purcell provided music for it. Dido and Aeneas, though clearly designed for performance before Charles II, may well have been dropped in favour of Albion too – Purcell (like many frustrated composers since) later teaming up with student performers to try it out.23 After Purcell’s death and after the break-up of the United Company, Betterton staged the first documented professional production of Dido, not as a stand-alone opera but as ‘Four Musical Entertainments’ served up alongside altered Shakespeare. Sections of Dido and sections of Measure for Measure alternated.24 A ‘new’ Betterton– Purcell semi-opera slotted together: one in the eye for Betterton’s competitors, and one more piece of overhanging Carolean opera business successfully concluded by the grand old man before he retired. In theory, Charles II ‘could not afford to operate a court opera [. . .] [and] did not even subsidize the production of opera in the public theatres’.25 In practice, and however unwisely, Charles did operate a court opera and did subsidise opera production in the public theatre, admittedly by roundabout routes. This deserves to be better known. Albion and Albanius is widely held to have failed. From Dent onwards, most critics have found it ‘an unsatisfactory work’ from which Restoration audiences sensibly stayed away.26 But if we take impact and legacy into account a different picture emerges. Grabu helped English opera performers raise their game to international level. Dryden produced a genuinely innovative libretto from which others writing English words for music had much to learn. Purcell took patient note. As Carolean court opera time-shifted into a later reign, the Purcell–Betterton semioperas made wholly satisfying sense. Extremes of royal narcissism no longer had to be indulged; an English composer with sound commercial instincts had at last stepped up. The English opera experiment paused through force majeure in 1685 could resume. To the end of his career, though, Purcell looked back as often as he looked forward, conscious of court masque and court opera tradition and proud himself to be part of it. English masque scholarship closing the book in 1640 stops half a century too soon.

Notes 1. Anon., ‘Preface’ to The Fairy-Queen: An Opera (London: Jacob Tonson, 1692). Quoted from Henry Purcell’s Operas: The Complete Texts, ed. Michael Burden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 348. 2. Edward J. Dent, Foundations of English Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), p. 65; Robert D. Hume, ‘The Politics of Opera in Late Seventeenth-Century London’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 10 (1998), 15–43 (p. 20). 3. See James R. Jacob and Timothy Raylor, ‘Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie by Sir William Davenant’, The Seventeenth Century, 6 (1991), 205–50. 4. See Mary Edmond, Rare Sir William Davenant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). 5. Abraham Cowley, Pindarique Odes, Written in Imitation of the Stile & Maner of the Odes of Pindar (London: Humfrey Moseley, 1656), p. 22. 6. Sir William Davenant, The Siege of Rhodes, in Drama of the English Republic, ed. Janet Clare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 7. Cowley, preface, n.p.

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8. Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 83–101. 9. See Andrew Pinnock, ‘Theatre Culture’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Henry Purcell, ed. Rebecca Herissone (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 165–99 (pp. 175–84). 10. See Eleanore Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage (1660–1702), with a particular account of the production of Calisto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932). 11. Andrew Walkling, ‘Masque and Politics at the Restoration Court: John Crowne’s Calisto’, Early Music, 24 (1996), 27–62. 12. Not Charles in person but his allegorical stand-in Jupiter, played by Lady Henrietta Wentworth. 13. A bill to prevent his openly Catholic brother from succeeding to the throne was defeated in Parliament after a dirty campaign waged on both sides. 14. See Andrew Pinnock, ‘Deus ex Machina: A Royal Witness to the Court Origin of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, Early Music, 40 (2012), 265–78; Pinnock, ‘Which Genial Day? More on the Court Origin of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, with a Shortlist of Dates for its Possible Performance before King Charles II’, Early Music, 43 (2015), 199–212. 15. The Windsor ceilings were destroyed in the early nineteenth century; scholars have only recently realised how much influence they exerted on contemporaneous royal opera. 16. Dating from about 1290, it has hung in the hall since at least the 1540s. 17. Betterton started his theatrical career working for Davenant and took over the running of Davenant’s company when Davenant died. See David Roberts, Thomas Betterton: The Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 18. Anne Kingsmill (later Finch) may have written the libretto, or parts of it. See James Winn, ‘“A Versifying Maid of Honour”: Anne Finch and the Libretto for Venus and Adonis’, Review of English Studies, New Series 59 (2008), 67–85. For the music, see John Blow, Venus and Adonis, ed. Bruce Wood (London: Stainer & Bell, 2008 [Purcell Society Companion Series, II]). 19. See Louis Grabu, Albion and Albanius, ed. Bryan White (London: Stainer & Bell, 2007 [Purcell Society Companion Series, I]). 20. II. i. 75–7 in John Dryden, Albion and Albanius, in The Works of John Dryden, XV, Plays: Albion and Albanius, Don Sebastian, Amphitryon, ed. Earl Miner, George R. Guffey and Franklin B. Zimmerman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 21. Davenant, pp. 195–6. 22. Dryden, Albion and Albanius, pp. 9–10. 23. At Josias Priest’s Girls’ School, London, c. 1688. 24. Burden, pp. 95–169. 25. Hume, p. 23. 26. Paul Hammond, ‘Dryden’s Albion and Albanius: The Apotheosis of Charles II’, in The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 169–83 (p. 180).

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Part III Literature and Music in the Eighteenth Century Section Editor: Suzanne Aspden

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Introduction Suzanne Aspden

Music, Words and Literary Debate on Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century

I

n the course of the eighteenth century, so the story goes, music was ‘emancipated’ from its servile relationship to words.1 Freed from this connection, music was able to ascend the hierarchy of the arts to become pre-eminent precisely because it was not governed by rational language. But this is not to say that the relationship between music and words was (or became) unimportant in the eighteenth century: quite the opposite. Indeed, precisely because of these aesthetic developments, and the shift in music’s position, the relationship between music and words was interrogated more intensively and systematically in eighteenth-century philosophical literature than at perhaps any other time. And even as music achieved status independent of a text, it did so by becoming itself a ‘language’, structured (as eighteenth-century thinkers saw it) according to the rules of rhetoric.2 The words–music relationship mattered perhaps more than in any other period because the debate (and in particular the locus of music’s affective power) helped create the conditions and the space for ‘aesthetics’ – or epistêmê aisthetikê, ‘the science of what is sensed and imagined’, as Alexander Baumgarten coined it in 1735 – to emerge as a field.3 This shifted discussion of artistic judgement from a question of adherence to rules, or even individual ‘taste’ (also determined by those rules) to a philosophical investigation of both artistic theory and the nature of human perception, as part of a broader interest in concepts of cognition and selfhood in the period. As several scholars of eighteenth-century aesthetics have observed, ‘the problems of music engaged the minds of all those who have come to epitomize the age’, and these figures conveyed their ideas in literature at least as influential as any works of fiction.4 Musicological scholarship on the eighteenth century – following, in particular, scholarship in French literature and the history of ideas – recognises the importance of these debates, and as such, musicological consideration of eighteenth-century music’s relationship to ‘literature’ in the conventional sense (that is, to poetry, novels, drama) goes hand in hand with and is increasingly conditioned by examination of philosophical and critical approaches. Eighteenth-century assessments of the philosophical ramifications of the connection between music and language have been given extensive scholarly consideration, particularly by students of French music and literature, while those examining the linguistic and rhetorical qualities and functions of music have especially focused on later eighteenth-century Austro-German theorists

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and composers.5 Scholars of English literature with an interest in music have often delved into the rich body of writings they study for representations of music, seeking in those representations a broader insight into the cultural practices of the period.6 Rather than providing an overview of scholarly approaches to music and the novel, poetry and drama (which would, in any case, be unwieldy, as engagement with these kinds of literature is fundamental to musicological readings of texted music), this introductory chapter provides an overview of key elements of eighteenth-century thought on music in which its relationship with words and language – as well as literature – was central; the chapter briefly explores the connections that might exist between different approaches and the impact these theoretical explorations had on musical works composed during the period. For most of the eighteenth century, as since classical times, mimesis, or the imitation or representation of (human) nature and the cosmos, was the reigning justification for valuing artistic expression.7 Consideration of music – like literature (especially poetry) – as a mimetic art came chiefly from the authority of Aristotle’s Poetics: Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one another in three respects – the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.8 If music, like poetry, was a mimetic art, however, they were not equal; while poetry was second only (and naturally allied) to painting as an imitative art, music was more problematic. An important field of debate in the eighteenth century dealt with the question of what music imitated, because music as a performance art, at once temporal and kinetic, could be interpreted as ‘imitative’ on several levels.9 Was its imitation of audible nature – birds and the like? While such imitation had a long-lived appeal (being practised not only from Biber to Beethoven, but right on to Messiaen in the twentieth century and beyond), it had been widely decried since at least Vincenzo Galilei’s Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna (1581).10 Musical imitation might also be a reflection of movement (a connection contingent on music’s temporal mobility as equivalent to movement through space): the wind, flight, crashing waves. This option (like the first) influenced not only instrumental music throughout the century (for example, in successive French opera composers’ depictions of storms), but also vocal music: Italian serious opera is larded with simile arias, which compare the singer’s heart to wind, waves, ships, birds and so on, in order to provide a palate for musical imitation. An aria by Pietro Metastasio, the most famous librettist (or operatic poet) of the century, illustrates the point; this is ‘Siam navi all’onde algenti’ from L’Olimpiade (1733): Siam navi all’onde algenti lasciate in abbandono: impetuosi venti i nostri affetti sono: ogni diletto è scoglio: tutta la vita è mar.

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Ben, qual nocchiero, in noi veglia ragion; ma poi pur dall’ondoso orgoglio si lascia trasportar. (We are ships left abandoned on the cold waves: our emotions are impetuous winds; every delight is a rock; all life is the sea. Like a good helmsman, reason keeps watch in us, but then even he lets himself be carried away by the waves of pride.) In this setting by Vivaldi (Fig. III.i), we can see the composer’s care in expressing the text moment-by-moment: the voice initially represents the ship thrown about by the waves; then the orchestra performs the role of the ‘impetuous winds’, and so on. But again (and particularly in instrumental music), this seemed a trivial form of imitation in a society that justified art’s value in Aristotelean terms as serving to instruct or (with an emotional rather than a cognitivist emphasis) to offer catharsis, with maintenance of religious morality its ultimate end. In practical terms, too, the imitative expression of a single word (whether aural representation of birdsong or a kinetic equivalence with rushing water or wind) tended to distract from the sense of the whole.11 The imitation of the speaking voice offered more options: for while its sound might be imitated, so too might its syntax and its sense. This form of imitation was seen as so desirable that an entirely new genre, recitative, developed in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries (new that is, in its recognition by theorists and in its formalised notation by composers). In turn, recitative facilitated the emergence of another new genre, opera, which explored great works of historical and fictional literature in its libretti, works such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516) and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1575). Given the centrality of literature (and words) to opera, it is hardly surprising that it became the chief testing ground for considerations of the relationship between words and music, with prefaces to operas exploring and justifying approaches to word setting throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was early made clear that the validity of recitative as a form of ‘heightened’ speech rested on its imitation of the speed, rhythm and intonation of the conversing voice (as Galilei had famously proposed in 1581 in his Dialogo), but also on a broader sense of structure. Its early exponents suggested it derived from classical Greek practice (though practitioners acknowledged that this could not really be the case, as no examples of ancient music survived), but by the eighteenth century attempts to follow ancient principles had been abandoned (the experiments with classical quantitative metre, or with the rhythmic and melodic modes of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries). Instead, recitative structures reflected those of spoken rhetoric: practitioner-theorists such as Johannes Mattheson and J. G. Sulzer described in detail the ways in which recitative settings might follow the phrasing and punctuation of speech.12 In a more abstract sense, it might imitate the formulae of rhetoric: for instance, a triple construction in speech might be ‘imitated’ in a setting that used a rising musical pattern, as in Figure III.ii from Handel’s Giulio Cesare. Here, the imitation was less of the sound of the speaking voice than it was of the idea of the rhetorical figure. But of course, as recitative moved towards rhetoric, it moved away from its founding principles, causing criticism such as historian John Hawkins’s that,

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Figure III.i Antonio Vivaldi, ‘Siam navi all’onde algenti’, L’Olimpiade, Act 2, scene 5 (Venice, 1734), bars 14–30

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Figure III.ii G. F. Handel, Act 1, scene 1, recitative, Giulio Cesare in Egitto (London, 1724), bars 1–3 as it did ‘not imitate common speech [ . . .] recitative can in no degree be said to be an improvement of elocution’.13 These rhetorical principles of course applied not only to recitative, but to vocal music more generally, since it retained the ancient rhetorician’s aim of moving, delighting and instructing. Indeed, in the New Grove article on ‘Rhetoric and Music’, George J. Buelow suggests that ‘nearly all the elements of music that can be considered typically baroque, whether the music be Italian, German, French or English, are tied, either directly or indirectly, to rhetorical concepts’.14 The classical division of verbal discourse into inventio (finding or inventing the argument), dispositio (arranging the argument), elocutio/decoratio (style/embellishment), memoria (memorising) and pronuntiatio (delivery) was systematically applied to music by Johannes Mattheson in his 1739 Der vollkommene Capellmeister, as a set of instructions for aspiring composers. Although Vivaldi may not have read Mattheson, it is clear from the example above that he (like other composers) was already applying the same rhetorical principles, as well as those of imitation: thus the arresting opening leaping figure (the primary ‘invention’) is ‘disposed’ by being first subtly recast in more conventional fashion and contrasted with the following ‘winds’ figure (I’impetuosi venti | I nostri affetti sono’; the parallel cadences on ‘-genti’ and ‘venti’ and on ‘-dono’ and ‘sono’ demonstrate the connection between the first pair of lines and the second). It is then reworked again (the ‘embellishment’) for ‘ogni diletto’, as a more conventional arpeggio, suiting the idea of ‘delight’, though also hinting at the uncompromising ‘rock’ underneath. It is reworked one more time for ‘tutta la vita è mar’, traversing the interval of an eleventh, as a reminder of the perils of the sea. Vivaldi’s principal theme in this aria was a kind of locus topicus, which the composer and theorist Heinichen explained in 1728; Heinichen added that if the text at hand lacked interest, the composer might instead illustrate antecedent or consequent phrases. In this way, a text could serve to generate multiple musical possibilities.15 It should be clear from this brief examination of the opening of Vivaldi’s aria that the principles of rhetorical structure were as useful to composers of instrumental music as they were to those setting words. Indeed, Mark Evan Bonds notes that it was common amongst eighteenth-century theorists to consider instrumental music to be ‘a kind of wordless oration whose purpose was to move the listener’.16 The enduring interest in the connection between music and speech, to which the longevity of recitative attested, and which was prominent in the treatises of practitioner-theorists, was connected to broader quasi-scientific, philosophical

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investigations in this period. As Downing Thomas has observed, eighteenthcentury philosophers’ interest in studying the origin of semiosis, which was generally undertaken through speculative examination of the origin of language, saw music frequently invoked as the means of connection between meaning and language.17 The discussion was framed particularly by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac in his influential Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746, translated into English in 1756). Although Condillac influenced philosophers across Europe, aspects of his theories about gestural language (including music) and the influence of language on thought were already present (in John Locke and William Warburton, for example), and were expressed similarly by Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis in his Réflexions philosophiques sur l’origine des langues et la signification des mots (1740).18 Both Condillac and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his still more influential Essai sur l’origine des langues, proposed that vocal music, as an emanation of human passions which ‘wrung the first utterings’, pre-dated language, and as such provided the original model for semiosis, whereby one thing could act as a representative of another.19 Indeed, Rousseau not only believed that music came prior to language, but that, through vocal accent, it produced language. Primitive music thus marked the origin of all culture: it was, as Downing Thomas explains ‘the anthropological “missing link” in the eighteenth-century attempt to trace semiosis to its origin, to pinpoint the semiotic moment which separates culture from nature, and human beings from animals’.20 Rousseau’s philosophical interest in the truthfulness of simple, natural music led him to advocate not only that contemporaneous French opera should turn to a simpler, more melodically dominated musical style, like that of Italian opera buffa (in his debate with Jean-Philippe Rameau, in particular), but also to propose melodrama as a musical ideal in which, he suggested, ‘la phrase parlée est de quelque sort annoncée et préparée par la phrase musicale’ (‘the spoken phrase is in some way announced and prepared by the musical phrase’).21 Rousseau’s own Pygmalion (1762), was the most successful example of the genre, which inspired composers throughout Europe, including Mozart (in Zaide, for instance) and Beethoven (most notably, in the dungeon scene in Fidelio). If, in mid-century philosophy, music was considered pivotal in the development of primitive language, it was perhaps because it was already seen as intrinsically connected with national linguistic expression. Thus critic and playwright Joseph Addison merely confirmed general opinion when he wrote in the Spectator magazine: ‘recitative musick in every language should be as different as the tone or accent of each language’.22 Throughout the century, in France in particular, the question of music’s ability and fitness to express the peculiarities of each nation’s language – and, thereby, culture – was explored in a series of high-profile ‘quarrels’, which raised the profile of philosophical discussions of music amongst the general public. The Querelle de Lullistes et Ramistes (pitting Lully against Rameau) was followed by the Querelle des bouffons (Italian comic opera against French opera) and the Querelle des Gluckistes et Piccinnistes. In France, these quarrels focused especially on the rights of Italian or French to pre-eminence in prestigious dramatic music, this being seen – precisely because it united the distinctive language of a nation and its music – as representative of the national spirit and, as François Raguenet put it in 1702, the area in which ‘masters of both nations endeavour, more particularly, to exert themselves’.23 Thus

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Raguenet admitted that, while French operas had the advantage in their libretti, which were ‘writ much better than the Italian’, being ‘regular, coherent designs’ that could be acted without the music, nonetheless: the Italian language is much more naturally adapted to musick than ours; their vowels are all sonorous, whereas above half ours are mute [. . .] so that, in the first place, no cadence, or beautiful passage, can be form’d upon the syllables that consist of those [mute] vowels, and, in the second place, one cannot hear but half the words.24 John Dryden, writing an essay on English opera in 1685 (his preface to Albion and Albanius), was even more forthright and jingoistic, saying that while Italian was ‘the softest, the sweetest, the most harmonious’ language, the French who ‘cast a longing eye’ at their neighbours had a ‘natural harshness’ and ‘perpetual ill accent’ in their language, which meant it could never be fit for music. He also acknowledged the ‘natural disadvantages’ of the English language in its German inheritance, but nonetheless claimed that ‘our English Genius, incomparably beyond the triffling of the French, in all the nobler parts of verse, will justly give us the preheminence’.25 In both Raguenet’s and Dryden’s analyses, aspects of national character were (implicitly or explicitly) related to language and, from there, to appropriate operatic style: the Italian language was (for Dryden) naturally ‘soft’ and ‘sweet’, but in the eighteenth century this also came to reflect on their nature as a people, Italians having supposedly declined from the days of Roman glory to modern ‘effeminacy’.26 For both the French and the English, claims were variously made that their language was better suited to spoken theatre than to song. Such statements were not necessarily admissions of defeat: in England in particular, during the course of the eighteenth century, there was pride in the rejection of Italianate song as being unsuitable to the ‘manly’ and rational British spirit, which in itself generated a body of critical literature. One versifier quipped on the departure of an Italian prima donna from London in 1728: ‘Little syren of the stage, | charmer of an idle age [. . .] Tuneful mischief, vocal spell, | To this island bid farewell; | Leave us as we ought to be, | Leave the Britons rough and free.’27 And later in the century, The Musical Lady. A Farce (1762) was devoted to demonstrating the folly of English women who admired Italian music. Its dénouement showed the unmasked English husband revelling in dispelling his bride’s pretentions: Mask: Sophy: Mask: Sophy: Mask:

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And to-morrow morning, my love, you shall be roused with the drums, and the true British Serenade of marrow-bones and cleavers— Barbarous, and horrible! is this the Affettuoso Masquali? Is this the tender Sposo? English! my dear Sophy, speak English for Heaven’s sake! I can converse in no other language. How am I deceived and imposed on? And don’t you intend to carry me to Italy? To Italy! ridiculous! No, no, my love, we’ll stay here in the comfortable enjoyment of beef, liberty, and Old England.28

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In both France and England, vocal musical styles developed as deliberate reflections of perceived national character, whether Lullian recitative – in which Lully supposedly imitated the speech patterns of acclaimed tragic actors – or English ballad opera and a host of other patriotic dramas demonstrating British forthright simplicity. By the later eighteenth century, the connection between national character and music no longer needed the mediation of language: in 1751 the Frenchman Charles Fonton opined, in his unpublished ‘Essay on Oriental Music Compared to the European’ that ‘Since all peoples in general, however different their customs and character, nevertheless agree about the victorious charm of music and are responsive to it, it follows necessarily that each separate people should have a kind of music that is its own.’29 Nonetheless, there was also an increasing interest in tying attempts at national musical style to canonic national literature. I discuss one British composer who exemplified this trend in the chapter on Thomas Arne, below, but even the Italian opera in London attempted to get in on the act, for example with the story of Richard I in 1727 (as Riccardo primo), or with Milton’s Comus rewritten as Sabrina in 1737. In France, similar interest in national stories prompted Gluck, when trying to win over French audiences, to revisit classic Lully–Quinault collaborations, most notably in Armide (1777). Through all the quarrels of the century (and particularly those of the French), the new was (implicitly or explicitly) pitted against the old, demonstrating the connection of all these musical debates to the seventeenth-century quarrel of the ancients and the moderns (indeed, François Raguenet, who launched the eighteenth-century quarrels in 1702, adapted his title – Parallèle des Italiens et des Français en ce qui regarde la musique et les opera [sic] – from Charles Perrault’s influential Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences of 1674). Thus Lully, who in the seventeenth century had been seen as a ‘modern’, breaking with older Italian traditions, came to be seen in the eighteenth century as standard-bearer of French tradition.30 Rameau, at first, was the archetypal ‘modern’ (in the ‘quarrel’ over Lully or Rameau), but by the Querelle des bouffons, Rameau was the ‘ancient’, pitted against the modernising forces of Italian comic opera – in particular, Pergolesi’s La serva padrona. This overarching quarrel in turn expressed a larger question about the aesthetic paradigm with which this essay began: was mimesis really all one should strive for, or was greater artistic freedom for self-expression preferable? For the ‘ancients’, who espoused the long-held belief that contemporary society could in no way match the glory of ancient Greece and Rome, the best contemporary poets and artists could do was imitate the past, which was held to be more ‘simple’ and ‘natural’;31 the ‘moderns’, on the other hand, believed in progress, and that taste was an individual phenomenon rather than being dependent on rules.32 Again, music, which was so problematic in mimetic terms, provided a link between imitation and expression, as the point of imitation shifted from some aspect of the external world (nature) to the individual feeling in response to external stimulus. Through the eighteenth century, music’s mimetic credentials were asserted by proposing that it reflected the movements of the soul. Thus Rémond de Saint-Mard, writing his Réflexions sur l’opéra in 1741, asserted that ‘Music has, in some indefinable way, an analogy to human emotions, and has a certain power to express them which words alone can never attain.’ But in the earlier part of the century its power in this regard was feared,

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for it not only imitated the soul’s movements, but could arouse them without fixing that arousal purposively, unless it was tied to language. As Saint-Mard continued: When [. . .] recitative is well written by the composer and well delivered by the singer, it is far from being unnatural, but is rather in all times and in all countries the simplest depiction of our impulses and the most faithful language of emotion [. . .] Our instrumental music, trying to be learned, gets worse day by day. It is no better than noise [. . .] It is true that in sensitive souls [symphonies] sometimes wreak havoc, which allows those who take care of our consciences to claim the right to be concerned.33 For this reason (throughout the century), the usefulness and even validity of instrumental music was questioned due to its lack of mimetic specificity, whether in France (Fontenelle’s famous ‘Sonate, que me veux tu?’) or in Italy, where Esteban de Arteaga noted in 1786 that ‘the vague and indeterminate nature of the language of instrumental music’ precluded it from serving a narrative function (as Francesco Algarotti had proposed for operatic overtures).34 This was why music’s imitative power was considered best used – most likely to achieve moral or cathartic effect – when harnessed to words. Thus Jean-Laurent Lecerf de la Viéville wrote in his influential Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française (2nd edn, 1705): the first beauty, the true beauty, the unique beauty of an air, is to be fashioned to the words [. . .] one excellent mark of the quality of an air is that no words fit it except those for which it was composed.35 Under this view, music was necessarily an accessory to verse, ‘rendering the poetry of the opera a painting which really speaks’, in that it ‘retouch[es] it’ and ‘add[s] the final colours’.36 And even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose advocacy for music as the original conduit for emotion led the way for Romantic theorists, still felt that music and language were indissolubly linked in their expression through the pure human voice. But Rousseau was already, in the mid-century, reacting against operatic forms (both French and Italian) in which instruments and instrumental writing took an increasingly prominent role, at the same time as the virtuoso voice became increasingly ‘instrumental’ in its feats, and as operatic aria forms creaked under the weight of expanding musical structures.37 There was, nonetheless, something that connected this increasingly ‘instrumental’ operatic writing and Rousseau’s vision of vocal simplicity: as Catherine Kintzler puts it, for Rousseau ‘the finality of art is not to express the truth but to convey emotion by avoiding an overabundance of intermediate material or intellectual interference’, through ‘natural’ vocal expression.38 When music’s chief value was seen as the imitation of human emotion (rather than of the phenomenal world), imitation easily shaded into expression. So even Lecerf claimed that ‘without the natural and expressive, music is only a trifle [. . .] The ear is, for music, the door of the heart. To open this door, flattering the ear is thus the third care of the musician.’39 And of course that expressive function could be served as well by sensitive instrumental writing as it could by text setting for the voice. This transition from imitation to expression had significant implications not just for music, but for thought more generally. It reflected a broader interest in processes of

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cognition, which of course had its roots in Descartes and Locke (if not earlier). So, for example, Maupertuis’s theoretical investigation of the origins of language proposed that perceptions of objects, not the objects themselves, are at the root of linguistic development (for example, ‘je vois un arbre’, not simply ‘un arbre’).40 This increasing interest in perception was particularly relevant to music where, as we have seen, eighteenth-century thinkers recognised that, without a text to give it focus, mimesis was limited and the listener’s perception was free to roam. Gradually, this came to be seen as a positive attribute, rather than something to be feared. So Thomas Twining, in his 1789 edition of Aristotle’s Poetics, proposed that music allows the listener ‘the free choice of such ideas as are, to him, most adapted to react upon and heighten the emotion which occasioned them’.41 There was but a short step from this to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s characterisation of music as allowing the listener to access ‘inexpressible longing’ and a sense of the infinite.42 M. H. Abrams, in his classic study of Romantic aesthetics, The Mirror and the Lamp, proposed that the expressive ‘lamp’ which replaced the mimetic ‘mirror’ offered Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, and as such that music, which was seen as fundamentally non-mimetic, served as the ideal model.43 Indeed, the tables turned so completely that music was no longer given short shrift in aesthetic terms, but instead became the form to which other arts aspired: in 1818 William Hazlitt defined poetry as ‘the music of language, answering to the music of the mind’.44 The deft interweaving of music and language in the long eighteenth century is explored in a variety of ways in the chapters that follow. The first three chapters examine that most prestigious of eighteenth-century art forms, opera, looking at: the expression of national identity via literature as well as music in the case of Thomas Arne (Aspden); the ways in which Italian opera librettists addressed problematic mythological stories in order to teach moral lessons (Strohm); the rich layering of meaning found in and attendant cultural work done by the English ballad opera (Joncus). The next two chapters turn to music in the sacred sphere, which engaged just as closely and critically – and often with as much theatrical verve – with literature as opera did. Ruth Smith examines the rationale behind the construction of an oratorio in the case of Samson; Matthew Gardner considers the English church composer’s approach to texts and text setting via the example of Maurice Greene. That most significant of eighteenth-century literary genres, the novel, can be seen as a testing ground for changing thought about music. Three chapters on the novel consider: changes in the representation of music between the novels of Richardson and Burney, and what that suggests about contemporaneous norms and behaviours (Wiley); how Jane Austen’s representations of music indicate her dislike of social expectations for musical performance (Trillini); the use of vocal music, as conveyor of the passions, to advance ideas in the novels of the French moral philosophers (Cuillé). Hazlitt’s characterisation of poetry as ‘the music of language’ underlines the increasing sense of consanguinity between the modes in the later eighteenth century: our chapters on poetry and song variously consider the role of music in Shelley’s poetry (Wood); the varied theatrical representations of experience in settings of Goethe by Reichardt, Zelter and Schubert (Brown); and explorations in song of gothic horror and fantasy as a means of venturing into the depths of human subjectivity (Richards). We end with the light-hearted, convivial song of the catch and glee club: important expressions of sociability, but also open to more profound expression (Price).

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Notes 1. John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 2. Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 4. 3. Paul Guyer, ‘18th-Century German Aesthetics’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2014 edn, ed. Edward N. Zalta [accessed 20 August 2016]. 4. Neubauer, p. 4. 5. Analytical examination of eighteenth-century music criticism (which, aside from itself being literature on music, frequently takes as its subject the relationship between poetry and music) includes George Buelow’s work on Heinichen and the German tradition, detailed in: Paula Morgan, ‘Buelow, George J.’, in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press [accessed 16 September 2016]; Georgia Cowart, The Origins of Modern Musical Critcism: French and Italian Music 1600–1750 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981); Neubauer. As philosophy at this time was often an extension of criticism, study of philosophical writings on music is extensive, though structural, poststructural and cultural ‘turns’ in scholarship more broadly have inevitably also changed the focus of that investigation away from the largely descriptive and towards critical investigations of philosophical ideology; see, for example, Cynthia Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue, 1750–1764 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Thomas Street Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Downing Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); La ‘Querelle des Bouffons’ dans la vie culturelle française du XVI–IIe siècle, ed. Andrea Fabiano (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2005); Staël’s Philosophy of the Passions: Sensibility, Society, and the Sister Arts, ed. Tili Boon Cuillé and Karyna Szmurlo (Lanham: Bucknell University Press, 2013); Mark Darlow, Dissonance in the Republic of Letters: The Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes (London: Legenda, 2013). On study of music and theories of rhetoric, see, for example, George J. Buelow, ‘Music, Rhetoric and the Concept of the Affections: A Selective Bibliography’, Notes, 30 (1973–4), 250–9; Bonds; Gretchen A. Wheelock, Haydn’s Ingenious Jesting with Art: Contexts of Musical Wit and Humor (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992). 6. Two examples from authors in this section will suffice: Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Regula Hohl Trillini, The Gaze of the Listener: English Representations of Domestic Music-Making (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008). 7. On the difficulties entailed in defining ‘mimesis’, see Thomas J. Mathiesen, ‘Mimesis’, in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press [accessed 16 September 2016]. 8. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater, in The Works of Aristotle, 11 vols (Oxford, 1908), I.1447a.14–19; cited in Cowart, p. 70. 9. For an accessible discussion of music’s representational functions, see Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 10. Relevant passages are included in Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk, rev. edn Leo Treitler (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 462–7. 11. Jean-Laurent Lecerf de la Viéville particularly criticised the Italians for this practice; see Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française, 2nd edn (1705), III, p. 129; cited in Cowart, p. 74.

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12. Johannes Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739); Sulzer, ‘Accent in der Musik’, in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 4 vols (1771–99); both cited in Neubauer, p. 29. 13. John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, rev. edn (1853; reprinted. 1963), p. xxxiii; cited in Neubauer, p. 29. 14. Blake Wilson, George J. Buelow and Peter A. Hoyt, ‘Rhetoric and Music’, in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press [accessed 1 September 2016]. 15. Johann David Heinichen, Der General-Bass in der Composition (Dresden, 1728); discussed in Neubauer, pp. 33–4. 16. Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, p. 4. 17. Thomas, p. 7. 18. On the dating of Maupertuis’s treatise (previously thought to have followed and been influenced by Condillac’s), see David Beeson, Maupertuis: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1992), pp. 153–4. 19. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues (written 1755; published 1781); trans. in Thomas, p. 103. Among the many influenced by these French philosophers were British writers John Brown (A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music (London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1763)) and Lord James Burnett Monboddo (Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and W. Creech, 1773–92)). 20. Thomas, p. 9. 21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fragments d’observations sur l’Alceste italien de M. le Chevalier Gluck; cited in Peter Branscombe, ‘Melodrama’, in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press [accessed 18 August 2016]. 22. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, 29 (3 April 1711), I, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), in Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, 30 May 2014 [accessed 2 January 2016]. 23. See Cowart, p. 54. François Raguenet, A Comparison between the French and Italian Music and Operas (1702), in Source Readings, ed. Strunk; rev. edn Treitler, p. 671. 24. Raguenet, p. 674. 25. John Dryden, ‘Preface’ to Albion and Albanius (London: Jacob Tonson, 1685), in The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000), XV, ed. Earl Milner, George R. Guffey and Franklin B. Zimmerman (1976), pp. 6, 7. 26. On the problematic nature of Italian opera, see Suzanne Aspden, ‘“An infinity of factions”: Opera in Eighteenth-Century London and the Undoing of Society’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 9 (1997), 1–19. 27. This song was not published until 1731 (by the engraver, George Bickham), but was probably written earlier. 28. The Musical Lady. A Farce (1762), pp. 37–8. 29. Charles Fonton, ‘Essay on Oriental Music Compared to the European’, in Source Readings, ed. Strunk; rev. edn Treitler, p. 721. 30. Cowart, p. 48. 31. An association of the ancients with the beauty of simple nature (or, at least, a purified idea of the natural – la belle nature) was particularly the preserve of French critics: see ibid., pp. 63–7. 32. Ibid., p. 69. 33. Rémond de Saint-Mard, Réflexions sur l’opéra (1741), pp. 10–11; an extracted translation is available in Caroline Wood and Graham Sadler, French Baroque Opera: A Reader, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 77.

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34. Cited in A Critical Translation from the Italian of Vincenzo Manfredini’s Difesa della musica moderna [. . .] (1788), trans. Patricia Howard (Lewiston: Edward Mellen, 2002), p. xxxvi. 35. Lecerf, Comparaison, II, p. 221; cited in Cowart, p. 73. 36. Lecerf, Comparaison, I, p. 169; cited in Cowart, p. 74. 37. On the increasing role of the orchestra, see John Spitzer, ‘Orchestra and Voice in EighteenthCentury Italian Opera’, in Eighteenth-Century Opera, ed. Anthony R. DelDonna and Pierpaolo Polzonetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 112–39. 38. Catherine Kintzler, ‘Rousseau, Jean-Jacques’, in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press [accessed 22 June 2016]. 39. Lecerf, Comparaison, II, pp. 161–3; cited in Cowart, p. 76. 40. Beeson, p. 155. 41. Thomas Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, Translated [. . .] (1789), p. 49; cited in Kevin Barry, Language, Music and the Sign: A Study in Aesthetics, Poetics and Poetic Practice from Collins to Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 3. 42. Thomas, p. 1. 43. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 50, and generally. 44. Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’ (1818); cited in ibid., p. 51.

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22 Thomas Arne and ‘Inferior’ English Opera Suzanne Aspden

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as it possible to write an opera in English? At least since the prospect had become a serious one, after the Restoration, composers and poets had toyed with this question. In 1675 Matthew Locke, famously, had suggested that the English language was not suited to all-sung works, but that alternating spoken dialogue with the ‘songish parts’ was more appropriate for the English: all the Tragedy be not in Musick: for the Author prudently consider’d, that though Italy was, and is the great Academy of the World for that Science and way of Entertainment [opera], England is not: and therefore mixt it [song] with interlocutions, as more proper to our Genius.1 John Dryden, writing a decade later, similarly observed that while Italian was ‘the softest, the sweetest, the most harmonious’ language and ‘seems indeed to have been invented for the sake of Poetry and Musick’, English ‘has yet more natural disadvantages than the French; our original Teutonique consisting most in Monosyllables, and those incumber’d with Consonants, cannot possibly be freed from those Inconveniences’.2 While others proposed and wrote all-sung opera (of which Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is only – apparently – the most famous example), most followed common practice, mixing spoken dialogue and song. Italian opera’s appearance on the English public stage in the first decade of the eighteenth century demonstrated that all-sung works were, in fact, popular with native audiences, although they relied heavily on imported singers for their performance. Despite hostility to Italian virtuosi – overpaid and of the wrong creed, many felt – the Italian opera remained central to aristocratic sociability for the remainder of the century. While experiments in English recitative continued throughout the eighteenth century, and all-sung English-language works were occasionally created (sometimes as translations from the Italian), the practical circumstances of the London theatres from the beginning of the century on – and in particular the lack of availability of singers capable of sustaining a full-length, all-sung opera – made the mixture of spoken dialogue and song the most manageable option.3 This, then, was the format that composers of English opera in the eighteenth century took as standard, whatever its limitations. English operas mixing speech and song were written and performed with increasing frequency during the century, in Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres (primarily dedicated to spoken drama), London’s proliferating pleasure gardens and other venues; however their librettists and composers could only look enviously at the money and resources available to the prestigious

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Italian opera in the King’s Theatre. Aesthetic limitations on the genre there undoubtedly also were, particularly once Handelian oratorio had demonstrated the effectiveness and popularity of accompanied recitative in English: the association of such forms with the high-minded genre of oratorio must have seemed further to trivialise much (usually light-hearted) indigenous opera. As one lover of both genres wrote in 1740: Tho’ I ventured to applaud so highly such musical Dramas as are founded on the tender Passions, I yet am sensible that there is another Drama of an infinitely superior Nature, I mean Oratorios. As the noblest and most rapturous Kind of Music is that which is addressed to the Creator, these sacred Pieces might be so contrived as to administer the most exquisite Delight we can possibly enjoy here below.4 The creators of English opera had to seek other means to assert the value of their genre, and one way to do this was through choice of subject matter. The career of Thomas Arne, one of the most significant composers in the genre, shows how important national literature of various kinds became in shaping both English opera and artists’ careers. A survey of Arne’s career shows that he made significant use of several different classes of story with ‘national’ or patriotic overtones: stories derived from or popularised in ballads were particularly important early on;5 Arne used canonic literature throughout his career, for instance setting versions of Milton’s Comus in 1738 and Dryden’s King Arthur in 1770; and he also chose topics invoking British history and modern patriotism, such as Alfred (1740), Britannia (1755) and his popular Thomas and Sally (1760). Examination of the latter works will serve to demonstrate, on the one hand, how Arne and others sought to accommodate well-known stories, literature and patriotic tropes to the conventions of English opera, balancing the librettists’ and composers’ aspirations (financial as well as artistic) with the tastes of their audiences and the exigencies of the theatre. On the other hand, this examination will also show how Arne used musical form to reflect or enhance the text in ways that similarly enhanced the status of English opera, in part through establishing its connection with related genres. Comus and Alfred are Arne’s first surviving full-length dramatic settings, the one using a pre-existing, canonic text by Milton, set by Henry Lawes over one hundred years earlier, and the other drawing on famous history and popular ballad concerning the Saxon king, Alfred the Great.6 In each, the competing priorities of poet, historian, dramatist and composer are evident. Alfred is particularly interesting because of the generic permutations it went through during Arne’s lifetime, as he sought to maximise its impact and profitability. It appeared first (in private, for Frederick, Prince of Wales) as a ‘masque’, and then on the public stage as both opera and oratorio (as well as ‘masque’, ‘drama’ and ‘serenata’). The distinctions between Alfred’s different generic labels undoubtedly meant something to Arne and his compatriots: ‘masque’ seems to have invoked ideas of the classic, early seventeenth-century genre in terms of association with royal panegyric and somewhat static allegorical scenes (the centrepiece of Alfred in its original form is a procession of monarchs succeeding Alfred, and implicitly paying homage to Prince Frederick). Oratorio may seem the most surprising label to us, given the genre’s association with biblical or religious stories. However, for the eighteenth-century audience, for whom oratorio’s interest lay in the typological parallel of ancient Israelites and modern Britons facing a common ‘philistine’ (foreign) threat,7 Alfred’s story of the Anglo-Saxon fight against Viking invaders would have made the generic label more appropriate.

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Arne clearly recognised and wanted to exploit precisly the allegorical, patriotic value of this work: his first public revival of the piece in London (as ‘an Opera’) occurred in 1745, at the time of the Jacobite uprising, and included ‘A view of Kinwith-Castle’ in Devon, under siege, at the start of Act II. In his 1753 revival, Arne included ‘A New Funeral Dirge in Honour of the Heroes who die in Service of their Country, supposed to be sung [. . .] by Aerial Spirits’, which was an adaptation of William Collins’s ‘Ode Written in the Year 1746’, a response to the Jacobite rebellion. In 1759, Arne replaced the Dirge with Alfred’s song ‘Sacred is war and truly good’. The celebrated actor and theatre manager, David Garrick, twice staged the work (independently of Arne) as a spoken drama with incidental music; one of these stagings, in 1773, featured backdrops of the royal naval review at Portsmouth by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, which were apparently greatly admired for their realism.8 Although Garrick, reflecting the period’s slighting attitude to native opera, seems not to have set much store by the musical potential of the piece, Arne worked hard to ensure that the music contributed to the efficacy of the drama. The original masque version, for private performance at Cliveden, the Prince of Wales’s country estate, demonstrated typical use of music in spoken drama, deriving from Restoration practice: the individual songs were not primarily intended to advance the plot, but either built ambience, reflecting tangentially on the story, or heightened the allegory by marking Alfred’s supernatural encounters – first with two ‘aerial spirits’, then with the Genius of England in his summoning of the spirits of future monarchs, and finally with a Bard, who sang the famous ‘Rule, Britannia’. Aside from these supernatural or inherently ‘musical’ characters, the other singers were female: Emma, a humble shepherdess, offered meditations on a pastoral life, while Alfred’s wife, Eltruda, performed a haunting echo song, ‘Sweet valley, say, where pensive lying’, as she searched for her husband. All the songs, in other words, adhered to seventeenth-century conventions about the credibility (verisimilitude) of song in drama, by which songs could be pastoral, supernatural, or monologues of distress, and/or sung by relatively minor (and often inherently ‘musical’) characters. Subsequent designs for public performance, from 1741 onwards, not only reflected aspects of musico-dramatic convention, but also attest to the standard practice of shaping works according to the strengths of the performers available, and to the need to create a piece of sufficient length and substance to satisfy a paying audience. Characters might thus be added in ways that bolstered potential for music, while not necessarily adding much to the narrative: Edith, added in an unperformed version of 1741, first appears with a lament for her lover, lost in war (the lament being another accepted, verisimilar use of song in spoken drama). Edward, added in 1745, allowed Arne to dispense with the allegorical, moralising characters of the Hermit, the Genius and the Bard, focusing the moral sentiments instead on Alfred, Edward and Eltruda. In 1751, indeed, when the original author, David Mallet, revised the work for Garrick to stage, his avowed intention was to ‘make Alfred, what he should have been at first, the principal figure in his own Masque’.9 A performative role for the music in 1751 was a reminder of the function of music in the original masque genre, in which its calm and metaphysical beauty brought about the transition from the disorder wrought by the invading Danes to order restored by Alfred. The scene, too, was allegorical: Four furies arise, to the sound of instruments in discord, at four different openings from under the ground, with torches in their left hands, and bloody swords in their right. They form a confused Pyrrhic dance, shaking and pointing their swords and

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torches round the king in their centre: till, upon a change of the music into regular harmony descends the Genius of England, with a crowned sword in one hand, and a laurel wreathe in the other. On sight of whom the four Furies sink thro the openings they arose from. He presents the crowned sword and lawrel-branch at the feet of the king, and reascends [. . .]10 Despite Arne’s enthusiasm for demonstrating the importance of music to the drama, its role in Alfred’s success was variable. Arne’s 1745 version, which was mounted ‘at extraordinary expence, with regard to the number of Hands [instrumentalists], Chorus singers, building the stage, and erecting the organ’, was not staged as a drama, but ‘after the manner of an Oratorio’ (that is, concert-style) and was evidently unsuccessful.11 And Arne’s versions of the mid-1750s, and then ‘oratorio’ (unstaged) versions of the late 1750s and early 1760s, which also emphasised the music at the expense of the drama, seem to have been similarly unsuccessful – even when performed for the marriage of George III.12 On the other hand, Garrick’s 1751 production was something of a hit, as it aimed at entertainment, as Thomas Davies remarked in his Life of David Garrick: abundance of songs, and some odes, were added [. . .] In decorations of magnificent triumphal arches, dances of furies, various harmony of music and incantations, fine scenes and dresses, the masque exceeded everything which had before made its appearance on the English Stage.13 Even so, some sections of the audience ‘dislik’d’ some of the dances and songs, they being deemed ‘too long’.14 Arne was particularly significant for the length of his career and his stylistic influence. It is Arne’s style to which we now turn, because through it he wrestled with the problematic status of English dramatic music. If national literature required music that did it justice, Charles Burney suggested Arne provided just that, introducing ‘a light, airy, original, and pleasing melody [. . .] [which] was so easy, natural and agreeable to the whole kingdom, that it had an effect upon our national taste’.15 Writers since Burney have struggled to define this ‘light, airy [. . .] melody’, but in part we may say it derives from his careful use of already established stylistic markers of Englishness. Arne was deeply aware of questions of style and associated status: for example, in Don Saverio of 1750, only fragments of the music for which survive, the prefatory note states that the ‘songs and Recitative’ were ‘written in such a Dialect as the Character concern’d would naturally make use of on such an Occasion’, using English ballad style for the stereotypically cantankerous father, and modish galanterie for the Frenchified son. Arne also found the means to differentiate English characters in such light-hearted patriotic works as his popular Thomas and Sally (1760), in which steadfast lover, Sally, rebuffs the advances of the local Squire, and is rewarded by the return of her faithful sailor, Thomas, from the wars (Britain was in the midst of the Seven Years War at the time, but was almost constantly at war with France throughout the eighteenth century, helping to explain this work’s popularity). In Figure 22.1, Sally repines in G minor, with the shortbreathed phrases that were becoming characteristic of sentimental song at this time.16 The Squire, by contrast, is distinguished by hunting calls (one might think here of Squire Western in Fielding’s Tom Jones, interested only in such pursuits). Thomas is still more bluff and straightforward: he announces himself with a triadic, fanfare-like

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Figure 22.1 Thomas Arne, Thomas and Sally (1760), Sally, ‘My former time’, bars 5–14 recitative (Fig. 22.2), and his one song, with chorus, is characterised by simple melodic phrasing that includes the distinctively ‘national’ iambic ‘Scotch snap’ in the setting of its opening line, ‘From ploughing the ocean, and threshing Monsieur’, in order to bring out the contrast (on ‘threshing’) to the predominantly dactylic rhythm (Fig. 22.3). There are also subtler distinctions, however: our sympathies lie with Sally not only because she is a faithful, sentimental maiden, but because she introduces herself in a simple and rather old-fashioned musical style. The first verse’s clear textual contrasts facilitate musical structure, with a Purcellian balance between the relative major on the second line of text, and the minor, returned to in the following line. Parallel cadences in the relative major and minor on the second and fourth lines respectively emphasise the symmetry of the contrast: My former time, how brisk and gay! How blithe was I, as blithe could be; But now I’m sad. Ah, well-a-day! For my true love is gone to sea. Sally’s melodic range is confined to just over an octave, with much conjunct motion and leaps mainly outlining the tonic triad; the madrigalian phrase ‘Ah well aday’, confirming the return to the tonic minor, is set to a similarly antique descending tetrachord from scale degrees 5ˆ to 2ˆ . In the preceding recitative (Fig. 22.4), Sally makes effective use, at

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Figure 22.2 Thomas Arne, Thomas and Sally (1760), Thomas, ‘Avast, my boys’, bars 1–4

Figure 22.3 Thomas Arne, Thomas and Sally (1760), Thomas, ‘From ploughing the ocean’, bars 7–10

Figure 22.4 Thomas Arne, Thomas and Sally (1760), Sally, ‘In vain I strive’, bars 1–4

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the level of the individual word, of the iambic rhythm recognised as the ‘Scotch snap’ – a distinctively English musical feature since the early seventeenth century – to emphasise (among other things) the words ‘sorrows’ and ‘amuse’ on flat 6ˆ – 5ˆ and 2ˆ – flat3ˆ . Sally’s musical style is more varied than this, but it is significant that Arne ensures audience sympathy for Sally through stylistic means. When writing more overtly ‘national’ music, Arne also used a recognisably antique style to define Britishness. The 1755 masque, Britannia, begins with the character of Genius summoning Britannia, using the language and style developed for the Jacobean and Caroline masque, and cemented by Purcell (Fig. 22.5). The line ‘Awake! awake! arise! arise!’ begins arpeggiaically and terminates with a melisma (a run of notes to one syllable): although the melisma’s style is entirely of its time, the format of declaimed, speech-like opening and melodic conclusion represents the essence of the traditional, seventeenth-century masque’s declamatory song.17 Not surprisingly, the air ‘Arise, arise, sweet messenger of morn’ in Alfred is similarly structured. In such airs, the intentionally performative role of the opening (designed, in its fanfare-like construction, to awaken and energise its addressee), serves to remind the listener of the ancient metaphysical function of music.18 Invoking music’s power to move the emotions, affect behaviour and connect the earthly to cosmic harmony in these airs thereby reminded listeners of the case for the importance of music more generally. Arne’s stylistic dexterity encompassed not only Britain’s seventeenth-century musical inheritance, but more recent periods as well: he, like others of his generation, was immersed in the Handelian idiom, and was able to adopt that style when it suited him. In Alfred, for instance, the B section of Eltruda’s aria ‘Gracious Heav’n, O hear me!’ (first introduced in 1753) turns to a quasi-recitative style for the words ‘The heathen race shall fear thee’ (Fig. 22.6), as a marker of the seriousness of its message and the heroic status of Eltruda’s character.19 Undoubtedly, for both Arne and his audience, the words ‘heathen race’ suggested the shift to the accompanied recitative, a form that was by this time characteristic of Handelian oratorio, just as clearly as ‘arise, arise’ or ‘awake, awake’ suggested the seventeenth-century masque’s idiomatic declamatory song. In Arne’s oeuvre, there are many other examples of the connection between language or literary heritage and musical style. When, in 1771, the young Duke of York’s investiture in the Order of the Garter was celebrated, Arne and his librettist George Colman (the Elder) chose to adapt Ben Jonson’s Masque of Oberon (1611), renaming it The Fairy Prince (no doubt a deliberate echo of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, which itself adapted Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Taking the hint from the work’s literary pedigree, Arne suffused his melodic writing with seventeenth-century gestures, and crowned the first Act with what is effectively a verse anthem (a seventeenth-century form). The highlight of this verse anthem is a deliberate evocation of the royal coronation ceremony through referencing Handel’s 1727 music for ‘Zadok the Priest’, with the words ‘God save the King’ appearing in Arne’s work as they do in Handel’s.20 Arne’s work was clearly a piece of musical sycophancy, designed not just to flatter the young duke but to please his father, George III, an ardent Handelian. But again, such homage was, for Arne, an expedient demonstration of the power and value of music in civic life. The limitations of the English operatic genre must truly have frustrated Arne. In part, these were a reflection of the abilities of his singers: it is telling that Eltruda’s ‘Gracious Heav’n, O hear me!’, referred to above, is introduced with a lengthy orchestral ritornello, full of the octave leaps and rapid semiquaver figuration that would have suggested a virtuosic, bravura aria – but Eltruda’s vocal line imitates neither these leaps (for the

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Figure 22.5 Thomas Arne, Britannia (1755), Genius, ‘Britannia! Sov’reign of Isles’, bars 1–13 most part) nor the agitated violin line, instead emphasising a pathetic appoggiatura motif (Fig. 22.7). (Melismas with plentiful rests inserted also suggest a singer of limited technical ability.) Charles Burney, who was no great fan of Arne, noted that, like Purcell, he ‘had always an inferior band to the Italian opera composers, as well as inferior singers’.21 Although some of Arne’s singers (such as his pupil and lover, Charlotte Brent) were highly talented, in the main Burney was correct.

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Figure 22.6 Thomas Arne, Alfred (1740), Eltruda, ‘Gracious Heav’n, O hear me!’ (1753), bars 95–8 As this last observation might suggest, still more damaging for Arne and indigenous opera was the equivocal attitude on the part of critics and the general British public towards homegrown composition: as the lack of success of Alfred’s multiple adaptations suggests, music was not always appreciated. Indeed, as music was increasingly associated with effeminate foreigners (French dancing masters as much as Italian singers) or with feminine wiles, Englishness was seen as the antithesis of

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this elegant art. We might recall that, in the earliest version of Alfred, there was no music for the monarch himself. And similarly (lest this be thought an exception for heroes or sovereigns, as in seventeenth-century opera), the upright British sailor, Thomas, barely registers in musical terms in Thomas and Sally; what little music he has paints him in militaristic fanfares or rustic (Scotch snap) stereotype. Arne was not alone in catering to this simplistic view of what English music should sound like, but he and his contemporaries could hardly be blamed for such caricatures. Perhaps that is why Burney added to the list of ‘inferiorities’ that hobbled Arne’s creativity, cited above, that he also had ‘an inferior audience, to write for’.

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Figure 22.7 Thomas Arne, Alfred (1740), Eltruda, ‘Gracious Heav’n, O hear me!’ (1753), bars 16–26

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Notes 1. Matthew Locke, ‘Preface’ to The English Opera; or The Vocal Musick in Psyche [. . .] (London: the author, 1675), n.p. 2. John Dryden, ‘Preface’ to Albion and Albanius (London: Jacob Tonson, 1685), in The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000), XV, ed. Earl Milner, George R. Guffey and Franklin B. Zimmerman (1976), pp. 6, 7. 3. On the creation of these conditions in the early part of the century, see Curtis Price, ‘The Critical Decade for English Music Drama’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 26 (1978), 38–76. 4. John Lockman, Rosalinda, a Musical Drama. To which is prefix’d an enquiry into the Rise and Progress of Operas and Oratorios [. . .] (London: W. Strahan, 1740), p. xx. 5. See Suzanne Aspden, ‘Ballads and Britons: Imagined Community and the Continuity of “English” Opera’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 122 (1997), 24–51. 6. For a comparison of Comus and Alfred, see Michael Burden, Garrick, Arne and the Masque of Alfred: A Case Study in National, Theatrical and Musical Politics (Lewiston, New York and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994), pp. 24–31. 7. Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 8. Todd Gilman, The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013), p. 530. 9. David Mallet, Alfred (London: Printed for A. Millar, 1751), ‘Advertisement’, n.p. 10. Ibid., p. 58; discussed in Burden, pp. 50–2. On the performative function of music in the Caroline masque, see Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 43–103. 11. Mrs Arne’s newspaper advertisement, reprinted in The London Stage, III, p. 1161; Charles Burney, The Memoirs of Dr Burney, 1726–1764, pp. 29, 47; both cited in Burden, p. 43. 12. Burden, p. 67. 13. Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick (London, 1780), pp. 37–8; cited in Burden, pp. 46–7. 14. The London Stage, IV, p. 238; cited in Burden, p. 60. 15. Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (1776–89), ed. Frank Mercer, 2 vols (1935; reprinted New York: Dover, 1957), II, p. 1004. 16. The extracts used here are based on the score, Thomas and Sally, or The Sailor’s Return: A Dramatic Pastoral with the Overture in Score, Songs, Dialogues, Duettos and DanceTunes (London: J. Walsh, 1761). This version represents extensive alterations made after the first libretto edition was published in 1760. 17. Walls, pp. 46–75. 18. See, for example, Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 19. Figures 22.6 and 22.7 are based on: Thomas Augustine Arne, Alfred, ed. Alexander Scott, Musica Britannica (London: Stainer and Bell, 1981), XLVII. 20. Suzanne Aspden, ‘Arne’s Paradox: National Opera in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Word and Music Studies 4, ed. Suzanne Lodato, Suzanne Aspden and Walter Bernhart (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 195–215. 21. Burney, General History of Music, II, p. 403. Burney felt similar misfortune applied in comparison with Handel’s oratorio team; ibid., p. 1016.

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23 Phaedra and Fausta: Female Transgression and Punishment in Ancient and Early Modern Plays Reinhard Strohm

W

hen antiquity was recreated in early modern drama and opera, the Aristotelian concepts (in the Poetics) of mimesis, truth and verisimilitude were applied to these recreations – with predictably controversial results.1 Whereas Aristotle had proposed to widen the playwright’s options from true or transmitted facts to the kinds of actions (ta genómena) that could in probability (to eikós) or by necessity (to anankaîon) have happened, early modern dramaturgies, especially of the seventeenth century, aimed to subject dramatic verisimilitude to moral principles.2 Although the ancient texts, whether actual dramas or narratives from history and myth, were accepted as truthful or at least authoritative, mimesis was now understood as the imitation of ‘nature’, an imitation that would demonstrate the principles according to which humans should behave, rather than simply showing human actions known through history and fable. The morality of many ancient dramatic plots collided with concepts of human nature in Christian and feudal society. While audiences may have accepted, for example, that a given fabula such as the fate of Oedipus or Medea was historically ‘true’, they may also have felt that in its transmitted form it was contrary to ‘nature’ and therefore needed revision. The meaning of verisimilitude in the early modern theatre shifted from a persuasive rendering of known or possible actions, recommended by Aristotle, to a persuasive conformity with contemporaneous ethical principles such as decorum and bienséances.3 Outstanding seventeenth-century authors incurred criticism when attempting to tread a more independent path. Pierre Corneille’s early drama Le Cid (1636) provoked an unprecedented debate – the so-called Querelle du Cid – over the verisimilitude of decorum itself. Critics claimed that Princess Chimène was unlikely to have forgiven the killer of her father, despite being in love with him, because she was bound by her noble status and character. Facts that were historically true were not necessarily good material for the dramatic poet, who should present only what was socially and morally credible.4 In this argument, Aristotle’s principle of decorum as a simple aid to verisimilitude – individuals being portrayed according to their rank and upbringing – underwent a turn of the screw towards social ideology.5 A morally and socially weighted verisimilitude seems to have been the goal of Charles and Pierre Perrault, who defended Philippe Quinault’s libretto Alceste, ou le triomphe d’Alcide for Jean-Baptiste Lully’s opera (1674) against the criticism of Racine and others. The Perrault brothers claimed that Quinault had deviated from

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Euripides only to conform to decorum and bienséances: for example, in Euripides’s scene where Admetus tries to persuade his parents to die for him, or when Alceste says farewell to her children. These seemingly unethical actions of the play would in their view not be credible to modern audiences.6 Pierre Corneille, however, rejected the argument that the cruel and unethical actions of the ancient plays and myths had to be expunged because they lacked probability. He preferred in any case to make historical or transmitted facts believable rather than denying them: he criticised, for example, Giambattista Filippo Ghirardelli’s Italian tragedy Il Costantino (1653), where Emperor Constantine condemns his son Crispus to death in ignorance of his identity, whereas the historiographers had made the emperor conscious of this identity. Corneille, who believed that Ghirardelli had made an unnecessary concession to decorum, even praised the dramatic possibilities of an action in which the emperor knowingly kills his son.7 For Corneille, there was little point in using a traditional plot when it had to be sanitised for modern ears and eyes. In fact, the usefulness of problematic ancient plots could be defended. The choice of subjects such as Oedipus, Medea, Phaedra not only followed authority and provided universally known reference points, it also suggested a moral continuity between ancient and Christian societies. Although substituting Christian ethics for the moral implications of the Greek and Roman plots, playwrights attempted to use antiquity as testimony and arbiter of modern ethics and vice-versa. Jean Racine, in the preface to his Phèdre (1677), even equated the teaching of the ancient philosophers with the messages of ancient drama: ‘Leur théatre était une école où la vertu n’était pas moins bien enseignée que dans les écoles des philosophes’ (‘Their theatre was a school in which virtue was no less well taught than in the schools of the philosophers’).8 The authority of the ancients aided the persuasiveness of the precepts the modern play wanted to insinuate. These precepts were put on stage for the audience – male and female – to learn from. By comparing various adaptations of ancient stories and plotlines, we may explore some of the problematic moral issues which early modern playwrights tried to teach their audiences. Female sexual transgression and its punishment was a topic which demanded dramatic teaching as well as oratorical preaching. Ancient civilisation had addressed it in Euripides’s Hippolytos and Seneca’s Phaedra. Intertextual exploration of the early modern versions of these plays reveals the ideological and asymmetrical views of a still vastly patriarchal mentality. For lack of space, only one side of this mentality can be addressed here: the male view of women, not of men.9 To put the difference very simply, vraisemblance would demand in this period that if a male person of rank transgressed the moral order or was tempted to do so, he would repent, learn and mend his ways. If he didn’t, he was a tyrant, meaning he was not a genuine king by social status and was therefore morally suspect to start with. However, a person of genuine nobility who nevertheless did go through with the transgression, was usually a woman, who had to be punished. This was, briefly, the co-ordination of sexual norms, social privilege and gender asymmetry that the narrative system relied upon. Euripides, in the second version of his tragedy Hippolytos, presents Phaidra as a woman who takes her own life because of a non-consummated transgression of the sexual code. She has fallen in love with her stepson, Hippolytos, and although she

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does not dare approach him, she feels unspeakably ashamed. Her feeling of shame is exacerbated by her royal status (a thought that must have appealed to early modern audiences); in fact, her anxiety to protect her reputation (eúkleia) has been seen as the driving force of her actions.10 For Albert S. Gérard, she exemplifies an ancient ‘shame culture’, in which the individual is not only driven to self-destruction to avoid shame, but can even commit a heinous crime (the slander of Hippolytos) to the same end. A lost first version of Euripides’s Hippolytos is presumed to have influenced Seneca’s Phaedra. This drama is an example of Stoic principles e contrario; Phaedra does transgress and punishes herself for actions really committed. In Racine’s Phèdre (1677), Christian morality and the sexual code are undermined by passion, female nature and lack of guidance; the poet’s search for motivations and possible excuses is circumscribed by Gérard’s concept of ‘guilt culture’.11 The story of Phaedra and Hippolytus, and its parallel narratives, underwent a surprising diversity of treatment. Eighteenth-century operatic versions, for example, range from an almost total justification for Phaedra in Domenico Lalli’s libretto Ippolito (Munich, 1731, music by Pietro Torri) to utter condemnation in Luigi Salvioni’s Fedra (Naples, 1788, music by Giovanni Paisiello), with various shades in between. In none of these plots does Phaedra actually commit adultery. In all of them but Lalli’s, she dies.12 The gender asymmetry is epitomised in views of human nature pronounced in these plays. The ‘female crime’ of Phaedra was thought to arise from overwhelming passion, female nature or demonic influence. These forces could not be controlled by rational means. By contrast, male transgressions in sexual matters (as represented, for example, in plays on Roman emperors) were based on archaic conventions or even ‘rights’. They were less natural, more cultural. Male protagonists did not commit suicide because of sexual offences. Their misdemeanours could be overcome through advances of civilisation, minimised through princely education, redeemed by repentance, or avoided altogether by following the great examples of ancient virtue. Women, however, could not be so effectively educated or guided; they had to be saints to resist temptation. Another common denominator of the Phaedra dramas is the role of the female transgressor within a narrow patriarchal group, especially the family or dynasty. Although Phaedra is not related to Hippolytus, her transgression is condemned as incest, not just adultery. In this regard, male prejudices did not change and the plot remained stunningly realistic for centuries. Life imitated literature, at least in 1425: Parisina d’Este, the young wife of Marquis Niccolò III d’Este, had an affair with her husband’s bastard son, Federico. Both lovers were executed at the betrayed husband’s command. From a novella on the event by Matteo Bandello, Lope Félix de Vega Carpio derived his tragedy El castigo sin venganza (1631). The almost ironic title of the play (‘Punishment without revenge’) implies that the killing of the two lovers, which the marquis arranges in such a way that he is not personally involved, is a just punishment that does not give personal satisfaction to the offended husband. As a prince he is allegedly forced to act like this. Indeed, scholars have debated whether the marquis himself is actually the tragic figure in Lope’s play.13 According to Melveena McKendrick, the woman (Casandra) acts in self-defence or even revenge against her older husband’s philandering, an attitude of the woman which for Lope de Vega would have been an illegitimate presumption of gender equality.14 His tragedy re-creates the

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characters of Theseus and Phaedra under the dictates of asymmetrical morality in an authoritarian, Christian environment. Several dramas and libretti tell the story of Emperor Constantine I and the adulterous passion of his wife, Fausta, for her stepson Flavius Iulius Crispus. The historical events seem to be that the relationship was consummated, or at least that Constantine believed this to be the case, and that in 326 CE he had both Crispus and Fausta executed. Crispus, formerly a beloved son of Constantine and his companion in many battles, even suffered a damnatio memoriae (erasure from historical record, as Phaedra does in Seneca’s play). The story of Fausta and Crispus was narrated by Byzantine historians who may have known Seneca’s Phaedra, or the lost Euripidean version of Hippolytos, on which, it is presumed, Seneca’s was based. The Old Testament story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife was, of course, also familiar to these historians. A version of the Fausta/Crispus story was also transplanted to the German Middle Ages. The opera libretto Ottone, a tragedia con lieto fine by Girolamo Frigimelica Roberti (Teatro S. Giovanni Grisostomo, Venice, 1694), adds historical legend to the Senecan fabula.15 Empress Eleonora d’Aragona, called Maria, wife of Emperor Otto III (980–1003), pursues the young Count Fausto, who later turns out to be the emperor’s own son by a previous marriage. No crime is committed, but Maria’s pressure on the young man, who is married, becomes known and he is sentenced to be executed. His wife, however, maintains his innocence in a public ordeal as she walks on glowing ploughshares without being burnt.16 In the traditional tale, she requests the emperor’s own life in exchange for her husband’s, while the adulterous empress is summarily executed. The Italian librettist constructs a lieto fine, saving the count’s life – whereas Maria dies of her own guilty agonies after having repented and confessed. The libretto specifically owes to Racine’s Phèdre the part of Hippolyte’s fiancée (Aricie); the young woman serves as a female counter-example to the behaviour of the empress. What is uncanny about this drama is that it seems to have mirrored, once more, an incident of real life. Dedicated to Duke Ernst August of Braunschweig-Lüneburg at the time of his campaign for the electorate (1694–5), which motivates the historical-genealogical backdrop, the libretto almost outlines the affair between his daughter-in-law, Duchess Sophie Dorothea and the young Count Philipp of Königsmarck, a war hero. Their love tryst had begun before Sophie Dorothea’s enforced marriage in 1682 to Ernst August’s son Georg Ludwig, the later Elector of Hannover and King George I of England. The affair did not end when Sophie Dorothea tied the knot. By early 1694, when the opera was performed in Venice, many people knew of the affair. Did the Venetian librettist dare advise the duke what to do about it? The libretto’s ‘solution’, however, differed from the ensuing real events. In summer 1694, Count Königsmarck was murdered at the Hannover court. The duchess was divorced and kept in confinement for the rest of her life.17 The transmitted narrative of Fausta and Crispus assumed the actual guilt and punishment of both young lovers, as in the true stories of Parisina d’Este, elaborated by Lope de Vega, and of Sophie Dorothea. The above-mentioned Il Costantino by Ghirardelli (1653), however, prefers the model of the ancient Phaedra plays: the young hero is innocent – in spite of history – and the father becomes a guilt-ridden tragic figure, as in

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Euripides’s Hippolytos. Thus the Fausta/Crispus plot became virtually identical with the Phaedra/Hippolytus plot. Pierre Corneille’s comments on Ghirardelli (1660) may have brought the subject to the attention of Racine, who in his Phèdre (1677) opted for the Euripidean model. Ghirardelli’s variant with the innocent young hero also remained characteristic of Italian drama and opera. Crispus dramas after Ghirardelli’s Costantino of 1653 were written by Francesco Savaro del Pizzo (Bologna, 1662) and Annibale Marchese (Naples, 1715). Operas included a Crispo by Francesco Rossi (Milan, 1663; libretto by Carlo Righenzi); an unperformed Flavio Crispo by Johann David Heinichen (Dresden, 1720); Il Crispo by Giovanni Bononcini (Teatro Capranica, Rome, 1721; libretto by Gaetano Lemer) and a Giulio Flavio Crispo by Giovanni Maria Capelli (Teatro S. Giovanni Grisostomo, Venice, 1722; libretto by Benedetto Pasqualigo). The character of Crispus, whose name – rather than Fausta’s – formed the title of these works, often functioned as an exemplum of wronged male innocence, to arouse pity. In some dramatisations, the subtext is religious: the innocent Crispus is an allegory of Christ or of a male saint.18 But the intertext was sometimes gendered: the figure of Crispus was apparently promoted as a male counter-example to the innocent sufferer Griselda, whose history of dramatisations runs parallel to that of Crispus. In Apostolo Zeno’s libretto Griselda (1701), the heroine is unjustly treated by all, and sexually blackmailed by the villain of the play. Yet her royal husband and judge finally defends her and restores her dignity. Crispo and Griselda actually formed an opera pair in the Roman carnival of 1721. Versions of the two operas were repeated in 1722 in London, again as a pair, with textual revisions by Paolo Rolli and new music by Bononcini. The authors left Crispo relatively intact while creating a new Griselda.19 Contemporary London opera-goers, as satirised by Richard Steele, interpreted the relationship between the two operas as a gender competition: the ladies preferred Griselda as an object of compassion, whereas the gentlemen habitually agreed with the ladies, i.e. they preferred Griselda, too.20 Steele’s satire underplays the fact that Lemer’s and Rolli’s Crispo is about the sexual transgression and punishment of a woman – Fausta – whereas the male villain in Griselda is only a marginal figure. In Crispo, the gender asymmetry is sharpened beyond that of the Hippolytus/Phaedra tradition: Fausta intends to harm Crispus in revenge for his rejection of her love, like the biblical Mrs Potiphar. This is found neither in Racine nor in Seneca. Fausta’s jealousy of Crispo’s lover Olimpia (corresponding to Racine’s Aricie) functions as a further ‘female’ motivation for her crime. Crispo’s half-brother interferes with his infatuation with Olimpia. The persecuted Crispo wants to take poison but is prevented at the last moment. On the false news of his death, Fausta goes mad and confesses. She is sentenced to death but spared by Costantino on Crispo’s intercession. The ‘moral verisimilitude’ in such a drama was actually defective: considering the motivations of most characters, which are mischievous or wicked, moral righteousness determined only the final result, not the intervening actions. Authors of the Crispus/Fausta dramas found it didactically effective to add jealousy and calumny to the heroine’s misdemeanours, the latter even where she did not need to lie to protect herself. This compounding of female guilt also happened in several Phaedra plays and operas. The characters of the monarch and of the male hero

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underwent revisions too. In early modern society, Hippolytus could not be a credible prince if he hated women and marriage; apparently he seemed even more innocent if he was in love with another woman, which also provided a credible motivation – jealousy – for Phaedra’s character. The monarch did not just defend his own marriage or the reputation of his house, as Euripides’s Theseus had done, but he represented the law and seigneurial morality to all others. That men of high social status were capable of administering ‘punishment without revenge’ (Lope’s title), made them rightful wielders of divine justice: it even obliged them to exercise such justice, if need be, against their own interests. The righteousness of princes made them all soldiers (and potential martyrs) of God. The relationship between our two dramatic subjects – Phaedra/Hippolytus and Fausta/Crispus – is like that between a primary and a secondary text that get entangled with each other. In the Fausta dramas, which lacked classical authority, playwrights were freer to radicalise the Phaedra fable beyond its transmitted and respected boundaries. It is amazing how close this plot came to events of real life, and how Fausta’s guilt and punishment nevertheless resisted all the revisions. The two dramatic plots were not rivals for public favour; rather, they promoted each other. It seems that the early modern European theatre, in its re-creation of the ancients and teaching of moral principles, developed such double story-telling – as it did in other cases – in order to explain its messages.

Notes 1. Aristotle, Poetics, 1451a, ll. 38–9. See Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 58–9. 2. Buford Norman, ‘Actions and Reactions: Emotional Vraisemblance in the TragédieLyrique’, Cahiers du dix-septième, 3 (1) (1989), 141–54, with contemporary testimonies for the dependence of verisimilitude on public opinion. 3. Gérard Genette uses the Querelle du Cid and the novel La Princesse de Clèves as examples to show the entanglement of social prejudice with theatrical persuasion: Gérard Genette, ‘Vraisemblance et motivation’, in Genette, Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1969), II, pp. 72–5, and comments in Katharine Ann Jensen, ‘Rewriting for Vraisemblance: Grenaille’s Version of Héloïse’, Cahiers du dix-septième, 3 (1) (1989), 155–67. 4. Georges de Scudéry, ‘Observations sur Le Cid’ (1637), in Pierre Corneille, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Couton, Collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1980–7), I, pp. 782–99 (p. 785): ‘C’est pourquoi j’ajoute [. . .] qu’il est vrai que Chimène épousa le Cid, mais qu’il n’est point vraisemblable qu’une fille d’honneur épouse le meurtrier de son Père.’ 5. In his ‘Trois Discours sur le poème dramatique’ (1660), in Corneille, III, pp. 115–90, Pierre Corneille follows Aristotle in prioritising verisimilitude (vraisemblance) and necessity (le nécessaire) over the retelling of truths or facts, and admits both human nature and moral–social standards as benchmarks of verisimilitude. 6. [Charles and Pierre Perrault], ‘La Critique de l’opéra, où examen de la tragédie intitulé Alceste’, in Alceste, suivi de la querelle Alceste, Anciens et Modernes avant 1680, ed. William Brooks, Buford Norman and Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi (Geneva: Droz, 1994). Online [M. Perrault], La Critique de l’opéra, où Examen de la tragédie intitulé Alceste, où le Triomphe d’Alcide (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1674), pp. 38–9 ; Charles Perrault, Contes, ed. Marc Soriano (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), pp. 129–52. On the Querelle d’Alceste, see Buford

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7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

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Norman, ‘Ancients and Moderns, Tragedy and Opera: The Quarrel over Alceste’, in French Musical Thought, 1600–1800, ed. Georgia Cowart (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), pp. 177–96. Corneille, III, pp. 155–6. Jean Racine, Théâtre complet, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Garnier, 1960), p. 542. I am also preparing a study of ‘male continence’ in Scipio and Hercules. Albert S. Gérard, The Phaedra Syndrome: Of Shame and Guilt in Drama, Studies in Comparative Literature 2 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 6–8, with reference to Hans Strohm, Euripides: Interpretationen zur dramatischen Form (Munich: Beck, 1957), pp. 75, 104 n. 1. Gérard, pp. 6–8. Further details in Reinhard Strohm, ‘Die Sünden der Herrscher: Phaedra und Hippolytus in der Hofoper des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Ereignis und Exegese, Musikalische Interpretation, Interpretation der Musik. Festschrift für Hermann Danuser zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Camilla Bork et al. (Schliengen: Argus, 2011), pp. 313–24. See Melveena McKendrick, Theatre in Spain 1490–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 105–7. Ibid., pp. 261–73. See Christian Seebald, Libretti vom ‘Mittelalter’: Entdeckungen von Historie in der (nord) deutschen und europäischen Oper um 1700 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009), pp. 37–42. This action was also ascribed to the Empress Kunigunde of Luxembourg (975–1033), who according to legend cleared herself from the charge of adultery in this way. Kunigunde was canonised by the church in 1200. She was the wife of Emperor Heinrich II (972–1024), canonised in 1147. See Bernd Schneidmüller, ‘Heinrich II. und Kunigunde. Das heilige Kaiserpaar des Mittelalters’, in Kunigunde – consors regni: Vortragsreihe zum tausendjährigen Jubiläum der Krönung Kunigundes in Paderborn (1002–2002), ed. Stefanie Dick et al. (Munich: Fink, 2004), pp. 29–47 (pp. 45–6). For another classical opera plot that overlapped with Duke Ernst August’s family affairs, see Wendy Heller, ‘The Beloved’s Image: Handel’s Admeto and the Statue of Alcestis’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 58 (3) (2005), 559–637. The historical Crispus was a military leader in Constantine’s war against Maxentius (‘In hoc signo vinces’). As the first Christian Emperor of Rome, Constantine ‘sacrificed’ his own son in the story discussed here. The Roman version had been set to music by Alessandro Scarlatti. See Reinhard Strohm, ‘Dramatic Dualities: Opera Pairs from Minato to Metastasio’, in Italian Opera in Central Europe, vol. 1: Institutions and Ceremonies, ed. Melania Bucciarelli, Norbert Dubowy and Reinhard Strohm, Musical Life in Europe, 1600–1900: Circulation, Institutions, Representation (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2006), pp. 275–95. See Strohm, ‘Dramatic Dualities’, based on research by Lowell Lindgren.

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24 ‘When Farce and when Musick can eke out a Play’: Ballad Opera and Theatre’s Commerce Berta Joncus

B

allad opera was formative for the eighteenth-century London stage. During the period of its efflorescence (1728–37) it revolutionised musical taste, built up a corpus of roughly 190 works, generated about 2,500 songs and achieved a breadth of dissemination previously unknown for London theatrical productions.1 Ballad opera staples remained highly popular throughout the century, and ballad opera’s practices were absorbed into other forms of musical theatre. The main medium through which ballad opera conveyed meaning and achieved success was music. Ballad opera authors from John Gay onwards reset common tunes – that is, melodies in the public sphere – to smuggle in extra-textual messages, selecting a familiar English-language song which would recall its earlier verses and thereby generate double meanings. Authors used this thicker form of communication to intensify satire and sneak in subversive political, social and sexual allusions. Principal players Lavinia Fenton and Kitty Clive, by contrast, used the song’s heightened expressive means to perform in the manner of sentimental heroines, turning themselves into singing celebrities. Eventually, the attraction of sentimental heroines overpowered that of authorial wit, and playwrights began selecting common tunes to create a seemingly native backdrop for British singing stars. Comparing ballad operas by John Gay, James Ralph and Theophilus Cibber, this essay explores the history and practices of ballad opera, and, in particular, how common tunes were repackaged as pseudo-native song to promote principal singers. Ballad opera has a birthday: 28 January. On this day in 1728, The Beggar’s Opera opened at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Its author John Gay aimed to rattle normative cages by mischievously combining such heterodox forms as opera, topical satire, common tunes, pastoral conceits and sentimental comedy. The result was what Roger Fiske called ‘the greatest theatrical success of the century’:2 performed an unprecedented sixty-two times during its first season, The Beggar’s Opera made the fortune of manager John Rich and an overnight star of its lead singer-actress, Lavinia Fenton. Critics despaired that the taste of commoners had overtaken that of the Town, with the nobility flocking to The Beggar’s Opera as enthusiastically as the denizens of pit and gallery. The work also spawned an unparalleled outpouring of print material and ephemera, from the wordbook with engraved music through to pamphlets and fire screens.3 What was the secret of Gay’s success? A key attraction was his practice of satirical allusion mocking the powerful and famous, not least first minister Robert Walpole and

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the operatic prime donne Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni. Another was the story, which drew on the careers of the infamous highwayman Jack Sheppard and the fence Jonathan Wild. Sheppard’s exploits had provoked a flood of print material, and a third of London was said to have attended his execution in 1724; by effectively casting him as the protagonist of The Beggar’s Opera, Gay was using one unprecedented event in mass spectatorship to create another. The melodies Gay selected also helped: although referred to as ‘ballads’, they were in fact mostly polite common tunes from stage productions and print collections.4 Gay wrote his airs to instruct audiences; his songs halted the action and his song verses commented archly – even seditiously – on the action’s moral lesson. That many of the songs focused on the enduringly popular topic of how women are, and how they should be, may also have strengthened The Beggar’s Opera’s reception. Finally, there was the audiences’ obsession with the seventeen-year-old Fenton, which led Gay to wonder ‘whether her fame does not surpass that of the Opera itself’.5 Among spectators bewitched by Fenton was the Duke of Bolton, who, after watching her onstage multiple times – William Hogarth famously painted the duke’s besotted gaze – had her off the boards by 19 June to be his mistress, and eventually his wife.6 Fenton’s vocal technique and public image became a locus classicus for native taste and simplicity. The epigram of her mezzotint portrait identified her with the practices of street ballad singing: which probably meant ‘straight’ tone and chest resonance, direct address to the audience with didactic intent, and the use of melodies whose earlier settings were vital referents. The Beggar’s Opera was the first London stage hit founded upon ‘natural’ vocal production.7 The author of The Touch-Stone (1728) – possibly James Ralph or Robert Samber – noted caustically that The Beggar’s Opera, by robbing the Performers at Pye-corner [and] Fleet-ditch [. . .] of their [. . .] Properties, has reinstated them in Wealth and Grandeur; and what shock’d most Ears [. . .] at turning the Corner of a Street [. . .] when thrown into a regular Entertainment, charms for Hours.8 Lincoln’s Inn Fields’s loss from Fenton’s abrupt retirement was rival theatre Drury Lane’s gain, though it took some time for Drury Lane soprano Kitty Clive to establish herself as Fenton’s successor. Drury Lane manager Colley Cibber, who had declined to mount The Beggar’s Opera, brought out an elevated song-laced pastoral in January 1729. Although a flop, Cibber’s production introduced an important new understanding of ballad opera’s music that built on Fenton’s publicity. For Gay, common tunes had been a means to flippantly replace Italian opera’s high-style arias with familiar melodies. Cibber made the larger claim that the tunes he used were ‘Native’, and like the ‘Old Ballads’ which Joseph Addison and others had earlier lionised,9 a means to bring together Englishmen of different stations: If Songs are harmless Revels of the Heart, Why should our Native Tongue not bear its Part? [. . .] Time was, even Here, when D’Urfey vamp’d a Song, The same the Courtier and the Cobler sung.10 Drury Lane aggressively promoted Clive in a series of polite, rustic ballad operas; largely through mezzotint portraits, she became literally the poster-girl for

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such productions.11 After several flops, Clive’s subversive improvisatory skills – her ability to ‘turn it & wind it’, as she later described her practice – in The Devil to Pay (1731) established her stardom, through which Cibber’s theatre came to replace Rich’s as the home of London’s best-known ballad operas.12 In 1732 Clive’s talents were paired with those of Henry Fielding, who refined Gay’s technique of ridiculing public figures through sly allusion. Fielding’s provocative 1730–1 ballad operas at the fringe Little Haymarket Theatre had made him London’s most popular comic playwright, and from 1732 he wrote sentimental, witty Clive vehicles, deploying dialogue rather than song to mine her talents. He left Drury Lane and in 1736 returned to mounting seditious works at the Little Haymarket;13 these productions, along with other anti-Walpole stage works and a flurry of pamphlet ballad operas, helped to provoke the Licensing Act 1737, which became law probably through Walpole’s connivance.14 By enforcing strict censorship and closing all nonlicensed theatres, the Licensing Act choked off the creation of new ballad operas.15 The story doesn’t end there, however, because ballad opera’s popularity was rooted in its music and musical practices, and these flourished even after 1737. We can get a sense of what these practices were from James Ralph’s The Fashionable Lady (1730). In this work, Ralph derided ballad opera as pandering to musical ignorance while claiming to strengthen musical taste. To make his point, in The Fashionable Lady Ralph himself deployed ballad opera’s basic techniques: instruction through song, particularly about women; the entwined construction of gender, star performer and national musical identity; and the double meaning intrinsic to each common tune’s set of associations. At once a ballad opera and a burlesque of ballad opera, The Fashionable Lady illuminates both how writers wrote satirical ballad opera and how audiences apprehended it. The Fashionable Lady is, besides a ballad opera, also a ‘rehearsal’ play, a seventeenth-century form in which dramatis personae watch and comment on a stage work being rehearsed. In The Fashionable Lady, ‘Mr Ballad’ enthusiastically hosts a ballad opera about ‘Mrs Foible’ and her followers. The emblematic Mr Ballad represents ballad opera audiences and their folly. Ballad credulously believes, as Cibber and others had claimed, that the ‘Old Ballads’ in ballad opera are authentic, and the preserve of a commendable native taste. He champions ‘old English Tunes’ because he likes what is familiar rather than what is tasteful, arguing for instance that ‘there is not a Country Parish-Clerk, that has twang’d a couple of Staves [. . .] but knows more of true Musick than [. . .] all your Senesino’s [sic] put together’.16 In the ballad opera Mr Ballad hosts, the dramatis personae have names, as was typical of the genre, which identify their vices: Mrs Foible, her maidservant Prattle, and Foible’s suitors: Mr Whim the Humourist (a rakish Town gentleman), Mr Trifle the Virtuoso (a scholar and antiquarian), the fop ‘Smooth’ and the bellicose sea captain ‘Hackum’.17 Foible, who represents the genre and the female stars it engendered, receives ‘Half the Town as her Adorers’, a charge that had routinely been levelled at Fenton.18 Foible’s characteristics are thus summarized: Cousin Foible is the Assemblage of every female Folly [. . .] Affectation ruins her Gentility, as Pride sullies her Beauty. – Besides her Brain is as empty as a Harpsichord, and her Heart as various as its Musick; her Conversation is trifling as an Opera, and her Passions a Medley like an Entertainment.19

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Ralph followed the standard ballad opera practice of ranging diegetic alongside didactic song. Like ballad opera writers, he reserved diegetic music principally for drinking and love scenes, selecting common tunes recycled to flag such action. For one love song Ralph chose the siciliano ‘Gently Touch the Warbling Lyre’, as had Essex Hawker in 1729 and Fielding earlier in 1730.20 Five later ballad opera writers were to reuse this melody,21 attributed, almost certainly erroneously, to Francesco Geminiani.22 Ralph’s drinking song, ‘Let’s be merry, fill Your Glasses’ had been used in Thomas Odell’s The Patron (1729), all three versions of Charles Coffey’s The Beggar’s Wedding (1729), and would resurface in eight later ballad operas.23 Ralph probably used these recycled tunes not to lampoon ballad opera’s standard music, but to encourage bookseller John Watts to print The Fashionable Lady. As London’s leading theatrical publisher, Watts had a set of notated typeset tunes to hand; any playwright who used these tunes made publication more cost-efficient for Watts.24 As instructing audiences was a chief preoccupation of ballad opera, dramatis personae typically break off their exchanges to sing about the action’s moral. In performance, this was an opening for a player to criticise the stereotype he or she embodied. Air 25 of The Fashionable Lady is typical in this regard: having declared, ‘I love a Man of Quality’, Foible identifies her own frailty, singing how the ‘Courtier’s Airs’ seduce the ‘Belle’ only because her ‘Pride demands’ such attention.25 Such moments of observation in ballad opera, outside the constraints of character, gave players like Clive the chance to share the playwright’s authority. Ralph similarly made use of the double meaning that inhered in ballad opera song. Common tune titles like Foible’s ‘I’ll rove and I’ll range’ identify the vices being exposed.26 New verses chimed with earlier settings of the common tune selected – for example, ‘See, see, My Seraphina comes’, reset by Ralph as ‘See! see! Like Venus she appears’ – to amplify mockery, in this case of Foible’s flouncy entrance.27 Air 30, ‘Cease your funning’, referred to the eponymous air 37 in The Beggar’s Opera. This ‘common’ tune had in fact been crafted by The Beggar’s Opera composer-arranger Johann Pepusch out of two themes from a Purcell anthem.28 In the original verses, Gay warned about flirts who want only to exercise their sexual power. By recalling Gay’s words as well as his melody, Ralph sharpened his attack on women like Foible who manipulate male desire (in Gay’s words, using ‘Force or cunning [. . .] to seduce [a] constant man’); the melody’s original verses also helped justify Ralph’s advice to relegate such women to spinsterhood (‘Let her dye [sic] a Maid’).29 Ralph also used common tunes to discredit such music. The Fashionable Lady’s opening number is ballad opera’s most-used tune, the ‘Abbot of Canterbury’.30 For the educated eighteenth-century listener, this melody would have exemplified poor taste through its asymmetry, obsolete modalism, lack of tonal centre – the first musical idea outlines the Dorian, the second the Lydian mode – and awkward octave leap (see melody in Fig. 24.1). Ralph has Mr Ballad first praise this melody, then sing it: When Farce and when Musick can eke out a Play, Can write for the Stage, and contend for the Bay, Hang Graces, and Muses, we need not their Aid, ’Tis our Tunes that we trust, and our Tunes are all made.31

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Figure 24.1 ‘Air 1. A cobler there was, &c.’, in James Ralph, The Fashionable Lady; or Harlequin’s Opera (London: Printed for J. Watts, 1730), p. 5. National Library of Scotland. Bute.663(7)

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Through the ‘Abbot of Canterbury’, Mr Ballad (and the devotees he represents) displays impoverished rather than good taste, and the common tune he performs is the agent and signifier of his debased musical sensibility. In The Fashionable Lady, Ralph tried to demonstrate that ballad opera corroded musical taste by popularising crass songs that only seemed to be native. Foible, that ‘Assemblage of every female Folly’ embodied ballad opera, and the incomprehensible appeal it held for its ‘Adorers’. Despite Ralph’s criticism, the association of ballad opera with women and their audience continued in a series of sentimental ballad operas designed to promote Clive. Eschewing cynical allusions, writers selected common tunes principally to market the female lead’s ‘Native’ charms.32 For example, in Theophilus Cibber’s 1730 Patie and Peggy (an adaptation of Allan Ramsay’s ballad opera The Gentle Shepherd (1729), or Joseph Mitchell’s The Highland Fair (1731), gentrified ‘Scottish’ music was deployed to allude not to a melody’s earlier verses, but to the notion of ‘unspoiled’ protagonists, Clive especially.33 In later London pastiche operas, such as Love in a Village (1762), The Shamrock (1783) and The Highland Reel (1788), led respectively by London’s next-generation sirens Charlotte Brent, Elizabeth Bannister and Miss Reynolds, ‘Irish’ or ‘Scotch’ melodies were likewise chosen to characterise an innocent English-speaking heroine. John Gay had written his seminal Beggar’s Opera to satirise Town folly, choosing common tunes whose earlier titles and verses would strengthen his mockery. Ralph, in The Fashionable Lady, pilloried the genre Gay had invented, but, like the authors of all ballad operas that criticised society, embraced Gay’s strategy of selecting common tunes that would deepen the satirical bite. Sopranos Fenton and Clive, by contrast, used the attractions of ballad opera song – its ‘natural’ delivery, direct address and seeming native roots – to create sentimental heroines. Audience enthusiasm for Fenton and Clive led ballad opera writers to craft works like Patie and Peggy, whose common tunes would endear a leading vocalist to spectators. The Licensing Act 1737 may have quashed new productions, but ballad opera’s legacy lived on in celebrity-led pastiche British operas staged throughout the century.

Notes 1. See Ballad Operas Online [accessed 4 February 2017]. 2. Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 94. On the first season’s enormous returns, see Jeremy Barlow, ‘The Beggar’s Opera in London’s Theatres, 1728–1761’, in ‘The Stage’s Glory’: John Rich, 1692–1761, ed. Berta Joncus and Jeremy Barlow (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), pp. 167–204 (p. 169). 3. For a summary of Beggar’s Opera scholarship, see Joncus and Barlow. 4. Jeremy Barlow, ‘Notes of the Origins of the Songs’, in The Music of John Gay’s ‘The Beggar’s Opera’, ed. Jeremy Barlow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 108–15. 5. The Letters of John Gay, ed. Chester F. Burgess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 72–3. 6. William E. Schultz, Gay’s ‘Beggar’s Opera’: Its Content, History and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), p. 24. 7. Berta Joncus, ‘“The Assemblage of every female Folly”: Lavinia Fenton, Kitty Clive and the Genesis of Ballad Opera’, in Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Tiffany Potter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), pp. 25–51 (on ‘natural’ vocal production, see pp. 27–34).

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8. The Touch-Stone (London: 1728), p. 16. On this volume’s attribution, see Lowell Lindgren, ‘Another Critic named Samber’, in Festa Musicologica, ed. Thomas J. Mathiesen and Benito V. Rivera (Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1995), pp. 407–34. 9. Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 27–34; Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 140–58. On the influential Collection of Old Ballads (1723–75), see Suzanne Aspden, ‘Ballads and Britons: Imagined Community and the Continuity of “English” Opera’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 122 (1997), 24–51. 10. Prologue to Colley Cibber, Love in a Riddle: A Pastoral (London: John Watts, 1729). 11. Joncus, ‘“A Likeness where none was to be found”: Imagining Kitty Clive (1711–1785)’, Music in Art, 34 (2009), 89–106. 12. Joncus, ‘“The Assemblage”’, pp. 36–41. 13. Fielding’s contributions to ballad opera are charted in Henry Fielding: Plays, ed. Thomas Lockwood, The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004–11) and Robert D. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728–1737 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 14. Victor J. Liesenfeld, The Licensing Act of 1737 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 123–55. 15. Berta Joncus, ‘Ballad Opera: Commercial Song in Enlightenment Garb’, in The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, ed. Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 31–63. 16. James Ralph, The Fashionable Lady (John Watts: London, 1730), p. 2. Senesino was London’s most celebrated castrato at this time. 17. Ibid., p. 7. 18. Schultz, pp. 22–37; Cheryl Wanko, Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2003), pp. 71–9. 19. Ralph, p. 14. 20. Hawker used this ballad in two rival productions of The Country-Wedding and Skimmington; Henry Fielding used it in the March 1730 version of The Author’s Farce. 21. The melody featured in The Humours of the Court (1732), The Mock Lawyer (1733), The Oxford Act (1733), The Raree Show (1739) and The Devil Upon Two Sticks (1745). 22. Ralph, Air 11, p. 15. Set as ‘Gently Touch’ by Arthur Bradley in the Opera Miscellany (c. 1725), this melody is not extant in Geminiani’s pre-1730 output, despite the attribution in Lockwood, I, pp. 701–2. 23. Ralph, Air 41, p. 53 (‘Let’s be Jovial, Fill Our Glasses’). Coffey’s The Beggar’s Wedding was mounted in March 1729 in Dublin, and in rival productions at the Haymarket Theatre and Drury Lane in summer 1729. Other ballad operas with ‘Let’s Be Merry’ (identified by title, often variant) include The Sailor’s Opera (1731), The Court Legacy (1733), The Court Medley (1733), Lord Blunder’s Confession (1733), The Fortunate Prince (1733), The Ladies of the Palace (1735), The Disappointed Gallant (1738) and The Philosopher’s Opera (1757). 24. Edgar V. Roberts, ‘The Songs and Tunes in Henry Fielding’s Ballad Operas’, in Essays on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage, ed. Kenneth Richards and Peter Thomson (Manchester: Methuen, 1972), pp. 29–49. 25. Ralph, Air 25, p. 22. 26. Ibid., Air 18, pp. 23–4. 27. Ibid., Air 27, p. 35. 28. John Forrest has identified Pepusch’s source as the antiphonal allelujahs, bars 100–26 in Henry Purcell’s ‘O God Thou Art my God’. Private communication of 10 July 2010 from Jeremy Barlow.

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29. Ralph, Air 30, p. 38. 30. Used in eighteen ballad operas, the tune before 1730 was in: Penelope (1728), The Village Opera (1729), its popular afterpiece version, The Lover’s Opera (1729), The Beggar’s Wedding (1729) and its rival version, Phebe (1729). 31. Ralph, Air 1 (as ‘A Cobler There Was’), p. 5. 32. Joncus, ‘“The Assemblage of every female Folly”’, pp. 27–34; Berta Joncus and Vanessa Rogers, ‘Beyond The Beggar’s Opera: John Rich and English Ballad Opera’, in ‘The Stage’s Glory’, pp. 184–204. 33. Newman discusses how Ramsay depicted Scotland as a pastoral realm, untainted by commerce, yet advanced from savagery, in Newman, pp. 44–60. Cibber and Mitchell discuss their intentions with regard to the ‘Scottish’ content in: Theophilus Cibber, ‘Preface’ to Patie and Peggy (London: John Watts, 1731), n.p.; Joseph Mitchell, ‘The Introduction’, Highland Fair (London: John Watts, 1731), n.p.

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O R AT O R I O

25 National Aspiration: SAMSON AGONISTES Transformed in Handel’s SAMSON Ruth Smith

By Milton fir’d, brave Handel strikes our ear, And every power of harmony we hear.1

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AMSON, Handel’s seventh English oratorio, was drafted in 1741, expanded and completed in 1742, and first performed in 1743. It immediately became, and remained, one of his most celebrated works.2 The libretto was devised by Newburgh Hamilton from Milton’s closet drama Samson Agonistes and fourteen of Milton’s other poems and paraphrases.3 Both Milton’s text and the libretto dramatise the encounters of Samson with his friends, his father, his former wife and his enemies’ champion during his last day on earth, and recount his destruction of his enemies and himself. Points of difference between the libretto and its main source, and the settings that the libretto prompted at such points, illuminate defining aspects of Samson which also characterise the oratorio genre that Handel and his librettists developed. Samson opens with a brief secco recitative in which the blinded and enslaved Samson bitterly remarks that a festival honouring the Philistines’ god Dagon is affording him a day’s respite from ‘servile toil’. Readers of Samson Agonistes familiar with the prevailing style of eighteenth-century opera and oratorio would expect this recitative to be followed by an air for Samson, its text probably likewise drawn from his opening speech of anguished remorse in Milton’s drama. Instead, Samson, and Handel’s listeners, are startled by a blaze of orchestral colour and a jubilant chorus, the first in a sequence of alternating airs and choruses from Samson’s captors, the hostile Philistines. The contrast with Samson’s isolation and dejection could hardly be greater. There is no Philistine Chorus in Milton’s Samson Agonistes. By giving a voice to the enemies of Samson and his nation, Hamilton was affording scope to a major structural device of Handel’s style: progression by contrast of tempo, of vocal register, of vocal and orchestral forces. The twelve-minute Philistine scena provides several of these in itself and, more tellingly, it brilliantly both sets off and embodies the cause of Samson’s physical and emotional dejection, which is the preoccupation of all but four of the following twenty-three numbers that make up the remainder of Act 1. The Philistines’ lilting airs and robust homophonic chorus throw into starkest relief the halting string

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introduction and unaccompanied first five vocal bars of Samson’s largo e staccato outcry ‘Torments, alas’, intensifying its poignancy. For those familiar with Milton’s text, the Philistine dominance in the opening of Samson is a surprise; for Handel’s listeners it would have been additionally shocking to hear heathens announce a ‘solemn hymn’ to an idol which they claim to be ‘king of all the earth’ in metres that are anything but solemn, with trumpets and drums – connoting royalty and triumph – and with words recognisably drawn from the Bible. Lacking texts in his main source for his Philistine Chorus, Hamilton drew on Milton’s psalm translations, accidentally or by design heightening the sacrilegiousness of the idol-worshippers. (The libretto identifies the Philistines of this first scene as ‘Priests of Dagon’, but what Handel evokes is a mass of people and their individual representatives, with the chorus scored in four parts (SATB), and the airs designated ‘Philistine man’ and ‘Philistine woman’.) For a modern audience, in a performance by a powerful chorus and orchestra, the irruption of Philistine glee can evoke a strong sense of outrage. For Handel’s first audience the effect would have been stronger and richer. During Samson’s composition, and for the following seven years, Britain was at war. For Handel’s public, the commonplace analogy of their nation with the ancient Israelites of the Bible – believing themselves to be God’s chosen people, as the Israelites had been, and championing the true (Protestant) faith, as the Israelites had championed Jehovah – was especially telling in time of war, when the Israelites’ heathen enemies represented for the British the hostile forces of Catholic Europe. As one of Handel’s oratorio librettists said from his pulpit in 1740, delivering a sermon on a day of fasting in support of the war, ‘there are some Instances in which our present condition so nearly resembles the ancient State of Israel, that I doubt not, but while I was reciting the foregoing passages from the History of that Nation, your Minds were fixed at home’.4 What had begun as a naval contest with Spain and several successes under the heroised Admiral Vernon had become, by 1743, a far-flung, confusing land-war with no clear heroes or gains. In 1744 a French invasion fleet sailed unopposed up the English Channel and was driven back not by the British navy but by a (‘providential’) storm. For Handel’s audience, the Philistines (and the heathen ‘others’ of Handel’s other Israelite oratorios) symbolised a very real threat to Protestant Britain.5 Hamilton and Handel created a second episode of mass Philistine assertiveness at the end of Act 2. Samson’s challenge to Harapha is followed not, as in Samson Agonistes, by the Philistine champion’s ‘crestfallen’ exit, but by a duet for Samson and Harapha, which – although Samson has the last words and the energetic melismas – leaves the action at a stalemate. The Israelite Chorus-leader Micah restates the challenge, not as a test of Samson’s strength but as a proving ground of divine power. The Israelites appeal to their god, the Philistines to theirs. In the six-part chorus which ends the Act, the opposing groups are head-on, each declaring its god’s omnipotence, simultaneously and with the same music. Inasmuch as neither god answers, the Act ends in suspense. It concludes also with a sharp division of all the characters between the two groups. By this point in Milton’s drama, Samson has far outdistanced his father and the Chorus – fellow-members of his tribe – in spiritual understanding and strength, and is close to regaining his position ‘as of a person separate to God’. But in the oratorio he joins with his father and the Israelite Chorus, sharing their words and music. There is no distinction between hero and community.

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The merging of hero with nation in the fight for liberty is of a piece with contemporary exhortations of the British nation, in sermons, in journalism and in party-political polemic, to eschew faction and present a united front to external threats. Hamilton’s dedication of his libretto to Frederick, Prince of Wales may have been intended to attach the oratorio to the aims of the mid-century Patriot opposition party, of which Frederick was the figurehead. The Patriots laid particular claim to the call for national unity and traditional liberties, and particularly enlisted Milton’s recently republished political writings, and his new profile as a selfless patriot, in their support for the war.6 But in drawing an encouraging and inspirational symbol of their nation from the Old Testament, oratorio authors had to make many improvements to the Israelites’ moral–political record.7 In Samson the alteration is particularly evident, for the unity of Samson and the Israelite Chorus is engineered by thoroughgoing amendment of their relationship both in the Bible and in Milton’s text. All criticism of Samson’s tribesmen in Milton’s drama is suppressed; they have not failed him; he is not superior to them intellectually, morally or spiritually – Hamilton has pruned out most of the argument which forms the ‘agonistes’ of Milton’s drama and the hero’s recuperation of his stature; and, crucially, he has no greater access to divine assistance. The existence of a ready-made Chorus, albeit with no physical battles to win, must have been one of the attractions of Samson Agonistes over the Bible or Paradise Lost as a source for an oratorio libretto. The Chorus of ancient Greek drama does not always know best, but early-eighteenth-century British drama theorists recommended the reintroduction of the Chorus into the theatre as a moral guide and teacher of true religion.8 The Israelite Chorus in Handel’s oratorios, wishful analogue of the audience’s desired identity as a ‘chosen’, united nation, subscribes to the ‘right’ religion, sometimes lapsing, with dire results (an admonition to contemporary listeners), but eventually triumphing, thanks to divine aid earned by courage gained from faith. As part of their ‘improvement’ to Milton’s picture of the nation, Hamilton and Handel radically altered his Chorus’s spiritual stature. Besides being blameless, dispensing unquestioned moral commentary, and, in the person of Micah, constantly offering generous compassion (in keeping with contemporary dramatic taste), the oratorio’s Israelite Chorus voices a closer and stronger connection to God than Samson’s. In a characteristic emendation, when Samson finally goes towards an unknown fate, the Chorus confidently proclaims: ‘Heav’n bids thee strike the blow. | The holy One of Israel is thy guide.’ The first line is not in Milton, and the second has the wish ‘be’, not the assertion ‘is’. The oratorio Samson makes just one address to God, early in the action (in ‘Why does the God of Isr’el sleep?’), whereas the Israelite Chorus describes, invokes or directly petitions God on seven occasions. Other than the introduction of a Philistine Chorus, this inversion of relationships to the divine is the most substantial and transformative alteration to Milton’s drama, and it enabled Handel to make the oratorio a prime manifestation of that favourite eighteenth-century mode, the religious sublime. Two years before he began setting Samson, Handel heard Samson Agonistes read at an evening party hosted by his patron the 4th Earl of Shaftesbury, who reported to his cousin and fellow Handelist James Harris that during pauses in the reading Handel – ‘who was highly pleas’d with the piece’ – improvised on the harpsichord, ‘I really think better than ever, & his harmony was perfectly adapted to the sublimity of the Poem’.9 The key word here is ‘sublimity’. By this date it was a commonplace of art and criticism that ‘sublimity’ in art connoted dignity, grandeur and originality of

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idea and expression, instilling exalted sensations of awe, astonishment and rapture; that the noblest form of sublime art was informed by religious belief and apprehensions of divine omnipotence; that Handel’s religious choral music, whether anthem or oratorio, was the acme of the sublime in music, combining force and gravity of expression, harmonic boldness and serious (contrapuntal) artifice – the opposite, that is, of Italian operatic style; and that Milton was the pinnacle of the sublime in English verse, probably in any verse. English art infused with the religious sublime was held to surpass even classical art, because it conveyed the truths of the true religion.10 To unite Milton and Handel was an obvious goal for all lovers of high art music: the result would be a work of unparalleled stature. Paradise Lost being considered the greatest sublime poem of the world, attempts were made to persuade Handel to set it, but without success.11 Samson Agonistes, however, had a passport to sublimity that even Paradise Lost lacked. To the satisfaction of eighteenth-century critics, the ‘urtext’ prescription for elevated art, On the Sublime, despite its assumed pagan authorship, cited as a prime instance of the sublime the divine fiat of Genesis, ‘Let there be light’;12 and that text appears in Samson Agonistes. In ‘O first-created beam’ (a rare instance of Hamilton leaving two lines of Milton intact) the hushed, awestruck Chorus feels its way chromatically, guided by only continuo accompaniment, to pause for a whole breve on ‘word’ before a C major blaze on ‘Let there be light’, which is uttered unison and unaccompanied – a formula of purity and force that Handel commonly employed to convey God’s pronouncements – and which unleashes ebullient string semiquavers to spread radiance ‘over all’ (anticipating Haydn in The Creation). The second part of this chorus is a contrapuntal prayer for Samson’s enlightenment, beginning in canon, and to his audience’s ears and ours ‘archaic’. In keeping with the views of many contemporary British music theorists on the proper style for religious music,13 Handel characteristically uses this ‘church style’ to denote Israelite probity and identification with the Ancient of Days, often (as in this oratorio) in obvious contrast to the carefree lilt and homophony of pagans.14 In the closing pages of ‘O first-created beam’ the ‘church style’ is emphasised by the lengthened note-values and chorale-like melody of the upper line, whose first five notes are indeed those of the chorale ‘Aus tiefer Not’.15 Fugal ‘church style’ recurs for ‘Then shall they know’, expansively asserting the eventual universal acceptance of Jehovah’s omnipotence; and for God’s edict on marriage (‘To man God’s universal law’). The six-part ‘Hear Jacob’s God’, opening the choral confrontation with the Philistines at the end of Act 2, is genuinely archaic, for it borrows the concluding lament, ‘Plorate, filii’, from Carissimi’s oratorio Jephte (c. 1650). The increasingly painful modal harmonies, the grave tempo, the juxtaposition of block outcries with successive single-voice cross-accented pleas to ‘save us’, superimposed on the monotone statement that ‘Israel depends on thee alone’, together evoke the immensity and remoteness of the deity and the anxiety of His imperilled people who yet cling to their belief. This piece has been criticised for not ‘merging’ with the rest of the work,16 but that is the point: the contrast with the following Philistine triple-time allegro dance-song and chorus is total. Handel clearly enjoyed the challenge of devising varied settings for similar texts, and at the point where in Milton the Chorus, in the face of Samson’s seemingly inexplicable new confidence, withdraws from engagement with his future, Hamilton provides another Israelite appeal to God to show His strength, which Handel renders initially

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concitato, imitating the desired divine thunderbolts. But when the scurrying semiquavers fall away, the dotted figure, now supporting cries for help, suggests fear, and the central section is a subdued but intense appeal. Milton’s ‘plot’ of Samson’s gradual spiritual regeneration is replaced with a drama of suspense, unresolved until the last half hour of three and a half hours of music: will God intervene in time to save His nation? Eventual salvation of the righteous is not in doubt: the religion underlying the oratorios is the Protestant Christianity of their audience, not Old Testament Judaism. But the uncertainty of temporal salvation is the mainspring of tension in Samson (and in other Handel oratorios). Both concerns are kept in play, from the moment in Act 1 when – in a violent swerve away from Milton’s drama – Samson’s despairing wish for death is answered with a three-movement sequence that stamps Christian belief on the oratorio. Denigrating ‘earth[l]y grossness’ and raptly envisaging ‘the starry throne’ of God, the Chorus confidently promises Samson joy in a heavenly afterlife (of which there is no suggestion in Samson Agonistes; Hamilton here derives his text from Milton’s ‘On Time’). Perhaps aptly for its position as the finale of the first Act, the foursquare choral setting of the last movement in this sequence seems almost to encourage audience participation, and certainly audience assent. Anticipation of heavenly joy also, famously, concludes the entire oratorio. The texts of the soprano aria ‘Let the bright seraphims’ (with trumpet) and chorus ‘Let their celestial concerts all unite’ (with trumpet and drums) derive from Milton’s ‘At a Solemn Musick’, in which union with the celestial concert is explicitly desired for ‘us’. The finale’s aspiration heavenwards is the more meaningful in that it follows a verse anthem elegy (to words based on Milton’s ‘Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’) which defies the veto on mourning in Samson Agonistes and embodies the musical sublime in its guise of ceremonial communal lament. Having toyed with using his magnificent funeral anthem for Queen Caroline as the elegy in Saul before making it Part 1 of Israel in Egypt, Handel here reuses the dead march from Saul, which immediately became one of the most famous parts of Samson. Had Handel set all of Hamilton’s text, the elegy would have continued into a hymn on the evidence of God’s creativity in the natural world, one of the period’s favourite themes of religious sublimity; and Hamilton gave Handel added scope for grandeur and expansiveness by adding a ‘hallelujah’ to each of its three stanzas (derived from Milton’s Psalms 7 and 136).17 Hamilton’s libretto was no mere abridgement of Samson Agonistes, but a lapidary, scissors-and-paste amalgamation of Miltonic texts, with additions (apparently) of his own. Of the forty-three arias, duets and choruses, only twelve have any text from Samson Agonistes; of the seventeen choral numbers, only one has text which is assigned to the Chorus in Samson Agonistes, and fourteen are to texts entirely from outside Samson Agonistes. Of the 606 lines of Samson Agonistes that Hamilton retained (many of them omitted in performance), he left only sixty-five unaltered, clipping bits from them and joining widely separated passages; and he frequently reassigned lines, for example from Samson to the Chorus, from the Chorus to Manoa.18 In compiling a text that Handel could use he is at the opposite end of the spectrum of respectful adaptation from (for example) James Harris and Charles Jennens in their arrangement of L’allegro and Il penseroso, or Mrs Delany, who, in drafting a Paradise Lost libretto for Handel, ‘would not have a word or thought of Milton’s altered’,19 and is closer to the bolder adaptations of Milton for two recent music theatre successes of the late

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1730s, Rolli’s Sabrina and Dalton’s Comus.20 Milton was sublime, but not sacrosanct, and was thought to need adapting to suit modern taste; there is an obvious parallel with the treatment of Shakespeare in this period.21 There is also a parallel with the pasticcio opera (works assembled from various sources), a genre despised to the point of complete neglect by modern critics for whom original authorship is a paramount touchstone, but received as unexceptionable by the eighteenth-century audience, witness Handel’s and other opera producers’ programming of pasticci during the 1730s; and with Handel’s own habit (subsequently also disparaged) of borrowing from other composers.22 Samson is entirely characteristic of its time, and tuned to its audience’s tastes and concerns. Unsurprisingly, Lord Shaftesbury recorded that ‘it was received with uncommon Applause’,23 and it was among Handel’s most frequently performed oratorios during the remainder of the eighteenth century.24

Notes 1. Anon., ‘Hearing Mr Handel’s Sampson, at the Theatre in Covent-Garden’, London Magazine, April 1744, p. 200. 2. Full score: Samson, ed. Hans Dieter Clausen, Hallische Händel Ausgabe, I/18.1–2 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2011), hereafter Clausen, HHA, containing (pp. lxxxvi–lxxxv) a facsimile of the wordbook’s first edition: Newburgh Hamilton, Samson. An Oratorio. As It Is Perform’d at the Theatre-Royal in Covent-Garden. Alter’d and Adapted to the Stage from the Samson Agonistes of John Milton. Set to Musick by George Frederick Handel (London, 1743). 3. Clausen, HHA, pp. xxxv–lxvii. 4. Thomas Morell, The Surest Grounds for Hopes of Success in War. A sermon, preached at Kew Chapel, on January 9. 1739/40. Being the Day appointed for a General fast, &c. (London, 1740), p. 18. 5. For possible relationships of Samson to the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–40) and the War of Austrian Succession (1740–8), see Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 repr. 2005), hereafter Smith, Oratorios, pp. 296–9. 6. Smith, Oratorios, pp. 292–3; Dustin Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 7, 16–17, 20–1, 160, 279 n. 37. 7. Smith, Oratorios, chapter 10. 8. Ibid., pp. 62–70. 9. Music and Theatre in Handel’s World: The Family Papers of James Harris 1732–1780, ed. Donald Burrows and Rosemary Dunhill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 80 (24 November 1739). 10. Alexander H. Shapiro, ‘“Drama of an Infinitely Superior Nature”: Handel’s Early English Oratorios and the Religious Sublime’, Music & Letters, 74 (1993), 215–45. 11. Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, ed. Lady Llanover, 6 vols (London, 1861–2), II, p. 280 (Mrs Delany, 1744); Clive Probyn, The Sociable Humanist: The Life and Works of James Harris, 1709–1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 72–3 (John Upton, 1746). 12. Smith, pp. 108–9. 13. Ibid., chapter 3. 14. Jens Peter Larsen, Handel’s Messiah: Origins – Composition – Sources (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1957), p. 64; Anthony Hicks, ‘Handel and the Idea of an Oratorio’, in The Cambridge Companion to Handel, ed. Donald Burrows (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 145–63 (pp. 154, 158).

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15. J. S. Shedlock, ‘Handel’s Borrowings (concluded)’, The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, 42 (703) (1 September 1901), 596–600 (p. 596). 16. Paul Henry Lang, George Frideric Handel (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 403, following Winton Dean, Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 336. 17. Printed in Clausen, HHA, pp. lxvi–lxvii. Hamilton’s Preface to the wordbook (n.p.) explains that ‘Tho’ I reduc’d the Original to so short an Entertainment, yet being thought too long for the proper Time of a Representation’, his text could not be set complete. 18. Clausen, HHA, pp. xxxv–lxvii. 19. Llanover, p. 280. 20. Paolo Rolli, Sabrina. An Opera for the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket (London, 1737); [John Dalton,] Comus, a Mask: (Now Adapted to the Stage) as Alter’d from Milton’s Mask at Ludlow-Castle (London, 1738). 21. Jean I. Marsden, The Re-imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and EighteenthCentury Literary Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). 22. For borrowings in Samson see Händel-Handbuch, ed. Walter and Margret Eisen, 4 vols (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1978–84), II, Bernd Baselt, Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis: Oratorische Werke, vokale Kammermusik, Kirchenmusik, p. 215. 23. Otto Erich Deutsch, Handel: A Documentary Biography (London: A. and C. Black, 1955), p. 848. 24. Clausen, HHA, pp. xxiv–xxv.

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26 Maurice Greene and the English Church Music Tradition Matthew Gardner

D

uring the eighteenth century, the Church remained an important employer of musicians; one of the roles of its composers was to write new music for the daily services within the Anglican liturgy as well as for special services of thanksgiving or national significance. In London, church music centred not only around St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and larger parish churches, but also around the court through the Chapel Royal, where composers received secure employment and provided church music for the royal family. One of the leading figures in London’s musical life during the first half of the eighteenth century was Maurice Greene, whose contribution to English church music was substantial, comprising a rich output utilising an array of religious texts. Greene’s career within the English church music tradition therefore serves as an example of the way in which an eighteenth-century composer could engage with biblical texts within the liturgy of the Anglican Church. Additionally, his interest in opera and other secular music forms offers a glimpse of the activities of church musicians in non-sacred contexts, and consequently their interests in secular texts and English literary traditions. Greene, like many of his colleagues, was trained from an early age within the English church music tradition, first reportedly as a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral and then as an apprentice under Richard Brind, who had been organist at St Paul’s since 1707. His progress as an organist was rapid and he received his first appointment in 1714 at St Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet Street, followed by a similar post at St Andrew’s Holborn in 1718. He had only been at St Andrew’s for one month when Brind died and Greene was announced as his successor as organist at St Paul’s. This marked the start of a career as a church musician that would last for the remainder of Greene’s life, culminating in the publication of one of the most significant anthem collections of the eighteenth century – Forty Select Anthems in Score.1 At St Paul’s, Greene’s duties were primarily to manage the daily choral services – which in 1718 comprised matins and evensong – as well as to provide new anthems and service music. He was also responsible for the music at one of the highlights of the London calendar – festal matins for the annual charitable Sons of the Clergy festival (benefiting widows and children of clergy),2 which usually took place on the second Thursday in December up to 1726 and in the spring from 1728; for this he frequently composed new large-scale orchestral anthems and sometimes new settings of the canticles – the fixed texts used at the daily services of matins and evensong. As his career progressed, Greene engaged with various aspects of the English church music tradition, writing services and anthems, publishing his music, researching church music of the past, and expanding his horizons with secular music, including songs, oratorios

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and pastoral operas, all whilst holding some of the most prestigious posts available to a musician in early eighteenth-century London. Greene’s work at St Paul’s was clearly admired. This was evidenced not only by newspaper reports, the mention of his name in music criticism alongside those of Henry Purcell and William Croft, and the inclusion of his anthems in Thomas Tudway’s Harleian Collection as early as 1720,3 but also through his appointment as the principal Organist and Composer to the Chapel Royal in 1727, following the death of Croft. Despite gaining this position, the royal preference for Handel, who had been made an extra-ordinary ‘Composer of Musick for his Majesty’s Chappel Royal’ by George I in 1723, meant that it was he who dominated at high-profile royal events such as the 1727 coronation of George II, weddings and funerals. This left a no-doubt disappointed Greene to deal with the day-to-day service music, rather than being permitted to provide anthems for state occasions.4 Nevertheless, Greene secured a further court position in 1736 when he was made Master of the King’s Musick, which required him to regularly set secular texts by the Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber, in the form of odes for the New Year and king’s birthday.5 Church music in the first half of the eighteenth century revolved around the professional London choirs at the Chapel Royal, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral. Composers such as Greene, his predecessor at the Chapel Royal, William Croft and his pupil and successor, William Boyce, consequently had a highly skilled set of performers at their disposal, allowing them to write ambitious music for soloists. The types of text which they could set fell into two general categories: the fixed texts of the Anglican liturgy, for example the Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis or Te Deum; or texts freely selected for anthems. The majority of Greene’s church music falls into the latter category, with 98 of 103 known anthems surviving; however, he also produced a number of liturgical settings, of which one complete service in C and seven Te Deums – two accompanied by a Jubilate setting – are extant.6 It was not unusual for a church music composer to concentrate on the anthem, as this was the only opportunity within the Church to set varying, non-liturgical texts. For a composer of English anthems in the early eighteenth century, a number of musical forms were available: the full anthem (for choir without soloists), the verse anthem (solo voices in verse passages contrasted with chorus sections for the full choir), the solo anthem (for a solo voice, often with virtuoso passages and in alternation with the full choir) and the orchestral anthem (accompanied with an orchestra, rather than organ or no instrumental accompaniment), the last usually being reserved for important festal occasions. Anthems and service music were commonly multi-sectional and could also employ a mix of solo, verse and chorus movements, sometimes interspersed with declamatory passages of recitative.7 This array of forms and structures was utilised by composers in order to support and contrast the content of the texts they were setting; for example, chorus sections could be employed to represent the general suffering or jubilation of the people, while a solo passage might represent the individual and his personal requests to God. An ideal example can be found in the first three sections of Greene’s solo anthem ‘My God, my God, look upon me’ conceived for Good Friday.8 The text ‘My God, my God, look upon me, why hast thou forsaken me and art so far from my health and from the words of my complaint?’, is set for solo voice to depict the general plight of the supplicant and his question to God. This is followed by a passage ‘O my God, I cry in the day-time, but thou hearest not [. . .]’, which is underlined by a declamatory style of writing, marked as recitative – the musical form closest to spoken dialogue. The

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third section is a six-part chorus with double soprano and bass parts (SSATBB) and is a commentary on the previous two movements with the text ‘He trusted in God, that he would deliver him [. . .]’, now in the third person and consequently requiring the representative change in vocal forces. The majority of Greene’s anthems are verse and solo anthems, numbering sixty-five in total; they therefore reflect the tastes of the early eighteenth century, which favoured solo vocal music, stemming from the vogue for Italian opera.9 Fourteen full anthems also survive, six of which are written in a modal (stile antico) style, and may have been composed around 1730 in an attempt to display Greene’s ability to write in the ‘old style’, perhaps connected with his receipt of a doctorate from Cambridge in 1730. The twenty-four large-scale orchestral anthems, which usually also include both small ensemble (verse) and solo passages, were not written for standard services, but rather for festal occasions, such as the Sons of the Clergy festivals at St Paul’s or for important services at the Chapel Royal (mostly for the safe return of the king following his visits to Hanover). Handel was not usually asked to compose for the latter occasions after 1727, presumably because they were not sufficiently high-profile for him to be called upon in his capacity as an extra-ordinary composer to the Chapel Royal (as outlined above); this was fortunate for Greene, as it afforded him an opportunity to write more complex instrumental accompaniments. Given his preference for composing anthems, it is not surprising that Greene cemented his career by publishing his Forty Select Anthems in Score in 1743. Both its dedication to the king (with a note connecting the anthems to the Chapel Royal) and its similarity to earlier prestigious publications (Croft’s Musica Sacra of 1724–510 and Henry Playford’s popular publication of devotional music by various composers, Harmonia Sacra, from 1688 to 1693) marked out its status.11 The anthems included in Greene’s collection were carefully selected to offer a full spectrum of works for a variety of occasions in the Church calendar, as well as for performing forces ranging from one to eight voices, all with continuo (keyboard plus, perhaps, cello and lute) accompaniment. Greene selected twenty-two verse anthems, eleven solo anthems and seven full anthems dating from as far back as 1719 for the publication, highlighting the preference for solo writing and the lesser interest in full anthems mentioned above. For the selection of his anthem texts, the majority of which draw on the colourful texts of the Psalms, it is likely that on some occasions Greene sought the advice of a cleric at St Paul’s or the Chapel Royal (especially for important occasions, such as the Sons of the Clergy festival), as well as following the example of his predecessors, Croft and Purcell, in resetting some of the texts they had used.12 However, his life-long association with church music and consequent knowledge of the Bible would also have adequately equipped him to select his own anthem texts – in any case, the texts would have been drawn from the King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer. That eighteenth-century composers were capable of choosing their own anthem texts, and expected to do so, is illustrated by the report that when Handel was sent the texts he was to set for the 1727 coronation of George II, he was offended, stating that ‘I have read my Bible very well, and shall chuse for myself.’13 This is additionally confirmed by George III who in a copy of John Mainwaring’s biography of Handel, published in 1760 shortly after the composer’s death, noted that by order of his grandfather (George II) ‘G. F. Hendel should not only have that great honour but except the 1st choose his own words.’14 Furthermore, in the eighteenth century a range of literary publications on the Bible was available to composers and their audiences, including

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church sermons and critical commentaries, such as those by Simon Patrick or Samuel Humphreys (who in the 1730s provided several oratorio libretti for Handel), adding a further resource for those wishing to gain a deeper understanding of religious texts.15 Greene’s range of compositional techniques, especially his skill at employing musical imagery and his text sensitivity, can be observed throughout his anthems. For example, in the full anthem, ‘Lord, let me know mine end’ (SATB) (Fig. 26.1), composed in c. 1725, Greene employs a persistent walking bass of crotchets throughout the entire anthem, which, combined with the largo tempo, minor key and frequent use of suspensions, paint the image of the overall theme of the anthem set down in the opening phrase of the text: ‘Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days that I may be certified how long I have to live.’ Greene’s techniques create a mournful sense of temporality.16 Further examples of Greene’s use of musical imagery include employment of short runs of notes – melismas – on words such as ‘rejoice’ in the opening movement of the verse anthem ‘The King shall rejoice in thy strength’ (ATB) and extended notes for the words ‘long’ and ‘life’ in the second movement for solo alto, ‘O Lord, grant him a long life’, or the use of suspensions in the full anthem, ‘Let my complaint come before Thee’ (SSATB), to emphasise the word ‘complain’.17 The influence of Italian music, some of which may have been passed on to Greene from Croft, can also be found throughout Greene’s anthem output, demonstrating his willingness to incorporate new styles into English church music. For example, in the anthem ‘Put me not to rebuke, O Lord’ (AAB) (c. 1724–36), the closing section employs a walking bass of quavers with a series of suspensions in the vocal parts, which, combined with the alternation between verse (solo) and chorus (tutti) passages, is reminiscent of similar movements found in Corelli’s sonatas and concertos (for example, Op. 1, no. 11 or Op. 6, no. 7), which were highly popular in eighteenth-century England.18 Italianate style can also be found in Greene’s frequent use of ritornellos (instrumental passages) in anthems with both organ and orchestral accompaniment,19 for example, in the closing chorus of the orchestral anthem ‘I will give thanks unto Thee, O Lord’,20 or the opening chorus of ‘Blessed are all they that fear the Lord’, written in 1733 for Princess Anne’s wedding (but never performed),21 as well as throughout Forty Select Anthems. Although Greene’s career as a church musician was largely successful, setting anthem texts for the Church had its creative limitations compared with text setting for theatre music. Despite the rich contrasts found in some of the Psalms, there were no characters with dramatic relationships to explore and no intricate plots to develop with music, and within the secular context a broader array of text types, including lyrical verse or dramatic prose and verse, often written specifically for the purpose of being set to music, offered composers a less restrictive creative environment. Additionally, Greene may have felt somewhat constrained by criticism (common in the early eighteenth century) of new styles of music, and in particular the Italianate style, creeping into church music from the theatre. For example, Arthur Bedford, writing in 1711, suggested that: Our Artists boast themselves that they imitate the Italian Fashion, and which is worse, take their Patterns, not from the Churches, but from the Play-houses, and such like Diversions [. . .] There are many Men, who cry out against Church Musick, because it is light, frothy, and wanton.22

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Figure 26.1 ‘Lord, let me know mine end’, in Forty Select Anthems, 2 vols (London: John Walsh, 1743), I, p. 91, bars 1–9

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No doubt Greene encountered such criticism at times during his career (as others had before him), despite the warm reception some of his anthems received, such as in 1723 when the rehearsal of his anthem for the Sons of the Clergy festival met with ‘great Applause’ and ‘drew a vast Concourse of Gentry to hear the Performance’.23 Given the constraints on composition within the Church and the natural interest of composers in musical forms other than the anthem, church musicians in the eighteenth century also frequently engaged in secular musical activities. Greene was an active member of musical societies and clubs in London, such as the Castle Society, Academy of Vocal (later Ancient) Music and his own Apollo Academy. Arguably, activities of this kind are part of the church music tradition, with further examples of composers branching out including Boyce, the organist John Stanley and, in the previous century, John Blow and Purcell. For the Apollo Academy, a semi-private musical club founded by Greene and his friend Michael Christian Festing following their departure from the Academy of Vocal Music, Greene produced a number of secular works including pastoral operas and English oratorios, and published collections of songs which were probably also performed as part of the Academy’s concerts.24 Writing oratorios and pastoral operas provided Greene with the opportunity to set dramatic texts rather than the more narrative-style text used in church music, as outlined above. It also allowed him to work closely with a librettist – for the majority of his large-scale secular works he collaborated with his friend (and clergyman) John Hoadly, who had a strong interest in the theatre.25 Outside the Church, Greene also set texts by well-known English poets, showing interest in English literary traditions, including a set of songs based on Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti in 1738 (published in 1739) and a setting of Alexander Pope’s Ode for Musick in 1730, adapted by the poet for Greene and first performed as his Doctor of Music exercise at Cambridge. His engagement with English church music, and especially his successful publication of Forty Select Anthems, is nonetheless what Greene is chiefly remembered for today. It is therefore unfortunate that, despite his colourful and imaginative settings of religious texts for the Church, demonstrating a strong awareness of the close ties between words and music, many of his anthems are now rarely performed.

Notes 1. Maurice Greene, Forty Select Anthems in Score, Composed for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 Voices. By Dr. Maurice Greene, Organist and Composer to His Majesty’s Chapels Royal, &c., 2 vols (London: John Walsh, 1743). 2. For further details about the music at the Sons of the Clergy festivals, see Harry Diack Johnstone, ‘The Life and Work of Maurice Greene (1696–1755)’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1967), I, pp. 54–67. 3. British Library, Harl. MSS. 7342; William Weber, ‘Thomas Tudway and the Harleian Collection of “Ancient” Church Music’, British Library Journal, 15 (1989), 187–205. 4. For details of Greene’s relationship with Handel, see H. Diack Johnstone, ‘Handel and his Bellows Blower (Maurice Greene)’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, 7 (1998), 208–17. 5. Rosamond McGuinness, English Court Odes 1660–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 31–5, pp. 167ff, and Johnstone, ‘Maurice Greene’, I, pp. 165–72. 6. For a catalogue of Greene’s music see Johnstone, ‘Maurice Greene’, II. 7. See, for example, the full anthems ‘Put me not to rebuke, O Lord’ and ‘The King shall rejoyce in thy strength’ (Forty Select Anthems, I, pp. 72–7 and II, pp. 15–24); the solo

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

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anthem ‘Have mercy upon me, O God’ (ibid., II, pp. 64–9); or the verse anthem ‘O God of my righteousness’ (ibid., II, pp. 79–84). Ibid., I, pp. 26–32. Henry Burnett, ‘The Sacred Music of Maurice Greene (1696–1755): A Study of the Problems Confronting the Composer of English Church Music during the Early Eighteenth Century’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, The City University of New York, 1978). William Croft, Musica Sacra; Or, Select Anthems in Score, Consisting of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 Parts, 2 vols (London: John Walsh, 1724–5). Henry Playford, Harmonia Sacra; or Divine Hymns and Dialogues, 2 vols (London: Printed by Edward Jones for Henry Playford, 1688–93). Burnett, II; Johnstone, ‘Maurice Greene’, II. Charles Burney, ‘Sketch of the Life of Handel’, in An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, 29th; and June the 3rd, and 5th, 1784. In Commemoration of Handel (London: Printed for the benefit of the Musical Fund, 1785), pp. 1–56, (p. 34). William C. Smith, ‘George III, Handel, and Mainwaring’, The Musical Times, 979 (1924), 789–95 (p. 790). Simon Patrick, A Commentary upon the Books of Joshua, Judges and Ruth (London: Printed for Ri. Chiswell at the Rose and Crown in St Paul’s Churchyard, 1702); Samuel Humphreys, The Sacred Books of the Old and New Testament, Recited at Large: And Illustrated with Critical and Explanatory Annotations [. . .], 3 vols (London: Printed by R. Penny, 1735–9). The anthem draws on Psalm 39, ll. 5–8, 13 and 15, and is included in Greene, Forty Select Anthems, I, p. 91. Greene, Forty Select Anthems, II, pp. 15, 17, 25. Evidence of Corelli’s influence can also be found in some of Handel’s English church music; see Donald Burrows, Handel and the English Chapel Royal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 98, 222. Burnett, I, pp. 51–9. Bodleian Library, MS. Mus. d. 47. British Library, Add. 17859. Arthur Bedford, The Great Abuse of Musick (London: Printed by J. H. for John Wyatt, 1711), pp. 214, 216. The Daily Post, 13 December 1723. Matthew Gardner, Handel and Maurice Greene’s Circle at the Apollo Academy: The Music and Intellectual Contexts of Oratorios, Odes and Masques (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2008). Keith Maslen, ‘Dr Hoadly’s “Poems Set to Music by Dr Greene”’, Studies in Bibliography, 48 (1995), 85–94; H. Diack Johnstone, ‘More on Dr Hoadly’s “Poems Set to Music by Dr Greene”’, Studies in Bibliography, 50 (1997), 262–71; H. Diack Johnstone, ‘New Light on John Hoadly and His “Poems Set to Music by Dr Greene”’, Studies in Bibliography, 56 (2003–4), 281–93.

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E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U RY F I C T I O N A N D M U S I C

27 The Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Music: Virtuous Performers and Well-Mannered Listeners Christopher Wiley

T

he novel asserted itself as a distinct and hugely popular literary genre during the eighteenth century, assuming great significance during this period as a form of writing that both reflected and produced culture. This essay explores aspects of the role played by music in the mid- to late eighteenth-century novel in England, exemplified by the output of Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) and Frances Burney (1752–1840). Its focus lies on the first two works by each author: Richardson’s international bestsellers Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–8), the former achieving unprecedented circulation across Europe and famously dividing reading communities into ‘Pamelists’ and ‘Antipamelists’; and Burney’s coming-of-age novels Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), which elicited favourable critical comparison to Richardson and similarly enjoyed widespread popularity.1 Burney thus presents herself as an appropriate candidate for discussion alongside the pioneering Richardson, not least given her own situation within the literary and musical circles of her day as well as commonplace practices of writers reading the work of successful precursors and contemporaries. Examination of selected references to music in these texts reveals fundamentally contrasting priorities between the two authors: Richardson’s depictions of private, functional amateur music-making focus on music as the act of performance, whereas Burney’s scenes of professional opera and concert performances for public consumption offer extended narratives of music as a listening experience.2 In probing the motivations for representing their female protagonists as either performers or listeners, issues raised in the course of discussion include contemporary social expectations for young women to be virtuous (but not virtuoso) musicians, and the general conduct of audiences of the time at public performances. A concluding section briefly considers the wider contexts for some of these literary themes within eighteenthcentury fiction, music and history, contemplating their longevity by glancing ahead to Burney’s later novels and those of Jane Austen (1775–1817), in light of the extent to which Austen was familiar with, and influenced by, the works of both Richardson and Burney.

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While there are comparatively few overt references to music in Richardson’s epistolary novels Pamela and Clarissa, they nonetheless yield important insights into their heroines’ characters, each being portrayed as a reasonably talented performer. Pamela Andrews relates that she learned music from Lady B (Richardson redacted the family’s full name), whom she served as waiting-maid until her demise at the start of the novel: my late dear good Lady [. . .] said, she would be the making of me, if I was a good Girl; and she put me to sing, to dance, to play on the Spinnet [. . .] and also learnt me all manner of fine Needle-work; but still this was her Lesson, My good Pamela, be virtuous [. . .] (p. 200) In addition to music, then, Lady B’s tuition included a range of other activities befitting a respectable woman of manners and devoted housewife in the making. Furthermore, it formed an acknowledged part of Pamela’s wider moral education, and reinforced the construction central to the novel of a protagonist who (at least in the view of the ‘Pamelists’) epitomised unfaltering female propriety, consonant with more established traditions of the conduct book. This connection between Pamela’s musical instruction and her virtuousness receives fuller expression in her observation that ‘as [Lady B] would have it I had a Voice [. . .] and often has she made me sing her an innocent Song, and a good Psalm too’ (p. 76). The chastity ascribed to the (presumably secular) song – and, by extension, its performer – is augmented by the inclusion of the ‘good Psalm’, signalling the commonly understood association between religion and morality that Richardson had made explicit at the outset, in his preface as ‘editor’ of Pamela’s correspondence (p. 3). Psalm-singing resurfaces at various other points in the novel, notably during Pamela’s incarceration by Mr B, Lady B’s son and Pamela’s new employer, whose repeated sexual advances she steadfastly resists. Significantly, this thoroughly miserable period sees her decline to give a musical performance of a psalm for the housekeeper under whose close watch she is held, Mrs Jewkes, ‘because my Spirits were so low’ (p. 140). Instead, once Mrs Jewkes has left, she reworks Sternhold and Hopkins’s metrical setting of Psalm 137 (which concerns the imprisonment of the Jews in Babylon and their refusal to sing for their captors) such that the words match her own situation (pp. 140–2). It is a sign of happier times when the reformed Mr B reads this version aloud at a dinner following a Sunday church service, with Mr Williams, the clergyman, reciting the original in tandem (pp. 317–21), eliciting praise for Pamela’s ‘Genius and Accomplishments’ (p. 318). Pamela’s talents as a performer are emphasised to accord both with the theme of musicality as a reflection of a morally virtuous character, as well as with the social eligibility of a young woman seeking to establish herself as refined. On one occasion, she gives an impromptu performance at the spinet of ‘a Song my dear good Lady had learn’d me [. . .] which she brought with her from Bath’ – in reality, an early version of Aaron Hill’s ‘The Messenger’ (1753)3 – while waiting to take dinner with the neighbouring families. Her performance is viewed favourably by the ladies in attendance, one of whom, Miss Darnford, commends Pamela on having ‘all the Accomplishments of [her] Sex’ (p. 288) and attests that she ‘plays sweetly upon the Spinnet, and sings as sweetly to it’ (p. 298), indicating her to be an exemplary and worthy female on the basis of her musical ability. The strength of association between the woman of virtue

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and music is such that the parallel is even drawn (p. 288) between the spinet being in tune and Pamela’s own mind being sufficiently in tune to play it.4 These narratives do, however, expose a limitation in the mode of storytelling that Richardson adopted for his sentimental novel. Since its constituent letters issued from the pen of the eponymous heroine almost exclusively, the reader has only her word to take for the praise frequently bestowed upon her, prompting criticism from the ‘Antipamelists’ that her apparent immodesty compromised her professed status as quintessentially virtuous. Building on the experimentation of his lesser-known continuation volumes of Pamela (1741),5 Richardson’s expansive Clarissa comprises letters written principally by two pairs of correspondents, thereby enabling the unmediated presentation of different characters’ perspectives on the protagonist’s musicality as well as significantly enriching the emergent web of intertwined voices, as Alex Townsend has recently demonstrated in relation to Richardson’s wider oeuvre.6 Like Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe’s musicality is insisted upon alongside her prowess in other domestic female pursuits such as reading, drawing, needlework and making conversation, all of which were important markers in establishing a young woman’s eligibility as a socially suitable housewife. Mrs Harlowe reminisces about her daughter’s ‘skill in music, her fine needleworks, her elegance in dress’, as manifested earlier in her life (p. 584), while Clarissa’s cousin, Colonel Morden, remarks ‘What an example she set! How she indited! How she drew! How she wrought! How she talked! How she sung! How she prayed [recte: played]! Her voice, music! Her accent, harmony!’ (p. 1448). At the same time, the eulogistic final letter written by Clarissa’s confidante Anna Howe – in which she states that ‘I say nothing of her skill in music, and of her charming voice when it accompanied her fingers, though very extraordinary, because she had her equals in both’ (p. 1469) – is more ambivalent. Miss Howe’s cautious assessment points towards the apparent need for musical women not to be portrayed as being too highly skilled as performers, and hence manifests the ‘virtuosophobia’ discussed in Regula Hohl Trillini’s chapter with respect to Austen’s novels. Music mirrors Clarissa’s state of mind, as it did Pamela’s. Following an angry epistolary exchange with family members conspiring to marry her off to a moneyed suitor, Roger Solmes, whom she finds unpleasant, she writes to Miss Howe that she was ‘forced to try to compose my angry passions at my harpsichord’ (p. 231). Much as Pamela (re)composed verses during periods of misery, Clarissa endeavoured to set to music and perform the closing three stanzas of an ‘Ode to Wisdom, by a Lady’, which, tellingly, makes repeated reference to ‘Virtue’. Clarissa conveys to Miss Howe her belief that ‘my heart went with my fingers’ (p. 231), suggesting that the musical experience was affecting and emotional for her, consonant with the aesthetics of sensibility. Having been dissatisfied with her own execution, she encloses her musical setting with the letter in the hope that Miss Howe will perform it to her. Richardson’s publication therefore included not just the ode’s complete lyrics (pp. 231–4), written by Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806) and reproduced from manuscript without permission, but also Clarissa’s music (Fig. 27.1), the work of an unidentified composer commissioned by the author himself. A prominent London printer by trade, Richardson would have been well aware of the significant expenses involved in having this music engraved as a fold-out insert appearing alongside the associated letter, testifying to the importance of its inclusion.7

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Figure 27.1 Clarissa Harlowe’s musical setting of ‘Ode to Wisdom, by a Lady’, reproduced from the first edition of Clarissa (1747–8). Copyright © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved. Shelfmark: C71bb1 In Burney’s early novels, conversely, her characters’ engagement with music primarily takes the form of their experiences of listening to operas and concerts, rather than acts of music-making per se. Evelina and Cecilia, both set in the 1770s, reflect London’s thriving cultural entertainment through their reference to half a dozen or so musical performances each, the author having been well-connected to the city’s professional artistic life via her father Charles Burney, the musician and music historian. Her anonymously published first novel recounts, in a series of letters between the eponymous protagonist and various correspondents, the wealth of activities undertaken by Evelina Anville in the capital: ridottos, shopping expeditions and visits to the theatre to see plays and operas, as well as excursions to the renowned pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Marylebone. At the former she hears an open-air performance of a hautbois (oboe) concerto (p. 195); at the latter, a violin concerto played by François-Hippolyte Barthélemon (p. 233), a friend of the Burney family prominent on the London music scene for many years. Notwithstanding her lack of experience, Evelina displays an instinctive cultural sensitivity towards listening to music, which eighteenth-century readers might have held to have befitted her true heritage as a disowned child of aristocratic stock raised in obscurity; this sets in relief the multiple breaches of social convention she commits elsewhere. Although admitting to being initially ‘very indifferent’, her earliest exposure to serious opera leads her to remark that the music and the singing were charming [. . .] I wish the opera was every night. It is, of all entertainments, the sweetest, and most delightful. Some of the songs seemed to melt my very soul. (p. 38)

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Evelina resolves to return to the opera a few days later, being ‘still more pleased’ than at her first visit, but, desiring to immerse herself fully in the act of listening, she complains of ‘the continual talking of the company around me’ (p. 40). The heroine’s commitment to listening attentively and quietly to music, as against the less wellmannered conduct of other audience members, thereafter becomes a recurring theme in Burney’s novels. For instance, Evelina comments of one subsequent concert, at the newly opened Pantheon in Oxford Street, that ‘I am quite astonished to find how little music is attended to in silence; for though every body seems to admire, hardly any body listens’ (p. 106). Contrasting attitudes to music and its appreciation also function to accentuate the social distance between Evelina and the Branghtons, her extended family, when attending the opera at the celebrated King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. That its primo uomo is identified as Giuseppe Millico (pp. 93–4), the real-life soprano castrato whom the author held in the highest regard, suggests that the work in question was one of Gluck’s, given the composer’s strong connections with Millico’s career. Evelina is troubled by the Branghton daughters’ behaviour in calling to collect her for the opera without having made any such arrangements in advance, the family’s patriarch, a silversmith, has an embarrassing altercation with the door-keepers over ticket prices (pp. 90–2), and they ultimately gain entrance only to the oneshilling gallery, rather than to the more socially exclusive pit as Evelina had originally intended (p. 86). Moreover, the party members react to the performance in markedly different ways. The culturally ignorant Mr Branghton finds much to criticise in an evening he describes as ‘nothing but one continued squeaking and squalling from beginning to end’ (p. 95), while his son protests the singers’ ‘unnatural’ gestures (p. 93) and the absence of speech (p. 94). Conversely, Evelina feels ‘tormented’ by her companions’ ‘continual talking’ (p. 93); in a passage typical of Burney’s detailed narratives of musical listening, the heroine relates how her attempts to immerse herself in the opera are universally met with ridicule by those who seem incapable of engaging with art on her refined level: This song [. . .] caught all my attention, and I lean’d my head forward to avoid hearing their observations, that I might listen without interruption; but [. . .] I found that I was the object of general diversion to the whole party; for the Miss Branghtons were tittering, and the two gentlemen making signs and faces at me, implying their contempt of my affectation. (p. 94) Nor is Evelina the only individual for whom significance is vested in their acts of listening to music being misunderstood by others: Madame Duval, her French grandmother, is visibly affected at a concert of musical automata at the recently opened Cox’s Museum in Spring Gardens. In a typical display of his embarrassing behaviour, the repugnant Captain Mirvan imitates Madame Duval by ‘[flinging] himself into [. . .] many ridiculous distortions’ (p. 78); then, during a performance of the Coronation Anthem (presumably Handel’s Zadok the Priest), he brings her round by administering smelling salts (p. 79). Much as absorption during musical performance underlines the difference between Evelina and the more uncultivated Branghtons, it also serves to illustrate the antagonism of the xenophobic, misogynistic Captain Mirvan towards Madame Duval.

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Burney’s departure from the epistolary format for Cecilia necessitates a more detached reporting of the characters’ experiences of listening to music; at the same time, it prompts the novel to assume a structure that both Sarah Gore and Leya Landau have explored for its analogies to opera, with its formal divisions resembling Acts and its succession of cherished sentimental episodes akin either to a series of arias or to the pasticcio, given its aggregation of favoured musical movements (albeit typically those of multiple composers).8 That the protagonist shares her name with the patron saint of music would doubtless have been known to many of Burney’s readers from the annual feast day celebrations and associated poetic and musical works. Like Evelina, the orphaned Cecilia Beverley develops a passion for music; however, in contrast to her immediate literary precursor, Cecilia, living in the care of one of her appointed guardians as she is too young to inherit her late uncle’s fortune, engages with her first visit to the opera from a slightly more informed standpoint: Burney describes her as ‘not wholly a stranger to Italian compositions, having assiduously studied music from a natural love of the art’ (p. 64). One of the novel’s early chapters crystallises around a rehearsal of Artaserse, and it is this occasion that provides Cecilia’s introduction to live opera since she attends as a constituent of the party of Mrs Harrel, her childhood friend and the wife of her present guardian. Given that the principal singer is identified as Gasparo Pacchierotti, a leading soprano castrato of the day and close friend of the Burney family, the setting of the popular Metastasian libretto was surely Ferdinando Bertoni’s (1776), as performed at the Haymarket Theatre in 1779, the year in which the novel is set. In an extended narrative passage, Burney notes that Cecilia is delighted and impressed by Pacchierotti’s masterful performance, as well as moved to dedicate to the opera ‘an avidity of attention almost painful from its own eagerness’ (p. 64). The only other character whom Cecilia particularly observes to exemplify such an ‘uncommon sensibility to the power of music’ is an elderly gentleman who ‘lent his head in a manner that concealed his face, with an evident design to be wholly absorbed in listening’ (p. 65). The gentleman, subsequently identified as the moralising Albany, is thus established as sympathetic to the eponymous heiress, in an echo of the manner in which audience members’ conduct at musical performances functioned in Evelina to delineate different types of characters. Correspondingly, he issues a prescient warning to the protagonist as he leaves about the danger of the wealthy yet unvirtuous company she is keeping, and counsels her to support the poor instead (p. 68), which is ultimately borne out by her more financially charitable behaviour. Later on, Cecilia resolves to return to the Haymarket Theatre with Mrs Harrel and others (p. 131), and once again has the pleasure of hearing Pacchierotti. Arriving behind schedule, she has the misfortune of sitting next to a party of ladies too occupied with discussing trivial subjects, such as hairdressing, to pay any attention to the performance, and, while she endeavours to focus on the opera, her ‘fruitless attempts all ended in chagrin and impatience’ (p. 134). Instead, she determines to eavesdrop on her talkative neighbours’ exchanges (pp. 134–5), thereby substituting one deliberate act of listening for another and inadvertently becoming complicit in the contemporary practices repeatedly decried in Burney’s writings, of attendance at public performances for reasons of socialising and conversing rather than necessarily devoting attention to the music. That Cecilia subsequently witnesses similar behaviour at two concerts – discovering that ‘no one of the party but herself had any desire to listen’ during one (p. 274), at the Pantheon, and that talking nearby in the audience made it ‘impossible

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to hear a note’ at another (p. 322) – implicitly confirms to her (and to the reader) that such conduct was by no means limited to opera. To conclude, Pamela and Clarissa depict protagonists who embrace music actively as performers, fulfilling the expectations of their day in being capable amateur singers and keyboardists, while the heroines of Evelina and Cecilia, as listeners, are more distanced from the phenomenon of the physical creation of the sound itself, albeit thoroughly absorbed in music in other ways. Richardson’s repeated juxtaposition of music-making with other respectable domestic pursuits establishes his eponymous performers as virtuous, a concept further extended, in Clarissa’s case, by her setting to music an ode on themes of virtue. Moreover, it reflects the cultural understanding in eighteenth-century England of a refined young woman’s acquisition of skill in performance as both a marker of social standing and, as Richardson suggests in Pamela (p. 264), a means of enhancing her marriage prospects. At the same time, for reasons of the previously noted ‘virtuosophobia’, their level of proficiency needed to be kept in balance. In this respect, the predominance of female protagonists as (no more than) merely competent performers – and, indeed, as well-mannered listeners – in the above discussion is unsurprising, notwithstanding that the novel as a genre also came to be directed to a female readership. As Regula Hohl Trillini’s essay identifies, the notion that a single woman in possession of a good musical ability must be in want of a husband subsequently received extensive literary critique in Austen’s novels of manners (1811–18), several of which have a claim to belonging to eighteenth-century literature in that they were drafted in the 1790s. The parallel is particularly apposite to the present context since Austen both held Richardson’s works of fiction in the highest esteem and was greatly influenced by Burney’s; of various direct connections between their respective outputs, one of the most explicit is the reference by name to Richardson’s third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), as well as Burney’s Cecilia and her later Camilla (1796), in Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). However, whereas in Austen’s writings only the women (and almost all of them) tend to be musicians,9 Richardson’s are not so exclusive. The morally upright protagonist of Sir Charles Grandison – itself a response to Richardson’s great literary rival Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and reportedly Austen’s favourite novel – plays the harpsichord (a skill he apparently acquired during his time in Italy) and sings, as does its heroine, Harriet Byron. Several individuals (male and female) in Richardson’s, as well as Burney’s, works of fiction inconsequentially sing or hum tunes either to themselves or in public, while others play the harpsichord or the early piano. Both Richardson’s eponymous females and Burney’s aspire, in different ways, to high society, which also represented an important source of musical patronage throughout the eighteenth century. Burney’s novels incorporate a strong emphasis on public performances, emblematic of the general shift in the course of the century from music under the curatorship of the aristocracy (to which social strata Pamela and Clarissa each strive), to music for the consumption of the upper middle classes (where Evelina’s and Cecilia’s activity lies), even if the latter continued to remain indebted to the social elite for its audiences. Isolated examples of attendance at public operas and concerts are also to be found in Richardson’s works of fiction, including indications that Clarissa’s predatory antagonist, Robert Lovelace, has visited the opera with some frequency (pp. 284, 1476); and, as Lawrence Woof has explored, the novelist evokes a range of allusions to both Italian opera and English oratorio throughout Clarissa

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as well as Sir Charles Grandison, in which Handel’s Alexander’s Feast is repeatedly referenced.10 A more fundamental difference of approach between the two authors lies in Burney’s privileging of narratives of musical listening above those of performing. Evelina and Cecilia each recount several instances of their protagonists’ desires to engage quietly in acts of captivated listening at operas and concerts, since both women demonstrate an innate love of music. But their endeavours are often thwarted by the unsympathetic or disruptive company in which they find themselves, reflecting contemporary social trends whereby audience members attended musical events because it was fashionable to do so, in order to be seen but not (necessarily) to hear. Doubtless these preoccupations reflect Burney’s distinctive upbringing within a renowned musical family (but without attaining the same level in performance as her father or her sister, Esther, a noteworthy harpsichordist) and her frequent attendance at major London music venues, such as the Haymarket Theatre, coupled to her personal frustrations with audiences’ general disregard for appreciating music in attentive silence. Wider factors influencing the focus of Burney’s writings include the aesthetics of sensibility, which resonated with descriptions of the heightened emotional responses to music experienced by listeners, as well as the perceived problem created by female musicians being elevated above the level of the competent amateur, suggesting that listening was the more socially acceptable role for women in relation to professional musical performances. Fiction’s engagement with music by no means merely travelled along a singular trajectory whose focus after Burney’s novels fell exclusively on acts of listening at the expense of performing. One need look no further than Austen’s output to uncover a series of heroines who (like the author herself) actively pursued amateur domestic music-making. Juliet Granville (Miss Ellis), the protagonist of Burney’s final novel, The Wanderer (1814), is a harp-player and singer whose income derives from teaching music to wealthy young ladies and who faces the daunting prospect, in one stretch of the story, of undertaking the less socially acceptable activity of professional performance in a public subscription concert. However, Burney’s works of fiction did serve to establish the attentive musical listener as a distinct literary figure, encountered in a range of subsequent guises. Austen’s writings again yield multiple examples, including Colonel Brandon listening to Marianne Dashwood’s singing, Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and Mr Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam) to Elizabeth Bennet’s piano-playing, Fanny Price to Mary Crawford at the harp, and Catherine Morland to musical performances in general, while other of her characters represent less sympathetic audiences. This emphasis on listening as an activity separate from performance, in turn, anticipated later trends in music’s social history: in the nineteenth century, musical performance became an increasingly ritualised, pseudo-religious experience, emphasising the distance between musicians and listeners, and establishing the still-current cultural etiquette of audiences maintaining a respectful silence in concert hall and opera house alike. Richardson’s novels likewise yielded long-lasting implications for the histories of literature and music. Pamela’s unparalleled success was such that it soon elicited literary responses not just in England – most famously, Fielding’s An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741) – but also, via translation, in continental Europe, where, as Ann Hallamore Caesar and Stefano Castelvecchi have recently discussed, Richardson’s early exploration of sentiment exerted wider influence on such artistic genres as stage drama and comic opera.11 Among the most celebrated manifestations are Carlo

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Goldoni’s two adaptations, as the play ultimately known by the title Pamela nubile (1750) and the opera libretto La Cecchina, ossia La buona figliuola, set by Niccolò Piccinni (1760), which itself provided a precursor for Mozart’s opera La finta giardiniera (1775). Resonances of the Pamela-derived literary themes of romantic attraction across specific class boundaries may thereby be traced in musical-dramatic works well into the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Notes 1. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. with notes by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely, and introduction by Thomas Keymer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, ed. with introduction and notes by Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1985); Frances Burney, Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom, with introduction and notes by Vivien Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Frances Burney, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody, with introduction by Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Subsequent page references to each of these novels will appear parenthetically within the text. 2. I am indebted to Noelle Chao for this pertinent observation. Further reading on the topic of this essay is to be found in her doctoral thesis, Noelle Louise Chao, ‘Musical Letters: Eighteenth-Century Writings on Music and the Fictions of Burney, Radcliffe, and Scott’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2007) and in her chapter on ‘Musical Listening in The Mysteries of Udolpho’, in Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013) pp. 85–102. See also The Cambridge Companion to the EighteenthCentury Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3. Richardson quotes the lyrics in full (pp. 288–9; see editorial note, p. 533). 4. Compare with the various references to Pamela’s mind being suitably tuned and fit for musical performance in verses 2–4 of her adaptation of Psalm 137 (pp. 141, 317–18). 5. This sequel is variously referred to as Pamela II and Pamela in Her Exalted Condition. 6. Alex Townsend, Autonomous Voices: An Exploration of Polyphony in the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Lang, 2003). 7. On the composition and printing of the ode see, for example, Thomas McGeary, ‘Clarissa Harlowe’s “Ode to Wisdom”: Composition, Publishing History, and the Semiotics of Printed Music’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 24 (3) (Spring 2012), 431–58. 8. Sarah Gore, ‘Sonorous Bodies: Music in the Novels of Diderot and Burney’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Harvard University, 1994); Leya Landau, ‘“The Middle State”: Italian Opera in Frances Burney’s Cecilia’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 17 (4) (2005), 649–82. 9. On this point, see Patrick Piggott, The Innocent Diversion: A Study of Music in the Life and Writings of Jane Austen (London: Douglas Cleverdon, 1979), pp. 1–3. 10. Lawrence Woof, ‘Music and Realism: Samuel Richardson, Italian Opera, and English Oratorio’, in Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa (London: Legenda, 2006), pp. 60–72. 11. Ann Hallamore Caesar, ‘Richardson’s Pamela: Changing Countries, Crossing Genres’, Journal of Romance Studies, 10 (2) (Summer 2010), 21–35; Stefano Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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28 ‘Dreadful Insanity’: Jane Austen and Musical Performance Regula Hohl Trillini

J

ane Austen’s attitude to music is easy to mistake for the same reasons that make her the writer ‘most difficult to catch in the act of greatness’.1 The surface of her novels lets us read them as unproblematic romances so that her ‘relatable’ characters and relationships can be pressed into service for romcom spin-offs, costume balls and dating advice. Similarly, Austen’s ambivalent treatment of music allows fans to entertain fantasies of ‘Jane’s’ pleasant musical world in recitals, blogs and appreciation groups. Even scholarly publications occasionally display this harmonising eclecticism, discussing characters and episodes or the music and society of the period mostly to argue that Austen was musical and liked music. Perceptible in titles such as The Innocent Diversion2 and Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony,3 this approach misses an elusive but pervasive undercurrent of unease. While Austen’s novels offer a rich, nuanced array of characters and situations, their basic musical topoi are standard for the time. There are only amateur players,4 almost exclusively female; in keeping with contemporary social norms, men feature mainly as listeners with an untrained, superficial interest that is more visual and erotic than musical.5 Well-established topics such as suspicious musical excellence or the instrumentalisation of music for match-making are frequent. What makes Austen unique is the sophistication with which she negotiates the complex social reality of music-making and questions the notion of ‘performance’ in her intensely controlled narrative voice.

Social Double-Binds Musical practice in Austen’s England was determined by the necessity to square gender and class norms with music’s precarious social standing, which required careful balancing acts from all performers. Playing was de rigueur for every well brought-up girl, but pronounced instrumental proficiency was also suspect, associated with exhibitionist licentiousness. Such ‘virtuosophobia’6 can be discerned in the musical reticence of Jane Fairfax, the best pianist in the Austen canon, in Mary Crawford’s suspect eagerness and in the narratorial disapproval of Marianne Dashwood’s abuse of music as ‘nourishment of grief’.7 All these configurations confirm the unwritten rule ‘Do not play too well’. Play they must, though: Marianne’s solitary musical passion simultaneously violates the second rule: ‘Play readily to please’. Refusing to play in company, as she does,

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is as selfish as the inconsiderate over-eagerness of Mary Bennet. The right balance is struck by Anne Elliot, who plays for others’ dancing for hours – as did Jane Austen herself 8 – or by Emma Woodhouse, who won’t ‘attempt more than she could perform with credit’ (E, p. 147). Typically for this complex figure, her musical limitations can be read in several ways: as virtuous restraint, commendable consideration for her listeners or the clever vanity of a lazy girl who has had ‘the power of having rather too much her own way’ (E, p. 1) after her mother’s early death. Emma’s reluctance to practise may also reflect an intensely discussed contemporary concern best summed up as ‘Too much practice is unhealthy’. Cramer’s and Clementi’s études, inspired by the technical demands of new piano music, encouraged extensive mechanical work but practising eight hours a day9 would damage a girl’s moral and intellectual development by making her neglect pursuits ‘superior in their nature and consequence’:10 Austen also prevents Emma from wasting her time. As an attractive heiress, Emma can ignore the fact that ‘[m]usic attracts potential husbands’. Regency novels and treatises attest to and criticise the fact that matchmaking was a prime aim of musical accomplishment. From the pious right to the revolutionary left, writers denounce an educational agenda which ‘consists entirely in making woman an object of attraction’11 and produces ‘weak beings [that] are only fit for a seraglio!’.12 Middle-class girls became ‘mere musical dolls [. . .] for sale in the great toy-shop of society’,13 showcasing pretty arms and their father’s income with the evidence of expensive music lessons. This is demeaning and dangerous because the veneer of carefully primed performances obscures a girl’s personality: ‘men know nothing of us in the world while we are single, but how we can [. . .] play a lesson upon the harpsichord’.14 With little for men to go on beyond a façade of drilled-in drawing-room accomplishments, it was no wonder that people talked of a ‘matrimonial lottery’.15 Austen hints at this risk when Edmund Bertram, bewitched by Mary Crawford’s harp, has to learn to appreciate the undemonstrative, unmusical Fanny Price. The erotic priorities of performance are confirmed by the fact that ‘really no young ladies ever keep up accomplishments after they marry’.16 In Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, a matchmaking aunt claims that her newly-wed niece ‘never could have [had] Joddrell without [. . .] the piano forte and harp I bought’, instruments which are ‘now useless lumber on my hands’.17 All Austen’s married women respect this convention; Mrs Elton’s refusal to play is not a ‘character indictment’18 but reflects the assumption that married women have more important duties than attracting men by music-making. Augusta Elton may be additionally motivated by class-specific ‘virtuosophobia’. While an outright inability to play implies poverty (Fanny Price), playing too well smacks of un-genteel professionalism. This is the flip-side of Jane Fairfax’s brilliance: musical skill was a prime asset in the ‘governess trade’ (E, p. 196) she fears. Governesses and ‘professional people’ taught the piano for money, while the gentry would never ‘do anything “like an artist”. Thus they seldom do any thing well’.19 Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s remark ‘If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient’ is a perfectly judged enactment of her social position, as is her approval of Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘very good notion of fingering though her taste is not equal to Anne’s’, a relative who ‘would have been a delightful performer, had her health allowed her to learn’ (PP, p. 117). Strictly middle class, Elizabeth is expected to practise, unlike her titled acquaintances, who are above such manual efforts.

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Instead, Lady de Bourgh prides herself on her appreciation: ‘There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste’ (PP, p. 115). The increased prestige of listening during the eighteenth century is reflected in Austen’s willing, virtuous listeners (Fanny Price and Anne Elliot), and can be seen hardening into a fad in self-professed music-lovers like Lady de Bourgh or Mrs Elton. Mrs Elton declines to play (‘upon my honour my performance is mediocre to the last degree’), but takes pains to declare that she is ‘doatingly fond of music – passionately fond; – and my friends say I am not entirely devoid of taste’ (E, p. 179). This fashionable proclamation of receptive sensibility is not calculated to impress the reader.

Literary Negotiations Fiction betrays an intense awareness of these contradictions: every heroine of every courtship novel between 1750 and 1830 is musical and never in a completely straightforward way. She plays readily but not too well, practises but not like a professional, and knows that playing will help to attract a husband and stop after marriage. Social routines became literary clichés; assumptions like the ‘opposition between virtue and virtuosity’ or the superior sensitivity of refined people could fossilise into a ‘rhetorical twitch’.20 In contrast, Austen’s fiction, which crowns and transcends the courtship genre, reflects both social and literary stereotypes with an unprecedented critical subtlety which prompted the famous diagnosis of ‘Regulated Hatred’.21 Most courtship narratives open with an introductory ‘blazon’,22 which outlines character, looks, mental attributes and accomplishments of the female protagonist, the last invariably including music. Austen’s facetious ‘Plan of a Novel’ accordingly starts with a ‘description’ of the heroine’s ‘faultless Character’. She is very highly accomplished, understanding modern Languages & (generally speaking) everything that the most accomplished young Women learn, but particularly excelling in Music – her favourite pursuit – & playing equally well on the Piano Forte & Harp – [. . .]. (E, p. 351) Northanger Abbey, conversely, provides an anti-blazon for the tomboyish Catherine Morland, who rejoices at the premature end of her piano lessons and only just manages to listen ‘to other people’s performance with very little fatigue’ (NA, p. 8). The heroines of Austen’s mature novels do comply with music lessons and party rituals but are all middling pianists at most, which simultaneously confirms their gentility, exempts them from demeaning display and protects them from literary stereotyping. Emma brilliantly reduces the blazon to the three words ‘handsome, clever and rich’ (E, p. 1) without any mention of music. Similarly unobtrusive gestures of resistance occur throughout Austen’s work. One typical procedure is that of outsourcing criticism from the narrator to individual characters. Here is the grasping Mary Crawford on families: about any three sisters just grown up [. . .] one knows without being told, exactly what they are – all very accomplished and pleasing, and one very pretty [. . .] It is a regular thing. Two play on the piano-forte and one on the harp – and all sing – or would sing if they were taught – or sing all the better for not being taught – or something like it. (MP, p. 197)

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These are the rules that simultaneously prescribe and circumscribe female musicianship. Educational pressure is stultifying, since girls would ‘sing all the better for not being taught’; snobbery avoids the hard work required for performance – ‘would sing if they were taught’ – and these conventions are an inescapably ‘regular thing’ which recognises only standardised categories of talent in ‘any three sisters’. This last observation also has a metatextual dimension: like careful parents, many novels (including Austen’s own)23 organise the education of sisters in predictable sets of two or three: ‘Two play on the piano-forte and one on the harp’. Social as well as literary stereotypes are elegantly and economically summarised and mocked. Whose is the mockery, though? Voiced by a flawed figure who desperately needs to use music for her personal ends, Mary’s sarcasm characterises herself as much as her society, and is easy to dismiss as sour grapes by a reader bent on harmony because the narrative voice remains unruffled by her sharpness. With wonderful economy, Austen tailors musical scenes so closely to her characters that anything they say or do can be read simply as part of a rich, plausible characterisation, ignoring potential educational concerns, literary in-jokes or feminist critique. Austen’s questioning of the concept of ‘performance’ tout court is similarly oblique. Jane Fairfax, overwhelmed by the gift of an expensive piano, cannot play ‘without emotion; she must reason herself into the power of performance’ (E, p. 156). This is a cornered woman hiding her feelings; but it also denounces a ritual which demands emotional control, superficial at best and dishonest at worst. Non-musical uses of the word ‘performance’ are just as ambiguous. A landscape embroidered by the unspeakably silly Charlotte Palmer is a ‘performance’ which proves that she has ‘spent seven years at a great school in town to some [unspecified] effect’ (SS, p. 114). The toadying Mr Collins, in ‘earnest endeavour to demean (sic!) [him]self with grateful respect towards her Ladyship’, is ever ready ‘to perform those rites and ceremonies which are instituted by the Church of England’ (PP, p. 43). Performance carries undertones of banality and untruthfulness also for listeners. The reconnection of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentwood is delayed by a concert: ‘as long as she dared observe, he did not look again; but the performance was recommencing, and she was forced to seem to restore her attention to the orchestra, and look straight forward’ (P, p. 125). In private company, only a ‘lucky stop in Marianne’s performance’ (SS, p. 199) allows her sister Elinor to overhear an important conversation, and the noun ‘performer’ turns even such richly realised individuals as Emma Woodhouse and Jane Fairfax into generic party guests. ‘Miss Woodhouse and Miss Fairfax were the only young-lady-performers’ (E, p. 149), and their playing may be received by ‘a great many people who had real taste for the performance, and a great many more who had none at all’. This is the society in which the typical amateur players are ‘as usual, in their own estimation, and that of their immediate friends, the first private performers in England’ (SS, p. 176). The most explicit repudiation comes in Pride and Prejudice, significantly from two characters who themselves enjoy performing banter.24 At a ball, Elizabeth Bennet is going through the motions of musical flirtation: ‘Well, Colonel Fitzwilliam, what do I play next? My fingers wait your orders.’ The remark is really aimed at Darcy, who is standing by, hinting at their mutual understanding of such clichés over the head of the more conventional Colonel Fitzwilliam and implying the inferior interest of mechanical practice: ‘It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman’s

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of superior execution.’ Darcy concurs that Elizabeth must indeed ‘have employed [her] time much better’. In fact, he does not fall in love with her over her playing, but after a verbal altercation which is silenced by a third party’s request for music. It is the refusal of socially circumscribed musical performance which seals their bond when Darcy says to Elizabeth: ‘No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you, can think any thing wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers’ (PP, pp. 116–17). Jane Austen herself was equally unwilling to ‘perform to strangers’, although family memoirs show that, as a well-brought-up and not-yet-married woman, she should have done. Caroline Austen-Leigh writes: Aunt Jane began her day with music – for which I conclude she had a natural taste; as she thus kept it up – tho’ she had no one to teach; was never induced [. . .] to play in company [. . .] I suppose, that she might not trouble them, she chose her practicing time before breakfast – when she could have the room to herself.25 With few facts to support her, Caroline can merely ‘suppose’ that her aunt hid her practising out of consideration for her family. My ‘supposition’ is that Austen did not want to perform, full stop; by playing early in the morning and allowing only a child to observe her, she avoided ‘the more vulgar demands of accomplishment’26 such as personal display. Similarly, Caroline wishes to ‘conclude’ a ‘natural taste’ for music in her aunt – who herself gave this fashionable phrase to the annoying Lady de Bourgh. Henry Austen’s ‘Biographical Notice’, similarly bent on respectability, even co-opts the novelistic blazon. He opens with details of his sister’s ‘personal attractions’, ‘complexion’ and ‘voice’, and finally lists ‘accomplishments’, in which she would ‘have been inferior to few [. . .], had she not been so superior to most in higher things’. This is the voice of a narrator making excuses for his heroine, but reality comes through in the blunt conclusion: ‘Her own musical attainments she held very cheap.’27 Maybe because, like Austen’s baffled brother, academics cannot match this to any literary blueprint, not many of them have taken his testimony seriously. The one unambiguous comment comes from the film scholar Erica Sheen, who calls the ‘reconceptualisation’ of Elizabeth Bennet as ‘a good(ish) piano player’ in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice ‘the biggest infidelity of all’ because ‘Jane Austen herself doesn’t actually seem to like musical performers’.28 While it is more accurate to say that Austen did not like the necessity of performance, Sheen’s intuition is essentially right: the characters which Austen made her readers like the most are those that she protects most categorically from performing. Whatever playing the piano may have meant to her, Jane Austen mostly represents musical performance as an unavoidable but ambiguous and controversial social practice, with little time for Romantic notions of music or the (related) metaphysical superstructures which it carried in earlier centuries. When Mr Haden, her brother’s attractive physician, voiced a ‘firm beleif [sic] that a person not musical is fit for every sort of Wickedness’, she ‘ventured to assert a little on the other side’. This is a polite, possibly flirtatious, rejoinder to a commonplace claim and a facile Shakespeare quotation; only in reporting this conversation to her sister Cassandra did Austen acknowledge what she really thought of Haden’s pompous glorification of music: it is ‘dreadful Insanity’.29

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Notes 1. Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen at Sixty’, Nation, 34 (December 1923), 433–4 (p. 433). 2. Patrick Piggott, The Innocent Diversion: Music in the Life and Writings of Jane Austen (London: Douglas Cleverdon, 1979). 3. Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony: Jane Austen and the Arts, ed. Natasha Duquette and Elisabeth Lenckos (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014). 4. Here: people who do not earn money or patronage by performing or teaching. In Regency fiction, ‘professionals’ only feature as purveyors of concert experience. 5. Cf. Regula Hohl Trillini, The Gaze of the Listener: English Representations of Domestic Music-Making (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 81–5. 6. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 1. 7. Sense and Sensibility, p. 62. Austen’s novels are quoted from the Norton Critical Edition (1995–2004) and abbreviated within the text as follows: Sense and Sensibility SS, Pride and Prejudice PP, Emma E, Northanger Abbey NA, Persuasion P, Mansfield Park MP. 8. In 1815, Austen promised to ‘practice country dances, so that we might have some amusements for our nephews and nieces’ (Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 300). 9. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System for Female Education (Dublin: Porter, 1799), p. 55. 10. Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex (London: J. Johnson, 1798), p. 76. 11. Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809) (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. 67. 12. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: J. Johnson, 1792), p. 9. 13. Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (1818) (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), p. 358. 14. Frances Burney, Cecilia (Dublin: Price, 1783), p. 310. 15. Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1798), II, p. 522. 16. Catherine Sinclair, Modern Accomplishments (Edinburgh: Whyte, 1841), p. 149. 17. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (London: Thomson, 1801), pp. 126–7. 18. Wood, p. 159. 19. Anon., ‘Private Concerts’, Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 7 (1825), 295–310 (p. 296). 20. Wood, p. 164. 21. D. W. Harding, Regulated Hatred and Other Essays on Jane Austen (London: Athlone Press, 1998). 22. Katherine Sobba Green borrows this originally heraldic term from Julia Kristeva to describe these passages of ‘tropic commodification’ in The Courtship Novel 1740–1820 (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1998), p. 79. 23. Cf. the Dashwood, Bertram, Bennet and Elliot sisters, the Misses Musgrove, etc. 24. I am grateful to Suzanne Aspden for pointing this out. 25. Caroline Austen-Leigh, My Aunt Jane Austen (London: Jane Austen Society, 1952), p. 6. 26. Wood, p. 157. 27. Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice’, in Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 190–6 (p. 192). 28. Erica Sheen, ‘“Where the garment gapes”: Faithfulness and Promiscuity in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice’, in The Classic Novel from Page to Screen, ed. Robert Giddings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 14–30 (p. 24). 29. Letters, p. 300.

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29 Music, Passion and PAROLE in EighteenthCentury French Philosophy and Fiction Tili Boon Cuillé

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n her LETTRES D’UNE PÉRUVIENNE of 1747, Françoise de Graffigny’s Incan princess, Zilia, attributes the decadence of French language and society to the expanding breach between être and paraître, signifier and signified, likening the process to the growing distinction between the use and exchange value of economic goods.1 As Zilia acquires fluency in French, her narrative becomes a study of the limits and possibilities of written and spoken language. Following a night at the opera, she remarks that song and dance are better at representing and conveying the passions across linguistic divides than language itself, which is conventional and nation-specific.2 Zilia thus questions the efficacy of her own system of communication: written prose. Graffigny’s novel has been recognised as the immediate precursor to Rousseau’s, Diderot’s and Condillac’s reflections on the origins of language and society and the alternate sign systems of music and gesture.3 In this essay, I examine the role French moral philosophers accorded vocal music in their literary works, exploring how music, as vehicle of the passions, furthered the aims of the ‘modern’ novel. As early as 1719, the Abbé Dubos asserted that music imitates the accents of the passions. Contrasting music to poetry, he remarked that music employs a natural sign system, while poetry is based upon convention.4 The question of the relationship between music and language came to a head during the Querelle des bouffons, a debate about the relative merits of French and Italian opera that polarised Parisian public opinion in the years 1752–4. The debate was exacerbated by the circulation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique française, in which he declared that French was unmusical, contrasting it to the lyricism of Italian. In his letter, Rousseau claims that national music derives its character from national language.5 He does not suggest that musical taste need remain culturally specific, however, for one can learn to appreciate another nation’s music much as one can learn to speak a foreign tongue. Listeners prove sensitive to vocal intonation regardless of their ability to grasp the meaning of words. Citing the results of an experiment in which an Armenian who hears excerpts from French and Italian opera is perplexed by the former but moved by the latter, Rousseau attributes the superiority of Italian opera to its international appeal.6 In his Essai sur l’origine des langues, written in the years 1755–61, Rousseau continues to make regional distinctions between languages and musical styles, yet he traces the common origin of song and speech to the initial expression of passion, preserved in the languages of the south. Here too he attests to the power of vocal inflexions to move the listener, likening melody to speech and opposing it to writing, for: ‘L’on rend

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ses sentiments quand on parle et ses idées quand on écrit’ (‘We convey feelings when we speak and ideas when we write’).7 The power of these ‘signes vocaux’ (‘vocal signs’) to touch the soul of the listener renders the voice capable of uniting individuals.8 The degeneration of spoken into written language, of melody into harmony, and of vocal into instrumental music corresponds to the loss of eloquence and of the power to persuade the people that Rousseau associates with freedom of expression and representative government.9 The division into national languages and musical styles is a product of this devolution. Yet by evoking the union of music and language in the original cry of nature, Rousseau enables us to envision what once was and could be.10 Denis Diderot likewise distinguished between the natural and the conventional order of signs in his Lettre sur les sourds et les muets of 1751. Of all languages, he contends, French is the most conventional, and is better suited to reason than the passions. It does not lend itself to theatre or fiction as well as English or Italian, for it can neither move nor persuade the audience. While Diderot often turned to gesture or pantomime as alternatives to language, he ponders why it is that music is the most expressive of the arts.11 From his earliest writings, Diderot displayed interest in the physiological as well as the moral aspect of musical sensibility.12 Likening the passions to the strings of an instrument, he characterises listeners who are susceptible to music as possessed of ‘corps harmoniques’ (‘harmonic bodies’) that resonate in sympathy with the sounds they hear.13 Rousseau’s and Diderot’s mid-century preoccupation with the limits of language led directly to subsequent rethinking of the genres of opera, theatre and the novel. In his Éloge de Richardson of 1761, Diderot declared that the term ‘novel’ should be redefined in Richardson’s wake. Attributing to the novelist the same powers of observation he accorded elsewhere to the physician, the moral philosopher and the great actor, he claimed that the novelist’s ability to move the reader lies in the capacity to recreate the accents and expressions, the very physiognomy of the passions.14 The Marquis de Sade concurred with Diderot’s appreciation of Richardson’s novels in his Idée sur les romans of 1795, defining the subject of the novel not as virtue but as the human heart.15 In her Essai sur les fictions of the same year, Germaine de Staël likewise took Richardson as the model for the modern novel, defining its subject not as love but as the human heart, which encompasses an array of passions from ambition to vanity.16 According to all three authors, the purpose of the novel, like theatre before it, was to appeal to readers’ emotions in order to inspire love of virtue and hatred of vice. They invoked music, as the natural language of the passions, in order to enhance the expressive power of prose fiction, seeking to escape the constraints of written language on the level of the discourse by emphasising the authenticity and immediacy of vocal music on the level of the story. Both Sade and Staël singled out Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse of 1761 as the worthy successor to Richardson’s novels. In a famous letter to Julie, her lover Saint-Preux recounts his conversion from French to Italian music while listening to a castrato’s song. Previously, he states, ‘Je n’apercevais pas, dans les accents de la mélodie appliqués à ceux de la langue, le lien puissant et secret des passions avec les sons’ (‘I had not perceived the powerful and secret link between the passions and sounds in the accents of melody applied to those of language’). In the course of the evening, the music that until then had but tantalised his ear penetrates to his heart and soul. Once initiated into the Italian musical idiom, Saint-Preux loses all notion of the mimetic art

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as such, hearing the passions directly – ‘je croyais entendre la voix de la douleur, de l’emportement, du désespoir’ (‘I thought I heard the voice of grief, fury, despair’) – and seeing them enacted in his mind’s eye: ‘je croyais voir des mères éplorées, des amants trahis, des tyrans furieux’ (‘I thought I saw grieving mothers, betrayed lovers, furious tyrants’).17 Saint-Preux’s desire, once the semiotic distinction between signifier and signified and the critical distance between performer and audience have been elided, is to convince Julie to sing to him in Italian.18 Though his wish is never fulfilled, the letter constitutes a vision of shared sensibilities and the ‘union of souls’ that is oft repeated in the novel.19 It also provides a striking illustration of the mechanism of pity – the ability to empathise with others by responding to the sound of their voice – that unites individuals in the fête champêtre, the communal experience that Rousseau proposed as an alternative to theatre.20 It is to this sentiment, which transcends national boundaries and cultural divides, that Rousseau attributed the foundation of society and its moral regeneration. Diderot’s philosophical dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau, featuring the melomaniacal nephew of opera composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, evokes the forms of both theatre and the novel by alternating dialogue with description.21 Rameau’s nephew refers to the Italian airs Saint-Preux learned to savour as ‘la nouvelle musique’, a development in France that was contemporary to the new novel. This shift in musical taste extends far beyond Saint-Preux’s private conversion experience. The nephew defines new music – or, more specifically, a new form of opera, l’opéra-comique à l’italienne – as ‘l’imitation des accents de la passion ou des phénomènes de la nature’ (‘the imitation of accents of passion or natural phenomena’).22 He attributes the realisation – essential to the revitalisation of French opera and the novel – that ‘la passion dispose de la prosodie’ (‘passion determines prosody’) to Italian composers from Locatelli to Duni. The poetic line, the nephew insists, should be modelled on the accents of passion such as those of beggars or flatterers that one encounters not on the stage but in the street.23 In order to persuade his interlocutor of his convictions, the nephew must ‘entrer en passion’ (‘become passionate’) himself, incarnating instruments and characters in turn in order to convey what they themselves represent, whether nature or passion, to the listener.24 In the course of the pantomime de l’homme-orchestre, the semiotic distinction between signifier and signified, and the critical distance between performer and audience, are once again elided. While the nephew’s pantomimes of society are frequently analysed in the context of Diderot’s writings on the theatre,25 this particular performance is a vocalised improvisation of an operatic medley (French and Italian, tragic and comic). Jealous of his uncle’s talent, the nephew is incapable of writing his musical intuitions down. Possessed of a harmonic body, his performance remains oral, gestural and unscripted, rejoining the Encyclopédie definitions of enthusiasm and genius.26 This time it is not the listener but the virtuoso who loses his sense of self and of the performance as such, for the nephew enters into a state of enthusiasm culminating in ‘une aliénation d’esprit’ (‘mental alienation’), the moment at which Hegel considers him to have transcended the confines of individual consciousness.27 Though the nephew’s performance provokes both pity and admiration in his interlocutor, the sentiment is denatured by a hint of ridicule that creates a sense of affective dissonance.28 In De la littérature of 1800, Staël identifies the eighteenth century primarily with prose and modern literature with the novel, whose harmony she attributes to the vocal inflections that accompany the expression of the passions. The author who determined

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the development of contemporary French literature was, to her mind, Rousseau.29 As early as her Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J-J Rousseau of 1788, the act of literary criticism that brought her to writing, Staël attributed ‘une sorte d’harmonie naturelle, accent de la passion’ (‘a sort of natural harmony, accent of passion’) to certain passages of Rousseau’s oeuvre, suggesting that he had thereby helped restore what was lacking in the prose of his contemporaries. She regrets his statement in the Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, however, that women ‘ne sont jamais capables des ouvrages qu’il faut écrire avec de l’âme ou de la passion’ (‘are never capable of works that must be written with soul or passion’).30 One of Staël’s signal contributions was to appropriate Rousseau’s coveted powers of expression for women authors (herself) and characters (Corinne). Like Rousseau and Diderot, Staël ranks music above the other mimetic arts for its ability to touch the soul and grants the laurels for musical expression to the Italians.31 Asking, rhetorically, ‘Y a-t-il de la musique pour ceux qui ne sont pas capables d’enthousiasme?’ (‘Is there music for those who are not capable of enthusiasm?’), she defines the enthusiast as someone who vibrates, akin to an aeolian harp, in sympathetic resonance with the surroundings, providing a model of such an enthusiast in her 1807 novel, Corinne ou l’Italie.32 Corinne’s improvisations, accompanied on the lyre, hark back to the Greek art of declamation and are associated with the art of conversation – the spoken rather than the written word.33 Similarly, her performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in translation enhances the significance of English theatre with the sonority of Italian poetry.34 Staël’s novel also reflects eighteenth-century interest in the capacity of music to induce both healing and suffering in the listener. When Corinne first espies Oswald during her improvisation at the Capitol, she realises the tenor of her performance is out of keeping with his state of mourning and modifies it to suit his mood. Equally versed in English and Italian, she plays Scots airs from his homeland before a painting of a scene from Ossian to enable him to mourn his father, adapting her performance to his national sensibility and provoking a salutary catharsis.35 Corinne’s own emotions range from a lyrical enthusiasm, associated with the south, to a melancholic monotone, associated with the north. Music’s ability to stir these emotions proves to be the source of both her talent and her undoing. Corinne’s moments of poetic inspiration are associated with the ability to transcend the particular and embrace the universal (a move from pride to pity). She thus embodies one of the rare ‘grandes âmes cosmopolites’ (‘great cosmopolitan souls’) that Rousseau evokes, ‘qui franchissent les barrières imaginaires qui séparent les peuples, et [. . .] embrassent tout le genre humain’ (‘who overcome the imaginary barriers that separate people and embrace the whole human race’).36 Her susceptibility to suffering is in direct proportion to her musical sensibility, however. Once oppressed by personal sorrow she loses the capacity for transcendence, her lyre falls silent, and her oratorical powers are reduced to written fragments.37 The contention that music, like language, was nation-specific constituted part of eighteenth-century French philosophers’ analysis and critique of contemporary culture, yet they entertained the possibility of a more cosmopolitan sensibility in their fictions.38 Saint-Preux converts from French to Italian opera, Rameau’s nephew performs a medley of the two, and Corinne proves fluent in the musical idioms of the north and south alike. Rousseau, Diderot and Staël were persuaded of music’s ability to foster the communal rather than the individual and to invoke the universal rather than the particular.39 While the search for universal modes of expression paradoxically came to

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be associated with the rise of nationalism and imperialism, at the time it constituted a source of hope for those who questioned the cultural superiority of ‘nations policées’ (‘civilised nations’). In order to escape what risked becoming an economy of empty signifiers, they sought to restore the unmediated communication of passion associated with uncorrupt societies and artistic genius. We glimpse music’s expressive potential in the moments when the performer or listener – and, by extension, the reader – escapes the confines of the sign and the self. By conveying passion via identification or sympathetic vibration on the level of the story, music enhances the reader’s (affective or physiological) response to the narrative, giving rise to sentimental communities, a text-based analogue of Rousseau’s fête champêtre.40 By contrasting the immediacy and virtuosity of vocal music with the constraints of the written word, the narrative invites the reader to supply lost lyricism through imaginative participation at the very moment of mental alienation or written fragmentation, imparting a vision of ideal expression while on the brink of communicative failure.41

Notes All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 1. Françoise de Graffigny, Lettres d’une Péruvienne (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1993), p. 122. The distinction between être and paraître, or being and seeming, is usually rendered in English as appearance vs reality. See Downing Thomas, ‘Economy and Identity in Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne’, South Central Review, 10 (4) (1993), 55–72. 2. Graffigny, p. 75. 3. See Madeleine Dobie, ‘The Subject of Writing: Language, Epistemology, and Identity in the Lettres d’une Péruvienne’, Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, 38 (2) (1997), 99–117. 4. Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (Paris: Mariette, 1733), p. 444. 5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Lettre sur la musique française’, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 5, Écrits sur la musique, la langue et le théâtre, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), pp. 291–328 (p. 294). 6. Ibid., pp. 299–302. 7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp. 60–2, 79. 8. Ibid., p. 132. 9. Ibid., pp. 144–5. 10. Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Art Music’: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 163. 11. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et les muets, ed. P. H. Meyer (Genève: Droz, 1965), p. 102. 12. Downing Thomas has established the ‘direct link between music and the passions’ in musical and medical treatises at the time (Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 159). See also Scott Sanders, ‘Sound and Sensibility in Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau’, Music and Letters, 94 (2) (2013), pp. 236–62. 13. Andrew Clark, Diderot’s Part (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 101–2; Diderot, Lettre, p. 101. 14. Denis Diderot, ‘Éloge de Richardson’, in Oeuvres, ed. André Billy (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), pp. 1059–74 (p. 1064). 15. Marquis de Sade, Idée sur les romans, in Les Crimes de l’amour, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 27–51 (pp. 38–40).

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16. Germaine de Staël, ‘Essai sur les fictions’, in Oeuvres de jeunesse, ed. Simone Balayé and John Isbell (Paris: Desjonquères, 1997), pp. 131–56 (pp. 146–7). 17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967), pp. 85–7. 18. For the elimination of the distinction between signifier and signified, see Daniel C. Johnson, ‘La polémique musicale dans Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, politique et nation (Paris: Champion, 2001), pp. 557–65 (p. 563). 19. Julie attributes the series of exchanged sensibilities that constitute the stages of her relationship with Saint-Preux – correspondence, a kiss, consummation and contagion – not to love but to pity. 20. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles’, in Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), V. 21. Diderot began composing Le Neveu de Rameau at the time that his Éloge de Richardson and Rousseau’s Julie appeared, and continued to revise it to the end of his life. It first became known through Goethe’s 1805 German translation. 22. Denis Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), p. 107. Daniel Heartz refers to the new style as a ‘genre franco-italien’ (‘Diderot et le Théâtre lyrique: “le nouveau style” proposé par Le Neveu de Rameau’, Revue de Musicologie, 64 (2) (1978), 229–52 (pp. 238–9)). 23. Diderot, Neveu, p. 113. 24. Ibid., pp. 107–8. 25. Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), pp. 116–59. 26. David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 112–16. 27. Diderot, Neveu, p. 109; Margaret Stoljar, ‘The Musician’s Madness, Goethe and Hegel on Le Neveu de Rameau’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 24 (3) (1987), 309–32 (p. 320). 28. Diderot, Neveu, p. 110. 29. Germaine de Staël, De la littérature (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), pp. 179, 291–2. Note that Staël does not use the word ‘harmony’ in opposition to melody as Rameau and Rousseau did in their debates. 30. Germaine de Staël, ‘Lettres sur le caractère et les ouvrages de J-J Rousseau’, in Oeuvres de jeunesse, pp. 35–98 (pp. 45–7). 31. Germaine de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 247; Staël, De l’Allemagne (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), II, pp. 83–4. 32. Staël, De l’Allemagne, p. 313; Corinne, p. 84. 33. Staël, Corinne, p. 82. 34. Ibid., pp. 177–200. 35. Ibid., p. 238. 36. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). 37. Staël, Corinne, pp. 85, 520–6. According to Ellen Lockhart, Rousseau’s melodrama Pygmalion (1770) similarly represents the debris or ruins of the perfect sign, characteristic of ‘an ancient onomatopoeic language collapsing meaning and medium’ (‘Pimmalione: Rousseau and the Melodramatisation of Italian Opera’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 26 (1) (2014), 1–39 (pp. 1, 4–6, 10, 18–19)). 38. See Nicolas Martin, ‘Du Particulier à l’universel: la fondation de la cité humaine chez Rousseau’, Sens public, 12 (2007), 1–22; Daniel Chernilo, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Question of Universalism’, in Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty (Oxford: Routledge, 2012), pp. 47–59. See also Esther Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 54–60.

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39. As Julia Simon states, ‘in order to foster the constitution of a moral community, music must appeal to a transcendent form of passion that overcomes particular interests in favor of the common interest’ (Rousseau among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), p. 37). 40. Margaret Cohen, ‘Sentimental Communities’, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-national Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 106–32. 41. According to David Denby, ‘The point at which communication through ordered discourse breaks down [. . .] is the point at which the imagination of the reader [. . .] is called into the breach’ (Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 71–94 (p. 84)). See also Jay Caplan, Framed Narratives: Diderot’s Genealogy of the Beholder (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

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M U S I C , P O E T RY A N D S O N G

30 Shelley’s Musical Gifts Gillen D’Arcy Wood

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he poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was not a musician himself, but he nevertheless participated energetically in the thriving musical economy by which he was surrounded. On two occasions in his brief life, Shelley purchased musical instruments as gifts for young women whose intimate confidence he enjoyed, and whose musical talents inspired him poetically. The first was an expensive Kirkman piano given in 1816, the second an Italian-made guitar in 1822. The piano, now lost and mostly forgotten, partook of the general atmosphere of illicit exchange between Shelley and Claire Clairmont, was the subject of anonymous love lyrics, and ended its career in disgrace: Shelley defaulted on payments for the instrument. The guitar, by contrast, is a celebrated item of Shelleyana exhibited at the Bodleian library, cherished for its inspiration of his late lyrics to Jane Williams (soon to be widowed by the same shipwreck that claimed Shelley’s life).1 What is less well known is that the guitar, a replacement for Shelley’s originally intended gift of a harp, was a cheap production, more delightful to the eye than the ear. The ironies and mischances surrounding these instruments – and the poetry they inspired – help tell the story of British music culture in Shelley’s time. The fact he gave the instruments as gifts, rather than playing them himself, likewise focuses our attention on Shelley’s career as a listener to and consumer of music, which was available in an abundance and variety of forums unknown to previous generations. This will lead us in turn to the more general question of what Shelley’s listening career illuminates for us in his poetry. Musicality has long been a dubious ascription of poetic value. In a 1956 essay, the poet-critic John Hollander banished ‘musicality’ from the new academic literary lexicon, as too unrigorously impressionistic. By taking a more materialist approach to Shelley’s musical gifts, however, we can dare to hope that ‘musicality’ might yet be reclaimed from the twilight of belle-lettrism as a critical term of worth, and a true descriptor of Shelley’s poetic style and achievement. Our test case for this argument will be a third gift – this time an epistolary poem – Shelley gave to another of the musical women in his life, Maria Gisborne. Shelley’s birth year, 1792, is historically notable as the heyday of the French Revolution prior to the disillusionment of the Terror. It likewise stands at the heart of a revolution in British music culture. The 1780s had witnessed a ‘rage for music’ culminating in Haydn’s triumphant tours of 1791–5.2 While war with France would take its toll on the frequency of public concerts and visiting virtuosi, the explosion in music

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publishing continued unabated in the ensuing decades. A music catalogue of the 1760s might have advertised a hundred items at most. By the 1790s, amateur pianists had thousands of musical scores to choose from. Britain has been called ‘the land without music’ but in the late Georgian period, London was the commercial music capital of Europe. It combined wealth, technology and market scale to lure the European continent’s best musicians and music teachers, and to assert itself as the global centre of piano manufacture and music publishing.3 It is thus in the context of an emergent modern, middle-class music industry that we come to Shelley’s 1818 poem, ‘To Constantia, Singing’, dedicated to a musically accomplished member of his inner circle – Claire Clairmont – and inspired by her performance accompanying herself at the piano. In the first stanza, Shelley rhapsodises through the prism of melodic memory. Claire, the pianist-singer, assumes the classical role of poetic muse, with explicitly erotic overtones: Thus to be lost and thus to sink and die, Perchance were death indeed! – Constantia, turn! In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie, Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which burn Between thy lips, are laid to sleep; Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odour it is yet, And from thy touch like fire doth leap. Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet, Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!4 Biographers have suggested that Shelley and Claire Clairmont were lovers – even that Shelley fathered a child by her – during Shelley’s long-term relationship with Mary Shelley. Limned beneath the memory of a musical performance he subsequently describes in more explicit detail, the poet’s repressed ardour and the shadow of an erotic encounter – ‘lips’, ‘breath’, ‘thy touch’, ‘my burning cheeks’, ‘the torn heart’ – drive the poem. ‘Constantia’, Claire’s alias, is borrowed from the piano-playing heroine of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Ormond, while Shelley signs himself ‘Pleyel’, a name that hums with musico-literary allusions. For readers of Brockden Brown, the name instantly recalls Henry Pleyel, the duped lover of the Gothic novel Wieland, a favourite of the Shelley circle. But the context of Claire’s performance at the piano more strongly suggests another Pleyel – Ignace Joseph – a celebrated composer, music publisher and piano manufacturer of the Napoleonic period. Signing himself ‘Pleyel’, Shelley inserts himself into the heart of the musical culture of the 1810s, and heightens the secret erotic messaging of the poem: as instrument and score – as well as listener – he is the piano’s ‘sounds’, the music Claire is making, even the very keys blessed with ‘thy touch’. Just what did pianos mean in the late Georgian era? The answer is complex. Without doubt, the piano served as a social status symbol deeply involved in the commodification of women for the marriage market. The first stanza of Shelley’s poem objectifies Claire, as itemised ‘eyes’, ‘lips’ and ‘hair’ for the male audience’s delectation. At the same time, however, pianistic accomplishment opened, through the demands of technical mastery and the medium of art, unexplored horizons of female self-expression.5

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And it is the second, more empowering aspect of female pianism that Shelley is alive to in his second stanza: A breathless awe, like the swift change Unseen, but felt in youthful slumbers, Wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange, Thou breathest now in fast ascending numbers. The cope of heaven seems rent and cloven By the enchantment of thy strain, And on my shoulders wings are woven, To follow its sublime career, Beyond the mighty moons that want Upon the verge of nature’s utmost sphere, Till the world’s shadowy walls are past and disappear. (ll. 10–20) Shelley’s focus has shifted from the eroticised body and voice of the pianist-singer to his own ecstatic listening experience, ‘wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange’. Like other progressive intellectuals in the 1810s, Shelley perceives in the act of listening to music a form of soulful elevation that, in signature poems such as ‘Ode to the West Wind’, he later connected to awakened political consciousness and self-realisation. For Shelley, as for the founding members of the Philharmonic Society and countless other metropolitan and provincial musical organisations inaugurated in the 1810s, appreciative listening was not a passive act, but a potentially para-revolutionary discipline, a symbolic meditative experience in which the modern bourgeois self asserted itself against the ‘mind forg’d manacles’ of post-Napoleonic reaction and inherited privilege. In early 1822, Shelley formed a new melopoetic relationship with a talented female musician, Jane Williams. According to Shelley’s cousin and biographer, Thomas Medwin, Shelley was entranced by Jane’s breathy contralto and found, through fascination with her voice, a quick path to temporary obsession with her. Like Claire Clairmont, Jane Williams was thoroughly schooled in the genteel musical repertoire of the day – popular ballads and operatic melodies – but preferred to accompany herself on the harp and guitar rather than the piano. These instruments, which could engage the body of the amateur musician more fully and more languidly than the upright attitude of the pianist, were more susceptible to the claim that a paramount motive for performance must be the exhibition of physical charms. This makes Shelley’s gift to Jane Williams of an Italian-made guitar, inlaid with floral decoration, a potently suggestive anachronism. Through lack of funds, Shelley was forced ‘to get my musical coals at Newcastle’, by which he meant his purchase of a guitar for Jane in Italy, still the cultural heart of European music.6 Shelley’s choice of an industrial metaphor aptly averts to the wholesale commodification of music in the Regency age. It hints perhaps, too, that he had learnt his lesson from his extravagant purchase of a Kirkman piano for Claire Clairmont, and restricted himself to the lower end of the market. What little money he had, Shelley spent with a view to decorative appearance over musical quality. The guitar, a mediocre production by a workaday Pisan instrument maker named Ferdinand Bottari, nevertheless possessed an elegant shape and tasteful embellishment on its fretwork.7 An instrument that now endures in cultural memory as a purely visual icon almost certainly began its career in the same

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vein, as an attractive object – adherent to a higher ideal – that for Shelley captured perfectly his complex feelings for Jane Williams. Shelley had already sent Jane a selection of lyrics he had previously written in Italy, with the suggestion she adapt those she liked to her favourite melodies. With the gift of the Bottari guitar, Shelley raised the stakes considerably, and the melopoetic exchange between male poet and female guitarist intensified. Estranged from Mary Shelley in the traumatic aftermath of her recent miscarriage, Shelley brought Jane Williams and her guitar with him everywhere, even for cruises on the Bay of Lerici on the deck of the ill-fated Don Juan, where Jane would serenade the crew. In a few short months at Marlow in 1817, Claire Clairmont’s performances on the Kirkman piano had inspired at least four unfinished Shelley lyrics, including the startling and semi-illicit ‘To Constantia, Singing’. Jane Williams and her guitar had a similar unstoppering effect in 1822 in Pisa, releasing a stream of lyric variations on signature Shelleyan themes of mutability, memory and the ideal, enacted by recurring Kabuki-like figures (himself, Jane, the moon) in a shadowplay of forbidden intimacy. In ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’, Shelley meditates on the material history of the guitar itself, from the tree in the ‘wind-swept Apennine’ felled to provide the raw material, to the ‘artist’ (Bottari) who ‘wrought’ the instrument now melodising under Jane’s touch. The music Jane plays echoes the natural origins of the guitar itself: Whispering in enamoured tone Sweet oracles of woods and dells, And summer winds in sylvan cells. For it had learnt all harmonies Of the plains and of the skies, Of the forest and the mountains (ll. 62–7) As in the second stanza of ‘To Constantia, Singing’, Shelley’s attention then shifts to the greater metaphysical properties of music. Anticipating Wallace Stevens’s great lateRomantic meditation ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, Shelley recognises the power of music to shape perception itself.8 Music does more than ‘echo’ the world; for the listener, it makes the world in which he listens: and it knew That seldom-heard mysterious sound Which, driven on its diurnal round As it floats through boundless day, Our world enkindles on its way. (ll. 74–8) [. . .] and no more Is heard than has been felt before By those who tempt it to betray These secrets of an elder day. (ll. 83–6) In a companion poem, ‘To Jane’, Shelley returns to the same charged musical moment. Serenaded by Jane Williams in moonlight, Shelley’s senses are overpowered, leading the poet to the ecstatic brink of sublime intimation. Again, he seems to intuit a more

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essential harmony inspiriting Jane’s performance, what Stevens would describe as ‘ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds’: Though the sound overpowers, Sing again, with you dear voice revealing A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one. (ll. 19–24) More vivid here than Jane’s guitar playing is the image of Shelley’s deeply attentive listening and appreciation of music. Shelley is enamoured of Jane’s ‘tender voice’, but unlike ‘To Constantia, Singing’, the poem does not read like the coded memory of a sexual encounter, churning with ‘lips’, ‘eyes’ and ‘hands’. An explanation for the differences in the poems to Claire Clairmont and Jane Williams might lie in Shelley’s evolution as a listener. In the years 1816–18, while in London and Italy, Shelley underwent an intense education in music that appears to have affected him, and his poetic art, profoundly. In the company of Leigh Hunt and others of that music-loving ‘Cockney’ circle, Shelley attended more concerts and opera performances in two years – and heard far more quality music – than in the whole course of his life to that time. As Jessica Quillin has tabulated, From April 1817 into the beginning of 1818, the Shelleys saw works such as Paisiello’s La Molinara, Paer’s Griselda, and the latest Mozart and Rossini operas, including Figaro three times, Don Giovanni six times, and the London premiere of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia.9 For Shelley, the 1817 Don Giovanni – with the superb Giuseppe Ambrogetti in the title role – was nothing short of a musical conversion experience. Thomas Love Peacock, who accompanied him to the first of his six performances, left an indelible image of Shelley the born-again Mozartian: Before it commenced he asked me if the opera was comic or tragic. I said it was composite, more comedy than tragedy. After the killing of the Commendatore, he said, ‘Do you call this Comedy?’ By degrees he became absorbed in the music and action [. . .] From this time till he finally left England he was an assiduous frequenter of the Italian Opera. He delighted in the music of Mozart.10 This intriguing anecdote turns on perceived Mozartian complexity – is it comedy or tragedy? – and his ‘Shakespearean’ emotional range. The influence on Shelley – as on an entire generation of metropolitan musical enthusiasts asserting their newfound rights as cultural tastemakers in the post-Napoleonic era – was mesmeric and galvanising. Love of Mozart became a calling-card of radicalism and reform; in other words, a very serious business indeed.11 As a declared Mozart fan, Shelley’s musicality now entered a new phase, in which his response as listener transcended the conventional tributes to a Muse figure (Claire Clairmont), instead integrating musical experience within a larger concept of Shelley’s

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own political, aspirational identity. Without the experience of melopoetic complexity in Don Giovanni – and what Stendhal perceived as Mozart’s definitively modern melancholy – Shelley might never have thought to pen the famous lines from ‘Ode to the West Wind’: Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. (ll. 57–61) Mozart died the year prior to Shelley’s birth, but the poet nevertheless, while in Italy, came within a single degree of separation from the illustrious musical generation of the 1780s to which Mozart belonged. Maria Gisborne, whom Shelley befriended in Livorno, had a sister married to Muzio Clementi, the composer, virtuoso pianist and sometime rival of Mozart, who had subsequently become one of the most important performers, publishers and impresarios in London. Maria Gisborne herself was, predictably, an accomplished pianist, perhaps the most brilliant in a long line of female amateur musicians whom it was Shelley’s privilege to know during his brief adult life and career as a poet. Shelley’s extraordinarily modern, discursive lyric epistle to his musician friend, the 1820 ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, contains no explicit musical references. As such, it presents a critical challenge to our understanding of musicality in Shelley. Is it possible to discuss music as a property of Shelley’s verse, in addition to its ubiquity as a theme and figure? Shelley himself certainly believed so. In his Defence of Poetry, he distinguishes poetry from prose by virtue of its ‘uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry’. His early readers agreed. Robert Browning, for example, described Shelley’s poetry as ‘suffused with a music at once of the soul and sense’.12 Only with the advent of professional Anglo-American academic criticism in the mid-twentieth century did the ancient claim for music’s natural kinship with poetry – and, by extension, for Shelleyan musicality – fall into disrepute. John Hollander decried the persistence of ‘slipshod musical analogies’ with poetry as ‘a kind of Neo-Platonist gout’.13 As if responding to Hollander’s cue, mainstream literary criticism has abandoned prosody as one of its central concerns, and steered clear of musical metaphors for poetry, which smack of a sentimental amateurism unwelcome in the academy. We owe the prospect of a twenty-first century revival of music and poetry as ‘sister arts’ to a source outside aesthetic theory, indeed beyond the arts and humanities altogether. Recent neuroscientific research into music and listening offers a new material vocabulary for articulating the relation between musical and poetic expression. Since 1980, cognitive studies of musical audition have shown that listening is a highly active process, energised by a dialectic of anticipation, resolution and surprise, very similar to the act of reading. The listener to a piece of music who is versed in its language continually projects forward toward an anticipated resolution of a musical phrase or harmonic progression. ‘Anticipation,’ one commentator has written, ‘frees a mind from surface detail, allowing it to probe for deeper relations.’14 Pleasure derives from

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intuiting those relations, but not if the resolution itself is too consistently predictable or conventional. The ‘best’ music – the music to which listeners return again and again, and which literally lights up the human brain with synaptic activity – is music that provides exotic variations upon its own internal grammar: music-making is always a tug-of-war between the maintenance of underlying musical structure and the indulgence of musical deviations. With too much deviation, music becomes cloying and incoherent. With too little, music becomes cold and mechanical.15 The new melopoetics of anticipation offer fresh terms for a qualitative assessment of the poems under discussion in this essay. ‘To Constantia, Singing’ and ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’ have never belonged to the academic canon of Shelley’s verse. At best, they are ‘minor’ poems; at worst, in the unforgiving assessment of F. R. Leavis, Shelley’s ‘gross indulgences in the basest Regency album taste’.16 Applying a neuroscientific vocabulary to this value judgement, we might agree with Leavis that these poems, while about music, are musically deficient in themselves: their language, rhyming diction and sentiments are too rote and predictable. ‘The Letter to Maria Gisborne’, however, presents a very different case, exemplifying the aesthetic balance between order and surprise that neuroscience tells us holds the key to listener (and reader) gratification. Shelley’s relaxed conversational tone in the poem is studded with surprising diction, figures and turns of phrase, as in his memory of being caught with Maria in a storm: how on the sea-shore We watched the ocean and the sky together, Under the roof of blue Italian weather; How I ran home through last year’s thunder-storm, And felt the transverse lightning linger warm Upon my cheek. (ll. 145–50) Shore, ocean and sky establish a familiar grammar from which the ‘roof’ of ‘weather’ provides a delicious deviation, enlivening a sense of anticipation in the reader which ‘last year’s thunder-storm’ and ‘transverse lightning’ further excite. And so the poem achieves a music-like momentum, crafting a world of language through which the reader travels in perpetual anticipation of the closures, and surprises, in store. Later in the poem, Shelley’s famous lines about Coleridge likewise produce pleasure not for the aptness of their description, but for their well-orchestrated strangeness: You will see Coleridge—he who sits obscure In the exceeding lustre and the pure Intense irradiation of a mind, Which, with its own internal lightning blind, Flags wearily through darkness and despair— A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, A hooded eagle among blinking owls. (ll. 202–8)

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Shelley poeticised at length on the theme of his musical gifts to Claire Clairmont and Jane Williams. For readers and critics, however, the verses he dedicated to their performances on the piano and guitar have remained minor curiosities. By contrast, Shelley’s gift to another female musician, Maria Gisborne, took the form of a virtuoso verse-epistle, in which his own musical ‘gifts’, as poet, are most compellingly on display. In the poetic distance travelled between ‘To Constantia, Singing’ and his ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ – a poetical maturation that parallels his intense musical education in the opera houses of London – Shelley has renounced the tired Muse of drawingroom poetasty for the verbal inventiveness and musicality of his greatest poetry.

Notes 1. For a rich discussion of the mythology surrounding Shelley’s guitar, see Judith Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 1–25. 2. The phrase ‘rage for music’ was ubiquitous in the London journalism of the 1780s and 1790s. See Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 6. 3. Nicholas Temperley, ‘The Land without Music’, Musical Times, 116 (July 1975), 625. For the commercial vitality of British music culture, see inter alia the works of William Weber; McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn; and The Piano in NineteenthCentury British Culture, ed. Susan Wollenberg and Therese Ellsworth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 4. Ll. 1–9. Text of ‘To Constantia, Singing’ taken from The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904). All other Shelley texts are cited from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Neil Fraistat and Donald H. Reiman, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 2002). Line numbers are provided in the text. 5. In making this argument, I heed Leslie Ritchie’s call for ‘a more complex understanding of musical practice as an activity that afforded [women] self-defining intellectual and sensual pleasures sometimes subversive of moral discipline and the social purposes that musical practice was thought to serve’ in Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 31. See also my Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 151–79. This more sanguine reading of Georgian female musicianship runs counter to the well-established critique of accomplishment elucidated by Richard Leppert in The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and echoed, for example, by Gary Kelly in ‘Education and Accomplishments’, in Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 257. 6. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), I, p. 699. 7. Willibald Leo Lütgendorff calls Bottari’s craftsmanship ‘unremarkable’ in his instrumental history, Die Geigen und Lautenmacher vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt: Frankfurt Verlags-Anstalt, 1922), p. 47. 8. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1954). 9. Jessica K. Quillin, ‘Shelley and Music’, in The Oxford Handbook to Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 530–45 (p. 533). 10. Thomas Love Peacock, Memoirs of Shelley, and Other Essays and Reviews, ed. Howard Mills (New York: New York University Press, 1970), p. 45. 11. See D’Arcy Wood, Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, pp. 118–50.

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12. ‘An Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley’, in Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry; Shelley’s Defence of Poetry; Browning’s Essay on Shelley, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1937), p. 71. 13. John Hollander, ‘The Music of Poetry’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15 (2) (December 1956), 232–44 (pp. 237, 242, 239, 242). 14. Robert Jourdain, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy (New York: William Morrow, 1997), p. 265. Jourdain’s book is a layman’s summary of the first generation of neuroscientific research into music and listening. Another accessible popular account – this time from a scientist working in the field – is by Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music (New York: Dutton, 2006). 15. Jourdain, p. 312. 16. F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936), p. 215.

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31 Performative Enactment vs Experiential Embodiment: Goethe Settings by Zelter, Reichardt and Schubert Marshall Brown

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ongs are interpretations of poems. Performances then interpret the songs. And critical readings interpreting the songs have the potential to guide performers. The multidimensional quality of a musical work, which is at least partially imaged in the multifaceted graphic constituting a modern score, gives it a richness quite distinct from that of linguistic utterances. There now exist many more and less technical essays and guides to help in understanding the musical processes. The study of individual songs often begins with the choice and the manipulation of the text (verbal alteration, repetition, refrain); from there it might proceed to the prosodic treatment (relation of musical rhythm to verse rhythm, accentuation, prolongation, line length vs phrase length, relative weight accorded to different parts of the verse) and then go on to more strictly musical matters – including voicing, melodic shape, harmonic expression, expressive indications, musical topoi – and to the relation of instrumental parts (preludes, interludes, postludes) to the vocal sections and of instrument to voice generally. My discussion will illustrate some of these factors, without aiming at any particular novelty. While some readings highlight correspondences between text and setting,1 I will follow the precedent of those who emphasise the differentiating capacity of the music. But a song is not merely an interpretation of a poem; it also exemplifies a way of interpreting poetry. Styles of reading change over time, and tastes change partly in accordance with them. We sometimes favour different poems and songs from our forebears because we read and listen differently. We can gain renewed access to historical modes of reading through contemporary writings by the poets and composers themselves, by essayists and reviewers, and by the reading public. In the same spirit, I propose to take songs as a different kind of indicator of how poems might be read. Shifting styles of musical setting represent so many different attitudes and kinds of attention. My purpose here, then, is to sketch an episode in the history of song and to suggest briefly how it might recursively inform our (non-musical) critical reading of poems. Of course, each composer, and potentially each individual song, offers a distinctive mode of reading. But the commonalities are at least as important. My essay concerns Schubert and the composers who preceded him, specifically Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832), who was a close friend and frequent correspondent of Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) and who became the leading music educator in Berlin, and the slightly older Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814), long-time Royal Kapellmeister in Berlin, who wrote some 1500 songs, also including

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many Goethe settings.2 Goethe had strong musical interests, and these were his favourite song composers, notoriously far more so than Schubert. Consequently, it is reasonable to posit that their settings point to a preferred reception of his poems. Not all of his poems, to be sure. Both Reichardt and Zelter favoured simple strophic poems such as the light-hearted Anacreontics and pastorals that Goethe wrote in all stages of his career, along with ballads and gothic lyrics.3 They mostly or entirely avoided more complicated form such as sublime odes (of which there are famous Schubert settings), sonnets, and meditative and personal lyrics. They present an image of Goethe as a poet writing entertainments for a popular audience. And their songs reinforce that impression; they are technically facile, harmonically and structurally clear and regular, often written on two staves rather than three – that is, with the keyboard doubling the voice part rather than independent – and clearly intended for amateur domestic use. These composers’ preferences in fact represent the commonest type of poem in the eighteenth century, indeed (like Zelter’s success) continuing well into the nineteenth. The simplicity is not natural, but a willed achievement, classicising in its lyrical impulse and nostalgic (‘sentimental’, in Schiller’s vocabulary) in its narratives. Reichardt’s songs exemplify the fusion of the natural and the artificial.4 They are on the whole more conventionally tuneful than Zelter’s because they are built so regularly around the conventional harmonic structures that undergird familiar melodies. For instance, Reichardt’s two versions of Goethe’s ‘Neue Liebe, neues Leben’ (GL) (Fig. 31.1) both have a first half that moves toward the dominant then resolves back to the E flat tonic, followed by a second half that moves toward subdominant harmonies and then returns; in both songs the first half ends with the voice singing A-B flat. The same harmonic formula and almost the same phrase structure are present in both; the chief formal differences are that the first half in the later version extends to six bars rather than the first version’s more symmetrical four and that the vocal tessitura in the first version (middle C to high A flat, with some dramatic leaps) was simplified to just over an octave (G-A flat) in the second. As here, it is typical of Reichardt’s songs that the formula takes precedence over individuality. Many songs, for instance, including both these settings, repeat the last line of the poem to achieve a closing effect. And where Reichardt does set an irregular poem, ‘Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt’ (LL), he facilitates his strophic setting by repeating a word to fill out the syllable count of a short line: ‘und kann ich nur einmal | Recht einsam einsam sein’ (‘and if but once I can be all alone alone’). Reichardt’s musical structures have little respect for verbal niceties. Verbal repetitions are common in settings by most composers, but rarely are they so cavalier as this one, which makes the word ‘einsam’ a senseless companion to itself. Stanzas are always a challenge to a composer. In ‘Neue Liebe, neues Leben’, the first-half and concluding returns to the tonic fit the second verse, where the relevant lines concern the protagonist’s inability to escape, and likewise the third verse, where he is held tight and begs for release; but they have no bearing on the first verse, where he addresses his heart, the closing lines there being ‘Ich erkenne dich nicht mehr’ and ‘wie kamst du nur dazu?’ (‘I no longer recognise you’; ‘how did you come to this?’). The best composers of strophic songs contrive patterns that illuminate all stanzas; Reichardt, one is tempted to say, merely contrives patterns.5 The patterns enable communication, but they do not control it. For the soul of a Reichardt song lies neither in the words nor in the music, but in the performance. Both words and music are the canvas on which the singer paints her (or, more rarely, his) mood. Reichardt’s brief dedication to

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Figure 31.1 Johann Friedrich Reichardt, ‘Neue Liebe, neues Leben’, first version, in Goethe’s Lieder, Oden, Balladen und Romanzen (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1809), I, p. 14

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the Queen of Prussia in GL is explicit on this matter, and its terms appear determinative, whatever allowance one might make for the flattery: ‘The soulful [seelenvolle] rendition with which Your Majesty so often enlivened [beseelt] the older songs among these has inspired me to the happiest of the new songs.’ Performance brings soul to the words and the notes. The songs are not virtuoso pieces, as many of Schubert’s are; they require no elaborate discipline, but they do call for a performer to complete their effect by animating them with feeling. Projection of affect matters more than either words or notes. Performance and affect are even more visibly linked in Zelter’s songs. For his scores, even more than Reichardt’s, are rife with performance indications. Songs may be headed with general affect designations such as ‘Geheimnisvoll’ (‘secretive’), ‘Gerührt und natürlich’ (‘emotional and natural’), ‘Fantasiemäßig’ (‘like a fantasy’), ‘Bedeutend und sehnsuchtsvoll’ (‘significant and full of yearning’) and, most charmingly for Goethe’s second ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’ – the famous ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist ruh’ – ‘Still und nächtlich’ (‘calm and nocturnal’).6 Titles are sometimes added to similar effect, such as ‘Sehnsucht’ (‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’, Z. 120) or ‘Ruhe’ (‘Über allen Gipfeln’, Z. 126) (Fig. 31.2). Zelter follows the words more closely than Reichardt. There is a higher proportion of through-composed (rather than strophic) songs, and word and tone painting abounds: the word ‘frei’ (‘free’) in ‘Wo geht’s Liebchen’ (Z. 124) is set to a long melisma; the music leaps upward twice at ‘himmelhoch jauchzend’ (‘exulting skyhigh’), then immediately drops an octave to the voice’s low point at ‘zum Tode betrübt’ (‘grieving unto death’), superfluously marked ‘lebhaft’ (‘lively’) and ‘melancholisch’ (‘melancholic’) respectively (‘Clärchen’, Z. 124); when the sorcerer’s apprentice forgets the magic spell he repeats ‘das Wort’ over and over, as if groping for the word (‘Der Zauberlehrling’, Z. 123). More commonplace tone painting effects are also frequent, such as rising and falling lines, alternation of major and minor, abrupt key changes, pathetic syncopations, creepy chromatics and strings of diminished chords, swells and other expressive dynamics, and the like. Whereas Reichardt merely praises soulful performance, Zelter gives meticulous guidance, not infrequently also using piano preludes to set the tone. That is especially true in his long ballad and narrative poetry, often from Ossian or in the Ossianic mode. Hence, even though the two composers differ in the nature of their musical expression, they share the attitude that songs should foreground a performer communicating a mood or, less often, a series of moods. Zelter’s long, Ossianic ‘Selma’ (Z. 124) even includes what sound like stage directions – not just affect notations like ‘Mit Wehmut’ (‘nostalgically’) and ‘Etwas sanfter’ (‘somewhat gentler’), but also ‘Steht unruhig auf’, ‘Setzt sich’, and ‘Steht auf und schreitet voran’ (‘rises restlessly’, ‘sits down’, ‘stands up and strides forward’). These songs present an affect that the performer is expected to embody, enact and inspirit. Whatever their divergences, the songs of Reichardt and Zelter are not so much musical compositions as musical scripts; that is, the music serves the performer, and not the other way around. Or, as Thrasybulos G. Georgiades puts it, Zelter’s aim is ‘the musical performance of the poem. Goethe’s poetry is what is to be offered here. And Zelter merely crafts a musical housing for it’.7 Schubert’s singer does not portray fixed affects but inhabits emotional situations. Complexities can lurk beneath the surface of eighteenth-century Anacreontics, but in

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Figure 31.2 Carl Friedrich Zelter, ‘Ruhe’, in Neue Liedersammlung, Z. 126 (Zurich: Hans Georg Nägeli; Berlin: Adolph Martin Schlesinger, 1821), n.p.

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Schubert they are composed into the intricate flow of dialogue between keyboard and voice. Schubert’s enormously greater fluidity hardly needs demonstration, and since I have discussed these matters elsewhere,8 as have many others, I will give only one example here, Schubert’s setting of ‘Über allen Gipfeln’. Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.9 In my metrical translation: Over all the hilltops Is calm, In all the treetops You can feel Scarcely a breath; The little birds hide in the forest. Wait a bit, shortly You too shall rest. Zelter set this poem as a barcarolle in 12/8 time, accompanied by gently flowing triplet arpeggios. The piano postlude almost exactly duplicates the end of the prelude, except that it is displaced by two beats, to end in the middle of the bar rather than at its end: an effect of gentle rounding without perfect closure. The setting is basically in three regular four-bar units, with an extension of 1½ bars for ‘kaum einen Hauch’, including a melisma on ‘einen’, set very low in the voice (plus a few extra beats of piano postlude). There is no semantic rationale to feature this word, merely a general musical atmosphere of relaxation. For the last two lines of the poem, Zelter makes up his four bars by repeating ‘balde’ three times, on beat 2, beats 3–4, and the downbeat, yielding a discreet rhythmic climax, couched in harmonies that point audibly forward toward the tonic return for the final repose (I, V 56 to I, ii6, followed by the tonic cadence). Zelter avoids tension, however; the prevailing movement is a downward drift, as with the subsidence B-A-G# on beats 3-4-1 of bars 5–6 and 7–8, and especially when the third, climactic ‘balde’ is lower in pitch than its predecessors.10 Everything is thus neatly in place in a musical portrayal of floating calm.11 Schubert’s setting is likewise fourteen bars long, but far more varied, with dynamic swells and agitated syncopations in the middle, incorporating dissonant suspensions. Two of the dissonances are on the repeated word ‘schweigen’: silence is conspicuously not peaceful. At the end Schubert repeats the last two lines of the poem, which he has extended to 2½ bars by repeating ‘warte nur’ (set as a horn call, suggesting movement rather than repose). The extension generates a half-bar displacement, perhaps responding to Zelter’s manipulation of ‘balde’, but semantically complicated when the word stress is shifted,12 for the downbeat that falls initially on ‘auch’ (others are at

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rest and you ‘too’ will be) falls in the repeat on ‘ruhest’ (soon you too will find ‘rest’). Stress problematises rest, especially in the light of the ambiguous verb tense, present in form but wishfully future in meaning. Rest is sought by the speaker, but attained only by the piano, when in the final bar it echoes the music of ‘Ruhest du auch’, but more softly (pianissimo instead of piano). Rest is absence, in a poem multiply coded as an epitaph. Thus, rather than an affective stance that could be implied by the present tenses, the song stresses their future meaning and thus evokes an emotional itinerary toward internalisation and eternalisation of the landscape mood. An even more subtle effect is Schubert’s highlighting of Goethe’s diphthongs. ‘Kaum’, ‘Hauch’, ‘schweigen’, ‘schweigen’, ‘auch’, ‘auch’: all these diphthongs fall on weighted syllables in the poem, and Schubert emphasises them with prolongations (except for the second ‘schweigen’) and with dissonances on ‘kaum’ and twice on ‘schweigen’. The final ‘Hauch’ is a minim, the longest notated syllable in the vocal line. (There are caesuras twice on the second syllable of ‘Balde’. In performance it might last longer than ‘Hauch’. Still, the minim also stands out by contrast to the first setting of the same line, where it ends with a crotchet in the voice, followed by a horn call in the piano.) Phonetically, these long-held diphthongs remain in movement, an uncanny, almost subliminal projection of the ongoing force of time in words nearly devoid of stopped sounds.13 Songs as fluid as these are about the singer, not about an objectified emotion that the singer is representing. They project the poem as a lived experience. The first great theorist of the poetry of experience was Hegel, who was lecturing on aesthetics in Berlin during Goethe’s last decade and Schubert’s prime, though the lectures were published only after all three had died. The very concept of experience as it has been subsequently understood was barely emergent at the time; a new word, ‘Erlebnis’, shows up sporadically in Hegel almost for the first time and was not naturalised until much later in the nineteenth century.14 ‘Erfahrung’, the older word, suggests something one travels past (‘fahren’ = ‘to travel’), whereas an ‘Erlebnis’ is something one undergoes and ‘lives’ through. The journey motif is central to both Schubert (notably in his two song cycles) and Goethe (notably in his last novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years).15 And it is likewise implicit in Hegel’s lectures, though typically confined to a verbal prefix. Hegel phrases it this way: ‘von dem Dichter, weil die Poesie am tiefsten die ganze Fülle des geistigen Gehalts auszuschöpfen imstande ist, [darf] auch die tiefste und reichhaltigste innere Durchlebung des Stoffes gefordert werden, den er zur Darstellung bringt’ (‘since poetry is capable of fully exploiting the spiritual content, the deepest and most comprehensive inner living-through of the material must be required of the poet who brings it to expression’).16 The ‘durch’ that captures the temporal character of experience is featured a few sentences further on. ‘Nach innen and außen muß er das menschliche Dasein kennen und die Breite der Welt und ihrer Erscheinung in sein Inneres hineingenommen und dort durchfühlt, durchdrungen, vertieft und verklärt haben’ (‘He must know human existence and must have absorbed the breadth of the world and of its appearance in his innermost being and must there have felt through it, penetrated through it, deepened and transfigured it’). And then the poet must have mastered (and, as he elsewhere says, have shaped) his subjectivity: ‘Um nun aus seiner Subjektivität heraus [. . .] ein freies Ganzes [. . .] schaffen zu können, muß er [. . .] mit freiem, das innere und äußere Dasein überschauendem Blicke darüberstehen’ (‘To be able to create a free totality from out of his subjectivity, he must stand above it and freely survey his inner and outer being’). For lack of the appropri-

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ate word, Hegel here must struggle to express the double character of experience as inner and outer, movement and form, Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Still, the intention is clear, and it corresponds to the doubleness of a Schubert song as a shaped lyric utterance, with the vocal melody incorporated into its realisation, in collaboration with the piano that is far more than a mere supporting colouration. The singer passes through the series of moods; the piano adds a reflective dimension that gives a meaning to the story. In performance the songs of Reichardt and Zelter are vehicles of soul; Schubert’s are embodiments of lived experience. The complexity of the new, ‘experiential’ structure of feeling could not be achieved by Reichardt and Zelter, who participated in a tradition of songs in which the keyboard is intended merely to double or support the voice in projecting the poem. Indeed, it is far from a foolish approximation to say that Schubert’s vocal melody expresses experience as Erfahrung, which the piano then helps render in the form of Erlebnis. Schubert’s songs are of course not in any sense the end of the genre’s history. One can readily trace the course of the German lied through Schumann’s ironies, Brahms’s recovery of folk and popular elements, on down to Wolf’s declamatory musical prose.17 Each stage is receptive to particular kinds of poetry: so, for instance, while Reichardt and Zelter concentrated on Goethe’s simpler, folksonglike lyrics (including comic lyrics that are uncongenial to later styles and now too little regarded) and set the Wilhelm Meister poems in the same spirit, Schubert was more sensitive to the fragmentary, ‘found poetry’ character of the Wilhelm Meister poems as they appear in the novel, and he set many of the more meditative or fluidly personal poems that now seem most typical of Goethe. And only with Wolf was there a composer with the stylistic resources to set to music a substantial selection of Goethe’s didactic and gnomic poetry, including a cross-section of the Persianinspired West-östlicher Divan. It is common to accuse Goethe of limited musical taste, more or less as if Schubert set Goethe’s poems well, while Goethe’s favorite composers – who were, after all, the two leading song composers of their day – set them with servile incomprehension. Schubert’s settings, however, do not represent the judgement of eternity nor, indeed, a judgement at all. They should be taken rather as a historically motivated possibility. And so, likewise, should the earlier songs. There is no definitive approach to comprehending a poem. If we write off the taste of the late eighteenth century – and Goethe’s taste – as mere bad judgement, we limit our ways of viewing the world. Experience gained, it might be said, is soul lost; the theatricality implied by Zelter’s and Reichardt’s scores is a different style of performance from Schubert’s manner, and correlates with a reading technique more geared to momentary or (as with ‘Ruhe’) subsisting impressions than to overall structure. (See, for instance, Reichardt’s declamatory subito fortes on ‘Weg’ in both versions of ‘Neue Liebe’. By contrast, Beethoven’s up-tempo, through-composed setting emphasises movement over feeling, with its first high point – insistent sforzandos and a repeated high G – arriving with the word ‘rasch’ (‘quick’).) For a long time the Romantic canon in both music and poetry was ossified, in a spirit unresponsive to the tastes of the time before sensibilities like Schubert’s emerged. Criticism of British poetry in recent decades has renewed access to a vast range of writings that do not fit received, mid-twentiethcentury standards of taste, including not just the Anacreontics that I have mentioned, but sentimental poetry (which would include Schiller’s ‘Resignation’), didactic poetry

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and domestic poetry (often by women and working-class poets). Seeing how some of the earlier composers approached their texts can also point us toward how we might approach them.18

Notes 1. See, for instance, Of Poetry and Song: Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied, ed. Jürgen Thym (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010), a collaboration of two musicologists and two scholars of German literature that offers abundant and revealing examples of the musical realisation of the poetic texts. The focus there is on mimetic correspondences rather than (as in my essay) interpretive enactment; an entirely typical sentence is this: ‘The listener is kept in suspenseful expectation by the harmonic progressions, just as the reader of the poem is kept in suspense by the adventurous syntax’ (p. 245, my emphasis). 2. The indispensable study of the early Lied – the word gradually superseded ‘Ode’ in the later eighteenth century – is Heinrich W. Schwab, Sangbarkeit, Popularität und Kunstlied: Studien zu Lied und Liedästhetik der mittleren Goethezeit 1770–1814 (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1965), with abundant information on songfulness, the co-dependence of text and music, strophic setting and the emergence of the word and the concept of through-composition, performance instructions and flexibility, and so on. For this period he is largely followed by Walter Wiora’s much broader study, Das deutsche Lied: Zur Geschichte und Ästhetik einer musikalischen Gattung (Wolfenbüttel: Möseler, 1971), esp. pp. 105–19. 3. Anacreontics are simple poems of wine and love imitated from an ancient collection then attributed to the Anacreon, one of the nine canonical lyric poets of classical Greece; they were one of the most popular poetic forms throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. 4. Scores for the songs mentioned in this essay are available on the web at . Reichardt songs come from Goethe’s Lieder, Oden, Balladen und Romanzen, I (GL) and from Lieder der Liebe und der Einsamkeit (LL). Zelter songs are identified by the Z number of the collection; Schubert and Schumann songs by title. 5. See ‘The Poetry of Haydn’s Songs: Sexuality, Repetition, Whimsy’, in my ‘The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul’: Essays on Music and Poetry (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), pp. 225–50. 6. ‘Berglied’ (Z. 124), ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’ (Z. 120), ‘Wer nie sein Brot’ (Z. 120), ‘Kennst du das Land’ (Z. 120) and ‘Ruhe’ (Z. 126). 7. Thrasybulos G. Georgiades, Schubert: Musik und Lyrik (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1967), p. 33, his emphasis. However, Georgiades goes too far when he claims that Schubert’s songs are purely musical, so that ‘the poem is, as it were, canceled and recreated as a musical structure’ (p. 34). A more authentic formula appears earlier: Schubert’s ‘music [. . .] projects the literary work and illuminates it anew’ (p. 29). Georgiades’s Schubert analysis (pp. 17–31) appears under the title ‘Lyric as Musical Structure: Schubert’s Wanderers Nachtlied (“Über allen Gipfeln”, D. 768)’, trans. Marie Louise Göllner, in the excellent collection, Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), pp. 84–103. Two essays comparing all the principal settings of Goethe’s poem are Mieczysław Tomaszewski, ‘Doppelvertonung als Bereich für die Erforschung der Sinngehalte des Musikwerkes bzw. der signifikativen Form’, trans. Antoni Buchner, in Verbalisierung und Sinngehalt: Über semantische Tendenzen im Denken und in der Musik heute, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna: Universal, 1989), pp. 136–47, and the more appreciative Etienne Barilier, ‘Poésie et musique, I’, Revue musicale de suisse romande, 53 (2000), 11–30.

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8. On the poetry, see my essay, ‘Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric’, in ‘The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul’, pp. 119–224, as well as the essay cited in n. 5; and for voice and keyboard in Schubert, see ‘Negative Poetics: On Skepticism and the Lyric Voice’, also in ‘The Tooth that Nibbles’, pp. 79–98. 9. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gedichte, ed. Liselotte Lohrer (Stuttgart: Cotta, n.d.), p. 73, in Neue Gesamtausgabe der poetischen Werke und Schriften, vol. 1. For an imaginative, if idiosyncratic, interpretation of Goethe’s poem in English, see Benjamin Bennett, ‘The Poem as Hieroglyph: Goethe’s “Über allen Gipfeln”’, in The Defective Art of Poetry: Sappho to Yeats (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 31–51. 10. Of the two recordings of ‘Ruhe’ accessible to me, the tone is better captured by HansJörg Mammel accompanied by Ludwig Holtmeier (Carl Friedrich Zelter, Goethe-Lieder, Ars Musici 1246–2). Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with Aribert Reimann (C. F. Zelter, Lieder, Orfeo C097841A) distorts the effect by heightening the drama, rising to a more pointed climax on the third ‘balde’, despite the lower pitch. 11. Long after writing these words, I came across the virtually identical characterisation in Ludger Rehm, ‘“Es ist eine Art Symbolik für das Ohr [. . .]”: Carl Friedrich Zelters Gedichtvertonung Ruhe nach Goethes Lied Über allen Wipfeln ist Ruh’, Neue Berlinische Musikzeitung, 11 (1996), 46–62: ‘The coda corresponds to bars 3 and 4 of the prelude, but does not end as that does on the downbeat and so remains in a delicate metrical suspension [Schwebe].’ Rehm’s essay is a serious attempt to hear more autonomy in Zelter’s songs than they are commonly credited with, and since music is never completely static, his observations do deserve respect. Still, ‘remains’ signals that the expression is typically general and atmospheric rather than experiential, in the terms I describe below. (‘Wipfeln’ in the essay title is Rehm’s typo for ‘Gipfeln’.) 12. The stress shift in the repeated 2½ bar phrase is subtle and by no means always conveyed in performance. But the accent marks on downbeats signal Schubert’s concern to make it audible. ‘Warte nur, warte nur’ has an accent the first time on the first ‘Warte’, the second time on the second ‘Warte’. 13. The same auch-Hauch rhyme concludes Robert Schumann’s ‘Räthsel’ (to a translated Byron text); Schumann ironically one-ups Schubert by replacing the word ‘Hauch’ with a wordless sigh, accompanied by a footnote: ‘The musician believes that by silencing the last syllable he has spoken clearly enough.’ 14. I rely here chiefly on the historical philology in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), pp. 49–61; a word search in Google Books turns up a modest number of additional early occurrences, often with a sacred aura. In ‘Negative Poetics’ I have queried a common notion of Erlebnislyrik as a merely subjective outpouring of feeling; ‘Erlebnis’ more authentically refers to the shaping of lived time into a lasting possession, such as Schubert’s songs accomplish. Readers of this essay may be familiar with the Erfahrung-Erlebnis pair from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’. Like much in Benjamin’s writing, his account of these words is highly idiosyncratic; it does not represent the historical usage of the words. 15. In ‘Schubert’s Wanderers and the Autonomous Lied’, Journal of Musicological Research, 14 (1965), 147–68, David Gramit follows Friedrich Kittler to link the solitary wanderers in five Schubert songs, including ‘Über allen Gipfeln’, to the elitism of the intellectual class. He does not discuss the music, however, and he stresses that this understanding is in fact aberrant: ‘private, direct communication from soul to soul is hardly the first result that one might expect from a musical experience like that through which audiences experienced the Lied during most of the nineteenth century’ (p. 159). 16. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 272–3. My translation, since the commonly used English translation is too free to be of use.

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17. These are, of course, merely shorthand notations for a history of formal self-consciousness in songs that would need to encompass many more composers and nuances. Wolf, for instance, often indulges in folk character, but typically in his comic vein. And Schumann’s ‘Ein Räthsel’ is already headed ‘Gut zu deklamieren’. 18. I do not have space here to provide sample readings of poems; there are some in the essays of mine referred to in n. 8. Some personal favourites among literary critics are Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992); Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Susan Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

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32 The Musical Poetry of the Graveyard Annette Richards

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n November 1813 Germany’s most widely-circulating music periodical, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, reported the death earlier that autumn of the virtuoso flautist Eleonora Prochaska, a martyr in the Napoleonic Wars who sacrificed first her identity and then her life in the name of freedom.1 Twenty-eight-year-old Prochaska had secretly joined the army in the spring of 1813, posing as the eighteenyear-old August Renz; as one of the riflemen of the Lutzow Free Regiment, she joined a corps filled with patriotic writers, intellectuals and other nationalist misfits, including the poet Theodor Körner (killed in August of the same year), the ‘Turnvater’ Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (known as the father of German gymnastics), and the poet and historian Friedrich Förster. It was Förster who later gave an eye-witness account of Prochaska’s heroic death: as battle raged against the French troops in woods near Lüneburg, he recalled, she had seized a drum and begun to play a virtuosic tattoo, exhorting her comrades on in a triumphant marching song. As she led her regiment to the brink of victory, Prochaska was mortally wounded. Förster reports how she fell to the ground, and in the extreme urgency of pain cried out ‘Ich bin ein Mädchen!’ (‘I am a girl!’). Needless to say this came as a shock to Förster, who returned in the aftermath of the battle (whose successful outcome he attributed in large part to Prochaska’s courage) to search for the injured soldier, only to find August Renz sublimely metamorphosed into a vision of female martyrdom: lying stricken in the mud, the soldier’s tunic had been pulled open, and Leonora’s naked body exposed; Förster’s narrative lingers on the dying woman’s breasts as she gasps for breath, and his gaze falls on ‘her snow-white bosom [that] betrayed the straining of her heroic, maiden’s heart’.2 The fervent nationalistic martyrdom of Eleonora Prochaska captivated the contemporary imagination. Just over a year later, in March 1815, Ludwig van Beethoven composed incidental music to Johann Friedrich Duncker’s little-known play Leonore Prohaska, celebrating the heroism of the fallen soldier. He set her final scene as a haunting melodrama, employing, for the first and only time in his career, the glass harmonica, as musical accompaniment to Duncker’s text. Beethoven’s melodrama presents a transcendent vision of Eleonora’s death in that battlefield graveyard;3 she is no longer able to sing, only to whisper at painful intervals between the musical interjections. The music is not that of suffering or darkness; rather, the glass harmonica’s hymn-like D-major phrases conjure a translucent idyll, another world that transcends the gore, filth and pain of the battlefield. The ringing of the glass music provides a shimmering nimbus around the dying heroine, seeming to prefigure the parting of the soul from the body. Eleonora’s

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demise is presented as a pure, even saintly, death. As a counterpart to this angelic vision, a funeral march follows, returning us to the realities of death, burial, the cold earth of graveyards (the music is an orchestration of the March ‘for the death of a hero’ from the piano sonata Op. 26, transposed from A flat minor to B minor). But Beethoven/Duncker’s vision seems to suppress an important element in Eleonora Prochaska’s contemporary appeal. Förster’s account of her death presents not only a heroic martyrdom, but also, with its battleground setting and prurient fascination with the cross-dressed woman’s body, intimations of a gothic fantasy. In his telling, the exposed Eleonora’s silent suffering carries with it hints of a sensual bliss comparable to baroque representations of figures such as Bernini’s St Theresa, in her amorous and mystical rapture, female martyrs who, like St Cecilia, were objects of renewed fascination in the years around 1800. Prochaska’s death carries with it a sensuality and corporeality that seem at odds with Beethoven’s disembodied musical ambience; Beethoven’s music suggests the transcendence of the soul, while accounts such as that of Förster hint instead at a gruesome physical rapture. French historian Philippe Ariès has chronicled late eighteenth-century obsessions with the corporeality of death, as the dead and dying body itself became an object of both scientific curiosity and perverted desire, and dissectionists vied with necrophiliacs over the mouldering contents of desecrated gravesites.4 Graveyards such as these were terrifiying places, whose ‘mouldy damps’ and ‘ropy slime’ had been etched into the popular imagination by Robert Blair’s enormously successful poem The Grave (published in 1743, and reprinted and translated at least forty times before 1800), which depicts a place of: Skulls and Coffins, Epitaphs and Worms: Where light-heeled Ghosts, and visionary Shades, Beneath the wan cold Moon (as fame reports) Embody’d, thick, perform their mystick Rounds.5 Blair’s graveyard of terrifying touches and disgusting stenches invites meditation on the horrors, not the peace, of death – contemplations elaborated upon in Thomas Warton’s The Pleasures of Melancholy (1747), where the melancholy wanderer enjoys a fearful solitude in ruined abbeys, cloisters and crypts, enveloped in the midnight sounds of organ and choir, ‘Till all my soul is bath’d in ecstasies, | And lap’d in Paradise’.6 In burial grounds such as these, the dead return, their haunting voices dismally hovering, half-consoling, half-terrorising the living – those bereaved mortals who linger beside the tomb, absorbed in ecstatic fantasies of lost love, of passions too intensely felt and too nearly indulged. As contemporary literary and visual culture attested, by the end of the century love and death had formed a ‘veritable corpus of macabre eroticism’7 (to quote Ariès), one vividly realised in that instant classic of the genre, Gottfried Bürger’s ballad ‘Lenore’ (1773, first published in the Göttinger Musenalmanach, 1774). ‘Lenore’ is the tale of a girl who abandons herself to despair and curses God when she loses her lover, Wilhelm, at the Battle of Prague. As the ballad unfolds, Lenore’s frenzy of grief is

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stemmed only when, in the dead of night and riding a ghostly steed, Wilhelm returns in full battle dress to collect his bride: Komm, schürze, spring’ und schwinge dich Auf meinen Rappen hinter mich! Muss heut’ noch hundert Meilen Mit dir in’s Brautbett’ eilen. (Come, my sweet, jump up Behind me on my steed! Today must I hasten with you still A hundred miles to our marriage bed.) They gallop past funeral processions and amidst clouds of screeching phantoms, until at last, as they careen through the gates of a great castle, the flesh falls from the soldier’s body and the panic-stricken Lenore finds herself in an embrace with a horrific phantom. Lenore’s terrifying midnight escapade with the ghost of her lover brings her deliriously toward the ghastly fulfilment of their love – the marriage bed described so vividly by Wilhelm does double duty as the narrow coffin from which he has risen; the landscape through which they pass is an endless graveyard, the noxious air thick with spirits. At last, as Lenore finds herself in the arms of Death himself, marooned amongst the chaotic rubbish of the charnel house, the ambiguous ending (does she die or dream?) leaves open the possibility of a kind of satanic consummation. The more ambitious of late eighteenth-century composers setting this ballad to music mustered an arsenal of effects borrowed from the baroque theatre to elaborate a sonorous tapestry of horror. One of the most striking of these settings is the work of the blind virtuosa Maria Theresia von Paradis, who imagined the musical topography of this graveyard world, like that of the operatic underworld, as one of diminished harmonies, shaking tremoli, exposed octaves and creeping chromaticism. Paradis’s through-composed setting of Bürger’s thirty-two stanzas for soprano and keyboard accompaniment, published in 1789, not only vividly evokes the grim setting, but also dramatically characterises the individual voices of the tale. Death, ventriloquising Wilhelm, sings in a low drone as he calls Lenore to wake, hollowly repeating a single note (the tonic C), accompanied simply by stentorian octaves in the piano (Fig. 32.1a); or ascending ominously through the chromatic scale as he recounts his progress through the night (Fig. 32.1b) over hammering octave triplets which continue incessantly for large sections of the song, interspersed with tremoli which seem to contrast the pounding of the horses’ hooves with the thickly-crowding ghosts all around. Paradis’s setting enacts a curious ecstasy of its own as the endless passages of repeated octaves demand from the pianist energy, stamina and even a kind of physical transcendence that intimate the sublime transports of the virtuoso. If the blind Paradis, famous equally as soprano and pianist, had both sung and played this composition simultaneously, her performance could well have veered toward a grotesque embodiment of Lenore’s own agonies and rapture. But heightened theatricality and erotic passion do not offer the only path into the graveyard. As we have already seen in Beethoven’s music for Leonore Prohaska, standing in a dialectical relation to this grotesque musico-poetic idiom was one far quieter and less corporeal – and all the more unsettling. One of the most influential

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Figure 32.1a Maria Theresia von Paradis, Lenore, bars 223–31

Figure 32.1b Maria Theresia von Paradis, Lenore, bars 240–7

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of all graveyard poems of the period, Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), begins in hushed calm: The Curfeu tolls the Knell of parting Day, The lowing Herd winds slowly o’er the Lea, The Plow-man homeward plods his weary Way, And leaves the World to Darkness, and to me. Now fades the glimmering Landscape on the Sight, And all the Air a solemn Stillness holds, Save where the Beetle wheels his droning Flight, And drowsy Tinklings lull the distant Folds. Gray’s Elegy, reprinted numerous times before the end of the eighteenth century, frequently in conjunction with Blair’s The Grave, helped to establish not only in England but across Europe a fashion for graveyards as sites for curative solitude and contemplative melancholy – sacred gardens of remembrance whose secular analogue was to be found in the incorporation of mausoleums and memorial monuments into bucolic corners of landscape gardens.8 The deepening summer twilight that suffuses a natural landscape in the opening stanzas of Gray’s poem set the scene for two German odes in this vein, ‘Die Sommernacht’ (‘The Summer Night’) and ‘Die frühen Gräber’ (‘The Early Graves’) by F. G. Klopstock, published in Hamburg in 1771, both of them popular vehicles for musical settings well into the nineteenth century. ‘Die frühen Gräber’ exemplifies the manner in which both poems elegiacally evoke the consolations of nature to temper grief and loss at the graveside: the poem opens with an invocation to the moon ‘Willkommen, o silberner Mond, schöner, stiller Gefährt’ der Nacht!’ (‘Welcome, O silver moon, beautiful, quiet companion of the night’), and it is only in the last verse that death is refracted through the atmosphere of hushed stillness, as the already mossy tombstones of the lost loved ones come into focus in what is revealed to be a graveyard: ‘Ihr Edleren, ach, es bewächst | Eure Male schon ernstes Moos! | O wie war glücklich ich, als ich noch mit euch | Sahe sich röthen den Tag, schimmern die Nacht’ (‘You nobler beings, alas! Your monuments are already overgrown with stern moss! O, how happy I was when, still with you, I saw day redden and night glimmer!’). With sensitivity to the poem’s message of pastoral consolation, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s musical setting, composed in 1773 and first published in 1774, presents a bucolic major-mode melancholy rather than a darker vision of death (see Fig. 32.2): calmly diatonic, its undulating step-wise C-major melody is accompanied sweetly in thirds; the song is easy both to sing and to play, lending itself to pensive contemplation rather than anguished empathy.9 This is domestic music, delectable graveyard wandering for the player at home, musing at his or her keyboard in solitary delight; it struck the poet (and member of Klopstock’s North German – and anglophile – literary circle) Johann Heinrich Voss as ‘heavenly’, (‘ganz himmlich componirt’)10 and prompted a casual poetic homage: Freundlicher Mond, du gießest milden Schimmer Auf mein goldnes Klavier, und winkest lächelnd Mit des seelenschmelzenden Gluck: Willkommen!

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Figure 32.2 C. W. Gluck, ‘Die frühen Gräber’ Dich zu begrüßen. (Friendly moon, you pour mild glimmer On my golden clavichord, and wave smiling To be greeted by the soul-melting Gluck: Welcome!)11 Eighteenth-century poetic-musical representations of the ecstasy of the graveyard, then, oscillated between the consolatory and the terrifying. Franz Joseph Haydn understood that both modes could be contained within one song, to deeply uncanny effect. In his setting of Anne Hunter’s ‘The Spirit’s Song’ (late 1790s), an ominous figure in slow, upward-rising quavers, in F minor, its sparse octave texture and dotted rhythms recalling the spirits of the operatic underworld, introduces the utterances of a spectre hovering at his (or her) own gravesite, haunting the bereaved lover (Fig. 32.3): ‘Hark what I tell to thee.’

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Figure 32.3 Haydn, ‘The Spirit’s Song’, bars 1–19 A quiet chill lies over the whole, its ghostliness enhanced by chromaticism as the spirit seems to gradually emerge from the tomb. The minor mode, hollow texture and indeed the upward insinuating creep of the opening figure are marked as the music of the dead (Fig. 32.4). In the second and third stanzas, however, the poetic attention shifts from the ghost to the bereaved lover weeping beside the grave (Fig. 32.5): All pensive and alone, I see thee sit and weep, Thy head upon the stone, Where my cold ashes sleep. Reflecting the change of emphasis, Haydn’s music, now in the relative major, conjures a lyrical idyll that recalls the consolatory sonic landscape of the Gluck/Klopstock ‘Frühen Gräber’.

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Figure 32.4 Haydn, ‘The Spirit’s Song’, bars 26–38

Figure 32.5 Haydn, ‘The Spirit’s Song’, bars 40–52

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But Hunter’s poem does not end here, choosing instead to return to the exhortations of the ghost, and the chilling invitation to join him/her in the grave. Haydn, likewise, reprises the opening stanza, returning to the voice of the ghost at its most ominous; indeed, he goes even further, to insistently stress the spirit’s waiting as he moves into a coda that depicts not so much consolation, as haunting – a remarkable evocation of the soul’s ecstasis beyond the corpse and the corporeal world. The chilling chromatic descent which seems to accompany the return to the grave, arrives after a momentary deflection, at a perfect cadence at bar 83; in the coda that follows, as the voice breaks out to soar far beyond its range in the rest of the song to a high G flat (the Neapolitan harmony, both closely related and distinctly distant from the tonic), the spirit appears magically to rise, hovering outside the body and the grave, and at last only reluctantly returning to that low tonic entombment where the profundity of the grave is sounded out in the left hand on the very lowest note of Haydn’s piano (Fig. 32.6).

Figure 32.6 Haydn, ‘The Spirit’s Song’, bars 77–95

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Figure 32.7 ‘The Soul Hovering over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life’. Illustration designed by William Blake, engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti, for Robert Blair, The Grave (London: R. H. Cromek, 1808), Plate 7 (facing p. 16). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

The musical depiction of haunting, of the soul’s transcendence, or reluctant ecstasy, seems to echo William Blake’s illustration for Blair’s The Grave of the soul’s departure from the body (Fig. 32.7): an unwanted liberation that constitutes the sorrowful parting of a lover from the beloved, their eventual reunion at the Last Judgement one radically passionate and sensual, far from that conventional vision of risen souls purged of sensuality (Fig. 32.8). Giving voice to the dead was nothing new in music; the hero of musical modernity’s first great monument, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, provisionally defeated death through song. The Lutheran concept of the art of dying (ars moriendi), which was itself in declining health during the Enlightenment, often articulated dying affirmations of belief and animated the departed spirit in song. What is new in the musico-literary representations of death explored in this essay are the texts and textures of horror – the physicality and fear that would be seen and heard in Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’ and Weber’s ‘Wolf’s Glen’ scene, and, later in the melodramas of the silver screen. From the uncanny commentary of Beethoven’s glass harmonica on the re-enacted death scene of Eleonora Prochaska, through the full-throttle fright of Paradis’s Lenore, to the calm tristesse of Gluck’s graveyard promenade, to the gloomy limbo and ecstatic longings of Haydn’s Anne Hunter songs, the horror emanates not just from the diminished harmonies and stabbing figurations, but more unsettlingly from the ghosting of word by music as the texted utterance is accompanied by a keyboard commentary that speaks without words – but somehow also through them – from the deepest recesses of the mortal human subject.

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Figure 32.8 ‘The Reunion of the Soul and the Body’. Illustration designed by William Blake, engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti, for Robert Blair, The Grave (London: R. H. Cromek, 1808), Plate 13 (facing p. 32). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

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Notes 1. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 15 (46) (17 November 1815), col. 758. 2. See Freia Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper: Die Musizierende Frau in der bürgerlichen Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1991), p. 389. 3. While Duncker uses a variant spelling of his heroine’s name (as do numerous contemporary sources), for the sake of clarity I will continue to use here the spelling generally agreed upon in biographical dictionaries. 4. See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1980), pp. 372–3. 5. Robert Blair, The Grave: A Poem (London, 1743), p. 4. 6. Thomas Warton, The Pleasures of Melancholy: A Poem (London, 1747), p. 17. 7. Ariès, p. 393. 8. Equally important for the transmission of the English graveyard aesthetic, especially for later theorists of the sublime in Germany, was Edward Young’s The Complaint: Or, NightThoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (London, 1742–5). 9. Gluck’s settings appeared first in the Göttinger Musenalmanach (1774) and subsequently with improvements, in Klopstock’s Oden und Lieder beym Clavier zu Singen [. . .] von Herrn Ritter Gluck [. . .] (Vienna, 1780–5). 10. In a letter from Voss (12 December 1773) to Ernestine Boie, sister of the editor of the Göttinger Musenalmanach, Heinrich Christian Boie. Quoted in Max Friedländer, Das deutsche Lied im 18. Jahrhundert, 2 vols (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1902), II, p. 126. 11. Briefe von Johann Heinrich Voß, ed. Abraham Voß, 3 vols (Halberstadt: Carl Brüggemann, 1829–32), I, p. 228.

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33 Of Mathematics, Marrow-Bones and Marriage: Eighteenth-Century Convivial Song Christopher Price

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ense and Harmony combin’d | Make a Banquet for the Mind.’ When Benjamin Cooke set this epigrammatic couplet of Edward Mulso in 1775 he was celebrating the perfect union of words and music in English song and offering practical advice at the same time: ‘If the Prize you mean to get,’ he begins, ‘Season Music well with Wit | [. . .] The Prize obtain’d, with me you’ll hold | Sterling Wit is sterling Gold.’1 The deft wordplay leads by example. The prizes in question were the medals offered by the Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club, founded in 1761: annual awards of ten guineas each for the best catch, canon and glee (later subdivided into two categories, ‘serious’ and ‘cheerful’). To put the prize into perspective: in 1781 R. J. S. Stevens was paid £40 per annum as organist at St Michael Cornhill,2 and a lay clerk at Canterbury cathedral earned £24 per annum in 1786.3 The ‘Prize’ was valuable; the ‘Nobs and Gents’ were helping to make these small, distinctively English forms of convivial song respectable. Respectability was desirable: catches and glees, and the people who sang them, were firmly associated with the exclusively male – and fairly disreputable – environment of the tavern. Shakespeare had been partly responsible: the most famous literary reference is to be found in Twelfth Night, Act 2, scene 2, when Sir Toby Belch greets Feste with ‘Welcome, ass. Now let’s have a catch.’ In 1795 the composer William Jackson described them as pieces which ‘when quartered, have three parts obscenity and one part music’.4 This was not entirely fair, as we shall see, but the best-known musical examples were Purcell’s catches, which reinforced the impression of an unwholesome music with some of the most uproariously salacious examples in the repertoire. For all this, the catch had been at the heart of sociable music-making in England since at least the thirteenth century. Its consistently lively text is one part of its appeal; its relative musical simplicity is another: it takes the form of a single melody, broken up into phrases of equal length (usually three or four), which may be sung not only consecutively, but concurrently – at which point the underlying harmony becomes audible. This is inclusive music; anyone who knows the melody may join in and experience the pleasure of singing a kind of instant part-song. A typical performance will have a singer (or group) begin the melody, subsequent singers starting in turn when the first phrase has been sung, and all simply repeat the entire melody until, by agreement or mishap, all stop. Clearly, this is music intended for participators, not an audience – which would, indeed, find it difficult to hear any individual phrases when all the singers have joined in. And as the performance progresses, another important feature of some catches may emerge: in the more lewd examples,

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as the interplay between voices develops, an apparently innocuous text acquires an altogether different complexion. The example below, as with all the examples in this study, is to be found in the archives of the Canterbury Catch Club (1779–1865), now held in Canterbury cathedral library. ‘As t’other day Susan’, by Luffman Atterbury, illustrates all the above characteristics: in three ten-bar phrases we meet Susan and Tom apparently attempting to sing a song. Tom is less competent than Susan, and keeps losing his place. His entreaties to Sue to help him regain it (‘let me in’) are met with smiling rebuffs, since she doubts his ability, at which point Sam comes along and offers to fill Tom’s role. As if the double-entendre had not become sufficiently clear, Atterbury’s setting reinforces it in bars 7 and 8 by means of the carefully placed pauses in the different voice parts (Fig. 33.1).5 This example raises interesting questions about performance practice and types of text. Given the masculine, alcohol-fuelled, participatory nature of the genre, it may be thought that the catch would lend itself only to a limited range of subject-matter. It is indeed the case that favourite topics include the importance of singing, the imperative to drink more and the torment of shrewish wives – the last two subjects neatly combined in Purcell’s sardonic ‘Once in our lives, let us drink to our wives’.6 But, as the above example suggests, other forms of text may be given musical treatment in this

Figure 33.1 Luffman Atterbury (1735–1796): ‘As t’other day Susan’, bars 7–10, Canterbury Catch Club (CCC) IX, p. 44

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repertoire: discussion and narrative frequently occur, as does soliloquy – particularly in the form of the epitaph, to which we shall return. Distinct voices emerge, and it is easy to imagine a more varied treatment in performance, so as to bring out the different characters more clearly. Often, the composer’s setting of the text encourages such character distinction; Sam’s line in the above example remains in a lower range apart from a brief upward leap in bars 3–4. Wit, as Mulso suggests, was a crucial ingredient. Whether by dint of wordplay, humorous characters or situations, or deftly hidden meanings, the words and music of this genre appealed to the spirit of an age that treasured wit highly. This may help to explain why the catch was not only heard in the morally questionable tavern; from at least the end of the seventeenth century it found a home in more salubrious surroundings such as the rooms of cathedral clergy and university tutors. William Hayes was Professor of Music at Oxford from 1741 until his death in 1777, and in his preface to his own Catches, Glees and Canons (1757)7 he makes clear that the humble catch had several claims on such attention: I found [the compositions] to be productive of the most desirable effects: viz. [. . .] Good Humour, Friendship and a Love of Harmony; not to mention how much [they] contributed to the improvement of the younger practitioners, enabling them to sing readily at sight [. . .] and this [. . .] by allurement, and the gratification of the pleasure they found in it themselves. There is no doubt that the ‘allurement’ of Hayes’s catches owed much to their subject-matter, which spans a remarkable range from the poignant epitaph to the satirical story. Two examples must suffice, and it is worth noting that the epitaph, in particular, seems to bring out the best of the English talent for word setting, embracing a vocabulary seldom elevated in song. Above the manuscript of ‘On the death of Wells’,8 a dedication tells us that Wells had been Master of the Bear-Garden; hence the wry ‘Ye butchers, weep, for you, no doubt, are grievers | And sound his loss with marrow-bones and cleavers.’ Hayes’s setting of this pithy text is concise, but expansive in its melodic treatment, employing a range of a diminished twelfth, and the flattened second in bar 3 of the first line adds to an effective depiction of the dogs’ howling. When all the voices have entered, that moment is underlined by the diminished chord in bar 3, which includes a rare moment of chromaticism as the middle part moves to G sharp after the perfect cadence in G major in the previous bar. We are, then, firmly back in E minor, and the stark unison ending is a fitting farewell to Wells (Fig. 33.2). Hayes’s collection contains a fine example of a catch that tells a story. Apart from its pleasantly satirical tone, ‘As Sir Toby reel’d home’9 has at least one ingredient crucial to an arresting plot: the flawed central character finds himself in a quandary of his own making. Sir Toby is heroically drunk, and is consequently unable to navigate home in a forward direction. Ingeniously, he reckons he should turn back to the pub, and this proves successful. It is worth noting that this tale is told in a lively twenty-four bars employing no repetition of text while once again requiring reasonably agile voices which, if everyone sings everything as customary, have to cover a large range – occasionally very nimbly. The effect is energetic. Once again we are reminded of the potential tension between form and content: the witty, inventive text may be inaudible to a potential audience as the voices join in.

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Figure 33.2 William Hayes (1708–1777): ‘On the death of Wells’, CCC XVIII, p. 156 The clue to the resolution of this tension lies in the very circularity of the catch in performance. Our modern audience/performer dichotomy is irrelevant; the performers are themselves the observers of such narratives as these. Thus, whilst entertainment was undoubtedly in the process of becoming simply another commodity in the newly emerging consumer society at the end of the eighteenth century, the catch serves as a reminder of a period in which creating one’s own pastimes gave command of at least two aspects of the tripartite relationship uniting creator, performer and audience. While the catch and glee shared an ancestry associated with sociable drinking, the glee was always the more sophisticated cousin. Its musical antecedents are the madrigals of the sixteenth century, but it came to be characterised by a texture in which counterpoint, whilst not entirely absent, is less common than in much of the madrigal repertoire, and by structures which make frequent use of sections contrasting in tempo, metre and tonality – always in response to the text. The normal forces required are three or four unaccompanied male voices, of which one may often be the distinctive countertenor voice that has been the defining feature of the English cathedral sound-world. This in itself is a clue to one important aspect of the glee; it required trained musicianship and vocal technique. This is music that expected an audience. The glee’s artistic development is seen in both music and text. Although there is much exhortation to alcoholic excess and lengthy discussion of the advantages of wine over women, the best texts offer suitably weighty form and content for a genre which, in the main, expected to be taken very seriously: subjects included art,

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philosophy, politics, religion, patriotism and war. Stylistically, the texts aspire to the elegance of classical models in heightened, somewhat archaic, language. Favoured poets, following Shakespeare, included Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ (frequently set by John Wall Callcott), Milton (John Stafford Smith’s ‘Blest Pair of Sirens’) and Spenser (Smith’s ‘Flora Now Calleth Forth Each Flower’). John Stafford Smith found an opportunity to plumb the depths of intensely private emotion in Thomas d’Urfey’s 1694 adaptation of Cervantes’s classic, The Comical History of Don Quixote. The song ‘Sleep, poor youth’10 appears in Act 2, scene 2, at a moment which is far from comical: the young Chrysostom is being laid to rest, and maidens sing this ‘Dirge’ to accompany the burial. Death, says the song, has at least spared this young man any more of the cares of this mortal life. Smith sets the text with expressive power, beginning with a slow section treating the first half of the first verse with homophonic simplicity in slow triple time. The following lines, ‘Couch’d in the dark and dismal grave, | No ills of fate thou now canst fear’, begin with a rare chromatic departure from the prevailing E flat major tonality to suggest, briefly, the relative minor, before returning to the home key. The metre changes to duple time here, so the rhythmic treatment is closer to that suggested by the iambic tetrameter of the verse, but textural variety becomes more important: the first appearance of ‘Wars that do fatal storms disperse | Far from thy happy mansions keep’ is set for the upper three voices only, and this leads into a more dramatic treatment of the following line (Fig. 33.3a): ‘Earthquakes that shake the universe | Can’t rock thee into sounder sleep.’ Despite their angular, staccato character, these earthquakes shaking the universe fail to rock the poor youth into any sounder a sleep than his present state. After the cadential half-close shown in Figure 33.3a, Smith departs briefly from the text in favour of a more complex repetition of the lines, in which a rhythmically augmented, syncopated variant of the rocking motif is set imitatively against further reference to the ‘earthquakes’ whose music recalls the original version (Fig. 33.3b). The final section – the chorus of the song – sees a return to the slow triple time of the start, for an exquisitely peaceful ending: ‘Past is the fear of future doubt, | The sun is from the dial gone,’ sing the shepherd and shepherdess, ending with profound restraint. The undisputed master of the genre was Samuel Webbe (1740–1816). He is notable for the quality not only of his music but also of his words; he set a dozen of his own poems to music. In ‘My pocket’s low and taxes high’11 we find a perfect match of words, music and wit, in which the sectional structure of the glee works particularly well. At the start a bass bewails his poverty in a most plangent lament for a good fifteen bars (Fig. 33.4a). It is worth noting that such a monophonic texture is not uncommon in the glee repertoire; at these moments we are reminded of the start of a catch. The others then enter, trying to cheer him up in lively counterpoint, whilst the bass carries on grumbling. Above this polyphonic ingenuity, the countertenor begins to recite the National Anthem, and the result is the gloomiest reharmonisation ever penned, in a depressed minor mode, of what was by now Britain’s patriotic song (Fig. 33.4b). But, declaims the second tenor, swiftly modulating to the relative major, ‘Propitious fortune yet may smile | On fair Britannia’s sea-girt isle.’ With this they all agree, and gather in a rousing restatement of ‘God save great George our King’ in its normal, triumphalist, major tonality, to end.

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Figure 33.3a John Stafford Smith (1750–1836): ‘Sleep, poor youth’, bars 34–41, CCC IX, p. 32

Figure 33.3b John Stafford Smith (1750–1836): ‘Sleep, poor youth’, bars 42–6, CCC IX, p. 32

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Figure 33.4a Samuel Webbe (1740–1816): ‘My pocket’s low and taxes high’, bars 1–16, CCC XXXV, p. 70

Figure 33.4b Samuel Webbe (1740–1816): ‘My pocket’s low and taxes high’, bars 25–30: first, minor, harmonisation of the National Anthem, CCC XXXV, p. 70

As this piece suggests, a sense of theatre, suffused with the wit of the age, is seldom far away in this repertoire, but it is important to note that the joke is as much a musical one as verbal or dramatic. In Henry Harington’s ‘Goody Groaner’, a hapless tenor whose wife is about to give birth finally gives up asking directions to the midwife when he realises the two hopeless stammerers will never reach the end of their sentences after fifty-five bars of speech defect set to music.12 And Harington’s ‘What shall we sing now here are three’13 heaps great ignominy upon a venerable canon – Non Nobis, Domine, often erroneously attributed to William Byrd but actually by Philip van Wilder (c. 1500–1554) – when three incompetent singers fail to sing it properly in a very accomplished representation of musical chaos. In these and other examples, the talent of the best glee composers lies in their ability to reinforce a dramatic or verbal punch line with musical skill. In the piece with which we began, Cooke emphasises Mulso’s point by deft handling of texture: his repetition of ‘with wit’ is delivered in various pairings (Fig. 33.5). This quasi-antiphony then gives way to a much more expansive, full-textured setting of ‘sense and harmony’ before the piece ends in simpler homophony.

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Figure 33.5 Benjamin Cooke (1730–1794): ‘If the prize you mean to get’, bars 1–6, CCC XI, p. 121

This example serves to close this brief study by recalling that for the highly literate composers writing for an equally literate elite in the late eighteenth century, music and text should ‘combine’ to express the sentiment – a word with much more profound significance than its vapid modern counterpart – of the poetry. The Catch Club ceased to award the prizes in 1793, but in a real sense they had served their purpose: the decades in which the catch and glee flourished as the favoured genres of English composers bequeathed a repertoire which is indeed ‘a banquet for the mind’.

Notes 1. Canterbury, Cathedral Archives, Canterbury Catch Club (CCC), XI, pp. 121–3. 2. R. J. S. Stevens, Recollections of R. J. S. Stevens: An Organist in Georgian London, ed. Mark Argent (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), p. 40. 3. Canterbury, Cathedral Archives, Deans’ Book no. 6, p. 135. 4. William Jackson, Letters on Various Subjects: On Catches, 3rd edn (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1795), pp. 61–71 in [accessed 19 November 2014]. 5. Atterbury, ‘As t’other day Susan and Tom trudg’d along’; CCC, IX, p. 44; cf. also The Catch Book, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), no. 132. 6. CCC, XXIV, p. 55. 7. CCC, XVIII, p. 173. 8. Ibid., p. 156. 9. Ibid., p. 156. 10. CCC, IX, p. 32. 11. CCC, XXXV, p. 70. 12. CCC, IX, p. 18. 13. CCC, V, pp. 96–8.

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Part IV Literature and Music in the Nineteenth Century Section editor: Delia da Sousa Correa

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Introduction Delia da Sousa Correa

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he transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century coincides with an important shift in the relations between words and music. It was during this period that Romantic veneration of music’s transcendent and poetic powers secured its elevation to the position that it has essentially occupied ever since. In her introduction to the previous part of this volume, Suzanne Aspden outlined how growing regard for music’s expressive powers heightened esteem for wordless instrumental music during the eighteenth century. However, in Scott Burnham’s words, ‘[I]t is only at the outset of the nineteenth century, the threshold of our modern aesthetic values, that artists and thinkers began to seek in instrumental music itself something higher than poetry, something to which poetry might now aspire.’1 This aspiration is everywhere apparent in nineteenth-century writing, familiar from the ‘profuse strains of unpremeditated art’ of Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’, which is discussed by Francis O’Gorman in his essay below.2 Thus the nineteenth century saw the continued elaboration of relationships between literature and music that had become vital to Romanticism and in which the idea of music, independent of words, represented the highest aesthetic ideal. The ongoing inheritance of Romantic ideas about music is also plain from the attachment to the view of music as a consummate form of expression, beyond the power of words, that pertained amongst writers throughout the nineteenth century; a view that presented challenges as well as opportunities for the status of writers and the written word. A few writers, such as Vernon Lee, questioned this Romantic way of thinking. Lee, a significant interdisciplinary scholar in her own time with an interest in music’s influence on literature and the other arts, wanted to dispel what she saw as the Romantics’ failure to distinguish between music and poetry.3 She argued that music’s satisfactions were formal, rather than based in its power to express specific emotions or any form of meaningful content. Her own fictions nevertheless constantly invoked many of the same aspects that were important to her fellow writers, such as the affective impact of music and especially of the human singing voice. For most nineteenth-century writers, a strongly Romantic sense of affinities between music and poetry, and of music’s expressive and transcendent powers, remained implicit; such beliefs enjoyed a currency that readers might understand from even the most passing reference or metaphor. While literary aspirations to an ideal music are powerfully in evidence, relations between music and literature during the nineteenth century are anything but onedimensional or one-directional. A very wide range of relationships invite critical investigation by interdisciplinary scholars of literature and music. Conceptions of music, poetry, and narrative were exchanged during the century with significant and pervasive

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impacts on both arts. New engagements between European musical and literary genres proliferated, between opera and the novel for example, in addition to the long-standing partnerships of poetry, lyric and song. Some of these engagements involved a direct combination of different media, as in musical settings of song texts and operas based on literary themes. But a great deal of this interconnection operated at the level of form and structure, metaphor and meaning. The extent of these exchanges was facilitated by material developments, above all by the advances in print technology that permitted the mass printing of musical and verbal texts, and of the critical responses that emphasised their cultural importance. (Indeed the novelist Stendhal’s initial written responses to opera were in the form of music journalism, as Gillen D’Arcy Wood discusses in his essay below.) Relations between literature and music took place within a web of interlinking cultural contexts that are, in themselves, of interest to many contributors to this part of The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music. While poetry from the Romantic period onwards pursued the transcendent and expressive powers of music, music itself increasingly turned to literature, including to narrative, for its models. It is not surprising that the musicologists who have drawn on literary criticism and theory have so frequently drawn their examples from the nineteenth century: to a significant degree, nineteenth-century music’s fertile relationships with poetry and narrative have found a critical counterpart in the way that late-twentieth-century musicology has had recourse to the abundance of critical theory. Some of the ways in which nineteenth-century composers turned to literature for inspiration are clearly manifested in the song-settings of verse that burgeoned in the Romantic period and thereafter, and in the opera libretti inspired by works of literature. In the essays that follow, Philip Bullock reflects on Tchaikovsky’s work as an interpreter, and sometimes author, of poetry. Within the context of a cultural valorisation of realism and hostility towards lyric in nineteenth-century Russia, Tchaikovsky’s musical settings became significant agents of literary dissemination. European opera, meanwhile, increasingly turned to works of non-classical literature for its libretti, with English literature a particular inspiration for Italian operatic composers, who greatly increased the fame of their source texts. Denise Gallo discusses the importance of literary models for this genre in an essay that investigates the complex processes of translation underlying operatic treatments of English texts by Shakespeare and Walter Scott. The new importance of the novel form to nineteenth-century opera was identified by Peter Conrad in his seminal book, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (1977). Conrad saw the interiority of the nineteenth-century novel, and not drama, as representing the literary ideal to which Romantic opera aspired as it became more occupied with ‘poetic’ expression of interior psychology rather than with ‘the exterior life of action’.4 In his essay below, Michael Halliwell examines the historical continuation of this relationship, demonstrating how nineteenth-century fiction has inspired later composers through an analysis of a more recent operatic adaptation of Henry James. For the twentieth-century composer and librettist, James’s text offered a connection with some of the nineteenth-century literary and musical sensibilities that are fundamental to opera’s heritage; in turn, their operatic treatment of James’s The Aspern Papers illuminates the complexities of the novel within a double timeframe made possible by the layering of musical and dramatic forces.

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The relevance of literature for music during the nineteenth century is not only apparent within these flourishing vocal genres, but most particularly in the increasing value of narrative structures for composers of instrumental music. Berlioz’s 1830 Symphonie fantastique (Op. 14) is a famous example of music with an explicit narrative ‘programme’, but non-programmatic narrative patterns and strategies can also be discerned in a very wide range of instrumental works. Indeed, in the essay that follows this introduction, Lawrence Kramer queries the continued usefulness of the term ‘programmatic’ since music inspires our imaginations by telling its listeners something about a story rather than relating the events of the story as such. Although narrative strategies are by no means exclusive to music of the nineteenth century, they became of central importance at this time, and this move towards narrative within nineteenth-century music has been the topic of ground-breaking work in critical musicology over recent decades which has seen (re)discovery of lyric and narrative as categories for new explorations of music ‘even in the absence of specific comparisons’.5 The impact of literary, linguistic and aesthetic theory on musicology has also fostered a striking variety of work in musical semiotics, whereby a variety of analytical and, increasingly also, more hermeneutic approaches are used in systematic explorations of music’s participation in larger systems of signs.6 Flourishing modes of research have investigated music’s potential to narrate via the use of recognised musical conventions that can communicate ideas to an audience. Work in musical ‘topic theory’ traces how conventions from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera migrated into instrumental music during the eighteenth century. Scholars have shown how, for instance, passages of stormy music (tempesta) or of music foreboding the shadowy or supernatural (ombra) can be recognised in Haydn symphonies, Mozart concerti and Schubert piano sonatas. These topics continue through into the nineteenth century, becoming manifest in works such as the portentous slow introductions to Beethoven’s second and fourth symphonies (1802, 1806) and the storm movement of his ‘Pastoral’ sixth symphony (1808).7 Scholars in the field of topic theory have been keen to demonstrate that music communicates meaning in relation to musical rather than simply to literary conventions. Mahler’s use of ‘marches, landler, bugle-calls, chorales and so on’ exemplifies how a composer can call on listeners’ familiarity with those topics and their cultural significance.8 However, in recent practice, work in topic theory has branched out to embrace an interest in how music connects with extra-musical texts and traditions. Kofi Agawu, whose work has spear-headed this expansion, writes that topic theory enables analysis of how music may be heard as a ‘wordless discourse’; a ‘topic’ is a subject incorporated into this discourse and permeates it so suggestively that a listener might ‘catch a whiff’, as of an allusion ‘overheard’.9 For a literary scholar, musical ‘topic theory’ suggests strong affinities with literary theories of intertexuality, and these connections are discussed in Michael Klein’s essay on ‘Intertextuality, Topic Theory, and the Open Text’ for the opening section of essays in this volume. For this nineteenth-century part of the volume, Lawrence Kramer’s essay on ‘Music and the Rise of Narrative’ investigates the nature of narrative as it inheres – or is transmitted through – music in an expansive, culturally-significant sense. Kramer identifies the narrativity that came to the fore in nineteenth-century music as coinciding with the general advance of narrative in European systems of thought. In literature this same rise fostered the rapid ascent of the novel and underpinned

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the ‘master narratives’ of ‘Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud’. Frequently, nineteenth-century music selected recognisable elements from particular stories and developed on those in ways that listeners hear as meaningful, even though they do not reproduce the action of plot. Elsewhere composers create analogues of narrative structures without association with any particular story as such; Kramer defines multi-movement works that present their several elements united within a coherent form as ‘appropriating the model of novelistic integration’ and ‘finding a musical equivalent for the novel’s enhanced time-scale’.10 As previously noted in my volume introduction, critical musicology’s interpretation of music within wider cultural contexts has opened up a wealth of possible meanings for consideration. Kramer himself has generated numerous narrative and cultural readings of nineteenth-century music over the past few decades. These cover an extensive range of subjects and encompass, for instance, readings of Schubert’s music as ‘a response to [. . .] a new form of western social organization in the first years of the nineteenth century’; this makes his songs ‘a vehicle for exploring the great transformations of subjectivity characteristic of his era’, transformations that include newly-conceived modes of expressing sexuality.11 Other examples are a discussion of the Finale of Beethoven’s last string quartet (String Quartet no. 16 in F major, Op. 135, 1826), as an example of ‘musical narrativity’; or an account of Beethoven’s 1808 ‘Ghost Trio’ (Piano Trio in D major, Op. 70, no. 1) in relation to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.12 Strongly in the lineage of E. T. A Hoffmann, the Beethoven specialist Scott Burnham also shares the now widespread concern with narrative on the part of musicologists. His work brings to light the narrative moments within music that interest him and fellow ‘poeticizing critics’.13 Burnham’s emphasis on the poetic within music criticism promotes a reconnection for musicologists with the critical practice of nineteenth-century writers such as Hoffmann and Robert Schumann, with their insistent identification of the musical and the poetic. In his own discussion of Beethoven’s 1808 Fifth Symphony, Burnham comments that Beethoven’s instrumentation, exemplified by the famous oboe passage in the scherzo of the symphony’s finale, can ‘offer the emotive presence of a first-person narrator’.14 In Burnham’s account, Beethoven also ‘narrates [. . .] form’; his deployment of sonata form ‘overemphasizes closure and return [. . .] so that we hear ultimate affirmation [. . .] deafening us to the sound of doubt’.15 This is ‘music as an enactment of a narration’.16 Similarly, in his poetic reading of the Ninth Symphony Burnham identifies narrative elements as the basis of the ‘moral force’ that listeners to this day hear in Beethoven’s music and which often shapes their experience of the music as simultaneously expressive of affirmation and doubt.17 Burnham invites us to comprehend ‘how tonal music can be understood to sound and explore values, and not just to value and explore sounds’: for him, a concern with narrative engenders modes of criticism that register subjective experience, and through which ‘one gets a sense of why it might be important to listen to music’.18 Principles of narrative, therefore, became increasingly entrenched within nineteenthcentury music at the same time as the idea of music permeated literature in a wide variety of genres. Poetry offers the most immediately evident example of this idea, for ambitions to achieve music’s transcendent, inspirational and expressive power could be aligned with the formal affinities that had always existed between music and words

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arranged as verse. However, while poets might aspire to an ideal music (and were judged on the formal ‘musicality’ of their language), the degree to which this poetic valorisation of music involved engagement with music itself is complex. Indeed, a distance between actual performed music and an imagined unheard music seems fundamental to much European poetry of the period. This sense of distance from performed music in English Victorian poets who were invested in the figurative sisterhood of poetry and music, and whose work is replete with ‘musical’ qualities, is examined by Francis O’Gorman in his essay on ‘Music in Romantic and Victorian Poetry’ below. References to music in these poets alert us to expressive qualities in poetry that cannot readily be linked to meaning and which have the effect of encouraging readers to listen to the musical qualities of verse. O’Gorman also points out that appeals to imagined, ongoing music can figure a continuous poetic afterlife, a ‘condition of music’ that calls specifically on its associations with the infinite and ideal. Thus music is powerfully recruited to the ends of poetry. A more concrete engagement with music is involved in the investigation that follows, by Ewan Jones and Phyllis Weliver, of how the specifics of musical performance may have influenced the formation of Tennyson’s published text of The Princess. Their essay ‘The Princess and the Tennysons’ Performance of Childhood’ is a study of how the making of music and poetry worked together in the creative lives of the Tennyson family. It charts the evidence for the impact of domestic performances of Emily Tennyson’s musical settings on the formal qualities of Tennyson’s poetry. Jones and Weliver explore how the Tennysons shared a ‘fundamental and dynamic’ relationship between poetry and music in performance. They also refer us to a related on-line resource that makes the musical manuscripts of settings and recorded performances of them available to listeners today, a resource that aims to contribute to new understandings of Tennyson’s compositional processes. This listening experience was, of course, not available to Tennyson’s nineteenth-century readers, for these were invited, at the time of the publication of The Princess, to encounter the music of language rather than of song. Interestingly, O’Gorman, in his essay on poetry, selects examples of poems from The Princess to demonstrate that, in the poems as encountered by Tennyson’s readers, images of inaudible music direct them to hear his ‘poetry as poetry’ and to appreciate that its music is chiefly to be heard in the sonic qualities of his words. While music in literature pervasively works in this powerfully self-referential way, as writing about the music of writing, the interactions of music and poetry in the Tennyson household nevertheless give us an intriguing glimpse of productive connections between literature and music within the fabric of Victorian life. It can also remind us that, while readers may not have had access to the specific music of Emily Tennyson’s settings, music may often have had a more than metaphorical significance for how Victorian writers envisaged connecting with the musical experiences of their audiences; their readers’ experience of the musical qualities of words may, of course, have been strongly connected with their contemporary experience of musical performance. Notwithstanding the way in which the music of poetry becomes carefully distinguished from actual music, it can enhance readers’ sense of connections between the affective powers of both arts. Certain poets, notably Robert Browning, do seem, exceptionally, to engage more directly and specifically with music in their writing. Browning had some of the same

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connections with international musicians as George Eliot, whose allusions to European composers underpin the cosmopolitan values of her final novel, as discussed in my own essay below. Browning’s engagement with near-contemporary music is apparent in his extended evocation of Schumann’s Carnaval in Fifine at the Fair (1872); also with music of the past, as in ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ (1855), which O’Gorman discusses in his essay. Here, however, O’Gorman finds Browning highlighting a separation between music and words by challenging just what verbal interpretations of music can actually convey. This is a challenge that I would be tempted to see as according with a sense of ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ as deeply ironic, a reading much encouraged by the way the poem’s jaunty trochaic metre suggests the repetitive, perhaps tedious, rhythms of eighteenth-century keyboard music. Arguably what this poetry shares with music is performative rather than analytical. In Fifine at the Fair, Browning’s extended response to Schumann certainly seems chiefly to be a matter of imaginative play and creative practice, rather than semantic description, an engagement that brings non-semantic and somatic aspects of both arts to the fore. O’Gorman’s essay indicates some of the advantages to poetry of music as an ‘absent sublime’, and this idea is central to the work of Peter Dayan, as he explains at the outset of the essay on Wagner and French poetry that concludes this nineteenthcentury part of our volume. Both Dayan and O’Gorman discuss Wagner as a composer exerting an important influence on poets who, nevertheless, carefully avoided attempting to convey the musical details of the composer’s work. Dayan would argue that poetic detachment from actual music is crucial, that the poetic inheres not in music as heard but in the idea (or ideal) of an essential or imagined Music. Indeed this idea of music, so fruitful for literature, loses its potency when attempts are made to associate it with the specifics of musical performance. These are theories that Dayan developed extensively in his 2006 book Music Writing Literature, where he concludes that literature aspires not to music as heard, but to the condition of an essential Music, becoming most musical and most literary at the point where it fails to realise that condition, and the particularity of each art becomes clear.19 For his essay here, this finding is exemplified in a case study that shows how Wagner influenced the idea of music in French poetry, independently of whether the poets concerned had ever heard his operas or, more precisely, because they had not. Hence the power of ‘opera unheard’ in the work of the French Symbolists, who spearheaded the more overt emphasis on relations between poetry and music by poets of the last part of the century and powerfully influenced the international development of modernism thereafter. While the idea of music and formal relations with music might be expected to be particularly evident in nineteenth-century poetic genres, allusions to music – and aspirations after musicality – are also pervasive in fiction and non-fictional narrative prose of the period. Nineteenth-century novels are replete with accounts of musical experience and musical allusions. Novelists drew on the potential of references to music to dramatise the internal lives of characters and emotional encounters between them. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), to take an example from a still much-read work, Jane herself is no great musical performer; but her response to hearing Rochester sing with her rival communicates her own growing passion and encourages the reader to identify sympathetically with her:

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Mrs Fairfax had said Mr Rochester possessed a fine voice: he did – a mellow, powerful bass, into which he threw his own feeling, his own force; finding a way through the ear to the heart, and there waking sensation strangely. I waited till the last deep and full vibration had expired.20 At such moments, writers of prose were, like poets, recruiting music’s acknowledged affective power to enhance the impact of their prose and to draw readers’ attention to it, signalling their aspirations to a writing ‘voice’ of similar expressive power. Musician characters, realist accounts of social music-making and references either to unspecified music or to particular works that might awaken readers’ musical memories all contribute to this expressive use of musical allusion. Novels might also develop affinities with particular genres of music. Allusions to specific repertoire that suggests connections with the opera are frequent, and extensive parallels with the operatic genre are sometimes developed. A striking example of this is George Eliot’s extended analogy with grand opera to portray upper-class society in her 1876 novel Daniel Deronda.21 Thus while opera was finding many of its subjects in fiction, novels in their turn drew upon opera. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship substantiates Peter Conrad’s claims, mentioned above, for the depth of affinity between opera and the novel.22 This affinity extends throughout the nineteenth century and into the next as represented here in the essay by Michael Halliwell already mentioned. The buzz of meaning that clusters round literary references to opera in fiction from the 1830s and 1880s is analysed by Gillen D’Arcy Wood writing on Stendhal and Cormac Newark on literary and filmic readings of a story by the Italian writer Boito. These opera-related essays, authored by a combination of literary critics and musicologists, exemplify the cross-disciplinary exchange that is achieved in this field. Wood discusses the formative influence of Stendhal’s experience of the opera on his novels in relation to the widening access to opera in Europe following the Napoleonic wars and the rise of a new class of metropolitan opera fans whose personal emotional responses to music were integrally connected with liberal politics and the nurturing of individual subjectivity. He traces the impact of Stendhal’s familiarity with the operas of Rossini on the multi-voiced writing and ‘resistless prose tempo’ that creates ‘the intensity of a Rossini-like musical present’ in his late fiction, The Charterhouse of Parma, and also underpins formal patterns of repetition and chance. Newark highlights the significance of opera to Italian politics and nationalism over a timespan of considerably more than a century. His essay combines analysis of a fictional allusion to opera by Boito with an account of opera’s presence within a film adaptation of Boito’s text, and certain reverberations in more recent political events. A passing reference to Meyerbeer in Boito’s tale carries complex layers of meaning in relation to its 1860s setting in a northern border region under Austrian occupation. Couched within a work that shares many narrative features with opera, it is an allusion so freighted with significance that it can only be translated into a cinematic adaptation by the introduction, within the film’s action, of a full-scale opera production: a telling example of the potency of even small-scale literary references to opera. As Newark comments, ‘the soundtracks (as it were) of fiction never fade into the background as they can do in film, but rather attract attention, intertextual and contextual, to themselves’. This is a statement that can be applied to references to music in a great

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deal of nineteenth-century fiction, and it highlights the rich rewards to be gained by attending to music within critical readings of these texts. These essays outline some of the many ways in which fiction was musicalised during the period when the novel overtook poetry as the predominant literary form. The realist novel that came to dominate the genre during the century may not immediately suggest the same formal analogies with music evident in poetry of the period, or as were later to feature in modernist prose. However, as the scholar of German literature Hugh Ridley suggests, we need not take too narrow a view about what constitutes musical prose.23 Ridley points out, for instance, that the literary prose of realist fiction is frequently at odds with the subject-matter it describes. A well-known novel that comes to mind as an example here is Hard Times (1854), a ‘Condition of England’ tale in which the artistry of Dickens’ language is at virtuosic odds with the world of ‘hard fact’ that it describes. Dickens himself makes repeated use of musical metaphor in this novel to describe this artistry in terms of ‘key-notes’ and ‘tunes’; one of countless instances in nineteenth-century fiction where music is of evident importance to the poetics of the novel.24 Indeed, the points at which writers resort to musical metaphor often mark moments when their prose becomes especially interesting. Within novels, musical metaphors and accounts of responses to music may embody the fulfilment of desires that cannot be realised within realist plot, often with tragic effect. This is the case for Maggie Tulliver’s longing for ‘more instruments playing together’ in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and music features comparably in numerous novels by Thomas Hardy.25 In his essay below, John Hughes demonstrates that allusions to music in Hardy’s novels are always connected with his characters’ desire for individual expression, and explores how they variously also illuminate the constraints of their social situations and gender, so charting the progress of Hardy’s increasingly tragic vision. Hughes quotes a passage in Tess of the d’Urbervilles where the world is transfigured as Tess listens to music. Her apprehension of the garden in which she sits suspends consciousness of the usual limits of time and space and briefly suggests a synaesthetic and emotionally-expressive unity with the external world. Creating an intense evocation of a present moment, music can also inspire or emblematise powerful, almost telepathic, levels of communication between characters and between characters and their surroundings. These expand the usual borders of individual subjectivity, as here, or at a number of musically-clairvoyant moments in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.26 In his essay on Stendhal below, Wood comments that the formal response to opera in The Charterhouse of Parma ‘opens the horizon of our own autonomy’. Musical allusion in writers like Stendhal, Eliot and Hardy fosters experimental prose that extends and challenges the limits of literary realism and of its reading subjects. When we pause to consider allusions to music in nineteenth-century literature, their multi-dimensionality is frequently striking: often a single allusion to music operates at composite levels. The essays below discuss references to music as compelling attention both to literary qualities of language and to a host of related contexts for that language. Many wider contexts for the nineteenth-century culture within which music played so important a role palpably inform allusions to music in every literary genre. Contemporary scientific debates over music’s origins and purpose, discussions of its role in the lives and education of women, the nature of its emotive power, and its

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contributions to social progress (the impetus for the century’s socially-reforming sightsinging movement) took place within books and periodicals that were consumed by a wide general readership, with the specialist scientific press of today just beginning to be developed. Thus relations between literature and music feature in the powerful nineteenth-century master narratives highlighted by Kramer. When identifying the prevalent narratives significant for our understanding of relations between literature and music, we could name among them the manifold contemporary discourses of evolutionary biology, physics, psychology, philosophy, history, sociology, aesthetics, criticism, education and gender. Such narratives, all subject to varying degrees of contention at the time, obviously shaped the contexts in which literary texts were read and music heard, impinging on the formal and aesthetic relationships between literature and music and their possible meanings. Engagement with these discourses is manifest in a huge variety of fiction, poetry and prose – not least in the tragic plots of Thomas Hardy’s fiction, which convey his deep and troubled engagement with the principles of determinist science. The eighteenth century had seen music and its relationship to language intensively discussed within wider philosophical enquiry. In the nineteenth century, this pattern continued within the work of evolutionary scientists such as Herbert Spencer or Charles Darwin; music was a rich source of metaphor for writers on scientific topics and in itself offered a significant puzzle for theories of inheritance. Music was also an important topic of investigation for physiologists, psychologists and for pioneers of physics such as Ludwig von Helmholtz and his British student John Tyndall. For those such as Spencer concerned with social evolution, music had a role in the future of language and of human development. The psychiatrist James Sully, an influence on Freud, referred to musical experience and employed musical metaphors to explore ideas of identity and the working of memory. Representations of music in nineteenth-century novels inevitably engage in close dialogue with these other prose forms. Widely investigated by literary critics as contexts and inter-texts for nineteenth-century fiction in the past few decades, the narratives of science are also frequently of importance for illuminating music’s multiple roles in fiction. In Daniel Deronda, a reference to a musical instrument is used as an image of latent inheritance within an individual which, unused: would lie within them as a dim longing for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their inherited frames would be like a cunningly-wrought musical instrument, never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy mysterious moanings of its intricate structure that, under the right touch, gives music.27 Here Eliot has updated an allusion in Shakespeare’s Richard II, where a viol or harp ‘unstringed’ or a ‘cunning instrument’ shut away or unfamiliar to the touch are all listed to figure a lost capacity for utterance.28 A single musical reference jointly embodies Eliot’s interest in contemporary theories of musical response and biological inheritance, couched with reference to her important, and constantly-evoked literary inheritance from early modern drama; this forms just one, if telling, example of how a relationship with music was deeply enmeshed with writers’ literary and cultural concerns.29 With regard to gender, a pervasive area of contention throughout the century, there was much equivocality in relation to music within literature. This was intensified by the jointly ambiguous status of music as the most spiritual but most sensual of arts, and of

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women as the sympathetic agents of domestic harmony who were at the same time prey to the involuntary emotional effects of their reproductive biology. Madame Bovary’s seduction at the opera in Flaubert’s novel provides a musically-fuelled example of this. While writers might be highly lauded for the ‘musicality’ of their language, praise for such qualities could be complicated by its entanglement with gendered views of music. A feminised view of music was intertwined in attitudes towards the ‘musical’ gifts of both male and female poets. On the one hand, there were intimations that the celebrated musicality of a male poet such as Tennyson might be in danger of making him regarded as too feminine for a public poet.30 On the other hand, women poets were at risk of being cast, or casting themselves, as mere spontaneous songbirds, writers in the lyric mode whose work lacked the intellectual force and hard-won artistry of their male peers, a status resisted by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti among others.31 Portrayals of women’s music-making in nineteenth-century realist novels very palpably reflect the conflicted gender ideology of the time. Often they also highlight analogous anxieties and vulnerabilities that challenged published women writers. The extent to which portrayals of women musicians and theatrical performers in nineteenth-century literature convey women’s fraught claims for artistic fulfilment has been noted by scholars of the period.32 Women musicians who moved beyond the bounds of domestic society, from Germaine de Staël’s Corinne (1807) onwards, could become the focus of particular unease, both as potentially dangerous siren figures and because their exposure made them vulnerable. Fictional prima donnas, such as George Eliot’s Alcharisi in Daniel Deronda, challenge, yet also mirror, prevailing attitudes towards female professionalism. The subtle radicalism that could be conveyed in portrayals of women musicians forms part of the discussion of Eliot’s portrayal of the Jewish singer Mirah in my own essay below. Allusions to music in nineteenth-century literature are as various as are the relations between literature and music within nineteenth-century culture. The rich connections between literary and musical culture have enabled literary scholars to illuminate relationships between music and nineteenth-century science, music and ‘the woman question’, and music and social reform. At the same time, Romantic idealisations of music were fundamental to how writers employed musical tropes and readers interpreted them. Musical metaphor conveys the affective power of literature and the ideals and aspirations of writers, even as music in nineteenth-century literature frequently maintains an insistent non-metaphorical connection with listening experience. Despite the historical differences in listening then and now, musical allusion remains important to the continuing affective power of nineteenth-century texts, and the interdisciplinary study of music and literature enriches understanding of nineteenth-century culture.33 Above all, these relations between literature and music convey the depth of contemporary investment in the experiences of the two arts during the nineteenth century and how they mattered to their creators and audiences. The essays that follow chart some of the plethora of connections between literature and music during the century, and provide examples of different critical approaches to these. As we learn more about the webs of connection linking literature and music at this time, we can enjoy an expanding recognition of how these relationships enhance our reading, listening and interpretation of the copious nineteenth-century voices still available to us. For this century, while no longer the last before our own, is in many ways not so very distant from us.

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Notes 1. Scott Burnham, ‘How Music Matters: Poetic Content Revisited’, in Rethinking Music, ed. Mark Everist and Nicholas Cook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 193–216 (p. 193). 2. The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1914), p. 596. 3. Vernon Lee [Violet Paget], ‘Hoffmann’s Kreisler: The First of Musical Romanticists’, Fraser’s Magazine (1878), 842–80; reprinted as ‘Chapelmeister Kreisler: A Study of Musical Romanticists’, in Belcarro (London: W. Satchell, 1881), pp. 106–28 (pp. 106–9, 127–8). 4. Peter Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 1. 5. Lawrence Kramer, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical Criticism’, 1989; reprinted in Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 35–43 (p. 41). 6. For a useful discussion of musical semiotics see Kofi Agawu, ‘The Challenge of Semiotics’, in Rethinking Music, ed. Mark Everist and Nicholas Cook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 138–60. See also Agawu’s Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); for semiotic interpretations of Beethoven in this work see pp. 110–26, and of Romantic music pp. 135–43. 7. See Clive McClelland, ‘Ombra and Tempesta’, in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 279–90 (pp. 295, 296). 8. Agawu, Playing with Signs, p. 136. 9. Agawu, ‘Topics and Form in Mozart’s String Quintet in E Flat Major, K. 614/i’, in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, pp. 474–92 (pp. 474, 475). See also Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 10. See Lawrence Kramer, ‘Music and the Rise of Narrative’ in this volume. 11. Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1, 10. 12. Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 106–10; Lawrence Kramer, ‘Saving the Ordinary: Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio and the Wheel of History’, in Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa (London: Legenda/Maney, 2006), pp. 73–84. 13. Burnham, p. 200. 14. Ibid., p. 204. 15. Ibid., p. 206. 16. Ibid., p. 207. 17. Ibid., pp. 212, 207. 18. Ibid., p. 212. 19. See Peter Dayan, Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 20. Jane Eyre, ed. Margaret Smith, introduction and notes by Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 180. 21. For more detail on George Eliot and opera, see my ‘George Eliot and the “Expressiveness of Opera”’, in Opera and the Novel, ed. Emma Sutton, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 48 (2) (April 2012), 164–77. 22. For recent explorations of this connection, see further essays in Opera and the Novel, ed. Emma Sutton as cited above. 23. Hugh Ridley, Wagner and the Novel: Wagner’s Operas and the European Realist Novel: An Exploration of Genre (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), p. 96.

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24. See the openings of chapters 5 and 8 in Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 27, 52. 25. The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 288. 26. For an account of this aspect of Daniel Deronda, see Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), especially chapter 4. 27. Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 697–8. 28. Richard II, I. 3. 154–9. 29. For further discussion of connections between music and science in nineteenth-century literature, see Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 30. See John Hughes, ‘“The Exile’s Harp”: Tennyson’s Lost World of Music’, NineteenthCentury Music Review, 3 (2006), 113–35. 31. See Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (London: Harvester, 1992). 32. See, for example, Rosemary Bodenheimer, ‘Ambition and its Audiences: George Eliot’s Performing Figures’, Victorian Studies, 34 (1990), 7–34; Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); also works by Weliver and da Sousa Correa cited above. 33. For a more extensive account of music and nineteenth-century English literature than can be provided here see da Sousa Correa, ‘Music’, in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert and Linda K. Hughes (Chichester: Wiley, 2015), pp. 1092–1101. For a survey of interdisciplinary scholarship in the period, see Phyllis Weliver, ‘A Score of Change: Twenty Years of Critical Musicology and Victorian Literature’, Literature Compass, 8 (10) (2011), 776–94.

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34 Music and the Rise of Narrative Lawrence Kramer

T

his will not be a narrative. Narrative rose to pre-eminence during the nineteenth century and brought music along with it. But history is not a narrative – it is just told that way – and of the three classic anchoring points attributed to narrative by Aristotle (and more imperiously by a certain Red King) the process described in these pages has only one. Lewis Carroll’s King of Hearts tells the White Rabbit how to read a verse narrative, dealing, among other things, with secrets and obstacles, both topics we will shortly encounter, ‘Begin at the beginning [. . .] and go through to the end: then stop.’1 The rise of narrative has a middle to go through, but no beginning to start from and no place to stop. So this will not be a narrative, though there are narratives in it. It will be a collage, or, if that is too old-fashioned, a hypertext waiting to be coded. Although narrativity in non-vocal music can be traced back as far as one wants to go, and certain instrumental genres such as battle pieces, depictions of the Passion, and so on, similarly have a long history, musical narrativity assumes a novel position of centrality and even dominance around that all-purpose but reliable moment, the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is not a development internal to music, but part of a broad and consequential cultural process, part of a shift to what in Michel Foucault’s terms would be the modern episteme, or something like it. The advance of musical narrativity coincides with the rise of narrative as a form of cognition and prototype of explanation, or, more particularly, of non-mythic, non-scriptural narrative in that role – in positive terms, the rise of contingent, empirical narrative with the potential to be raised further into a general temporal law. In literature this trend corresponds to the rapid rise of the novel in status and value, so that by the end of the century the novel had replaced poetry as the normative literary form. In other areas of discourse the same trend produced the master narratives of Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. One way to take the measure of this change is to compare expressively similar compositions divided by the century. The slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F major, Op. 18, no. 1, composed around 1799, was said by the composer to be inspired by the tomb scene of Romeo and Juliet. It is quite easy to give a narrative account of the music with that in mind, and even if one doesn’t know the connection a description based on some tragic narrative or narrative prototype is easy to formulate. But it is not necessary. It is perfectly possible, if not desirable, to give an account of the movement purely in terms of ‘sonata form’. Most accounts, unfortunately, do exactly that. But the possibility remains. Not so in 1888, in the unexpectedly tragic slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. (Not to mention his Fantasy-Overture: Romeo and Juliet; but ‘programme

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music’, so called, confuses the issue by apparently exempting itself from a non-narrative norm, or presumed norm. We need something that nominally observes the norm.) It is impossible to give a satisfactory account of the Fifth Symphony’s slow movement in purely formal terms. This is especially true as the movement approaches its end. It has been working steadily toward a grand climax on its ardent second theme, but no sooner has the climax arrived than it begins to break down – until it is hammered down by a brutal outbreak of military-style brass. A portion of the theme then returns in ever-weakening form, finally dying away as a solo clarinet ushers in a fadeout over murmuring strings. There are any number of ways to tell the story of these events, but the exact content is less important than the fact – and it is a fact – that the music asks us to tell its story. It asks, at the very least – demands, really – to be heard as story-like, even if we choose to leave things at that, either because that seems enough for the moment or because we are intimidated by claims that any such story-telling is a fabrication that misses the music itself.

Migrations This does not mean that music learned to tell stories in the nineteenth century, although storytelling remains a useful metaphor for what it did learn to do. Contrary to certain persistent commonplaces about music (here meaning music apart from words, whether it sets words or not), music is perfectly capable of making limited use of certain conventional signs to make reference to events. But that is not where its primary narrative force resides. Galloping horses and rippling streams are more matters of atmosphere than of action. Richard Strauss’s Don Juan obviously dies at the end of the tone poem named for him, but what he does before that is not so clear. (Death, which according to Walter Benjamin is the ultimate source of narrative meaning, is in that respect cheated.)2 Music’s narrated content, any content contingent on particular references, is limited; unlike literature, drama and cinema, music cannot be narratively full. Its narrative force, whether or not it has explicit narrative content, depends on its independent deployment of features typical of narratives that tell or show stories. As I have put it elsewhere, ‘the strategies and rituals [of narrative] are migratory, easily displaced from the venues of storytelling’.3 In other words the primary dimension of narrative in music is narrativity as such. At various points in the history of Western art music, narrativity rose and fell in importance, but it was at every point an inherent possibility. In accounting for both its glory days in the nineteenth century and its complex afterlife since, an inevitable oscillation will arise between historical particularity and theoretical generality, sometimes to the point of blurring one into the other. This is not a problem to be resolved but a condition to be explored. Narrativity cannot be defined; the exceptions immediately outweigh any rule that can be proposed. Nor is narrativity a property of narratives or of a category termed ‘narrative’. Instead, narrativity is the impetus to pursue a given end by narrative means; it is a dynamic principle, a determined impulse, a drive to tell. The means are extrapolated from previous usages; the ends are symbolic and culturally saturated, and are therefore open to incessant interpretation and paraphrase. Narrativity is the purposive

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energy that makes a narrative possible, or, better, it is the general purposive energy that makes a narrative possible in its particulars. Like desire, narrativity is migratory at the core; it can go almost anywhere. In the absence of a verbal or pictorial narrative, the sense of narrativity arises in the space between impulse and articulation. Any and all features of narrative can move through that space independent both of each other and of a fully specified, explicit story, whether or not such a story is told or can be told. It is occasionally possible, however, to perceive narrativity in its own right, in its primordial condition or something close to it. This possibility arises in very short works, in any medium, which strip narrative content down to a bare minimum. The drive to tell appears where telling fails; in the particulars of that failure the drive finds a passing concreteness. Samuel Beckett’s Breath goes about as far in this direction as anything can. This play, so-called with poker-faced irony, consists entirely of faint light growing and dimming on a bare stage (littered with ‘miscellaneous rubbish’) in tandem with a faint cry, an inhalation, an exhalation and another cry. The whole thing is supposed to last thirty-five seconds. Breath is the origin of narrative as well as of life and its dramas, but Breath seems to imply that there is no story but the one it incorporates, which is no story at all despite being every story. This fraction of a minute is anything but meaningless, perhaps even overladen with meanings, but it tells us precisely – precisely – nothing. Beckett’s modernist reduction has twentieth-century parallels in music by Webern and Kurtag, among others (Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments for voice and violin contain quite a few), but it also has nineteenth-century precedents. The third movement of Beethoven’s C sharp minor Quartet, Op. 131, is a chain of fragments only eleven measures long; it moves from a spare to a full texture in association with changes in tempo. Among Chopin’s Preludes, which contain several instances, the most extreme is probably the Prelude in E flat minor (no. 14), which consists of about thirty seconds of angular octave triplets in shifting dynamics. This piece – and never was the term more appropriate: this sliver or chunk of music – anticipates Breath to a remarkable degree though it is less symmetrical (its métier is more chaos than doom). The heavy (pesante) articulation never changes; the harmony goes by in a blur; melody is marginal. What changes significantly is the dynamics, the fluctuations of which rise to a fortissimo climax at just past the midpoint; in rapid succession the climax takes hold, intensifies and dwindles away. The exact effect is strongly dependent on performance, but the disclosure of raw narrativity remains much the same as it is in the Beckett: impulse, painful in both cases, expends itself quickly in a rise and a fall. Narrativity appears, and more to the point here, sounds, as the elemental force separating us from mere entropy, a Lucretian swerve against the movement of atoms in a void.4

Suasions One key function of narrative is what the literary critic J. Hillis Miller calls the ‘ordering and confirming’ of cultural roles and protocols.5 To which one must add that this process is no less significant when it fails than when it succeeds. Perhaps even more so: for narrative as such tends to subsume critique under confirmation. Whatever story one tells, or prevents, or disrupts, the narrative format itself, the sheer fact of storytelling affirms an underlying order in which the subject and its culture have their place.

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The narrative import of nineteenth-century music rests on that order independent of the narratives that the music invites or eludes. Twentieth-century art music often seeks to disrupt that order on behalf of a wider modern scepticism, though its efforts are no more uniformly successful than those they seek to replace. It has to be said emphatically that this tendency has little or nothing to do with changing attitudes toward form or tonality. Tonality per se has nothing to do with narrative except in the crude sense of normative departure and return, a pattern that in any case can easily be realised by other means. As Michael Klein has suggested, ‘tonality is less like the analog of narrative and more like the reigning ideology of music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’.6 If we listen to this music while keeping its ideology at a distance, which is nearly always a good idea, the music is likely to sound very different from the stories usually told about it. That will certainly be the case with my comments on a Brahms symphony later on. Besides, legend notwithstanding, most twentieth-century music was tonal in some intelligible sense. This music, or a good part of it, is non-narrative only in that it refuses to repeat, in a mechanical sense of the term, the specific stories of former times, especially those of that infamous nineteenth century and its burdensome mixture of imposing greatness and vexing grandiosity. This refusal is not the same as a refusal of narrativity as such, which, as already noted, can and does thrive, perhaps thrives essentially, in the absence of any particular story. Confusion on this point has bedevilled accounts of musical narrative, especially those that seek to ignore the literary provenance of narrative – the spoken or written stories that supply narrative in general with its models and prototypes – in favour of identifying narrative with quasi-Aristotelian ordered sequences. Narrative is not a structure or a logic; it is a field of activity subject to any number of vicissitudes from wholly absorbed participation to wholly detached observation, from inclusion or incorporation in other activities to expulsion from them. Its only irrevocable feature is the primordially verbal imperative to tell. Every effort to do so inevitably bears the traces of many others. Most often the modern refusal of story is an act of objectification, distancing or incorporation rather than a simple exclusion. Twentieth-century music addresses narrative by incorporating rather than by exemplifying it. And that means that narrativity, however compromised it may be, remains the modern or modernist medium for an otherwise elusive or forbidden affirmation.

Four Theses on Narrative (in any order) What follows next is a series of negations that, in good Hegelian fashion, seek to turn themselves around into acts of positive understanding. The negative form is made necessary by the impossibility of ascribing any positive identity to the apparent object of understanding, namely narrative. For although there are – obviously – narratives, there is no such thing as narrative. Like ‘game’ in Wittgenstein’s famous analysis, the term refers to a series of fuzzy concepts linked loosely by a network of family resemblances. There is, so to speak, a place of narrative, but there is no narrative as such, no narrative itself. Another way to put this is to say that it is impossible to specify a condition for narrative that is both necessary and sufficient; you can have one or the other but not both. Thus, for example, temporality is a necessary condition for narrative but it is not sufficient, and a narrator is sufficient but not (however customary) necessary. Although

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we have no reason not to speak loosely about narrative in ordinary language (following Wittgenstein’s principle that ordinary language is ‘all right’, despite the mischief the statement provoked in its day), any disciplinary account of narrative has to be more rigorous, and that rigour leads to the negative passage to be followed here. Although we cannot say directly what narrative is, we can engage with it productively by first saying what it is not. (As I’ve shown elsewhere, the same is true of the equally vexed concept of interpretation.)7 Hence the four theses: 1. Narrative is not a form. It is more like a value, a preference for certain kinds of meaning and ways of making meaning. 2. Narrative is meaningless apart from its historical location and the specific textual and cultural practices in which it participates. Narrative as metaphor is narrative as mystification; narrative, whatever it ‘is’, is irreducibly historical. This principle applies not only to stories but also to the ways in which stories are told and retold: history lays claim to narrative, not just to narratives. The invention of cinema, for example – but this is not just any example – fundamentally changed the nature of narrative. So, to a lesser degree, did the possibility of composing music saturated with narrativity. So, of course, has the internet. 3. Narrative does not exist outside language. It comes about as a response to the demand to tell something. The demand may come from without as a call or request, a question or an accusation, or it may come from within as desire or compulsion, as an internal or internalised demand. From Homer’s Odysseus on down, characters as well as narrators have embodied the origin of story in such a demand. The demand can be answered by other means than telling but it cannot be answered fully where speech is withheld. The history of visual narrative makes that clear enough: the mute projection of narrative ‘wants’ verbal supplements, as in captions for illustrations, speech bubbles for comics, ekphrasis for pictures, and titles and actual speech in cinema. The dumb show in Hamlet means little until it wrings speech from Hamlet and Claudius alike. Where the supplements are lacking, as in narrative ballet, the narrative recedes, at times to the point of becoming a pretext. In this there lies an object lesson for ‘musical narrative’ in contradistinction to musical narrativity. The question of music and narrative is a question of music and language. More exactly it is a question of music in the place of language, which music cannot occupy simply, but which it can and does occupy. 4. No narrative is entirely true. Narrative is vexed by truth; since its earliest inception in classical times, narrative presupposes the possibility of lying. As Frank Kermode once pointed out, all narrators are unreliable.8 We trust them as a matter of genre not to lie to us, though sometimes they do, but we cannot prevent them from lying to themselves. Music is not supposed to be able to lie. Our pleasure in it partly depends on this supposition. Even in opera, music is usually constrained to speak the truth even when, and especially when, the characters are lying. But if we want to think of music as having narrative potentials, then one of those potentials must be the ability to falsify, either because music can lie to itself and to us or because its falsifications may allow certain truths to appear. As narrative, music must be able to be unreliable.

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A brief example is hard to give, but consider the third movement of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. The movement begins like a scherzo, or as one, with an outburst of folksy good cheer replete with tingling triangle. But the music keeps changing its tune, veering this way and that and lurching into exaggerated moments of delicacy on one hand and self-assertion on the other. The good cheer is a false front; eventually the movement proves to be a mockery of sonata form – a case not of satire (satire? Brahms?), but of self-deception. The impression of an unreliable musical narrative peaks with the movement’s critical failure to recapitulate its ebullient beginning. The recapitulation begins in medias res (it brutally interrupts an episode of pastoral nostalgia that has strayed in from nowhere, led by the horns) and its truncation issues in an oversize, overemphatic coda. For me, at least, this movement is hard to listen to without asking, ‘What gives? What’s the story? What is this music hiding from itself?’ It is as if Brahms, aware of his reputation for nostalgic impotence, were trying and failing to write out a strong assertion of will – will to power, will to pleasure – and deliberately dramatising the failure, as if to show that the thing just couldn’t be done in the 1890s.9 He wants us to know that this kind of weakness takes strength.

Literariness The relationship between music and narrative depends on how loosely or strictly one uses the term ‘narrative’ (or ‘music’ for that matter, since the presence or absence of text setting makes a considerable difference; for present purposes, however, the concern is not with narratives set to music but to the place of narrativity in music). Speaking loosely, ‘narrative’ refers to any represented sequence of events that counts as a plot, that is, as an action with human agents (or analogues to them) with a beginning, middle and end. Narrative in this loose sense is equally at home in poetry, fiction, plays, movies and even paintings. The analogue clause puts it at home in music, too, at least in such music as avails itself of the opportunity. But thinking of musical narrative in these terms is limited by the general inability of music to make specific descriptions, so that the music in question ends up merely as an instance of a generic narrative form. Such music has ‘a’ story but no ‘the’ story; it illustrates but it does not tell; it is limited to a continuum of implicit commentary with full affirmation at one end and full irony at the other. Thinking of musical narrative in these terms is not useless, but it is meagre, and it tends strongly toward a focus on the narrative tradition rather than on the music that is, in this framework, only the tradition’s representative. Narrative in the strict sense is a plot recounted in words by a real or fictitious person; the narrative is contained within that person’s utterance. Some literary forms are compounded of such narratives, which may occur either in juxtaposition or in layers. With moving images, camerawork typically acts as a kind of surrogate narrator in combination with musical underscore and sometimes with voiceover or framing by onscreen narration. Such a definition of narrative excludes live drama while retaining the ancient distinction between showing and telling; drama can contain narratives but it is not a narrative itself; it is plotted action. Even with text setting, music cannot have or tell a narrative in the strict sense. Music cannot narrate. But this inability is not a disability; far from it. It is not a bar to understanding musical narrative but the means to it. It is not a reason to dismiss literariness as a criterion of narrativity in music. As already noted, and more than once, the elements of literary narrative do occur

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musically as migratory forms – including plot realisations or fragments of them – independent of the particular narratives that no music, on its own, can convey. These forms are historical, but their usage is as often anachronistic as it is timely. The nineteenth century in particular is full of forms saturated with a sense of the past, often a past more authentic or heroic or epic than the present, but this very saturation is at the same time the era’s favoured mark of its own modernity. Wagner’s Ring Cycle is perhaps the pre-eminent example. And once it begins to emerge, this play of ambivalence between anachronism and modernity (it cannot be reduced to a conflict or dialectic) becomes an accredited practice, like the intrusion of the leopards into the temple in Kafka’s short parable, which is, among other things, a parable about narrative: ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial vessels dry; this repeats itself again and again; eventually one can reckon on it in advance and it becomes a part of the ceremony.’10 When, during the nineteenth century, the migratory occurrence of narrative in music happens with increasing frequency and urgency, it sets up a legacy that the twentieth century, predictably, would both continue and resist. One reason why, intimated earlier, is that the foundational shift away from Enlightenment thinking, which was above all based on typologies and inventories, took the form of elevating narrative into a primary means of cognition and explanation. Another reason was the widely felt need to counter the levelling and alienating effects of modernity; to that end, the priority of the past over the present provided an opportunity as well as a dilemma. The past could not be recaptured, but its narrativity could. Extended, encyclopedic mythological or mythichistorical narratives in particular could become prestigious genres, with instances ranging from the already-cited Ring Cycle to the novels of Walter Scott and the operas based on them, to Meyerbeer’s Robert Le Diable and Les Huguenots, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Longfellow’s Evangeline, Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, H. Rider Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines, to books for children: Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, even Carroll’s Alice books. This mode of narrative provided the cure, such as it was, to modern malaise. The less well it worked, the more it was tried. Especially as music rose in the hierarchy of the arts and gained, for a time, quasitranscendental value, the turn to narrative as a point of reference, the adoption of migratory forms of narrative by music, was almost a foregone conclusion. Music distilled the lure of anachronistic narrativity to its essence, regardless of whether one was listening to evocations from Shakespeare or Dante or the Kalevala or the Faust legend, or to the implicit, unspoken cultural protocols of ordering and confirming. Of course this grand narrativising did not last as an aesthetic practice, though it did last as repertoire, and still does. But it never entirely disappeared as a practice, either; it might even be said to have a vigorous afterlife. More on that later. The occurrences of migratory narrative elements in music fall roughly into two types, which are not exclusive and which sometimes overlap. The first type is generic; it primarily encompasses symphonic overtures, tone poems, and Romantic character pieces for piano. Traditionally much of this music would have been described as ‘programmatic’ but the term has long since outlived its usefulness. Only in rare cases do compositions of this kind create a continuous correspondence between musical events and a narrative ‘programme’, that is, a text that forms part of

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the compositional apparatus, either adopted (Liszt’s Mazeppa, to a narrative poem by Hugo itself adapted from Byron) or invented (Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, by far the most famous – and most atypical – example). Even in those cases the narrative force of the music lies elsewhere. Music that represents narrative does so primarily by signifying a small group of elements belonging to the story involved and then interpreting this material by means of its musical treatment. The music does not ‘tell’ the story but tells the listener something about it, or rather invites the listener to imagine or paraphrase such a telling. Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, for example, takes just one element from the poem by Mallarmé from which it draws its ‘plot’, the faun’s piping on his reed flute. All the rest is musical refraction, very rich in meaning, but far from a reproduction of the faun’s actions, such as they are (the poem continually evades its own narrative; if Debussy had tried to mimic the poem’s story, he would have falsified it). The same considerations apply when music is taken to exemplify a narrative genre, archetype or typical plot.11 Associating the music with such a higher-order narrative tells us very little unless we go on to ask how the music redefines, transforms, mocks, exalts, extends, reinterprets, reduces, elaborates, reflects on, mystifies and/or clarifies the type it exemplifies. The list of possibilities in the preceding sentence is, of course, just a smattering. The second type of narrative migration is processual. Its primary venue is the span of multi-movement works that need not have any elements of narrative signification. The processual orientation appeals primarily to the novel, the conceptual format of which becomes increasingly important in the nineteenth century as the genre rises in popularity and prestige. Two features of the nineteenth-century novel stand out in particular: patterns of repetition that cross the boundaries of discrete units and the long-term binding together of multiple plots into a single coherent action. The emphasis on these processes reflects both the popularity of serial publication, which extended the span of narrative expectation across weeks and months, and the sheer length of many nineteenth-century novels, which served in part to create opportunities for extended absorption in an imaginary/imaginative world. Symphonies, quartets and other genres of composition that would once – to recall another outdated term – have been dubbed ‘absolute music’ made themselves available to listeners as coherent, intelligible forms in part by appropriating the model of novelistic integration and by finding a musical equivalent for the novel’s enhanced time-scale. Classic examples include symphonies such as Brahms’s Third and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, works that return in their finales to music introduced in their first movements in such a way that the symphonies conclude by an act of reinterpretation or transformation that is also an analogue to narrative closure.

Narrative Nostalgia The problem of narrative in twentieth-century music – or the problem with it – would seem to be both conceptual and historical. The original conceptual models for studying musical narrative were developed primarily with reference to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, and in particular with reference to formal procedures that, obviously, did not survive intact into the twentieth century. Neither, moreover, did the concept of narrative itself, which was famously one of the first victims of twentiethcentury modernity.

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This critical narrative, however, if not quite a fairy tale, is a fable in need of reinterpretation. The formal and tonal procedures of pre-twentieth-century music are not the foundations of musical narrative but merely one of its media; their attenuation or even outright disappearance does not in itself signal the decline of narrativity. And it did not take the twentieth century to render narrative as such problematic; one might even suggest that scepticism about narrative has long been part of its very definition. The key question about narrative in music (or for that matter in culture) since the twentieth century is not whether it has been subject to scepticism, mutation, or deconstruction, but what distinctive forms of these vicissitudes it has assumed, and why. Much twentieth-century music, apart from music composed to accompany film or narrative ballet, seems to puzzle over its own relationship to narrative models, as if the only way it could narrate would be to narrate with a bad conscience, or as an act of deliberate archaism, or both. When the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 15 begins – and continues – to quote Rossini’s William Tell Overture, it turns Rossini’s narrative clarity into an enigma because the quotation is so utterly lacking in context. More than that, the quotations question the very possibility of modern musical narrative by incorporating a work that is narrative to the core from which the core has been removed. The symphony is typical of its time in that it narrates only the inauthenticity of any possible narrative. Unless, that is, the object of its critique is not the narrative ideal represented by the Rossini but its own inability to meet the demands of that ideal, a failure intimated by another set of quotations in the final movement, this time from Die Walküre: Brünnhilde’s declaration to Siegmund that he is doomed to die – a story line that she tries, and fails, to alter.

Temporality Music becomes meaningful, becomes itself, by saturating the time of unfolding, socalled real time, though it is really fictitious, by the time of the event: that is, by saturating a stretch of the time we live through, but not in, by the time of, for, by, with and to – by one of the times, that is, in which we exert existential concern or care. This process not only forms the musical event but also models the larger activity by which music inhabits culture. Paul Ricoeur regards time-of (and so on; time-of for short) as the kernel of narrative time; narrative comes about when mere clock time is turned to the purposiveness borne by the prepositions of care.12 (My echo of Kant’s definition of beauty as ‘purposiveness without a purpose’ is deliberate, though it does not come from Ricoeur.)13 In language this process is largely imperceptible, perhaps because language is the primary medium of narrative. In music the process becomes audible. Music affords the opportunity to hear the becoming of narrative. That process of returning to the origin is obviously fictitious itself, but its import is less a matter of reviving the past than of inhabiting the present. The narrativity of music may emerge most strongly in the century of the novel, but its effect is less to mimic novelistic time and telling than it is to remedy the potential isolation that the novel intrudes on the scene of narrative. For Walter Benjamin (who admittedly ignored the nineteenth-century habit of reading novels aloud in the family circle), the confrontation between the silent reader and the page entailed a sacrifice of the immediacy of oral storytelling, a narrative mode that could not survive into the modern world.14

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Music regains that immediacy, especially when its performance is gripping. Musical narrativity extends the narrative effect of reading into a simulation of living narration. Music becomes the event of story. But it does so by indirection. It does not take the place of the storyteller but shares that place with the performer and the listener. Narrativity does not inhere in music but passes through it as from one storyteller to another in a charmed circle. Anyone can join.

Notes 1. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Macmillan, 1898), p. 182. 2. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 83–110 (p. 101). 3. Lawrence Kramer, ‘Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline’, in Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 98–121 (p. 111). 4. On the swerve, see Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011). 5. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Narrative’, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentriccia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 66–79 (pp. 71–2). 6. Michael Klein, ’Musical Story’, in Music and Narrative since 1900, ed. Michael Klein and Nicholas Reyland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 3–28 (p. 15). 7. Lawrence Kramer, Interpreting Music (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2010), p. 7 and throughout. 8. Frank Kermode, ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’, Critical Enquiry, 7 (1980), 83–102 (pp. 89–90). 9. At this point a familiar question is likely to arise: the story I have just told about this music is only one possible interpretation; what can we actually learn from it? The short answer is that one can learn how this possibility stands to others and thus how the network of interpretations surrounding this music may be shaped, reshaped, expanded or contracted. Variability of interpretation, whether of music, image, text, or event, is nothing new, and it is not expendable. It qualifies as a source of knowledge because it is not unlimited or unrestricted; the question in each case is what its limits are. For more on this subject, see my essay on methodology in this volume. 10. Leoparden brechen in den Tempel ein und saufen die Opferkrüge leer; das wiederholt sich immer wieder; schließlich kann man es vorausberechnen und es wird ein Teil der Ceremonie. German text from . My translation. 11. Important instances include, among many others: Anthony Newcomb, ‘Once More “between Absolute and Program Music”: Schumann’s Second Symphony’, 19th Century Music, 7 (1985), 233–50, and Byron Almén, A Theory of Musical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 12. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative Time’, Critical Enquiry, 7 (1980), 169–90. 13. ‘Explanation of the Beautiful Derived from this Third Moment’, in Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant, trans. J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 90. Accessed via [accessed 10 September 2019]. 14. Benjamin, pp. 83–8.

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OPERA

35 From English Literature to Italian Opera: A Tangled Web of Translation Denise P. Gallo

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rom opera’s genesis in the Renaissance, its plots and characters were drawn from literature. Works like Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando furioso (1516, rev. 1521 and 1532) and pastoral plays like Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (1581) or Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido (1585) became standards that inspired composers for the next two centuries.1 The classical style in turn inspired dramatic poets like Pietro Metastasio, whose libretti were so revered that they became literary masterpieces in their own right; his dramas, set myriad times from the 1720s to the 1830s, provided an exemplar of the didactic literature which bolstered the aristocracy until the onset of the age of revolution. By the late eighteenth century, however, these literary borrowings became hackneyed, many serving as fodder for satires, their characters shadows of the nobles they formerly had represented.2 As interest in these classics waned, a new source for operatic subjects emerged: English literature. Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) inspired one of the earliest examples, the libretto crafted by master playwright Carlo Goldoni for Niccolò Piccinni’s La buona figliuola (1760). By the early nineteenth century, librettists on the Continent routinely turned to English novels and short stories, narrative poems and plays that supplied striking romantic histories, intriguing characters and ‘exotic’ settings. One might attribute this craving for fashionable literature to increasingly literate middle-class opera-goers.3 In reality, though, librettists or composers most often championed the new texts. While their enthusiasm may have come from reading a work – generally in French or German translation – it was more often inspired by knowledge of adaptations for the foreign stage. Librettist Felice Romani, for instance, was introduced to the subject of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Il pirata (1827) via Bertram, ou Le pirate, the 1821 French stage adaptation of Irish playwright Charles Robert Maturin’s Bertram; or The Castle of St Aldobrand (1816). Composer Heinrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr was based on the play Der Vampir oder die Totenbraut (1821) by Heinrich Ludwig Ritter, taken in turn from John Polidori’s short story The Vampyre (1819). Researching the often intricate lineages of libretti translated from English literature is critical since, as will be demonstrated, libretti have been harshly criticised for distorting their sources and entire operatic treatments condemned on this account, when in fact they were based on secondary and tertiary renderings, offspring of a complex intertextual genealogy.

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Opera’s creators and audiences could acquaint themselves with English literary models through a variety of sources. An emerging international musical press offered reviews and synopses of novels, plays and adaptations in newspapers like La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, La Gazzetta musicale di Milano, and the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. The increased importance of libretti as collectable literature, available for purchase at music shops in advance of performances, helped to disseminate the titles of the works from which operas were drawn. Furthermore, the inclusion of didactic essays in collected editions of literary works published in translation offered plot summaries and commentaries on the originals focused through the lens of a different time and culture; in fact, in some cases, these commentaries proved to have more significant influence on operatic adaptations than the works themselves. Moreover, though an opera might bear its source’s title, each translation took it another step away from its ancestry. While the process of translating may appear as simple as replacing words from one language with those of another, original meanings are rarely retained since multiple cultural layers are inherent in the exchange. As Susan Bassnett has noted, translation makes comprehensible to a new set of readers an original text produced for people who almost certainly had different views and experiences.4 Since such didactic essays might reflect modified interpretations of themes and characters, even the most respectful translators and librettists deviated from the English sources in terms of literal accuracy. Hence, reviews often unduly criticised praiseworthy stylistic treatments. Like playwrights, librettists needed to trim characters and subplots from novels and narrative poems to accommodate the time allotted a theatrical performance. Because operas were driven by music, there were additional challenges. Throughout the early nineteenth century, operas featured ‘sung speech’ or recitative, alternating with arias and ensembles. Since it mimicked dialogue, the first advanced the plot. The latter two, however, stopped the action, giving characters time for reflection, and since this was the age of the primo uomo/prima donna, such expressions were as much elaborate vocal exhibitions as dramatic vehicles.5 No matter the language, though, an aria’s text needed to follow specific poetic rhythms dictated by contemporary musical conventions.6 The following discussion, centring on examples from the Italian repertoire, demonstrates how these issues affected the translation from page to stage in operas based on two of England’s most popular literary sources: Walter Scott and William Shakespeare.

Walter Scott Along with Dante and Shakespeare, Walter Scott is considered one of the few authors to have shaped the European mind, reaching a ‘pan-European audience’.7 Although myriad operas were based on Scott’s works, only two remain staples in today’s repertoire – Gioachino Rossini’s La donna del lago (1819), drawn from the 1810 poem ‘The Lady of the Lake’ and Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), based on the 1819 novel The Bride of Lammermoor.8 Donizetti also relied on Scott for Il castello di Kenilworth (originally Elisabetta al castello di Kenilworth, 1829) from the 1820 novel Kenilworth, but via stage adaptations by Victor Hugo and Eugene Scribe. Other Scott-inspired operas included Michele Carafa’s Le nozze di Lammermoor (1829), Georges Bizet’s La jolie fille de Perth (1867) from the 1828 novel The Fair Maid of Perth, and François-Adrien Boieldieu’s La dame blanche (1825), comprised of dramatic episodes taken from several novels including Guy Mannering (1815), The Monastery and The Abbot (both 1820).

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Scott’s 1819 novel Ivanhoe was an especially popular source, employed for Heinrich Marschner’s Der Templer und die Jüden (The Templar and the Jewess, 1829), Otto Nicolai’s Il templario (The Templar, 1840) and Giovanni Pacini’s Ivanhoé (1832). Another Ivanhoé, attributed to Rossini, had long been denigrated for its musical selfborrowings as well as its departure from the original story. The work, however, proved to be a pastiche of numbers from eleven other Rossini operas stitched together by music publisher Antonio Pacini, with the composer providing recitative. It was this Ivanhoé Scott saw in Paris on 31 October 1826: It was superbly got up [. . .] It was an opera and, of course, the story sadly mangled, and the dialogue, in great part, nonsense. Yet it was strange to hear anything like the words which I (then in agony of pain with spasms in my stomach) dictated [. . .] now recited in a foreign tongue, and for the amusement of a strange people.9 Scott’s description of the opera as ‘sadly mangled’ with ‘nonsense’ dialogue is noteworthy. Lord Byron used precisely the same term when passing judgement on an operatic adaptation of Otello, as will be seen below. Literary scholars note that The Bride of Lammermoor was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century, as tightly structured as a Shakespearean narrative.10 While Lucia focuses on a single subplot – the ill-fated triangle between the heroine, her chosen suitor Arturo and her true love Edgardo – the novel is heady politicallytinged historical fiction hearkening back to events that occurred at the time of the Union of the Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707.11 Although Scott publicly agreed with the Union, he mourned, particularly in correspondence with Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth, what he considered the loss of his country, comparing it with enslaved Israel.12 The politics implicit in Scott’s novel would not have resonated with Donizetti’s audiences who were about to face a very different struggle for unification. If anything, Lucia’s audiences best enjoyed being transported to an ‘exotic Other-world’: the Scottish moors, a suitable setting for a powerful mad scene through which the prima donna exhibited her vocal and dramatic skills, providing the character of Lucia with a channel of expression beyond anything available to Scott’s Lucy. Also absent from Lucia was another theme central to the novel: witchcraft, which, when set in motion by Lucy’s own mother, brought about the girl’s destruction. Instead, librettist Salvadore Cammarano chose to portray Lucia’s downfall as psychological, resulting from her thwarted love. For Verdi, however, the supernatural became a primary element upon which he insisted for his rendering of Macbeth. To his mind, the presence of witches was not only faithful to Shakespeare but became a critical dramatic device.13 The contrasting use of the supernatural by Shakespeare and Verdi in their Macbeths demonstrates how literary models moving from one period and culture to another can be partly lost – and consequently transformed – through translation.

Shakespeare As Shakespeare’s works became more popular throughout Europe, composers and librettists increasingly drew on his plays.14 A brief list includes Rossini’s Otello (1816), Nicola Vaccai’s Giulietta e Romeo (1825), Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1825) and Hector Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict (1862). Richard Wagner employed Measure for Measure as the model for his ill-fated comedy Das Liebesverbot (1836).

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Verdi was especially devoted to Shakespeare, composing three adaptations: Macbeth (1847, rev. 1865), Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). Also at several points he explored setting King Lear. In contrast to Verdi’s Otello, Rossini’s had been challenged for infidelity to its source. Perhaps the most famous critique was Byron’s: they have been crucifying Othello into an opera (Otello by Rossini) – Music good but lugubrious – but as for the words! all the real scenes with Iago cut out – & the greatest nonsense instead – the handkerchief turned into a billet doux.15 The French press also took issue with the translation employed for productions in Lyon in 1823 and Paris in 1825. The original Italian libretto had in effect reworked the tale so greatly that François-Henri-Joseph Blaze (working under the pseudonym Castil-Blaze) could do little more than translate what he found; he was criticised for not returning to Shakespeare or a French translation of the play.16 In a 1994 article attempting to bring to bear a greater historical understanding of how adaptation works, James Aldrich-Moodie tried to vindicate Rossini’s setting by considering how and why Shakespeare’s plots had been adapted for later audiences.17 However, scholars subsequently discovered that Rossini’s libretto was not based on Shakespeare at all but on two loose contemporary stage adaptations of Othello, one French and one Italian.18 To examine a libretto apart from its musical setting can be a useful textual exercise; however, establishing its precise origins is a complex and necessary enterprise. Meanwhile, operas such as Rossini’s Otello have suffered widespread criticism for their perceived lack of fidelity to the canonical source despite offering compelling examples of nineteenth-century operatic music. In addition to identifying their correct libretto source(s), one needs to bear in mind how the translations used in their conception differed from the original Shakespearean text. A simple three-word passage from Macbeth yields a rich example. Interrupted by a courier as she reads a letter in which her husband confides that he is to be king, Lady Macbeth conceives of murder as soon as the messenger advises her of King Duncan’s visit. Jarold Ramsey has called what occurs next her ritual preparation for the deed.19 Come, come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here; And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse; That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose [. . .]20 The passage ably describes what Lady Macbeth is and will become, but the most revealing exercise in translation-analysis centres on three words, ‘unsex me here’. Ramsey and others interpret them as a charge that she be stripped of feminine qualities like mercy and compassion in order to be filled with masculine attributes, for murder falls in a man’s realm.21 Yet ‘unsexing’ might also be understood as an unnatural distortion of her birth gender. Jenijoy LaBelle proposes that Shakespeare’s audiences would have understood the speech, with its obvious physiological references

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to ‘blood’, ‘passage’ and ‘visitings of nature’, as alluding to menstruation.22 Blocking these functions in no way makes Lady Macbeth manly but rather obstructs her womanhood, rendering her, as Jane Bernstein has described her, ‘a terrifying presence, who is and is not a woman’.23 The question then becomes whether Lady Macbeth’s demand to be unsexed describes a desire to become less feminine, masculine, or asexual and genderless like the bearded witches who appear to be neither and both at the same time. Attuned to the supernatural, Shakespeare’s audiences would have been able to predict the dire consequences of Lady Macbeth’s words; their own king, James I (the very James VI of Scotland of whom Scott wrote in The Bride of Lammermoor), had published Daemonologie (1597), a treatise on witchcraft. Verdi’s audiences would not have had the same frame of reference for a woman who would desire to distort her nature, but they would have understood a wife willing to go to any lengths to advance her husband’s career. None of the letters Verdi wrote explaining the genesis and interpretation of his ‘Ledy’, as he called her, reveal any knowledge of the original Jacobean characterisation because both of the translations that he and his librettists used rendered this passage differently. Verdi’s opera exists in two versions: one produced in Florence in 1847 and a revision done for Paris in 1865. The 1847 libretto was primarily the work of Francesco Maria Piave, although an impatient Verdi himself penned much of it. When displeased with Piave’s work, the composer called upon Andrea Maffei who would publish his own Macbeth in 1863 (based on Friedrich Schiller’s translation).24 None of the three, however, understood English. Two Italian translations were available when Macbeth was composed in 1846: one by Michele Leoni and the other by Carlo Rusconi. Leoni’s verse translation was first published in 1814–15, but Piave, as Andrew Porter has established, used the 1820 revision (Sourcebook, p. 352). Leoni renders ‘unsex me here’ as ‘Per miracol novo, | Me del mio sesso spoglia’ (‘By some new miracle | divest me of my gender’).25 Although Lady Macbeth seeks some extraordinary intervention that would strip her of any feminine qualities, she does not call for the radical distortion of Nature expressed in the original. Rusconi, whose 1838 set of translations Verdi owned, chose to translate Shakespeare in prose, fearing that he would be unable to duplicate the beauty of the original poetry.26 In the 1838 edition, Lady Macbeth asks, ‘obbliare mi faccia che femmina nacqui’ (‘obliterate anything womanly with which I was born’).27 Neither translator replicated Lady Macbeth’s chilling request. One other translation which Verdi knew deserves mention. Giulio Carcano published his rendering of Macbeth in 1848, postdating the Florence première. Some scholars have suggested that Verdi and Piave may have had access to Carcano’s text before publication, but Porter posited that Carcano was influenced by the libretto instead (Sourcebook, p. 352). He translates the phrase as ‘In me mutate il mio sesso’ (‘change my sex’), but later in a translation created for the great Shakespearean interpreter Adelaide Ristori, the line became ‘l’esser mio snaturate’ (‘un-nature my being’).28 One wonders if Ristori, herself familiar with the original, was behind this subtle but significant revision which brings the line closest to what Shakespeare wrote. Shakespeare’s audiences would not have been surprised by what befell Macbeth’s wife since tampering with Nature was dangerous. Indeed, the doctor who watches

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her sleepwalk comments, ‘More needs she the divine, than the physician.’29 Verdi and his librettists were led to a different conclusion, having been influenced by August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s commentary on Macbeth, which appeared in Giovanni Gheradini’s translation in both Leoni’s and Rusconi’s editions: Lady Macbeth, the guiltiest of the accomplices of regicide, falls into an incurable sickness, caused by remorse; and, with all the signs of despair, dies without being mourned by her own husband. To Schlegel, this was ‘a just punishment’.30 It was this view of ‘Ledy’ that coloured Verdi’s perception of how she would look and sound. After hearing that soprano Eugenia Tadolini had been cast in the role, he wrote: Tadolini’s qualities are far too good for that role! [. . .] she has a beautiful and attractive appearance; and I would like Lady Macbeth to be ugly and evil [. . .] Tadolini has a stupendous voice, clear, limpid, powerful; and I would like Lady to have a harsh, stifled, and hollow voice [. . .] In short, she was to appear ‘diabolical’ (Sourcebook, pp. 66–7). So, the role was given to a very different soprano, Marianna Barbieri-Nini. Yet Verdi needed to cajole her to sing in what he deemed a Shakespearean manner. In a letter dated 2 January 1847, he wrote that Lady Macbeth was ‘resolute, bold, extremely dramatic’ and that the soprano was to honour his attempt to remain as close as possible to the original (as he knew it), ‘I wish the performers to serve the poet better than they serve the composer.’31 Less than a month later, he would explain further. Traditionally, a character was introduced with a pair of arias: the first, a cantabile, showcased a singer’s lyrical qualities; following came a rhythmically powerful cabaletta that allowed the singer to execute vocal pyrotechnics. Feeling that a cantabile would have undercut Lady Macbeth’s characterisation, Verdi composed only the second, ‘I see how much you have wanted a cantabile [. . .] But observe well the character of this role and you will see that that could not be done without betraying it [. . .]’ (Sourcebook, p. 39). In fact, audiences were so attuned to such compositional practices that the cantabile’s absence would have been noticed and, to Verdi’s mind, understood. The cabaletta text is exactly where one would expect to find Lady Macbeth’s request to change her nature. Yet here, too, there is only the call on ‘infernal spirits’: Or tutti sorgete –, ministri infernali, Che al sangue incorate – spingete i mortali! Tu notte ne avvolgi – di tènebra immota; Qual petto percota – non vegga il pugnal.32 (Now arise all you hellish ministers That push mortals to bloody acts! Night, wrap us in motionless darkness. Let not the breast see the dagger that strikes it.)33

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It is Verdi’s music, though, that empowers her to summon them. The entire text is repeated twice, each time allowing the singer to soar into her uppermost range; while the vocal line mirrors Lady Macbeth’s passionate abandon, the singer must navigate difficult runs with great control. Composing her thusly, Verdi depicted the ‘dominating demon’ he had found in all of the translations. In the end, however, the absence of those three words – ‘unsex me here’– radically transformed her from her ancestral model. By having her call the forces of evil, Shakespeare dehumanised her right before his audience’s eyes. As Verdi had come to know her and present her, she was evil all along. Although Verdi crusaded tirelessly to render Macbeth faithfully, one of the most severe critiques of the opera accused him of not knowing its source. In defence, he responded angrily that the reviewer ‘states that I didn’t know Shaspeare [sic] when I wrote Macbeth [. . .] but that I don’t know, don’t understand, don’t feel Shaspeare – no, by God, no’ (Sourcebook, p. 119). Given the translations and their subsequent transformations by librettists Piave and Maffei, one must understand that his knowledge of Macbeth came through a variety of different lenses. Twenty years later, Verdi’s librettist for Otello, Arrigo Boito, actually suggested that the adaptation from one artistic medium to another justified changes to a source, absolving the librettist, if not the linguistic translator, from charges of infidelity: What I am about to write seems blasphemy: I prefer Rusconi’s sentence [. . .] My opinion is to retain it as the translator gives it to us. The fact remains that Rusconi was wrong to adulterate a thought of Shakespeare’s. A translator’s fidelity must be very scrupulous, but the fidelity of one who illustrates with his own art a work from a different art can be less scrupulous, in my view. The translator’s duty is not to change the letter, the illustrator’s mission is to interpret the spirit; the former is a slave, the latter is free. Rusconi’s sentence is unfaithful, and this is wrong in a translator; but it enters quite well into the spirit of the tragedy and the illustrator must exploit this quality to his own advantage.34 To Boito, the existence of different versions of a text was defensible for they had different purposes, the operatic libretto serving the spirit rather than the letter of its source. By this logic, no matter how contemporary critics may have felt, Cammarano’s libretto for Lucia and Piave and Maffei’s for Macbeth served their purposes, despite issues of faithful linguistic translation. Investigating the transformation of any work of literature into an opera is a genealogical quest. One must know the ancestral text and how it traces down to its multiple descendants, taking into account how each was shaped by different times, places and cultures. And as this brief foray into nineteenth-century operas with English models suggests, it is unwise to assume that the ‘ancestor’ always retains priority over the ‘descendant’. While Shakespeare’s Macbeth is better known today than is Verdi’s opera, Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor is chiefly encountered via Donizetti’s Lucia. These examples drawn from the Italian repertoire are just two of many operas inspired, however circuitously, by English literary texts. They narrate an all-important history of how opera was translated and interpreted in the nineteenth century, its literary sources drawn from a particularly rich area of crosscultural exchange.

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Notes 1. Orlando furioso inspired Jean-Batiste Lully’s Roland (1685); Domenico Scarlatti’s Orlando, ovvero La gelosia pazzia (1711); Antonio Vivaldi’s Orlando (1727) while Aminta was rendered in Lully’s Armide (1686), Vivaldi’s Armide al campo d’Egitto (1718) and Franz Joseph Haydn’s Armida (1784). George Frederick Handel’s version of Il pastor fido premièred in 1712. 2. Among the earliest examples of such works were French musical comedies parodying the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully and his librettist Philippe Quinault which mirrored the world of their patron, Louis XIV. These comic theatre pieces, peopled with French versions of Italian commedia dell’arte characters, were so popular that even the high-born they targeted enjoyed them. This popular genre crossed the Channel, inspiring ballad operas like John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). See both Robert M. Isherwood, ‘Popular Musical Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 9 (1978), 295–310, and Daniel Heartz’s ‘“The Beggar’s Opera” and “opera-comique en vaudevilles”’, Early Music, 27 (1999), 42–53. 3. Opinions are guarded on the rise of literacy in the first half of the nineteenth century since it often was measured simply by the ability to sign one’s name. Literacy affected social change later in the century when more people could actually read. See Carl F. Kaestle, ‘The History of Literacy and the History of Readers’, Review of Research in Education, 12 (1985), 11–53. 4. See Bassnett’s ‘Literary Research and Translation’, in The Handbook to Literary Research, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa and W. R. Owens, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 167–84 (p. 168). 5. For new accounts of the prima donna’s importance, see The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 6. For a brief explanation of musical/poetic versification, see Denise Gallo, Opera: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 44–50. 7. Robert Crawford, ‘Walter Scott and European Union’, Studies in Romanticism, 40 (2001), 137–52 (pp. 140–1). According to Jerome Mitchell, Scott inspired more operas than any author save Shakespeare. See Mitchell’s The Walter Scott Operas (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1977). 8. Dates of the source’s publication and the opera’s première offer examples of how long it took for works to be adapted. 9. Cited by John Gibson Lockhart in The Life of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Printed by T. and A. Constable for T. C. and E .C. Jack, Causewayside, 1903), IX, p. 23. 10. See Scott W. Klein’s ‘National Histories, National Fictions: Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor’, English Literary History, 65 (4) (1998), 1017–38. 11. See James Chandler’s discussion in ‘Scott and the Scene of Explanation: Framing Contextuality in The Bride of Lammermoor’, Studies in the Novel, 26 (1/2) (1994), 69–98. 12. Klein further supports this comparison by citing a line from chapter 2 of The Bride of Lammermoor (‘In those days, there was no king in Israel’), describing the political climate in Scotland after James VI left for the English throne (p. 1024). Edgewood would have understood Scott’s sentiments since the comparison was also employed by Irish writers. 13. ‘there are three roles in this opera, and three is all there can be: Lady Macbeth, Macbeth and the chorus of witches’. See Verdi’s letter of 8 February 1865 to Léon Escudier cited in Verdi’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook, ed. David Rosen and Andrew Porter (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984), p. 99. All further references to this work are to this edition and will be provided within the text.

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14. For a discussion of the gentrification of Shakespeare, see Denise Gallo, ‘“Repatriating” Falstaff: Boito, Verdi and Shakespeare (in Translation)’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 7 (2) (2010), 11–34 (pp. 26–30). Another account of operatic responses to Shakespeare is Daniel Albright, Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres, Eastman Studies in Music (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2007). 15. James Aldrich-Moodie, ‘False Fidelity: “Othello, Otello”, and Their Critics’, Comparative Drama, 28 (3) (1994), 324–47 (p. 330). Byron’s complete postscript to the letter dated 3 March 1818 may be found in The Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Thomas Moore (London: John Murray, 1838), p. 376. Byron’s poem, ‘The Corsair’, would inspire two operas entitled Il corsaro, one by Pacini (1831) and the other by Verdi (1848). Byron died in 1824, predeceasing both. 16. Mark Everist cites the press’s ‘savaging of Castil-Blaze’s efforts’ with the French adaptation of Otello in Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824–1828 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 224–5. 17. See Aldrich-Moodie, pp. 324–47. 18. Roberta Montemorra Marvin, ‘Il libretto di Berio per l’Otello di Rossini’, Bollettino del Centro Rossiniano di Studi, 31 (1991), 53–76. Published in English as ‘Shakespeare and Primo Ottocento Italian Opera: The Case of Rossini’s Otello’, in The Opera and Shakespeare, ed. Holger Klein and Christopher Smith, in The Shakespeare Yearbook (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellon Press, 1994), IV, pp. 71–95. 19. Jarold P. Ramsey, ‘The Perversion of Manliness in Macbeth’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 13 (2) (1973), 285–300 (p. 287). 20. Macbeth I. 5. All references to Macbeth are to the edition most used by nineteenth-century translators of Shakespeare, The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. George Steevens, 9 vols (London: Johnson et al., 1803), III, 391–477 (p. 406). No line numbers are given in this edition, [accessed 12 August 2016]. 21. Ramsey, p. 287. 22. LaBelle cites, among other sources, The Byrth of Mankynde, otherwise the Womans Booke (London, 1545) and John Sadler’s The Sicke Womans Private Looking-Glass wherein Methodically are handled all uterine affects, or diseases arising from the wombe (London, 1636). See ‘“A Strange Infirmity”: Lady Macbeth’s Amenorrhea’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 31 (3) (1980), 381–6. 23. Jane A. Bernstein, ‘“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”: Lady Macbeth, Sleepwalking, and the Demonic in Verdi’s Scottish Opera’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 14 (2002), 31–46. 24. Maffei alters this passage more than the translations used for the opera. Dividing the letter scene into two (IX and X), his Lady urges Macbeth to ‘fly, fly to your wife’ (‘Vola, vola alla tua donna!’) so that their spirits can be made as one and his doubts can be lost in her kiss (‘Trasfondere saprò lo spirto [sic] mio | Nel tuo spirto, o Macbetto, e le mie labra | Cacceranno da te quelle dubbiezze [. . .]’). ‘Unsex me here’ becomes ‘extinguish in me what is woman’ to be replaced by the cruelty not of a man but of a ‘tiger’ (‘In me spegnete | Quanto è di donna, e dal capo alle piante | Stillatemi la rabbia e l’efferata | Crudeltà della tigre’). See Maffei’s Macbeth / imitate da Federico Schiller (Florence: Le Monnier, 1863), pp. 34–35. Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations are my own. 25. Macbetto, Tragedia di G. Shakspeare recata in versi italiani da Michele Leoni, Vol. V, edizione seconda (Verona: Società tipografica, 1820), p. 28. Leoni’s translation offers insight into the transition from Shakespeare to a poetic rendering in Italian. He employed a verse form as typical to Italian poetry as iambic pentameter was to Shakespeare: hendecasyllabic lines in versi piani (a line of eleven poetic feet with a stress on the penultimate syllable). Text is divided into feet by starting with consonants; words ending and starting with vowels are grouped in a single foot. Thus, the passage from which the lines in my essay are quoted would be scanned: Sor/gi a / che /tar/di?/ Per /mi/ra/col/ no/vo, Me/ del/ mio/ ses/so/ spogl/ia_e/ men/e_e/ co/re

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26. Gallo, ‘“Repatriating” Falstaff’, p. 11. 27. See Macbeth in Rusconi’s Teatro completo di Shakespeare (Padua: Minerva, 1838), p. 5. Rusconi later changed the passage to ‘trasmutate il mio sesso e empitemi tutta della più atra crudeltà’ (‘change my sex and fill me full of cruelty’). See Macbeth: Tragedia de Shakspeare [sic], voltata in prosa italiana, 5th edn (Florence: Le Monnier, 1867), p. 31. 28. In Italian, the prefix ‘s’ added to the verb ‘naturate’ negates or indicates an opposite. Macbeth was published in translation with the original text as Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Macbeth: Adapted Expressly for Madame Ristori and Her Italian Dramatic Company (New York: Sanford and Harrows, 1866). To highlight Ristori, Lady Macbeth leads the list of dramatic personae. Carcano retained the 1848 translation in all subsequent editions; see, for example, ‘Macbeth’ in Teatro di Shakspeare scelto e tradotto in versi da Giulio Carcano (Naples: F. Rossi-Romano, 1860), p. 236, [accessed 5 October 2016]. 29. Macbeth, V. 1., Steevens, p. 464. 30. Leoni, p. ix. Schlegel’s commentary on Macbeth appeared in his Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (1809–11). 31. The original Italian and this translation appear in the Sourcebook, pp. 26–8. 32. Sourcebook, pp. 471–8 (p. 472). To accommodate the aria’s rhythms, the verse is set as two quatrains of senàri, or lines of six feet, again in verso piano. The first quatrain scanned would be: Or/tut/ti/sor/ge/te Mi/ni/stri_in/fer/na/li Che_al/san/gue_in/co/ra/te Spin/ge/te_i/mor/ta/li 33. My translation. The relevant passage in Macbeth is at I. 5., Steevens, p. 406. 34. See Boito’s letter to Verdi dated 10 May 1886 in The Verdi–Boito Correspondence, ed. Marcello Conati and Mario Medici, trans. William Weaver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 100–1.

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36 James, Argento and THE ASPERN PAPERS: ‘Orpheus and the Maenads’ Michael Halliwell

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enry James (1843–1916) was not a ‘musical’ author when compared with someone like George Eliot whose work is suffused by music and its performance. When approached to write a libretto, James replied that he was ‘unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical, and unmanageable’!1 However, James used descriptions of music and performance in increasingly subtle ways throughout his long writing career. Like many other novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, James saw the opera as a site of important social interaction, and the opera house as a ‘performance’ space – both on and off the stage. Opera figures throughout his fiction, as well as in his other, frequently autobiographical, writings. James often uses that significant ‘literary’ trope, the opera box, in scenes scattered throughout his work; it is a site of the gaze – ‘seeing’, with all its connotations, was an important thematic aspect of James’s fiction and underlies his theoretical ideas. This is encapsulated in his celebrated (and theatrical) description of the ‘house of fiction’ from the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, from every window of which individual viewers train their eyes and ‘field-glasses’ on the ‘same show’, whilst each receiving ‘an impression distinct from every other’.2 Just as James’s fiction has been the basis for a number of films of the last twenty years, so it has provided the source for several operas.3 Most celebrated is probably Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1954), which is frequently performed. Less well known is the operatic adaptation of The Aspern Papers (1988), by American composer Dominick Argento (1927–2019), first staged most appropriately exactly one hundred years after the publication of James’s novella.4 In many ways this is one of the most interesting operatic readings of James as its sustained self-reflexive quality has very strong elements of his own fascination with the intricacies of his art. This includes James’s frequent use of opera performance as a trope throughout his fiction, and in this opera Argento engages with nineteenth-century literature and operatic performance practice. James’s novella is set in Venice, and Italy was always very close to his heart. One of his most delightful non-fiction works is Italian Hours, in which he reminisces on many aspects of his travels there. In ‘From Chambéry to Milan’, he describes an excursion he had made to Lake Como during which he imagined himself as ‘a hero of romance with leisure for a love affair’. The theatricality of the setting set him thinking where he had seen all this before: the pink-walled villas gleaming through their shrubberies of orange and oleander, the mountains shimmering in the hazy light like so many breasts of doves, constant presence of the melodious Italian voice. Where indeed but at the opera when the

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manager has been more than usually regardless of expense? Here in the foreground was the palace of the nefarious barytone, with its banqueting-hall opening as freely on the stage as a railway buffet on the platform; beyond, the delightful back scene, with its operatic gamut of colouring; in the middle the scarlet-sashed barcaiuoli, grouped like a chorus, hat in hand, awaiting the conductor’s signal. It was better than being in a novel – this being, this fairly wallowing, in a libretto.5 Argento transposes the novella from the theatricality of Venice – James’s novella is characterised by frequent allusion to Venice resembling a giant stage setting – to the romance associated with Lake Como, and the figure of Aspern changes from poet to composer. In The Aspern Papers James was interested in a romantic evocation of the past while at the same time engaging in an examination of some of the seamier aspects of the literary life. He makes this plain in his preface to the novella, ‘I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past’ which is ‘fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone’.6 How fully to enter into the spirit of the past without violating the privacy of the individuals concerned is dramatised in the novella. Argento commented at the time of the première: I was intrigued by that remarkable phrase James wrote for one of the narrator’s ruminations: he wonders ‘what mystic rites of ennui Miss Bordereau celebrated in those darkened rooms’. I, too, wondered what they might have been. Given the old lady’s peculiarities – the obsessive secrecy about Aspern’s papers, her confinement to a wheelchair, the green shade forever masking her eyes, the dwelling in darkened rooms and receiving no one – it seemed to me that the most obvious ritual she performed was the projection of memory. Seated in the darkness for interminable hours, days, years, her principal occupation might well have been to visit the past, to use James’s terms, to relive, over and over, the joys and sorrow her love for Aspern had brought her.7 The opera introduces a double time frame, not featured in the novel, which draws on this desire for a connection to the past and makes concrete what remains ambiguous speculation in James’s text; at the same time it offers a self-reflexive analysis of the operatic art form and its relationship to ‘real’ life, much as James meditates on the nature of his art and the literary life in The Aspern Papers. James’s ‘palpable imaginable visitable’ past, sought by the narrator of the novella, now becomes a recoverable reality in the opera in which these two time-frames operate: the original, ‘Jamesean’ events occur in the 1895 part of the opera, while the earlier events alluded to in James now are the ‘reality’ of the represented 1835 events of the opera. There is also a symmetrical balance between the two time-frames with two triangular relationships – Juliana, the Lodger and Tina in the 1895 time-frame balanced against Juliana, Aspern and Sonia in the 1835 frame, with Juliana acting as the bridge between the two periods. Triangular relationships are, of course, central to many operas. There is a running operatic metaphor in the titles of the scenes from the 1835 part of the opera: the first is a vocal ‘Quintet’ followed by a vocal ‘Quartet’ and so on, ending with ‘Solo’, which ironically consists of two characters, one of whom, however, remains mute: silence becomes an increasingly important thematic concern in the opera.

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There is also a mythical third frame – the lost opera Medea composed by Aspern – which acts as a further commentary on the ‘real’ events represented in the opera. Medea is the object of investigation by the Lodger (who fulfils the role of the narrator in the novella), and draws on several of the classical allusions in the novella. At the outset James describes Aspern as ‘Orpheus and the Maenads’, and the musical allusion is further emphasised: ‘[Aspern] was not a woman’s poet [. . .] but the situation had been different when the man’s own voice was mingled with his song. That voice, by every testimony, was one of the most charming ever heard.’8 Jeanne Campbell Reesman observes that the allusion to the Orpheus story casts the characters in the tale in ‘mythic roles: the narrator as Orpheus come to resurrect his love, Juliana and Tina as, respectively, the (past) dead Eurydice and Tina as the (present) living Eurydice’.9 Lawrence Holland describes the narrator as being left alone by Tina at the end in a ‘strangely twisted version of Orpheus’s separation from Euridice’, who ‘turns her back on him, but she pauses to look back once, giving him “one look” that marks their separation but grips his memory’.10 Of course, Orpheus is the founding figure of opera, and remains the quintessential operatic character – composer and singer of his own song. The motivation for his transposition of the novella, both in terms of location and expanded time-frame, was discussed by Argento at the time of opera’s première: The 1830s for me are bracketed by retiring Rossini and early Verdi, with Bellini and Donizetti in between. James was told the original story in Florence but set his telling of it in Venice. Though I understand his point about Venice and decay, Lake Como, whose ‘operatic’ atmosphere James describes wonderfully in his travel pieces, was where people like Barbaja, Merelli, Bellini, Donizetti, Pasta and Ricordi all had summer villas. My Juliana was a reigning diva who helped Aspern achieve his first success. They became lovers. That brought to mind the case of Bellini and Pasta – he was living on one side of Lake Como the summer Pasta and her husband lived across from him, close enough so that he could hear her vocalizing across the water. Barelli is partly Merelli, but also partly Barbaja, the impresario who launched Rossini and lost his mistress, Isabella Colbran, to the composer.11 The invocation of Pasta here echoes the significant impression that another famous diva of the later nineteenth century made on James when he was young. Adelina Patti and James were both eight when he first saw her: I listened to that rarest of infant phenomena, Adelina Patti, poised in an armchair that had been pushed to the footlights and announcing her incomparable gift. She was about our own age, she was one of us, even though at the same time the most prodigious of fairies, of glittering fables.12 James went on to invoke the power of Patti’s singing in one of his early stories, ‘Eugene Pickering’ (1874), and female singers, in particular, occur throughout his later work. While not overtly ‘musical’, The Aspern Papers is suffused with the sound of the human voice, not only the description of the melodious voice of Aspern, but also the changing tones in the voices of the two women in the palazzo, which are frequently described. The ambient sounds of Venice are also inherently musical; appropriately Lake Como also has its musical aspects, not the least being the capacity of sound to carry over water, a phenomenon which is made much of in the opera.

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The Aspern Papers lends itself to intermedial transposition; its structure consists of nine intricately interlinking sections which describe the narrator’s almost militarystyle campaign to obtain the papers that he believes Juliana Bordereu still retains – it is suggested in the novella that the elderly spinster had a relationship with the young American poet Aspern many years before. Each section is a discrete theatrical revelation of the stages in this campaign, like scenes from a play, with extended dialogues between Tina (the niece of Juliana) and the narrator – who, significantly, is never named and is revealed at the end of the novella as one of James’s typically ‘unreliable’ narrators – framing three crucial dramatic encounters with Juliana. All culminates in her discovery of his fumbling attempts to steal the papers and her gasped accusation: ‘Ah you publishing scoundrel!’13 A very effective scene occurs early in Act 1 of the opera – ‘Quartet’. One of the crucial encounters between Juliana and the narrator in the novella concerns a portrait of Aspern that she attempts to get him to sell. This is the only tangible ‘relic’ of Aspern that he actually touches, and it becomes a bargaining ploy between them. Argento ingeniously uses this cue to construct a scene occurring sixty years before, during which the portrait is actually being painted. While this is happening, part of the opera Medea, the object of the Lodger’s quest, is being rehearsed by Juliana. The complex layering of two elements of artistic creation – the portrait and the opera rehearsal – fuses different musical discursive levels. The scene’s self-reflexivity is quintessentially Jamesean, with the contents of Juliana’s utterance reflecting the opera as a whole. The frame is Argento’s opera in which Medea is embedded, but which itself refracts the larger operatic work. This scene also contains three distinctive musical levels. The 1830s Bellinian pastiche of Juliana’s aria from Medea contrasts with the lyrical duet of the impresario Barelli and Aspern, which is couched in the dominant late twentieth-century musical idiom of the opera as a whole. These two discursive levels are, in turn, undercut by the recitative-like music of the painter, with his interjected comments on the problems of rendering a portrait of Aspern. In essence life is being captured by art on two levels; through the portrait as well as on the broader thematic level of the opera itself. Argento reflects on the mythic early history of opera through the use of Medea – Greek myth is the basis of many early operas – but also through the allusion to the myth of Orpheus as embodied in the figure of Aspern. The Medea myth has a structural function as a paradigm of the relationship between Aspern, Juliana and Sonia (the mistress of Barelli, but also having an affair with Aspern, as well as being a potential singing rival to Juliana). Ironically, the only ‘performance’ that this opera within the opera will receive is a mute version that frames Act 2 in which the Lodger reads from a copy of Barelli’s memoirs, outlining the plot of Medea while the figures of Aspern, Juliana, Sonia and Barelli appear and don the costumes of Jason, Medea, the Princess and Creon. The stage direction indicates that the ‘the characters appear to be singing as the “opera” is performed but no sounds issue from their mouths’.14 The ‘narration’ takes place on several levels: the sung verbal text of the Lodger acting as a commentary on the mimed action of the ‘opera’, a universalised choral element, and the orchestra, all combining to produce a ‘dramatic’ and vivid, yet paradoxically, ‘silent’ version of the opera. As Tina burns the pages of the score at the end of the opera, the mythic characters one by one disappear; the final link with the past has been severed. It is a uniquely

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‘meta-operatic’ moment where the idea of opera itself is foregrounded. The voice of the Lodger, dispassionately commenting on the ‘performance’, suggests a critical distance from the art form adopted by Argento in his opera, but also implies the potency of the affective power of music, or in this case, its lack, as the voices of the operatic ‘Medea’ characters remain silent. One might also read this moment as an analogue of James’s genius at conveying the rich yet silent operation of thought. But the Medea myth also functions as an ironic reflection of the events taking place in 1835. In the embodiment of both Juliana and Sonia as singers, there is a conscious examination and criticism of operatic ‘performance’ – the myth of the opera diva is interrogated.15 These quasi-parodic elements play an important part in the representation of the relationships in the opera; there are three different and mutually reflective conflicts being portrayed. Juliana is being betrayed for Sonia; Barelli is being betrayed for Aspern; Medea was betrayed for Creusa. Simultaneously, there is also an examination of the nature of ‘authorship’ as Aspern contemplates the possibility of expanding Sonia’s part – his relationship with Sonia will thus have a vital influence on the final shape of the work of art – a comment on the realities of operatic production and the often brutally pragmatic, even mundane world in which ‘high art’ is created. Thus, the final shape and effect of the opera is determined by a variety of factors, not necessarily all the result of ‘artistic’ choices; Argento’s opera deconstructs the ‘Romantic’ idea of the integrity and autonomy of the work of art. What also emerges is a debate on the actual viability of opera: the ‘popular’ art form that it was in the Italy of the 1830s is contrasted with the radically different status it enjoys in the late twentieth century, and, of course, in the present. This critique of performance is expanded in scene 4: ‘Trio’, where Aspern is rehearsing a duet from the opera Medea with Sonia while Juliana interjects with comments on Sonia’s interpretation and vocal technique. The music again is a Bellinian pastiche: the voices in parallel sixths with a typical arpeggio orchestral accompaniment. Juliana’s short interjections echo the painter’s in the previous scene – comments on the art that conceals the art – but also the intrusion of the criticism of artistic performance within the ‘actual’ performance. Here we have a meta-operatic critique of the notion of performance itself as these two discursive levels collide, providing a postmodernist blurring of the distinctions between the theatre and ‘reality’, but also a reflection of aspects of postmodernity in the contemporary opera theatre itself. A reflection on James’s ‘palpable imaginable visitable past’, in operatic terms, is invoked by Italian composer Luciano Berio, who eloquently argues that the modern composer should always be aware that most of the operatic conventions, characters or ingredients on which he is so keen to turn his back are unavoidably present, in more or less explicit form, on stage. Whatever they may do, say or sing, the figures that come and go on the operatic stage, be they ever so experimental, will always bear the mark of operatic associations. Those figures, those ‘characters’ that advance towards us, seem to have already sung arias, duets, cavatinas and ensembles. Even if still and silent or employed in unexpected vocal behaviour, they seem all to be ‘singing’ because, whatever they may do, they implicitly carry about them the signs of operatic experience. They are inhabited by them and themselves inhabit a space – the opera house – that is never empty because it throngs with memories and ghosts (operatic ones, of course) that impose their presence and their model.16

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The complex layering in this scene in the opera is embodied most fully in the figure of Aspern, who functions on several levels: as James’s ‘original’ character; as a character in Argento’s opera; as a character within the opera Medea within Argento’s opera; as a performer in a duet with Sonia; as ‘composer’ of the music they perform; as ‘musician’ playing the piano which accompanies their duet; and, finally, as the subject of the quest of the Lodger/narrator. Argento takes up James’s description of his Aspern as an Orpheus: ‘You are the real Eurydice’ sings his Aspern to Sonia.17 This moment also carries within it elements of parody as the words are couched in a lyrical, high-lying phrase – a ‘typical’ operatic gesture with its image of the stereotypical tenor lover declaring his passion! The sustained evocation of Orpheus further problematises the distinction between ‘reality’ and myth. The Sonia/Eurydice figure is the cause of Aspern’s destruction: later in the opera he decides to swim across the lake to her at night after Juliana, gaining firm evidence of their affair, releases the boat from its mooring in an attempt to prevent Aspern’s assignation. Her action results in his death by drowning. Before he attempts the swim, Argento has Aspern briefly sing a snatch of the song sung by Juliana earlier in the opera, ‘Siren Singing to Siren’, suggesting the two singers on either side of the lake who can hear each other practising. Aspern’s fatal swim adds further to the mythic element of the opera as it recalls the legend of Hero and Leander in which Leander, swimming across the Hellespont to Hero, is drowned. One could argue that Argento’s figure of Aspern is emblematic of the state of contemporary opera in which the culture that gave birth and sustained the art form for several centuries, reaching its apotheosis in the nineteenth century, no longer exists. Opera, like Aspern, might appear to be doomed to destruction; or, as Peter Conrad observes of contemporary opera: ‘What fate remains for a modern Orpheus but, in shame and remorse, to lose his voice?’18 Theodor Adorno observed that opera ‘has been in a precarious position since the moment when the high bourgeois society which supported it in its fully developed form ceased to exist’. In contrast to Berio, he claimed that opera was founded on so many conventions that it resounds into a large emptiness as soon as these conventions are no longer vouchsafed to the audience through tradition. The newcomers [. . .] will feel contempt for it, while the intellectually advanced public is almost no longer capable of responding immediately or spontaneously to a limited store of works, which have long since sunk into the living-room treasure-chest of the petite bourgeoisie.19 It might well be argued that much of the inherent ambiguity of final ‘meaning’ in James’s novella is lost in the opera – an art form that is essentially reductive when adapting fiction – but its theatricality could well have appealed to James; after all, he was interested in the dramatic aspects of opera, but was equally fascinated by the figure of the prima donna. He speculated on using the celebrated Swedish soprano, Christine Nilsson, in a story. Writing to a friend he observed: ‘Last night I heard our friend Nilsson. What a pity she is not the heroine of a tale, and I didn’t make her!’20 He had more intimate contact with French contralto Pauline Viardot, the mistress of his friend, Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, and his attitude towards her was complex – essentially he was wary of what he regarded as her malign influence on Turgenev.

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However, he commented that she was ‘a most fascinating and interesting woman’, but that he found her musical evenings dull because ‘she herself sings so little’. However, when Viardot sang it was ‘superb’; she sang ‘a scene from Gluck’s Alcestis, which was the finest piece of musical declamation, of a grandly tragic sort, that I can conceive’.21 There are many other such descriptions of female singers scattered throughout his work, and therefore turning James’s Juliana into a celebrated singer might not be such a leap of imagination, and the transposition ultimately does little violence to James’s novella and is certainly appropriate in terms of the ubiquity of the figure of the prima donna in the fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite whatever inherent subtlety and ambiguity might be lost in the transposition of novella to opera, the theatrical force of the operatic performance would surely have appealed to James who deeply yearned, but in vain, for success on the dramatic stage. His fascinating characters, and the novella itself, take on a vibrant new existence, albeit in a different medium. Argento’s opera effectively dramatises contemporary opera’s strong connections with the nineteenth century while offering an example of the continuing potential and viability of the art form; he is aided by James’s consistent engagement with opera performance in his fiction, even if only obliquely as in The Aspern Papers. James’s text offers Argento access to the artistic world of the nineteenth century which is brought to life for a contemporary audience. Reading the literature of the nineteenth century through late twentieth-century operatic practice offers insights into both art forms.

Notes 1. Leon Edel, ‘Henry James and the Performing Arts’, The Henry James Review, 10 (2) (1989), 105–11 (p. 106). 2. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 45–6. 3. See Michael Halliwell, Opera and the Novel: The Case of Henry James (New York, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). 4. In a piling on of coincidence, another operatic version of the story by Philip Hageman was premièred on exactly the same day at Northwestern University. Argento’s opera, first staged in Dallas in 1988, has recently been restaged in a twenty-fifth anniversary performance by the Dallas Opera (2013). 5. Henry James, ‘From Chambéry to Milan’, in Italian Hours, ed. John Auchard (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1947/74), pp. 77–87 (p. 87). 6. Henry James, ‘Preface’ to The Aspern Papers; and The Turn of the Screw, ed. Anthony Curtis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 27–42 (p. 31). 7. Quoted in Nelly Valtat-Comet, ‘From Novella to Opera: Dominick Argento’s The Aspern Papers’, in E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde Anglophone. The Reception of Henry James in Text and Image, 3 (2) (2005) [accessed 5 April 2014]. 8. James, ‘Preface’, p. 48. 9. Jeanne Campbell Reesman, ‘“The Deepest Depths of the Artificial”: Attacking Women and Reality in The Aspern Papers’, The Henry James Review, 19 (1998), 148–65 (p. 158). 10. Lawrence B. Holland, The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 154. 11. Quoted in James Helme Sutcliffe, ‘The Argento Papers’, Opera News, 53 (5) (November 1988), 14–18 (p. 18). 12. Quoted in Benjamin Ivry, ‘Portrait of an Author’, Opera News, 3 (5) (November 1988), 20–2 (p. 20).

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13. James, ‘Preface’, p. 125. The equivalent moment in the opera has Juliana hissing these same words ‘passionately, furiously’ (Dominick Argento, The Aspern Papers (New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1987), p. 124). Significantly they are not sung – the spoken discourse disrupts expectation and increases their intensity. 14. Argento, p. 129. 15. Implicit is also the figure of Maria Callas, perhaps the most celebrated twentieth-century opera singer. One of her most famous roles was the title figure in Luigi Cherubini’s opera, Medea, but she also made a film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini based on Euripides’s Medea. 16. Luciano Berio, ‘Of Sounds and Images’, trans. David Osmond-Smith, Cambridge Opera Journal, 9 (3) (1997), 295–9 (p. 298). 17. Argento, pp. 96–7. 18. Peter Conrad, A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera (New York: Poseidon Press, 1987), p. 26. 19. Theodor Adorno, ‘Bourgeois Opera’, trans. David J. Levin, in Opera through Other Eyes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 25–43 (p. 40). 20. Ivry, p. 22. 21. Ibid.

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37 Opera in Nineteenth-Century Italian Fiction: Reading ‘Senso’ Cormac Newark

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eaders of this volume, if familiar with Camillo Boito’s 1880s story ‘Senso’, are likely to be so mainly – perhaps only – as viewers: through its 1954 film adaptation by Luchino Visconti.1 The latter is deservedly famous, in particular its striking opening scene, which is set at the Fenice opera house in Venice in 1866, shortly before the second battle of Custoza.2 The Austrian soldiers, in white uniforms, are clearly identifiable in the (high-status) stalls and boxes, and so are the Italian civilian patriots, thanks to the camera-work revealing what is transpiring in the (low-status) gallery during the performance. Playing on stage is a work so well known as to need no introduction: Il trovatore by Giuseppe Verdi.3 After the initial credits, which are read against the backdrop of the chapel scene, with Manrico about to wed Leonora, the action of the film begins just as he strides downstage, all thoughts of marriage now put aside, to sing his showstopping cabaletta, ‘Di quella pira’.4 As the applause begins to die down, nationalist protests strike up in the auditorium with the rallying-cry ‘Fuori lo straniero da Venezia!’ (‘Foreigners out of Venice!’). At that signal, pamphlets and bouquets in the red, white and green of the Italian tricolour rain down from all around the gallery. This vivid spectacle has become iconic, not only of Italian cinema – in whose history it represents an important landmark as one of the first large-scale productions in colour – but also of aspects of Italian-ness more broadly.5 It was re-enacted at the Rome opera house in 2011, when a performance to mark the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy was disrupted by members of the audience protesting at a different kind of attack on national identity: cuts to the arts budget that threatened the very existence of Italian culture (i.e. opera).6 Although no historical record survives of the events at La Fenice described by Visconti, his dramatisation of the protest, in particular of the careful preparation necessary to its impact, rings true. As an arena for political activity, the opera house was an important part of nineteenth-century public life all over Europe. Most routinely cited in this context are the popular demonstrations that followed Auber’s La Muette de Portici in Brussels in September 1830,7 but similar protests took place in other countries, and, despite relatively authoritarian controls, Italy was no exception.8 The relationship between what is happening on stage and events in the auditorium is also plausible: although the politicised reaction to Il trovatore is shown in the film not to be spontaneous – just as in 1830, notwithstanding the myth, Belgian independence from the Netherlands did not derive only from the stirring effect of the duet ‘Amour sacré de la patrie’ (‘Sacred love of the fatherland’) in Act 2 of La Muette – it is nevertheless an intelligible response. It makes sense as a reflection of the Italians’ identity as an

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oppressed people without a homeland, for the scene from Il trovatore represented in Visconti’s film is that in which Manrico, outraged to learn that his mother, a gypsy, has been taken prisoner by the haughty Count Luna and is about to be burnt as a witch, aligns himself unequivocally with the socially, economically and racially downtrodden people who raised him. It also makes sense as a direct textual exhortation to the Italians in the audience: Manrico calls his followers together for an immediate rescue attempt and they leave shouting ‘All’armi!’ (‘To arms!’). Most of all, it makes sense musically: his final, heroic top C is a rousing incitement to action.9 By the time Boito was writing, moreover, there was already a precedent, well-established across Europe, for literary representations of Italian opera as Italian political inspiration. Honoré de Balzac’s novella Massimilla Doni (1837–9) famously describes a performance, also at La Fenice, of Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto and its patriotic effect on citizens of various parts of the peninsula.10 In George Meredith’s novel Vittoria (1867), the eponymous heroine sings a similarly rousing aria at La Scala in Milan.11 These and many other examples attest to the existence of a widely shared idea of the close relationship between lyric stage performance and what might be called the historical romance of the Risorgimento. Or, rather, they demonstrate that – then as now – representations of Italian unification, whether dramatic (the process of unification), poetic (the idea of unification) or commemorative, seem almost inevitably to feature representations of Italian opera, too. In light of all this it seems surprising that Boito’s story does not, in fact, portray a scene at La Fenice or any other theatre, or even any singing at all. Visconti’s elaborate invention was also not the only major change he made to Boito’s text, for various more or less ideological reasons, cinematic, narrative and political. To the original story of Livia (a countess from Trento) and her lover Remigio Ruz (a lieutenant in the Austrian army) he added an extended sub-plot involving Roberto, Livia’s cousin, a committed Italian nationalist and leader of a group of partisan fighters at Custoza. The scene in which Roberto’s irregulars are rejected by the royalist Italian army, causing him to reflect bitterly that the war is not about unification but class and regional division, fell foul of state censorship – in much the same way as nineteenth-century opera frequently did – and was deleted.12 Visconti also left viewers in no doubt that Livia is a traitor (as well as an adulteress and a murderously jealous lover), but her national identity was originally much more nuanced: although Boito’s story is predicated on the contested status of Lombardy-Venetia, it seems relatively clear that his Livia has always thought of herself as a citizen of Imperial Austria.13 More straightforwardly, but perhaps just as significantly, Visconti dispensed with Boito’s narrative frame, in which Livia is writing the story down in a notebook sixteen years after the events described – that is, in 1883, the present day of Boito’s first readers. Visconti’s scene at La Fenice, then, may derive from a decidedly twentieth-century, and decidedly visual, idea of the Risorgimento. But for all the reasons touched on above, opera nevertheless remains a crucial interpretative context for reading ‘Senso’. Paradoxically, its importance derives precisely from the sharp contrast between the privileged place of opera in Visconti’s lavish costume-drama adaptation and the single brief – but meaningful – reference to it in Boito’s text, and from what this contrast says about the relationship between opera, fiction and history in post-unification Italian culture. Boito’s own view of the latter no doubt owed something to personal experience: although only twelve years old at the time, he had actually seen active service in 1848 during the so-called First War of Italian Independence (when the first battle at Custoza was fought). By the time of

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‘Senso’, however, it was a view from distance: he fled Venice shortly after the renewal of hostilities in 1859 (the Second War of Italian Independence). While his account of events in ‘Senso’ (i.e. of the Third War of Italian Independence) is thus in one sense an authentic document of the Risorgimento, it is, like Livia’s, an account after the fact, containing elements transposed, as if by senile lapse of memory, from one campaign to another, and in any case written in light of what happened next. Nevertheless, Boito’s use of musical local colour is artfully redolent not only of the time and place, but also of the traditions of opera in fiction he had inherited. The scene is iconically Venetian, and exquisitely aloof from the brutal military action only a few days’ march away. Livia has begun to betray her husband, a member of the Tyrolean nobility forty years her senior, with the handsome but (she readily admits) self-centred and cowardly Remigio. It is a liaison doomed to end badly, and later Livia, having helped Remigio bribe the regimental doctor to invalid him out of the fighting, will discover his faithlessness and betray him in turn, leading to his summary execution by firing squad. But for the moment all is sensual pleasure: La seggiola di paglia su cui mi adagiavo in Piazza San Marco diventava un trono; credevo che la banda militare, la quale suonava i valzer degli Strauss e le melodie del Meyerbeer innanzi alle Procuratie vecchie, indirizzasse la sua musica soltanto a me, e mi sembrava che il cielo azzurro e i monumenti antichi godessero della mia contentezza.14 (The straw seat on which I lounged in St Mark’s Square became a throne; I believed that the military band, which played waltzes by the Strausses and tunes by Meyerbeer in front of the Old Procuracies, was directing its music only towards me, and it seemed to me as if the blue sky and the antique monuments took pleasure in my happiness.) This is the same inward, solipsistic, quintessentially nineteenth-century listening experience as that enjoyed by, say, Emma Bovary.15 It is also an excellent example of how the soundtracks (as it were) of fiction never fade into the background as they can do in film, but rather attract attention, intertextual and contextual, to themselves. It is what Livia is listening to that is most interesting: alongside the eminently – in the context even exaggeratedly – Austrian music represented by Viennese waltzes, operatic excerpts by Giacomo Meyerbeer. Born in Berlin, trained in Italy and settled in Paris, this enormously successful composer represented more than any other the increasingly international nature of operatic style, and in a story set against the nuances of national and regional identity that made Italian unification so problematic, the idiom of opera, the pre-eminent home cultural product, is clearly significant. There are many similar questions of language and translation woven into the fabric of ‘Senso’. For instance, it is difficult not to notice the numerous different currencies mentioned in the story, apparently designed to stand for various more subtle transactions between the communities.16 Then there is a more fundamental confrontation when the Austrian general asks Livia if she is German (which in this context really means Austrian) and she replies that she is ‘trentina’ (i.e. from the Trentino or South Tyrol, even today considered part of a transnational ‘Euroregion’).17 In a nod to the translating nature of fiction – its national coding, but also its ability to cross borders easily – the doyen of Parisian social fiction Paul de Kock

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is rendered as the Italo-Germanic-sounding ‘Paolo di Koch’.18 And at the very end, the soldier who spits in Livia’s face for what she has done is from another part of the empire entirely: Bohemia.19 Boito wrote in Italian throughout, but the reader is surely supposed to understand that all the characters must be communicating in German, the historical lingua franca of the region.20 Opera, which of course already had its own history of national and linguistic politics, is especially important to the sense of ‘Senso’. Meyerbeer’s presence in Boito’s story reminds us that just when opera needed to be straightforwardly Italian, in Venice and indeed all over the peninsula, it no longer was. This is not a point about national or regional taste, still less about Austrian administrations favouring Germanic music (or simply music that was not too Italian). Rather, Meyerbeer’s name metonymically invokes the relationship between political and cultural allegiance, and – as here – how the two may easily be made to collapse into one another or (with just a little more scrutiny) pull apart suggestively. For in 1865–6, the year in which ‘Senso’ is set, the repertoire brought to mind by Boito’s tantalisingly unspecific reference would not have been Meyerbeer’s first Italian triumphs: Margherita d’Anjou for Milan, even Emma di Resburgo and Il crociato in Egitto for Venice itself.21 These works were all more than forty years old. Still less would it have been his early failures in Germany.22 Rather, it would have been his immensely influential Parisian grands opéras: Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, Le Prophète and, for the really up-to-date reader, L’Africaine, produced posthumously in Paris just the previous April.23 While it was Wagner whom critics and native composers most often held responsible for the stylistic encroachment on Italian opera, Meyerbeerian grand opéra had a much more profound impact in the decades immediately following Il trovatore. In response to this Parisian fashion, which carried with it implications for every aspect of operatic aesthetics, there even emerged a national version, opera-ballo, which was to occupy the attention of the coming generation of Italian composers.24 The significance of these developments for a reading of ‘Senso’ is that they show the extent to which opera, too, was contested territory. The battle was conducted on more than one front: opera production, critical reception and national cultural discourse more broadly. The combatants were composers, librettists, critics, intellectuals and politicians, all groups that overlapped considerably with each other, and what was being attacked or defended – depending on one’s point of view – was nothing less than the new national identity.25 Yet the question was not as simple as a national tradition and its exports in an increasingly aggressive international market. There were Italians for whom the glorious inheritance of Rossini and Verdi was something that needed to be dismantled rather than preserved, let alone built upon. Boito’s own brother, Arrigo, who in the 1860s was both a composer and a librettist working with other radical young composers, was a significant figure among the iconoclastic ‘scapigliati’ (literally, ‘the ones with dishevelled hair’) in Milan during this period.26 The revisionist tendencies of Scapigliatura are keenly felt in ‘Senso’: in its problematisation of cultural and national identity, its refusal to be seduced by the romance of the Risorgimento, and above all its rehearsal of the very process of revision. Livia’s narrative is about looking back with a clear eye, stripping away the accretions of the intervening period, in which, it turns out, she has lost some of her beauty and Italy some of its illusions. Her purpose is to record, unashamed, what it was really like in those turbulent times and what people’s motives really were – although not to any constructive end. Even as she remembers she emphasises her inclination to forgetfulness,

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and even as she writes she promises that no one will ever read her account: her papers are to be burnt after her death, a duty which she suggestively assigns to her husband, despite his being so much older than she is.27 The irony, so beautifully played out in Visconti’s process of adaptation, is that her story is itself susceptible to revision – both aesthetic (hijacking it in the name of spectacle) and political (for all its sumptuous colours, the film is much more a black-and-white fable of class and loyalty). For those interested in narratives, of historical change and musical reception alike, what stands out most clearly in Visconti’s assertion of the right of the ‘right’ opera to speak for the Risorgimento is the extreme interpretative contingency of, in the phrase I used earlier, ‘what makes sense musically’ when it comes to opera in fiction. Certainly ‘Senso’ is operatic; since Visconti, generations of cinema-goers would surely agree. But perhaps it is ‘operatic’ less in the sense that is easily translatable into the director’s big-screen aesthetic (opulently costumed tableaux, crowd scenes featuring hundreds of performers) than in its rich conception of narrative (long political and familial backstories, intractable situations). No doubt Visconti thought Senso just had to have a scene at the opera: not only (ironically) to make it more cinematic, but also to make it a more joined-up story of nineteenth-century Italian-ness. Reading Boito shows us, on the contrary, that opera has something to tell us about Italian history precisely on account of its own nineteenth-century discontinuities.

Notes 1. Boito (1836–1914) published the work, often described as a novella, in Senso: Nuove storielle vane (Milan: Treves, 1883), pp. 261–318, his second, ‘new’, collection of ‘vain little stories’ (‘vain’ in the sense of ‘idle’). Visconti’s film, starring Alida Valli and Farley Granger, was released at the Venice Film Festival in September 1954; references are to the restored and remastered edition, Cristaldifilm PSV8118G (2004). 2. Fought about eighty miles from Venice on 24 June 1866. 3. The opening credits specify a ‘commento musicale’ (‘musical commentary’), Bruckner’s Symphony no. 7 in E major, but not the music actually heard while they are rolling (1’09”). Il trovatore had its première in Rome in 1853, and quickly established itself as one of Verdi’s most enduringly popular works. 4. The last part of the tenor’s aria in Act 3, scene 6: it begins with the cantabile ‘Ah sì, ben mio coll’essere’ and the tempo di mezzo, with which the film opens, is ‘L’onda de’ suoni mistici’, sung by tenor and soprano together. 5. The very first Italian film in colour is usually cited as Totò a colori (Totò in Colour), directed by Stefano Vanzina and released in April 1952. 6. Among the slogans on the pamphlets were ‘Italy, rise up (“Italia risorgi”, i.e. in echo of “Risorgimento”) in the defence of patrimony and culture’ and ‘Opera, unifying identity of Italy throughout the world’. The incident was widely reported; for the relevant article in the English-language edition of the Corriere della Sera (Milan), see (Valerio Cappelli, trans. Giles Watson) [accessed 18 November 2019]. 7. See Sonia Slatin, ‘Opera and Revolution: La Muette de Portici and the Belgian Revolution of 1830 Revisited’, Journal of Musicological Research, 3 (1979), 45–62. 8. See, for example, my ‘“In Italy We Don’t Have the Means for Illusion”: Grand opéra in Nineteenth-Century Bologna’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 19 (2007), 199–222, apropos of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. 9. Although not in the score, the high note had been part of standard performance practice for more than half a century.

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10. The first chapter was published in 1837, the second, ‘Une représentation du Mosè de Rossini à Venise’, in 1839 in La France Musicale (25 August 1839). See Honoré de Balzac, Massimilla Doni (Paris: Hippolyte Souverain, 1839), pp. 151–83. 11. See Phyllis Weliver, ‘Imagining 1848 Risorgimento Opera Production in Vittoria’, in her The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, Culture and Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 110–29. 12. See C. Paul Sellors, ‘Senso’, in The Cinema of Italy, ed. Giorgio Bertellini (London: Wallflower, 2004), pp. 62–71 (pp. 64–8); also Torunn Haaland, Italian Neorealist Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 146–66. 13. For example, when she refers to Verona as ‘still ours’ (i.e. under Austrian control): ‘Senso’, p. 295. Trentino did not become part of Italy until 1919. 14. ‘Senso’, p. 274. The Strauss family – Johann (1804–1849) and his sons, especially Johann the younger (1825–1899) and Josef (1827–1870) – had cornered the market in Viennese dance music by the early 1830s. 15. Gustave Flaubert, ‘Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province’, first published serially in the Revue de Paris (1 October–15 December 1856) and subsequently in volume form (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1857); chapter 15 is set at the Théâtre des Arts in Rouen. The ‘soirée à l’opéra’ (‘evening at the opera’) was a familiar trope in nineteenth-century French literature; see my Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 16. References to coins in the story are variously to the long-established and familiar Italian ‘lire’, early nineteenth-century French ‘napoléons’, post-unification ‘merenghi’ and Habsburg ‘fiorini’. 17. ‘Senso’, p. 314. For more on Euroregions, see the Association of European Border Regions website [accessed 19 August 2016]. 18. Charles Paul de Kock (1793–1871), author of around a hundred novels, plays and libretti, was even more popular abroad than in France; his work became a widely cited touchstone of Parisian life. 19. ‘Senso’, p. 318. 20. Or, just conceivably, Ladin, the minority language spoken near the Trentino–Venetia border. In Visconti the situation is even more complicated: Livia’s husband speaks (subtitled) German, while the lines of Livia and Remigio (Granger was American) are delivered in English, in accordance with the practice of the time, and dubbed into Italian. 21. Emma di Resburgo (Teatro San Benedetto, 1819); Margherita d’Anjou (La Scala, 1820); Il crociato in Egitto (La Fenice, 1824). 22. Jephthas Gelübde (Munich, 1812); Wirth und Gast (Stuttgart, 1813). 23. Robert le diable (Opéra, 1831); Les Huguenots (Opéra, 1836); Le Prophète (Opéra, 1849); L’Africaine (Opéra, 1865). Meyerbeer had died in May 1864. 24. Ponchielli, Catalani, Marchetti, et al.; see Jay Nicolaisen, Italian Opera in Transition, 1871–1893 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980). 25. This is thoroughly explored in Alessandro Roccatagliati, ‘Opera, opera-ballo e grand opéra: commistioni stilistiche e recezione critica nell’Italia teatrale di secondo ottocento (1860–70)’, in Opera e libretto II: Studi di musica veneta, ed. Gianfranco Folena, Giovanni Morelli and Maria Teresa Muraro (Florence: Olschki, 1993), pp. 283–349. As is well known, cultural figureheads, including composers such as Verdi, became senators and even deputies in the new parliament following the declaration of unification in 1861. 26. See Rosa Solinas, ‘Arrigo Boito: The Legacy of Scapigliatura’ (DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 1999); he wrote libretti for (among others) Franco Faccio and, much later, Verdi, as well as his own Mefistofele (La Scala, 1868; rev. Bologna, 1875) and Nerone, unfinished at his death in 1918. 27. She repeatedly refers to her inability to recall details (of a poem by Parini, of the battle in which her first suitor was killed in 1859); see ‘Senso’, pp. 263, 266 and elsewhere.

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N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U RY F I C T I O N A N D M U S I C

38 Stendhal at La Scala: The Birth of Musical Fandom Gillen D’Arcy Wood

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he increasingly commercial, professionalised character of music in the early nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new, uniquely modern category of audience: the fan.1 The post-Napoleonic opera fan, in particular – an aggressive bourgeois animal – articulated a form of ‘emotionally involved and invested’ listening distinct from the more casual forms of consumption associated with pre-revolutionary music performance, and began through journalism and sheer ticket purchasing power to assume the role of tastemaker in metropolitan musical fashion.2 With opera less and less an exclusive court entertainment after 1815, public opera houses became increasingly politicised social spaces, while opera fandom, for many, ‘trumpeted a model of selfhood that stressed personal fulfillment and social mobility’.3 The liberalisation of the opera houses in turn spurred an increasing literacy of musical appreciation. With Europe reopened in 1815, the stage was set for a sparkling new dialogue between music and literature. No one better embodied this newly liberalised form of musical listening and advocacy than the French critic and novelist Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal (1783–1842). From his first ecstatic opera-going experience in Milan as an officer of Napoleon’s invading army in 1800, Stendhal became an inveterate maven of opera at La Scala, San Carlo (Naples) and numerous provincial opera houses across Italy. Over the ensuing two decades, he fashioned himself in the salons of Paris and Milan as a walking, talking archive of Italian opera scores, performances, singers and styles. ‘[My] ear has been trained,’ he boasted, ‘through the medium of a couple of hundred performances at the opera buffa.’4 Post-1815, Italian opera embodied, for some liberals, the elitist court rituals and aesthetic values of the bygone ancien régime. For others, such as Stendhal, the pleasures of the opera house represented an indispensable cultural prerogative of the emerging metropolitan ruling class. He lived in an age when musical listening, of itself, could be a revolutionary act. From 1816 onward, he patronised the opera boxes of the most prominent liberals in Milan, where he met sympathisers of the carbonari, including Lord Byron. Music’s political dangers would later become a leitmotif of his fiction. Clélia, in La Chartreuse de Parme, communicates to the imprisoned Fabrizio through

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recitative, prompting her jailer father to ban all music from the precincts of the Tower, ‘le général craignait que toute cette musique, don’t les sons pouvaient pénétrer jusque dans les cachots les plus profonds, réservés aux plus noirs libéraux, ne contînt des signaux’ (‘the General feared that all this music, whose sounds could penetrate to the deepest dungeons reserved for the blackest Liberals, might contain signals’).5 Not educated in music, and with an impressionistic rather than technical approach to criticism, Stendhal nevertheless became a prominent music journalist in Paris in the 1820s (with publication also in Britain), and was Rossini’s first and highly influential biographer. Opera, for Stendhal, served as a synecdoche for the inimitable pleasures of Italy as a whole – its art, landscape and culture. Following Rousseau, he declared French an unmusical language, and his compatriots the ‘least musical race on earth’.6 In Italy, by contrast, music was the ‘sole living art’, where the natives lived according to a regime of the passions unknown to rational northern Europeans.7 Unsurprisingly, Stendhal’s opinions were unpopular in Paris, where his championing of Cimarosa, Mozart and Rossini above the claims of French opera made his music journalism, at best, a succés de scandale, ‘I denounce myself a Rossiniste de 1815!’ he declared defiantly.8 For much of his lifetime, Stendhal was better known to his contemporaries as a controversial music critic than for the novels for which he earned enduring posthumous fame, namely Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839). Nevertheless, as we shall see, the latter novel in particular bears a strong imprint of Stendhal’s lifelong passion for music. Musical fandom, in the embryonic form of Stendhal’s era, emerged as a reaction against the depersonalisation of musical listening at the vast new opera houses and concert halls of the early 1800s. Not content with silent and anonymous participation in the crowd, and disgusted by the dry pedantry of the connoisseurs, opera devotees such as Stendhal insisted on their right ‘to creatively imbue their participation in musical life with a lasting personal connection and depth of feeling’.9 For the genuine fan, music is more than mere entertainment, it is the soundtrack of one’s life. So it was for Stendhal who, in his pseudonymous autobiography, La Vie de Henry Brulard (1890), recalls his first evening at La Scala, where he witnessed a performance of Cimarosa’s popular Il Matrimonio segreto (1792), an opera he heard over a hundred times. The intense recollection of that listening experience – its soul-making power – was, for the novelist, as much an event as the performance itself. Stendhal cherished the memory of ‘divine happiness’ and ‘pleasure’ that filled his teenage self. The sublimity of the music rendered his recent battlefield horrors unimportant, and inspired in him a resolution to ‘live his life!’ and ‘devote his life to music!!’10 As this characteristic account suggests, musical listening, for Stendhal, was a physical rather than intellectual experience. ‘The purpose of music,’ he stated baldly, ‘is to inspire physical pleasure.’11 Stendhal involves music in the contemporary cult of emotions, with jacobinical overtones, ‘There is nothing in the world more futile than arguing about music. Either one feels it, or one does not.’12 Stendhal’s insistence on the personal nature of musical experience amounts, at times, to a triumphant solipsism of music, ‘Great music is nothing but our emotion.’13 This is the modern music fan’s assertion of proprietorial rights over his favourite performers, composers and scores – an implicit protest against emerging mass market forces in the publication and performance of music.

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For all his emphasis on wordless emotion as the ideal of listening, Stendhal nevertheless found abundant occasion to develop an elaborate vocabulary of musical experience for which pleasure, entwined with erotic desire, was the keynote. In his famous essay De l’Amour (1821), Stendhal places the pleasures of music and love on a continuum. A night of bliss spent at the opera is ‘proof that music, when perfect, has the same effect on the heart as when in the presence of a lover [. . .] it gives the most vivid impression of happiness available on this earth’.14 Music here is more than the sum of listening experiences, however sublime. In his seminal 1992 essay, Lawrence Grossberg connects the pleasures of fandom to a new ‘affective sensibility’ intrinsic to modernity. According to this reading, opera-going signals the eroticisation of politics through music. Obsessive pleasure taken in musical performance can initiate the coming into consciousness of a modern liberal way of being, a ‘site of the optimism, invigoration and passion which are the necessary conditions for any struggle to change the conditions of one’s life’. In Stendhal’s case, operagoing – among other forms of cultural ownership – enfranchised an alienated post-war European generation with ‘control over their affective life [. . .] to invest in new forms of meaning, pleasure and identity in order to cope with new forms of pain, pessimism, frustration, alienation, terror and boredom’.15 Such terms perfectly describe the music of modern life after Waterloo, when for thousands of music fans the banality, energy and rage of metropolitan life under the Restoration found its pitch-perfect voice in the operas of the young Gioachino Rossini. One summer’s day in the early 1810s, Stendhal was strolling through the public gardens of his beloved Milan when his ear was caught by a Mozartian melody performed by a German military band. He gave himself up to the pleasures of ‘melancholy’ he relished in Mozart’s music, but his reverie was rudely broken by the band’s next tune, which disturbed and fascinated him with its energy and light frivolity, like nothing he had ever heard before. On enquiry, he learned the composer was a ‘young man named Rossini’, and that he should certainly see Tancredi (1813), his breakout opera.16 Having heard Rossini’s name and music for the first time, Stendhal found suddenly that he could not escape it. His melodies seemed to be everywhere – in the streets, cafés and ballrooms, as well as at La Scala, which performed his operas six nights a week. Stendhal hastened to see Tancredi, and was as overpowered by the sensation of this new music as he had been by his first experience of Cimarosa a decade and a half before. In Rossini’s radically modern opera seria, Stendhal discovered the perfect union of Italian melody and German harmony (the binary opposition by which most early nineteenth-century commentators categorised contemporary music). Barely twenty years old, the precocious Rossini had ‘seized unerringly upon that exact balance between richness and luxuriance, by which beauty is made more beautiful still’.17 Stendhal’s first introduction to Rossini would mark the high point of his admiration, however. By the time he came to publish his Life of Rossini in 1824, Stendhal’s attitude toward the Italian tyro was decidedly ambivalent. For all its crackling energy, his music came to embody for Stendhal the empty restlessness and vulgarity of modern life in the post-Napoleonic era, ‘In this unquiet, unleisured century of ours, Rossini has one [great] advantage: his music demands no concentration.’ Stendhal could perceive the beginnings of a collective attention deficit disorder in the increasingly commercialised opera sphere.

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In Rossini’s great appeal lay also the greatest danger: his music was too easy to listen to; likewise, on account of his music’s popularity with the masses, ‘it is desperately easy to hear too much of it’. Rossini’s ‘verve’ and ‘stirring rapidity’ lightened the spirit, but in the process rendered all other music ‘dull and heavy’ by comparison, even Stendhal’s beloved Cimarosa and Mozart.18 In the dilemma of his feelings over Rossini, Stendhal experienced a historical bifurcation of sensibility emblematic of his age. His own tastes remained loyal to the more naive beauties of the music of the 1780s and 1790s – Mozart, Cimarosa – while his dawning interest in the greater sociology of music produced the realisation that Rossini spoke for the times and could not be ignored. In the case of the Rossini ‘revolution’, as Stendhal nominated it, he offered his audiences an ear-shattering noise and orchestral complexity they instantly came to crave.

Metastasio and The Charterhouse of Parma By the mid-1820s, even before the success of his Rossini biography, Stendhal had begun to realise that his affective sensibility, forged at La Scala, had evolved beyond musical journalism toward fiction writing. The music of the opera house, Mozart in particular, floats through Armance (1827), his debut novel. A critical moment in the interior development of the hero, Octave de Malivet, is ritualised at the piano, where he plays through a full Act of Don Giovanni until ‘les accords si sombres de Mozart lui rendirent la paix de l’âme’ (‘Mozart’s sombre harmonies brought peace to his soul’).19 In Le Rouge et le Noir, an idealised, Italianate mountain panorama – ‘[les] grands précipices bordés par des bois de chênes’ (‘great precipices surrounded by oak forests’) – reminds Madame Derville of Mozart.20 The seamless conjunction of alpine décor, erotic tension and musical reverie is pure Stendhal, and has prompted generations of critics to look beyond literal references to music in the novels to their syntax, form and general affetto, so powerfully suggestive of the opera buffa. Stendhal’s mature novels owe their unique Italianate atmosphere to his sentimental education in the opera houses of his adopted country. Stendhal’s late masterpiece, The Charterhouse of Parma, composed with Rossinian rapidity in only fifty-two days, also exhibits a pervasive musicality of form and mood. Key scenes of the novel take place at the opera, but it is the seductive grace and ease of the novel’s style – a formal achievement – and the vivid, theatrical deportment of its characters that has drawn comparisons with the Italian opera. Consciously or not, Stendhal fulfils in La Chartreuse de Parme a musico-literary ideal he adumbrated two decades earlier in a biographical essay on the baroque librettist Metastasio, doyen of the eighteenth-century opera stage. To Stendhal, Metastasio was ‘the musician’s poet par excellence’, a status he would, in his own way, aspire to in his fiction.21 Metastasio’s unique achievement as a wordsmith of the opera, according to Stendhal, was to ‘endow his characters with unfailing clarity in their discourse’, by virtue of which they ‘retain scarcely a trace of the drabness of reality’. In The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal’s Metastasian characters – from the mercurial hero Fabrizio del Dongo, to the consummate courtier Count Mosca, to the charismatic Duchess Sanseverina – speak an ‘identical language’ of love besieged by cynicism and intrigue in effortlessly unspooling paragraphs. An affective rhetoric of glorious banality – everything is ‘charming’, ‘divine’, ‘wretched’, ‘enchanting’ – can be traced from Stendhal’s music journalism of the 1820s to the pages of Charterhouse. The aesthetic effect is the very opposite of

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tedium: it endows the action with a luminous suggestiveness reminiscent of theatrical gesture and décor. Stendhal’s characters – modelled on his own opera-going persona – are in love with how they feel, be it inspired by Napoleon, by a lover or by the opera itself.22 ‘“Mais est-ce le souvenir de sa voix que j’aime, ou sa personne?”’ (‘“Is it the memory of her voice I love, or her person?”’), Fabrizio muses, when he finds himself infatuated with a celebrity soprano modelled on Stendhal’s intimate friend Giuditta Pasta.23 The novel’s impassioned protagonists – Fabrizio, Gina, Clélia and Count Mosca – at once antique and modern, acquire theatrical lustre through their elevated discourse and outward actions; ‘upon the rough violence of physical desire’ Stendhal, like Metastasio, ‘bestows a patent of nobility’; at the same time, as in Metastasio’s libretti, Stendhal combines this theatrical heightening with a naturalistic psychological account of his characters’ moods and internal deliberations that ‘adheres to an unfailing truth to nature in [its] portrayal of details’.24 The result is a baroque realism unique to Stendhal, reflective of a sensibility formed in equal parts by the spare lyric sincerity of Metastasian opera and the countervailing ironies of Romantic literary introspection endemic to post-Napoleonic disillusionment. His long, sometimes difficult engagement with the operatic art of Rossini likewise crystallised for Stendhal the aesthetic ideals he would set himself in his fiction writing. Commenting on Rossini’s celebrated L’Italiana in Algeri (1813), Stendhal identified as the keys to its astounding success ‘its speed, its extreme economy, and its lack of turgidity’. Two decades later, with Rossini’s music mostly forgotten, the composer’s economy of style became the blueprint for Stendhal’s narrative orchestrations in his greatest novel. The remarkable scenes of Fabrizio’s battlefield experience at Waterloo in the early chapters of The Charterhouse of Parma, for example, adhere closely to Rossini’s formula, to pulsating effect: Voir arriver la mort n’était rien, entourés d’âmes héroïques et tendres, de nobles amis, qui vous serrent la main au moment du dernier soupir! Mais garder son enthousiasme, entouré de vils frippons!! Fabrice exagérait comme tout homme indigné. Au bout d’un quart d’heure d’attendrissement, il remarqua que les boulets commençaient à arriver jusqu’à la rangée d’arbres à l’ombre desquels il méditait. Il se leva et chercha à s’orienter.25 (To look death in the face was nothing, surrounded by tender and heroic souls, noble friends who clasp your hand at their last gasp! But to preserve your enthusiasm in the midst of vile scoundrels!! Fabrizio was exaggerating, like any offended man. After a quarter of an hour’s sweet self-absorption, he noticed that the bullets were approaching the row of trees shading his meditations. He stood up and tried to figure out where he was.) The multiple voices in this brief passage – fluctuating with Fabrizio’s mood – convey the confused drama of battle, but Stendhal’s irony and resistless prose tempo frame the action as black comedy, pure buffa. This passage – and one could cite almost at random from the text to make the same point – exemplifies Stendhal’s literary attempt to capture the intensity of a Rossini-like musical present (durée) in which there is no before and after – a theatrical authenticity distinct from the contemporary sociopsychological ‘realism’ of a Balzac or Wordsworth. For the reader, it is an opportunity

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to experience the exhilarating sense of freedom Stendhal first enjoyed at La Scala – in fiction as at the opera, art opens the horizon of our own autonomy. Ever since his first delirious experience of Cimarosa’s Il Matrimonio segreto, Stendhal pronounced first-rate opera buffa a supreme art form that offered ‘the most astonishing combination of pleasures; it stimulates both imagination and tenderness, accompanied by insane laughter’.26 Such is the experience of reading The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal’s extraordinary opera-without-music, with its all-consuming cult of love, virtuosic ensembles of intrigue, and a circularity of motion in which characters return again and again to the same predicaments – even the same words. The novel’s tendency to find pleasure in repetition – added to its operatic admixture of pathos and farce – has its origin in the sorts of questions first raised in the author’s mind by Rossini’s music: ‘how [does] the composer create an atmosphere of profound sadness, and at the same time maintain his tone of complete simplicity, and all this – prime necessity of all – without losing speed?’.27 Rossini’s compositional technique was to create momentum through the almost obsessive repetition of short melodic units, against simple harmonies punctuated by sharp rhythmic clusters. The development of formal solutions for producing momentum, for Stendhal, was to solve the mystery of art itself, across all media. The heady tempo of The Charterhouse of Parma is thus not an idiosyncrasy of Stendhal’s late style, or an accident of its frantic composition, but among his premier formal achievements in the novel. To subordinate characters’ will to the often outrageous hazards of intrigue and chance is a standard feature of baroque opera. In Il Matrimonio segreto, the distressed heroine Carolina rails against ‘il ciel tiranno’ (Act 2), while in Tancredi, Rossini subjects his characters to two Acts of ‘la cruda sorte estrema’ (‘the cruel extremes of chance’ – Act 2) then offers a choice of endings, one happy, one sad (both remain in the repertoire), as if to highlight the sheer randomness of operatic pseudo-resolution. So do Stendhal’s heroes, stepped out of a buffa world, find no meaning except in love and are baffled to discover that desire is prey to chance, that happiness is mere happenstance in the modern world order. Destiny, or any linear progress whatever for that matter, belong only to the characters’ illusions (such as Fabrizio’s faith in portents). The present imbroglio is resolved only ever by chance – by a kind of theatrical, comedic accident – as when Fabrizio first makes love to Clélia at the very moment he is to make his escape from the Farnese Tower. Sexual passion interrupted, Fabrizio prepares to die heroically, only to find he has been fortuitously released anyway. The magic of the scene lies in the irony, tending to hilarity, of its hectic events, mixed with the utter sincerity of action and passion of purpose of its characters. Opera offered Stendhal the model of an impassioned world in which lovers are oppressed, and lovers and oppressors alike repeat themselves, unable to shake their roles. When the teenage Stendhal attended his first opera at La Scala in 1800, he stumbled upon what was, arguably, the most modern theatre in the world, with elaborate machinery, lavish mise-en-scène and, of course, superlative singing. The experience changed him forever. Viewing his mature novels as a disciplinary extension of his youthful fandom, we find the opera ‘theatricalised’ his literary art. Stendhal was, in this sense, a serial iconoclast. His aggressive fandom of opera, expressed in his musical journalism, sought to break down traditional distinctions between artists, critics and the public. In his fiction, meanwhile, he discursively traversed media, importing into narrative the rhetoric and affetto of opera and the fine arts.

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A liberal by conscience, Stendhal nevertheless found the aesthetic values of baroque court opera intensely seductive, even as he recognised their obsolescence and borderline ridiculousness. In the end, he made an art form out of the anachronism, with the medieval fortresses and alpine vistas of Italy as his pasteboard scenography of desire. Stendhal’s novels, particularly his virtuosic Charterhouse of Parma, showcase modern modes of literary self-reflection in characters in thrall to a pre-modern logic of the passions, where love and honour, daggers and dungeons, counts and conspiracies – all the beguiling apparatus of the opera – rotate in sublime futility against a sunlit stage.

Notes 1. The word ‘fan’ is an anachronism to the early 1800s, not entering common usage until the century’s end. But the original focus of ‘Fan Studies’ on twentieth-century mass media has now broadened to the nineteenth century, when commodified forms of leisure that predate film, television and pop music introduced new forms of cultural consumption characteristic of fandom. For wider reading related to this topic, see Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Oakland: University of California Press, 1998); Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Benjamin Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 2. ‘Introduction: Why Study Fans?’, in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington (New York: New York University Press, 2007), pp. 1–18 (p. 10). 3. Anna Fishzon, Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Finde-Siècle Russia (New York: Palgrave, 2013), p. 15. See also Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge: University Press, 2010), pp. 118–50. 4. The Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe (London: John Calder, 1970), p. 264. 5. La Chartreuse de Parme, ed. Mariella di Maio (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 434. 6. Life of Rossini, p. 59. 7. Voyages en Italie (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 8, translations mine unless otherwise indicated. 8. Life of Rossini, p. 122. 9. Daniel Cavicchi, ‘Loving Music: Listeners, Entertainments, and the Origins of Music Fandom in Nineteenth-Century America’, in Fandom, ed. Gray, pp. 235–49 (p. 248). 10. Oeuvres intimes, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Pléiade, 1955), p. 387. 11. Lives of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio, ed. Richard N. Coe (London: Calder & Boyars, 1972), p. 209. 12. Life of Rossini, p. 223. 13. Ibid., pp. 404–45. 14. De l’Amour, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Garnier, 1959), p. 39. 15. Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Is there a Fan in the House?: The Affective Sensibility of Fandom’, in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 50–65 (p. 65). 16. See Henry Prunières, ‘Stendhal and Rossini’, The Musical Quarterly, 7 (1921), 133–55 (p. 133). 17. Life of Rossini, p. 62. 18. Ibid., pp. 404–45. 19. Armance, ed. Christophe Mercier (Paris: P. O. L. Editeur, 1992), p. 27.

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436 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

gillen d’arcy wood Le Rouge et le Noir, ed. Michel Crouzet (Paris: Flammarion, 1964), p. 74. La Chartreuse de Parme, p. 209. Ibid., pp. 223, 210, 212. Ibid., p. 216. Ibid., pp. 211, 213. Ibid., p. 102. Histoire de la peinture en Italie, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Le Divan, 1929), II, p. 172. La Chartreuse de Parme, pp. 80–1.

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39 George Eliot, Schubert and the Cosmopolitan Music of DANIEL DERONDA Delia da Sousa Correa

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ANIEL DERONDA (1876) is both Eliot’s most musical and her most cosmopolitan work; indeed, its cosmopolitanism derives substantially from its musical characters and allusions. In the character of the musical maestro Julius Klesmer, Eliot unites a figure of Wagnerian stature with that of the ‘Wandering Jew’.1 In 1855, Eliot had provided possibly the first sympathetic account of Wagner’s operatic theories for the English press.2 This chapter argues that in Daniel Deronda, twenty years on, she proposes a recuperative cosmopolitanism that can incorporate Wagner’s ‘music of the future’, without unduly privileging it. In her novel she makes implicit allusions to a variety of international, frequently Jewish, composers and performers, such as Anton Rubinstein. This promotes a cosmopolitan vision that is potentially redemptive of the philistinism of British culture. Explicit allusions to Liszt and Mendelssohn also contribute to the musical-cosmopolitan threads in the novel.3 Less immediately conspicuous, but also significant for its cosmopolitan reach, is the music of Franz Schubert (1797–1828), arguably a formative influence on Eliot from her first travels to the Continent with her partner, the scientist and philosopher George Henry Lewes. Eliot’s association of Schubert with Klesmer reflects her awareness of the posthumous revival of interest in his music, and that she shared in the re-estimation of his output that had been promoted by Schumann and Brahms, but with which Wagner did not concur. ‘Herr Klesmer is something more than a pianist,’ says Catherine Arrowpoint, his pupil and future wife, ‘He is a great musician in the fullest sense of the word. He will rank with Schubert and Mendelssohn’ (p. 224). This statement follows close on her explanation that Klesmer holds ‘cosmopolitan ideas’ and ‘looks forward to a fusion of the races’ (p. 224). At the same time, the music of Daniel Deronda also underpins the future Zionist enterprise that will become Deronda’s vocation.4 We are told that both Deronda and Mirah, his future wife, perform Schubert (p. 406). Thus Schubert is implicated in the ways that Eliot’s portrayals of music and musicians inflect the international and domestic themes of her novel. The association of her characters with Schubert takes on additional significance because Schubert, unlike Wagner, is consistently listed amongst the German composers Eliot loves best. Although she was one of the first champions of Wagner in England and admired his ideas about drama, having been introduced to them by Liszt during her visit to Weimar in 1854, her response to his music was ambivalent and she found composers like Schubert far more engaging. She doubtless heard in his music something of the Wordsworthian ‘speech of men’ that she savoured in Beethoven,

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in contrast to what she called the ‘glums and gowries’ of Wagner’s music.5 In 1870, Lewes wrote they had ‘come to the conclusion that the Music of the future is not for us – Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck or even Verdi – but not Wagner – is what we are made to respond to’.6 Eliot’s letters and diaries for the two decades or so before she wrote Daniel Deronda reveal just how consistently she admired Schubert’s music and valorised the idea of his genius within the context of his somewhat varied reputation in Europe over the decades of her writing life. An early journal entry shows Eliot responding to a powerful relationship between music and speech in Schubert’s music. On her 1854–5 visit to Berlin with Lewes, she heard Schubert’s setting of ‘Erlkönig’ (1815) sung by the French tenor Gustave-Hippolyte Roger. Eliot was particularly moved by his ‘not to be forgotten’ performance: He gave the full effect to Schubert’s beautiful and dramatic music, and his way of falling from melody into awestruck speech in the final words ‘war todt’, abides with one. I never felt so thoroughly the beauty of that divine ballad before.7 There seems to be something particularly significant in Eliot’s account of the Sprechstimme, the ‘speech-like voice’ employed by Roger, ‘his way of falling from melody into awestruck speech’ in the final line of Schubert’s dramatic setting of Goethe’s poem – as if this bridging of song and speech performs something fundamental to Eliot’s own formation of a literary language, especially in relation to Daniel Deronda, where music so often spans different modes of perception and expands them beyond familiar systems of explanation. The scholar Mordecai, in proleptic anticipation of his first sight of Deronda rowing out of the haze on the Thames, feels landscape and thought blend together as if by ‘a fine symphony’ (p. 442). A more extended example of musically-inspired communion has already occurred in chapter 17 of the novel when Deronda first meets Mirah, their recognition of one another via a fragment from Rossini’s Otello that Deronda is singing anticipating their first spoken exchange.8 Roger’s performance of Schubert and Goethe’s uncanny ballad seems to have encapsulated Eliot’s sense of the relationship between the music that she loved and her own creative medium, with literature as ‘awestruck speech’ to the elusive ‘melody’ that inspires it. Some of the significance to Eliot, as a writer, of her listening experience in Berlin becomes apparent a year later, when she makes Schubert the point of comparison with the poetry of Robert Browning; the terms of her comparison indicating that she valued the originality and uniqueness of Schubert’s music as well as the beauty and dramatic power noted in her account of Roger’s singing. ‘Turning from the ordinary literature of the day to such a writer as Browning,’ she wrote in her 1856 review of Men and Women, ‘is like turning from Flotow’s music, made up of well-pieced shreds and patches, to the distinct individuality of Chopin’s Studies or Schubert’s Songs.’9 The work of European composers had become a yard-stick for her assessment of English culture in advance of her career as a novelist. Eliot’s experience of listening to Schubert’s music was closely enmeshed with other parts of her life, including her passionate interest in science. In Munich with Lewes in 1858, she enjoyed Schubert songs performed ‘with much taste and feeling’ by the wife of ‘the great anatomist’ von Siebold, von Siebold himself playing the ‘difficult

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accompaniments’.10 The convergence of music with the rest of her social and intellectual experience was also a feature of Eliot’s life at home in London. Several of the literary and scientific figures who attended the evening parties she held with Lewes were competent musicians, with Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, Herbert Spencer and others joining in the singing. Describing one such ‘charming musical evening’ to her stepson Charles Lee Lewes in 1859, Eliot ended her account with, ‘Schubert’s songs [. . .] I especially delight in: but, as you say, they are difficult.’11 ‘Difficult’ here alludes firstly to her own experience as a performer. Schubert features in a list of music that she requests her stepson Charles Lee Lewes to buy for her in October 1868, and her first biographer, Mathilde Blind, recorded, ‘George Eliot’s sympathetic rendering of her favourite composers, particularly Beethoven and Schubert was always delightful to her friends [. . .] many an exquisite passage scattered up and down her works bears witness to her heartfelt appreciation of music, which seems to have had a more intimate attraction for her than the fine arts.’12 Schubert’s music certainly remained of immense personal importance to Eliot. During 1869, she would play either Schubert or Beethoven to Lewes’s son Thornton, who had returned home from Africa mortally ill.13 A decade later, on the first anniversary of G. H. Lewes’s death, a line in her diary for 8 September 1879 reads simply ‘Darwin. Schubert’.14 ‘Darwin’ may denote a visitor, rather than his books. Schubert she had presumably been playing at the piano. The two names register the twin passion for science and music that had united her with Lewes as much as their love of literature. Arguably there is a particular significance in the musical name. Eliot’s engagement with contemporary science was self-evidently of ongoing importance, not least because she was assiduous in preparing Lewes’s unfinished work for posthumous publication. But Schubert was an entirely personal choice on this dark anniversary, the composer who best offered an expression of her love of Lewes and her grief for the soulmate who shared her passion for music, and who frequently recorded his particular delight in performances of Schubert during their final decade together. Since Schubert was important to Eliot from early on in her career, through to the height of her fame, the allusions to his music in her letters and fiction can be usefully framed within the wider context of his reputation in Europe. Eliot and Lewes’s experiences of listening to Schubert appear to have been unusually diverse for their time. For, despite a flurry of posthumous publication, Schubert was still generally best known as a composer of songs and short piano works (with the songs themselves frequently heard in piano transcriptions).15 However, in their years in London, Eliot and Lewes heard a wide range of his music, instrumental as well as vocal, performed in a variety of public and private contexts, including the Saturday concerts at St James’s Hall during the 1860s and, particularly during the 1870s, at private concerts held by friends such as the Liberal politician Frederick Lehmann, or the artist Frederic Leighton. A stellar and cosmopolitan array of musicians played at these concerts and gatherings, including the violinist Joseph Joachim who, like Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, contributed very energetically to the promotion of Schubert’s music.16 (Other musicians performing were the cellist Carlo Alfredo Piatti and Charles Hallé, renowned as a pianist as well as a conductor.) The repertoire played is often noted in Eliot and Lewes’s diaries. On Saturday 8 March 1868, for example, Eliot records hearing ‘Joachim and Piatti with Schubert’s Ottett’ and on

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Saturday 20 February 1869 ‘A glorious concert, Hallé, Joachim and Piatti, winding up with Schubert’s Trio’.17 Lewes’s diary also makes numerous references to hearing Schubert’s chamber works, recording at least some of the occasions on which they would have heard this music. Eliot’s fascination with the stream of posthumous publication of Schubert’s work, which had continued from the 1830s through to the 1870s, manifests itself in four lines in her 1871 poem about the singer ‘Armgart’.18 Schubert, too, wrote for silence; half his work Lay like a frozen Rhine till summers came That warmed the grass above him. Even so His music lives now with a mighty youth. In feeling the poignancy – and irony – of so much of Schubert’s music having lain in silence, to emerge with youthful vigour and purpose as the sun warmed his grave, Eliot evinced a more European and more cosmopolitan appreciation of Schubert than the music critic for the Times, J. W. Davison, who was somewhat scornful of this apparently never-ending supply of newly published work appearing under Brahms’s editorship.19 Schubert’s date of birth preceded Eliot’s by only twenty-one years and, with so much of his music coming to light during her own adulthood, it is all the more apt that she regarded him as a standard-bearer for an art of contemporary importance. This is significant because Eliot’s allusions to Schubert in Daniel Deronda all turn out, on close scrutiny, to be more interesting and less conventional than they might at first appear – and thus of greater resonance for a critical reading of this novel. Eliot’s love of Schubert might in some respects be regarded as indicative of a fairly conservative taste in music, a view that Eliot’s own comments on Wagner quoted above might be seen to support, especially as she followed them with an evolutionary quip, joking that her ears were at a ‘tad-pole’ stage of development.20 However, from Eliot’s recorded responses to Schubert’s music, we know that when she chose to associate Schubert with the characters of her musical maestro Klesmer, the novel’s hero Deronda and its Jewish heroine Mirah, she was linking them to music that she regarded as supremely dramatic, expressive and original, and which she experienced in the cosmopolitan contexts both of her visits to Europe and her cultural life in London. In its published form, Daniel Deronda does not specify precisely which works by Schubert were performed by its characters. However, in the original draft of the novel, Eliot had included a reference to a specific Schubert song which she subsequently revised. In the final novel, there are two critical moments when Mirah sings Beethoven’s ‘Per Pietà non dirmi addio’ (p. 344). Originally, Mirah was to have performed, not Beethoven, but the final song of Schwanengesang, ‘Abschied’, which Eliot gives its French title: ‘She sang Schubert’s “Adieu”, filling out its long notes’ (p. 344, n. 1). At the suggestion of Charles Lee Lewes, Eliot changed the reference to a song by her other favourite composer, Beethoven.21 Beethoven’s song was certainly more closely relevant to Mirah’s situation in the novel at the point where she fears that Deronda is about to abandon her. However, although ‘Abschied’ no longer features in the completed novel, Eliot’s original choice of Schubert left its imprint on the text of Daniel Deronda. It is clear that Schubert is a constant in Mirah’s repertoire. When Deronda asks her to sing,

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she does so ‘willingly, singing with ready memory various things by Gordigiani and Schubert’ (p. 345).22 Later, Deronda specifically singles out her skill in the singing of Schubert to advertise her suitability as a teacher for the daughters of his aristocratic acquaintance: ‘You who put up with my singing of Schubert would be enchanted with hers,’ Deronda assures them (p. 406). Daniel declares that Mirah’s musicianship offers a much needed ‘model of feminine singing’ (p. 406). No doubt Schubert may have seemed a particularly appropriate composer for her in this regard, since by the 1870s his chief reputation was as a composer of works best suited to domestic performance, not least, according to Scott Messing, because of the way in which Robert Schumann’s description, in an important essay of 1838, of Schubert’s sensitive ‘Mädchencharakter’ (‘feminine – or ‘girlish’ character’) had come to predominate assessments of his music.23 A domestic and feminised view of Schubert ostensibly makes his music an obvious choice for Mirah, whose exquisite voice the mighty Klesmer has deemed as suitable for a drawing room but not for larger public spaces (pp. 452–3). In this context, allusions to Schubert’s music help to make Mirah’s professional musicianship respectable. Readers from Henry James onwards have tended to mock, or squirm with discomfort at the ‘domestic’ performance space given Mirah in the novel. While this is understandable, it is worth noting that the kind of musical parties Eliot herself attended at the time of writing Daniel Deronda were gatherings of the nation’s social and artistic elite at which guests were entertained by internationally acclaimed professional musicians. The concerts envisaged in the novel are situated far closer to the cusp of public and private than we might imagine when we read about Mirah not objecting to sing at ‘private parties or concerts’ (p. 406). In the 1838 essay just mentioned, in which Schumann identified Schubert’s sensitivity and interiority as feminine characteristics when set against the giant Beethoven, he also asserted that, compared with anyone other than Beethoven, Schubert was ‘man enough, the boldest and freest, indeed, of all the newer musicians’.24 This aspect of Schumann’s assessment of Schubert gained less traction, but Scott Messing, in his book Schubert in the European Imagination, is convinced that Schumann’s intention was to propose an androgynous ideal for the Romantic artist, a view that finds correspondences in Lawrence Kramer’s analysis, mentioned in my introduction to this part of the volume, of Schubert as a composer whose music explored new modes of subjectivity and sexuality.25 It is paradoxical that, whilst Schumann was set on drawing attention to the originality and vigour of Schubert’s music, his identification of this ‘Mädchencharakter’ became firmly attached to the image of Schubert as a composer whose small-scale song and piano repertoire was regarded as representing a form of Romanticism that did not disrupt or endanger domestic limits. It is not certain whether Eliot read Schumann’s essay, although she was reading the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the periodical that Schumann founded and edited, during the 1850s, and drew material from this publication for her own 1855 article on Liszt and Wagner for Fraser’s Magazine.26 Although it is not clear how far back her reading of the Neue Zeitschrift went, there are certainly strong affinities with Schumann’s views of Schubert in what Eliot says about him. Both writers identify the youthful appeal, to which Eliot alludes in the lines from ‘Armgart’ quoted above.27 Schumann frequently stresses the originality of Schubert’s compositions, and this aspect, not as yet widely associated with Schubert’s music in Britain, is emphasised in the review of Browning also already quoted; Eliot wrote this review

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shortly after she is first known to have read the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Significantly, in the passage from Daniel Deronda quoted at the start of this essay, Klesmer is described as a future Schubert in order to defend him against the criticism of a rich businessman; Eliot’s representation here of Schubert as a bulwark against philistinism on Klesmer’s behalf also echoes Schumann’s war against philistinism in both his journalism and his music. There is nothing to suggest that Eliot ever viewed Schubert as a lesser composer of melodic invention essentially suited to the domestic sphere. With both Eliot’s hero and his future wife as singers of Schubert, the contrary is indicated, for she makes Schubert central to the repertoire of the founders of the future Zionist state. And it is not insignificant that Eliot should have coupled Schubert’s name with Mendelssohn’s when speaking of Klesmer’s alternative vision of a cosmopolitan fusion of races. Klesmer’s association with Mendelssohn has already marked him out as one distinguished by ‘that fervour of creative work and theoretic belief which pierces the whole future of a life with the light of congruous, devoted purpose’, a view of Mendelssohn consonant with his elevated stature in Britain at the time (p. 222). Schubert keeps company with those whose destiny it is to shape the future. This indicates a more heroic stature than seems to have been common in most representations of Schubert at the time. Eliot’s direct experience of the cosmopolitan musical life of London may have had a bearing on this. She and Lewes greatly looked forward to Joachim’s regular visits to London and the intensification of high-quality music-making that ensued.28 These visits certainly increased the range of Schubert’s music that Eliot heard. We know that Lewes was in the habit of leaping up to demand further Schubert at private recitals; it is tempting to imagine that Eliot must have been party to discussions of Schubert amongst the musicians with whom she socialised, and that this will have amplified the high regard in which she already held his music. How we would love to hear that talk! However, regardless of whether this was the case or not, her references to Schubert are in sympathy with Joachim and Brahms’s view of the composer, and are an implicit rebuttal of the opinion held by Wagner, amongst others, that the intimacy and melodic appeal of Schubert’s compositions excluded them from partaking of the music – and thus the wider political and cultural life – of the future. Both Richard and Cosima Wagner indicated that they regarded Schubert as a composer of merely melodic gifts. Wagner had written dismissively of Schubert’s new popularity in Paris during the 1840s. During the 1860s, he was derisive of Brahms and Joachim’s championing of newly discovered work by Schubert. Wagner accused Brahms of advocating ‘a return to the melody of Schubert’s songs’ and Joachim of expecting ‘a new Messiah for music in general’ – imputing that this was a status that Joachim wanted to claim for Schubert, or indeed himself; he went on to provide a crude amplification of the anti-Semitic implications of this view, commenting that if ‘it should come to pass that he himself is the Messiah, he may, at all events, rest assured the Jews will not crucify him’.29 When read against Wagner’s invective, Eliot’s positioning of Schubert in Daniel Deronda, as a composer whose music will assuredly be performed by Deronda and Mirah in the new Zionist state, does not seem insignificant, regardless of whether hers was a conscious intervention in contemporary debates about the music of the future (about which debates she was certainly better informed than most and to which she

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had previously contributed in her 1850s journalism). Whereas Schubert continued to have a reputation chiefly associated with the domestic or homeland in later writers such as Thomas Mann,30 for Eliot he is also aligned with a progressive vision of the future. Notwithstanding the way in which Deronda’s description of Mirah’s singing as an ideal combination of ‘first rate teaching’ and ‘instinct’ offers an accommodation of feminine ideals and professional standards which has discomforted later readers (p. 406), close attention to allusions to Schubert in this intricate novel aids an understanding that Eliot’s portrayal of the domestic in its relation to the public and political may be less conventional and less apologetic than is sometimes assumed. We ought to recognise the considerable claims that are being made on Mirah’s behalf. She may not be permitted to be a full-blown prima donna, but she is a professional woman artist none the less. Moreover she is Jewish. Thus, on the one hand, allusions to Schubert help to lend respectability to her future role in Deronda’s Zionist enterprise and, on the other hand, the artistic claims implied by the connection with Schubert are far more challenging than is at first apparent, when we understand that in Eliot’s eyes – and ears – Schubert was so much more than a composer of modestly domestic and feminised works. Mirah, after all, is to play a role in a political future, unlike Deronda’s mother, the prima donna Alcharisi, whose loss of voice leaves her impotent.31 Eliot’s emphasis on the difficulty of Schubert’s music also seems significant in relation to her commitment to depth and complexity in her own craft. In this respect, difficulty might be a good thing, with which the delight experienced by the listener or reader is not unconnected.32 With literary references to Schubert’s music in works by women writers generally occurring within popular short stories,33 Eliot is certainly unusual in giving Schubert a significant place within a full-scale work of fiction. Schubert would seem to occupy a special niche within her poetics of the novel. Just as Klesmer is so much ‘more than a pianist’, so Schubert is much more to Eliot than a composer of innocuous pieces safe for domestic performance. Since for her he was clearly an original genius, the standards of musicianship represented by Mirah’s singing of Schubert thus entail a greater claim for the feminine and for female artistry – and a more fundamental reform of English aesthetic sensibilities and domestic ideals – than is ostensibly suggested by Deronda’s account of it as a good example of ‘feminine singing’. Eliot’s references to Schubert are part of a fabric of cultural allusion that helps to underpin the legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise and provides connection with the cosmopolitan genius of Klesmer. Schubert, it might be argued, provides something of a feminine, poeticised correlative for the more muscular creative genius claimed by Klesmer on behalf of the novel. In this respect, the association of Schubert with Deronda himself seems particularly apt, given that Deronda is repeatedly described in the novel as possessing feminine powers of empathy and affection, a further indication that this is a novel where both gender and the domestic are subject to a subtly radical scrutiny. Eliot’s allusions to Schubert can be viewed as contributing to the extent to which the novel’s musical allusions destabilise gender conventions and the bourgeois domestic categories with which the scope of women’s artistic lives, and of the realist novel genre itself, were both so closely bound. Thus, Schubert has a place in Eliot’s envisioning of the novel of the future. Given Schubert’s quiet, yet potent resonance in Daniel Deronda, there is a nice affinity between Eliot’s representation, in ‘Armgart’, of Schubert’s music frozen in silence until released into the soundscape by posthumous publication, and the silently

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vibrating harp which, for Deronda, symbolises unknown Jewish inheritance: ‘a cunningly-wrought musical instrument’, which is ‘never played on, but [. . .] under the right touch, gives music (pp. 697–8). Schubert has a haunting presence within the pervasive musicality which in Daniel Deronda is associated so closely, not only with the novel’s political themes but also with uncanny moments of coincidence and clairvoyant communication that expand the limits of Realism. Eliot intended everything in her extraordinary final novel ‘to be related to everything else there’,34 thus allusions to Schubert reverberate more extensively than is immediately apparent. The stature of his music in its own right, and as emblematic of the subtle affective power to which Eliot aspired in her own writing, had endured from the instant when she heard, in Roget’s transition ‘from melody into awestruck speech’, something that came close to realising an impossible but longed-for unity of music and the medium of her own art. Finally, there exists a physical reverberation that allows an unprecedented connection to be made between our present-day listening experience and Eliot’s own. In the late 1870s, Eliot recorded her delight at hearing the young baritone George Henschel.35 Born in what was then German Silesia of Polish-Jewish parentage, Henschel, later most famous as a conductor, trained initially as a pianist. Like Joachim and others, he belonged to the international and cosmopolitan artistic circles in which Eliot and Lewes also moved. He became a friend of Frederic Leighton’s, and frequently joined the performers for concerts at Leighton House and at other venues where Eliot and Lewes heard him sing. They left enraptured comments on his performances.36 Henschel, in turn, left an endearing account of Eliot, with her ‘low musical voice and very gentle, charming way of talking’, and Lewes, with his excited insistence on hearing one song after another.37 Henschel, who was in his late twenties when Eliot heard him sing, and is among possible inspirations for the character of Deronda, lived until 1934. In 1928, he made a selection of recordings; even in his late seventies, the voice they preserve is extraordinarily fresh. His accounts of Lieder by Schubert, Loewe and others, with Henschel accompanying himself at the piano, are considerably faster than modern renditions, with very sparing use of embellishments such as vibrato or portamento (the slides between notes favoured by many singers of the period). Their vigour and disciplined restraint are amongst the qualities that make these performances moving – and are a salutary reminder of attributes not always sufficiently acknowledged in later characterisations of Eliot and her contemporaries. Thus uniquely, we have access to an example of what Eliot heard in Schubert, an echo that may convey something more profound than the few material relics and photographs that also constitute the traces of her life. The music that we also love helps to make her writing live for us now. Our musical tastes and modes of listening may have altered, but in certain crucial ways they perhaps endure. That we share a great deal as listeners to Schubert seems indisputable if we find it enthralling and poignant to admit into our current soundscape this ghost of a voice that delighted Eliot herself 150 years ago.

Notes 1. Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1876, repr. 1984), p. 224. All further references are to this edition and will be provided in the text. 2. See ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’, Fraser’s Magazine (1855); reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge, 1963), pp. 96–122.

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3. All the musicians listed here are implicated in Eliot’s portrayal of Klesmer. ‘We shall so like to renew our acquaintance with Klesmer – whom we met at Weimar in ’54!’, wrote G. H. Lewes in 1876 at the prospect of their dining with Rubinstein whilst Eliot was completing Daniel Deronda; The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1954–78), IX, pp. 176–7. In the novel, Klesmer is ‘not yet a Liszt’ (p. 220). His ideas about musical progress echo those of Wagner, and this association is confirmed when another character asserts his preference for music that ‘is not addressed to the ears of the future’ (p. 93). His stature as a musician and noble being is modelled above all on that of Mendelssohn (p. 222). For more detailed discussions of Klesmer, see my George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 4. Schubert is the subject of this essay, but this applies to the music of the novel more widely. The mythologised relationship between the operas of Verdi and the Italian Risorgimento forms a parable for the Zionist project anticipated in this 1876 novel. When Eliot’s Jewish singer Mirah performs a fictional ode to Italy as an analogue for the current loss and future revival of Israel, this adroitly mirrors the way in which Verdi’s chorus of Hebrew Slaves in Nabucco (1842) had, by the time Eliot was writing, become widely identified with Italian nationalist aspirations (pp. 451–2). For a discussion of the theme of vocation in Daniel Deronda and other of Eliot’s novels, see my chapter on ‘Voice and Vocation in the Novels of George Eliot’ in On Voice, ed. Walter Bernhart and Lawrence Kramer, Word and Music Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), XIII, pp. 105–16. 5. Essays, ed. Pinney, p. 103. 6. Letters, V, p. 85. 7. The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 251. 8. For a discussion of Daniel Deronda and opera, see my article on ‘George Eliot and the “Expressiveness of Opera”’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 48 (2), Special Issue on ‘Opera and the Novel’ (April 2012), 164–77. 9. From Eliot’s review of Browning’s Men and Women, in the Westminster Review (1856); reprinted in Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 349, 350. Friedrich Flotow (1812–1883) was a fashionable German composer. 10. Letters, II, p. 454. 11. Ibid., III, p. 178. 12. Ibid., IV, pp. 478–9. Mathilde Blind, George Eliot, Eminent Women Series, ed. John H. Ingram (London: W. H. Allen, 1883) p. 24. 13. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, repr. 1985), p. 418. 14. Journals, p. 180. 15. See Scott Messing, Schubert in the European Imagination, 2 vols (New York: Rochester, 2006, 2007), I, pp. 122, 79. 16. For an account of Brahms’s editorial work during the 1860s and Joachim’s role in promoting Schubert’s music, see Messing, e.g. pp. 78, 173. 17. Journals, pp. 132, 135 (The Octet in F major, D. 803 was composed in 1824; possibly the Trio heard was no. 2 in E flat major for piano, violin and violoncello, D. 929, one of the last compositions completed by Schubert in November 1827.) 18. George Eliot, ‘Armgart’ (1871), Collected Poems, ed. Lucien Jenkins (London: Skoob, 1989), p. 149. 19. Davison had remarked in 1839 on ‘the posthumous diligence of the song writer, F. Schubert, who while one would think his ashes repose in peace in Vienna, is still making eternal new songs, and putting drawing-rooms in commotion’. Quoted in Messing, pp. 105–6. 20. ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’, p. 102.

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21. Eliot wrote to Charles Lee Lewes on 11 March 1875 thanking him for a list of suggestions for musical allusion in Daniel Deronda; Letters, VI, p. 184. 22. Luigi Gordigiani (1806–1860) was a Tuscan opera and song composer sometimes called the Italian Schubert. 23. Quoted in Messing, p. 9. 24. Quoted in ibid. 25. See ibid., pp. 3–4, 25; Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1, 10. 26. See n. 2 above. 27. For Schumann’s reflections on the youthful attractions of Schubert’s work, see Messing, p. 18. 28. In 1878 Eliot wrote, ‘We have been having much musical pleasure of late, this being the time of Joachim’s visit to England’; Letters, VII, p. 18. 29. Richard Wagner, ‘On Conducting’ (1869), trans. Edward Dannreuther (London: William Reeves, 1887), quoted in Messing, p. 106. For more details of the hostility between Joachim and Wagner and Liszt’s ‘new German school’, see Messing, p. 240, n. 59. As Messing comments, Wagner’s views on Schubert amount to an ‘implicit critique that Schubert could hardly provide a fitting model for the music of the future despite his gifts of melodic inspiration’ (p. 73). 30. See Messing, pp. 152–3. 31. Lawrence Kramer, writing about Schubert, suggests that his Lieder often subvert the norms that they appear to follow; this applies to the way in which his music supports the speakers in his songs who are often marginal characters, such as Goethe’s Mignon. Mirah certainly includes traces of Mignon, albeit Eliot grants her personal fulfilment and a political future not accorded the original. See Kramer, Franz Schubert, pp. 3–5. On Mignon’s legacy, including in Daniel Deronda, see Terence Cave, Mignon’s Afterlives: Crossing Cultures from Goethe to the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 32. Letters, III, p. 178. 33. See Messing, p. 122. 34. Letters, VI, p. 290. 35. Letters, VII, pp. 16, 18. 36. Lewes frequently records private parties and concerts during 1877, where Henschel sang ‘finely’, ‘grandly’, ‘superbly’ and ‘divinely’; Letters, IX, p. 188; VI, pp. 355, 363, 373. On 27 March 1878 Eliot writes, ‘a great baritone singer, Henschel, has taken up his abode in London and stirs one’s soul by singing fine Handel and other songs’; Letters, VII, p. 18. 37. George Henschel, Musings and Memories of a Musician (London: Macmillan, 1918), p. 220.

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40 Music in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction: ‘You Must Not Think Me a Hard-Hearted Rationalist’ John Hughes

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n November 1891, Thomas Hardy reflected that ‘[t]he highest flights of the pen are mostly the excursions and revelations of souls unreconciled to life’.1 The tone – rueful, plaintive, dispirited – chimes with time-honoured perceptions of Hardy (1840–1928) the cosmic pessimist, his unsparing pronouncements prompting comparisons with formidable thinkers whose work attracted him: writers like Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, or Darwin. Nonetheless, it is a significant benefit of the recent surge of interest in the role of music in Hardy’s life and work that it has allowed us to shape a more complex and generous view of Hardy’s writing and thought. A moment’s close study of Hardy’s comment above, for instance, reveals the division within it between the ultimately prevailing attitude of sceptical disenchantment, and alternative notions of transport, individuality, lyricism and expressivity that are arguably even more integral to his outlook, and that surface inimitably here through the vocabulary of ‘flights’, ‘excursions’, ‘revelations’ and ‘souls’. Out of such a study of music, then, there emerges an altered – more nuanced and extensive – sense of Hardy’s literary originality, one that turns on noting this generative disjunction within his work between desire – the expressive, relational, individuating powers of the embodied mind – and reflection – the returning, reflexive, private (and privative) determinations of ruminative consciousness. For Hardy, writing perpetually pursues how the self opens and closes between ‘revelations’ of ‘soul’, and the deflations of the rational self who dejectedly takes stock of how social norms or circumstance satirise human hopes. This brief case study of the fiction ranges over Hardy’s novelwriting career to emphasise just how fully and variously he associated musical experience with human expressivity, and to explore the persistence, subtlety, range, diversity and power of his fictional evocations of, and meditations on, musical experience. As it does so, it also plots how far Hardy’s depiction of musical inspiration changed, reflecting the increasingly sardonic and tragic world of his later work. In approaching this, it is worth highlighting how such a perspective allows us to respect the continuities between Hardy’s creative and intellectual lives, and give full measure to his lifelong fascination with the material and affective bases of mind. Much of Hardy’s diligent (often patronisingly dismissed), lifetime philosophical reading is bound up with this. In 1873, he transcribed from Comte’s Social Dynamics the epigram that ‘Thought depends on sensation’,2 and a year or so later he would have come across a passage in Mill’s posthumously published Three Essays on Religion

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that similarly chimes with many of the fundamental themes of his writing – on the physical conditions of subjectivity, and the belated and derived closures of rationality – and whose philosophical elaborations he would later pursue in Bergson, Nietzsche, or William James: ‘That nothing can consciously produce Mind but Mind is self-evident, being involved in the meaning of the words; but that there cannot be unconscious production cannot be assumed.’3 Of course, for these writers also, music itself was often important – as a fact for Bergson, Schopenhauer, Schelling or Nietzsche, or even as a trope for how mind is generated out of sensation, as in von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, where ideation is produced, and consciousness built up, through material vibrations, resonances and rhythms. Such links clearly open Hardy’s work to literary theoretical or feminist readings bent on investigating the philosophical and social dimensions of his work as it critiques normative or cognitive fictions of self-identity. The gathering importance of music to Hardy’s critics reflects its potency in these respects, though it is worth saying that no biographer has ever neglected the centrality of music in Hardy’s life and work.4 Throughout the Life, he himself associates it essentially with human relatedness, community, vitality, joy and expression – a perpetual index of what gives life value and meaning. Memorably, he described his youthful self as ‘of ecstatic temperament, extraordinarily sensitive to music’, and always moved to tears by tunes his father would play on the violin.5 On one occasion, after having played himself for forty-five minutes at a dance, the boy was stopped by the hostess who was fearful that he should break a blood vessel, and at another a bride was ‘so delighted with the music that she kissed him in her white dress as a sign of her pleasure’.6 Throughout the fiction, music works as trigger, vehicle and metaphor for the nonrational, unconscious, physically and affectively conducted powers of the mind or ‘soul’. Mind here is primarily conceived as an embodied capacity of correspondence, response and relatedness, not a seat of rational interiority or volition. It operates through involuntary, surprised, disclosures of selfhood at odds with the workings of self-consciousness because physical, sentient and affective in origin (and ideal in their power of variation). Hardy’s gift as a novelist is his power to surrender, alongside his characters, to imaginative events through which his characters can become themselves in such unforeseen ways through their encounters. In fact, perhaps nowhere can these internal divisions, and the sense of unbridled inspiration, be seen so extremely as in Hardy’s earliest published novel, Desperate Remedies (1871). In an extraordinary scene set in a storm, Hardy places the guileless Cytherea and the would-be seducer Manston together, as the latter plays the organ amidst the ‘elemental strife’, his music acting as a catalyst for romance and desire. He thrills and terrorises her, drawing out involuntary expressions of self through his playing: The varying strains—now loud, now soft; simple, complicated, weird, touching, grand, boisterous, subdued; each phase distinct, yet modulating into the next with a graceful and easy flow—shook and bent her to themselves, as a gushing brook shakes and bends a shadow cast across its surface. The power of the music did not show itself so much by attracting her attention to the subject of the piece, as by taking up and developing as its libretto the poem of her own life and soul, shifting her deeds and intentions from the hands of her judgment and holding them in its own.7

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The writing divides and ramifies, becoming a sensitised, lyrical medium that conveys to the reader not only the variegated qualities of Manston’s virtuosity, but also its affective and erotic effects, as his organ passages display his expert soliciting of her unconscious responsiveness. Music inundates Cytherea’s sensibility, making her forget herself as she manifests to Manston the ‘ideal element in her expressive face’. This revelation of her soul is here not something objectified by any male gaze, however, even Manston’s, since there are only dynamic participants in this musical event, and narrator and reader are equally swept up by this transporting, antiphonal logic of call and response. Yet in spite or because of all the comic inadvertence evident in the writing, the metaphysical reach and modernity of Hardy’s writing appears all the more authentic, even here: to take one aspect, the dislocations of punctual time as Cytherea, Manston, reader and narrator come under the sway of the unfolding musical event, incarnate a dynamic temporality of a kind that anticipates Bergsonian notions of becoming and duration. Often condescendingly dismissed as a charming shambolic youthful work, in fact Desperate Remedies displays throughout this extraordinary and original physical inspiration, however essentially oblivious the narrator might be to the requirements of plot. A similar waywardness of effect, expressing an often comic syncopation between an unfolding, eventual scene and narrative pattern, occurs fascinatingly in so many other ‘minor’ novels like Two on a Tower (1882), A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), A Laodicean (1881) or The Hand of Ethelberta (1876). Hardy, like Cytherea, is often strikingly oblivious to precept and duty when responding to the sway of events and the material intimations of his imagination. So Virginia Woolf registered, with a certain wonder, Hardy’s power as an ‘unconscious’ novelist who is continually ‘taken by surprise’ as he writes, while his characters too are ‘suddenly and without their own consent [. . .] lifted up and swept onwards’.8 Clearly, too, music works as a privileged vehicle for this kind of inspiration, and the romantic, poetic, dramatic and comic effects it yields, and very often Hardy’s plots turn decisively on musical incidents. The Mellstock Choir’s singing helps transfix Dick as he gazes at Fancy in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) while in A Laodicean Somerset, ‘an instrument of no narrow gamut’, follows the sounds of his favourite psalm to see Paula at a baptism, where he is attracted by the way her disclosure of irresolution chimes with his own self-uncertainty.9 Similarly, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Angel’s first awareness of Tess is emphatically musical: reading a musical score, he feels that the outward scene lacked ‘a new note’, before he hears Tess’s own ‘fluty note’, describing her belief ‘that our souls can be made to go out of our bodies when we are alive’.10 It is a further aspect of Hardy’s modernity that his texts continually use such dynamic musical scenes to dislocate socially invested gender positions, the writing conveying relatedness as a counterpoint between two people unfixed from themselves and caught up in unformed, transformative, passages of feeling and selfhood. In its larger motions this corresponds to the recurrent pattern in Hardy’s fiction, ever since his first unpublished novel, The Poor Man and the Lady (1867), whereby a hapless male finds his world and self-possession continually overturned by amorous interest in a woman who herself refuses to be tied down, and who possesses a greater financial independence. A psychoanalytical or feminist critic might ponder at this point how far such dynamics and powerlessness derived from his profound boyhood infatuation

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with Lady Julia Martin. Their singing and music-making helped foment an unequal relationship that arguably provided the imaginative template for this deep-lying socioerotic pattern in the fiction, as for instance in Two on a Tower, where the youthful Swithin and Lady Constantine fall in love. Obviously here one thinks of the relationship of Oak and Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), which from the beginning involves all kinds of inversion of patriarchal roles and precedence. Even though this is such a highly-crafted novel, its narrative power derives from Hardy’s own corresponding surrender of control as he waits on events, and on his characters to reveal themselves (like Oak in the early scenes as he watches Bathsheba). So the final coming together of Oak and Bathsheba is not so much designed by Hardy, as dependent on, precipitated out of, unpredicted physical contingencies, even musical influences. Bathsheba has been contemplating Troy’s grave and listening to the ‘little attenuated voices of the children’ in the choir, learning to sing ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, and feeling herself ‘stirred by emotions which latterly she had assumed to be dead within her’. She is brought to tears, and Hardy charts her feelings – without articulating or naming them – in a passage that is remarkable for its sense of the independent and incalculable life of the characters, and the narrator’s manifold, unfolding inwardness with them: All the impassioned scenes of her brief experiences seemed to revive with added emotion at that moment, and those scenes which had been without emotion during enactment had emotion then. Yet grief came to her rather as a luxury than as the scourge of former times.11 At this point, she finds Oak observing her, and he tells her that he is planning to leave to go to California. This is a crudely implausible plot-device, perhaps, but it crucially registers his independence from her, while bringing to the surface her love and need for him. In the earlier novels (as in the more minor or experimental fictions too) such effects appear instinctively or intuitively produced, as Hardy is taken over by his physical imagination. In such texts the disjunction between scene and plot often meant that desire and romance would be extinguished by the ironic closures of plot in a way that could be alienating or tragic, and which seemed violently imported from a different kind of text altogether, as Hardy’s conscious sense of social restriction conclusively imposed itself. Hence the lowering effect of Ethelberta’s marriage to Lord Mountclere in The Hand of Ethelberta, or Elfride’s death in A Pair of Blue Eyes, or Viviette’s in Two on A Tower. However, in the later novels there is an increasing sense of the centripetal workings of Hardy’s narrative consciousness, evident in a more tragic, conscious determination dictating events and prescribing a tragic patterning of experience evident in the design of the novel throughout. In these novels, musical scenes tend to signify the character’s social predicament. In The Return of the Native (1874), for example, music is identified with Eustacia’s impossible fantasies of romance and escaping Egdon, whereas in The Mayor of Casterbridge its ‘regal power’ for Henchard is an index of how the Old Testament grandeur of his personality involves a tragic inflexibility.12 This sense of an impossible tragic tension inflecting the representation of music can be seen even in Tess, the most romantically invested of all Hardy’s novels. The

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celebrated scene where Tess is transported by Angel’s harp-playing is a set-piece that outwardly compares with the scene above between Cytherea and Manston. It similarly binds together narrator, character and reader through Tess’s sympathetic, ‘exalted’ response: Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound.13 The difference, though, is that the narrator is never forgetful of the over-arching significance of the unfitness between this ‘pure woman’ and her destructive social world. Everything is transfigured and sublimed in association with Tess’s innate and sympathetic susceptibility. The elements of the garden take on mysterious, eloquent qualities, and are expressively arranged around her as she is revealed through her responses to them. The ‘notes’ of the harp pass ‘like breezes’ through Tess, and the motes of pollen appear like musical ‘notes made visible’, while even the ‘rank-smelling weed-flowers’ take on a poetic intentness. In such ways, music functions throughout this novel to produce an exclusive intimacy with Tess, within knowingly unsustainable interludes of hope or romance. One thinks of the passages at Talbothays dairy or the empty mansion – intermezzos whose informing pathos are tragically at odds with the clanging closures of plot and social precept. Tess’s nature and naturalness is revealed through them with a pathos accentuated by the lowering influences of Alec’s predations or of Angel’s hidebound class-consciousness. So, although music is always a means of expressive individuation throughout Hardy’s fiction, its treatment differs according to the particular thematic focus or authorial vision of a text. Often identified in terms of its bitter, explosive critique of marriage and religion, Jude the Obscure (1895) can seem a self-excoriating novel, one in which Hardy seeks pitilessly to outface and scourge the lyrical and romantic susceptibilities evident in Tess and the earlier fiction. In these terms, Jude is the culmination of gathering iconoclastic tendencies in Hardy’s fiction-writing career (as well as perhaps something of a marital cri de coeur for the Hardy helplessly infatuated with society women). In these terms, it is a bitter valediction, one that unremittingly fuses its own spiralling, de-realising enactments of the impossibilities of novelistic form with its intensifying vision of the inhumanity and injustice of Victorian norms of education, class, marriage, religion, gender and sexuality. Accordingly music, and the tender sensitivities associated with it, are endlessly subject to ironic and negative displacement in the book, as when Jude visits the composer of the soulful hymn he so admires, only to discover the man is unfeeling and mercenary. Again, music does not bind Jude and Sue, but only ratchets up the painful disenchantments of a world resistant to the projections of his ‘dark, harmonizing eyes’.14 Opposed to the musical kettle that accompanies Angel and Tess, for instance, one can contrast the kettle which Jude had given to Sue as a wedding-gift and which ‘sang with

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some satire in its note to his mind’ (p. 195). Significantly, at the end of the book, Jude’s death is brought about by a chill resulting from his ‘putting up some stone-work of a music-hall’ (p. 301) and he dies listening to the organ music and bells, and the sounds of Christminster festivity mockingly infiltrating his room from outside. In The Well-Beloved (1897) and the short stories too, desire and knowledge – the ineradicable and incompatible components of Hardy’s imagination – are again all too aware of each other and cohabit unhappily, rubbing each other up the wrong way. Fictional form by this stage of Hardy’s career is a sardonic instrument that more consciously, dispiritedly, reveals the longing for individual expression as a tiresomely automatic, fated, projection. The open-ended, expansive sensitivity that animated earlier texts, conveyed by music, has become hollowed-out and subject to sardonic reversal. So, in The Well-Beloved, this belated and exhausted sense of music finds itself reprised over and over again in this most mechanistic and repetitive of plots. The degradation is evident throughout, as when Pierston overhears, when talking to Nicola Pine-Avon, a ‘sound old melody called “The Jilt’s Hornpipe”’ now ‘twisted about’ and ‘doctored’ into a ‘rollicking air’ played by an organ-grinder.15

Notes 1. Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 240; the quotation in my essay title is from p. 369. 2. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Lennart A. Björk, 2 vols (New York: New York University Press), I, p. 74. 3. William R. Rutland cites this passage from John Stuart Mill’s Three Essays on Religion (1874) in his discussion of Hardy’s reading of the text in Thomas Hardy: A Study of His Writings and their Background (Oxford: Blackwell, 1938), p. 69. 4. For further reading on Hardy and music, see Mark Asquith, Thomas Hardy, Metaphysics and Music (London and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); Joan Grundy, Hardy and the Sister Arts (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979); John Hughes, ‘Ecstatic Sound’: Music and Individuality in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Caroline Jackson-Houlston, ‘Ballads, Songs and Snatches’: The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British 19th-Century Realist Prose (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). 5. Florence Hardy, p. 15. 6. Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (London: Viking, 2006), p. 40. 7. Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 155. 8. Virginia Woolf, ‘Thomas Hardy’s Novels’, in The Common Reader (London: Hogarth, 1959), pp. 247–8. 9. Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 13. 10. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 158–9. 11. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 412. 12. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 296. 13. Thomas Hardy, Tess, p. 162. 14. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics), p. 71. Subsequent references are given within the text. 15. Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1986), p. 66.

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M U S I C , P O E T RY A N D S O N G

41 Music in Romantic and Victorian Poetry Francis O’Gorman

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oes poetry about music make us think more about poetry or more about music? Whatever the answer, poetry that comments on the experience of hearing music certainly encourages the reader to consider what words cannot say about sound. There is a form of deafness in poetry about music. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), writing in Die Sonette an Orpheus (1922), a collection addressed to the most enchanted singer of the classical world, asks: ‘Wer zeigt mit Fingern auf einem Geruch?’ (‘Who points with fingers at a smell?’).1 It is a cognate disjunction between the mode of expression and the matter gestured to, the difference between the pointer and the pointed at, which is involved in putting notes into words, music into language. The Irish political theorist and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797), writing in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), briefly considered music. He admitted it was an art in which he could not say that ‘I have any great skill’.2 And in his inevitably sketchy consideration – music is treated as a species of the beautiful rather than the sublime – Burke found it necessary to approach his subject through poetry. He could not bridge the gap between words and music and was obliged to turn to others’ words instead, to music already mediated. John Milton, Burke said, was ‘perfectly well versed in that art’ and therefore could speak authoritatively about how to express ‘the affections of one sense by metaphors taken from another’.3 Burke invokes several mediations: using Milton’s words rather than his own to describe music, he recognises Milton is dealing with metaphors anyway. It was this nexus of poetry and music, the crossing point of two art forms, which seriously interested the nineteenth century. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) was attentive to the significance of music that could not be heard through poetry. ‘The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept’, one of the Hebrew Melodies (1815), was published in editions with the music of Isaac Nathan (1790–1864) and, aptly, with Byron’s words alone. Some of the poems are literally about words separated from sound. ‘The Harp’ considers King David, by long tradition the Psalmist, and the power of an art that is gone: The harp the monarch minstrel swept, The King of men, the loved of Heaven, Which Music hallowed while she wept O’er tones her heart of hearts had given, Redoubled be her tears, its chords are riven!

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francis o’gorman It softened men of iron mould, It gave them virtues not their own; No ear so dull, no soul so cold, That felt not, fired not to the tone, Till David’s Lyre grew mightier than his throne!4

This is a version of the absent sublime that can be marked in words as traces not in memory but in imagination. The chords of King David’s music are ‘riven’, lost, even if, in the Psalms, we still know what the words are. Byron’s poem commemorates an Orpheus in the Underworld – music that is out of our reach, available to us only as fabrication, as unheard sound that cannot be obtained through print. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) wondered about the out-of-reachness of music too and mapped it on to the out-of-reachness of a friend. In ‘To the Rev. W. J. Hort while teaching a Young Lady some Song-Tunes on his Flute’ (1796), Coleridge thought music able, potentially, to conjure a peculiar form of human presence through an unspecified combination of memory and fantasy. He imagines the scene of Dr Hort, his friend, teaching a young lady and looks forward to sensing a companionship through sound: as she bids those thrilling notes aspire (‘Making my fond attunèd heart her lyre’), Thy honour’d form, my Friend! shall reappear, And I will thank thee with a raptur’d tear.5 The poem is in the future tense – the act of imagining has not yet occurred. And the reader does not know if it will. What is certain is distance. Coleridge plots space between himself and his friend; between the present moment and the time when he will find in music that the ‘honour’d form’ has reappeared; between the music that Dr Hort teaches and the actual music that Coleridge expects, strangely, to be able really to hear. And for the reader, in this poem textured from gaps, there is also the irretrievable sound itself that cannot penetrate through language to our ears. Given all of this distancing, it is perhaps no wonder that Coleridge begins his poem with the silencing ‘Hush!’6 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) found the sublime in music rather than the beautiful. Listening to a skylark, he built a rapturous poem from daring acts of imaginative interpretation, a poem about the suggestiveness of the bird’s song rather than the song. Indeed, what the poet actually says in any technical sense about the song of Alauda arvensis is concise indeed: Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.7 What exactly does a skylark sound like? It sounds like ‘profuse strains of unpremeditated art’, Shelley replies, turning birdsong into the ideal, unfettered figure of poetic genius that slips away from the very verbal medium poetry must use. The remoteness

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of natural music as it is hidden behind words becomes, in turn, a sustaining idea in Shelley’s questioning of what this art means. The poet cannot explain to himself exactly, securely, what the bird’s sound is about. Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ (1820) sets up a sequence of similes as it tries to capture essence: the bird or the song is ‘like a cloud of fire’, ‘Like a star of Heaven’, ‘Like a Poet hidden | In the light of thought’; ‘Like a high-born maiden | In a palace-tower’.8 But what, exactly, is it? The world of the bird’s music is known only by correspondences. And the meaning of the bird’s song is an enigma even if its power to move, to stir thought and feeling, is undoubted: What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?9 The song belongs with forms of knowledge outside human certainty. Music figures the limits of the mind. The unreachable nature of music tropes, eloquently, the ungainable nature of higher realms beyond cognition to which the human poet can only yearn. Music is otherness, a loftier state dimly refracted in earthly language like a bright jewel in the murkiest of water. Music’s capacity to suggest the ineffable penetrates far into the nineteenth century. Music’s value in poetry is uniquely associated with what it cannot say or do or be. For Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), music is that which is felt more than heard. In the dreamy landscape of the ‘Choric Song’ from ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ (1832), music flits between the senses with no predominance given to hearing: There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass, Or night-dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes; Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.10 Music ‘lies’ on the spirit as the eyelids rest on tired eyes and, like a narcotic, sound brings sleep. Music is a mysterious power, a kind of touch, best understood as a drug and its soporific gentleness is primarily audible only in the mellow sounds of the ‘Song’ itself, the chimes of Tennyson’s calming – but dimly troubling, resignatory – words. Great world-forces could be sensed or described through music and all the more meaningfully because music did not allow those forces to be analysed too carefully. Affect trumps analysis. Where Coleridge thought music might bring before his mind the presence of an earthly friend, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) ruminated on visions that went beyond even Shelley’s entrancement at what the skylark knew. Swinburne, who appears not to have any wide knowledge of, or extensive interest in, much actual music, had nevertheless a fondness for the work of Richard Wagner (1813–1883).11 In A Century of Roundels (1883), the poet endeavoured to capture in poetry both something of the Unendliche Melodie (never-ending melody) of Wagner’s

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mature music dramas and the distinctive forms of the sublime that Swinburne discerned in Wagner’s music. ‘From the depths of the sea,’ he wrote: from the wellsprings of earth, from the wastes of the midmost night, From the fountains of darkness and tempest and thunder, from heights where the soul would be, The spell of the mage of music evoked their sense, as an unknown light From the depths of the sea. As a vision of heaven from the hollows of ocean, that none but a god might see, Rose out of the silence of things unknown of a presence, a form, a might, And we heard as a prophet that hears God’s message against him, and may not flee. Eye might not endure it, but ear and heart with a rapture of dark delight, With a terror and wonder whose core was joy, and a passion of thought set free, Felt inly the rising of doom divine as a sundawn risen to sight From the depths of the sea.12 Probing like Shelley a sequence of similes or of analogies that link music and what language could say of its effects, Swinburne turns to natural forms – sunlight, great waters, storms – to clinch some of music’s ability to enter both ‘ear and heart’ with a kind of vastness. These are stand-in terms for power, for the magnitude of Wagner’s communicative force, for the immense emotional response that Swinburne has to Wagner’s music. Yet Swinburne, at the same time, tells us nothing about which music this is or what, precisely, it is like: he says nothing of form, rhythm, pitch, timbre, orchestration, the musical score. As Swinburne’s words capture passion more than feeling, they attend to sound more than music. Swinburne was absorbed by forms of human achievement that were both in and out of time.13 He thought, for instance, of great works of art as belonging to a particular moment in history, noting for instance what Shakespeare had learned from Marlowe. He read political poetry – particularly Victor Hugo’s – in relation to the specific historical events, including the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune that prompted Hugo’s L’Année terrible (1872). But he also placed Hugo out of time, reading him as a revolutionary poet who declared permanent truths of human liberty. Much of Swinburne’s own political poetry was distinctive in its up-to-the-minute immersion in what was happening overseas and at home. But it concerns abiding values of freedom and republicanism too, beyond any local issue or particular instant in time. And the notion of enduring music subtly expressed a version of this fascination with art’s relationship with history, with time and what was beyond it. Music came from a particular moment in history, from a composer situated in time, of course. Yet music stretched in Swinburne’s imagination into perpetuity, boundless and unconfined. Swinburne turned to a notion of everlasting music as a figure for the survival of a poet’s art after his death, of the ultimate existence ‘out of time’. This was particularly true in Poems and Ballads, second series (1878). The volume, rich with elegy, includes an exquisite elegy on the death of Barry Cornwall (the poet and lawyer Brian Waller Procter, 1787–1874) that begins:

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In the garden of death, where the singers whose names are deathless One with another make music unheard of men, Where the dead sweet roses fade not of lips long breathless, And the fair eyes shine that shall weep not or change again, Who comes now crowned with the blossom of snow-white years? What music is this that the world of the dead men hears?14 The perpetuity of the garden of death (one of Swinburne’s inventive replacements for anything that looked like a Christian heaven) is marked in music that is both unheard and continuous. And on earth there is sustained and sustaining music, figuratively, too. Barry Cornwall left behind words that last like endless music. So ‘with us’, Swinburne concludes his memorial, ‘shall the music and perfume that die not dwell’.15 Music is an apt metaphor – though not the only one – for art that is in-time and out-of-time, ungraspable but still real, something that belongs in history and can gloriously rise above and out of it. Music is created at a point in time by a nameable individual but it is also world-music, sound without end, the Unendliche Melodie of an artist’s posthumous fame. Music in the air acted for others as a suggestive sign of remembrance, as Coleridge knew, and for where the souls of the departed might be. Voices in the atmosphere suggested a private, intimate version of reassurance about where the dead go, avoiding for a range of reasons the more generalised and less personal language of Christian immortality. Tennyson heard the living voice of his dead friend Arthur Hallam in ‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’ (1861). And, less famously, in ‘Sweet Music in the Wind’ from the first collection of Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1861), the Rev. William Barnes ruminated touchingly on untouchable messages carried through the atmosphere by music that substituted for a human voice. ‘An’ when the plaÿvul aïr do vlee,’ the song concludes: O’ moonlight nights, vrom tree to tree, Or whirl upon the sheäkèn grass, Or rottle at my window glass; Do seem, – as I do hear it pass, – As if thy vaïce did come to tell Me where thy happy soul do dwell, Sweet music in the wind!16 There was something peculiarly useful in the intangibility of music, its capacity to occupy the atmosphere like a spirit, for those wondering about the life beyond, for those thinking about beings that cannot be seen and about the whole domain of what could not be known of the soul but could be believed. Music occupied a crucial theological position in the nineteenth century, compared to a message from God, working as nothing less than a figure for, and even sometimes a replacement of, the promise of heaven. Music that could not be heard implied continuation but, for the agnostic, such absent music echoed with the telling silence of those no longer present. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) cared deeply about music, and some of the most cheerful and affirmative moments in his fiction – albeit often unrealised – are associated with

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ballads and folksongs, dancing and small instrumental bands.17 The history of the Stinsford choir, in which Hardy’s father and grandfather had played, ran in Hardy’s blood-stream. But in ‘To My Father’s Violin’ (1916) from Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917), it was the presence of a musical instrument that confirmed the absence of Hardy’s now dead father. ‘He must do without you now,’ Hardy says to his father’s fiddle: Stir you no more anyhow To yearning concords taught you in your glory; While, your strings a tangled wreck, Once smart drawn, Ten worm-wounds in your neck, Purflings wan With dust-hoar, here alone I sadly con Your present dumbness, shape your olden story.18 Words cannot transmit music for the sister arts speak different languages. But that division, that loss of music in poetry, is turned to poignant and personal significance in this local recognition of what does not – as Swinburne imagined – continue as sound. Hardy’s poem offers dumbness that is not language’s fault but time’s. Of course, the relationship of poetry to music during the nineteenth century, as elsewhere, can be comprehended in terms of the ‘music’ of poetic language itself. We lack better terms for talking about the sounds of poetry than those that are drawn from music. But it is worth remembering, and not for poetry of the nineteenth century alone, that talking about the ‘music’ of poetry can valuably remind us that poetic sound is a form of art that does not necessarily have ‘meaning’ in a verbal sense. It is tempting in poetry criticism to yoke the sound of a line to a particular meaning. ‘Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,’ Tennyson the ‘musical’ poet observes in ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, ‘Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes’. It does not feel critically illegitimate to point to the repeated, elongated vowel of ‘tir’d’ as a small but valuable feature of how Tennyson captures aurally a sense of energies running down, of vitality stretching into slumber, of something gentle fading to rest. Yet the nineteenth-century poet’s awareness of the uncapturable nature of music in words might remind us of the risks of making too much of such associations. The nineteenth-century reflections on the untranslatability of music into words can point usefully to the uncapturable nature of the music of words. Sometimes acoustic patterns in poetry are – acoustic patterns. And sometimes the subtle effects such patterns achieve, influencing the reception of a line of poetry, are part of the nature of verse that cannot easily be converted into something we can merely account for, merely convert into meaning. Swinburne, a critic as well as a poet, was not averse to drawing ‘meaning’ from sound. Yet his comments on the ‘music’ of verse do not exchange sound into sense in any sustained and detailed way. About Charles Baudelaire’s ‘O toi qui de la Mort’ from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), Swinburne noted in a letter to The Spectator in 1862 that the aural properties of the poem were something ‘between wailing and triumph, as it were the blast blown by the trumpets of a brave army in irretrievable defeat’.19 But this is an unusual moment where Swinburne recognises, so to speak, an element of sonic mimeticism (and it is worth observing that he does not exemplify this assertion

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by looking more closely at the verbal habits of Baudelaire’s poem). More characteristically, Swinburne talks of the achievement of Baudelaire’s musical poetry simply in admiring terms: he praises rather than interprets. Concluding his commentary on ‘O toi qui de la Mort’, for instance, Swinburne acknowledges that ‘every verse [of the poem] has the vibration in it of natural sound and pure metal. It is a study of metrical cadence throughout, of wonderful force and variety’.20 This is semantic neutrality. This is recognition of sound as sound; of ‘music’ as part of poetry’s form that undertakes its own work and cannot be replaced by explanation. Robert Browning (1812–1889) wondered hard about efforts to interpret music, to change it into verbal sense. He wrote a number of significant dramatic monologues where the speaker endeavours to extract some form of philosophy or guidance from musical performance, exposing the intellectual procedure to the reader’s scrutiny. In ‘Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha’ (1855), the organist-speaker endeavours to interpret the ‘meaning’ of the fictitious Master Hugues’s five-part fugue. Similarly, in ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ (1855), Browning’s speaker listens to a musician playing one of the real composer Baldassare Galuppi’s keyboard toccatas (we do not know which one). And as he listens, the unnamed speaker endeavours to translate the piece into semantic propositions: What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions — ‘Must we die?’ Those commiserating sevenths — ‘Life might last! we can but try!’ ‘Were you happy?’ — ‘Yes.’ — ‘And are you still as happy?’— ‘Yes. And you?’ — ‘Then, more kisses!’ — ‘Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?’ Hark, the dominant’s persistence till it must be answered to!21 This is seductive. The listener-monologuist turns the music into narrative, transforming sound into human language, conversation, ideas. But is this insight into what the composer intended by his Toccata or into the lively imagination of the listener? Browning’s poem is a challenge in that it silently asks what exactly the act of interpretation is illuminating. ‘After all that has been, or can be said,’ remarks the Newcastle organist, composer and musical theorist Charles Avison in An Essay on Musical Expression (1752), ‘the energy and grace of musical expression is of too delicate a nature to be fixed by words.’22 What exactly, then, is it that music expresses? Browning – who wrote a monologue about Avison too23 – was absorbed by the implications of that challenge. Poetry has long been associated not simply with music but with song. And the nineteenth-century poets were no strangers to the implication of what that meant. This is a great century of hymn-writing, of a practice of verse directly linked with music. There were political hymns (Ebenezer Elliott’s ‘The People’s Anthem’ (1847) remained popular well into the twentieth century) and, prolifically, Christian hymns. The 1861 Hymns Ancient & Modern drew together many whose words and tunes remain familiar. But figuratively the association between poetry and song continued a matter for speculation as the utility of an eighteenth-century conception of the bardic poet became both clichéd and liable to suggest a poet’s redundancy.24 Tennyson, for one, exploited the implications of imagined song, of poetry conceived as music that

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the reader cannot hear, which brings us full circle to the question of the independence of music and poetry. In songs from The Princess (1847), the exquisite finish of Tennyson’s words replaces the music that we as readers can only imagine. As Daniel Karlin has rightly made clear, Tennyson calls on the idea of song only to privilege language, that which is not song.25 The poet invites his reader, in effect, to listen to his verses in the reading experience with a peculiar assiduity because we cannot hear them as a different art form. We attend to what is inaudible and, in turn, ‘hear’ the poetry as poetry with a new clarity, a new attention to words as words. Allowing readers to feel what cannot be known of music through words, nineteenth-century poets inventively reminded readers of the irreducible specificities of these related but decisively different practices of art.

Notes 1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Sonette an Orpheus (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1922), Sonnet XVI. My translation. 2. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: McLean, 1757, repr. 1823), p. 180 of the latter. 3. Ibid., p. 178. 4. Lord Byron, Hebrew Melodies (London: Murray, 1815), p. 5. 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 79. 6. Ibid., p. 78. 7. The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1914), p. 596. 8. Ibid., p. 597. 9. Ibid. 10. Alfred Tennyson, Poems and Plays, ed. T. Herbert Warren and Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 51. 11. For more consideration of Swinburne and music, see Francis O’Gorman, ‘On Not Hearing: Victorian Poetry and Music’, in The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 745–61. On Wagner and the late nineteenth century, see most recently Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 12. Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Century of Roundels (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), p. 30. 13. For a searching investigation of the meaning of ‘out of time’ in relation to Matthew Arnold, see Jane Wright, ‘Matthew Arnold, Out of Time’, in The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Poetry, ed. Bevis, pp. 400–5. 14. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, second series (London: Chatto & Windus, 1878), p. 100. 15. Ibid., p. 103. 16. William Barnes, Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect: First Collection, 4th edn (London: Smith, 1866), p. 49. 17. There is an important discussion of this feature of Hardy in John Hughes, ‘Ecstatic Sound’: Music and Individuality in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). 18. Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 452. On the piano in Hardy, see Regula Hohl Trillini, ‘The Dear Dead Past: The Piano in Victorian and Edwardian Poetry’, in Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa (London: Legenda/MHRA, 2006), pp. 112–24.

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19. [A. C. Swinburne], ‘Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal’, The Spectator, 1784 (6 September 1862), 998–1000 (p. 1000). 20. Ibid. 21. Robert Browning, Men and Women, 2 vols (London: Chapman Hall, 1855), I, pp. 40–1. It is unclear whether the terminological errors in these stanzas are Browning’s or the speaker’s. 22. Charles Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression, 3rd edn (London: Davis, 1752, repr. 1775), p. 71 of the latter. For a consideration of this in relation to ‘Master Hugues’, see Don Perkins, ‘“Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”: Robert Browning’s Other “Avison” Poem’, Newsletter of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada, 12 (1986), 25–38. 23. ‘With Charles Avison’, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, 1887. 24. For a recent consideration of this topic, see Daniel Karlin, The Figure of the Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 25. See ibid., chapter 5.

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42 THE PRINCESS and the Tennysons’ Performance of Childhood Ewan Jones and Phyllis Weliver

T

he intersection between music and literature of the Victorian period has inspired a rich seam of recent scholarly work, which has investigated (among other matters) the practice of text setting, the sociology of concert going, the pervasive trope of music and the ‘melopoetics’ of prosody. Yet this cumulative endeavour has not facilitated a sustained re-evaluation of Tennyson’s work, for all that he is often loosely referred to as ‘the most musical of poets’.1 John Hollander and Francis O’Gorman have pointed to the somewhat vague status that ‘music’ holds within Tennyson’s conception of his sonorous verse-craft;2 and while the previous two decades have witnessed much interest in the various settings and musical adaptations of Tennyson’s work (as parlour ballad, song cycle or popular musical), it has not greatly altered our sense of the laureate’s own technical process or achievement.3 In this dedicated case study, however, we read the complex compositional history of Tennyson’s songs from The Princess, to argue for a far more fundamental and dynamic relationship between poetry and music – a relationship that helps both to consolidate and to complicate some of the recent scholarly trends described above. Tennyson had responded to the cool public and critical response to his long narrative poem (1848), by publishing barely two years later a revised third edition, which among other alterations introduced six intercalated songs. His rationale for so doing was as direct as it was striking: ‘Before the first edition came out’, he declared, ‘I deliberated with myself whether I should put songs between the separate divisions of the poem; again I thought that the poem would explain itself, but the public did not see the drift.’ The six short lyrics were therefore to perform a specific exegetical function: ‘The child is the link through the parts’, Tennyson continued, ‘as shown in the Songs, which are the best interpreters of the poem.’4 Christopher Ricks takes Tennyson’s claim at face value, arguing that ‘of these six songs, all but two explicitly mention children’, and that, as a result, the additions ‘consolid[ate] that aspect of the story which showed the child Aglaïa, and so motherhood, to be the Princess’s fatal miscalculation’.5 On this reading, the superadded lyrics introduce a thematic and expressive tenderness, which rescues a conventional family moral for what might otherwise seem a rather unsettling narrative (wherein the eponymous princess leads a group of women to secede from patriarchal society, with what seems no little justification). Our own analysis, however, reads these songs as part of a variegated compositional process, in which the tension between song and narrative reveals a range of expressive effects far broader than that which Ricks is prepared

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to countenance. We support such a claim in four distinct but interconnected ways: by exposing the often jarring incongruity between the blank verse narrative and the interwoven lyrics; by uncovering several variorum versions of the songs available in manuscript materials; by considering Emily Tennyson’s settings of the songs to music; and by taking into account the eventual use of this material in the education of the Tennysons’ own children. While these six songs do therefore bear directly upon family as such, they do so in an unsuspected variety of ways (ranging from the erotic, to the matrimonial, to the pedagogical), for which music is indispensable. By focusing our analysis upon one particular song – ‘Sweet and Low’ – we aim to shed light on a broader compositional process whose collaborative and dynamic nature has yet to be explored. This process exemplifies a creative interaction between words and music, with implications both for how we interpret relations between the two arts, and for our understanding of how their performance bridges constructions of public and private life. It also bears distinct consequences for the critical treatment and archiving of Victorian literature and music more generally. The third edition of The Princess introduces the six additional lyrics at specific junctures in the ongoing narrative; yet their placement is far from stable or self-evident. One of Tennyson’s own copies of the 1848 first edition, now held in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, demonstrates that fact clearly. The volume was donated by the American composer Jerome Kern, who writes on the inside cover, ‘[t]o my mind one of the most delightful Tennyson items in existence. The poet’s wife selects the places for the songs, + writes them in’.6 Emily Tennyson in fact does more: for she enters the six lyrics in an entirely different order from their eventual sequencing. The variations are shown below (Table 42.1); the two long dashes indicate a pair of long, smudged lines in the Berg copy. The variability of this running order already challenges Tennyson’s claims that ‘song’ discharges a simple exegetical function. Indeed, that claim seems all the shakier when we consider that ‘Sweet and Low’, for instance, would seem to fit more naturally into Emily Tennyson’s provisional sequence, than it does in the subsequent 1850 edition. Were that song to have come in the interval between Parts III and IV, as placed by Emily in the Berg MS, it would follow naturally from a moment of rare intimacy between Princess Ida and the narrating Prince, who walk for a time hand-in-hand. As it stands, however, the lyric occurs at the end of Book II in the 1850 edition, where Table 42.1 Alternative placements of songs from The Princess Berg MS

Third edition (1850)

I ^ II

—

‘As through the Land at Eve We Went’

II ^ III

‘As through the Land at Eve We Went’

‘Sweet and Low’

III ^ IV

‘Sweet and Low’

‘The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls’

IV ^ V

‘The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls’

‘Thy Voice is Heard through Rolling Drums’

V ^ VI

—

‘Home they Brought her Warrior Dead’

VI ^ VII ‘Home they Brought their Warrior Dead’ ‘Ask Me No More’

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it holds an incongruous force so pronounced that it is difficult to believe that it was not in some way intended. Having smuggled themselves into the female university, the Prince and his two compatriots observe the many aspects of the women’s radical education. Prior to the lyric, Tennyson cues a very different kind of music: Six hundred maidens clad in purest white, Before two streams of light from wall to wall, While the great organ almost burst his pipes, Groaning for power, and rolling through the court A low melodious thunder to the sound Of solemn psalms, and silver litanies, The work of Ida, to call down from Heaven A blessing on her labours for the world. (II, ll. 448–55) [II ^ III] Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me; While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps. Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, Father will come to thee soon; Rest, rest, on mother’s breast, Father will come to thee soon; Father will come to his babe in the nest, Silver sails all out of the west Under the silver moon: Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep. It is quite some stretch to get us from the elemental liturgy of the blank verse’s ‘great organ’ to this Theocritan lullaby: where Ida’s matriarchal hymn calls for us to remake the world, ‘Sweet and Low’ tucks us into bed and asks us to wait for daddy’s return. Several of the other lyrics interpolated into the 1850 edition possess a similarly discordant relation to the framing narrative.7 But ‘Sweet and Low’ demonstrates perhaps most clearly the productive tension between would-be lullaby and something rather more disconcerting. To perceive this tension, we need to take into account the wide variety of manuscript and archival material relating to the lyric. One crucial constituent of this scattered repository is a notebook held at the Cambridge University Library, which contains several variorum versions of The Princess songs, and which reveals just how closely they were bound to Tennyson’s ongoing courtship of the-then Emily Sellwood.8 The item takes a curious form: Tennyson commenced it at both ends, filling one side with draft songs and blank verse sections for The Princess, and the other with prose notes on ‘Dun-Dagell Vicarage’, and the ‘History of King Arthur’. Those apparently disparate elements (the mock-epic Princess and solemn Arthurian legend) increasingly interpenetrate, with the

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Figure 42.1 Original manuscript of songs from The Princess, Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 6346, 112r, 113. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library two strands arranged around a curious sketch, which we can confidently attribute to Tennyson’s own hand (Fig. 42.1). One of several artfully torn pages half-reveals the face of a woman; the simple act of turning that page brings it together with the image of a man. This visual form of wish-fulfilment may well shed light on a passage from The Princess, where the Prince declares himself to be ‘but half | Without you; with you, whole; and of those halves | You worthiest’ (IV, ll. 440–2).9 In short, we can conclude that this curious notebook did not only chart the successive developments and frustrations of Tennyson’s courtship; so too did it itself attempt to actuate that courtship: through the pictorial sketch, but also through the frequency with which we know Tennyson to have recited the very same songs to his love. The notebook’s variorum version of ‘Sweet and Low’ (f.17r) represents one of the more obsessively reworked lyrics, in a volume full of obsessive reworking. Where the ‘final’ version found in The Princess implores the wind to blow, ‘While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps’ (II ^ III, l. 8), this alternative omits the child entirely from its first stanza, asking rather for the absent lover to return (‘Home, sweet wind, bring him home’). Given this suggestive blurring between slumbering child and absent lover, we might well speculate that the ‘theme’ of childhood represented not only a means of clarifying The Princess, but also (or rather) a toning-down of what had otherwise been an overly insistent need for female affection: a need that the long poem frequently deflates into bathos. Indeed, these variorum versions frequently commingle the unspecified ‘child’ with Tennyson’s fraught sense of self.

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The acoustical elements of verse prove crucial to this sense that song permits Tennyson a means of channelling his erotic desires and frustrations. ‘Sweet and Low’ holds a strange relation to the preceding blank verse drama of The Princess not only through the explicit theme of music (in the odd transition from the great organ to domestic lullaby), but also through a discordancy at the expressive level: where Tennyson’s insistently iambic patterning (‘Of solemn psalms, and silver litanies’) gives rise to the upswell of triple rhythm (‘Father will come to his babe in the nest’). When we take the variorum versions of these songs in isolation, we find Tennyson further exploring such compulsive rhythms, until they in turn push desire almost to breaking point. A fragment that opens ‘Sir Ralph rode down to the tilting fields’ (f.13), which Tennyson never subsequently published, demonstrates one moment where The Princess’s burlesque begins to interpenetrate somewhat with the wishfully virile heroism of Arthurian legend.10 In the opening sections of The Princess, Sir Ralph is introduced as a ‘good knight’ who fought at Ascalon, who was now merely ‘a broken statue propped against the wall’ (Prologue, p. 99). In this cancelled version, by contrast, Sir Ralph is very much flesh-and-blood: ‘Rolled in dust & dabbled in blood’, he ‘Crack’d [. . .] and hack’d and hewd’. This violent energy accrues an appropriately erotic charge, given that Sir Ralph is ‘true knight & lover’: ‘The Queen of Beauty crown’d his lance | Colourd as she crownd it’. It is difficult not to read the concluding passage – ‘Take her Sir Ralph | Said the King’ – without ourselves mimetically colouring a little. Indeed the force of Tennyson’s erotic fantasy even threatens the poet’s habitual technical mastery. While the bulk of these provisional variorum versions still evince a remarkable command of rhyme and rhythm, here Tennyson’s insistent rhythm threatens to compel the contours of his thought: the fragment abounds with repetition that feels excessive even for a poet so drawn to parallelism (‘Round and round the tilts he rode | he rode round & round’). Far from simply explaining the domestic drama of The Princess, then, song enabled Tennyson to explore a range of often mutually exclusive desires; the subversive desire that is given free rein in these notebook versions is only imperfectly repressed in the subsequent long poem, which helps account for the disjunctive effects that we traced above. Yet as we shall now explore, music holds a still greater and more literal significance, in the shape of Emily Tennyson’s several settings of the same songs. These treatments do not simply ‘render’ a completed text, so much as shape and protract an ongoing compositional process, to which performance of various kinds was already central. We witnessed earlier Emily’s alternative sequencing of The Princess songs, an act that could, at a push, be explained as that of a dutiful amanuensis (perhaps Alfred Tennyson simply vacillated over two or more rival placements). Yet abundant – if previously unexplored – archival material suggests her far more active and varied role in the songs’ extended compositional process. To that end, we turn now to three music manuscript books available at the Tennyson Research Collection in Lincoln, along with a hybrid musical album of popular drawing-room repertoire copied in Emily’s hand, interleaved with her own compositions, arrangements and settings of Tennyson’s poems. Despite the manuscript pages of this last document bearing the amalgamated initials ‘AET’ (for Alfred and Emily Tennyson), Hallam interpreted the creative division of labour in a more one-sided manner: ‘My Mother’s settings of my Father’s Poems were made mostly after she had first heard them read by him; and give the impression of my Father’s reading,’ he notes summarily in the flyleaf.11 When the Polish pianist Natalie Janotha performed her own arrangements of Emily’s settings at a concert at St

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James’s Hall in 1891, the press similarly understood the pieces as mere embellishments of Tennyson’s poetic originals.12 Yet while Emily evidently was concerned to register faithfully her husband’s distinctive vocal performance, her resultant settings move beyond mere transcription: rather, they complicate the lullaby quality of the Princess songs still further. Emily’s engagement with much of the musical material both predates and substantially postdates the third edition of The Princess. In November 1849, during the first breaking-off of their engagement, Tennyson sent her two versions of ‘Sweet and Low’ to choose between (the subsequent published version reflects her preference). She chose the poem that she found to be most ‘song-like’ and set it to music, emphasising on the manuscript pages: ‘Music written before publication of the words’.13 This setting proves one of the most materially worked-over of the songs: it is one of the only AET compositions with both pinned and stitched-in revisions (just as Tennyson himself reworked the song more intensively than any other piece from The Princess). With a pin and white thread, Emily secured a half-page of her first draft atop another full sheet; for the second draft, Emily added a seven-bar piano introduction on a slip of full-width paper, again stitching it in with white thread.14 Decades later, ‘Sweet and Low’ represented the first item in a collection of Emily’s musical settings which Janotha arranged. The score of this song was eventually published in The Girl’s Own Paper of 1895, a year before Emily Tennyson’s death.15 Emily’s setting of ‘Sweet and Low’ extends still further the expressive range of its source text. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of her treatment is the avoidance of conventional cadential formulae, as at the end of the first stanza (Fig. 42.2). The melody’s stepwise descent reserves at least the possibility of a perfect cadence, but is harmonised with only a fleeting dominant within a longer tonic pedal. This avoidance of conventional harmonic cues would appear to be a conscious choice, for the manuscripts elsewhere show clear examples of more conventional endings, as in ‘Home they Brought him’. Emily’s interpretative decision thereby renders the lullaby as a repetitive rocking motion; where cradle songs similarly employ simplified or static harmonies, they typically contrive to distinguish cadence points more clearly. Janotha later took just such an option, arranging ‘Sweet and Low’ in 6/8 as a barcarolle (thereby emphasising the rolling qualities of the rhythm), and updating the harmony with treatments familiar from the contemporary art song of Clara and Robert Schumann (the former having served as Janotha’s teacher). The 3/4 setting is in C major, and the accompaniment takes on the characteristics of the ‘rolling sea’, first in the right and subsequently in the left hand. It ends with a steady rhythm of quarter note chords in both melody and harmony, leading to half and dotted half notes.16 Janotha’s treatment therefore offers more incisive formal articulations compared to Emily’s more fluid original. And when Tennyson himself heard the former’s arrangement, he objected in a specific manner, so as momentarily to check the piece’s smooth progression. A footnote from Janotha explains that ‘Lord Tennyson, when hearing this song remarked at this point, “Stop here! – she kisses him!”’.17 The indicated ‘point’ occurs immediately after ‘While my little one,’ in the middle of line 8, where Janotha inserts a fermata. This sudden interruptive burst of affection – whether belonging to mother or lover – recalls precisely that tumultuous desire which had intermittently risen to the surface of Tennyson’s earlier variorum versions of the very same songs. Might we speculate that he reheard, or even heard for the first time, the force of that

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Figure 42.2 ‘Sweet and Low’, bars 26–50, green cloth ms music book, TRC/Music/5312/2. This item is reproduced by permission of Lincolnshire County Council, UK

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desire in Janotha’s setting (or in what Janotha’s setting omitted)? In any case, this subsequent revision offers a very different treatment from that found in Emily Tennyson’s draft music, which emphasises the stanza break with a rallentando (slowing down), pianissimo, fermata and a one-bar piano interlude. Several of Emily’s further settings, however, demonstrate that she too intuited (and indeed created) an expressive complexity that moved beyond lullaby. However much ‘Sweet and Low’ does accentuate the sentimental aspect of Tennyson’s poem (with its unresolved or disruptive aspects present only in outline), other settings betray a force that the finished Princess would sometimes seek to mitigate. Take, for instance, Emily’s employment of the D flat major key in ‘Home they Brought him Slain with Spears’ (it is in itself significant that she sets this textual variant, rather than the less graphic ‘Home they Brought their Warrior Dead’, which appears in Tennyson’s long poem). D flat major is an unusual key due to its five flats and because D flat minor is not a relative key (as, for example, the six sharps of F sharp major seem less remote, F sharp minor being the relative minor of A major). These chromatic keys were rarely used at the time, and their occasional appearances thus evoked a sense of exoticism, or extreme emotional states. Hugh Macdonald describes ‘the active cultivation by nineteenth-century composers of key character and in particular their belief that a statement in, say, D flat or G flat has a special character which would be destroyed if the music were transposed to D or G’.18 As opposed to what Schubart in his treatise Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1784–5) termed the ‘completely pure’ key of C major (the key of ‘Sweet and Low’), which ‘evokes innocence, artlessness, naiveté, babytalk’, D flat major is ‘[a] squinting key, extreme in suffering and ecstasy [. . .] it cannot howl, only grimace’.19 Macdonald notes the increasing prevalence of such ideas throughout the 1820s and 1830s – precisely at the time, that is to say, that Emily would have been taught music.20 In Emily’s setting of ‘Home they Brought him’, D flat major becomes the setting of a martial procession: ‘Slow march’ she writes at the top of the final version, which is borne out by the dotted-quarter-eighth rhythms of the piano introduction (Fig. 42.3). This emphasis of the military aspect of Tennyson’s lyrics is not incidental, as we can see from the vocal line and accompaniment of ‘Lady Let the Rolling Drums’ (once again, Emily sets a significant textual variant; unlike ‘Thy Voice is Heard through Rolling Drums’, which appears in The Princess, this title implicates female agency in the militant setting). This setting similarly follows a dotted-quarter-eighth martial rhythm, and also includes an element of emotional extremity, in the odd transposition in the last line at the end of the first stanza (‘And gives the battle to his hands’), which moves from D major to B minor (relative minor) then to the dominant of B (F sharp), which Emily leaves unresolved (Fig. 42.4). Suddenly at the beginning of the second stanza (though there is no piano interlude between stanzas), the harmony shifts down a whole step to the new key of E major with which the piece ends with a slowed dotted-halfquarter note rhythm. Just as the erotic force of Tennyson’s songs re-emerges through their variorum versions and musical settings, that is to say, so too do Emily’s treatments reveal a complex link between childhood, militancy and mimetic desire, which the eventual domestic moral of The Princess might well obscure. Her selection among textual variants, of the D flat major key, of sudden unresolved transitions, all realise a more complex notion of childhood, which at times emerges in some of Tennyson’s own suppressed variants. In the unpublished version of ‘Home they Brought him Slain with Spears’ that Emily

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Figure 42.3 ‘Home they Brought him’, bars 1–15, red leather ms music book, TRC/Music/5312/1. This item is reproduced by permission of Lincolnshire County Council, UK

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Figure 42.4 ‘Lady Let the Rolling Drums’, red leather ms music book, TRC/Music/5312/1. This item is reproduced by permission of Lincolnshire County Council, UK

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chooses, for instance, we find that ‘The boy began to leap and prance | Rode upon his father’s lance | Beat upon his father’s shield’. There is something quite disconcerting about this child beating in time to Emily’s martial tempo, where war both connects, and fatally separates, father and child. Yet despite these songs having been shown to treat childhood in such a complex and at times disquieting manner, they nonetheless served actively in the construction of the Tennysons’ subsequent family life. It is to this familial setting that our analysis now turns, as the final demonstration of music’s dynamic engagement with literature. The childlike handwriting on several of the manuscripts strongly suggests that Emily’s arrangements were used both as pedagogic and performance aids. Notwithstanding the militancy of some of Emily’s settings as discussed above, her minor alteration in ‘Sweet and Low’ of a ‘dropping’, in place of a ‘dying’, moon, may well suggest parental censorship; indeed, the musically scored ‘Sweet and Low’ seems designed for performance in a nursery. Beyond the gentleness of the poem’s musical setting, The Girl’s Own Paper was intended to prepare young girls for domestic fulfilment; we might therefore say that the musically scored ‘Sweet and Low’ ‘performed’ motherhood and childhood in a more transparent manner than did the lyrics within the context of The Princess. Archival evidence reveals that the Tennysons’ own children transcribed lyrics, vocal melody and piano harmony from listening attentively to their mother’s performance. Dictation exercises comprise the earliest entries in Hallam’s manuscript music book, whose front cover specifies ‘Settings by Emily Lady Tennyson’. The first page contains simple dictation and harmony exercises, with the text and melody in Emily’s hand, harmony in Hallam’s. From the start, Hallam learns through the very same material that had previously reflected (and actively produced) the Tennysons’ own complex prehistory: namely, the songs from The Princess. The childish rendering of ‘Home they Brought him’ almost certainly indicates his hand, given his tendency at the time erroneously to turn bass clefs in both directions (Fig. 42.5). While he clearly has trouble with the musical setting, Hallam nonetheless legibly writes the title, ‘Home they Brought her Warrior Dead’. The piece appears to have been dictated in the easier key of C major. When performing the text in an educational setting, Emily therefore appears to have opted for a version more like that which was in evidence in The Princess. But this does not mean that the comparatively tranquil setting ‘contradicts’ what we have seen as the more tumultuous elements of her earlier musical treatments. Rather, it simply adds further life to a fluid compositional process that has already produced several strikingly contrasting renderings. What consequences does this dedicated case study hold for Victorian literature and music? For a start, the songs from The Princess call upon us to reconsider conventional distinctions between composition and performance. In The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry, Eric Griffiths considers a number of works whose significant ambiguity exceeds any possible specific vocal actualisation.21 But how could we even speak of ‘Sweet and Low’ as existing separate from, or prior to, performance? It is not that the song’s ambiguity enables a wide range of performances; rather, we can only understand its productive variety through the history of its specific actualisations, actualisations that are simply inextricable from ‘composition’, and which range from the flirtation of courtship, to the attempted recuperation of lyric into matrimonial narrative, to the creation and maintenance of family life. This small case study, that is to say, asks us to reconsider not only the often false separation between composition and performance, but also the unnecessarily restrictive way in which we often consider the latter. Far from denoting

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Figure 42.5 ‘Home they Brought him’, Music Album, TRC/Music/5321. This item is reproduced by permission of Lincolnshire County Council, UK merely the public or artificial, we should treat performance as existing equally within the private and intimate realm: when Emily Sellwood worried that she and Tennyson would not be able to ‘make one music’ (on which basis she rejected his marriage proposal in 1848), her phrasing is far more than a figure of speech.22 Their collaborative

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literary/musical performances were among the social rituals through which even the apparently fixed roles of spouse, parent and child come into being.23

Notes 1. The claim is repeated, for instance, in Nicholas Frankel’s review of Tennyson Transformed: Alfred Lord Tennyson and Visual Culture, Victorian Studies, 52 (4) (Summer 2010), 623–5. The authors wish to thank Bruce Durazzi and Grace Timmons for generously sharing information during the chapter development. 2. See John Hollander, ‘Tennyson’s Melody’, The Georgia Review, 29 (3) (Fall 1975), 676–703; Francis O’Gorman, ‘On Not Hearing: Victorian Poetry and Music’, in The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 745–61. For further studies that examine the importance of music in Tennyson’s poetry or its sonic features, see John Hughes, ‘“Hang there like fruit, my soul”: Tennyson’s Feminine Imaginings’, Victorian Poetry, 45 (2) (Summer 2007), 95–115; Ewan Jones, ‘Tennyson’s Phantom Beat’, 27 June 2016 [accessed 25 November 2016]; Angela Leighton, ‘Tennyson’s Hum’, Tennyson Research Bulletin, 9 (2010), 315–29; Yopie Prins, ‘“Break, Break, Break” into Song’, in Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason David Hall (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), pp. 105–34. 3. See, for instance, Linda K. Hughes, ‘From Parlor to Concert Hall: Arthur Somervell’s Song-Cycle on Tennyson’s “Maud”’, Victorian Studies, 30 (1) (Autumn 1986), 113–29; Michael Allis, British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in the Long Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012). 4. Hallam Lord Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1897), I, p. 254; hereafter Memoir. 5. Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 194. 6. Henry W. Berg and Albert A. Berg, Collection of English and American Literature, Berg Coll MSS Tennyson (The Princess Copy 1). 7. For a much fuller treatment of this and the other songs, see Ewan Jones, ‘Lyric Explanation: Tennyson’s Princesses’, Thinking Verse, 4 (1) (November 2014), 50–78. 8. Original manuscript of songs from The Princess, Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 6346. The following textual references specify the folio pages as recto or verso; where the folio is unspecified, the extract extends to both recto and verso. 9. All references to The Princess use Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 2007). 10. It is clear that Tennyson originally intended this song for the transition between Books IV and V, given his subsequent copying-out of the ‘warbling fury’ passage from V, pp. 9–10. 11. MS music settings by Emily Lady Tennyson of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poems, TRC/ Music/5321, f.1, Lincolnshire County Council (hereafter LCC). For the complex meaning of the amalgamated initials, ‘AET’, see Phyllis Weliver, ‘Emily Tennyson’s Music Manuscript Books’, 31 March 2016 [accessed 25 November 2016]. 12. Press clippings from the Standard, Truth and The Musical Standard, TRC/Catalogue/ 6877, LCC. 13. Memoir, I, p. 255; red leather manuscript music book, TRC/Music/5321/1, f.4. 14. AET, ‘Sweet and Low’, TRC/Music/5312 and TRC/Music/5321/3, LCC. 15. The album suggests the date ‘September 30 1880[?]’ as when fifteen songs were sent to Janotha, but 1890 is likelier. See Janotha to H. T., 23 January and 8 September 1890, TRC/Letters/3815–6, LCC.

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16. Both the limited lexicon of repeated directives (‘sleep’) and the rhythm are consistent with how Emily set lullabies, as seen in her composition ‘Hallam’s & Lionel’s Lullaby’ with its repeated ‘hush’. Music Album, TRC/Music/5321, f.41, LCC. 17. Emily, Lady Tennyson, 'Sweet and Low,' arr. Natalie Janotha, words by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Girl’s Own Paper, 793 (9 May 1895), 356–8 (p. 357). 18. Hugh Macdonald, ‘[G-Flat Major Key Signature]’, 19th-Century Music, 11 (3) (Spring 1988), 221–37 (p. 222). 19. Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1784–5), cited in Macdonald, p. 223. 20. Macdonald, pp. 225–6. 21. Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 22. Ricks, p. 196. 23. This rather grand claim brings a much more practical corollary. Even a limited case study such as the above testifies to the need for an extension of the literary archive, which the digital resources at our disposal now make possible for the first time. Provision exists for several of the separate strands of our argument, whether it be Herbert Tucker’s For Better for Verse (), which allows students to test their scansion of various canonical poems, or John Rink’s Online Chopin Variorum Edition (), which permits the comparison of textual variants, online community annotations and the creation of users’ own editions. But in order to present a work such as ‘Sweet and Low’ across its full range of performative lives, we require a broader and more truly cross-media digital archive; one that supplements the productive interaction between text and image that we find for example in Jerome McGann’s Rossetti Archive, with a reparatory of spoken recitation and musical adaptation. The website Sounding Tennyson () attempts to do just that, setting archival material alongside musical settings and performances of ‘Break, Break, Break’; it is our hope that this exploratory online case study can in time be extended to the Tennysons’ broader output.

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43 Tchaikovsky’s Songs: Music as Poetry Philip Ross Bullock

R

ealism, as the prevailing aesthetic in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, inevitably shaped the artistic practice of even those artists who might not necessarily have seen themselves as realists. In this regard, the case of Petr Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) is particularly instructive. Writing to Vladimir Pogozhev, for instance, he claimed, ‘I think that I really have a gift for faithfully, sincerely, and simply conveying in music the emotions, the atmosphere, and the characters suggested by the text. In this sense I am a realist and a thoroughgoing Russian.’1 Yet elsewhere his attitude was more equivocal. Writing to Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov (1858–1915) about his own opera, The Queen of Spades (Pikovaya dama, 1890), Tchaikovsky distanced himself from the claims of realism: ‘if the pursuit of realism in opera is taken to its ultimate conclusion then you inevitably arrive at the total denial of opera itself. [. . .] I certainly have no intention of submitting to the theory of realism, with its despotic demands’.2 Realism is, of course, based on a work’s perceived fidelity to the object it represents, but in the case of music, both the nature of the object and the means of its representation can often be obscure. As Tchaikovsky observed to his fellow composer, Sergey Taneev (1856–1915), ‘I have always tried to express as faithfully and sincerely as possible in the music what was in the text. But faithfulness and sincerity are not the result of cogitation, they are the immediate product of an inner feeling.’3 It is this emphasis on feeling over thought – or what the composer also referred to as his habit of ‘departing from literal truth to the advantage of artistic truth’4 – that means that the ‘realism’ of his works is always offset by an equal, and sometimes even greater, dose of subjectivity (or what might also be termed ‘Romanticism’). Moreover, Tchaikovsky’s Romanticism brought him into close contact with a number of poets, whose work represented an aesthetic challenge to the values of realist poetics and whose survival in the age of realism was in part determined by their interaction with music, whether as creative metaphor or social practice. It is instructive that Tchaikovsky’s remarks to Pogozhev, Romanov and Taneev all relate to his penultimate opera, The Queen of Spades. Of all musical genres, opera was the one most obviously suited to the practice of realism (with orchestral music, especially programmatic symphonies and tone poems, not far behind). By contrast, song’s relationship to realism was more complex, not least because of its association with lyric poetry. Tchaikovsky may have been an appreciative reader of the realist novels of Fedor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910) and Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), yet he was equally drawn to such figures as Afanasy Fet (1820–1892), Apollon Maikov (1821–1897), Aleksey Khomyakov (1804–1860) and Fedor Tyutchev (1803–1873), whose poetry presents a very different account of the evolution of the

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Russian arts in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet even here, realism impinged on the song tradition, where the guiding principles of composition were widely held to be the selection of first-rate poetry and an accurate, attentive and respectful attitude to questions of prosody and form. In La Musique en Russie (1880), for instance, César Cui (1835–1918) had claimed that ‘vocal music must be in complete agreement with the sense of the words’,5 a judgement shaped by his commitment to the aesthetic principles of the mid-century, when realism and nationalism were in the ascendant, most notably in the work of the composers of the so-called ‘mighty handful’ (moguchaya kuchka). Within this context, Tchaikovsky’s songs were often considered failures, albeit ones that enjoyed considerable popularity with audiences and performers. Writing in 1896, for instance, Cui roundly denounced Tchaikovsky’s songs for failing to respect the literary values of the words they set: if many of his songs are charming as ‘music’, then very few of them are flawless as ‘songs’. He never acknowledged the right of the text to be treated as equal to the music, was disdainful in his attitude to it, and dismissive in his treatment of it; one might suppose that in vocal music he considered the text to be merely a necessary evil there to get in the composer’s way.6 Yet song is not just a version of a source text to be judged on its supposed ‘accuracy’ or ‘adequacy’; rather – like a translation – it constitutes a creative response to an original work that should be assessed according to its own criteria. Tchaikovsky’s songs fail to live up to Cui’s criteria precisely because he himself rejected the tenets of realism in favour of a fundamentally Romantic understanding of the relationship between language, poetry and music. For Tchaikovsky, what mattered most was the access that song provided to the poet’s mood and psychology (‘the essential in vocal music is truthful reproduction of emotion and state of mind’). This meant that he could pay relatively little attention to the material form of the poem itself (‘absolute accuracy of musical declamation is a negative quality’). At the heart of such statements lay the conviction that art was a vehicle for intuiting a form of reality otherwise inaccessible through ordinary means of cognition; it was not that Tchaikovsky rejected truth at all, but merely that he disagreed with Cui about where such truth was to be found (‘I should feel no embarrassment in impudently turning my back on “real truth” in favour of “artistic” truth’).7 To subjugate musical form to the dictates of verbal language was, in effect, an act of aesthetic deceit. Tchaikovsky’s views about the ability of music to access a form of truth that lay beyond verbal language might suggest a belief in the fundamental primacy of music over text. In the famous programme of the Fourth Symphony that he wrote for Nadezhda von Meck (1831–1894), for instance, he ultimately rejected any possibility of conveying the work’s putative narrative in verbal form: ‘That, then, my dear friend, is all I can tell you by way of explanation of the symphony. Of course, it’s unclear and incomplete. But it is characteristic of instrumental music to defy detailed analysis. “Where words leave off, music begins”, as Heine has remarked.’8 Likewise, when it came to poetry, Tchaikovsky was particularly drawn to writers who explored the euphonious possibilities of rhythm, rhyme, form, shape and structure to write verse that extended well beyond the merely referential. Writing to von Meck from Florence in February 1878, for instance, he asked her to select ‘among the works of

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Fet, A. Tolstoy, Mey, and Tiutchev poems which seem to you suitable for setting to music’.9 The following year, he provided further details about the criteria by which he judged poetry suitable for musical setting: Words cast in verse form are no longer mere words – they have become musicked. The best proof that poetry attempting to express love is already more music than words is that very often such poems (I cite Fet, of whom I’m very fond), read punctiliously as words and not as music, hardly have any meaning at all. But there is meaning, there is a profound idea, except that this idea is not a literary idea but a purely musical one.10 This focus on the boundary between the connotative power of words and the expressive power of music was an important notion for poets too, and reveals how Tchaikovsky’s songs play a crucial role in literary, as well as musical, culture. Many of the poets he set to music were profoundly grateful for the way in which song realised many of the musical aspirations of their verses, simultaneously providing them with a form of musical afterlife. Aleksey Pleshcheev (1825–1893), for instance, inscribed a copy of his volume of children’s poetry, The Snowdrop (Podsnezhnik, 1878) with the following dedication to the composer: ‘To Petr Ilʹich Tchaikovsky, with respect and gratitude for his wonderful music to my poor words.’11 Other poets even sent Tchaikovsky unpublished works, aware that music was an ideal way of disseminating their texts beyond the purely literary sphere (and gaining additional cultural prestige by association with the famous composer). In the summer of 1892, the young Daniil Rathaus (1868–1937) proposed a number of his as yet unpublished verses as suitable song lyrics; Tchaikovsky set six of them to music in a matter of days the following spring, and their publication as a cycle actually preceded the appearance of Rathaus’s own first volume of poetry, in which the relevant poems were asterisked and marked as having been ‘set to music by P. I. Tchaikovsky’.12 Indeed, in some cases, Tchaikovsky’s songs are the only known source for poetry that was not otherwise published. ‘To Forget So Soon’ (‘Zabytʹ tak skoro’, 1870) and ‘He Loved Me So’ (‘On tak menya lyubil’, Op. 28, no. 4, 1875) are settings of verses by Aleksey Apukhtin (1840–1893) that were not included in editions of the poet’s works until as late as 1991.13 Other poems by Apukhtin – whose friendship with Tchaikovsky dated from their school years in St Petersburg – also circulated primarily in musical form. Until the first published collection of Apukhtin’s verse in 1886, poems such as ‘No Response, No Word, No Greeting’ (‘Ni otzyva, ni slova, ni priveta’, Op. 28, no. 5), ‘Frenzied Nights’ (‘Nochi bezumnye’, Op. 60, no. 6) and ‘Whether the Day Reigns’ (‘Denʹ li tsarit’, Op. 47, no. 6) would have been inaccessible to general readers, who had to rely on musical setting as a means of accessing poetry that was otherwise confined to manuscript copies and the salon albums of society hostesses. Apukhtin’s reluctance to see his poems in print may have stemmed above all from his legendary laziness, but it may also have been motivated by a widespread hostility to lyric poetry that was typical of the mid-century, when values of utilitarianism and positivism ruled much criticism.14 Under such circumstances, song provided a venue where lyric poetry could flourish alongside the realist prose that dominated the journal publications of the period, as well as withstand the ideologically motivated attacks of the radical critics (Dmitry Pisarev, for instance, declared that ‘in time . . . Fet’s work will be sold by

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weight for wallpapering rooms or wrapping up tallow candles . . . in this way it will, for the first time, serve some small practical use’).15 In the work of Tchaikovsky – and of other song-composers of the nineteenth century – music plays a crucial, if underappreciated and little-theorised role in the formation and dissemination of the literary canon. Despite Cui’s strictures, Tchaikovsky was clearly gifted with a subtle literary sensibility. An adroit linguist, he produced a number of important translations for his publisher, Petr Jurgenson, ranging from François Gevaert’s Traité général d’instrumentation (1865, translation 1866) to Anton Rubinstein’s Die Lieder des Mirza-Schaffy, Op. 34 (1851, translation 1869).16 More importantly perhaps, three of his songs set lyrics of his own devising (four, if his version of ‘Pimpinella’, Op. 38, no. 6 – a Florentine street song – is included), all of which show a greater degree of metrical innovation and flexibility than the poems he set by other writers. ‘So What More Can I Say’ (‘Tak chto zhe’, Op. 16, no. 5, 1872) combines ‘mixed ternary and binary’ metres ‘in unrhymed lines of varying length’ (a pattern decidedly rare in mid-nineteenth-century Russian poetry, where syllabotonic versification and fixed stanzaic arrangements were still the norm).17 ‘Simple Words’ (‘Prostye slova’, Op. 60, no. 5, 1885) likewise mixes ternary and binary metres (here, ‘two anapests followed by an iamb, with the first strong downbeat on the third syllable’).18 ‘The Fearful Minute’ (‘Strashnaya minuta’, Op. 28, no. 6, 1875) explores the yet more varied possibilities of unrhymed accentual verse (which might, in fact, be a better way of describing the mixed metres of the other texts).19 Like certain verses of poets such as Apukhtin, Fet, Tyutchev and Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky’s lyrics were contingent on musical setting for their genesis and afterlife, constituting a genre within poetry that was already breaking out of the bounds of the purely literary. Yet Tchaikovsky also left behind a small body of verse that was not meant to be set to music and attests to a life-long interest in poetry per se. As a child, Tchaikovsky’s inclinations were more literary than musical, and partly under the influence of his governess, he wrote a number of French verses, some imitations of original works, others occasional pieces prompted by family events.20 Later in life, Tchaikovsky would turn out similar pièces d’occasion in Russian, often of a humorous nature. ‘Lilies of the Valley’ (‘Landyshi’), however, is a substantial work dating from December 1878, and which Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest, urged him to consider publishing as a standalone work. Writing to von Meck, Tchaikovsky himself summed up the poem’s virtues and the importance of its subject-matter: I think I have mentioned my passion for lilies of the valley several times before. My brother Modest loves violets with equal passion and we often argue about the superiority of the one flower to the other. I told him a long time ago that one day I was going to extol the lily of the valley in verse. And now I have. I’ve pondered long and hard over every line, and a fairly decent poem has resulted, of which I’m very proud.21 Unlike the lyrics Tchaikovsky provided for his own songs, this poem fully and expertly observes the formal demands of nineteenth-century verse. The rather world-weary content is ideally matched by the use of iambic hexameter, a metre with strong elegiac connotations in Russian poetry (see, for instance, Vasily Zhukovsky’s ‘Evening’ (‘Vecher’, 1806)). Through apposite use of caesura and enjambment, Tchaikovsky varies the pace

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and tone of the unfolding narrative, fashioning a lyric monologue that holds the reader’s attention over the course of its fourteen alternately rhymed quatrains as effectively as many more famous works from the period. Ironically, much of this was lost when Anton Arensky set the seventh, eighth and ninth stanzas as a song in 1894, the form in which Tchaikovsky’s verse is best known today. Although Arensky’s attitude might strike one as disrespectful to the form and structure of the literary original, such practices were not uncommon in the work of nineteenth-century song composers, who frequently set short extracts of longer poems, omitted or repeated lines, and even altered individual words and phrases (as Tchaikovsky himself did, of course). Clearly, Tchaikovsky the composer had some command of the technical requirements of verse composition, something that can be seen in his extensive correspondence with Konstantin Romanov, a highly-placed member of the Imperial Family, as well as a poet who published under the thinly veiled cipher of K. R. The two men met in 1880, keeping up a warm friendship and detailed correspondence thereafter. Tchaikovsky set six of Romanov’s poems as his Six Songs, Op. 63, in 1887, and the following summer, they engaged in a long exchange of letters that reveal much about the composer’s detailed technical knowledge about poetry.22 On 20 May 1888, for instance, Tchaikovsky pointed out a number of instances in Romanov’s narrative poem, The Martyrdom of St Sebastian, that went against established prosodic practice: Your verses (if I am not mistaken, I have a certain sensitivity in this regard) are unusually beautiful, lush, sumptuous and sonorous. I am very pleased by your decision to employ the trochaic pentameter; it is a wonderful meter. The four-foot eighth line of each octave lends your verses a particularly original charm. In one or two places, however, I was rather perplexed. It seems to me that in trochaic pentameter, the first syllable of the second foot euphony requires always to be properly stressed. I have just looked at Lermontov’s poem ‘Out onto the road I go, alone’. Here, this rule is always assiduously observed (I don’t know whether this is correct, but such is the way my ear hears things).23 In his reply, Romanov justified such deviations by pointing out that they had been sanctioned by none other than Fet, who had corrected a number of his initial drafts.24 This elicited a fluent response from Tchaikovsky, covering examples from classical literature, Goethe and the Russian tradition, before concluding with a deft admission: ‘I treat verses as a musician and see a violation of rhythmic laws in places where, from the point of view of versification, no such violation exists, or if it does, then it can be excused.’25 These discussions continued over the summer, during which time Tchaikovsky offered a summary of Fet’s poetic achievement that will amply serve as a summary of both his attitude to literature and to his treatment of it in music: I consider him a poet of undoubted genius [. . .] Fet is a completely exceptional phenomenon; it is quite impossible to compare him to other first-rate poets, whether Russian or foreign, to find affinities between him and Pushkin, or Lermontov, or Al. Tolstoy, or Tiutchev (who is also one of the great poets). Rather, one might say that at his best, Fet goes beyond the boundaries imposed on him on poetry and steps boldly into our province. It is for this reason that Fet so often

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reminds me of Beethoven, but never of Pushkin, Goethe, or Byron or de Musset. Like Beethoven, he has been given the power of touching such strings of our hearts as are inaccessible to those artists who, however talented they are, are limited by the boundaries of the word. He is not simply a poet, but rather a poet-musician, who is somehow able to avoid even those subjects that are most easily expressed through words.26 In Tchaikovsky’s songs, then, music is in no way subservient to poetry, as materialistically minded critics like Cui were wont to advocate. Rather, literature and music creatively co-exist on a continuum, with lyric forming a telling point of contact between the very different expressive possibilities of words and music, but with both reaching into and being enriched by contact with the other through acts of performed and enunciated emotion.

Notes 1. Cited in Alexandra Orlova, Tchaikovsky: A Self-Portrait, trans. R. M. Davison (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 377 (emphasis in the original). 2. Cited in ibid., p. 370. 3. Cited in ibid., p. 378 (emphasis in the original). 4. Cited in ibid., p. 370. 5. César Cui, La Musique en Russie (Paris: Fischbacher, 1880), p. 74; cited in Richard Taruskin, ‘Realism as Preached and Practiced: The Russian Opera Dialogue’, Musical Quarterly, 56 (3) (1970), 431–54 (p. 431). 6. Ts. A. Kyui, Russkii romans: ocherk ego razvitiya (St Petersburg: N. F. Findeizen, 1896), p. 108. My translation. 7. Cited in A. Alshvang, ‘The Songs’, in Tchaikovsky: A Symposium, ed. Gerald Abraham (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1945), pp. 197–229 (p. 198). 8. Letter from Tchaikovsky to Nadezhda von Meck, 17 February/1 March 1878, in ‘To My Best Friend’: Correspondence between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, 1876–1878, ed. Edward Garden and Nigel Gotteri, trans. Galina von Meck (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 183–8 (p. 187) (emphasis in the original). 9. Letter from Tchaikovsky to von Meck, 16/28 February 1878, in ibid., pp. 182–3 (p. 182). 10. Letter from Tchaikovsky to von Meck, 9/21 February 1878, in ibid., pp. 173–7 (p. 176) (emphasis in the original). 11. The inscription is reproduced in P. I. Chaikovskii i russkaya literatura, ed. B. Ya. Anshakov and P. E. Vaidman (Izhevsk: Izdatelʹstvo ‘Udmurtiia’, 1980), unnumbered illustration 6. Tchaikovsky set fourteen of Pleshcheev’s poems and translations in his 16 Songs for Children, Op. 54 (1883). Detailed commentaries on the poems and Tchaikovsky’s settings can be found in Richard D. Sylvester, Tchaikovsky’s Complete Songs: A Companion with Texts and Translations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 151–89. 12. Sylvester, p. 269. 13. A. N. Apukhtin, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatelʹ, 1991), pp. 366 and 352–3 respectively. The latter poem is, in fact, a translation of ‘Il m’aimait tant’ by Delphine de Girardin. 14. Charles A. Moser, Esthetics as Nightmare: Russian Literary Theory, 1855–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 15. Cited in T. J. Binyon, ‘Lermontov, Tyutchev and Fet’, in Nineteenth Century Russian Literature: Studies of Ten Writers, ed. John Fennell (London: Faber, 1973), pp. 168–224 (p. 204) (ellipsis in the original).

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16. For a complete and annotated list of these translations, see Alexander Poznansky and Brett Langston, The Tchaikovsky Handbook: A Guide to the Man and His Music, 2 vols (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), I, pp. 449–53. 17. Sylvester, p. 46. 18. Ibid., p. 219. 19. Ibid., pp. 107–8. 20. These are listed in Poznansky and Langston, pp. 455–63. 21. Letter from Tchaikovsky to Nadezhda von Meck, 31 January 1878/12 January 1879, in ‘To My Best Friend’, ed. Garden and Gotteri, pp. 423–4 (p. 424). 22. Tchaikovsky’s letters are included in the relevant volumes of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: literaturnye sochineniya i pisʹma, 17 vols (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykalʹnoe izdatelʹstvo, 1953–81), but for a selection that includes both sides of the correspondence, see K. R., Izbrannaia perepiska, ed. L. I. Kuzʹmina (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), pp. 31–86. 23. K. R., Letter from Tchaikovsky to Konstantin Romanov, 20 May 1888, in ibid., pp. 42–3 (p. 43). 24. Letter from Romanov to Tchaikovsky, 24 May 1888, in ibid., pp. 44–5 (p. 44). 25. Letter from Tchaikovsky to Romanov, 30 May 1888, in ibid., pp. 45–7 (p. 46). 26. Letter from Tchaikovsky to Romanov, 26 August 1888, in ibid., pp. 50–3 (p. 52) (emphasis in the original).

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44 Wagner and French Poetry from Nerval to Mallarmé: The Power of Opera Unheard Peter Dayan

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usic has always influenced poetry. But that influence often turns out to have been exerted less by music actually heard than by music unheard, constructed or reconstructed in the poet’s mind – as if real, sounding music got in the way of poetry, whereas imaginary music inspired it. The case of Wagner in France is an illustration of this peculiar dynamic. No composer has ever had a more powerful and visible influence on the development of French poetry than Wagner. And yet most of the famous nineteenth-century poets who wrote about him never heard any of his operas. His influence was mediated through a bizarre series of performances missed, cancelled, or inaudible, of encounters not real, but imagined or invented. The first of these took place in 1850, on the occasion of the première of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, in Weimar, conducted by Liszt. Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855), already well known as a translator from German and as a writer, had booked his place for the performance. Due to illness, he missed it, and indeed was never in his life to hear a piece by Wagner performed.1 This contretemps did not prevent him from publishing a review of the opera (largely based, one has rationally to assume, on notes which Liszt gave to him). The review delighted Wagner. Nerval reproduced most of it in his 1852 book Lorely: Souvenirs d’Allemagne. Nerval recounts that, on hearing Goethe’s play Egmont accompanied by the music that Beethoven had written for it, Wagner had been overwhelmed by the emotional effect of bringing drama and music together, and had vowed to do better by bringing the two arts into perfect harmony. To achieve this, Wagner needed to become himself both poet and musician. This ambition is presented by Nerval as a properly poetic one, and Wagner himself as primarily a poet; as if the union of the arts was at root born from development of the chief amongst them, poetry. And yet the effect produced is one in which the music dominates. With that baffling prescience and deceptive understatement which inhabit so much of his writing, Nerval unfolds the strange relationship between poetry and music which was to inspire and torment French poets for much of the rest of the century. La musique de cet opéra est très remarquable [. . .] On a reproché à M. Wagner d’avoir donné trop d’importance aux instruments, et d’avoir, comme disait Grétry, mis le piédestal sur la scène et la statue dans l’orchestre; mais cela a tenu sans doute au caractère de son poème, qui imprime à l’ouvrage la forme d’un drame lyrique, plutôt que celle d’un opéra.2

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(The music of this opera is most remarkable [. . .] Mr Wagner has been criticised for having given too much importance to the orchestra, and, to quote Grétry, for putting the pedestal on the stage and the statue in the pit; but this is doubtless to be attributed to the character of his poem, which imposes on his work the form of a lyric drama, rather than that of an opera.) Pre-Wagnerian opera is a form designed to promote singing, which is to say, music with words attached. For music without words – instrumental music – to come into its own, and take its rightful place on stage, a new literary form had to be invented: the lyric drama, which liberates music from the word-bound conventions of opera. But poetry, in releasing music from its bondage, becomes, by the newly realised power of music, itself at that point relegated to the subordinate position that used to be music’s. This apparently strange reversal becomes easier to understand if one bears in mind how poetry had, since Romantic times, presented its own relationship to music. The highest praise for poetry was to say that, going beyond words, it had become music. Wagner’s poetry, as Nerval receives it, takes that literally: it becomes music, it dissolves itself in music. Poetry after Wagner could either sacrifice itself willingly in this dissolution, or defend itself, as we shall see, by redefining poetry and rejecting Wagner’s. Meanwhile, what was undeniable was the extraordinary effect of Wagner’s music, which Nerval describes at the beginning of the following chapter of Lorely: Le lendemain de la représentation, j’avais besoin de me reposer de cinq heures de musique savante dont l’impression tourbillonnait encore dans ma tête à mon réveil. 3 (The morning after the performance, I felt the need for rest, to recover from five hours of masterfully composed music which had left an impression that was still swirling around my head the next morning.) It is the music, or rather the impression of the music, that is so difficult to get out of one’s mind. Wagner’s poem had given the music its form; his musical science had allowed him to compose according to that form; and what is left is a powerful musical impression that lingers, even if one might well want to get rid of it. The fact that Nerval had not, in point of historical fact, heard a single note of that music, merely emphasises the transcendent, ahistorical force that music acquires when it thus feeds on and absorbs poetry. The year 1857 is one of the most resonant in French literary history. In that year, Flaubert published (and was prosecuted for) Madame Bovary; Baudelaire published (and was similarly prosecuted for) Les Fleurs du Mal; and for the first time, a wellknown Parisian poet actually attended an opera by Wagner. It was Nerval’s friend and admirer Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), who, travelling through Germany, happened to see Tannhäuser performed in Wiesbaden. Like Nerval, he sent a review home to Paris. It is curiously similar to Nerval’s article. Both pieces, in order to explain the distinctive flavour of the opera, emphasise above all the medieval, Germanic and legendary character of the libretto. That, for Gautier, is the key to understanding the music itself, whose apparently revolutionary features are in fact rooted in Wagner’s Romantic attachment to the art of the Middle Ages. Like Nerval, he notes that Wagner wrote the words as well as the music, ‘pour que la cohésion de l’idée et de la note soit encore

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plus parfaite’ (‘so that the idea and the notes should cohere even more perfectly’). He goes on to ask: Ce système prévaudra-t-il? Richard Wagner sera-t-il la maëstro de l’avenir? [. . .] Nous ne le croyons pas; mais nous voudrions que le Tannhäuser fût exécuté à Paris, au Grand-Opera. La partition mérite cette épreuve solennelle.4 (Will this system prevail? Will Richard Wagner be the maestro of the future? [. . .] We do not think so; but we would like Tannhäuser to be produced in Paris, at the Grand Opera. The score deserves this solemn trial.) Four years later, his wish was granted. Tannhäuser was performed, by order of the Emperor Napoleon III, at the Opéra in Paris. And it turned out to be a trial indeed. Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), a friend and admirer of both Nerval and Gautier, went to see it. In a postscript to his essay ‘Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris’, which has ever since remained, I think it is fair to say, the most celebrated essay on any composer written by a French poet, he describes what happened in the theatre on those momentous nights. The performances were so disastrous that Wagner asked for the run to be stopped after the third, and the emperor granted his wish. There were two reasons, Baudelaire tells us, for the lack of success. One was inadequacies in the performance, including ‘un ténor allemand [. . .] qui se mit à chanter faux avec une assiduité déplorable’ (‘a German tenor [. . .] who sang out of tune with deplorable persistence’).5 But the main problem was the high-society Jockey Club, whose members had season tickets to the Opéra, and were used to turning up every evening, not at the beginning of the performance, but after dinner, at a time when, traditionally, the performance would include a ballet in which many ladies intimately known to them would figure. Wagner had been told that this was their expectation, but he had refused to adapt his opera to provide a ballet at the appropriate moment. The members of the Jockey Club came along at their usual time, were duly scandalised (though not surprised, as they had been warned of Wagner’s obduracy), and made such a noise that the opera could not be properly heard. For the second performance, they ensured they were armed with noise-making equipment, including whistles. The third performance was reprogrammed for a Sunday, when the Jockey Club members traditionally did not turn up; but turn up they did, determined to ensure that this insult to their lifestyle was not repeated. They triumphed. The uproar and tumult was such that Wagner had to admit defeat. Baudelaire summarised events thus: ‘Le Tannhäuser n’avait même pas été entendu’ (‘Tannhäuser had not even been heard’).6 For the second time, a key moment in Wagner’s reception in France hinged on an opera that a poet could not hear – even though, this time, he had at least managed to be in the theatre during the performance. What Baudelaire certainly had heard was the music by Wagner that had been performed in orchestral concerts in Paris the preceding year. Those concert performances inspired his most famous and original reflections on music. Writing of the impression produced in him by the overture to Lohengrin, he appears to suggest that Wagner’s music, thanks to its uniquely expressive power, is able to evoke similar images in the minds of diverse listeners. The previous Romantic view of instrumental music had generally been that although it could and did evoke images in the mind, different listeners

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would see different images, thus confirming music’s essential difference from poetry and painting, which were arts of representation. Is Baudelaire contesting this essential difference? Is he claiming that Wagner’s music does in fact work like poetry, in that it can convey concrete images? A careful reading of his article reveals that he is not. He does indeed maintain that different (well-intentioned and intelligent) listeners will all receive similar impressions from Wagner’s music; but the similarity between those impressions is at a level of abstraction which takes us far beyond the concreteness of poetic or painterly images, into the realm of dream. Je me souviens que, dès les premières mesures, je subis une de ces impressions heureuses que presque tous les hommes imaginatifs ont connues, par le rêve, dans le sommeil. Je me sentis délivré des liens de le pesanteur, et je retrouvai par le souvenir l’extraordinaire volupté qui circule dans les lieux hauts [. . .] Ensuite je me peignis involontairement l’état délicieux d’un homme en proie à une grande rêverie dans une solitude absolue [. . .]7 (I remember that, from the very first bars, I was possessed by one of those happy impressions that almost all men of imagination have known, through dream, as they sleep. I felt myself liberated from the bonds of gravity, and, by the grace of memory, I recovered the extraordinary sensual delight which inhabits the higher regions [. . .] Then, involuntarily, I painted for myself the delicious state of a man prey to intense reverie, in absolute solitude [. . .]) This ‘reverie’, as Baudelaire acknowledges, is ‘vague’ and ‘abstract’. The effect of Wagner’s music goes beyond all specific images, all dramas, everything personal; it is of the order of the immense, the spiritual, the unsayable. Indeed, in its very poetic nature, it goes beyond the need for words altogether. En effet, sans poésie, la musique de Wagner serait encore une œuvre poétique, étant douée de toutes les qualités qui constituent une poésie bien faite: explicative par elle-même, tant toutes choses y sont bien unies, conjointes, réciproquement adaptées, et, s’il est permis de faire un barbarisme pour exprimer le superlatif d’une qualité, prudemment concaténées.8 (Even without poetry, Wagner’s music would still be a poetic work, being endowed with all the qualities that constitute well-made poetry: explicative in itself, all things in it being so well united, conjoined, adapted to each other, and, if I may permit myself an inhabitual expression to designate the superlative degree of a quality, prudently concatenated.) What Baudelaire is stating explicitly is that Wagner’s music does not need poetry in order to be poetic. But something else, something more radical, is implied by a careful reading of Baudelaire’s article: this poetic effect of his music is only actually present when his poetry is absent, divorced from the music, not present with it in performance. It was Wagner’s instrumental music heard in the concert hall, not his operas, which so inspired Baudelaire.

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Why does the poetic effect require the absence of poetry? At the end of this essay, I shall suggest that there is a fundamental aesthetic principle at work here, according to which the Wagnerian conception of the union of the arts is a colossal mistake. But there is also a more immediate, art-historical explanation for the rejection of Wagner’s verbal poetry. It is that Wagner’s libretti are, as Nerval, Gautier, Baudelaire and Mallarmé all say, rooted in an old tradition; that of the Romantic drama, inspired by the Middle Ages, by myth and legend, telling a story, as if the story mattered. This is not poetry as those post-Romantic French poets conceive it. The genius of Wagner is to have used Romantic drama to destroy the old operatic form, and free music to do something new. When we hear Wagner’s new music rather than his outdated poetry, what we receive is poetic indeed. But when what we hear is a lyric drama, the poetry vanishes. In the 1870s and 1880s, there was only one performance of a Wagner opera in France: Lohengrin, in 1887. (A run of ten performances had been planned, but it was called off after the first, due to political tensions with Germany.) Nonetheless – and as we have now seen, this is not a paradox – these were the golden years of Wagnerism in French literature. Its greatest servants in the 1870s were Judith Gautier (a well-known novelist and translator from Chinese, and daughter of Théophile Gautier), her husband the poet Catulle Mendès and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. All three had visited Wagner in Switzerland in 1869. They tirelessly promoted the Wagnerian cause among their literary relations in Paris. Among their friends were two poets who were to determine the future of Wagnerism in French literature: Edouard Dujardin (1861–1949) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898). In 1885, Dujardin founded the Revue wagnérienne. He had seen Wagner’s operas performed, in London and in Bayreuth, and he was convinced that Wagner’s aesthetics, and their philosophical underpinnings, needed to be better known in France. He later described thus the achievements of the Revue: 1 Elle a propagé les doctrines de Schopenhauer, notamment sur la musique; 2 elle a expliqué que Wagner était un poète autant qu’un musicien [. . .]; 3 c’est la Revue Wagnérienne enfin, qui, en la personne de son directeur – et je m’en glorifie – a conduit Mallarmé aux Concerts Lamoureux.9 (1 It propagated the doctrines of Schopenhauer, especially on music; 2 it explained that Wagner was a poet, as much as a musician [. . .]; 3 it was the Revue Wagnérienne which, in the person of its director – and of this I am most proud – led Mallarmé to the Concerts Lamoureux.) This was true. Before 1885, Mallarmé had rarely been to orchestral concerts. It was his Wagnerist friends who persuaded him to attend. He rapidly became a devotee. The results are visible throughout his later prose writings, beginning with the essay he published that same year in the Revue wagnérienne: ‘Richard Wagner, rêverie d’un poète français’. The very title makes it clear that for Mallarmé, as for Baudelaire and Nerval before him, the distinctive virtue of Wagner’s work is in its ability to inspire a dream-like state. Again like them, Mallarmé links that virtue to Wagner’s poetic character; his music is not merely music, it does not follow a traditionally musical form, and that is

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why, like no other music, it has the capacity to inspire ‘rêverie’. But with a logic more cruel and implacable than theirs, Mallarmé traps Wagner in the paradox thus created. Wagner’s poetry, which frees his music from the old operatic conventions, is dramatic poetry, poetry that tells a story, and more specifically a legendary story. That, for Mallarmé, is not true poetry. True poetry is to be located in the imaginary, in dream, in the abstract (Mallarmé uses, indeed, the word ‘abstrait’, as had Baudelaire), and not in the dramatic or the legendary. But for Mallarmé, if Wagner’s poetry is not true poetry, his music cannot, either, be true music. Subordinated to Wagner’s dramatic intentions, ‘le principe même de la présence de la Musique échappe’ (‘the very principle of the presence of Music escapes’).10 It becomes ‘une musique qui n’a de cet art que l’observation des lois très complexes qu’il se dicte’ (‘a music which retains, of that art, only the observation of the very complex laws that it imposes upon itself’). Subordinated to the structures of ‘le drame personnel’, in other words to the depressing conventions of nineteenth-century theatre, it limits its own capacity to make us dream.11 This condemnation of Wagnerian theatre has as its corollary a condemnation of all theatre based on myth, legend and personal drama, all theatre whose aim is to tell us stories about individual gods or humans. Mallarmé, over the following decade, was indeed to participate in a powerful campaign against that theatre, which was a key factor in the theatrical revolutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These included Lugné-Poe’s ‘Théâtre de l’œuvre’, Jarry’s Ubu trilogy and the works of the Belgian playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck, whose play Pelléas et Mélisande (produced in Paris by Lugné-Poe in 1893) inspired Fauré and Schoenberg, as well as forming the basis for the libretto of Debussy’s opera of the same name. French poets’ engagement with Wagner thus influenced the future course not only of poetry, but of theatre and of music. Doubtless due to the urgings of his Revue wagnérienne friends, Mallarmé planned to see Lohengrin in 1887. He decided to avoid the première, and attend one of the subsequent performances. However, as we have seen, the run was cancelled, for extra-musical reasons; so he missed it, and, like Nerval, never saw a performance of a Wagner opera. He could have done had he wanted to. Anti-Wagnerian sentiment in Paris became much less vocal and violent in the 1890s. Starting from 1891, several of Wagner’s operas were performed there, often to great acclaim and large audiences. But by then, it was too late. Just as Wagner’s operas were becoming popular with the French public, French poets were losing interest in hearing them. The Revue wagnérienne had disappeared in 1888. From the beginning, like Nerval and Mallarmé, it had identified the distinctive character of Wagner’s work with that of drama. In its early days, this had appeared a strength. The review had exalted the value of drama above that of music or poetry, subsuming both. The programmatic essay introducing the very first issue had proclaimed: l’œuvre de Richard Wagner [. . .] est bien l’œuvre d’art complète, qui n’est ni poésie, ni musique, ni plastique, mais qui, étant tout cela ensemble, est le drame.12 (the work of Richard Wagner [. . .] is nothing other than the complete work of art, which is neither poetry, nor music, nor plastic, but, being all those things at once, is drama.)

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By 1888, thanks doubtless to Mallarmé, this faith in drama had evaporated, and with it, the ‘raison d’être’ of the journal. The last article in the last issue was by Teodor de Wyzewa, one of the review’s most assiduous contributors, but also an admirer of Mallarmé, who had learned the lessons of Mallarmé’s new poetics. The final sentence of this valedictory article was an expression of opposition to the idea of constructing a Wagnerian theatre in Paris; that, said Wyzewa, would be the best way to ‘obscurcir, fausser, obstruer à jamais la compréhension de l’œuvre Wagnérienne’ (‘obscure, falsify, block for ever the understanding of Wagner’s work’).13 The poetic consensus now was that the best way to understand Wagner’s achievement was to keep his operas at a distance. Their drama could only obscure his art. Increased public enthusiasm for Wagner’s operas merely confirmed what the poets already knew: the taste of the public was retrograde, prosaic, mired in shallow realism and escapist thirst for the dramatic. True art was heading the opposite way, towards abstraction. Mallarmé himself spent much of the following decade constructing a theory of the relationship between poetry and music which has remained highly influential ever since. Building on his scepticism of Wagnerian drama, he created a concept of a ‘musique idéale’ which poetry would evoke, but which could not be reduced to any sense that words could convey – or to any sounds that the human ear could hear. At the same time, he created a new kind of poetry that similarly could not be reduced either to sound or to the sense of words. Its most spectacular achievement was his poem Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance) (Fig. 44.1). Mallarmé himself compared it to a musical score; but there is an obvious limit to the parallel. Whether one reads French or not, the sight of this extraordinary work is unforgettable.14 I will not attempt to say how it operates; but it will be apparent even at first glance both that it tells no story, and that it cannot be translated into sound (or indeed, into any other language), because the physical shape and spacing of words on the page are essential elements of its functioning. The music of Mallarmé’s poem cannot be heard. It is saved from becoming audible by its anchorage in the visual. By the time he wrote Un Coup de dés, Mallarmé had moved so far away from the Wagnerian concept of poetry that even Wagner’s music, to the extent that it collaborated with that old idea of what poetry was, no longer interested him. Meanwhile, in 1894, he had discovered the true music of the future. It was not Wagner’s; it was Debussy’s, whose Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune neither sets nor shadows the words of the poem by Mallarmé whose title it cites. French poets born between 1800 and 1870 have had a disproportionate influence, not only on poetry throughout the world, but on the development of ‘high art’ aesthetics. For the public and for academics today, there is quite a clear pecking order among them. At the top of that pecking order, we find Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, also Verlaine: all poets who wrote about Wagner, but never managed to hear a Wagner opera (though, as we have seen, Baudelaire did try).15 Those poets – and there were many, especially among the contributors to the Revue wagnérienne – who enjoyed Wagner’s operas and attended more than one, are not considered in the top rank. Indeed, it is almost possible to say that the more Wagner operas a poet heard, the less highly esteemed his verse is today.16 Is this a coincidence? I do not think so. Rather, it illustrates the central importance of the ‘Wagner question’ to our modern notion of what constitutes great poetry.

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Figure 44.1 Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (Paris: NRF, 1914), left half of the fifth double page spread. [np]

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The true acolytes of Wagnerism thought that poetry and music could work together to produce a higher art form that contained the virtues and media of both. The great poets were unable to swallow this Wagnerian union of the arts in the theatre. On one level, this inability seems to result from their rejection of drama as a literary form. But this rejection of drama was itself based on a more fundamental conviction: that poetry, like music, had to have at its heart an absence, an absence which should be figured in the first place as the absence of another art. For them, the real poetry in Wagner’s music was only truly apparent when his libretti were obscured; the words had to be occluded for the poetry to sing out. Conversely, the music in poetry had to be something one could never be sure of having heard; it could not be materially present. That is the idea of poetry that gave rise to modernism (and if one knows where to look, one can find it persistently present, too, in postmodernism). Baudelaire’s unique virtue, which perhaps helps to explain his uncontested place as the father of this tradition, is that he was able both to keep Wagner’s music at the required distance from his poetry, and to feel and praise its beauty.

Notes 1. For historical information on French poets’ engagement with Wagner, the best source is: Paul du Quenoy, Wagner and the French Muse (Bethesda: Academica Press, 2011). 2. The translation, like all those in this essay, is mine. See Gérard de Nerval, ‘Lorely’, in Œuvres completes, ed. Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1993), III, pp. 1–231 (p. 64). 3. Ibid., p. 65. 4. Théophile Gautier, La Musique (Paris: Charpentier, 1911), p. 297. 5. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1976), II, pp. 779–815 (p. 810). 6. Ibid., p. 813. 7. Ibid., p. 784. 8. Ibid., p. 803. 9. Quoted in Cécile Leblanc, Wagnerisme et création en France 1883–89 (Paris: Champion, 2005), pp. 170–1. 10. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Richard Wagner, rêverie d’un poète français’, Revue wagnérienne, 1 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968), pp. 195–200 (p. 197). 11. Ibid. 12. Louis de Fourcaud, ‘Wagnérisme’, ibid., pp. 3–7 (p. 3). 13. Teodor de Wyzewa, letter to ‘Monsieur le Directeur de la Revue Wagnérienne’, Revue wagnérienne, 3, 298–300 (p. 300). 14. It is available on . 15. There is one poet who is also in the top rank of that pecking order, but does not figure in this list: Arthur Rimbaud. He never wrote about Wagner. But then, unlike the others in my list, he never, in his short life, found himself in a city where a Wagner opera was being performed; therefore, unlike them, he never had, so to speak, the formative opportunity to miss hearing one. 16. Dujardin’s prose writing has been highly valued by a small number of cognoscenti; James Joyce famously said he had learned from Dujardin the technique of interior monologue. But Dujardin’s verse, especially his dramatic verse, which even Mallarmé found indigestible, remains unloved.

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Part V Literature and Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Section editor: Stephen Benson

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Introduction Stephen Benson

N

o account of literature and music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can hope to do justice to the number of ways in which the relation between the two arts – the constitutive and of literature and music – has been performed, conceived and critiqued during the time, by composers, writers and musicians, and by critics. To admit as much is not justifyingly to invoke that commonplace notion of the modern and postmodern world, the world after circa 1900, as somehow more bewilderingly complicated than that of previous centuries; it is, rather, to mark the fact that the decades in question have been witness to developments in music of such significance as fundamentally to disrupt received understandings of what music is and of how whatever it is, is heard – assuming hearing, whether actual, promised or imagined, is necessary for musical experience, an assumption far from self-evident after the provocations of much twentieth-century sonic art. Literature, by comparison with music, and leaving aside the comfortably perennial question of how the literary might or should be defined, has remained relatively stable during the period as a category of artistic practice and an object of attention. In the broadest of terms, and give-or-take conceptually-oriented shenanigans, the received forms of literary writing – novel, short story, poem, play, essay and so on – remain relatively stable, as forms, for writers and for readers; whereas of those forms dominant in music at the start of the twentieth century – the various forms employed or acknowledged in the composition of art music, along with the eminently flexible category of song – only the latter might be expected now to be recognised as familiar or significant according to any measure of consensus. Music – how it sounds, how it is made, how we encounter it and how it comes to signify – has changed radically over the past century-and-a-fifth. The ramifications of these changes are still being felt and comprehended as I write, and it is for this reason especially that an introductory overview of the kind customary here is destined to be even more provisional and tendentious than is usual for the genre, and the constituent parts more discontinuous. Symptomatic tendentiousness duly marked, we can identify three major developments in the field of music during the period covered by this, the final section of the Companion, developments that are again of far greater significance and impact than any comparable shifts in the field of literature. First, and most obviously, music as understood and experienced by a large proportion of the population has come over this time to mean pop music of one form or another: three- or four-minute songs, most commonly, made in a studio or bedroom and then copied and circulated, often although not always within the networks of an increasingly globalised corporate marketplace. Second, and intimately involved in the life of pop, recorded music has been subject to a number of changes in the ways in which it is reproduced, disseminated and consumed. These include especially the three-stage passage from vinyl to compact disc to digital download and varieties of on-line streaming, a progressive dematerialisation

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of recorded music that has had a profound effect on the relationship of listeners to their chosen musical experiences, or rather on the nature of the experiences themselves, as well as on the status as commodity of such recordings. The third development, more esoteric than these first two but no less wide-reaching in its ramifications, is the broadening of the concept of music, some would say its dissolution, and the constitution of an open field of sound and acoustic experience. Music conventionally understood is reconceived so as to figure primarily as an intentional object, a particular category of or orientation to acoustic experience. The question of whether the reconception is felt to be a diminishment or an expansion of music’s significance is of course moot, ever-interestingly so. Added to these three major developments is the formation during the period of musico-literary studies as an identifiable field of academic enquiry, with all the attendant ramifications, for better and for worse, of disciplinary self-consciousness; a more parochial development than those directly involving music, no doubt, but one of equal significance within the context of the current volume. An overview should perhaps start at this point, with the emergence of the field within which all of the writing in the present volume might now be gathered. Neat as this would be as a solution to the challenge of order and selection, it could well appear shamefully narcissistic, not to say tacitly self-aggrandising. I have thus opted to leave until the end the matter of academic self-formation and to start instead with inter-art relations conventionally conceived, turning thence to the aforementioned landmark changes.

Music in Literature Relations between literature and music in the last and present century begin, of course, at the beginning; begin, that is, with modernism, in particular, with those major works of early twentieth-century writing in which music plays a significant part. Yet to begin at this beginning is not quite as self-evident or self-explanatory as it might appear. It suggests above all else that the relation in question has come to be defined, and defined forcefully, in terms of a certain inflection of the and in literature and music, the conjunction being understood primarily as involving literary accounts and versions of – literary claims on – music. And indeed, this is absolutely the case. It would be an exaggeration to say that musico-literary studies, from its inception in the later decades of the twentieth century until relatively recently, has been haunted by Ulysses, À la recherche du temps perdu and Doktor Faustus, but these novels have exerted a considerable influence, whether directly or otherwise, on the establishment of the field; not only for the seriousness with which each pursues its relation with music and the central importance accorded to the workings of one art as viewed by the other, but also and especially for the manner in which that relation is conceived, and so made possible.1 The and as understood and inhabited in the three novels is twofold, but it is the first of the two meanings accorded to the conjunction that is of particular significance for the character of musico-literary relations in the early decades of the twentieth century. We might say that the literary performance of music in Proust and in the Sirens episode of Ulysses, as well as in a host of less monumental works by writers of the time (including Woolf, Mansfield, Richardson, Forster, Beckett and Gide),

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carried with it the aspiration to do away altogether with the and separating the two arts: for literature to attain the condition of music, or to mourn, albeit productively, the impossibility of so doing. Such an aspiration is predicated on a prior notion of music’s aesthetic status; and such a notion requires itself a particular conception of the musicality of music.2 This conception, variously remembered and worked through by writers in the early decades of the 1900s, is modernism’s nineteenthcentury inheritance. It comes via, inter alios, Schopenhauer, Wagner and Pater; via Symbolism, and via Symbolism’s own inheritance of the Romanticist idealisation of instrumental music as free absolutely of any semantic substance other than the play of its own tones. The art of music thus understood offers a model, for some the model, of a union of form and content, and so of an erasure of the apparent dualism of the artwork. It was a model coveted by modernist writers for whom the Victorian preoccupation with contentful matters of drama and description were felt to be both a falsifying of the nature of experience and a limiting of the liberatingly autonomous possibilities of the aesthetic.3 Literature’s writing of music at this time involves thus both a borrowing of specific forms, with especial attention to the interplay of voices in counterpoint and polyphony, and more generally, the practice of leitmotivic composition as allowing a patterning of associations – experiential; memorial; cultural – felt to be more organic, and paradoxically free-form, than the thematic structural machinery of Victorian prose. We can see the continued influence of the valorisation of music’s formal properties as a model for literature (and, beyond that, as an imagined echo of life’s own patternings) in the work of Milan Kundera, the contemporary writer most consistently attentive to the possibilities of a musically-minded prose fiction. Kundera is notable not least for his knowledge of twentieth-century music, Stravinsky and Janáček in particular, a disappointingly rare attribute amongst novelists.4 Indeed, literature’s record when it comes to the art music of its own time is poor, with the resulting irony that the music and musical ideas informing literary adventurousness tend to be those of the past rather than the present. Literature’s experiments in this regard can carry a veiled form of aesthetic conservatism. The shining exception to this tendency, at least as far as concerns the mechanics of contemporary music, is Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Here, serial composition, as a radically modern reimagining of polyphony, in theory and practice, is a central concern, both for the narrative and the novel’s critique of the ideology of composition.5 Doktor Faustus is remarkable for its detailed verbal descriptions of music – Beethoven’s Op. 111, amongst other works – and again, for its reading of the ideological resonance of musical form. And it is these two possibilities for literary music – ekphrasis and, relatedly, forms of musical critique – that have come to the fore as the potency of the Paterian aspiration to the absolutes of musical form has weakened. The postmodern condition is defined in part by its resistance to the workings of artistic and historical definition, reliant as they tend to be on assumed agreements of cultural value and aesthetic principle. Hence the history of literary turnings to music in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of its successor, is one of a discontinuous series of individual, and individually appealing, works, rather than of a relatively unified stylistic or formal trend. Along with the novels of Kundera and Thomas Bernhard, and the late prose of Beckett, the series includes works of a variously musical persuasion by Gabriel Josipovici, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bernard MacLaverty

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and James Hamilton-Paterson, to name only those English-language prose writers for whom music was or is a recurring preoccupation.6 Again, the story of literature and music after modernism is characterised not by matters of form or ideologies of musicality, but by signal developments in the music itself and in the means of reproduction – that is, by the life of pop music, the turn to the art of sound, and by a series of shifts, prompted by new technologies, in the ways in which music inhabits and impinges on our lives. It is to these three signal developments that I turn below.

Literature in Music Before doing so, however, we should consider the matter of musical adaptations of literary works; the matter, that is, of music’s continued interest in literature, as opposed to literature’s in music. The latter relationship, one involving necessarily verbal description and modelling, is more readily amenable to literarily-inclined critical enquiry, not to say theoretical disquisition, and tends thus to predominate as a focus of scholarly attention. And yet musical settings of literary texts offer a rich seam of attentive acts of adaptation and translation, so of interpretations of literature, one which literarilyinclined readers, with their fondness for holding safely to the world of words, would be well advised more frequently to acknowledge. Opera in the twentieth century had something of a troubled passage, most obviously in terms of its status as a form of art dependent on large investments of time and money, but without the promise, as justification, of general public appeal or, however dubiously finagled, apparent social relevance. Opera companies continued to thrive, and continue still, relatively speaking, but by far the majority of productions are of works of the increasingly distant past. The same is true of art music more generally, but opera has served as a particularly exposed and exposing case, for those inclined to make it, of art music’s moribund condition. The ethical and aesthetic claims of opera, for listeners as well as for composers, continue to be the subject of argument and disagreement; in fact, it may be precisely opera’s contentiousness that makes it such a historically resonant and formally rich art form with which to think about, amongst other things, music and literature. And there is certainly no doubting the importance for the concerns of musico-literary studies of the major operatic works of the period since 1900. Modernism, conceived in the broadest terms, offers a series of singular explorations of the possibilities of opera, each in its own way continuing to work the founding operatic matter of music’s relationship with the word and vice versa: the promise or variously pitched refusal of a union of the two, and so of the endless permutations of language sung and text set. The series begins on the cusp of the new century with Debussy’s adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s prose drama, Pelléas et Mélisande, a still remarkable-sounding experiment in sung speech, and in the most exquisite setting of the French language. Ravel’s opera on a story by Colette, L’enfant et les sortilèges, offers something of a counterpart to the Debussy, a composed soundworld of childhood to set alongside the latter’s abstracted but ever-suggestively adult realm. The counterparts in the Austro-German tradition to these two highpoints of modernist French opera are Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu, the first Berg’s own adaptation of scenes from a play left unfinished at his death by Georg Büchner, the second an adaptation, again by the composer himself, of two plays by Frank Wedekind.

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The pre-eminent librettists of the twentieth century, of those writers of notable literary consequence, are of course Hugo von Hofmannsthal and W. H. Auden.7 The former worked in this medium collaboratively, and exclusively, with Richard Strauss, producing a series of six operas of extraordinary variety and verbal richness; while the latter, writing with Chester Kallman, collaborated with several twentieth-century composers, including Stravinsky and Henze.8 The works in question are of interest not only as artful verbal adaptations – of Hogarth (The Rake’s Progress) and of Euripides (The Bassarids) – but also as heard in relation to Auden’s own writings on the subject of the libretto, a genre the singular nature of which has received little sustained attention.9 Auden’s Paul Bunyan, his initially troubled collaboration with Benjamin Britten, stands in a surprisingly rich line of British operas, works which offer amongst other things a fascinatingly diverse set of responses to the provocations of musical modernism.10 Britten is the pre-eminent twentieth-century English composer, and is of particular significance here for his life-long concern for and sensitivity to literature, and to the setting of words to music. His operas include adaptations of Shakespeare, Crabbe, Melville (Billy Budd, with a libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier) and Henry James, works the collaborative composition of which are in marked contrast to the operas of his contemporary, Michael Tippett, which have each a libretto written by the composer himself. The respective texts are not perhaps in the first rank of works in the form. The latter judgement is certainly not true of the operatic collaborations of Harrison Birtwistle and the poet David Harsent, namely Gawain, The Minotaur and a linked pair of chamber works, The Corridor and The Cure. This major series of pieces, coming at what feels so late a point in opera’s history, offers both a restatement of the genre’s inaugurating return to myth and romance – The Corridor is the latest in a chain of Orpheus retellings that runs through the life of opera – and a reimagining also of the continued possibilities of musical modernism, during a period in which such possibilities have been felt by many composers to be variously untenable, albeit perhaps not wholly so.11 Turning to the less contentious form of song, we find in each of what are still identifiably national or regional traditions within Europe a repository not only of musical achievement, but of the performance and so understanding in music of literature, poetry in particular. English art song offers especially fine examples of the setting by music of native poets, in genuinely popular works by the likes of Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Ivor Gurney, Gerald Finzi and, most obviously, by Britten – his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and Nocturne, and the War Requiem, with its settings of Wilfred Owen.12 Britten was, again, singularly attuned to the musicality of English literature as performed in song, and the same attunement is evident in the twentieth-century French mélodies of Fauré (his settings of, for example, Verlaine), Debussy and Poulenc, as well as in what are perhaps the two major musico-poetic works of the second half of the twentieth century, Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître, on texts by René Char, and Pli selon pli, a Portrait de Mallarmé. Boulez’s late modernist homages to modernist forebears can be set alongside a number of other roughly contemporaneous rememberings and workings through, in song, of twentieth-century literary influence, including György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente, a cycle of settings of lines from Kafka’s diaries and letters, and . . . pas à pas – nulle part . . ., his singular pairing of poems by Beckett with the maxims of Sébastien Chamfort; and Heinz Holliger’s settings of Robert Walser (Beseit, together with the extraordinary opera on

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a dramolette by Walser, Schneewittchen). Holliger is important here also as a mark of the reading of literature in music across centuries, where the claiming of influence and affiliation – the interpretative work of text setting – is particularly strongly registered. His Scardanelli-Zyklus, for example, stands alongside Luigi Nono’s Fragmente – Stille, an Diotima as a major reimagining in the late twentieth century of Hölderlin and the legacy of German Romanticism. And so, having acknowledged, albeit woefully selectively, the wealth of compositional interaction between music and literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I turn now to the three major developments in the field of musico-literary relations nominated at the start of the present introduction, developments operative at a level beyond and beneath that of works and genres; and from there, finally, to the identification and subsequent growth of the field of study to which the present volume is ample testimony.

Sound The second half of the twentieth century was witness to a number of identifiable strands of music making. In art music, we might point to the afterlives of modernism, serialism in particular, the rise and diversification of minimalism, electro-acoustic composition and, more broadly, a loosening of the ideological resonance of specific forms of compositional practice and a subsequent mixing of modes, the latter in particular taken by many as a signature feature, in music, of postmodernism. In jazz, meanwhile, three decades of extraordinary, now-canonical, creativity, were followed by a splintering of specific strands of musicking, a period involving, on the one hand, developments in free improvisation and in specific aspects of African-American forms, and including also a broadening of jazz’s territory into Europe and elsewhere, and on the other, a classicising tendency closely related to the entry of jazz into the academy, as a music to be played and as the object of critique. And as discussed below, this is most obviously and triumphantly the period of pop, and of the life and times of the many and various strands of music held by that deceptively innocuous-sounding little name. Literature has acknowledged and addressed each of these forms of music, most often, in the novel at least, via allusion, whether fleeting or sustained, but also via drama – the dramatising of aspects of musical experience – and, less frequently, thematisation. It is, however, another strand again of post-war music that has provided perhaps the most significant opportunity for writing and for our conception of literary practice, and so for a genuinely inventive interrelation of the literary and the musical. John Cage is undoubtedly the chief influence here, both positively and as a figure against whom others have defined themselves. Cage’s work from the early 1950s onwards, as both musician and writer, proposed a shift in the understanding of what constituted music: a shift in our definition of the musical.13 Put simply, this shift involves a broadening of the field of music so as to admit ambient sound, with the proviso that a broadening of the kind involved might be taken to push sounds made or heard in this manner beyond any useful or meaningful sense of the musical, so to dissolve music in such a way that it is subsumed into an open field of sound. The admittance of ambient sound is coupled with the withdrawal of composerly intention, hence the programmed dismantling of the notion of music as involving primarily an act of organisation. Intention is transferred to the listener, in whose gift music comes

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to reside. Music results thus from a particular form of localised attention on the part of each one of us as listeners. The musical event is reconceived as a form of temporal framing within which a large proportion of the acoustic matter is a mix of ambient sound and of the sounds of everyday objects or activities – sounds, that is, in relation to which music traditionally conceived has been made and imagined. Integral to this promotion of ambient sound is the text score, in itself a sub-species of literature; a set of written instructions for the making or acknowledging of sound, instructions, often of the most gnomic and open variety, intended to foster activities requiring no specialist training or knowledge.14 Music is everywhere, available to all to make and to hear and to be with; we need only adopt the appropriate attitude. Cage’s quietist revolution, the ramifications of which are still being felt and worked through at the time of writing, was roughly contemporaneous with R. Murray Schafer’s writing on the idea of the soundscape, and more broadly, with a turning of attention to acoustically-oriented ecology.15 There followed soon after a pronounced shift across the arts and humanities towards all things acoustic, beginning in the 1980s and involving variously the rise of sound art, historical and sociological work on cultures of listening, and a renewed theoretical interest, of assorted methodological affiliation, in listening and acoustic experience. The metaphor of the turn is over-used and often misleading, but it is warranted here; for this is, amongst other things, the age of sound studies.16 Each constituent strand of critical or creative practice within the general trend comprises its own particular threads. Of especial importance within the context of musico-literary studies is the close attention accorded to listening and sound in theoretical work of the early years of the new century, attention expressive both of a phenomenologically-oriented interest in affect and the body that has followed in response to the textualist theorising of previous decades, and of a related critique of the dominance of vision in accounts of experience, and, via metaphor, paradigms of knowledge and cognition.17 And what of literature? There has been a considerable and undoubtedly welcome flurry of publications of a cultural-historical stripe, work on specific cultures of sound in which literature offers privileged access to soundscapes and transcriptions of moments of listening.18 These are of relevance within the frame of musico-literary studies only, however, to the extent that they acknowledge the conceptual shift in our experience of music proposed by Cage; and of course they tend not to. A reconception of writing in the wake of Cage – in the era of ambient music, the field recording and the text score – would involve rather a rereading of the literary canon as a source of literary music in the now expanded sense of the term. Cage himself, in his Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), along with the attendant __,__ __ Circus On __ text score, and in Empty Words, his acoustically-minded treatment of Thoreau’s journals, offers a wonderfully baroque model of how such rereadings might be the acted out.19 This is literature read as potential text score and so as prompt for performance; literature as audiobook in the full sense of the word. The post-Cagean possibilities of this form of critical-creative response remain relatively unexplored.20 Individual writers, conceived under the new dispensation, stand out as particularly attuned to the music of the soundscape: Samuel Beckett, for example, a writer whose ear for traditional musical matters, in his middle- and late-period prose, was of a piece with a capacious sensitivity to the eventfulness and, shall we say, eco-musicality of ambient sound. Modernist writing offers rich pickings for the acoustically-minded

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reader, in part a result simply of a maximalism that would include as a matter of course, but not in any way privilege, acts of listening. Hence the continued interest here of Joyce, Proust, Woolf and, a little later, Georges Perec. And of course, most literature, both prose and poetry, offers instances of acoustic attention, however fleeting and seemingly innocuous. The possibilities for forms of writing attentive specifically to ambient sound and to the musicality of the soundscape are still to be realised, but we can see recent evidence of such exploratory annotation, in the UK at least, in the work of, for example, Daniela Cascella.21

Pop To consider in any detail precisely what does or should constitute pop music is beyond the remit of the present volume. It signifies here in its most capacious sense, encompassing any number of individual genres of popular music (with due caution regarding the connotations of the so-called ‘popular’), each with its own history and formal characteristics, together with attendant matters of recording, reproducing and distributing, performing, purchasing, listening, storing and collecting. Wherever we draw the boundary lines, however, pop, that catchiest of catch-all categories, stands as the dominant musical form of the second half of the twentieth century and shows no signs of diminishment as it is remade and reimagined by successive generations of musicians and listeners. Pop music is the cultural form of our times, the sound of globalised culture, of late capitalism and of the virtual world of the internet. Pop is music, for a significant proportion of listeners, including those who remain resolutely sceptical about its dominance and ubiquity. Resisting listeners cannot but acknowledge pop as the variously characterised mainstream against which other musics are defined and from the creeping reach of which they, both musics and listeners, require defending. Pop music, viewed within the frame of the present volume, is an event; and yet for literature-and-music studies most conventionally conceived, pop’s invention, constitution and rise to dominance can appear simply grist to the mill of an unchanging sub-field of academic enquiry. Literature, the novel in particular, continues relatively unworriedly to be the art in which music’s presence and meaning in the world are represented and recorded, an item of evidence in music’s ever-expanding archive. The scholarly labour involved in such tracking and archiving – the labour of critique – is, of course, necessary and valuable, not least because few novels written in the past sixty years have managed without a passing reference to a pop song, from the most innocuous-seeming sonic reality effect to the heavily resonant song motif. Hence the provisional canons of the pop-music novel and the charting as artful history of specific aspects of pop life.22 The documentary archiving of pop by literature – pop as so much literary content – continues apace, and is worth charting. But what difference does it make? Specifically, what difference does it make to the resonant and of literature and music when the music in question is pop? As so often, the relation is made to signify most tellingly, not to say most interestingly, when reading or readability are affected and so altered by the conjunction: when something happens to literature as it hears music, and when something happens to music in its knowing of literature; when, that is, each becomes an event in the workings of the other.

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The most straightforwardly eventful instance of pop’s relationship with literature is a matter of definition, namely, the extent to which the words of pop music are understood to be literature, and so eligible for consideration in literary terms within a received tradition of lyric or confessional poetry. This is in one sense the most tedious and insidiously conservative of pseudo-debates, dependent on a reified notion of the literary as a signifier of cultural status and historical legitimacy. Literature is what the pop lyric becomes, the male-authored pop lyric in particular, when pop attains sufficient critical mass, a cruel twist in the Paterian trajectory. Hence the paradigmatic test case of Nobel laureate Bob Dylan, available in non-audiobook format as Christopher Ricks’s Dylan’s Vision of Sin, and the Faber- or Penguin-sponsored, and clearly gendered, canonisation of the likes of Van Morrison, Nick Cave, Ian Curtis and Jarvis Cocker. Debates of this kind are reliant on matters of definition and constitution. They tend as a matter of course to have a reactionary underpinning, and so to provide evidence, post-Adorno, of the continued availability of pop music as the cultural form most amenable to debating matters of cultural value and the ideology of the aesthetic. And yet something happens here to both the literary and the musical, something to do with the act of reading. On the musical side, the arguments for and against according literary status to the pop lyric have given rise to some of the most incisive musico-literary thinking. Rather than seek to settle the matter – according to what transcendental scale or criterion could it ever be settled? – this work uses the lyric to consider matters of artful language in performance: matters, of interest across the literary-musical hyphen, of voice and tone, of vocal technique and technology, and of prosody, performance and persona.23 On the literary side, the pop lyric is a singular textual artefact, akin to the opera libretto in its resonantly over-determined silence. Is it a song-in-waiting or the scripted echo of a past performance? Is it a lyric in the classical sense of the word or a peculiarly modern instance of a migrant transcription? In the very fact of our pausing to question resides the germ of a literary-musical happening. The fatal flaw in any such reading, however attuned to meaning and verbal nuance, is that it disavows the lived experience of the pop lyric as a kind of endlessly shifting ambient presence, willed or otherwise, in our lives.24 It is in poetry especially that this presence, a fundamental aspect of the life of pop, is most acutely reproduced, and in which the subterranean workings of the pop lyric, its seductions and its entrapments, are anatomised. The work of Denise Riley, to pick just one particularly seductive example, offers a series of enactments of pop perception, part mimetic charting of the enduring ability of song to lodge itself within the stream of our auto-dialogue, effortlessly and often uninvited; part unravelling of the shaping of thought by pop wisdom, most commonly when the thought in question concerns, as it so often does, love and desire.25 Poetry is especially appropriate as a medium for such anatomising precisely because its roots are deep in song. A poem which touches the life of pop is always in part self-reflexive, at whatever distance of historical remove. This is literature and music at their most symbiotic. And finally, there is what we might call pop-lit; that is, literature in which contemporary pop music in all its gaudily globalised and commodified afterlife becomes part of the sensibility of the writing itself. Pop-lit has moved beyond intertextuality or allusion, beyond the representation of music as subject or as context. Pop is no longer what literature is about or what literature is like: it is what literature is, akin, perhaps, to the writing of the Beats in their relation to their own contemporary musical mode.

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Poets such as Sam Riviere and Jonty Tiplady write in a variously heightened clubpop register, hyper-knowing, video-saturated and full of what seem like cut-and-paste echoes of pop’s earworms.26 Pop is here both the lingua franca of love and longing, the language in and with which we desire, and the sound of the failure of the world to deliver on our wishes – the failure of the world to deliver on pop’s promise, thereby ensuring the songs’ continuance.

Technology The period covered by this final section of the Companion is that of music’s mechanical reproduction, enacted in an increasingly swiftly turning cycle of forms of technology. If the sounds of music today – the time of the publication of the present volume – are startlingly different from those of the early decades of the preceding century, the means by and the manner in which we hear these sounds are even more radically different in 2019 as compared to 1910. The significance of this difference cannot be overstated. I am listening as I write to a live stream of the BBC’s classical music radio station, Radio 3. The music is interspersed with, and so framed by, speech: a softlyspoken female presenter with a vaguely northern-sounding English accent introducing and explaining, briefly, the pieces chosen for broadcast. The sounds, streamed over the internet, are amplified by a loudspeaker attached to the computer into the memory of which I type these words. (The sound of my fingers tapping out the letters on the keyboard tends rather to overpower the music, although certain instruments, the solo violin in particular, are better than others at making their voices heard.) Chopin’s Ballade no. 4, Op. 52, is being played now (or at least it was). The radio programme is a live broadcast of digital recordings, either CDs or MP3 files, and perhaps also, although increasingly rarely, an old gramophone record, complete with authenticating scratches and crackles. Some of the works are played in full, some only in part. I did not select any of the music I am hearing, and while I can at any time choose to turn the stream off, the sounds broadcast are a part of the ambience of my office space, so of my sense of that space and my affective involvement in it, whether or not I am listening.27 Certain of the elements of this all-too-mundane musical experience are common across the centuries, and might be said to form part at least of any formulation of that experience: the openness of our ears to whatever music happens to be on the air; music’s amenability to the vagaries of our attention and to the many contingencies that lead to our being with such-and-such a sound at such-and-such a moment. And yet for every instance of continuity across time there is an equal and opposing sense in which the successive forms of the technological overhauling of music in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries represent a series of epistemological breaks with musical experience before the full flowering of mechanical reproduction. To summarise a wonderfully complex area of thought, we might say that three of the constituent elements of music’s ontology – music as work (the idealising work-concept, however conceived), music as performance and music as idea – have been variously overturned by technology: by the gramophone, the radio, the Walkman, the digital revolution, the CD, the MP3 and related audio coding formats, and, as I write, the form and purview of streaming services. These technologies have altered variously how music is conceived, made, recorded, received and consumed, and how it is understood. They have each in their own way altered what music is, both conceptually and materially, meaning in the case

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of the latter the extent to which the technologies in question have influenced the very possibility of the sounds themselves, from the duration of the long-playing record, to microphone technique, to scratching and sampling, to digitisation and file compression, and so on.28 The question, as always in the present context, is how these changes are or might be considered in relation to literature, a form of art the materials and modes of production and consumption of which have remained relatively unchanged over the past century. (The dissemination of literature has been perhaps the only aspect of its working life to be significantly affected by technology.) Literature offers the most precious and detailed recording of the life of music in the era of its technological reproduction. Much has been made of the presence of the gramophone in the work of the high modernists – in Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Eliot and others.29 More recently, novels of very different kinds by, inter alios, Irvine Welsh, Ali Smith, David Mitchell and Hanif Kureishi have sought to chart the influence of music in the lives of late twentiethcentury listeners in such a way as to mark the fact of this influence being dependent entirely on technology: on, for example, the personal archive of the record collection, on the nocturnal rhythms of club culture, and on global networks of listening. The imbrication of technology with our experience of music, and of this music’s subtle imbrication with the sense we make of ourselves and of others: this is perhaps the richest vein for thinking about the relation of music and modern or contemporary literature, one for which technological reproduction is not merely a means to an end but an integral part of the end itself, of how it comes about and of how it is experienced. In the early part of the twentieth century such thinking involved in particular the uncanny presence of recorded music, a throwing of sounds and voices across space and time that echoed in modern technological form the very mechanics of lyric and narratorial voice, and in so doing, offered new possibilities for verbal representation and invention. The equivalent scenario in more recent decades is perhaps the extraordinary availability and portability of music brought about by successive technological developments. The commodity status of music today, its constitution and transference at every level in a web of streams of capital, is countered by the manifold ways in which music is appropriated by listeners as an ever more embedded part of the ebb and flow of daily life.30 In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, for example, the poignancy of the titular song is due in no small part to its material status: a tape recording listened to alone on a portable player. The listener in question describes being discovered by another whilst engrossed in the act of listening, a fleeting moment of voyeurism the resonance of which is dependent on the creation, via technology, of a private space of listening and of the self-regulation of affect by music within that space.31 An even more striking, and certainly more elaborate, example of such a scenario occurs in Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar, in which mixtapes played out of doors on a Walkman serve intermittently as a kind of silent soundtrack to the novel – silent, that is, for the reader. The character listening is only too conscious of the music as she follows through a shocking act of authorial appropriation. The material and technological condition of the music in each of these two novels is instrumental rather than incidental in or subservient to the acts of listening involved: the means of reproduction serve to make possible and to shape the respective narratives. The opportunities for formal literary experiment offered by music’s technologies are, however, yet to be extensively explored. Perhaps the most obvious example of

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the technological cross-over of literature and music is the audiobook, specifically the audiobook in which the spoken word is accompanied by music.32 Where previously it could only be imagined, readers, or reader-listeners, can now hear the music invoked by literature. So, for example, a musically-saturated novel such as Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music becomes a thing of both word and sound, the promise of the book’s network of allusions realised, or at least sounded, in the digital performance. Whether this literalising of allusion is a healthy development is a moot point. The silence of literature is never more resonant, for some readers, than when music is the matter at hand; indeed, literature’s singular ability to conjure music is dependent precisely on the silence (or almost silence) of the written word. It remains to be seen whether this silence will come increasingly to be broken, imaginatively or otherwise, as a result of the possibilities for multimedia performance offered by technological means.

Discipline And so to the discipline. The signal development in musico-literary studies during the period covered by the present section of the Companion, is the formulation of the very idea of such a field, or sub-field, of enquiry, a formulation attested by the Companion itself. This is the period towards the more recent end of which musico-literary studies attained self-consciousness.33 The idea of our Companion, with its bringing together specifically of music and literature, its tacit proposal of sufficient continuity in the conjunction over several centuries to warrant dedicated attention, and its presumption of a relatively healthy readership for whom the conjunction will signify and be of interest: such an idea is made possible by two inter-related developments in the humanities, developments the respective forces of which need still to be acknowledged, however increasingly difficult it may be to conjure the vehemence of the debates of those years. I refer, with the usual caveats regarding catch-all categories, to the rise and subsequent influence within the academy of critical theory and to the ‘new’ or cultural musicology. The somewhat becalmed character currently of the work associated with these two developments is a sign not of diminishment, however, rather of success and, broadly if sometimes begrudgingly, acceptance. The present volume is, again, testimony to that acceptance, and in the case of many of the contributions, to the widespread influence both of critical theory and of work from those areas of musicology that responded to theory’s challenges. Before turning to these developments it is worth stating the obvious fact that while musico-literary studies is a field of recent invention, studies of the relation of literature and music are nothing new. The sharp increase, over the last third of the twentieth century, in the amount of work concerned primarily with the specific relation of the two art forms, is a long-term result both of the formation and constitution of the modern university, and so of the disciplines attendant on music and literature respectively, and of the general trend within and across each discipline towards ever more finely delineated specialisation. This trend was marked by the publication in 1948 of Calvin S. Brown’s Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts, a book which serves still as a useful anthology of material, both literary and musical, and in particular, as a reliable indication of the general orientation and merits of work in the area up until that time (and indeed for several decades beyond). Brown’s avowed ambition was to ‘open up a field of thought which has not yet been systematically explored’, hence the

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heuristic division of the volume into four parts: general commonalities between music and literature, vocal music, the modelling of literature after music and of music after literature.34 The second and fourth of these categories is each relatively self-evident in intention and straightforward in methodology, being concerned variously with the adaptation of literature by music: the musical setting of words and the translation into music of verbal scene, narrative or character. It is the third category that is most significant for the history of the workings of musico-literary studies, involving as it does the identification and analysis of the use in literature of specific formal or structural elements of music, from the general orientation of theme-and-variation to the detailed working out of fugal subjects; and the analysis and judging of literature’s borrowings from and aspirations towards a more abstractly defined musicality, in the likes of motivic development and symbolic patterning. Music as conceived in the central parts of Brown’s study is the formal arrangement of tones, after the abstracted arrangement and play of which literature has a habit of chasing. Brown is writing before the advent proper of pop music, in all its guises, and the not unrelated decline in the fortunes and status of European art music. His book pays next to no attention to the experiments of the early twentieth century – the almost total absence of references to musical modernism is striking – and ignores entirely questions of technology. It has the characteristically weightless and unruffled tone of mainstream humanities scholarship of the period. More specifically, and considering our concern here with disciplinary matters, two features of the work, and of this kind of work more generally, mark it out as of its time. It is pervasively formalist in method (where it isn’t descriptive), content to track in relatively loose analogical terms the apparent cross-over between the two arts. History is invoked, but in relation largely to developments within ostensibly autonomous artistic movements. And while it aspires to systematisation, it is entirely unformulated in terms of working method or theory, of whatever stripe, formalism included. It is important to acknowledge that much of the local and detailed work on specific instances of music’s interest in literature, and vice versa, continues broadly in the vein of Brown, albeit sometimes modified in acknowledgement of recent trends in critical practice. An academic field, whatever its more lofty ambitions, depends for its security on an underpinning of detailed but relatively modest work on individual texts and topics. It is true, nevertheless, that Brown’s book, and much of the analysis written in the same critical vein, appears now as the work of a different age; and this is so for two very closely related reasons. The first of these is the deceptively simple fact that Brown was writing BT: before theory, critical theory in particular. It is a fact universally acknowledged that from the 1960s to the turn of the century, the humanities was witness to successive waves of theoretical overhauling via the influence primarily of various strains of continental philosophy and social thought; an influence that challenged fundamentally received conventions not only of scholarship and institutional value, but also of the basic constituent parts of social and cultural life: of selfhood and identity; language and signification; politics and ideology; and the form and function of history. The story is relatively familiar. It involves, contemporaneously with the rise of critical theory, the fact and influence of major changes in social and cultural politics, from the constituent parts of the second wave of feminism to the several forms of postcolonialism, changes registered also in the music of the decades in question. The effect, again, for advocates and sceptics alike, was a widespread revision of thinking and

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orientation in each of the constituent disciplines of the humanities, a process involving not least major changes to curricula and the importation of a new theoretical and methodological canon, from structuralism and post-structuralism to psychoanalysis and extensively revised forms of historicism and Marxism. Nowhere was the influence of critical theory registered more forcefully than in the academic study of music. This influence is the second reason why Brown’s book, for all its virtues, is so palpably a thing of the past. Music is notably lacking as a topic of significant concern from the work of all but a few of the most prominent of those thinkers usually gathered under the catch-all heading of critical theory (compare the amount of attention paid to the visual arts and, especially, to literature).35 Yet despite music’s relative absence from the major critical-theoretical works of the decades involved here – an absence in keeping with philosophy’s poor record generally on matters musical – the effect of critical theory on thinking and writing about music, an effect one result of which is the present volume, cannot be overestimated. New or cultural musicology are the names commonly ascribed to the significant revision of orientation across the discipline that began in the early 1980s. A brief summary of this period will always run the risk of constructing a straw target against which the novelty of the so-called new musicology can be measured. It is broadly true, nevertheless, that the major turns involved – turns of method, register and ideology – resulted from a strong reaction against both the high formalism of music analysis conventionally conceived and the positivism of music history. The waves of theory that swept onto the shores of musicology combatively challenged a number of the working assumptions of the mainstream of the discipline, a list of which will have to suffice: music conceived primarily as the formal play of tones; the assumed neutrality and objectivity of analytical methodologies, and of the analyst; the continued idealisation and objectification of the musical work, and the ideology attendant on such abstractions; the continued veneration of a small canon of male European composers, the most successful of whose works were held firmly as paradigms of compositional achievement; faith in the autonomy of the musical work except in so far as historical conditions can be understood to provide a necessary backdrop to and enabling context for composition and performance; tacit reliance on a conventionally humanist conception of the figures involved in musical life, from composer and performer to listener, each understood to be discrete subjects, knowable, in large part, to themselves and to others; and a presumption, of various extent and with necessary and notable exceptions, as to music’s rightful place beyond or at one remove from ostensibly limiting matters of politics and ideology. The pre-twentieth-century heritage of these principles is readily apparent. Indeed, it is in part a sense of the increasingly untenable nature of this heritage, in the face of altogether different conceptions of gender, ethnicity and sexuality in the second half of the twentieth century, which fuelled the desire for a radical critique and revision of working practices (the claim to radical activity is, for once, warranted). The various strands of the work which for the sake of convenience we can call ‘new musicology’ held in common an understanding of the sound of music not as constitutionally free of content, or as signifying only in the most abstract and essentialist sense, but as always and everywhere meaningful, both in terms of a worldliness of which it cannot but partake, and, in its turn, influence, and an openness to and reliance on interpretative ascription. Music, in so far as it signifies at all, is no different from other forms of art.

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Musical meaning is made not discovered, nowhere more conventionally than when music, so-called absolute music most effortlessly, is claimed as the art which slips free of the nets of signification; and the methods by which this discovery of significance are made are a matter themselves of conscious selection and scrutiny in much the same way as are selections of material for analysis. Music’s forms, to adopt the familiar phrase, are ever contentful.36 The key works of the period are identifiable according to their exploration of one or other of the most telling preoccupations of the new musicology.37 Most obvious amongst these was an extensive revision of the canon of art music, both its works and its figures, allied to a critique of the normative workings of canonicity itself. Music’s gates were unlocked and thrown open. There was an admittance, in various guises, of narrativity in music, not as the mimicking or accompaniment in sound of a preexisting verbal tale, but as the invocation in music and by its listeners of specific aspects of narrative, whether of actor, event or narrating voice, each of which carries always its own worldly resonance. The influence of psychoanalysis allowed for an opening-up, not to say a belated complication, of the subjectivity of those involved in making and hearing music, and of their always desirous, mobile, identificatory and multiply contingent situatedness. Music’s role is not merely reflective but constitutive, intimately influencing many of the ways in which we feel and think of our feelings, in the moment and over time. Allied to this opening-up of subjectivity was an acknowledgement of the constitutive work of language, and so writing, in the making of music, at the fundamental level of sounds heard and meanings attributed. The received wisdom of a small number of ostensibly objective critical modes and methods gave way in acknowledgement of the fact that music is and can be made, in writing, in any number of registers, all necessarily contested; hence the arrival in some quarters of performative music criticism, as one instance of a broadly critical-creative turn in the humanities in the early twenty-first century. The names of the musicologists and critics in question here are now familiar. Each is in her or his own way a brilliantly perceptive and inventive listener, none more so than Lawrence Kramer.38 His books, each comprising a number of closely argued and finely detailed set-piece encounters with music, exemplify the interpretive richness and conceptual ambition of theoretically-interested academic musicology of the past thirty years.39 They offer also the most cogent articulation of the workings of writing about music in the present time, and so of why such writing matters. At stake is ‘a full and open engagement with music as lived experience, experience rendered vivid and vivified by a host of overlapping cultural associations’.40 Music under this dispensation sounds not as the exception that proves the rule of discourse, as that human activity that marks the limits, precisely as it is taken to escape, the reaches of cultural and social signification, but rather as exemplifying the always contested, never-ending or -endable ways in which the music we produce is taken and made to mean something. As such, Kramer argues, It would be a good idea to deal seriously and acceptingly with other people’s words about music. And it would be a good idea not to be shy or apologetic about our own. We can trust our imaginations, and our acculturations, more than we’ve often been told we can. And the better we talk about music, the better we can listen.41

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It should come as no surprise, given this stance towards listening and writing, that Kramer’s readings are full of literature, offered variously as historical co-text to music, as music’s aesthetic counterpart, as music’s reader and as music’s writer; and above all, as the co-art in which we can witness music being made and put to work and to play in the world. Because of course – and here, finally, is the pay-off for the laboured exposition of these pages – the idea of music conceived by contemporary musicology is old news for literature; for literature, music was ever thus. Literature cannot have it any other way; cannot, that is, speak of, and so make, music as anything other than wordy and wordly. ‘Musico-literary studies’ is only the name, albeit infelicitous, for that area of enquiry in which we follow and seek to account for music’s continued life, using for the purpose what is arguably the richest source of evidence. What we find, with infinite variety, is that music has been and continues to be ever-variously literary and literature ever-variously musical. As such, musico-literary studies is not simply a modish or esoteric corner of academic burrowing, but rather an acknowledgement of music and literature’s mutually constituting and affirming entanglement.

Notes 1. On the much-discussed subject of music and literary modernism, see in particular Eric Prieto, Listening In: Music, Mind and the Modernist Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Josh Epstein, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For encyclopaedic forays into the world of inter-arts modernism, see the work of Daniel Albright, especially Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music and Painting, 1872–1927 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) and Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 2. Most major modernist writers have been the subject of studies devoted to their relation with music. See, for example, Bronze by Gold: The Music of James Joyce, ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles (London: Routledge, 1999); Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Proust as Musician, trans. Derrick Puffett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Emma Sutton, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Michelle Fillion, Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E. M. Forster (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Mary Bryden, Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). 3. Several of the major works of modernist poetry draw extensively on music, to various effect: Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets, Pound’s Cantos and Bunting’s Briggflatts. I have concentrated here on the novel not only because it provides a particularly striking set of examples of the literary aspiration to aspects of music – an aspiration that is perhaps the most distinctive feature of relations between the two arts at this time – but also because poetry’s interest in music, lyric poetry’s in particular, is often an interest in the so-called musical elements of language: in rhyme, rhythm, metre and sonority. This interest is of course central to the very constitution of the lyric, but for that reason, and because music thus understood is of a generalised nature, feels less distinctive as a mark of literary-musical relations during the period. This is not to say that Eliot, Pound and Bunting, amongst others, did not write perceptively on matters of poetry and music,

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Pound especially and certainly most extensively (see Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer). For work in this area, see, for example, T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music, ed. John Xiros Cooper (London: Routledge, 2000). Kundera writes variously about music, both in itself and as a model for fiction, in two of his essay collections: The Art of the Novel (London: Faber, 1988) and Testaments Betrayed (London: Faber, 1995). The circumstances surrounding the writing of Mann’s novel have been extensively documented and are of considerable interest for the history of relations between fiction and music. See Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann, Correspondence 1943–1955, trans. anon. (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), and Susan von Rohr Scaff, History, Myth and Music: Thomas Mann’s Timely Fiction (London: Camden House, 1998). On contemporary (English-language) fiction and music, see Stephen Benson, Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Gerry Smyth, Music in Contemporary British Fiction: Listening to the Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); Write in Tune: Contemporary Music in Fiction, ed. Erich Hertz and Jeffrey Roessner (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). We should mention also Jean Cocteau, librettist for operas by Stravinsky, Poulenc, Milhaud and Honegger. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings by W. H. Auden: 1939–1973, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1993). A selection of Auden’s writing on music, including opera, can be found in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, new edn (London: Faber, 1987). On the subject specifically of the opera libretto, see Reading Opera, ed Arthur Groos and Roger Parker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). On the inter-relation of music and literature, and of writers and composers, in the renaissance of opera in Britain in the twentieth century, see Irene Morra, Twentieth-Century British Authors and the Rise of Opera in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Other British operas of note as much for their literary as their musical elements include two collaborations between Michael Berkeley and David Malouf, each based on a classic of English literature (Baa Baa Black Sheep, which draws on Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and Jane Eyre); Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert, which has a libretto written by the composer, based on Ludwig Tieck’s story of the same name; two operas by Thomas Adès, Powder Her Face, with libretto by the novelist Philip Hensher, and The Tempest, a Shakespeare adaptation with libretto by the playwright, Meredith Oakes; and the operatic collaborations of George Benjamin and playwright Martin Crimp: Into the Little Hill and Written on the Skin. Benjamin Britten’s Poets: An Anthology of the Poems He Set to Music, ed. Boris Ford (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996). Although an American artist and so strictly beyond the bounds of the present volume, Cage’s work in text is not only crucial to the history of post-war music, but offers also a store of wonderfully inventive musico-literary works, the artist himself declining to recognise a clear distinction between creative and critical practice. See the series of volumes of writing that begins with Silence: Lectures and Writings, first published in 1961 (fiftieth anniversary edn (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011)). Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation, ed. John Lely and James Saunders (London: Continuum, 2012). R. Murray Schafer, Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1994). The Tuning of the World was first published in 1977. See The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull (Oxford: Berg, 2003); The Sound Studies Reader, Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012); Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). Of the increasingly

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19. 20. 21.

22.

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stephen benson large number of writers to have written extensively on aspects of sound, see the work of Douglas Kahn, Brendan LaBelle, David Toop and Salomé Voegelin. See in particular Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). For a sampling of the state of the field, see Thresholds of Listening: Sounds, Technics, Space, ed. Sander van Maas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). See, for example, Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Sam Halliday, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Mark M. Smith, Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). John Cage, Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (Mode 28/29, 1979); John Cage, Empty Words: Writings ’73– ’78 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1979). One example of a post-Cagean critical work of the kind I am imagining here is Stephen Ratcliffe’s Listening to Reading (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). En Abîme: Listening Reading Writing: An Archival Fiction (Alresford: Zero Books, 2012) and F.M.R.L.: Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains, and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Alresford: Zero Books, 2015). The critical literature on pop music is, of course, extensive. For a good indication of the breadth and depth of such writing, see the work of Simon Frith and of Richard Middleton. For criticism concerned specifically with pop music and literature, see Smyth, Music in Contemporary British Fiction; Claus-Ulrich Viol, Jukebooks: Contemporary British Fiction, Popular Music, and Cultural Value (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006); LitPop: Writing and Popular Music, ed. Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014). See also the ‘Literature and Music’ special issue of Popular Music, 24 (2005). Simon Frith, Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music, new edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, ed. Richard Middleton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Peter Szendy, Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). Denise Riley, Selected Poems (Hastings: Reality Street, 2000). Sam Riviere, 81 Austerities (London: Faber, 2012); Sam Riviere, Kim Kardashian’s Marriage (London: Faber, 2015); Jonty Tiplady, Zam Bonk Dip (Norfolk: Salt, 2010). Music radio has been the subject of much critical work in recent decades. Although from an earlier period, see in particular Adorno’s unfinished writings on the subject, published as Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Polity, 2009). I mention this in particular because of its close relation to Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility’ (1935), an essay much cited by those musico-literary critics concerned with the relation, in theory and in practice, between music’s technological manifestations and literature. On the more general subject of musically-minded literature written specifically for the medium of radio, see Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) and Kevin Branigan, Radio Beckett: Musicality in the Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008). The critical literature here is extensive. See Michael Channon, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1997); Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California

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Press, 2004); Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hans-Joachim Braun (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Friedrich A. Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) has been a particularly influential critical text for readings of modernism and technologies of music. See also Richard Leppert, Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature: Opera, Orchestra, Phonography, Film (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). For readings of the work of individual authors, see, for example, Pamela Caughie, Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (London: Routledge, 2000). See Tia deNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Tia deNora, After Adorno: Rethinking Musical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and, for work concerned specifically with personal music players, Michael Bull, Sounding out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (London: Berg, 2000); Michael Bull, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (London: Routledge, 2007). Critical accounts of the increasing presence, albeit often unnoticed, of music in everyday life are of particular relevance to musico-literary studies, most obviously because the novel has long been considered the form best equipped for the transcription of the texture of the everyday. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (London: Faber, 2005), pp. 69–71. Audiobooks, Literature and Sound Studies, ed. Matthew Rubery (London: Routledge, 2014). For one example of a more inventive use of the audiobook format, see the short ‘Book Report Series’ published by Wist Rec. (), for which musicians were invited to offer newly composed soundtracks for short literary works. The music was presented on a 3-inch CD fixed inside the respective volume, with instructions for it to be played whilst the literary text was read. See also Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technology, ed. Adalaide Kirby Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). The emergence of the field is attested also by the founding in 1997 of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The volumes of papers taken from the biennial conferences organised by the WMA offer a rich store of work in the area, and an indication of the variety of critical approaches practised. The key figure in the founding of the WMA, and in the establishment of musico-literary studies, is Steven Paul Scher. See Word and Music Studies: Essays on Literature and Music (1967–2004) by Steven Paul Scher, ed. Walter Bernhard and Werner Wolf (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004). Scher was the editor of Music and Text: Critical Inquiries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), an important essay collection published several years before the establishment of the WMA. Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1948), p. xi. The exceptions to this rule are Roland Barthes, whose later work includes a series of essays on his avowedly amateurish love of music, and Jean-François Lyotard. For examples of this work, see the essays on music included in Barthes, Responsibilities of Form: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). McClary’s title nods approvingly to Hayden White’s widely influential study, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). The character and preoccupations of the new musicology are perhaps best sampled via a series of influential essay collections published between 1993 and 2000. The titles themselves offer

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stephen benson an indication of the primary concerns: Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Musical Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas (London: Routledge, 1994); Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons, ed. Katherine Bergeron (Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian and Lawrence Siegel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997); Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Synoptic accounts followed immediately in the wake of these collections: Alastair Williams, Constructing Musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Kevin Korsyn, Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Along with Kramer, see the work of Carolyn Abbate, Susan M. McClary, Rose Rosengard Subotnik and Richard Leppert. See in particular Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) Lawrence Kramer, ‘Subjectivity Rampant! Music, Hermeneutics and History’, in The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 124–35 (p. 134). Lawrence Kramer, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Words, Music and Performativity’, in Word and Music Studies: Essays in Honour of Steven Paul Scher and on Cultural Identity and the Musical Stage, ed. Suzanne M. Lodato, Suzanne Aspden and Walter Bernhart (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 35–47 (p. 46).

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M U S I C A N D C R I T I C A L T H E O RY

45 Nelson Goodman: An Analytic Approach to Music and Literature Studies Eric Prieto

N

elson Goodman’s LANGUAGES OF ART, although a major text in the field of aesthetic philosophy, is not well known, or at least not often cited, by scholars of the relations between music and literature.1 This is perhaps understandable (much of the attention paid to his work in aesthetics has focused on his controversial treatment of pictorial representation) but is also regrettable. Goodman’s work on the symbolic functioning of the arts casts a refreshing light on both music and literature, asking challenging questions about the relations between them, including some familiar ones but also many that have not occurred to commentators outside of the analytic philosophy community. Given that so much work on the relations between music and literature comes out of a continental tradition shaped by phenomenological, structuralist and deconstructive philosophies, Goodman’s aesthetic system provides a useful way to reframe the central questions of the field by examining them from an unfamiliar angle. Goodman’s discussion of the arts begins by conceiving of them in terms of more mundane kinds of symbols, such as labels, samples, maps and graphs. He identifies a certain number of basic symbolic functions – naming, measuring, counting, comparing – and considers the roles they may play in the various arts. By starting with consideration of such basic symbolic functions, rather than grappling immediately with the complexities of fully realised works of art, Goodman is able to clear away much of the ideological baggage and conceptual underbrush that can impede the work of critics, and to do so without taking sides in debates about what constitutes good or bad art. In so doing, he is able to offer a clear response to what may well be the central question of word and music studies: how the ‘presentational’ mode of music (which has no codified relationship between signifier and signified) can be brought to bear on the ‘representational’ mode of literary works and vice versa. This, in turn, helps to show how the two arts can be made to work together, be it through adaptations from one art to the other, hybrid combinations (as in song and opera), or by using the principles of musical expression to shed light on literary expression and vice versa.

Three Central Concepts At the heart of Goodman’s analysis are three central concepts: denotation, exemplification and expression. Particularly important for our understanding of music is Goodman’s concept of exemplification, which helps to resolve the problem of musical

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reference. Historically, the central difficulty facing those interested in explaining musical signification has been the problem of reference: how are the tonal formations of music able to evoke the rich variety of extra-musical ideas that we commonly attribute to them? This question has led many to fall back on metaphysical or mystical explanations of musical meaning (the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres, the Schopenhauerian ante rem, the Nietzschean postulation of a pre-rational Dionysian element, psychoanalytic appeals to the foetus’s auditory experiences in the womb, etc.) while others (like the French musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez) have tried to apply linguistic models of meaning to music, with at best mixed results. So intractable is this problem that it has led writers as diverse as Eduard Hanslick, Monroe Beardsley and Igor Stravinsky to resort to purely negative definitions of musical meaning: Stravinsky: ‘I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.’2 Goodman’s concept of exemplification accounts for the grain of truth that all of these theories contain, while also showing how they fall short in various ways. What then is exemplification? In abstract terms, exemplification is a mode of reference in which a symbol serves as an example of some of the properties it possesses. The classic example of an exemplificational symbol is the sample: a swatch of fabric or a paint chip is a symbol whose sole purpose is to serve as an example of certain of its properties. The paint chip exemplifies a certain colour, and perhaps other related qualities like gloss, but usually not properties like the weight or age of the chip, which would be considered trivial in this context (although perhaps not in others). How do we know which of its many properties are the salient, non-trivial ones, i.e. those to which the sample actually refers? For the most part, we rely on context to tell us. When we go to the paint shop, we go looking for certain kinds of things and all of the samples we run across function without ambiguity so long as we remain within that tightly defined context. Exemplificational symbols work in the same manner in the arts. When we encounter a complex non-representational symbol like an abstract painting or a Bach partita, it cannot tell us what it means in the way that a novel or representational painting can. In other words, musical symbols do not denote efficiently. But in the context of the concert hall, we go in knowing that we are looking for certain kinds of things (aesthetic properties linked to the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and timbral features of the works performed), and we begin our interpretation of each work by closely following the formal features deployed there and asking ourselves questions about the properties they exemplify. An accurate description of those features normally requires use of technical terms (through rhythmic and harmonic analysis), although a layman’s approximation can usually be achieved through use of more general or subjective terms. Even in the complete absence of any denotative symbol telling us what a musical work is ‘about’, we are able to answer that question, in a formal sense at least, by examining its features and deciding what properties those features exemplify. There is, of course, much more speculation involved in this kind of interpretation than in the interpretation of denotative symbols. But it is by no means mere guesswork, so long as we are aware of the institutional conventions operative for that work and its interpretive community. And even though many of our interpretations may turn out to be incorrect or partial, this kind of ambiguity should not be construed as a failing. On the contrary, a big part of the pleasure derived from interpreting abstract works arises from the hermeneutic adventure of organising our analysis of the work’s

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various elements into a coherent, meaningful interpretation, working from our observations of what is demonstrably there to more speculative questions of meaning and significance. The challenge is to generate as much meaning as possible without violating the constraints imposed upon interpretation by the work’s formal features. At this point, it should be noted that exemplification is not limited to abstract works. All symbols, including words, exemplify certain properties independently of whatever it is they might denote. (Consider what is exemplified by the word ‘short’, compared with the word ‘monosyllabic’.) This is all the more true of works of art. Even the most flatly journalistic literary text exemplifies some set of formal properties and, indeed, in some contexts, ‘flatly journalistic’ may have great expressive value in its own right, as in Hemingway. Meanwhile, some modes of literary expression (e.g. verse poetry) are valued as much for the abstract properties they exemplify as for their thematic content. As in musical interpretation, the reader of a literary text is constantly asking questions about the exemplificational value of the words and sentences that make up the text. The difference, of course, is that the denotational, representational dimension of the literary text is so strongly foregrounded that we may not consciously register its exemplificational features, even though they may have a powerful subliminal effect on our interpretation of the work. Having sketched out this brief introduction to the concept of exemplification, and, in passing, that of denotation, we now need to turn to Goodman’s third mode of symbolisation, which he calls expression. In Goodman’s system, expression works in much the same way as exemplification: through reference to some of the properties that the symbol possesses. (The symbol functions as an example of those properties.) But whereas exemplification covers only those properties that a work possesses literally, expression refers to those properties that a work possesses metaphorically. Thus, although it would be naïve to think that Beethoven’s Third Symphony is heroic in some literal way (notes are just notes, after all), it does express that property, meaning that it possesses certain features that can metaphorically be interpreted as heroic, including ‘majestic’ chord sequences, ‘grandiose’ melodies, ‘powerful’ climaxes and ‘triumphant’ resolutions. All of the adjectives in this list are metaphors that help to understand the effect of the various features of the composition. Those features are literally present, but in attributing non-musical predicates like heroism to them we are interpreting them metaphorically. As with exemplification, our interpretations of the expressive qualities of a work are always subject to differences of opinion. There has always been and always will be some amount of disagreement in the interpretation of the expressive qualities of a work, especially when we begin to move beyond broad categories like ‘heroic’ and ‘sad’ to discuss its finer points. But again, this is a feature not a bug. And with the aid of experience, cultural context, knowledge of institutional norms and conventions, and perhaps a little help from the composer (a descriptive title, interview, etc.), we are usually able to achieve a workable consensus on the most important expressive features of the work, one that solidifies in time, as works in innovative or unfamiliar styles are incorporated into our frame of reference. It is worth noting that Goodman’s definition of expression breaks with common usage on one important point. We commonly say that I am expressing my sadness when I tell someone I am sad. But in Goodman’s scheme the statement ‘I am sad’ does not express my sadness; rather, it denotes or describes my sadness. In order to

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express sadness in Goodman’s sense I would need to give some signs of sadness, by, say, crying or rending my garments. Expression, in other words, like exemplification, involves showing rather than telling. Since such signs do not tell us what they mean, they require using the same kind of interpretive strategies needed to decode exemplificational symbols. This is a significant point for the interpretation of literary works, because it reminds us of the important distinction between the statements found in a work and the qualities it expresses, the difference between what a work says and what it shows. There may well be much overlap between the two, but there may just as well be a wide gap. Indeed, many rhetorical devices, like irony and antiphrasus, exploit this gap, which is why we often talk about the importance of reading between the lines. A notable philosophical advantage of Goodman’s theory of expression as metaphorical exemplification is that it enables us to set aside ontological or psychological questions about what expressive qualities are actually possessed by the work or actually experienced by its artist or audience, since this becomes a matter of metaphorical exemplification, not a declaration about the true state of things in the world.3 The attribution of expressive labels is simply a way of providing a kind of short-hand description of the work that is able to mediate between what is literally present in the work (i.e. its formal properties), its perceived or intended effects, and their presumed significance. This ability to set aside the question of whether an emotion is actually being experienced or instantiated somewhere spares us unnecessary speculation about states of mind and being, which are quite variable and may ultimately be unknowable. Another significant advantage of Goodman’s theory of expression is that it releases us from the need to take sides in the ongoing debate on the relationship between music and the emotions. Goodman’s system, as we’ve already seen, is perfectly able to account for ‘programmatic’ theories of musical meaning that explain its significance in terms of emotions and psychological processes (e.g. Susanne Langer). But a work of art, in Goodman’s scheme, can also express non-human traits, such as order or disorder, stasis or dynamism, lightness or heaviness (or darkness). This makes Goodman’s theory capacious enough to accommodate essentialist theories that explain music’s ultimate significance in divine, cosmic or scientific terms (from Pythagoras to Helmholtz to evolutionary psychologists), or the proponents of absolute music (like Hanslick or Stravinsky), who resist any attempt to relate music to non-musical concerns. Each of these approaches can find a place within Goodman’s theory of expression, contributing something important to our understanding of musical expression that might be more or less pertinent depending on the kind of music under consideration.

Goodman’s Conventionalism It should be clear from the preceding that Goodman’s view of the arts puts great weight on the crucial role played by institutions, tradition and conventions, which help to guide our interpretive efforts. This institutional emphasis also comes to the fore in Goodman’s theory of notation, which places great importance on the role of the score/ text. Goodman sees the existence of such notational systems as alphabetical writing and standard notation in music as the result of a long historical process of cultural selfdefinition. Thus, ‘the problem of developing a notational system for an art like music

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amounted to the problem of arriving at a real definition of the notion of a musical work’.4 A notational system grows out of, and then begins to enforce, a widely shared consensus that what counts in a given art is what can be notated in that system (tones and rhythms in music; letters and words in alphabetic writing). Conversely, arts like painting or sculpture lack such a system of notation. With no system of notation, every detail, however minute, is at least potentially significant, which means that the work is a singular object, the painting itself. Or, as Goodman puts it, pictures and sculptures are both syntactically and semantically dense, whereas literary texts and musical scores are semantically dense but syntactically articulate. It is this fact that founds the distinction between autographic arts (identified with the physical object itself, making forgery an important issue) and allographic arts, which can have multiple physical inscriptions/performances (they can of course be copied, but this is very different from making a replica of a painting).5 The lack of a notational system for painting shows that there has been no consensus on what elements count and which do not in a painting. Or, more accurately, the historical consensus has been that all visible elements count in a painting. This distinction raises some interesting questions: why is it that painting has remained an autographic art, but not music or literature? Is there something inherent in the nature of light and sound, or in the ways that humans process images and sounds, that makes syntactical density more important in the former than in the latter? This might be considered a question for cognitive science and evolutionary biology, but Goodman is highly resistant to any argument that relies on naturalistic appeals to the true nature of things. For Goodman, always true to his analytic outlook, any answers to such questions must be provided by the logical structure of the symbol systems themselves, not ontological assertions about the way things truly are.6

Goodman’s Ontological Agnosticism Although Goodman, as an analytic philosopher, practises philosophy in a way that is quite remote from the continental tradition of aesthetics, music and literary criticism, his work can be brought into dialogue with the various strands of philosophical thinking that have shaped the outlook of music and literature studies. It is possible, for example, to reframe the kind of claims made about musical signification by thinkers like Schopenhauer (direct representation of the Wille) and Leibniz (occult arithmetic) in terms of exemplification, making it easier to work with (and derive benefit from) their theories even if we don’t accept their metaphysics. And Goodman’s theory of notation, which locates the musical work in the score itself, furnishes us with a clear way to understand what Ingarden and Sartre are getting at when they speculate about the ‘location’ of the work of art (which they situate in a quasi-Platonic virtual space), even if we don’t agree with their conclusions. Meanwhile, as we just saw, Goodman’s theory of expression provides a useful way to mediate between those who have thought of music as an art of the emotions and those who have thought of it in abstract or physicalist terms. And Goodman’s thoroughgoing cognitivism resonates with the thinking of evolutionary biologists who see the emotions themselves as cognitive algorithms, a kind of advanced guard of rational decision-making, enabling us to make snap decisions when under pressure.

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Goodman’s approach also has a number of more immediate applications for studies of the relations between music and literature, helping to understand what we are doing when we make comparisons, transpositions and combinations of words and music. What, for example, are we doing when we say that a literary work is musical in some sense? In Goodmanian terms, we are trying to label those exemplificational properties of the work that do not fit within the usual nomenclature of literary analysis. This is an inherently metaphorical process and thinking of it in these terms helps to avoid the misleading idea, still prominent in some circles, that musical terms should only be considered applicable to literary works once they have crossed some threshold of literality. Goodman reminds us that it is more important to ask what gap in the existing critical vocabulary is being filled by the musical metaphor. The same considerations apply in the other direction (from music to words) when we assert that a musical work is expressing a certain idea or representing a certain scene. In Goodmanian terms, this is a way of giving a shorthand (i.e. metaphorical) description of the work’s properties, one that is, to be sure, inherently inadequate to the specifically tonal, rhythmic and textural particularities of that work, but that can nonetheless orient our interpretation and help us to focus attention on the most salient and meaningful aspects of the work. Finally, a similar set of considerations applies when we analyse combinations of words, music and images in song, opera and the like. Arguments about the adequacy of the relationship between the music and text of a given work, or the proper relationship between music and words in general (i.e. whether music should be the master or the servant of the words), provide us with occasions to think through this reciprocal referential relationship between language and music. And one of the great strengths of Goodman’s approach is to remind us that although we may, for ideological reasons, feel compelled to come down on one side or the other in such debates, there is no single, proper answer, but rather a broad spectrum of answers that will vary over time and across different cultural milieus. This last point highlights one of the central lessons of Goodman’s approach to the arts, which is to remind us of the need to be cautious in our ontological commitments, to guard against the kinds of mistakes that stem from excessive reliance on received wisdom and preconceived notions. Without forcing a judgement on, say, the value of romantic emotionalism vs classical proportion, he enables us to think in new ways about what we are doing when we commit to such a view, what we gain (and lose) when we make judgements along these lines. Goodman’s approach results in a kind of desanctification of the arts, relativising aesthetic activity itself by highlighting what the arts have in common with other kinds of symbolic activity, including high-level pursuits like scientific enquiry but also low-level pursuits like measuring, sorting and comparing. By rethinking what we do when we interpret a work of art in terms of such basic tasks, he helps to avoid the no-doubt understandable but often muddled tendency to discuss the arts in reverent or hyperbolic terms. This is not of course to say that Goodman is somehow above the fray. There are certainly many kinds of commitments that Goodman makes from which we might wish to distance ourselves (including, no doubt, his score centrism and irrealism7). But because the main thrust of his argument goes so strongly against the grain, intersecting transversally with many established positions, they can still have a tonic effect on our own thinking about the arts. Whether or not one agrees with Goodman’s general outlook, or the various interpretive strategies that flow from that outlook, the fact of

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having wrestled with his arguments and taken a stance for or against them will greatly enrich the critic’s own understanding of those relationships.

Notes 1. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976). One notable exception to this rule is John Neubauer, ‘Music and Literature: The Institutional Dimensions’, in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 3–20. 2. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (1903–1934) (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975), pp. 53–4. 3. This has been a major preoccupation of many aesthetic philosophers, including Roman Ingarden. 4. Goodman, p. 197. 5. Arguably, an improvised jazz performance should be considered an autographic work, since the non-notable nuances of performances are of paramount interest. This is one of the notable weaknesses of Goodman's system: its reliance on the score as definitional of the work tends to foreclose consideration of important performance issues. 6. This strong resistance to naturalistic explanations is taken to its most extreme point in Goodman’s ‘irrealism’, which leads him to deny that resemblance plays a significant role in representation, even in the pictorial representation of objects. But that debate is outside the scope of this essay. 7. See notes 5 and 6 above.

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46 Lyotard, Phenomenology and the Shared Paternity of Literature and Music Anthony Gritten

Disciplinary Relations

F

rom Gotthold Lessing to Jean-Luc Nancy, attempts to relate the Arts are as numerous as the artists themselves. Countless studies unpack the ways in which novelists write music into literature and the ways in which the one art form can be read in terms of, and through, the other. Peter Dayan, for example, writes about the ‘intermedial’ relationships between the Arts, unpacking ‘the sea of paradoxes that is generated by the question of artistic value’.1 In Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida, he analyses the relationships between music and literature (including poetry), seeking to distinguish between cultural objects (pieces of music, works of literature) and the parent category of Art. His argument is that ‘Letters may give to music a lucidity it might have lacked; but first, the printed page must be saved from the death of self-identity; and that is the task of music.’2 For Dayan, in fact, music is not just an art form. It is also a phenomenon with a wider application than sonic cultural practices. Music (with a capital M) or ‘the musical’ is a category that gathers its value from being the grounding rhythm of the very relationship between pieces of music and works of literature. Following Dayan’s precept that ‘Music is always art; if it is not art, it is not music. It thus proves by its very existence that art exists’, I use the capitalised term ‘Music’, as my focus is on the specific relation of music and literature.3 Between other pairs of Arts, different Ur-terms are appropriate, since a key moment of the aesthetic is that: ‘this ability of art in a given medium to metamorphose into the universal quality of art-in-general is shared by all of the arts. (We will see music-as-universal-harmony becoming the principle behind poetry and painting. The concept of “universal poetry”, as the general truth of art, works in exactly the same way; like music-as-universal-harmony, it goes back at least to the Romantics.)’4 Music, in Dayan’s deployment, is the ‘rhythm between relations, conceived as beyond meaning, beyond analysis, beyond reproduction and beyond hearing’; music’s essential quality is that ‘which is not simply present in its sound’.5 Writers in Dayan’s tradition figure Music as the driving force of literature and behind the inclusion of music in literature. This distinction between ‘music’ and ‘Music’, between real individual pieces of music and a broader quality open to phenomenological but not empirical reduction, explains why writers appear contradictory in their musical engagements, to say one thing about music (its meaning) but believe another, and to seem to reject debate per se.6 As Dayan summarises a key element of the aesthetic: ‘one can write

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nothing interesting, true or useful about what music is and does without simultaneously subscribing to two contradictory beliefs: that music embodies something absolutely and endlessly beyond words; and that music expresses something that can be translated into words.’7 In Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond, Dayan broadens his purview to include painting and poetry alongside literature and music. His focus now is on what he calls ‘the interart aesthetic’.8 This is an aesthetic that allows artists in all media to describe and define their own art form only in the terms offered by another art form, hence the book’s title. To put it schematically: good painting is music (Whistler’s symphonies), good music is poetry (Stravinsky’s versifications), and so on. Dayan’s central contention is perhaps clearest in his spin-off article, ‘Different Music, Same Condition: Hofstadter and Lyotard’. In this comparison of two nominally quite different writers, he argues that a central paradox needs to be, not rejected, but accepted and worked through. Such writers, whether folk psychological or more rigorously scientific, often differ at a discursive level in their belief as to what constitutes music and poetry, in what they propose should be named ‘music’ and ‘poetry’, and in particular in what they judge to be ‘good music’ and ‘good poetry’. At the same time, paradoxically, the same writers nevertheless frequently share a deep-seated definition of ‘the conditions’ of music and of poetry. Contrasting cultural manifestations of each art form, of each Art, are grounded in the same ontology. As Dayan puts it, ‘different music, same condition’. This ‘condition’ is that of Music: ‘Music embodies, by its very definition, that wedding of form to content which distinguishes art’ per se. Thus, for Hofstadter, ‘What defines music is not [. . .] its sound. It is the relationship between the form that its sound may compose, and its content,’ and, for Lyotard, similarly, what is significant is music’s ‘unarticulated breath, a timeless, voiceless lament which manages to slip through the articulated form of the work. The beauty or sublimity of music is in that unarticulated breath, not in its material’.9 In this essay I unpack the relationship between literature and music through the prism of Jean-François Lyotard’s writings. These offer an exemplary way of approaching the phenomenology of art and of phrasing the relationship between literature and music, and in particular their phenomenologically intimate and co-determining emergence in contemporary society. I treat literature and poetry together as ‘literature’, bracketing the complications that come from not making a separation between them. I propose that the ‘same condition’ shared by music and literature can be reduced phenomenologically to a matter of energy. Energy is a broader and more fundamental category than Music. What music and literature share is their manner of emergence from energy. A single undifferentiated flow of energy comes to be invested and cathected in different ways in different art forms, in the process generating their different and characteristic rhythms and tempi. I unpack this claim with reference to Lyotard’s phenomenology of aesthetic events. Lyotard considers that all forms of creative art making, across all media, have a common origin in the displacement, transference, investment and cathexis of energy. To unpack his phenomenology of visual art is to unpack his phenomenology of music, his phenomenology of literature, and so on, notwithstanding the details of the actual bracketed matter, to which he is extraordinarily attentive. The aesthetic event analysed in ‘Anima Minima’ exists without reference to any particular art-making practice.10 Lyotard’s focus on contemporary artistic practices

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expands Dayan’s comparison with Hofstadter, and provides a context for the broad disciplinary relationship – mimesis? dialogue? intersection? complementarity? – of music and literature. My specific focus is on what in Postmodern Fables Lyotard terms ‘the sigh’: a minimal, unarticulated, unlinked, absolute feeling. I will over-emphasise and essentialise the term ‘sigh’ somewhat, at the expense of a related concept key to Lyotard’s later work: the ‘phrase-affect’.11 Being almost nothing, I will hear the sigh requiring an impossible kind of attention – distracted, perhaps – that can only fail to adequate with its object. But this attention is one that, in failing, and precisely by virtue of its coursing alongside (as opposed to against) the sigh, has the potential to set in motion valuable artistic insights into the nature of events today – including musical and literary events.

Systemic Sighs One of Lyotard’s worries concerns the contemporary social system. For him this is a worry about the human relation to time, for the system (his word of choice for a highly complex phenomenon) swallows up time and drains it from human discourse. Nevertheless, despite acknowledging that the world has become irrevocably systemic, and that this presents intractable problems for humanity, he nevertheless realises that there are aesthetic events within the system, and that these hold a key to determining a resistant way forward. His realisation is that, much as the system might claim to be a matter of ‘setting things in motion totally and mobilising energies’, not all energies can be mobilised.12 Even those energies that allow us to think that we have mobilised them are not entirely under control. Energy always is what it is and not what we suppose it to be. On the back of the system ride aesthetic events, bubbling away at the surface, apparently unstoppable, occasionally unpredictable, often private. Little and prosaic these events may be, in comparison with the gigantic pretensions of the system, but they are there to be listened to. Several examples of these aesthetic events are found in the first section of Postmodern Fables, which contains four essays under the subtitle ‘Verbiages’. Here are seven of them: 1. ‘People get bored, they have enough of snacking always on the same images, the same ideas at the cultural fast-food outlets, they need a little something live and unexpected. A good loophole.’ (PF, p. 11) 2. ‘What is beautiful catches the eye, stops the permanent sweeping of the field of vision by the gaze [cf. PF, p. 47] [. . .] visual thought pauses, and this point of suspension is the mark of aesthetic pleasure.’ (PF, p. 36) 3. ‘We’re starting to get bored. We dream of being upset. We wait for an event.’ (PF, p. 38) 4. ‘Graphic artists have to arouse them [‘bored passersby’; cf. PF, pp. 9, 11, 38, 40, 42] from the comforting slumbers of generalised communication, to slow down their unfortunate speed of life, to make them lose a little time.’ (PF, p. 40) 5. ‘But graphic art is not propaganda [. . .] it intrigues [a reference to the essay’s original French title; cf. PF, pp. 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 47, 49], thus immobilising and causing reflection.’ (PF, p. 44)

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6. ‘You have to freeze [cf. PF, pp. 47, 95] the eye, quickly. The passerby stops, turns back, and examines the poster.’ (PF, p. 45) 7. ‘The system always needs these criticisms, objections, hindrances, litigations, and even differends: they improve its performance. Maybe that’s why our contemporaries are so attached to the aesthetic moment: a sigh, the provisional suspension [cf. PF, pp. 63, 74, 95] of the principle of efficiency.’ (PF, p. 58) These seven statements, writing themselves across the different art forms as well as art in everyday discourse, are exemplars of a second time that runs alongside the stockpiling time of the system, performative instances of artistic events working through Lyotard’s text. Collectively, they inflect an underlying principle, a loose constellation concerning the phenomenology of aesthetic temporality. This phenomenology is phrased less militantly than it had been in The Differend and The Inhuman, which had respectively invoked Levinas’s figure of ‘the hostage’13 and asserted that ‘That which we call thought must be disarmed’.14 This phenomenology needs some unpacking and glossing, based on the sigh’s ‘disturbance’. Here, disturbance means more than the familiar sense associated with the artistic avant-garde, namely the significance of ‘works that challenge a very open set of discourses, rather than a specific artistic tradition. [The avant-garde] also means shock, not only on the grand scale, but also as a disturbance of a well-ordered relation between perceptions, tastes, values, economic exchanges and forms of knowledge. The avant-garde creates a disturbance through new desires and sensations, rather than merely through “new” artistic forms.’15 The phenomenology of this second time encompasses slowing, losing, suspending, displacing, interrupting, pausing, waiting, reflecting, distracting and resonating. These moments are neither noises outside the system nor resistance to the system, since there is no subject of resistance outside the system. Rather, they are disturbances within the system and, more dangerously, of the system; indeed, the ontology of these little artistic events has a general quasi-transcendental significance that reaches beyond the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. In ‘The General Line’ Lyotard has much to say to Deleuze about this second time, which he terms ‘the second existence’: The ‘general line’ is not the line of life in general, of life ‘such as it is’. The second existence is nonetheless sweet in relation to ‘the life everyone sees’. It suspends it a little, it dwells within it from time to time and sweeps it away, but without one knowing anything about it. The second existence does not really wrong the first one; it opens little parentheses within it. (PF, pp. 117–18) In the final section of Postmodern Fables, which brings together four essays under the subtitle ‘Crypts’, he analyses how the effects of such parentheses and disturbances work on, in, under and through the system, ‘unbeknownst’ to it (PF, pp. 185–97). Such ‘parentheses’ and disturbances are Trojan horses sent under false (or at least unacknowledged) pretences into the city, the castle, the ‘crypt’. Within the multiple proliferating streams of cultural capital (the first of the seven statements above), within the hegemony of vision (the second), within the psychological imaginary, within the communicational context, within politics, within the discourse on interest, and within what the seventh statement simply calls the system

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tout court: within these seven statements there is a double movement that produces aesthetic temporality, that constitutes it phenomenologically, literally ‘existing’ it (PF, p. 243). This phenomenological constitution occurs both on the surface of the seven statements and inside them. It disturbs the distinction between surface and interior in a manner that recalls Lyotard’s earlier use of the Moebius strip metaphor to phrase desire.16 These little artistic events, which are ‘the most minimal occurrence[s]’, are constituted as little passages from the system towards the aesthetic without leaving the system behind.17 Posing the question, ‘Whence the aesthetic?’, Lyotard phrases the argument via transcendental phenomenology, unpacking the issues in ‘Anima Minima’. So, the seven statements above describe events representative of contemporary life, by which Lyotard means life in the system. These events are the embryos of what we come to recognise and determine as the art forms of music and literature. This section has unpacked their surface-level significance. The next section begins a phenomenological reduction of these events, and of the sigh in particular.

Phenomenological Noemata In order to understand the disturbing passage of the sigh towards the kind of aesthetic event that we recognise as music or literature, we need to unpack what is common to the seven statements. Phenomenological motifs working through these seven statements include the following: the live and unexpected (statement 1); pausing and suspending (statement 2); events (3); slowing and losing time (4); intriguing, immobilising and reflecting (5); freezing and stopping (6); and suspending (7). These noemata can be grouped under three related moments. First moment: liveness. The first moment is what the first and third statements phrase as a loophole and an event respectively: something live and unexpected. Loopholes were originally defensive features of medieval castles, looped or slit gaps in the brickwork from behind which arrows could be fired without making the defender visible or vulnerable. To the extent that they afforded the subject a lethal means of dealing with outsiders, they were effectively little disturbances in the hermetically sealed enclosure that constituted the castle’s keep, holes through which threats to the system could be intercepted, the villagers could be monitored, and the polis could be regulated. In Postmodern Fables, though, the opposite is meant: loopholes are passages created by unexpected seismic disturbances through which energy passes from the system and is transformed into an aesthetic event. Lyotard does not essentialise ‘liveness’ into an absolute value, but emphasises the initiation and infancy of the event, its opening up of possibilities and sheer presence as quod rather than quid. An ageing agitator, he is interested less in what happens down the line, in the event’s eventual becoming-system: what matters is what the event sets in motion. He writes approvingly of Sam Francis’s painting that ‘The gesture multiplies openings’.18 Elsewhere he explains that the value of the live event is ‘its very value as initiation. You only learn this later. It cuts open a wound in the sensibility. You know this because it has since reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed temporality. This wound ushered you into an unknown world, but without ever making it known to you. Such initiation initiates nothing, it just begins.’19

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Second moment: air. The second moment is what the second and seventh statements phrase as pausing, suspending and sighing. From the event there is an exhalation of air, a ‘breathy flatus’ (PF, pp. 226–7). This is not a winding down but a winding out, a clearing of the ‘throat’, as Lyotard might have put it in his books on Malraux. Here it is about phonè rather than lexis: ‘grunts, moans, sighs and so on’.20 The sigh is a voice without a voice, barely registering, almost mute: it is ‘an address which is an inaudible breath. This breath is almost a sigh or a little groan’.21 In The Inhuman, Lyotard writes of the danger of having ‘no pause for breath’.22 In most of his texts on the sublime he refers to ‘suspense’ as a key element, particularly with respect to Burke. Suspense ‘distinguishes poetics from practice and pragmatics’ but it cannot be separated from them (PF, p. 95). The system is itself suspended, put into suspension, albeit momentarily, in a fit of heavy breathing, matter hooked on itself: ‘The matter I’m talking about is “immaterial”, an-objectable, because it can only “take place” or find its occasion at the price of suspending these active powers of mind. I’d say that it suspends them for at least “an instant”.’23 ‘Suspense’, sublime or otherwise, may be limited as an explanation of the sigh: it seems to imply the removal of a bridge or passage between two previously established events, that something is suspended, whereas the sigh is not yet in a position to remove anything from anywhere – it betrays the body’s incapacity, its lack of support, diaphragm denied. Lyotard’s point about exhalation is only secondarily a matter of consciousness. It is more than a matter of aesthetic decision making, and of ‘The avant-gardist task [. . .] of undoing the presumption of the mind with respect to time’.24 As he says in a late essay nominally about music, recapitulating his argument in ‘Anima Minima’: The delight or the disturbance that [the act] gives to the subjectivity of the composer or of the listener assumes [. . .] a sort of suspension or decomposition of this subjectivity [. . .] Its time, its space, the materiality of the sensations that affect it are suspended. The ‘presence’ is not itself sensed since it does not satisfy the conditions of place, of time and of sensorium which are those of subjective sensibility.25 The exhalation of air avoids, or at the very least complicates, the touch of two bodies, two subjects, and it should not be psychologised into the expressive gesture of a subject pure and simple. The second statement above phrases it that ‘visual thought pauses’, but this is only ‘the mark of aesthetic pleasure’, not necessarily the trace of a subject-proprietor that owns that pleasure or whose property the pleasure is. The pleasure of this aesthetic exhalation, its airy jouissance, is ‘provisional’, replete in itself,26 ‘isolated, with no notion of its cause’,27 but, of course, shot through with entropy. Third moment: slowing. The third moment is what the fourth, fifth and sixth statements phrase as the slowing, freezing and loss of time, and the consequent stopping and immobilisation that affords intrigue, reflection and ruse.28 This is the entropic movement down towards absolute zero, the catatonic body. It is worth noting that Lyotard’s mention of ‘arousing’ the subject from her ‘slumber’ is, with its Kantian echo, a matter, not of arousing in order to catapult the subject at high speed, but of encouraging her to relax, loosen and slow. Slowing is a familiar Lyotardian motif,29 despite the punditry on the back cover of Postmodern Fables, which, notwithstanding the nature of the book business, seems to completely miss the irony of Lyotard’s quip

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that ‘Today, life is fast’ (PF, p. vii). As Lyotard says, ‘what is intriguing always stops the flow of time’ (PF, p. 37). Slowing is more than the response to the arrival of something unexpected or surprising, and is not the trace of an essentially conservative view of time or of social or aesthetic progress. Qua response, the slowing itself is always too late on the scene to do any substantial good. The sigh contains a moment of ‘fatigue’.30 The slowing is of organic life itself, its eidos, or, as Lyotard phrases it, complexification. Life slows as it comes into its proper plenitude, and there is a sigh, a release of tension and energy as intensities and drives are cathected in a temporary object. Lyotard says that ‘Thought must “linger”, must suspend its adherence to what it thinks it knows.’31 The slowing and loss of time in the sigh, which general philosophical aesthetics comes to inhabit and which literary theory and music theory come to order, perhaps betray, is one of the system’s internal organs. The answer to Lyotard’s rhetorical question, ‘Why do we have to save [. . .] time to the point where this imperative seems like the law of our lives?’, is that we do not, and that, even if we desired it, as the system seduces us into believing, there is no way of saving time systematically.32 Entropy cannot be avoided, and the sigh always slows the process. Notwithstanding its protestations, it is the system’s safety switch. Mnemonically: shock sigh saves system. So, three noemata constitute the sigh as an embryonic aesthetic event: liveness, air and slowing. How do we get from a first-level description with little bracketing of what makes the sigh significant, to a deeper understanding of two things: firstly, how the sigh works through the system and through the subject; and, secondly, how the sigh plays a key role in the emergence of Art? What constitutes the passage between the two? The issue is how the sigh becomes rhythmic in the first instance (what Dayan refers to as Music), and from there how it becomes music or literature (specific art forms).

Rhythmic Passages Dayan does not talk much about the phenomenology of the ‘passage’ between individual and universal, between attending to one art and configuring its significance in terms of another art: the poetry of music, the music of literature. He tends to see the relation in more static terms. Here are four moments in Art as Music where he explicitly acknowledges its dynamism: 1. ‘This ability of art in a given medium to metamorphose into the universal quality of art-in-general is shared by all the arts.’ 2. ‘As ever, art arises at the mysterious crossing-point of the absolutely individual, and the incalculably universal.’ 3. ‘The interart appeal loads the original sin of rationality and representation onto a [second] medium [which Dayan terms a ‘scapegoat’] other than that of the work before us. The work then becomes free. We cannot locate its origin or its destiny.’ 4. ‘Music figures the beauty of art only as our critical reflection moves towards it; not once it has arrived.’33 The question of interart phenomenology is this: what constitutes this ‘metamorphosis’, ‘crossing-point’, ‘loading onto a second medium’ and ‘moving reflection’? What affords the emergence of music and literature out of the dynamic passage embodied

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in these four configurations? I continue suggesting that it is energy that affords their emergence and the passage from one medium to Art in general, and that the primary moment of interart phenomenology, namely the passage from sigh towards aesthetic event, is a matter of rhythm and tempi. The sigh’s generative passage towards the aesthetic event is not a fleeting passage away from the system, a counter-response to the system, or a mechanism with which the Other flees, resists, or battles the system. These would be futile gestures in contemporary society, as Lyotard frequently notes. The loopholes in the castle’s keep will not surrender from bombardment alone. Nor is the passage the system’s own flattering self-appraisal, self-recalibration and self-reappropriation. The sigh is neither escapism nor aestheticism. Neither configuration of the passage by which the aesthetic event emerges from the sigh is adequate to the seven statements above. Similarly, the passage through the loophole is not the response of the system-as-body to foreign matter, of the organism to a virus that must be ejected in order to maintain the body’s health. The aesthetic event is not a violent exteriority or intruder challenging the system, with health measured in terms of the body’s silence. The sigh may be the eruption of the primary processes into the secondary processes (the system), the loosening of their bindings, but it is not their separation. The topography of the sigh’s passage lies somewhere between these various figures (notwithstanding the limits of the term ‘topography’, which recall those of ‘suspense’: that it implies pre-existent nodes, the space between which it maps). It is stretched between them. The loophole opened up by the sigh is neither a place nor a space, but a way of articulating emergence, of relating inside and outside, the castle’s keep and the village. The sigh is an excitation of the system, an underground tremor through the village and the castle equally.34 It is simultaneously the sigh of the system itself qua system, but it is otherwise than the system’s self-regulation. For it troubles the system’s flamboyantly self-proclaimed sense of identity. As Lyotard says in ‘Music, Mutic’, ‘Aesthetics is phobic, it arises from anaesthesia, belonging to it, recovering from it’ (PF, p. 232).35 This is how the sigh interrupts the system from within. It is a mole burrowing deep underground into the castle’s keep, squatting inside its host: ‘Affects silently squat the most explicit referential meanings and addresses [. . .] It can infiltrate a given place in the articulated structure, a given linkage, without being heard, precisely without inflecting the good order, and thus without having to reflect it.’36 The sigh that we recognise as the quiet initiation of the aesthetic moment is not a long-winded mode of resistance to the system, but a brief and unprepossessing exhalation, an ‘unarticulated’ feeling.37 Unbeknownst to itself, the system resists itself. ‘We see that this reflection is not a bending of thought back upon itself, but rather a bending within thought of something that seems to not be itself since thought cannot determine it. Yet it is the bending of something that is possibly more “inside” thought than itself.’38 As the sign ‘squats’ the system, time is lost rather than saved, expended rather than extended. Losing time, the sigh reflects back to itself and folds in on itself, generating intrigue and reflection. This reflection begins the passage towards rhythm, towards the rise and fall of what, once the sigh has worked through the body and made of it a subject, turns it into the system (in both senses: transforms, betrays) – ultimately, the commodification of music and literature. The loophole opened up by the sigh is ‘reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unknown

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temporality’.39 The air of the sigh spirals back on itself and becomes ‘Respiration’, the regular oscillation of systole and diastole.40 Here music and literature begin functioning separately as distinctive media, on the back of a particular rhythmic investment of energy and the emergence of Music. Dayan writes: ‘Music is rhythm; a rhythm that, in an impossible but necessary time, precedes sense, precedes industry, seems to exist between relations before the relations are established.’41 The seven statements above knock rhythmically against the system and reflect it back to itself. Lyotard notes this, writing that, while, on the one hand, the ‘Rhythmed wisdom [of the aesthetic subject] protects itself against pleonexia, the delirium of a growth with no return, a story with no pause for breath’,42 on the other hand, ‘the difference between life and death [between the breath (the sigh) and the system] is only one of rhythm (death hurries while life delays)’.43 Schematically: systems hurry, life delays, Art happens, literature and music emerge.

Future Events What is interesting about Lyotard’s later texts on the relation between energy and the system is the way that he consistently reserves a place for the sigh as a little disturbance that pulls centrifugally away from centripetal, centralising systemic time towards a different, aesthetic temporality. Schematically: through the sigh, saving time is displaced by passing time, passing time gives way to Art, and Art comes to write itself through the system. In this way Lyotard concludes that ‘Such is the resistance of art – a resistance in which all of its consistency consists: determination should never exhaust birth.’44 This is also why Dayan’s composers, writers, poets and painters all seem to reject logical discourse about their own Art: they are committed to an aesthetic ideology in which it is only in the very passage from one art to another, from their art to Art, only in the rhythmic oscillation between the two arts, that genuine artistic value is found (hence Dayan’s point about the ‘harmony’ between the arts).45 Here, of course, lies the value of analysing the relation between literature and music in terms of energy, as Lyotard’s work suggests: it affords a way of unpacking this passage from sigh to Art, a phenomenological reduction that both grounds the logic of Dayan’s interart aesthetic – in terms of which many of the painters Lyotard writes about could be understood – and explains how Art functions in the contemporary world. Lyotard’s phenomenology of the sigh is more nuanced than the notion that sensitivity arises from forcing language to slow down. As Dayan argues, Music is a productive guide in this artistic-critical search for ‘the best gloss’, because it ‘provides in its internal workings the ultimate image of “justesse” [justice]’.46 Music is the role model for the arts, for Art, for music and literature alike: for the kinds of relation between them we wish to entertain and for the kinds of art-critical discourse in which we wish to invest our own energy, investing alongside (rather than against) entropy and the system, in the hope for an artistic future, for a future that includes Art. In this future, which is a ‘situation of increasing complication or complexity’, entropy still triumphs, Politics is displaced by Art, and musical and literary events loosen the grand claims of the system.47 Energy acts as a quiet Trojan horse without ‘an ear for unity, for the concert of the organism’.48 Unbeknownst to the inhabitants, it creeps into the castle’s keep over ‘walls, [and] secret thresholds’ and quietly waits and bides its time.49

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I have argued that the relationship between music and literature is most productively configured as a matter of overlapping and sharing, rather than as a matter of differentiation and distinctiveness. This, however, is not a matter of their sociology, of their local interpretative affiliations and hermeneutic affordances; music and literature do not share matter or content, and they do not imitate each other, except superficially. In fact, I have argued that to speak of the ‘relation between’ music and literature is itself a misnomer and not helpful to the field of word and music studies. Rather, to use a kinship metaphor, music and literature are siblings that are traceable back to a common family and bloodline via their DNA. I hope to have shown in this essay that Lyotard’s work in the phenomenology of art affords one way of (re-)uniting these two relatives and unpacking their common paternity.

Notes 1. Peter Dayan, Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), p. viii. 2. Ibid., p. 78. 3. Peter Dayan, ‘Different Music, Same Condition: Hofstadter and Lyotard’, Thinking Verse, 2 (2012), 9–26 (p. 23). 4. Peter Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 3–4. 5. Dayan, Music Writing Literature, pp. 76 and 75 respectively. 6. Peter Dayan, ‘Apollinaire’s Music’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 47 (1) (2011), 36–48. 7. Dayan, Music Writing Literature, p. 31. 8. Dayan, Art as Music, p. 2. 9. Dayan, ‘Different Music, Same Condition’, pp. 15, 15 and 24 respectively. 10. J.-F. Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 243. All further references will be included in the text as PF. 11. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘The Phrase-Affect (from a Supplement to The Differend)’, trans. Keith Crome, in The Lyotard Reader and Guide, ed. Keith Crome and James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 104–10. 12. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘The Survivor’, in Toward the Postmodern (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993), pp. 144–63 (p. 159). 13. J.-F. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), e.g. §163, Kant Notice 2.2. 14. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 89–107 (p. 90). 15. Keith Crome and James Williams, ‘Introduction: Art-Events’, in The Lyotard Reader and Guide, ed. Crome and Williams, pp. 283–92 (p. 285). 16. J.-F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Athlone Press, 1993). 17. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Newman: The Instant’, in The Inhuman, pp. 78–88 (p. 84). 18. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘No. 29, Untitled, 1989’, in Sam Francis: Lesson of Darkness; . . . like the paintings of a blind man . . ., trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1993), p. 149. 19. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Gloss on Resistance’, in The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans. Don Barry et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 87–97 (p. 91). 20. Ashley Woodward, ‘Testimony and the Affect-Phrase’, in Rereading Jean-François Lyotard: Essays on his Later Works, ed. Heidi Bickis and Rob Shields (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 169–88 (p. 183, n. 15).

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21. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Before the Law, After the Law: An Interview with Jean-François Lyotard conducted by Elisabeth Weber’, Qui Parle, 11 (2) (Fall/Winter 1999), 37–58 (p. 44). 22. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Domus and the Megalopolis’, in The Inhuman, pp. 191–204 (p. 192). 23. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics’, in The Inhuman, pp. 135–43 (p. 140). 24. Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, p. 107. 25. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Music and Postmodernity’, trans. David Bennett, New Formations, 66 (2009), 37–45 (p. 41). 26. Lyotard, ‘The Phrase-Affect’, p. 107. 27. Dayan, Music Writing Literature, p. 79. 28. J.-F. Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 8, 16, 36, 40–1, 43, 61, 80–1. 29. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Introduction: About the Human’, in The Inhuman, pp. 1–7 (p. 4); Lyotard, ‘Postscript to Terror and the Sublime’, in The Postmodern Explained, pp. 67–73 (p. 72). 30. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘On What is “Art”’, in Toward the Postmodern (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993), pp. 164–75 (p. 172) 31. J.-F. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 7, cf. p. 8. 32. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Time Today’, in The Inhuman, pp. 58–77 (p. 67). 33. Dayan, Art as Music, pp. 3–4, 66, 66 and 87 respectively (all emphases added). 34. Lyotard, ‘The Survivor’, p. 157. 35. Cf. Lyotard, ‘Newman: The Instant’, pp. 83–4. 36. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Voices of a Voice’, trans. Georges van den Abbeele, Discourse, 14 (1) (1992), 126–45 (p. 133). 37. Lyotard, ‘The Phrase-Affect’, p. 104. 38. Lyotard, ‘On What is “Art”’, p. 174. 39. Lyotard, ‘Gloss on Resistance’, pp. 90–1. 40. J.-F. Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 2. 41. Dayan, Music Writing Literature, p. 74. 42. Lyotard, ‘Domus and the Megalopolis’, p. 192. 43. Lyotard, ‘The Survivor’, p. 147; Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, p. 90. 44. Lyotard, ‘On What is “Art”’, p. 175. 45. Dayan, Art as Music, pp. 97–100. 46. Dayan, Music Writing Literature, p. 106 (emphasis in the original). 47. Lyotard, Peregrinations, pp. 43–4. 48. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Several Silences’, trans. Joseph Maier, in Driftworks (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 1984), pp. 91–110 (p. 91); Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern, p. 15. 49. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 36.

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MUSIC AND FICTION SINCE

1900

47 Music in Proust: The Evolution of an Idea Mary Breatnach

I

n the opening sentence of ‘Éloge de la mauvaise musique’, one of thirty prose poems entitled ‘Rêveries couleur du temps’ and published in 1896 in Les Plaisirs et les jours, Proust cautions his readers in the following terms: Détestez la mauvaise musique, ne la méprisez pas. Comme on la joue, la chante bien plus passionnément que la bonne, bien plus qu’elle s’est peu à peu remplie du rêve et des larmes des hommes. Qu’elle vous soit par là vénérable.1 (Detest bad music, do not despise it. Because it is played and sung much more passionately than good music, so it has become saturated little by little with men’s dreams and tears. Let it be venerated by you on that account.)

The tone may be ironic, but what we encounter in this early fragment is an insight into the relationship between music and human emotion that remained constant in Proust’s perception of music and informed his thinking about the nature of all art, including and especially literature. A keen appreciation of music, inherited from his mother, developed into a highly sophisticated and personal musical taste through years of assiduous listening. It became, in a crucially important sense, an intrinsic part of the texture and literary virtuosity that characterises his writing, and it is one of the central tenets of the musico-literary aesthetic we have come to know in À la recherche du temps perdu. It is no exaggeration to say that Proust’s concept of literature and the literary enterprise is unimaginable without this intense, visceral response. Evident at every turn, filtering and enabling articulation of countless artistic and philosophical insights, it permeates the very substance of his novel. Writing in 1931, the twenty-four-year-old Samuel Beckett described music as ‘the catalytic element’ in À la recherche. According to him, ‘[I]t asserts to [Proust’s] unbelief the permanence of personality and the reality of art. It synthesises the moments of privilege and runs parallel to them.’2 As this elegant formulation makes clear, music sustained Proust and enabled him to confront and finally counter the philosophical, potentially disabling, scepticism that he encapsulated in the title of his vast novel.

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In his wonderfully detailed and lucid Proust musicien, Jean-Jacques Nattiez coins a term for the abundance of references, musical as well as others, in À la recherche.3 He writes of ‘une véritable syntaxe de l’allusion’ (‘an out-and-out syntax of allusion’).4 Within that patterning, the name of one composer occurs more than any other. It is, of course, Wagner, a musician whose work had fascinated Proust and occupied a special position in his personal universe long before it became for him such an evident source of literary inspiration.5 But Wagner’s presence in Proust also has an important literary-historical dimension which, while contextualising his vision of the relationship between the written word and music, reveals his musicoliterary aesthetic as a strand in the evolution of a concept of literature whose beginnings can be traced to the publication in 1861 of Charles Baudelaire’s celebrated essay on Wagner. The singularity of this essay in Baudelaire’s output is obvious: it is the only work listed in the Pléiade edition of Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes under the rubric ‘Critique musicale’.6 Like the essays under the rubric ‘Critique d’art’, however, it illustrates the poet’s creative capacity to make an imaginative leap between disciplines in a startling and highly original way. Going beyond traditional attempts to imbue the written word with a phonetically-based, essentially analogical, musicality through rhythmic subtlety, limpidly beautiful sound patterns and the use of musical themes and images, Baudelaire attempted now to replicate in words the experience of listening to Wagner. As the American critic, Margaret Miner, says in her study of Baudelaire and Wagner, he ‘strove to erase the distinction between reading about Wagner’s music and listening to it’.7 Some thirteen months before the publication of the essay, in the immediate aftermath of the three concerts that inspired it, Baudelaire wrote a personal letter to Wagner. Ostensibly an attempt to convey his appreciation to the composer, it reveals a response that goes well beyond conventional admiration and gives a first glimpse of the literary project that he would develop fully in the essay: ‘Ce que j’ai éprouvé’, he writes, ‘est indescriptible et si vous daignez ne pas rire, j’essaierai de vous le traduire’8 (‘What I felt is indescribable and if you’ll deign not to laugh, I shall try to translate it for you’). In saying that his experience is ‘indescribable’, Baudelaire is not merely saying that it is beyond words, but, more precisely, that it cannot be conveyed using language that functions descriptively. In going on to say that he will attempt to translate his experience, and given that there is no question of addressing Wagner in any language other than French, the distinction he draws between description and translation may seem at first to be a simple affirmation of the capacity of language to function in different ways. But his words reveal an anxiety that belies simplicity. The clear-cut firmness of the first phrase is immediately replaced with a tone of caution that suggests both an awareness of having set himself an unusual and difficult task and a sense that he approaches it with trepidation. This is emphasised by the explicit reference to his fear of provoking Wagner’s ridicule and his appeal for forbearance. And if we consider for a moment the implications of what he says, we begin to understand his misgivings. Translation, unlike description, will require him to use words to encapsulate and replicate his experience. To put it another way, while description would mean recognising and accepting what I shall call the distance between the object described and the words used to describe it, translation implies, at the very least, an aspiration

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to eliminate that distance. Before going further, let us look at how Baudelaire’s translation begins: D’abord il m’a semblé que je connaissais cette musique, et plus tard, en y réfléchissant, j’ai compris d’où venait ce mirage; il me semblait que cette musique était la mienne, et je la reconnaissais comme tout homme reconnaît les choses qu’il est destiné à aimer.9 (At first it seemed to me that I knew this music, and later, reflecting upon it, I understood where this mirage originated; it seemed to me that this music was mine, and I recognised it as every man recognises the things he is destined to love.) Baudelaire’s letter contains all the essential ideas developed in the project he referred to as ‘un grand travail’,10 the essay he worked on for more than a year and published in the Revue européene in April 1861. Discussion of that daring and, in aesthetic terms, revolutionary work is outside the scope of the present study, but set against a background of orthodox nineteenth-century writings about music, the originality and distinctive character of both it and the preceding letter stand out very clearly. As the cultural historian Katharine Ellis says in Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: Revue et Gazette musicale, the primary aim of music criticism at the time was ‘to educate public taste’. She further confirms that over the period of forty-six years (1834–80), during which the journal she rightly calls the ‘most important and influential music journal in France’ was published, ‘the concept of criticism as an educative discipline remained constant’.11 Baudelaire’s concerns were clearly of quite a different order. The French neuropsychologist Bernard Lechevallier, approaching the matter through the lens of his scientific discipline, says that what distinguishes Baudelaire’s writing is the fact that he addresses aspects of listening that had until then been ignored. Baudelaire’s letter, he says, ‘est sans doute la première analyse détaillée de [l’audition de la musique] sur la vie psychique’ (‘is perhaps the first detailed analysis of [listening to music] on the mind’).12 Lechevallier’s observation is illuminating and important. Yet for me his use of the term ‘analysis’ begs questions. Its emphasis obscures somewhat the significant musico-literary connotations of what Baudelaire undertakes. Certainly the poet writes about the effect of listening on the mind, but rather than writing about it for its own sake he does so, as he clearly indicates, because he believes that it will enable him to translate the experience that cannot be described. From a literary point of view, what Lechevallier calls an analysis is thus a device, a means to an end, chosen by Baudelaire in his quest to eliminate the distance between the language he uses and the effect it is intended to decode, initially for Wagner and, subsequently, in the essay, for a wider audience. This is precisely the aspect of Baudelaire’s project that made him a key figure in the context of the music-influenced aesthetic that flourished in France in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Over the following quarter century, Wagner’s influence grew exponentially. In 1885, Edouard Dujardin founded the Revue wagnérienne, a journal entirely devoted to the study of Wagner’s work in all its aspects. A glance at the list of contributors confirms the predominance among them of writers. It also reveals a concentration on the theoretical aspects of the composer’s output. But the phenomenon as a whole

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also reflected a radical, Europe-wide shift in the way writers had begun to view and listen to music. Already at the beginning of the century in Germany perceptions had changed. As Carl Dahlhaus puts it: The earlier notion that music either moved the affections and touched the heart or was nothing but an ‘agreeable noise’ was confronted around 1800 by a modern aesthetic which Beethoven held in common with Schlegel: the idea that music, not unlike philosophical meditation, represents a train of thought.13 In time, music’s status among the arts rose until eventually it was regarded not only as the equal of the other arts, but as the greatest of them all. This is the view famously reflected by Walter Pater when he declared in 1873 that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ (italics in the original). He goes on to indicate that what other arts envied and sought in various ways to emulate was a unity of form and content that, for him at least, characterised music: ‘For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.’14 That obliteration was a goal that Baudelaire’s successor, Stéphane Mallarmé, pursued tirelessly. Born in 1842, Mallarmé discovered Baudelaire’s poetry in 1860 and though it is impossible to say when precisely he first read the Tannhäuser essay, his familiarity with it is beyond doubt. Arguably, he picked up the thread of the music-influenced literary aesthetic where Baudelaire had left it and pursued a logical, organic path, leading from the idea of recreating in words the experience of hearing Wagner to a radical questioning of the disciplinary boundaries between music and literature. Thus when Mallarmé says that ‘La poésie, proche l’idée, est Musique, par excellence – ne consent pas d’infériorité’15 (‘Poetry, close to the idea, is Music, par excellence – admits no inferiority’), he is not putting forward an analogy, but is expressing a conviction that he nurtured through listening over many years. As he puts it in Crise de vers: ‘ce n’est pas de sonorités élémentaires par les cuivres, les cordes, les bois, indéniablement mais de l’intellectuelle parole à son apogée que doit avec plénitude et évidence, résulter, en tant que l’ensemble des rapports existant dans tout, la Musique’ (p. 212) (‘it is not from elementary sonorities of the brass, the strings, the woodwind, but undeniably from the intellectual word at its apogee that Music, as the totality of relationships existing in everything, must result with fullness and clarity’). In 1862, aged twenty, Mallarmé wrote enviously of the mysterious character of musical language (pp. 360ff.). Thereafter he took little active interest in music until, in 1885, he received two invitations from his friend Dujardin. The first was to write about Wagner for the Revue wagnérienne; the second, to attend a concert given by the Lamoureux orchestra. By accepting these invitations, he set himself on a path he would follow for the rest of his life. He became a habitual presence at the Sunday afternoon Lamoureux performances and, as Paul Valéry tells us, always made notes while he listened.16 No one ever knew what his notes contained, but it is possible to infer certain critical information about them from his other writings. It becomes clear, for example, that he perceived music, and moreover contrived to hear it, not as sound, but as a relational phenomenon to which sound was incidental. His recognition of the structural nature of musical language is also apparent and he identified that as the key to music’s ability to communicate directly with listeners. Crucially, he maintained that the structure itself had been ‘usurped’ by musicians in general and by Wagner in

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particular (p. 154). The time had come, he declared, to restore it to poetry: ‘nous en sommes là, précisément’, he wrote, ‘à rechercher [. . .] un art [. . .] de reprendre notre bien’ (p. 212) (‘we are now at the point, precisely, when we must look for a way of taking back what belongs to us’). This dream of reappropriation was the constant motivation for Mallarmé’s listening. Filled, as Valéry puts it, with ‘une sublime jalousie’ (‘sublime jealousy’),17 he listened not as a music-lover, but as a predator, and he identified what sustained him in his efforts as ‘un indéracinable préjugé d’écrivain’ (p. 212) (‘an ineradicable writer’s prejudice’). He never wavered in his conviction that the future of literature and the creation of the ideal work, with all that implied, depended on the accomplishment of ‘cet acte de juste restitution’ (‘this act of just restitution’) as he called it in a letter to René Ghil.18 Arguably, the nature of Mallarmé’s œuvre, its famously idiosyncratic syntax and so-called ‘difficulty’, derives in large part from these efforts. Mallarmé, unlike Baudelaire, did not worship at the altar of Wagnerian art. Yet his encounter with the thinking behind the Gesamtkunstwerk played as vital and decisive a role in the development of his musico-literary aesthetic as listening to Wagner’s music did in the context of Baudelaire’s. Mallarmé, who shared Wagner’s ambition to create a ‘total work of art’, saw the composer not as a fellow-traveller, but as a rival. Already in the title he chose for the essay he wrote for the Revue wagnérienne, ‘Richard Wagner: Rêverie d’un poète français’ (pp. 153–9), he underlines salient differences between him and the German composer, and he goes on to argue that Wagner’s theory of totality is deeply flawed. The Gesamtkunstwerk, a work in which all the arts were present in their extension, could never, Mallarmé asserts, represent more than a temporary resting-place in the on-going struggle to create a work of authentic totality. What he envisages as an alternative is a work of pure literature into which all that is essential in the other arts, particularly music, has been absorbed. Such a work, as he wrote some ten years later, would be ‘Musique, par excellence’ (p. 226). Such radical thinking is far removed from anything envisaged by Baudelaire. Yet, incontrovertibly, something akin to Mallarmé’s ‘writer’s prejudice’ already hovered over Baudelaire’s musico-literary project. Inspired by the poet’s unequivocal admiration for Wagner and his music, that project was also fuelled by a resolve to use literature to replicate music’s affect. Baudelaire’s confidence that such a feat was possible implies a faith in the expressive power of verbal language that was as bold as it was inspiring for those who, like Mallarmé, came after him. Notwithstanding their radically different views of Wagner, listening to music had a palpable influence on both poets’ use of language. The same has been said many times about the language of À la recherche du temps perdu. Nattiez puts it in strikingly graphic terms: ‘Chez Proust,’ he says, ‘la musique contamine le fait littéraire lui même’19 (‘in Proust, music contaminates the very act of writing’). By characterising the musico-literary aspect of the novel in this way, Nattiez highlights something Proust himself implied when, in an interview with Jacques Benoist-Méchin in June 1922, he spoke of the importance of music in his life and work: La musique m’a apporté des joies incomparables [. . .] Elle court comme un fil d’or à travers toute ma Recherche du temps perdu.20 (Music has brought me incomparable joys [. . .] It runs like a golden thread through the whole of my Recherche du temps perdu.)

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Famously he named Beethoven, Wagner and Schumann as his favourite composers. All three, and many others besides, figure in his novel, but as has so often been said, Wagner occupies a particular position. This is a reflection both of Proust’s personal position as a committed Wagnerian and, more generally, of the continuing importance of the composer’s aesthetic and theoretical ideas in the context of literature and literary thought of the time. As eavesdroppers on the conversations of Proust’s fictional salonniers, we become aware of the perception of Wagner that prevailed not only in the salons of the Belle Époque, but also among intellectuals of the period. Furthermore, just as we find two distinctive views of the creator of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Baudelaire and Mallarmé, each documenting a particular moment in the evolution of nineteenth-century French musico-literary discourse, so in Proust we find a third, equally distinctive and historically grounded. Proust’s Wagner is neither the composer to whose art Baudelaire seems almost willing to concede expressive superiority, nor the ‘usurper’ charged by Mallarmé with having encroached on the poets’ domain. He is, rather, a fellow-artist, a constant source of inspiration, who provokes aesthetic reflection and legitimises a musico-literary dialogue that, while opening up possibilities of cross-fertilisation between literature and music, leads also to a reimagining or repositing of the nature of artistic endeavour as a whole. According to the composer Pierre Boulez, Proust’s conception of scale in À la recherche owes much to his knowledge of Wagner: Proust a été influencé par Wagner de manière très directe. Il n’aurait sans doute pas songé à écrire une œuvre de ce type, de cette envergure et avec de tels moyens, s’il n’avait pas eu connaissance – même épisodique – de l’œuvre de Wagner.21 (Proust was influenced by Wagner in a very direct manner. He probably would not have dreamt of writing a work of this type, of this scope and with such resources, had he not had at least some knowledge of Wagner’s work.) Nattiez goes further, underlining the parallel between Proust’s over-arching aesthetic purpose and Wagner’s, and declaring that the composer’s work provided the writer with a paradigm for the central theme of his novel: l’œuvre wagnérienne [a] representé pour Proust un modèle exemplaire de l’œuvre totale à créer, celle qui respecte l’individualité des personnages et des motifs, mais qui les transcende et les intègre dans l’unité. L’œuvre totale, c’est-à-dire non seulement la Recherche elle-même qu’on devine derrière chaque phrase de Proust concernant Wagner, mais aussi et surtout, l’œuvre en réalité imaginaire [. . .] que le Narrateur se décidera à entreprendre. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que ce soit chez Wagner [. . .] que Proust ait trouvé le modèle du sujet fondamental de la Recherche: la quête de l’absolu par l’œuvre d’art.22 (for Proust, Wagner’s work represented an exemplary model of the total work that was to be created, the work that respects the individuality of the characters and motifs, but transcends them and integrates them into the whole. The total work, that is to say not only the Recherche itself which one senses behind every sentence Proust writes about Wagner, but also and especially the work that is

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in fact imaginary and which the Narrator will make up his mind to write. It is therefore no surprise that Proust should have found in Wagner the model for the fundamental subject of the Recherche: the quest for the absolute through the work of art.) The impact of the music-influenced aesthetic initiated by Baudelaire and cultivated by Mallarmé is unmistakeable. Proust clearly shares his forebears’ fascination with Wagner. As well as a capacity to make the imaginative leap from one discipline to another, his awareness of the potential for cross-fertilisation between the arts, and in particular between music and literature, echoes theirs. But his approach is markedly different. The aspects of Wagner’s work that influence and inform his novel directly are, primarily, conceptual, as Boulez and Nattiez point out. In a gesture that is as simple as it is inspired, Proust ushers in a new phase in the evolution of the musico-literary dialogue begun half a century before precisely by restoring to music its phenomenal specificity. Eschewing any purposeful blurring of disciplinary boundaries, he creates a world in which music as an art in its own right is listened to, admired and, above all, responded to. In the context of Proust’s narrative, the consequences of this action are momentous. Listening is the conduit through which the narrator finally gains insight into his artistic destiny. It is for him a source of revelation.23 Despite the incontrovertible significance of real music in his work, the musical compositions Proust privileges over all others are entirely fictional: Vinteuil’s Sonate, said to be in F sharp, for piano and violin, and his posthumously-performed Septuor. They are the pieces that readers most associate with the novel, not only because they fulfil a vital narrative function, but also because, so often, they are catalysts for the philosophical, aesthetic and psychological explorations that make the work what it is. The sonata is heard many times, but the first time24 is at a soirée hosted by Madame Verdurin when our impressions of it are filtered through the narrator’s account of Charles Swann’s reactions to it.25 The septet receives its first performance many years (and almost 2000 pages) later (III, p. 753ff.) at a point when both Swann and the composer have died. The occasion again takes place at the home of Mme Verdurin. The focus this time is on the narrator’s responses to a work that is quite new to him. Unaware that Vinteuil had written anything other than the sonata, and seeing several instrumentalists on the platform alongside Morel and the pianist, the narrator believes the concert is to begin with music other than Vinteuil’s. His initial reaction is to feel disorientated and puzzled.26 But then something familiar strikes his ear: tout d’un coup je me reconnus au milieu de cette musique nouvelle pour moi, en pleine sonate Vinteuil, et [. . .] la petite phrase [. . .] vint à moi, reconnaissable sous ces parures nouvelles. (III, pp. 753–4) (all of a sudden I knew where I was in the midst of this music new as it was to me, right in the middle of the Vinteuil sonata, and the little phrase came to me, recognisable beneath this new finery.) The moment of recognition is epiphanic. A torrent of memories is set in motion, ebbing and flowing, now drawing the narrator back to Combray and distant events, now merging past and present, now provoking philosophical and aesthetic reflection.

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The ‘little phrase’ becomes a wondrous being (a process that is facilitated in French by the feminine pronoun) merged in his mind with the mythical guides of the Mille et une nuits, with Gilberte, his first love, and with the figure of an adolescent girl27 that has fascinated and bewitched him through his life. Then, prompted by a fleeting thought that the presence of the ‘little phrase’ in this unknown work might warrant an explanatory programme note, he begins to compare the septet with the sonata. The ‘aube liliale et champêtre’ (III, p. 754)28 (‘lily-white, pastoral dawn’) of the early work has long since lost its charm for him. Repeatedly over the years, he has attempted to conjure up worlds which retain the beauty of the sonata, but are different from it (‘aussi beaux mais différents’ (‘as beautiful, but different’) but without success. Now, ‘tiré du silence et de la nuit’ (III, p. 754) (‘drawn out of the silence and the darkness’), the septet seems to be about to reveal such a world to him. At times, when the work appears to him to change and even to withdraw its promise, the narrator’s attention wanders. He looks around him, contemplates his surroundings, his hostess and her guests, and observes the musicians’ movements and their mannerisms. But soon he is absorbed in the music once more. Nurtured by sounds ‘qui menaient l’auditeur de trouvaille en trouvaille’ (III, pp. 758–9) (‘which led the listener from one joyful discovery to another’), he becomes convinced that the septet is a ‘chefd’œuvre triumphal et complet’ (III, p. 756) (‘triumphant and complete masterpiece’), compared to which Vinteuil’s earlier pieces were simply ‘de timides essais’ (III, p. 756) (‘tentative endeavours’). In many respects, Proust’s narrator is a fictional exponent of the musico-literary aesthetic launched by Baudelaire and developed by Mallarmé. Proust clearly shares his predecessors’ conviction that the creation of great literature is intrinsically linked to a personal, individual, yet universal response to music. But Proust portrays music as an art in its own right. For him, the specificity of music, its abstract, non-referential character, serves as a means to investigate, contribute to, illuminate and, ultimately, reveal the nature of art in general and literature in particular. Central to his enterprise is the creation of a character whose sensitivity to music is coupled with a capacity to chart and verbalise in great detail the effect of listening on his mind. As the slow movement of Vinteuil’s septet draws to a close, the narrator contemplates music’s potential to connect people at a spiritual, immaterial level: Je me demandais si la musique n’était pas l’exemple de ce qu’aurait pu être – s’il n’y avait pas eu l’invention du langage, la formation des mots, l’analyse des idées – la communication des âmes. (III, pp. 762–3) (I asked myself whether music wasn’t the example of what – had language not been invented, words not formed, ideas not analysed – the communication of souls could have been.) The query has certain Mallarméan overtones. But Proust does not share Mallarmé’s belief that the experience of listening to music is to be grasped intellectually. Despite a detectable hint of regret, the narrator accepts the status quo: ‘Elle [la musique] est comme une possibilité qui n’a pas eu de suites, l’humanité s’est engagée dans d’autres voies, celle du langage parlé et écrit’ (III, p. 763) ‘[Music] is like a possibility that had no repercussions, humankind embarked on different paths, the path of spoken and written language’). Then, almost instantly, he is drawn back to dwell again on the

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intoxicating ‘inanalysé’, the non-intellectual, ‘celestial’ realm he had inhabited as he listened to the andante. It is also precisely in this musical realm of the ‘unanalysed’ that the narrator finally begins to glimpse a connection between the material details of his existence and his awareness of them. As the last movement of the septet unfolds, he identifies fragments of the sonata as they come and go, their rhythms and harmonies altered, recognisable yet changed ‘comme viennent les choses dans la vie’ (p. 763) (‘as things come in life’). Then one emerges, dominant, and enraptures him. In a flash of insight, he hears it as a summons ‘vers une joie supraterrestre’ (p. 765) (‘towards an extra-terrestrial joy’) and perceives it as ‘ce qui aurait pu le mieux caractériser ces impressions qu’à des intervalles éloignés je retrouvais dans ma vie’ (p. 765) (‘that which could best characterise those impressions that at distant intervals I found in my life’). This critically defining episode in À la recherche charts the progression of a cognitive process through which the narrator confirms an observation made some ninety pages earlier when, having found himself alone and in the right frame of mind, he sits down at the piano and begins to play Vinteuil’s sonata. As he plays, an inescapable echo of Wagner’s Tristan strikes his ear. Intrigued by the mysterious similarity and carried along by his admiration for Wagner, he is struck by the effect music has on his mind. ‘La musique,’ he declares, ‘bien différente en cela de la société d’Albertine, m’aidait à descendre en moi-même’ (III, p. 665) (‘Music, very different from Albertine’s company in this regard, helped me to descend into myself’). Listening to Vinteuil’s septet, he lives through such a ‘descent’ and records it in all its detail. Initially prompted by his recognition of the ‘petite phrase’, then drawn further in by the septet itself, he reflects back on his life and returns to many of the philosophical and aesthetic topics that have preoccupied him over the years, among them the nature of art and artistic genius, the quest for and nature of individuality, the significance of time, memory, ageing, the endlessly complex intertwining of human relationships and so on. Important and fascinating as this detail is and central as it is to Proust’s narrative, its significance for the narrator derives from its connectedness to the intense act of listening in which he is engaged. Communication with friends and acquaintances, his fellow listeners, is vapid compared to the process of assimilation taking place within himself: ‘Mais qu’étaient leurs paroles,’ he exclaims, ‘qui, comme toute parole humaine extérieure, me laissaient si indifférent, à côté de la céleste phrase musicale avec laquelle je venais de m’entretenir?’ (III, p. 762) (‘But what were their words which, like every human word from outside, left me so indifferent, alongside the heavenly musical phrase with which I had just conversed?’). And the reflexive verb is telling: unlike conversation with others, which forces him out of himself to ‘la plus insignifiante réalité’ (III, p. 762) (‘the most insignificant reality’), music guides him inwards to the depths of his being, enabling him finally to grasp the impression left by ‘la réalité même’ (III, p. 459) (‘reality itself’), the truth whose elucidation will constitute his work.

Notes 1. Marcel Proust, Les Plaisirs et les jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), pp. 183–4. 2. Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, Proust: And Three Dialogues (London: Calder, 1963), pp. 92–3.

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3. Much of the music Proust alludes to is performed on the two CDs that accompany Marcel Proust: une vie en musiques, textes, Évelyne Bloch-Dano, William C. Carter, Pierre Boulez and eight others (Paris: Archimbaud, 2012). 4. Cf. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Proust musicien (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1999), p. 148. 5. I have long been of the opinion that the shadow of Wagner and the ‘total art work’ is already discernible in the Proust of Les Plaisirs et les jours. The text-only versions currently available bear no resemblance to the original, luxury edition, published in 1896 in a run of only thirty copies. It is now accessible to the public only as a Special Collections item in very few libraries, one of which is the British Library. The literary content of the collection may be slight, but the variety of texts, the delicate illustrations specially prepared by Madeleine Lemaire at Proust’s request and above all the decision to incorporate the scores of Reynaldo Hahn’s settings of Proust’s four poems ‘Portraits de peintres’ suggest an aspiration to a type of completeness that is recognisably Wagnerian in its inclusiveness, though of course not in its scale. 6. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1975–6). 7. Margaret Miner, Resonant Gaps: Between Baudelaire and Wagner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 2. 8. Baudelaire, II, p. 1452. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., p. 1457. 11. Katharine Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 8. 12. Bernard Lechevallier, Le Cerveau mélomane de Baudelaire: Musique et Neuropsychologie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), p. 61. 13. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 81. 14. Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, in The Renaissance (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), pp. 128–49 (p. 132). 15. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2003), II (2003), p. 226. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 16. See Paul Valéry, Écrits divers sur Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Éditions de la N.R.F., 1950), p. 71. 17. Paul Valéry, ‘Au concert Lamoureux en 1893’, in Pièces sur l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1934), pp. 61–9 (p. 68). 18. Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd J. Austin, 11 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–84), II (1965), p. 286. 19. Nattiez, p. 14. 20. Cf. Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Retour à Marcel Proust (Paris: Pierre Amiot, 1957), p. 192. 21. ‘L’Absente de tout bouquet’, in Marcel Proust: une vie en musiques, Livre-disques, ed. Archimbaud (Paris: Riveneuve éditions, 2012), pp. 17–24 (p. 21). 22. Nattiez, pp. 61–2. 23. We now know that Wagner’s ‘Good Friday’ music from Parsifal was intended to be the catalyst for this revelation. See Nattiez’s discussion in Proust musicien, pp. 37ff. 24. In fact Swann has heard the music on a previous occasion, before the novel begins. Only now does he finally learn its name. 25. (I, pp. 208–11). All references are to À la recherche du temps perdu, 4 volumes, gen. ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–9). References to volume number and page are given after quotations in the text. 26. This is one of several echoes in the episode of Swann’s reactions to his first hearing of the complete sonata.

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27. In À l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, commenting on a group photograph of the socalled ‘petite bande’ at Balbec, Proust’s narrator comments on how indistinguishable its members were one from another: mais on ne peut les y reconnaître individuellement [. . .] il arrivait parfois à leurs meilleures amies de les prendre l’une pour l’autre sur cette photographie, si bien que le doute ne pouvait finalement être tranché que par tel accessoire de toilette que l’une était certaine d’avoir porté, à l’exclusion des autres. (II, pp. 180–1) 28. As well as being literary, both adjectives used by Proust to describe the sonata suggest that it belongs in another age. Having fallen out of use, the literary word ‘liliale’, which dates from the late fifteenth century, was revived at the end of the nineteenth century. Cf. Le petit Robert, dictionnaire de la langue française, nouvelle édition revue, corrigée et mise à jour pour 1990. The adjective ‘champêtre’ conjures up the ideal pastoral life that is also associated with previous centuries.

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48 Music in Woolf’s Short Fiction Emma Sutton

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n Virginia Woolf’s short fiction ‘Moments of Being: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”’ (1928), Fanny Wilmot’s intense curiosity about her piano teacher catalyses a cascade of speculations about the older woman’s history and inner life. Marvelling that Miss Craye should be familiar with anything so mundane as blunt pins, Fanny imagines a series of ‘scene[s]’ far removed from the immediate setting of the piano lesson.1 ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ explores the way an incidental, apparently inconsequential, remark stimulates Fanny’s imagination – as well as, more self-referentially, generating the literary work itself. Shifting between scanty dialogue and a highly articulate representation of the characters’ inner lives (a narrative technique probably learned from Woolf’s life-long study of Wagner’s mature leitmotivic music dramas), it concisely evokes a rich range of subjects and emotions.2 A bold study of lesbian desire; a meditation on solitude, childlessness and mortality; a reflection on women’s roles in Aestheticism and music education; an exploration of the ability to imagine and represent interiority – it is all of these things and more. It was, Woolf reflected, ‘some semi mystic very profound life of a woman’.3 And music – diegetic references to a musical work and performance, ideas about music, and musical genres and techniques – plays an important part in this modernist tour de force. ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ is one of a group of short fictions written during a period of exceptional creativity in the mid-1920s.4 These may have been ‘treats’ or ‘diversions’, written ‘to amuse myself’, but like Woolf’s long fictions they repeatedly explore the relationship between the limitations of speech and the amplitude of the characters’ inner lives.5 Formally and diegetically, this relationship is often explored through the (implied) opposition of words and music. ‘Music’ – whether specific works or an idea of music – is presented as a parallel to Woolf’s own oblique, ‘cryptographic’ prose.6 The exceptionally affective, evocative and expressive capacities Woolf attributed to music interested her acutely, providing a vocabulary and model (sometimes, an antithesis) for her own writing. She was, for instance, fascinated by music’s ability to prompt associations despite its apparent lack of signification, and frequently invokes music’s expressivity to suggest an ideal form of writing: in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, the pianist Rachel contemptuously exclaims ‘“[t]hink of words compared with sounds”’, declaring that ‘“[m]usic”’ ‘“says all there is to say at once”’, whilst Bernard compares life’s plenitude to a ‘symphony’ in the final monologue of The Waves.7 Extended critical attention is finally being given to Woolf’s interest in music, famously acknowledged in her statement that ‘I always think of my books as music before I write them.’8 These short fictions shed light on Woolf’s own experimentalism, and that of modernist writing more widely in which music frequently stimulates and provides a

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vocabulary for the reinvention of literary techniques and genres (hence the modernists’ prominence in word-music studies to date). The fictions share many common subjects (in several cases even characters) and, like ‘“Slater’s Pins”’, several allude briefly or obliquely to music. But, with the exception of ‘The String Quartet’ (1921), there has been relatively little attention to these works and almost none to their uses of music.9 This is partly due to the relative brevity of Woolf’s explicit allusions to music – like her novels, these short pieces are far more discreet in their musical references than the works of contemporaries including Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, Mansfield, Richardson, Pound, Forster or Stein. In ‘“Slater’s Pins”’, for instance, what we might expect to be significant details about a music lesson are left unspecified or belatedly revealed: it isn’t immediately clear whether teacher or pupil is playing, and whether in an institution or a home; the fluctuation of tenses in the opening paragraphs makes the exact sequence of events unclear (when does Miss Craye stop playing? is she speaking as she ‘strikes’ the ‘last chord’ of the Bach fugue? (p. 209)); and for most of the narrative the diegetic music is silent as Fanny hunts on the floor for the flower that has fallen from her dress. Nonetheless, Woolf invites us to ‘follow hints’ and to reflect on the choice of setting, the significance of the music lesson and of ideas about music more broadly.10 Just as the work flaunts its apparent absence of ‘point’ yet is ‘profound’, so music discreetly informs Woolf’s politics and formal innovations in this work and her writing as a whole.11 Formalist rather than historicist approaches have dominated criticism on the modernists’ musicality,12 but Woolf’s alertness to what Lawrence Kramer called the ‘cultural practice’ of music typifies its role throughout her writing.13 ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ draws, for example, on the rich social and literary histories of the music lesson which had, since the early nineteenth century at least, been an almost ubiquitous element of formal education for middle- and upper-class girls. As historians and musicologists have demonstrated, the significance of music education to constructions of gender can scarcely be overstated: music lessons were central to genteel femininity, preparing girls and young women for domesticity and marriage.14 Woolf’s allusions to music lessons convey her dissent from, as well as affinities with, her nineteenth-century predecessors: Cassandra Otway in Night and Day (1919) shrewdly embraces the value of musical accomplishment in the marriage market, whilst Rachel in The Voyage Out (1915) chafes at her aunt’s perception that she will ‘“spoil [her] arms”’ by too much piano practice and ‘“then one won’t marry”’.15 Similarly, Fanny speculates that Miss Craye’s ‘piano playing’ as a young woman was – along with ‘her good, blue eyes, her straight, firm nose’ – one of the assets that ‘attracted’ ‘young men’ (pp. 211–12); yet in maturity teaching provides professional and personal ‘independence’ for Miss Craye, whose ‘habits’ have ‘remained safe’ (p. 213). ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ relishes the potential of women’s music to become domestically and socially disruptive rather than ameliorating and normative; it draws on long-standing anxieties about opportunities for ‘inappropriate’ sexual, racial or class intimacies between teacher and pupil.16 It was during ‘one evening when the lesson had lasted longer than usual and it was dark’ (p. 211), Fanny recollects, that Miss Craye first spoke of her indifference to men and of Fanny’s beauty. As in many earlier accounts, this music lesson is represented as a liminal space, a threshold between childhood and adolescence, adolescence and womanhood, in which sexual and gender identities fluctuate or consolidate. Woolf’s use of the music lesson is metonymic

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of this modernist text as a whole, allowing her to evoke the rich inner lives beneath this paradigmatically mundane, ‘feminine’ activity. The material setting of the music lesson also informs Woolf’s critique of the devaluation of women’s musical and professional abilities. The ‘bare music room’ (p. 214) lit by harsh electric lights forms a sharp contrast to the home with its exquisite objets d’art that Miss Craye previously shared with her siblings. This comfort, Woolf makes clear, was dependent on Julius Craye – a ‘very well-known man’ (p. 209) – whose death leaves Julia Craye ‘badly off’ (p. 209). It is Miss Kingston, ‘Principal’ of the ‘Archer Street College of Music’ (p. 209) where Miss Craye now teaches, who confides this detail to Fanny, and Woolf’s representation of the Principal deftly exposes women’s vulnerability in the commercial context of music teaching. Miss Kingston’s economic self-interest is barely concealed: she ‘gave little character sketches like this on the first day of term while she received cheques and wrote out receipts for them’ (p. 209). As Miss Kingston reminisces about staying with the Crayes as a young girl, she tells Fanny that Miss Craye ‘only consent[s] to take one or two pupils’ ‘as a special favour to herself’ (p. 209). The Principal thus promotes the exclusivity of her teacher whilst simultaneously insinuating Miss Craye’s indifference – and moral superiority – to financial reward. The remarks are a textbook example of Aestheticism’s problematic claims of superiority to and aloofness from economic pressures, yet the comedy isn’t unsympathetic to the ‘practical’ Miss Kingston with her ‘dashing, cheerful’ manner (p. 210).17 Her very insistence on the exclusivity and aesthetic integrity of her teaching staff reveals her need to promote the ‘Archer Street College of Music’ in competition with more prestigious institutions dominated by male teachers and pupils under the sponsorship of eminent male composers and educationalists (such as the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, founded in 1822 and 1883 respectively). The proliferation of teaching establishments, musical pedagogies and individual teachers – particularly female teachers – in the nineteenth century had created a ruthlessly competitive market for pupils. In this context, aesthetic and economic value was frequently determined through gender. Music critics and numerous other commentators lamented the debasement of musical culture through the ‘standing army’ of female teachers, for instance.18 Similarly, male performers and teachers were frequently termed ‘masters’, ‘maestros’ or ‘geniuses’, their apparently superior interpretive originality (endorsed by the higher fees they commanded) implicitly contrasted with female musical ‘accomplishment’ which was characterised as imitative and derivative, technically skilled rather than aesthetically perceptive. Even Woolf’s passing allusion to the lesson’s repertoire augments her social critique: the Bach fugue that Miss Craye plays ‘beautifully’ as a ‘reward’ for her ‘favourite pupil’ (p. 210) demonstrates her command of a genre at the pinnacle of a prestigious, implicitly male canon. And fugue’s historical role as a pedagogical exercise through which composers displayed their understanding of compositional theory also ironises the marginalisation of female teachers and educational institutions: Miss Craye has ‘mastered’ a work historically used to school and test male composers and performers. The brief allusions to music in Woolf’s short fiction critique imperial as well as gender politics, as ‘A Simple Melody’ demonstrates. Here, a guest’s unease during a party is soothed by his absorption in a landscape painting that he compares to ‘a fiddler [. . .] playing a perfectly quiet old English song’ (p. 195). The ‘old English song’ evokes the

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compositions and polemics of the English Musical Renaissance (EMR), specifically the prominent part that English folksong, landscape and early music played in its nationalism.19 The simile seems incidental, but the later reference to the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–5, at which English folksongs and military marches were performed, suggests the work’s sustained attention to music’s role in contemporary constructions of English identity. The Exhibition’s opening and three-day long ‘Pageant of Empire’ included Elgar’s series of songs set to Alfred Noyes’s poems, his ‘Imperial March’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and Vaughan Williams’s arrangements of English sea songs.20 Mr Carslake’s judgement that Wembley was ‘very tiring’ and ‘not being a success’ (p. 195) deflates the Exhibition’s imperialist, nationalist agenda. Recent postcolonial readings of Woolf’s work have elucidated her life-long, albeit complicated, critiques of imperialism; Woolf’s sceptical representation of nationalist music and appropriations of music – from the EMR to Wagner – continues more overtly and lengthily in Orlando (1928) and Between the Acts (1941).21 It is worth remembering that when Woolf (along with seventeen million others) visited the Exhibition she would have had the opportunity not only to hear music by British composers but also indigenous music performed by the hundreds of participants from West Africa, Burma, Malaya, Palestine, Hong Kong, India, British Guiana and elsewhere. In ‘Thunder at Wembley’ (1924), she satirises various aspects of the Exhibition’s musical activities including the ‘gramophone [that] does its best [. . .] but all is vain’, and the ‘[a]dmirably impassive’ men of the ‘Massed Bands of Empire’; ‘[t]he Empire is perishing; the bands are playing; the Exhibition is in ruins’.22 In the context of the bandstands, piped music and performances of indigenous music, Woolf can hardly have missed music’s part in the Exhibition’s colonial ideology.23 Mr Carslake’s tastes also draw on music’s contemporary association with homosexuality, implied through the description of him as a ‘queer fish’ whose ‘affections’ for his butler are the subject of speculation by his friends (p. 201).24 As in Jacob’s Room (1922) and The Waves (1931), Woolf’s musical allusions allow her discreetly to represent tabooed sexualities, but it is ‘“Slater’s Pins”’, her ‘Sapphist story’, that is the most extended example. 25 The emotional and physical proximity of teacher and pupil throughout the lesson is emphasised: seated at the piano with her back ‘half turned’ to her pupil (p. 214), Miss Craye’s aural concentration on Fanny is so intent that she – rather implausibly – hears the rose fall from her dress over the sound of the Bach. In turn, the vision of Miss Craye buying pins is such a revelation that Fanny is herself ‘transfixed’ (‘deflowered’?), stooping to hunt for the pin ‘with her ears full of the music’ (p. 209). The music lesson is not the only instance of acute desire in this work: Fanny imagines Miss Craye and her homosexual brother looking at the young Polly Kingston with the same ‘lingering, desiring look’ with which they observe nature’s beauty. There is an unsettlingly acquisitive, even predatory, edge to the aesthetes’ desire but more importantly it conveys the siblings’ longing for intimacy and Miss Craye’s cultivation of intense ‘moment[s]’ of experience (pp. 212, 214). The ‘green Roman glasses’ (p. 209) leave the Crayes unsatisfied and the teacher’s remark about pins is, Fanny speculates, an attempt ‘to break the pane of glass which separated them from other people’ (p. 210). Woolf’s portrait of the Crayes, based on Clara and Walter Pater, exposes her own ambivalent relationship to Aestheticism and to Pater’s celebration of music as the supreme art; like many modernists, she implicitly accepts Pater’s dictum yet is anxious to differentiate her own writing from the formal characteristics and solipsism that she

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attributed to Aestheticism.26 She also exploits Aestheticism’s association with the sensual and, particularly, with homosexual desire: beneath the ‘cool, glassy world of Bach fugues’ (p. 209) lie tumultuous and, in this period, illicit emotions.27 ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ culminates in an ecstatic apotheosis: All seemed transparent for a moment to the gaze of Fanny Wilmot, as if looking through Miss Craye, she saw the very fountain of her being spurt up in pure, silver drops [. . .] She saw Julia open her arms; saw her blaze; saw her kindle. Out of the night she burnt like a dead white star. Julia kissed her. Julia possessed her. (p. 214) Ending with the sound of Miss Craye ‘laughing queerly’ as ‘Fanny pinned the flower to her breast with trembling fingers’ (p. 214), ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ veers close to the limit of what could be said. The work’s emphasis on homosexuality’s ‘unspeakable’ quality suggests why Woolf found music’s epistemological slipperiness and associative capacity so useful.28 ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ draws attention to the way in which homosexuality is obliquely articulated through innuendo, rumour and negations: it is ‘an indescribable tone’ in Miss Kingston’s voice ‘which hinted at something odd, something queer, in Julius Craye. It was the very same thing that was odd perhaps in Julia too.’ Similarly, Fanny reflects that ‘some piece of gossip’, ‘a tone’ or ‘a smile’ have shaped Miss Kingston’s sense that there is something ‘odd’ about Julius though ‘[n]eedless to say, she had never spoken about it to anybody. Probably she scarcely knew what she meant by it’ (p. 210). ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ invites the reader to reflect, like Fanny, on what is not ‘describable’, what can hardly be thought or ‘spoken about’ to anyone. Such ‘indeterminacy’ may typify literary representations of homosexuality but this epistemological instability is also an attribute of music that Woolf celebrates and exploits throughout her writing.29 It’s suggestive that it is ‘tone’ – with its musical connotations – that conveys to Miss Kingston a meaning that cannot be explicitly articulated. ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ invites us to reflect on music’s capacity to stimulate association (what ‘The String Quartet’ calls ‘“these silly dreams”’ (p. 134)) but also music’s inherent resistance to language. Both the subject and form of this work could thus be described as ‘flights of fancy’, ‘flights of the mind’, and it is worth remembering that Woolf used images of flight to describe her composition of the ground-breaking short fiction ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917).30 The conspicuous doubling that pervades ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ – the two women; the almost identically named siblings; the spoken and unsaid; the surface and the interior; Miss Craye’s ‘tug-of-war’ with illness (p. 213) – may also suggest that Woolf had in mind a classical root for ‘flight’: ‘fugue’. The fiction’s thematic and formal reliance on doubling may, with the allusion to Bach, hint at Woolf’s interest in fugal form with its duality of subjects and answer. Certainly, in The Voyage Out and Mrs Dalloway fugue shapes Woolf’s formal experimentalism and representation of musical-literary relations.31 If that is the case here, she was not the only one of her contemporaries to experiment in adapting this genre for poetry or prose – Huxley’s Point Counter Point, Joyce’s Ulysses and Pound’s Cantos all more explicitly claim affinities with musical fugue.32 Music’s importance to the narrative innovations of ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ is also suggested by the juxtaposition of terms that contrast

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visual with aural modes of perception. Miss Kingston’s ‘little character sketches’ (p. 209, emphasis added), with their hackneyed phrases and imprecision, are set against Fanny’s imagined ‘scene[s]’ (a term suggesting both the pictorial and the theatrical), and against what Evelyn Haller calls the ‘implicit sound’ of the work: the anaphoric ‘[s]he saw’ (p. 214) of the apotheosis is accompanied by the ‘explosive force’ of the noise of shattering glass as the ‘glassy surface’ (p. 210) isolating Miss Craye breaks.33 The work ends not with a visual image but with the sound of her laughter. In this fiction, music and sound appear to have a revelatory, disruptive force exceeding that of language. ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ fulfils the exhortation in Woolf’s manifesto ‘Street Music’ (1905), inviting writers to ‘remember’ literature’s ‘allegiance’ to music, an invitation we are now accepting too.34

Notes 1. Virginia Woolf, ‘Moments of Being: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”’, in A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick (London: Vintage, 2003), pp. 209–14 (p. 212). Further references to this and other short fiction are cited parenthetically in the text. 2. See further Emma Sutton, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), especially chapter 1. 3. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell assisted by Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977–84), III, p. 118. 4. ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ was written c. 1926–7; see Haunted House, pp. 3, 299. 5. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975–80), IV, p. 231; Diary, III, p. 229. 6. Linden Peach, ‘No Longer a View: Virginia Woolf in the 1930s and the 1930s in Virginia Woolf’, in Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History, ed. Maroula Joannou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 192–204 (p. 193). 7. Woolf, The Voyage Out, ed. Lorna Sage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 340, 239; Woolf, The Waves, ed. Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 197. 8. Letters, VI, p. 426. 9. On ‘The String Quartet’, see Charlotte de Mille, ‘“Turning the Earth Above a Buried Memory”: Dismembering and Remembering Kandinsky’, in Music and Modernism, c. 1849–1950, ed. Charlotte de Mille (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 182–203; Vanessa Manhire, ‘Mansfield, Woolf and Music: “The Queerest Sense of Echo”’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 3 (2011), 51–66; Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 148–63. See also Emilie Crapoulet, Virginia Woolf: A Musical Life, Bloomsbury Heritage, 50 (London: Cecil Woolf, 2009); Elicia Clements, Virginia Woolf: Music, Sound, Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). 10. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, ed. Sue Roe (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 24. 11. Woolf herself made the obvious pun: Letters, III, p. 431. 12. In this respect, studies of music in literary modernism differ from those of its role in Victorian fiction; a recent exception is Josh Epstein’s Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 13. Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 14. See, representatively: Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870–1914: ‘Encroaching on all Man’s Privileges’ (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Derek Hyde, New Found Voices: Women in Nineteenth-Century English Music, new edn (Ash: Tritone, 1991); Arthur Loesser,

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

emma sutton Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (London: Victor Gollancz, 1955); Women and Music: A History, ed. Karin Pendle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Woolf, Night and Day, ed. Suzanne Raitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 438, and The Voyage Out, p. 15. See Mary Burgan, ‘Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, Victorian Studies, 30 (1) (1986), 51–76 (p. 52). See Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Edward A. Baughan, ‘The Concert Craze’, Monthly Music Record, 30 (1900), 53–5 (p. 54); cited in Anna Elizabeth Watson, ‘Music Lessons and the Construction of Womanhood in English Fiction, 1870–1914’ (PhD Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014), p. 3. See, for example, Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993; 2001); Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993). See Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 494. See, for example, Kathy Phillips, Virginia Woolf against Empire (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994); on Woolf and musical nationalism, see further, Sutton, chapter 5. ‘Thunder at Wembley’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie (vols I–III) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols IV–VI), 6 vols (London: Hogarth, 1986–2012), III, pp. 410–14 (pp. 412–13). My account of the Exhibition is indebted to Anne Clendinning, ‘On the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–25’, in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net [accessed 9 September 2014]. Other musical activities and attractions included the working exhibits of ‘every kind of British instrument’ in the ‘Music Trades Federation’ section of ‘The Palace of Industry’, and the music piped by ‘telephones and “loud speakers”’ in the ‘Amusements Park’. See London and the British Empire Exhibition 1924 (London: Ward Lock, 1924), pp. M and G. See, for example, Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood, ‘Lesbian and Gay Music’, in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas, 2nd edn (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 351–89. See further Sutton, pp. 102–5; Letters, III, p. 431. Diary, III, p. 106. For a fine account of Woolf’s relationship to Pater, see Perry Meisel, The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980); on ‘“Slater’s Pins”’ and on Fanny’s ‘ambivalence’ towards Miss Craye and Aestheticism see especially pp. 23–6. Woolf’s acceptance of Pater’s dictum was not unqualified, though: see Sutton, p. 40. See particularly Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 94–6. William A. Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 191–236 (p. 193). See, for example, Letters, IV, p. 231. For more on Woolf and fugue, see Jocelyn Slovak, ‘Mrs Dalloway and Fugue: “Songs without Words, Always the Best . . .”’ [accessed 15 February 2010]; Sutton, chapter 4.

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32. See Nadya Zimmerman, ‘Musical Form as Narrator: The Fugue of the Sirens in James Joyce’s Ulysses’, Journal of Modern Literature, 26 (1) (2002), 108–18; W. B. Yeats, ‘A Packet for Ezra Pound’, in A Vision (1937) (London: Macmillan; Papermac, 1989), p. 4; cited in Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 99. 33. Evelyn Haller, ‘“Shivering Fragments”: Music, Art and Dance in Virginia Woolf’s Writing’, in Virginia Woolf and Music, ed. Adriana Varga (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 260–87 (p. 275). 34. Essays, I, pp. 27–32 (p. 31).

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49 Listening in to D. H. Lawrence: Music, Body, Feelings Susan Reid

D

. H. Lawrence’s writing reveals an interest in music that extends beyond the thematic, metaphorical and structural to the very materials of music, demonstrating what Michael Bell describes as ‘a concentration on the medium of music itself as a possible “language” of feeling’.1 Bell refers here to an oft-quoted complaint from Lawrence’s essay ‘The Novel and the Feelings’ (1925) that ‘we have no language for the feelings’,2 a lack that the writer argues can be resolved by: Listening inwards, not for words nor for inspiration [. . .] If we can’t hear the cries far down in our own forests of dark veins, we can look in the real novels, and there listen in [. . .] to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny.3

Though Lawrence’s essay invokes a ‘primitivist’ discourse of ‘natural man’, his seemingly intuitive linking of sounds and emotions also resonates with thinkers like Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)4 who noted that: When speech became emotional the sounds produced spanned a greater tonal range and thus came closer to music. He therefore proposed that the sounds of excited speech became gradually uncoupled from the words that accompanied them, and so came to exist as separate sound entities, forming a ‘language’ of their own.5 Whatever its origins, however, Lawrence’s notion of listening to the body provided a useful tool to combat the Cartesian split of mind and body – a cognitive dissonance that he felt might be resolved by sound, and particularly by music.6 In response to Lawrence’s call to ‘listen in’ to the characters in ‘real novels’, then, this essay explores how we might understand the ‘low, calling cries’ of the characters in Women in Love (1920) – if not in words then as musical sounds that articulate a language of the body and of the feelings. From the very beginning of his writing career, Lawrence perceived how musical relationships might be useful in articulating emotional relationships, as exemplified in an experimental series of poems titled ‘A Life History in Harmonies and Discords’, written in 1908–10.7 In a letter from this early period, he explains that ‘love is much finer, I think, when not only the sex group of chords is attuned, but the great harmonies, and the little harmonies, of what we will call religious feeling (read it widely)

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and ordinary sympathetic feeling’.8 While literature and music are usually perceived to intersect in the shared domain of time, Lawrence’s writing thus aspired from the outset to incorporate music’s vertical dimension of harmony, combining ‘two patterns of notation’ in a similar way to Michael Schmidt’s reimagining of novelistic prose ‘as lines of music that created harmonies and dissonances’.9 These novelistic ‘dissonances’ increased in parallel with dissonance in music, which though perhaps beginning with Richard Wagner and literary Wagnerism certainly did not end there, intensifying with the advent of modernist writing around 1910 (as later announced by Virginia Woolf) and of modernist music around 1906–8, as announced by works like Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, which ‘begins and ends with dissonance’.10 While Lawrence recognised the potential of music as a language of harmonies and discords, he was also aware of its representational limitations. He thus remained sceptical of the notion of music’s supremacy over other art forms; an idea that so impressed late-nineteenth-century writers including Walter Pater and the French symbolists that they started to ‘conceive themselves as surrogate composers’.11 Though Lawrence admired the poetry of Verlaine, he rejected his doctrine of ‘Before everything else, music’ explaining that ‘I do not worship music or the “half said thing”’.12 Accordingly, he asserted that: Absolute music is not intended to have any relation to ideas, I think. It has no more meaning than the wind round the house, or the cries of sea gulls over the low surf [. . .] There is no verbal, ideational meaning to the Pastoral Symphony – or any other [. . .] All that is sayable, let it be said, and what isn’t, you may sing it, or paint it, or act it, or even put it in poetry.13 The term ‘absolute music’, coined by Wagner, is a perennial ‘flashpoint of musical aesthetics’, that also engaged Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point (1928), a novel that has much to say about Lawrence and his views about music.14 For Lawrence no art form was ‘absolute’; in his own field of writing, when he reaches the limit of ‘All that is sayable’ he often sets his characters to singing or painting or acting or poetry, or to piano-playing or dancing or drawing.15 Here Lawrence is in tune with a feeling in Western culture that the arts are fundamentally one, as governed by the Muses (the Greek term that gave rise to the word ‘music’);16 an idea shared by the younger Wagner and to some extent inherent in the ‘maximalism’ of some modernist composers.17 Mahler, for example, aspired that his symphonies should ‘become vehicles for the transmission of universal vibrations into the domain of human perception’ and that his third in particular should be ‘a work so great that it actually mirrors the whole world – one is, so to speak, oneself only an instrument on which the universe plays’.18 The concept of a ‘vibrating universe’, shared by other modernist composers like Ferruccio Busoni,19 stretches back to Pythagoras and Boethius, whose De institutione musica (1491–2) identified ‘three kinds of music’: celestial, which relates to the motion of the planets and of the seasons; corporeal, which has to do with the harmony between reason and the body; and instrumental, music that is produced by the actual sounding of voices and instruments.20

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The perceived ability of music to operate across dimensions to provide harmony, particularly between reason and the body, appealed not only to modernist composers but also to modernist writers, like Lawrence, who therefore sought to exploit musical media in an all-encompassing form. Accordingly, Daniel Albright identifies a quintessentially modernist search for ‘the fundamental units of the mixed arts – figures of consonance, one might call them, in the sense of presupposing a deep concord among artistic media’.21 Albright’s notion of ‘a chord, vibrating between media, abolishing the distinctness of media’ might provide one way of understanding Lawrence’s attempts to deploy artistic media in his prose, as in his description of ‘the sex group of chords’ in his early letter discussed above, or the vibrations that resonate throughout his fiction. In Women in Love the vibrations are visceral, running ‘through [. . .] blood and [. . .] brain’ (p. 73); from ‘an electric vibration’ that Ursula Brangwen feels ‘in her veins, intense, much more intense than that which was always humming low in the atmosphere of Beldover’ (p. 199) to the ‘discord’ she feels ‘jarring and jolting through her, in the most barren of misery’ (p. 263). In Lawrence’s novel, the body is depicted, at one level, as an instrument, each with a unique voice that reveals character. If, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes has observed, Lawrence uses dance as ‘a way of breaking through “character” and “social relationship” to reveal something deeper’, then a similar process would seem to be at work here in his use of voice and music.22 Thus Ursula perceives that Rupert Birkin’s ‘physical attractiveness’ is like ‘another voice, carrying another knowledge of him’ (p. 44), while the insistent ‘sing-song’ of Hermione Roddice’s speech betrays her tendency to ‘rhapsodise’ intellectually – a symptom of her mind–body split.23 In his analysis of dance in Women in Love, Kinkead-Weekes turns first to a scene in which Gudrun performs Dalcroze eurythmics inspired by Ursula’s singing. But if, as he asserts, ‘Through the dance something of Gudrunness has come out unmistakably’, what of ‘Ursulaness’ comes out through her singing?24 Most importantly, Ursula’s singing seems spontaneous: in contrast to the intellectual rhapsodies of Hermione or Birkin’s ‘voice of pure abstraction’ (p. 146), Ursula begins ‘to sing to herself, softly’ in ‘one of the perfect moments of freedom and delight, such as children alone know’ (p. 165). Child-like, Ursula ‘seemed so peaceful and sufficient unto herself, sitting there unconsciously crooning her song, strong and unquestioned at the centre of her own universe’; her singing is thus an unconscious expression of ego. But the song that comes unbidden to Ursula’s lips is ‘Ännchen von Tharau’, a German folksong from a poem that reinforces a conventional view of love as ‘two lives [. . .] woven as one’ – the same idea of love that Birkin has disputed with Ursula in the preceding chapter.25 Instead, Birkin insists on a concept of separateness in union, where lovers meet ‘not in the emotional, loving plane – but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures’ (p. 146). Lawrence thus complicates the association of music and the unconscious, since although Ursula’s singing seems ‘natural’ and spontaneous the song itself conforms to a culturally conditioned ideal of love. Indeed, her self-expression through song may only be an assertion of her individuality – a symptom of modernity that is reinforced by her subsequent more conscious switch to two American ragtime songs (‘My Gal is a High-Born Lady’ and ‘Way Down in Tennessee’). Certainly the cumulative effect of juxtaposing ‘rapidly

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changing moods, sonorities and motifs’ in this scene is characteristic of the ‘acoustic unconscious’ – ‘a realm well below the threshold of the audible’ – that Veit Erlmann identifies in modernist music.26 In the realm of psychoanalysis Anton Ehrenzweig expresses a similar notion, while also suggesting the difficulties of making the audible intelligible, since ‘Music has become a symbolic language of the unconscious mind whose symbolism we shall never be able to fathom.’27 Symbolism itself comes under attack in the novel, since as Julius Halliday (a character based on the composer Peter Warlock) declares: ‘Life is all wrong because it has become too visual – we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see’ (p. 78). Accordingly, in the ‘Moony’ chapter, Birkin stones a reflection of the moon in a pond in an attempt to break out of a reflective visual mode of thinking. Although this scene is often interpreted in terms of the moon’s symbolism – or its function as a ‘leitmotif’28 – we might instead consider how in ‘obliterating’ the image of the moon Birkin is intent on fragmenting and confusing these ‘conscious’ associations, throwing stones until: there was no moon any more, only a few broken flakes tangled and glittering broadcast in the darkness, without aim or meaning, a darkened confusion, like a black and white kaleidoscope tossed at random. The hollow night was rocking and crashing with noise, and from the sluice came sharp, regular flashes of sound [. . .] Birkin stood and listened, and was satisfied. (pp. 247–8) Satisfaction, in this instance, comes to Birkin through his ear, though absolutely not through any programmatic association of music and moonlight such as that suggested by Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (1801) or Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ (1905). Initially in ‘Moony’, ‘the water that was perfect in its stillness’ (p. 245) seems to parallel what Taruskin describes as ‘the strikingly static effect of Debussy’s harmony’.29 This stillness, however, is what Birkin intermittently seeks and destroys – a sign of his self-division between conflicting desires to retreat into a reflective transcendence of the mind and the turbulence of physical passion that obliterates conscious thought. The impetus towards stillness in Lawrence’s Women in Love culminates in the liquid eroticism of the ‘Excurse’ chapter and the achievement of an ‘unspeakable communication’ that transcends both world and words (p. 320). But only after an initial outburst of passion from Ursula – who shouts and stamps her foot and throws away the rings that Birkin has given her – dissolves into the ‘peace’ that Birkin craves (p. 310). The turning point is a heavenly music which is at once universal and deeply personal: As they descended, they heard the Minster bells playing a hymn, when the hour had struck six. ‘Glory to thee my God this night For all the blessings of the light — —’ So, to Ursula’s ear, the tune fell out, drop by drop, from the unseen sky on to the dusky town. It was like dim, bygone centuries sounding [. . .] What was it all? This was no actual world, it was the dream-world of one’s childhood – a great circumscribed reminiscence. (p. 312)

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In ‘Moony’, dissonance is resolved through the ear and, as in Debussy’s music, passion is stilled and ‘positively silent’ (p. 320). However, as Leo Bersani analyses at some length, such stillness is ‘a state beyond movement and even character’.30 Again this lack of ‘forward drive’ and, above all, an ‘absence [. . .] of personalities’ recalls Debussy, who felt that music was ‘not the expression of feeling but the feeling itself’.31 Since Birkin’s self-division between mind and body is characterised as ‘a violent oscillation that would at length be too violent for his coherency, and he would smash and be dead’ (p. 297), it is not surprising that he yearns for a cessation of movement, for a stillness that would also preclude sound. However, as Erlmann concludes, ‘oscillation’ may be preferable to resolution since ‘It sometimes takes going back and forth between extremes to escape the tyranny of the binary and to recognize that indeterminacy and the neither-nor are the secret of the unity between reason and resonance, knowing bodies and feeling minds.’32 Indeed, in Erlmann’s analysis ‘a middle ground would be tantamount to silence. Resonance, by contrast, requires oscillation of both the mind and the ear. It summons us always to keep on percussing, discussing, percussing’ (p. 342). Similarly, then, in Women in Love, the resonance of ‘percussing, discussing, percussing’ is exemplified by continual clashes between Birkin and Ursula and, indeed, the novel ends on the dissonant note of a quarrel between them. Gerald Crich, on the other hand, has chosen to stop moving: he lies down to die in the snow and his frozen corpse crystallises the threat of death inherent in stillness and silence. In Women in Love, the oscillation between vibrations and stillness, like the musical techniques of harmony and dissonance, are a fundamental part of Lawrence’s attempt to shape a ‘language for the feelings’ that may resolve the Cartesian duality of mind and body. Lawrence attempts to portray, in Erlmann’s terms, ‘the reasoning ear and the resonating mind’,33 and yet he does not completely privilege aurality or the medium of music since to do so would only reinstate the dualities he contests. All the senses and all the artistic media are required if we are to ‘listen inwards’ to the body or to the characters in ‘real novels’.34 Thus, if we ‘listen in’ to Birkin at the close of Women in Love as he marvels at ‘The mystery of creation’, we hear that ‘The perfect pulse throbbed with indescribable being’ (p. 479). Finally, then, even the limits of ‘indescribable being’ can be intimated, not only by a sound that resonates with the rhythmic pulse of music but by the feeling of the blood throbbing in ‘the forests of dark veins’35 – a pulse that resonates with a ‘vibrating universe’ recognised, too, by musical thinkers from Pythagoras to Mahler.

Notes 1. Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 32–3. 2. D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Novel and the Feelings’, in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 201–5 (p. 203). 3. Lawrence, ‘The Novel and the Feelings’, p. 205. 4. Spencer was an early influence on Lawrence, contributing, for example, to his ‘seriously modified [. . .] religious beliefs’: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume I 1901–13, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 36–7. Links between

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5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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music and emotion have since been proved by neuroscience – see, for example, Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 35. Storr, p. 11. For a book-length discussion of the Cartesian legacy and the history of aurality, see Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone, 2010). My thanks to Stephen Benson for drawing my attention to this thought-provoking study that provides a useful parallel with Lawrence’s concerns with aurality in relation to the mind–body split. See also Storr, Music and the Mind. In D. H. Lawrence: The Poems, vol. III, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1525–9. For a discussion of the musical significance of these poems, and other examples of Lawrence’s early use of music, see Susan Reid, D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 7–10. Boulton, p. 66. Michael Schmidt, The Novel: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 16. Although Schoenberg was not well known in Britain at this time, Lawrence was certainly aware of Strauss – for instance he attended a performance of Elektra in March 1910, per Boulton, p. 157. For an account of literary Wagnerism, which includes Lawrence, see Stoddard Martin, Wagner to ‘The Waste Land’: Swinburne, Wilde, Symons, Shaw, Moore, Yeats, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982). An Anthology of Sources: Modernism and Music, ed. Daniel Albright (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 2; Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 5. Boulton, p. 63. Ibid., p. 101. Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 1. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 320. Hereafter page references to this edition are given parenthetically in the body of the essay. Albright, Anthology, p. 23. Taruskin, p. 5. Albright, Anthology, p. 6. Ferruccio Busoni, ‘Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music’ (1907), in Albright, Anthology, p. 144. Margot Fassler, Music in the Medieval West: Western Music in Context (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2014), p. 28. Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 6–7. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Dance’, The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, 10 (1) (1992), 59–77 (p. 59). The same sort of self-consciousness mars Lawrence’s early allusions to ‘high brow’ music; see for example Elgin W. Mellown, ‘Music and Dance in D. H. Lawrence’, Journal of Modern Literature, 21 (1) (1997), 49–60. Kinkead-Weekes, p. 69. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, trans. ‘Annie von Tharaw’ (1845) [accessed 14 October 2014]. Erlmann, p. 272. Storr, p. 16. Critics like Joyce Carol Oates have noted that the novel’s ‘proliferating images coalesce into fairly stable leitmotifs: water, moon, darkness, light, the organic and the sterile’:

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

susan reid ‘Lawrence’s Götterdämmerung: The Apocalyptic Vision of Women in Love’, Critical Enquiry, 4 (1978), 559–78. Taruskin, p. 78. Leo Bersani, ‘Lawrentian Stillness’, in A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), pp. 156–86 (p. 179). Taruskin, p. 78. Erlmann, p. 340. Ibid., p. 341. Lawrence, ‘The Novel and the Feelings’, p. 205. Ibid.

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50 E. M. Forster and Music: Listening for the Amateur Will May

I

A ROOM WITH A VIEW (1908), Mr Emerson informs Lucy Honeychurch that life is ‘difficult’, comparing it to ‘a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along’.1 His analogy is a curious mixture of the professional and the improvisatory: the performance is difficult not because the music is virtuosic, but because the player is really an amateur who has stumbled unawares onto the stage. This might be one way of reading Lucy’s own life after the novel has ended: in Forster’s whimsical essay, ‘A View without a Room’ (1958), he enlightens his readers as to her ultimate fate. She goes on to play the piano professionally and work as a music teacher. Her Beethoven performances move from recitals in her local church to wartime radio broadcasts where she plays them defiantly, as a conscientious objector. Her transformation is all the more remarkable given her first incarnation: in an early 1902 draft often called ‘Old Lucy’, she was merely a slighted accompanist, a supporting character taking part in a concert in aid of a church decoration fund. In the finished novel, we still find her striking ‘no more right notes than was suitable for her age and situation’ (p. 50). Yet a musician, even an amateur one, has the unique ability to change their situation; she is Forster’s only character to have both a future and a past imagined for them. His desire to return to Lucy throughout his professional career, long after he had finished writing novels, suggests a point of comparison. Like Lucy, E. M. Forster’s professional status is always in the process of revision, apparently something he makes up as he goes along. His essays are full of profuse apologies for his own musical amateurishness: his tendency to ‘wool-gather’2 as he listens to a concert, his self-presentation as ‘an amateur whose inadequacy will become all too obvious’.3 Yet he can be equally apologetic about music itself: his radio broadcasts perform curious arabesques in their desire to meet the audience half way. Reviewing a narrative version of The Magic Flute by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, he notes ‘rather unluckily it’s based on an opera by Mozart [. . .] be prepared for some queer names’,4 as if classical music must be smuggled in with a shrug of the shoulders. A similar contradiction seems at work in his extraordinary plan to spend the Second World War annotating Beethoven’s piano sonatas. The project, which is never completed, is a telling mixture of the ambitious and the impossible, as he confesses early on to Forrest Reid: ‘I’m keen on a vision of Beethoven reached through playing him as well as listening to him, and based upon details [. . .] unfortunately so much of him I can’t play.’5 Forster’s rhetoric continually shifts between suggesting music is beyond him because it is too complex, or because he is too much of a hobbyist: in ‘Not Listening to Music’ N

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(1939), he attempts to have it both ways: ‘music is so very queer that an amateur is bound to get muddled when writing it’ (p. 305). Here his self-identification as the amateur comes as part-writer, part-listener. Yet professional acknowledgement of his musical-literary talents was quick to come: in 1934, Peter Burra argued Forster was ‘a musician who chose the novel because he had ideas to utter which needed a more distinct articulation than music could make’;6 in 1947, he was invited as a keynote speaker to Harvard University’s Symposium on Music Criticism, one of the most significant musicological events of its kind. After commissioning him to co-write the libretto for Billy Budd (1953), Benjamin Britten called him ‘our most musical novelist’.7 Certainly, his works are supremely well-orchestrated: alongside the goblins of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Howards End (1910), there is the rural Italian staging of Lucia di Lammermoor in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), the erotically coded player-piano performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique in Maurice (1971), the folk-music researcher Dorothea Borlase in the incomplete Arctic Summer (2003), or the symbolic soundtrack of Indian classical music in A Passage to India (1924). Yet Forster’s affable refusal to take his musical fictions too seriously raises serious questions about how far his amateurishness is a posture, or whether the relationship between musical-literary endeavours will always be haunted by the notion that, in Forster’s words, the arts are to ‘be enriched by taking in one another’s washing’ (‘Not Listening to Music’, p. 304). Forster’s early musical life had a surprising trajectory, beginning with childhood piano lessons and concerts with the Tonbridge choir before his classics degree at King’s College, Cambridge brought him into contact with musicologist Edward J. Dent, and the wonders of Wagner. This mixture of the homely, the sublime and the professional offers one reason why Forster’s writing on music is as likely to turn to metaphors of domestic labour as German mythology, and why its qualifications often shade into contradiction. His work remains sceptical that an artist can be trained – the narrator reminds Rickie in The Longest Journey that ‘drudgery is not art and cannot lead to it’8 – yet deplores anything that looks like dilettantism. This may lie behind Forster’s dislike of Beethoven’s effortless predecessor: he coins the verb ‘Mozarting’9 for the fluent soft-pedalling that marks a composer who has not yet achieved greatness. He finds Oscar Wilde’s dialogues in ‘The Critic as Artist’ marred by the ‘setting of piano playing and cheap scent’,10 yet is sure ‘the artist is not a bricklayer at all, but a horseman, whose business it is to catch Pegasus at once’ (The Longest Journey, p. 20). It is a similarly divided impulse that wants to divine a system for music yet place it beyond the realm of human comprehension. Forster’s essays, novels and broadcasts offer a series of tentative models for understanding music, all marked by ‘the dotted-quaverrestlessness of indecision’ (‘Not Listening to Music’, p. 135). We might usefully read the Beethoven concert in Howards End alongside ‘Not Listening to Music’, where Forster attempts to ‘christen’ two types of music: music that reminds him of something versus music itself. This porous division suggests a line between the amateur and professional listener, but one that Forster crosses back and forth, as the title suggests. In the essay, Forster traces his love of programmatic music through Wagner, but cautions his readers that music which reminds will ‘open the door to that imp of the concert-hall, inattention’ (p. 135). It casts an intriguing light on the Queen’s Hall symphony that finds Tibby Schlegel listening for ‘the transitional passage on the drum’ while the narrator (and Helen Schegel) envisions ‘a goblin walking quietly

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over the universe, from end to end’.11 The proximity between the goblin and the imp is telling: Helen’s programmatic indulgence might make her inattentive to the practicalities of umbrellas, but Tibby’s meticulous listening ear is only matched by his indifference to the rest of the world. Neither system nor caprice allow a perfect communion with the performance. The festive Italian opera audience in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) encounter similar diversions. The English party on a rescue mission decide propriety will permit them to attend a rural performance of Lucia di Lammermoor, not realising that Italian opera ‘aims not at illusion but at entertainment’.12 In a novel pitched giddily between farce and tragedy, the musical dénouement combines the two: Lucia’s climactic mad scene is set off by ‘a bamboo clothes-horse, stuck all over with bouquets’ (p. 110). If the Queen’s Hall finds its audience lacking in the professional competence necessary to gather the music together, the rural opera in Monteriano finds the musicians themselves defiantly amateur. The concert in Howards End proves the beginning of a terrible muddle, whilst the rough-and-ready opera performance in Where Angels Fear to Tread marks the point where the characters give up all hope of untangling the muddle that has already ensued. Music is less a soundtrack to the events in a novel than an interruption, or an event to be interrupted, like Agnes Pembroke’s arrival in The Longest Journey as Rhinemaidens sound on the gramophone. Collective listening seems an imperfect ladder to the spiritual. Yet Forster’s other systems for understanding music are equally cautious, apparently presenting him as a muddling fanatic. In ‘The C Minor of That Life’ (1941), he explores the absolute qualities of key signatures, but devotes half of the essay to ‘Three Blind Mice’, where the key of C major seems appropriately ‘straightforward, nurserified, unassuming’ (p.130). His own criticism seems to inhabit a similar key; his extensive knowledge of Götterdämmerung or Beethoven’s Rasoumovksy quartets is shoe-horned into two paragraphs. It is only in his explication of rhythm that he allows for a system that aspires to difficulty, rather than apologises for it. In Aspects of the Novel (1927), Forster suggested music could not so much help a novelist, as provide them with an analogy, offering a final expansive beauty which ‘fiction might achieve in its own way’.13 The novelist might best attempt this through the ‘easy rhythm’ of ‘repetition plus variation’, yet hoping all the time to achieve the effect of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where the separate movements ‘all enter the mind at once, and extend one another into a common entity’.14 Yet to achieve this is to move from the rhythms which ‘we can all hear and tap to’ – what Forster helpfully glosses as ‘diddidy dum’, in Beethoven’s case – to the symphony’s broader rhythms, its relation between different movements, ‘which some people can hear but no one can tap to’. This, Forster warns us, is ‘difficult’ and ‘whether it is substantially the same as the first sort only a musician could tell us’; his system reaches its final revelation at the moment he is no longer able to account for it. Many of Forster’s characters will encounter ‘difficulty’, like the bemused Mrs Herriton when the letter comes telling of Lilia’s engagement in Italy (The Longest Journey, p. 28), but in his most substantial work of literary criticism, difficulty becomes not something for a character to overcome but a novelist to attain. The centrality of this ‘difficult rhythm’ to Forster’s conception of the novel – it provides the title to Michelle Fillion’s exceptional musicological study of his work from 2010 – asks us to explore the relationship between the ‘repetition and variation’ we find in his fiction and its wider structures. His work rebounds in ‘leitmotifs’,

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from the rather Wagnerian insistence of Mr Beebe’s phrase ‘too much Beethoven’ in A Room with a View, to the staccato cry of ‘Panic and emptiness!’ (p. 47) that punctuates Howards End. Yet the attempt to move from repeated phrase to ‘difficult rhythm’ brings with it the risky watchwords of suburban Sawston: ‘“Organize.” “Systematize.” “Fill up every moment’” (The Longest Journey, p. 269). Difficulty can only be accommodated through an effort to learn, but Forster has little faith in the systems that might teach us. In the short story ‘Co-ordination’ (1912), we find a dystopian satire on musical education, based around the despondent school music teacher Miss Haddon; it’s a work that bears comparison with Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Singing Lesson’ (1920). The Principal’s vision of her ‘new co-ordinative system’15 is that all taught subjects should focus on a particular topic (this term’s being Napoleon); indifferently, Miss Haddon drills her music students in the appropriate piano music. Yet when she hears the ocean in a sea-shell in the staff room, she renounces her claims to professional competence, confessing to the bewildered Principal that she had never had any aptitude for music, but feigned it sufficiently well to get the job. The headmistress responds to her resignation by giving the school a holiday, where they drive out ‘an immense distance into the country’ (p. 176). In the divine kingdom imagined by Forster for the story, geniuses sit in heaven tallying the number of times their works are mentioned or performed on earth, a kind of celestial Performing Rights Society. Beethoven looks down on earth with good humour, rewarding the amateurs who perform his music with the chance to hear professional performances. It’s a curious vision of a musical afterlife, a mixture of the spiritual and the empirical. Yet even this fanciful system is more than the arc of the story can hold, and the final scene has Mephistopheles chiding the angels for not arranging the plot more carefully: Listen. Charge one: Beethoven decrees that a certain female shall hear a performance of his A minor quartette. They hear – some of them a band, other a shell [. . .] The genius and the ordinary man have never co-ordinated since Abel was killed by Cain. (p. 178) The angels are forgiven, of course: the story works to mock tyrannical systems, whether earthly or divine. Co-ordination becomes the dark sister of connection, offering regimented restraint in place of expansion. Yet Mephistopheles’s charge that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the genius and the ordinary man sounds a note of concern. Forster tended to see his collaboration with Britten and Crozier for Billy Budd in similar terms. Their differences in musical approach are made clear by Britten’s crisp birthday tribute to Forster in 1969: Forster ‘prefers music based on striking themes, dramatic happenings [. . .] he prefers the Romantic to the Classical’.16 Yet Forster expresses the same musical difference in the language of the amateur, as in his address to Aldeburgh on Peter Grimes: It amuses me to think what an opera on Peter Grimes would have been like if I had written it [. . .] blood and fire would have been thrown in the tenor’s face, hell would have opened, and on a mixture of Don Juan and the Freischütz I should have lowered my final curtain.17

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His yearning for drama (not far from the ‘passion’18 he demands from Britten’s monologue for Claggart in Billy Budd) is here articulated in avuncular bafflement at his own excess; the epic nudges inadvertently into the banal. The posture of the comic amateur becomes one way of accommodating and managing difference, and of attempting to incorporate the spiritual with the mundane. Forster’s writing on music often aims for bathos to save lapsing into it. Advances in musical-literary scholarship mean we know more than ever before about Forster’s musical life. Michelle Fillion’s Difficult Rhythm (2010) provides a list of operas and ballets he attended; the important work of Emma Sutton in Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (2002) helps us read the wide Wagnerian arc of The Longest Journey. Yet Forster could sometimes be testy about how far a musical reading of his work might go. Lionel Trilling’s seminal work on Forster read Howards End through the drama of Faust, which Forster called one of the connections ‘I have had to reject’.19 The preponderance of commentary on Beethoven in Howards End muffles much of his canon – the folksongs of the drunken soldier in The Longest Journey, the accounts of Indian classical music in The Hills of Devi (1953), or Forster’s pointed refusal to write the sea shanty for Billy Budd. His war-time project to annotate Beethoven’s piano sonatas remains a puzzle: as Fillion notes, it was a pursuit ‘for which he lacked both the formal music-theoretical training and the necessary confidence in the analytical process’.20 Yet this may have been part of its appeal: music finds Forster drawn to the unknown, ambivalent about whether he wants its majesties explained or left silent. His reading life found him drawn to scholarship, yet compelled by ‘those solemn mystifications which are erected by ignorance, and which would disappear under proper instruction’ (‘The C Minor of That Life’, p. 130). If interrogating the structure of fiction in Aspects of the Novel (1927) had ended his desire to write, he would risk no such catastrophe in music.

Notes 1. E. M. Forster, A Room with a View (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 188. All further references are to the edition cited and parenthesised in the text. 2. E. M. Forster, ‘Not Listening to Music’, in Two Cheers for Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 134. All further references are to the edition cited and parenthesised in the text. 3. E. M. Forster, ‘The Raison D’Être of Criticism in the Arts’, in Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 114. 4. E. M. Forster, ‘Book Talk’, in The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster 1929–1960, ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), p. 88. 5. E. M. Forster to Forrest Reid, 30 September 1940, in Selected Letters of E. M. Forster: Volume Two, 1921–1970 (London: Collins, 1985), p. 182. 6. Peter Burra, ‘Peter Burra’s Introduction to the Everyman Edition’, in E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Arnold, 1978), p. 315. 7. Benjamin Britten, ‘Some Notes on Forster and Music’, in Aspects of E. M. Forster: Essays and Recollections Written for his Ninetieth Birthday (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), p. 81. 8. E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 20. All further references are to the edition cited and parenthesised in the text.

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9. E. M. Forster, ‘The C Minor of that Life’, in Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 132. All further references are to the edition cited and parenthesised in the text. 10. E. M. Forster, ‘The Creator as Critic’, in The Creator as Critic and Other Writings (Toronto: Dundun Press, 2008) p. 68. 11. E. M. Forster, Howards End (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 46. All further references are to the edition cited and parenthesised in the text. 12. E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 109. All further references are to the edition cited and parenthesised in the text. 13. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), p. 115. 14. Ibid., pp. 115, 133, 113. 15. E. M. Forster, ‘Co-ordination’, in Collected Short Stories (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 178. All further references are to the edition cited and parenthesised in the text. 16. Britten, p. 81. 17. E. M. Forster, ‘George Crabbe and Peter Grimes’, in Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 190. 18. E. M. Forster to Benjamin Britten, in Selected Letters, p. 242. 19. E. M. Forster to James R. McConkey, 21 September 1957, in Selected Letters, p. 267. 20. Michelle Fillion, Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E. M. Forster (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), p. 110.

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51 Beckett, Music and the Ineffable Eric Prieto

M

usic played a crucial role in shaping Samuel Beckett’s literary aesthetic, and remained a major preoccupation for him through every phase of his literary career. Although his approach to integrating musical materials into his writings evolved significantly, his underlying sense of music’s significance never did. For Beckett, influenced from the outset by Schopenhauer, music always represented a more essential medium than language, one able to overcome the inherent abstractness of the linguistic sign and point the way to a reality beyond the impoverished world of phenomenal experience. It provided him, in this sense, with an aspirational, as opposed to practical, model for his work. Rather than trying to find literary equivalents for musical forms or stylistic devices, as so many of his modernist peers did, he used music as a way to define his loftiest goals as a writer. Chief among these was his desire to find a language able to break through the barriers that keep human consciousness from gaining direct, unmediated access to reality, a reality conceived variously in subjective terms (as a foundational ‘I’) or in objectivist terms (as the world ‘out there’). That this project is a utopian one goes without saying, and helps to explain Beckett’s lifelong allegiance to what has been called his aesthetics of failure. That Beckett nonetheless persisted doggedly in the pursuit of this project, convinced of the necessity of at least trying to advance, however incrementally, along the path towards the kind of full communication symbolised by music, makes clear the fundamentally ethical nature of his project. Beckett quickly lost interest in the modernist game of transposing musical forms into rough prose equivalents, preferring instead to incorporate actual music into his writings, often in quite unprecedented ways. This preference for actual music, linked to a growing interest in the signifying potential of performance, is one of the factors that led him into the theatre beginning in the 1950s. The key moment for understanding the role of music in Beckett’s artistic evolution is no doubt the period from 1961 to 1963, when Beckett wrote his two major musically themed radio plays, Cascando and Words and Music, both of which feature a character named Music. These plays will be discussed in some detail below. But in order to understand the significance of this turning point, we need to understand the formative role that music played in his thinking.

Beckett’s Musical Evolution Beckett’s Schopenhauerian understanding of music’s relationship to language is clearly formulated in his first published prose work, Proust (1932), which concludes with a

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whole-hearted endorsement of Schopenhauer’s attribution of an exemplary role to music: Schopenhauer [. . .] in his aesthetics separates [music] from the other arts, which can only produce the Idea with its concomitant phenomena, whereas music is the Idea itself, unaware of the world of phenomena, existing ideally outside the universe, apprehended not in Space but in Time only.1 This view of music – conceived as a more essential ante rem counterpart to the representational arts, which can only give a schematic, post rem, imitation of reality – leads Beckett to conceive of a new approach to writing, which is first formulated in the often cited ‘German Letter’ to Axel Kaun of 1937: ‘To bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through’. And, lest the musical subtext of this project be overlooked, he adds, ‘to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies all’.2 Beckett’s Schopenhauerian understanding of music plays an important role in his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1932, although not published until after his death, in 1993), which features a stringent critique of the representational values of the traditional novel. Of particular note is the musical parable of Lîng Liûn’s musical instrument, which laments the monophonic linearity of the novel and its inability to portray the polyphonic complexity of an individual’s mental life, much less interactions between multiple characters.3 The novel prefigures in this sense Beckett’s later inward turn, without however fully making that turn itself. And despite the abundant references to music (and Schopenhauer) that punctuate the novel, it is clear that Beckett has not yet found a way to relate his musically inspired critique of language to his nascent literary project. It is not until Watt, Beckett’s last full-length novel in English and a kind of testing ground for the more experimental techniques he would deploy in his trilogy, that Beckett begins to dispense with the traditional elements of novelistic construction and to find his own voice. Significantly, Watt also contains Beckett’s first attempt to introduce actual music into one of his works. This is the ‘threne’ from chapter 1, a miniature comic masterpiece that uses a partially scored fugato to give a humorous account of what life is like inside Watt’s head.4 Although the ‘threne’ is only a brief interlude in a much longer work, it is emblematic of the dual turn that will make Beckett’s subsequent work so interesting from a musico-literary perspective: the association of music with interiority; and the decision to use actual music rather than references to music to get across his point. Beckett’s theatrical use of music finds its fullest expression in his radio plays Words and Music (1962) and Cascando (1963), which are related to each other like the panels of a diptych.5 Both plays feature a character named Music whose part is executed not by an actor reading a script but by an orchestra playing a musical score.6 Moreover, both plays set up a triangular allegorical structure in which Music interacts with a verbal counterpart, named Voice in Cascando and Words in Words and Music. Their interactions are mediated by a third, controlling figure, named Opener in Cascando and Croak in Words and Music, who can be thought of as the owners of the mental space within which the musical and vocal performances appear.

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In Words and Music, Croak plays the role of Master, giving orders to his two servants, Words and Music, berating them when they misbehave, and constituting the audience of one for their performances. Croak’s ultimate goal is to get Words and Music to work together in the creation of a song, which, after several false starts, much resistance (they don’t get along especially well), and much coaxing and coercion from Croak, they succeed in doing. The play, in this sense, depicts the story of a successful collaboration between Words and Music, or at least a relatively successful collaboration since (this being Beckett) no complete success is possible. Given this setup, the play is best understood as a meta-narrative allegory of the creative process itself: Croak’s goal is to bring Words and Music together in order to create a more satisfying performance than either of them could have given on their own. And significantly, it is Music that leads the way towards the ultimate revelation of the ‘Wellhead’ theme with which the play closes. After having coaxed Words into producing increasingly meaningful responses to the themes imposed on them by Croak, Music eventually reaches a point beyond which Words cannot pass. The Schopenhauerian intertext is clear. In Cascando, the Schopenhauerian paradigm is still in play, although with a very different emphasis. Opener’s goal is identical to that of Croak in Words and Music: he wants Music and Voice to ‘come together’. But unlike Croak, he cannot guide Music and Voice towards this goal, or otherwise influence their performances. As his name suggests, his function is to turn the Music and Voice on and off, which he does by ‘opening’ and ‘closing’. (In French the verbs ouvrir/fermer can be applied to electrical appliances like radios and televisions.) As this ‘broadcast metaphor’ (Zilliacus) implies, Opener has no control whatsoever over the content of the two performances.7 He can turn them on and off but not control what comes out. Like so many of Beckett’s narrators since the trilogy, Opener hears voices, voices that he dutifully passes on to his audience. But unable to control them, he must continue indefinitely, in the hope that they will somehow hit on a satisfactory combination, which will in turn release him from his obligation and enable him to rest. Cascando and Words and Music, then, provide us with two related but distinct views of the creative process: whereas Croak has a fair (albeit finite) amount of control over the two performances at his disposal, Opener can only listen and hope for the best. In both cases, the music and the words have a high degree of autonomy, making artistic expression more about discovery or excavation than creation. But Cascando differs from Words and Music in emphasising the complete foreignness of music and words with respect to the mediating consciousness of Opener. Indeed, one of the primary functions of Music in Cascando is to provide an apparently incontrovertible proof of the absolute alterity of the two performances. Thus, frustrated with those who say he is just telling the stories that pop up ‘in his head’, he plays a bit of music and asks, sneeringly, ‘Is that mine too?’ In Cascando, as in Schopenhauer, music truly is a language of the other side – not a friend or servant. Words and Music, on the other hand, remains closer to home, framing the struggle to bring Words and Music together in literally lyrical terms (the creation of a song). The thematic centre of this struggle is also more familiar, focusing on themes closely related to those of the Romantic song tradition of Schubert and Schumann, including loss, love, nostalgia, death and resurrection. And whereas Cascando emphasises the impossibility of ever bringing music and words together into a satisfying collaboration,

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Words and Music stresses that although this quest is exceedingly difficult, it can give rise to (fleeting) moments of (relative) satisfaction. In this, Words and Music can serve as an indicator of the path Beckett’s work would increasingly take in the second half of his career. Cascando, we might say, comes directly out of the trilogy (the plunge into the deepest, least explored recesses of the protagonist’s mental landscape), whereas Words and Music prefigures a renewed interest in the possibility of returning home to a more familiar less forbidding world – without, however, betraying the aesthetic and epistemological principles that had shaped the earlier works. One of the central features of this shift is a change in the way music is used: not as a proxy for the inner workings of the mind or the other side, as in Watt or Cascando, but as a reminder of long-gone moments of plenitude, which might be revived through continued attention to the music. It is this renewed lyrical side of Beckett’s personality that will come to predominate in his musically inspired television plays of the seventies and eighties. In these later works, Beckett abandons the fierce intransigence of Cascando and The Unnamable and related works, and adopts the more hopeful, conciliatory posture that we find in Words and Music, where moments of plenitude, of coming together, however fleeting and perhaps even illusory, can be generated. This trend takes form in works such as Ghost Trio and Nacht und träume, where we find an increasing emphasis on the themes of lost love and nostalgic reminiscence and an insistent emphasis on a new kind of quest: the quest to ‘make the image’, as Gilles Deleuze has put it.8 In Nacht und träume, Beckett uses a sung line from the eponymous Schubert lied to evoke the desire to escape from the torments of waking life and return to a more comforting world of dreams. And in Ghost Trio, Beckett uses the image of a man hunched over a cassette player playing the eponymous Beethoven trio to evoke the man’s almost religious devotion to the memory of a female figure. In the latter play, the man’s fixation on the music represents his effort to make this woman, or at least her image, come back and spend some time with him in his solitary chamber (which doubles as an image of his mental space). In all three of these cases, the music is essential to the project of reviving the memory of past happiness in such a way as to bring it to life for the protagonist of the work, giving him a powerful, if fleeting, sensation of plenitude. In Words and Music, we get a clear indication that this effort succeeds when Croak cries out ‘Lily!’ and Music moves on to its solo evocation of the Wellhead theme. In Nacht und träume success takes the form of the central male figure returning to a dream of ritual comfort giving. In Ghost Trio, however, the effort is unsuccessful: the desired female presence never does return. What is clear, though, is that without the kind of absorptive attention symbolised by the music, such efforts can never succeed. Words, in their post rem insufficiency, are not enough on their own. They can only succeed with the help of that ante rem principle symbolised by music, which can give fleeting access to what Schopenhauer called ‘the innermost kernel preceding all form’.9

Beckett, Schopenhauer, Modernism and Postmodernism Beckett’s decision to incorporate actual music into his plays distinguishes his work from the musical experiments carried out by other modernist writers of his generation. This decision could have led him in the direction of conventional songwriting – having his words set to music, as in opera or song. But that more traditional approach to the

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relationship between the two arts would have required Beckett to set aside the central concern of his lifelong quest for meaning, which was ontological and epistemological, not expressive. Beckett chose instead to use music in such a way as to explore the gap between the two media, in a way that leads to a more properly critical reflection on the nature of the relationship between the two arts, questioning the very possibility of an unproblematic collaboration of the kind found in song. This is especially clear in Cascando, which stresses the sheer incommensurability of music and words, but also in Words and Music, which emphasises the difficulty in bringing the two together, and shapes the use of music in Ghost Trio and Nacht und träume, which present the musical source material at a distance, as if filtered through the memory of the protagonist. Despite the enormous aesthetic distance travelled by Beckett over the course of his career – from the still Joycean effusions of Dream, to the unprecedented plunge into the depths of a narrative consciousness in The Unnamable, to the minimalist enigmas of his late period – Beckett remained faithful to the Schopenhauerian view of artistic creation sketched out in his early Proust essay, with music as the ante rem corollary to language, with the former pointing the way to the innermost truth of things and the latter expressing a partial, post rem, fallen view of things. There is a notable mellowing of the Beckettian perspective in his late period, which should not be taken as an abandonment of his earlier aesthetics, but as a new tendency to emphasise that dimension of Schopenhauer’s thinking that sees art as a provider of momentary salvation from the suffering of life. Beckett’s oeuvre charts a course that leads away from the totalising ambitions of his modernist predecessors and towards the fragmentation and suspicion characteristic of poststructuralist thinkers like Derrida and Baudrillard. His work never gives in to the temptation of postmodern despair, however, grounded as it is in a powerful ethical imperative: the obligation to continue, despite everything, in the search for meaning. And it is music, more often than not, that signifies the glimmer of epistemological hope that saves his work from despair or nihilism.

Notes 1. Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1997), p. 92. 2. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta (London: Calder, 1983), pp. 171–2. 3. Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (London: Calder, 1993), pp. 10–11. See also Disjecta, pp. 43–50. 4. Samuel Beckett, Watt (London: Calder, 1963), pp. 32–3. See Eric Prieto, Listening In (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002) for a detailed analysis. 5. These plays are included in the Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), pp. 285–304. The original French for Cascando is in Comédie et actes divers (Paris: Minuit, 1972). 6. Although there are several known scores for each piece the best known are Morton Feldman’s Words and Music and the Cascando scores of Marcel Mihalovici and William Kraft, which were used, respectively, for the BBC and NPR broadcasts of Cascando. 7. Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1976). 8. ‘L’Épuisé’, in Beckett, Quad et autres pièces pour la télévision (Paris: Minuit, 1992), pp. 55–106 (the phrase appears several times). My translation. 9. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols (New York: Dover, 1969), I, p. 263.

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52 Jean Rhys and the Politics of Sound Anna Snaith

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eit Erlmann, in HEARING CULTURES, questions the notion that ‘colonial and postcolonial power relations hinge fundamentally on the “gaze”’.1 There exists a vast literature on the music cultures of the black Atlantic (from W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk onwards), but less attention has been paid by literary scholars to the postcolonial politics of aurality. I want to consider selected writing by Dominican modernist Jean Rhys in the context of her exploration of the sonic dimensions of colonial identities. Her texts exhibit sustained attention to the politics of hearing, or the conditions in which sound is produced, received and silenced. Her interwar novels, in particular, operate as sonic collages, punctured as they are by street criers and performers, memories of French and English Caribbean folksongs, popular song lyrics from music hall and minstrel shows, and the noises that permeate the thin walls of bedsits and hotel rooms. Although they are full of specific musical allusions, these operate in the context of a wider acoustic environment. Sounds are invariably disruptive in Rhys’s texts; they unsettle and puncture the surfaces of the written text and the bodies therein. Because of the plurality of sounds in Rhys’s writing, her writing responds well to the emphasis on auditory cultures which has emerged over the last few decades. As Jonathan Sterne notes, ‘sound studies is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival’.2 Academics and practitioners working in sound studies have demonstrated the extent to which cultural shifts, conflicts and crises are marked as much by the sonic, complementing an ocularcentric view of modernity. With this emphasis on transdisciplinarity and an eclectic approach to the sonic, modernist writing can often be fruitfully understood through a sound studies approach, particularly given the shifts in sound technologies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To illustrate and explore these ideas, I will consider two of Rhys’s texts with Caribbean protagonists: the short story ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ (begun in 1949 and published in the London Magazine in 1962) and Voyage in the Dark (1934). Rhys was familiar with the music of the French Caribbean, particularly Dominican and Martiniquan folksongs, as sung to her by nannies and friends. From an early age, she recognised music’s power as a mode of cultural expression and resistance, but as a white creole she was also at a remove from a straightforward identification with protest song (or carnival music). It was through the aural rather than written cultures of the Caribbean, however, that she reconnected with her homeland while in England. Rhys wrote her own calypsos and in her seventies she was recorded singing French creole songs.3

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Rhys’s acts of cultural translation meant not just telling about the West Indies, as Anna Morgan insists in Voyage in the Dark, but also revoicing the sonic memories that fill her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please.4 As a touring chorus girl, Rhys was familiar with the repertoire of music hall and musical comedy. Her novels are punctuated by lyrics of Edwardian and interwar popular music.5 In multiple drafts of an unpublished essay, ‘Songs My Mother Didn’t Teach Me’, Rhys writes, ‘All my life I have been haunted by popular songs’; ‘sometimes I think I can divide my life into neat sections headed by the songs I loved at the time’.6 Her cultural difference was, of course, aurally rather than visually defined. She could ‘pass’ until she spoke. Anna, in Voyage in the Dark, is criticised for her ‘awful singsong voice’ (p. 56). Rhys received the same response while a student at the Perse School in Cambridge and she left RADA after being told ‘her accent [would] stand very much in her way’.7 Her hyper-consciousness about her voice lasted a lifetime; she would whisper, trying to hide her voice.8 But strangely – despite a substantial body of scholarship – there’s an uncanny silence around the aural dimensions of Rhys’s writing.9 Whereas a significant amount of attention has been paid to the sonic in modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, scholarship has tended to galvanise around modes of vision and the cultures of exhibition and surveillance in Rhys’s writing. This omission is, I think, about both her troubled position as a Caribbean modernist and the lack of annotated or scholarly editions of Rhys’s novels. The plethora of carefully chosen musical references – whether Caribbean or European – map a global and eclectic soundscape that juxtaposes high and popular forms, as well as creating another layer of narrative via lyrics that parallel or run counter to the situation of her protagonists. Sonic allusions, then, create another mode of identification or projection. And while the inclusion of song lyrics need not necessarily indicate musicality or aurality, in Rhys’s novels and stories, such allusions are invariably sung or overheard. Consequently, they are a key way in which Rhys points the reader to embodied experience and the centrality of the performative in her work. Not only do Rhys’s texts bring non-European musical forms to the heart of empire, but they engage with the disruptive properties of sound more generally. ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ is a story about racism and noise disturbance. Noise, conventionally defined as unwanted or unmusical sound, takes us to the subjective and uneven conditions of auditory cultures in that sound can be melodious to one individual, yet noise to another. In 1931, the physicist G. W. C. Kaye defined noise as ‘sound out of place’.10 Rhys’s heroines and the sounds they utter are invariably ‘out of place’, operating outside ‘proper’ national or domestic spaces. Noise exacerbates sound’s propensity to ignore spatial boundaries, as it is often problematic precisely because it intrudes across visual barriers. As Goddard, Halligan and Hegarty write, ‘noise operates on the thresholds of normative social interaction as a potentially disruptive agency’.11 Rhys’s heroines noisily transgress codes of behaviour befitting the Englishwoman: sobriety, chastity and quiet domesticity. If we return now to Rhys’s Dominican heritage we can see her attuned to noise as a mode of resistance to plantation slavery and its legacies. In Smile Please she describes a childhood experience of a riot as a ‘strange’ ‘ugly noise’.12 She was instinctively drawn to, but also fearful of, black Dominican culture; she trained herself aurally to hear

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and understand another’s culture. In particular, she was familiar with the centrality of noise to carnival practices as a way of claiming, repurposing and exceeding space. She often depicts what has come to be called acousmatic sound (cut off from its source), a function of her creole identity. At the close of Voyage in the Dark, for example, Anna remembers hearing the carnival music from inside, behind the jalousies (pp. 156–7). As a creole, she was in a limbo place, neither Afro-Caribbean nor European, and similarly her protagonists are often listening from a distance, not wholly part of the music making or the audience. In ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, mixed race, Caribbean protagonist, Selina Davis, moves to a flat in the ‘respectable’ suburbs of south London.13 Her new living quarters are ‘empty and no noise and full of shadows’ (p. 50). She livens the place up by drinking and singing her grandmother’s Martiniquan folksongs. Her neighbours object, call the police and after a second ‘disturbance’, Selina throws a rock through their stained glass window and is sent to Holloway prison. While in prison, she hears a woman singing a song of defiance, the ‘Holloway Song’. Later, out of prison, a man hears her whistling the song (she has stopped singing), jazzes it up and sells it. He sends her five pounds: her share of the profit. The word ‘noise’ echoes through this tale of sonic disturbance. Belonging and non-belonging are coded acoustically. Selina’s Caribbean songs, both in their content and decibel level, trouble white bourgeois society: ‘he says I make dreadful noise at night and use abominable language, and dance in obscene fashion’ (p. 60). Selina responds in French creole to her neighbour’s taunt: ‘at least the other tarts that crook installed here were white girls’ (p. 57). Sound is embodied or corporeal; it is inextricable from the sight of the black woman. Hierarchies of sound operate throughout the story: the magistrate has a ‘quiet’ voice and the courtroom is full of whispers (p. 60). Selina wants to give her testimony in a ‘decent quiet voice’, but instead: ‘I hear myself talking loud and I see my hands wave in the air [. . .] besides it’s no use, they won’t believe me’ (p. 61). Her utterances are reduced to noise: interference without content. In ways that resonate with Steven Connor’s notion of vocalic space, Selina’s voice becomes disembodied gesture.14 Connor writes of the way in which the voice, in moving from inside to outside, ‘requires and requisitions space’. Just as Selina hears her own voice as a spatial and bodily intrusion, Connor argues that the voice ‘goes out into space, but also always, in its calling for a hearing, or the necessity of being heard, opens a space for itself to go out into, resound in, and return from’.15 The singing she hears emerging from the prison cells is a sorrow song, just as in Good Morning, Midnight Sasha ‘defiantly’ sings ‘One More River to Cross’.16 It is passed on between women, in the same way that Selina sings her grandmother’s songs, including ‘Don’t Trouble Me Now’ about the building of the Panama canal (p. 58). The ‘Holloway Song’ transgresses spatial barriers: it ‘don’t fall down and die in the courtyard; seems to me it could jump the gates of the jail easy and travel far, and nobody could stop it’ (p. 64). Sound without origin, it both confirms the presence of an articulate being as well as seeming to convey the ‘misery’ witnessed by the ‘old dark walls’ themselves (p. 64). When the song is ‘jazzed up’ and commodified, Selina is distraught: ‘that song was all I had. I don’t belong nowhere really [. . .] when that girl sing, she sing to me, and she sing for me [. . .] Now I’ve let them play it wrong, and it will go from me like all the other songs’ (p. 67). The

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song was a place of belonging. ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ is an allegory for colonialism: colonised cultural forms are silenced initially and then co-opted for financial or cultural profit. The story tenses Selina’s silencing and criminalisation against the ‘voicing’ of the text in what Rhys called ‘stylised patois’, which she remembered ‘by ear and memory’.17 The story evokes sound’s capacity to exceed and interrupt (and in doing so to demand attention), as well as to regulate bodies deemed excessive in the context of post-Windrush London. Voyage in the Dark (originally titled ‘Two Tunes’) tells the story of white, Dominican Anna Morgan’s arrival in London, and her work as a chorus girl. While the ‘voyage in’ is meant to make an Englishwoman of her, and erase the ‘taint’ of the Caribbean, here, as in ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, Anna’s noisy evocation of Caribbean songs and carnival music makes impossible any such erasure. The city streets in Voyage in the Dark (as with all Rhys’s interwar novels) are an urban stage populated with street musicians, figures historically criminalised and demonised as a disruptive nuisance. The sounds of street criers open the novel: in Dominica, women selling fishcakes; in London, someone selling bread: ‘Somebody went past in the street, singing. Bawling: “Bread, bread, bread [. . .] It’s the tune that’s so awful; it’s like blows.” But the words went over and over again in my head and I began to breathe in time to them’ (p. 22). Rhys’s heroines are unusual in the way they listen to these street performers. They are ‘of the streets’ themselves, invariably without private homes to be intruded upon. Anna sees and hears the ‘invisible men’ ‘trailing along singing hymns’ (pp. 34–5). Sound is physicalised and the auditory rhythms of the city regulate Anna’s existence. As outsiders, Rhys’s heroines learn to navigate the city aurally as much as visually. Anna Morgan is hyper-alert to sound, constantly decoding and registering not only sounds but tone (pp. 27 and 137). She heightens the normal process of auditory streaming whereby we select, sort and evaluate sounds. In that they are focused around an individual consciousness, Rhys’s novels foreground the processes of subjective sense perception.18 Mary Lou Emery has discussed what she calls Rhys’s ‘plantation modernism’, specifically the way she links scenes of migrant labour – street criers, chorus girls – to the labour of the plantation system.19 This novel brings the histories of plantation slavery to the metropolis as Anna remembers the name of a slave girl, Maillotte Boyd, at the moment when she is about to prostitute herself (p. 48). Rhys insists on the foundational, yet suppressed, role of the slave trade in the formation of Englishness and the material infrastructure of the city. In her aural landscape, too, Rhys assembles a mixture of music relating to slavery and racial identities: minstrel songs, ‘plantation melodies’, French and English Caribbean folksongs and the music of Dominican carnival. Amongst the eclectic range of hymns (‘Abide With Me’, p. 35) and popular arias (‘Softly Awakes My Heart’, p. 64), is a reference to the ragtime piece, ‘Waiting for the Robert E. Lee’, which Anna has heard played by the actor and musician Melville Gideon at Oddenino’s two pages earlier (pp. 101 and 103). The song, composed in 1912, is about a steamship ‘that’s come to carry the cotton away’, and was often performed in blackface. Anna’s friend Laurie sings from the chorus of ‘Moonlight Bay’ (p. 105), another popular example of plantation nostalgia also from 1912. Later they hear a barrel organ playing the very same song (p. 113).

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One morning, Anna wakes up with ‘Camptown Racecourse’ going in her head (p. 130). Then two pages later we read: all that evening I did everything to the tune of Camptown Racecourse. ‘I’se gwine to ride all night, I’se gwine to ride all day . . .’ [. . .] Up in the bedroom I started singing: Oh, I bet my money on the bob-tailed nag, Somebody won on the bay, and he said, ‘It’s “Somebody bet on the bay”.’ I said, ‘I’ll sing it how I like it. Somebody won on the bay.’ He said, ‘Nobody wins. Don’t worry. Nobody wins.’ (p. 132)20 ‘Gwine to Run All Night, or De Camptown Races’ (1850) is one of the most famous minstrel songs of the popular, nineteenth-century, American composer Stephen Foster, written in his rendition of African American dialect.21 Popular in the repertoire of professional and amateur touring minstrel shows and in music hall in Britain well into the twentieth century, Foster’s ‘plantation melodies’ performed and rehearsed racist caricatures of blackness. On one level, Rhys is clearly evoking the aural atmosphere of pre-war London’s nightclubs and restaurants, but also the role of popular song in circulating and trading in racial caricature. Anna’s days and nights are punctuated, regulated and evoked by this soundtrack. She oscillates between audience and performer, just as Rhys unsettles racial categories through an emphasis on racial masquerade. Anna is read as black – she is called ‘the Hottentot’ (p. 12) – but also identifies with, ventriloquises and hence unsettles racial identities. Her inclusion of minstrel songs both underlines Anna’s complicity with slavery given her family’s history, but also her resistance to plantation economics through her own sense of enslavement and dispossession. Anna wants to tell her black servant, Francine, how much she ‘hated being white’ (p. 62). At the close of the novel, as Anna is recovering from an abortion, a surreal dream sequence includes a cacophonous evocation of carnival. She remembers hearing the procession from inside: I was watching them from between the slats of the jalousies – they passed under the window singing [. . .] there were three musicians at the head a man with a concertina and another with a triangle and another with a chak-chak playing There’s A Brown Girl in the Ring [. . .] and others dragging kerosene-tins and beating them with sticks. (p. 156) This is a traditional Dominican carnival band and the accompanying dancers are wearing white masks. Behind the blinds and outside the ‘ring’, Anna is obliquely positioned in relation to the visual and aural ‘noise’ (p.158), but by conjuring the memory she revoices or ventriloquises this articulation of resistance. In the original ending, Rhys has Anna singing all the French Caribbean songs she knows one after another.22 Together with the racial uncertainty around Anna in the novel (p. 56) – an uncertainty that Rhys shared – these sonic allusions work to suggest the ways in which racial identities (white and black) are tested out, resisted and perpetuated through masks, voice and the endurance of popular song. Rhys’s art of noise takes the reader ‘out of place’

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not only geographically, but also out of the verbal surface of the text, given its status as a silent collection of black marks on a white page. She gestures towards the difficulties and approximate nature of representing sound in writing, just as her frequent yet partial inclusion of song lyrics points ‘towards stories that cannot be fully recovered in the main narrative’.23 Rhys’s sonic imagination recognises aurality as inextricable from the spatial or visual, and as central to the experience of urban modernity, particularly in its imperialist manifestations.

Notes 1. Veit Erlmann, Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 4. 2. Jonathan Sterne, ‘Sonic Imaginations’, in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 2. 3. Jean Rhys, Letters: 1931–1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 281; Cynthia Davis, ‘Jamette Carnival and Afro-Caribbean Influences in the Work of Jean Rhys’, in Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination, ed. Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Patricia J. Saunders and Stephen Stuempfle (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2007), pp. 165–86. 4. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 46. All subsequent references are to this edition and referenced in parentheses. 5. Good Morning, Midnight is full of references to and lyrics from popular waltzes, and French Caribbean and English songs. See, for example, ‘Gloomy Sunday’ (Reszö Seress, 1933), ‘For Tonight’ (Charles H. Taylor, 1907), ‘Roses of Picardy’ (Frederick Weatherly, 1916), (Good Morning, Midnight (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 9, 97, 111). 6. Elaine Savory, Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 180. 7. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 49. 8. Ibid., p. 50. 9. A notable exception is Katherine Anderson, ‘Street Music in Jean Rhys’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2009). Savory also notes, in general terms, the importance of music and popular song in Rhys’s work (p. 99). 10. Quoted in Mike Goldsmith, Discord: The Story of Noise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 1. 11. ‘Introduction’, in Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise, ed. Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan and Paul Hegarty (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 1–11 (p. 2). 12. Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 47. 13. Jean Rhys, ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, in Tigers are Better-Looking (London: Andre Deutsch, 1968), pp. 47–67 (p. 57). All subsequent references are from this edition and referenced in parentheses. 14. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 5. 15. Ibid., pp. 5–6. 16. Rhys, Midnight, p. 38. 17. Rhys, Letters, p. 197. 18. For more on modernist narratology and aurality see Melba Cuddy-Keane, ‘Modernist Soundscapes and the Intelligent Ear: An Approach to Narrative through Auditory Perception’, in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 382–98.

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19. Mary Lou Emery, ‘The Poetics of Labour in Jean Rhys’s Caribbean Modernism’, Women: A Cultural Review, 23 (4) (2012): 421–44. 20. Interestingly, most of the musical allusions are misquoted or half remembered as at p. 90 and here ‘Racecourse’ for ‘Races’. 21. See Ken Emerson, Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). See also Emery, p. 439. 22. Jean Rhys, ‘Voyage in the Dark: Part IV (Original Ending)’, in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 381–8 (p. 382). 23. Emery, pp. 433–4.

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53 Music in Contemporary Fiction Christin Hoene

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n his 1910 novel HOWARDS END E. M. Forster writes: ‘It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.’1 In A Passage to India, first published in 1924, Forster depicts his English characters’ experiences of a performance of Indian classical music thus: ‘At times there seemed rhythm, at times there was the illusion of a Western melody. But the ear, baffled repeatedly, soon lost any clue, and wandered in a maze of noises, none harsh or unpleasant, none intelligible.’2 Two things are important here. In the first quote Forster takes for granted the universal validity of Beethoven’s music and its aesthetic effect upon listeners. There are no qualifiers of this aesthetic effect; it is ‘generally [. . .] the most sublime noise [. . .] ever’ (p. 43). For Forster, Western classical music is an omnipresent cultural referent whose aesthetic value is not questioned. In the second quote Forster denies North Indian classical music these exact values of aesthetic expression and experience. Where Beethoven’s – and Brahms’s – music is granted aesthetic sublimity and meaning throughout Howards End, Professor Godbole’s performance of an evening raga in A Passage to India is reduced to a faint resemblance to ‘a Western melody’, which is the standard against which North Indian classical music, also known as Hindustani music, is measured and must invariably fail. Forster’s understanding of Western classical music is deeply rooted in nineteenthcentury aesthetics. More precisely, his aesthetic sensibility echoes the ideal of absolute music, which was first introduced by the nineteenth-century Austrian music critic Eduard Hanslick in his 1854 book Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (The Beautiful in Music). According to Hanslick, music can only be beautiful, if it ‘consists wholly of sounds artistically combined’ and does not refer to any meaning that is external.3 For Hanslick, this entirely self-referential signification of music marks its beauty and elevates it to its status as pure art. Forster agrees, but only for Beethoven and Brahms, not for Professor Godbole. Writing almost a hundred years later, Vikram Seth in his novels A Suitable Boy and An Equal Music equalises this hierarchy by granting North Indian classical music the same aesthetic qualities as Western classical music. Listening to the classical musician Ustad Majeed Khan perform a raga in A Suitable Boy, the protagonist Lata experiences the music on a purely aesthetic level that does not carry any extra-musical meaning, but is significant and meaningful in its own right, something that Forster specifically denies it to be. Ishaq, too, sits ‘still, deep more in trance than in thought’ after having listened to the Ustad perform Raag Todi, while the Ustad forgets his surroundings as

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well as himself while playing.4 Similarly, in An Equal Music, the quartet at the centre of the story experiences the transgressive power of Bach’s The Art of Fugue as music that transcends extra-musical meaning. Seth is not the only contemporary author who writes against centralised Western aesthetics of music. Janice Galloway, Ian McEwan, Amit Chaudhuri and Kirsty Gunn all complicate our commonplace understanding of European art music, and particularly of nineteenth-century German instrumental music, which we still largely judge according to the standards of beauty and taste set out by Hanslick more than 150 years ago. Galloway, in Clara, and McEwan, in Amsterdam, each write against the perceived cultural centrality and aesthetic universality of European art music by undermining the aesthetic ideal of absolute music. Like Seth in A Suitable Boy, Chaudhuri and Gunn, in, respectively, The Immortals and The Big Music, claim this aesthetic ideal of absolute music, which Forster considered exclusively Western, for North Indian classical music and classical Scottish bagpipe music respectively. Hindustani music as a non-Western classical tradition and ceòl mór as a marginalised Western classical tradition thereby claim the same aesthetic status that European art music has hitherto exclusively claimed for itself. This, then, marks an act of decentring Western classical music and its self-perceived universal aesthetic validity.5 Again, A Suitable Boy is a case in point here. Ustad Majeed Khan, who is famous both as a performer and a teacher of Hindustani music, has little hope for the musical future of one of his students, a young boy trained in Western classical music. While the Ustad acknowledges that it is ‘a good tradition in its own way’, he concludes that ‘[t]he voice vibrates in the wrong kind of way’.6 This implies that there is a ‘right kind of way’, and for the Ustad it is Hindustani music. As with Forster, one classical tradition becomes the standard against which every other tradition is measured and against which it must, invariably, fail; only with Seth, the hierarchy is reversed. This time round, it is North Indian classical music that others Western classical music.7 There are two different registers of absolute music that are at work throughout the novels and throughout this essay. The first one refers to a very specific nineteenth-century aesthetic ideal of purely instrumental classical Western art music. Carl Dahlhaus describes this music aesthetics in detail in Die Idee der Absoluten Musik, published in 1978 and first translated into English in 1989 as The Idea of Absolute Music. According to Dahlhaus, who in turn refers to Hanslick’s The Beautiful in Music, the aesthetic position of absolute music is marked by a ‘conviction that instrumental music purely and clearly expresses the true nature of music by its very lack of concept, object and purpose’.8 Music does not refer to any ‘“extramusical” functions or programs’ (p. 2); instead, it is considered to be abstract, non-representational and autonomous. Musical meaning is understood to be self-contained in its structure and in the development of musical material over time. And this, Hanslick writes, is where the beautiful in music lies: We must now [. . .] endeavor to determine the nature of the beautiful in music. Its nature is specifically musical. By this we mean that the beautiful is not contingent upon nor in need of any subject introduced from without, but that it consists wholly of sounds artistically combined. (p. 47)

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According to Hanslick, music should always signify only itself, which, if achieved, renders a musical piece an object of pure art and intrinsic value: ‘a musical idea reproduced in its entirety is not only an object of intrinsic beauty but also an end in itself, and not a means for representing feelings and thoughts’ (p. 49). The transcendence of meaning is thus perceived to be a value in its own right. And this leads us to the second register of absolute music, which is its implicit superior aesthetic status as compared to other kinds of music. Absolute music, according to Hanslick, is always absolutely beautiful, and exclusively so. Only one particular kind of music can be absolute and thereby deserves to be called beautiful. Any other musical tradition must, then, be less beautiful. Therefore, every musical tradition that claims to be absolute by definition creates its others, because it can only be absolute if there is music that is considered less than absolute. In Clara the musical other to symphonic instrumental music of the nineteenth century is primarily programme music; in Amsterdam, that same musical self is othered by modern classical music of the early twentieth century. Chaudhuri, like Seth in other parts of A Suitable Boy, references the folk-music tradition of Rabindranath Tagore to emphasise the aesthetic singularity of Hindustani music. And Gunn’s novel already in its title sets up the dichotomy between the art music tradition of ceòl mór, which translates into English as ‘the big music’, and ceòl beag, which translates as ‘little’ or ‘light music’ and describes Scottish folk traditions such as dances, reels and marches. The musical traditions that are thus presented in the novels as musical others are implicitly deemed to be less valid in terms of aesthetic value, because a particular conception of the aesthetic, hence of aesthetic value, is in operation. They are presented as traditions that are merely good ‘in their own way’ but that cannot attain to the same ideal of absolute music that characterises their respective high art counterparts. At the same time, however, Clara and Amsterdam variously question and undermine the premises of absolute music as an aesthetic ideal, and in particular its claim towards timeless and universal beauty. In The Idea of Absolute Music Dahlhaus acknowledges that this aesthetic discourse refers to music that is firmly contextualised historically as well as locally, and that the discourse itself is subject to that same historicity and locality. At the same time, however, the aesthetic dominance of absolute music is today by and large taken for granted in Western culture and it is immediately recognisable. Writing in the second half of the twentieth century, Dahlhaus concedes this when he writes that, ‘it would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that the concept of absolute music was the leading idea of the Classical and Romantic era in music aesthetics’, and that despite its geographical restrictions, ‘it would be premature at the very least to call it a provincialism, given the esthetic significance of autonomous instrumental music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (p. 3). In Clara and Amsterdam, we see the ideal of Western classical music as absolute music at work throughout the texts. Towards the end of Galloway’s novel, Clara listens to her husband Robert Schumann and their friend Johannes Brahms and observes: And every night, late into the night, there was talking, a great deal of talking: the function of programme, the general foolishness of those who imagined Beethoven listening to birdsong as he wrote his Pastoral Symphony, the limitations of

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Liszt and the New School (ha!) who declared the symphony itself dead and gone. The sonata as a form was perfected, he said, his expression fiery: the world needs no more.9 In this scene the othering required by the discourse of absolute music is clearly at play. Programme music is as disregarded as are associations with nature when listening to Beethoven. Only the symphony, that epitome of classical instrumental music, is worthwhile and worthy to Schumann and Brahms, who themselves have by now become personifications of the very classical tradition they admire. We see this othering elsewhere in Galloway’s novel, too: The Davidsbund [a fictional music society created by Schumann], then, opposed bad music, showy music, music that was not music, competitions of virtuosity [. . .] and all else that was mere entertainment, tinsel, glitter, show. They battled for a public liberated from meretriciousness; their politics would be composed entirely of aesthetics. (p. 110) This call to aesthetic purity echoes Hanslick and consolidates music’s claim to absoluteness. And within the context of the novel, Robert rises to that call. Of the pieces that he sends Clara during their courtship, her thoughts and reactions to one of them are thus: ‘it was music anyone would call mystical, strange. The thick chord clusters, suspensions pedaled over shimmers of running semiquavers, gave it something of the timeless’ (p. 170). Here we find repercussions of the self-referencing of music that endows it with a quality that is ‘mystical, strange’ and ‘timeless’. Clara goes on: And this perfect melody, its handfuls of spread chords! It made her run hot and cold at once to play it, even to see it on the page. Its demands were fierce, but its result was sublime. This was virtuosity with a purpose, virtuosity as unlike the runof-concert kind as one could imagine. Exactly as he had said. The art in Art is to spiritualise matter. (p. 171) Again, virtuosity is valued for the sake of virtuosity rather than for being ‘showy’, and we encounter a spiritual dimension of aesthetic meaning and purpose that is eminently metaphysical. Also, as with Forster, Galloway evokes sublimity as a marker for aesthetic quality and perfection. Yet, the novel concretely localises and historicises the music that is supposed to be absolute, universal and, in Clara’s own words, ‘timeless’. On this point, Stephen Benson writes in Literary Music: ‘The alleged autonomy of such canonical sounds is thereby reduced, in the interests of a critique, not of the music, but of its reception and cultural positioning, part of a refusal to see such music in splendid isolation from its place of work.’10 As mentioned above, Dahlhaus seems to allow for this ‘cultural positioning’, but he closes that argument stating that ‘it would be premature at the very least to call it a provincialism’ (p. 3). However, this provincialism is crucial for the fictionalised Clara and Robert Schumann, precisely because it is intimately tied with the production, both composition and performance, of their music. Leipzig and Dresden, two of the places that are most important in their lives, each have their own

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specific musical character and history. Leipzig, the place of Clara’s childhood, is from the beginning of the novel marked as a place of sound, where she hears her father playing the piano and her mother singing: ‘Listen! You can hear it plain. Someone is playing exercises’ (p. 12); and: ‘Her mother’s voice. There’s no one else’s it could have been’ (p. 13). These sounds mark her early childhood memories: ‘Sound. That memory is made of sound before it’s made of anything else, she has no doubt. That it is not as ephemeral as it appears she has no doubt either [. . .] A fragment of music somehow remains’ (p. 13). Markedly, her first memory of Dresden is visual, not aural: ‘Memories of first things are strong with some. That first week in Dresden, for example: Clara recalls it with tangible clarity her life long, enough to teach her a lesson she never forgets, viz looks aren’t everything: they’re seldom anything at all’ (p. 66). The ‘stubbornly antique’ people make her feel ‘uncomfortable’, Dresden itself ‘made her feel lost’ (p. 66). Leipzig, on the other hand, ‘was home’ (p. 66). To a person raised with music and in a world of sound, home is remembered primarily for its soundscape.11 The act of listening itself becomes the foundation for memory. Seeing, on the other hand, distances her from the world and from the people; or rather, it distances world and people from her.12 Place and music, and sound more broadly, are thus intimately linked throughout the novel, which effectively undermines the universalising discourse of absolute music. The situation is different in Ian McEwan’s novel Amsterdam, although the result of decentring the aesthetic ideal of absolute music is the same. On the surface level, the novel presents us with an understanding of absolute music that has not only traversed space, but also time, and is hence very much in line with Dahlhaus’s definition. Set in England (and Amsterdam) at the end of the twentieth century, the plot of the novel revolves around two central characters, one of whom is Clive Linley, a fictional composer. Linley is in the process of finishing what is supposed to become his masterpiece, a commissioned symphony that is to celebrate and mourn the twentieth century at the turn of the millennium: ‘the lamented century’s ode to joy’.13 This is not the only reference to Beethoven in the novel. As with Forster, Beethoven is McEwan’s cornerstone for the aesthetics of absolute music, and Clive is Beethoven’s self-proclaimed musical heir (p. 113). Clive firmly situates his own music within the aesthetics of the absolute when he declares the following: it was time to recognize the primacy of rhythm and pitch and the elemental nature of melody. For this to happen without merely repeating the music of the past, we had to evolve a contemporary definition of beauty, and this in turn was not possible without grasping a ‘fundamental truth’. (pp. 22–3) According to the logic of absolute music, this ‘fundamental truth’ is to be found within the music itself, which, with Hanslick and Dahlhaus, must be abstract as well as meaningful. And Clive acknowledges this: ‘to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this non-language whose meanings were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalizingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused’ (p. 159). But Clive fails in his endeavour to ‘evolve a contemporary definition of beauty’ and grasp ‘a fundamental truth’. His composition is rejected, because the orchestra refuses to play a piece that turns out to be a ‘shameless copy of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, give or take a note or two’ (p. 176). In his attempt to recreate absolute

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music for his time, Clive is merely ‘repeating the music of the past’ (p. 22). In the context of the novel, absolute music is thus not timeless. Instead, the aesthetic discourse of absolute music itself is shown to be culturally located, which undermines its claim to universal validity and cultural transcendence. According to Stephen Benson, it is no surprise that contemporary authors who write about classical music would refer to the discourse of absolute music, which Benson, with reference to Peter Kivy, refers to as ‘music alone’: As is so often the case, public, non-specialist, even commonsensical ideas about culture are often doggedly traditional in their affiliation to nineteenth-century aesthetics. It should thus come as no surprise to find evidence of the discourse of music alone in contemporary fiction, particularly in those novels concerned in one way or another with European art music of the nineteenth century. (p. 106) What has come as a surprise, however, is that the same aesthetic principles that govern the concept of absolute music are also present in contemporary novels that are concerned with other musical traditions than European art music of the nineteenth century. And this brings us to the second way in which contemporary fiction decentres Western aesthetics: by reclaiming aesthetic value previously denied (again, see Forster above), and thus showing that the ‘fundamental truth’ Clive strives and fails to achieve in his music is not exclusive to that European ‘humanistic tradition’ he aims to reassert. In The Immortals, Amit Chaudhuri describes Hindustani music variously as ‘sublime’, ‘spontaneous and transporting’, and as creating ‘not only a single vibration, but a world. It was a world without time, and Nirmalya was alone in it’.14 This is the same sublimity Forster assigns to Beethoven and the same timelessness that Clara hears in Robert’s music. The novel describes Indian classical music as simultaneously strange and familiar: He stirred with recognition at the unmistakable ones, the ones with infallible preambles, Jaijaiwanti and Des; then, ragas like Puriya Dhanashree, with their seemingly antique inaccessibility – his ear began to domesticate them too; they remained mysterious, but became part of his life in the evening. (p. 100) Also, classical music is described in opposition to ostensibly low art traditions such as ghazals (love songs) and bhajans (devotional tunes), a move which conforms to the othering by absolute music discussed above. The interrelation of high versus low art is played out in the novel as repeated confrontations between the music teacher Shyam and Nirmalya, one of his students and the only one who wants to be taught in the tradition of shastriya sangeet, which Chaudhuri uses synonymously with North Indian classical music. Nirmalya asks Shyam why he does not concentrate on singing classical music, but instead sells out his talents to lesser art forms such ghazals: ‘“These ghazals are – cheap,” [. . .] “And look at the way they sing bhajans these days! Bhajans used to be sung in the temple”’ (p. 106). The novel does not resolve this conflict. For Nirmalya, classical music requires absolute devotion that must not be deterred by other, in his eyes lesser, art forms, or, indeed, by the need to make a living:

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‘Nirmalya had never known want; and so he couldn’t understand those who said, or implied, they couldn’t do without what they already had’ (p. 192). And even though Shyam reminds him that, ‘“[y]ou can’t sing classical on an empty stomach”’ (p. 192), Nirmalya remains ‘disappointed by Shyamji’s pursuit of the “light” forms, his pursuit of material well-being. An artist must devote himself to the highest expressions of his art and reject success’ (p. 191). The son of a successful businessman, Nirmalya can afford to be ignorant of the strong class divisions that have governed the production and performance of Indian classical music before and after independence – albeit under different political structures and professional circumstances for musicians.15 In his blissful ignorance of material needs, Nirmalya can afford to cling to an aesthetics of music that idealises the autonomy of art; the idea, with reference to William Butler Yeats, of ‘an art without an author’ (p. 196): Nirmalya thought he grasped now what ‘self-born’ meant – it referred to those immemorial residues of culture that couldn’t be explained or circumscribed by authorship. It was as if they’d come from nowhere, as life and the planets had; and yet they were separate from Nature. Dimly, he saw that, though the raga was a human creation, it was, paradoxically, ‘self-born’. (p. 197) This, too, is reminiscent of the concept of absolute music, for neither Hanslick nor Dahlhaus are very much concerned with the composer as the artist figure of creation. Absolute music is much more an aesthetic of perception than composition, and it proffers the ideal of an art autonomous of the context of its production. Yet, Chaudhuri also admits to a specific locality that characterises Hindustani music: ‘being a Hindustani classical musician, Shyamji’s art was intimately connected to these seasons, this light, an intimacy that Nirmalya had not too long ago discovered for himself’ (p. 238). Conversely, singing Indian classical music in England feels completely wrong to Nirmalya: ‘Outside his window, the sun was waning; a very different sun from the one he was used to. What sense, he asked himself, does it make to sing Asavari here?’ (p. 363). As we saw in Clara and Amsterdam, The Immortals variously complicates any absolute aesthetics. And maybe this is a service that literature can perform for music: to call out the fallacies of a musical discourse that claims, with Clive, a ‘fundamental truth’ while being culturally located. We see this same cultural locality of classical music in Kirsty Gunn’s The Big Music, a novel primarily concerned with the Scottish art music tradition of piobaireachd, synonymously used by Gunn with the term ceòl mór and defined by the author in the glossary that accompanies the novel as ‘the classical musical composition played on the great Highland bagpipe’.16 Where raga is intrinsically connected to North India as its place of cultural production and reception, piobaireachd is the music of the Scottish Highlands. As Gunn describes it in the definition of piobaireachd that precedes both novel and foreword, piobaireachd is music ‘written to be played outside’ (p. xi). A piobaireachd has four movements, the first of which is called the Urlar – or Ground – that presents the opening theme. The subsequent movements are variations on that theme that ‘extend the Urlar’s opening ideas while demonstrating both the dexterity of the piper and the composer’s ambitions’ (p. xi). The last movement usually ends with a repetition of the first notes of the Urlar, a return to the piobaireachd’s central theme or

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ground. The text plays on this double-meaning of Urlar, a word that signifies both the main theme as the musical – and narrative – ground and the land itself as the ground from which the piobaireachd originates and on which it is, ideally, to be played: ‘So the tune will stay and you can’t change it, the ground laid out for the deer to come down’ (p. 5), and, ‘it’s a tune for her, is what it is. The smallest, gentlest song against the ground, against the broad and mindless hills’ (p. 5). The land and the music are intrinsically linked throughout the novel, as are the family home in the Highlands and the musical tradition of teaching and performing piobaireachd throughout six generations of Sutherland men: The music of course played its large part here. Giving life and a colour, a sense of the past and its traditions to the present way of doing things, making occupations that were otherwise quite simple – some may say menial and poor – to have dignity in their own right, laid down as they could be upon a grand ground. (p. 92) When Callum, the grown-up son, returns home from London to spend his father’s last days with him, he feels that his return was as inevitable as the eventual return of the tune, which also must return to its ground, because: ‘The beginning of all music is here’ (p. 129). Yet, despite this strong locality of the music, Gunn describes its characteristics in terms that are, yet again, reminiscent of the aesthetics of absolute music: ‘Everything about the music of piobaireachd indicates a turning back to its origin – from the structure of the music and its return over and over to the ideas of its Urlar or first theme’ (p. 214). Here, again, is that idea that music is self-reflexive and that its meaning is contained within the formal structure of the tune, which clearly echoes Hanslick. Moreover, Gunn quotes Douglas MacDonald of Strathglass, who wrote a ‘General Account’ of piobaireachd, and who qualifies the music further: Piobaireachd is not the music of the pipe band (a nineteenth-century invention) nor is it the strathspeys and reels that folk dance to. These are known to pipers as ceòl beag or little music. Piobaireachd (a Gaelic word literally meaning the playing of pipes) is called ceòl mór, ‘the great music’ of the pipe that serious pipers revere as the height of their art. (p. 215) In the same way that instrumental music others programme music and Hindustani music others ghazals and bhajans, the ‘great music’, ceòl mór, others the ‘little music’, ceòl beag. Thus, all high art traditions examined in the novels discussed here lay claim to a state of absoluteness, which at the same time undermines each individual claim to one ‘fundamental truth’. In other words, to see that the aesthetic principle of absolute music is valid across cultures is to understand that this disrupts claims of universal truth and beauty that are caught up in judgements about aesthetic value. There is nothing intrinsic to one kind of music that renders it more beautiful than another. The second register of absolute music, where ‘absolute’ denotes one music’s claim to be valorised over another, can thus be deconstructed. Forster, in effect, can be proven wrong.

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Notes 1. E. M. Forster, Howards End, ed. Paul B. Armstrong, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 43. For a much more detailed account of music in Forster’s writing, see Michelle Fillion, Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E. M. Forster (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 2. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 72. 3. Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, The Library of Liberal Arts, 1957), p. 47. All further page references to this work are to the edition cited and will be provided within the text. 4. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy, 2nd edn (London: Phoenix, 1994), pp. 320, 319. 5. This shift in contemporary fiction away from the absolute claims of Western classical music coincides with a shift in musicology, the cultural turn in the discipline, which is referred to as cultural musicology or new musicology. It gained momentum in the 1980s and analyses music within the socio-political context of its cultural production. See, in particular, the works of Lawrence Kramer, such as Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 6. Seth, p. 316. 7. For a detailed discussion about the role of music and the aesthetics of absolute music in Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, see Stephen Benson, Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 117–29. Also, for a detailed account of the role of music in A Suitable Boy, see the first chapter of my book, Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature (New York and Abington: Routledge, 2015), pp. 15–50. 8. Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 7. All further page references to this work are to the edition cited and will be provided within the text. 9. Janice Galloway, Clara, 2nd edn (London: Vintage, 2003), pp. 368–9. All further references to this work are to the edition cited and will be provided within the text. All italics in this essay are in the original. 10. Stephen Benson, Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), p. 113. All further page references to this work are to the edition cited and will be provided within the text. 11. I borrow the term ‘soundscape’ from R. Murray Schafer’s study The Tuning of the World (republished as The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1994)). For more detailed discussion of soundscapes in literature, see, for example, Brigitte Cazelles’s Soundscape in Early French Literature (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Texts Studies in collaboration with Brepols, 2005) as well as John M. Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 12. For a more detailed debate on seeing versus listening, which is anthropological as well as philosophical, see, amongst others, David Hendy in Noise: A Human History of Sound & Listening (London: Profile, 2013); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in his chapter ‘The Echo of the Subject’, from Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 139–207; Jean-Luc Nancy, in Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); Tim Ingold in The Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000), who is profoundly suspicious of the idea that one form of sensory experience is ‘better’ than, or at least is valorised over, another. 13. Ian McEwan, Amsterdam (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), p. 87. All further page references to this work are to the edition cited and will be provided within the text.

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14. Amit Chaudhuri, The Immortals (London: Picador, 2009), pp. 100, 101, 389. All further page references to this work are to the edition cited and will be provided within the text. 15. For more information on the social and political circumstances of musical production in India before and after independence, see Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, ‘Confronting the Social: Mode of Production and the Sublime for (Indian) Art Music’, Ethnomusicology, 44 (1) (2000), 15–38; Qureshi, ‘Mode of Production and Musical Production: Is Hindustani Music Feudal?’, in Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics, ed. Regula Burckhardt Qureshi (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 81–105. 16. Kirsty Gunn, The Big Music, 2nd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), p. 446. All further page references to this work are to the edition cited and will be provided within the text.

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M U S I C , P O E T RY A N D S O N G

54 Modernist Poetry and Music: Pound Notes Adrian Paterson

Making it New ‘

P

oetry is a composition of words set to music,’ insisted Ezra Pound. ‘Most other definitions of it are indefensible, or metaphysical.’1 If Marjorie Perloff is right that ‘Pound’s poetic has become synonymous with modernism itself’, such definitions deserve more scrutiny.2 Pound’s own demand ‘Make it new’ has been widely broadcast: less widely appreciated even now is how much making it new demanded music.3 Making modernism in Pound’s image was less about an eyeful of imagism than has been generally acknowledged. Making it new meant remaking the relationship between poetry and music; indeed entirely recasting the relationships between all arts. Such things had happened before, but never had the arts so consciously, concertedly, conspicuously affected each other. A warm glow became white heat in the late nineteenth-century smithy: renegotiation became revolution. As perhaps never before music fanned the flames. So a book of art history, Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, claimed in incendiary italics that ‘all art constantly aspires to the condition of music’.4 Pater’s continuous present made an age’s characteristic preoccupation forever true: all time was now, and his renaissance edict functioned as future imperative to coming artists. Though seriously meant it was not clear what condition, or precisely what music, Pater had in mind. It was an idea, a dream, and, characteristically for the period, the tone pointed to the aspiration’s necessary failure. But just such imperatives drove artists beyond metaphor into full-blooded artistic exchange. So the painter Wassily Kandinsky, flushed with the effects of an impassioned correspondence with the composer Arnold Schoenberg, asserted: ‘there has never been a time when the arts approached each other more nearly than they do today’, and composed Klänge, a noisy book of poems and woodcuts, as if to prove it.5 Purists were not always happy. ‘We are experiencing a strange, impotent, abnormal tendency to mix the arts one with another,’ complained the composer Carl Nielsen.6 But nineteenth-century promises had been made flesh: the arts no longer aspired, but conspired together to make it new.7 If modernism made it new, it did so by reanimating the old. Even in its most Darwinian mode, the nineteenth was a backward-looking century: how else are we to explain Walter Scott, architectural Gothic, the Pre-Raphaelites. Yet modernism turned to the past with new intensity. The birth of archaeology, a new conception of history,

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a Paterian renaissance alongside a Nietzschean revaluation of all values; all encouraged a break with the immediate past and thrust the long dead back in mind again. With the arts retrospective as never before, music, arguably the nineteenth century’s most renewed and vibrant artistic expression, was ahead of the game. Maybe this was because, as Igor Stravinsky argued (echoing Henri Bergson), music is given to us ‘for the co-ordination of man and time’; maybe because every performance already makes it new (Stravinsky again: ‘music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present’).8 If reanimating the old was the condition of making it new, music was perfectly placed. Actual music now had an effect where once ideas of music held sway. The power of recent music demanded attention, if only in reaction. As for poetry, a generalised notion that it had something to do with music was older than the hills. Yet ballad singing and the twanging of aeolian harps had declined into Tennyson’s sonic nostalgia. When Ezra Pound insisted ‘poets who will not study music are defective’ and ‘poetry is a composition of words set to music’, we hear a new spirit and a new actuality.9 Or an old one: he was paraphrasing Dante, who used the term ‘canzone’. ‘I don’t know any better point to start from,’ Pound confessed.10 So actual music and poetry made acquaintance, collaborated, consummated, fought, regrouped, recommitted, the battle-ready Pound at the forefront. Other modern poets (Hardy, Joyce, Gurney, Auden, Zukofsky, Bishop) may have been more naturally musical (recalling Pound’s piano playing and singing William Carlos Williams was an early sceptic), but no poet since Campion has gotten so physically intimate with music. Pound’s ideas crystallised early, as we shall see; their resonance was lasting, and not only on his own work. His energy generated a swirling vortex for all that conspired to happen around him.

Synaesthetic to Synthetic Music The fin de siècle’s characteristic illness had been synaesthesia. As if injecting order into Shelley’s deliquescent descriptions of music, Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondences’ and Rimbaud’s ‘Voyelles’ (whose magical vowels ‘A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu’ supposed universal relationships of colour and sound) proposed sense-confusion as a fundamental artistic principle.11 So Francophile critic Arthur Symons found himself in poetry ‘gradually trying to paint, or set to music, to paint in music, perhaps, those sensations which London awaked in [him]’.12 The infection was Wagnerian, poetry conducting a compression of Gesamtkunstwerk at the level of the single image. Notwithstanding their local rationale, Symons’s lines from ‘The Opium Smoker’ – ‘Soft music like a perfume, and sweet light | Golden with audible odours exquisite’ – typified a deliberately cultivated malady pursued on foggy riverbanks after Whistler’s Nocturnes.13 Despite precocious musical sensitivity, actual music inclined to disappear. Symons’s descriptions of French poetry in The Symbolist Movement in Poetry (1899) nonetheless affected a generation of English language poets. Coming ‘as an introduction to wholly new feelings, a revelation’, T. S. Eliot recalled, ‘the Symons book is one of those which have affected the course of my life’.14 Its dedicatee, W. B. Yeats, pictured in George Moore’s novel Evelyn Innes (1898) as Ulick Dean, Wagnerian composer of chromatic tone-poems, used words as elemental motifs thereby conjuring in ‘little and intense poems’ a mystic symbolic language that aspired to the condition of music.15 No wonder: Symons’s book described poetry as a continuation of music by other means. Chief examples were Verlaine, who sought to write poems like songs ‘de la musique avant tout chose’, and Mallarmé, who went further than

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Wagner, demanding not just unity with music, but parity. Of his L’après-midi d’un faune, whose search for the fundamental note ‘A’ was itself sensually reworked by Debussy’s astonishing Prélude, Mallarmé told Paul Valéry ‘such a poem is suggested by music proper, which we must raid and paraphrase, if our own music is insufficient’.16 Raids on music’s technical resources transformed modern poetry, absorbing numerology, notation, even polyphony, and exploding its ordered spatial disposition: the shapes of birdwings and constellations formed by the disposition of words and typefaces in Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés also constituted ‘une partition’, a score, performed by the reader, silently. Into this silent revolution pitched Ezra Pound. His first substantial book of poems, A Lume Spento (1908), claimed as centrepiece ‘Scriptor Ignotus’, dedicated to Skryabin pianist Katherine Ruth Heyman. This poem’s confident sprawl promises to derive an epic from the ‘old world melodies’ her playing drew ‘from out the shadows of the past’, inspiring the poet to ‘A new thing | As hath not heretofore been writ’.17 Bad poetry maybe, but a decent manifesto, sounding an oddly proleptic echo of the Cantos, old music and language combining in conscious anachronism to make it new. Such pianistic evocations can be contrasted with D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Piano’. Although ‘Piano’ loses its drafts’ suggestion of an identifiable music – baring her bosom and soul, ‘A woman is singing me a wild Hungarian air’ – in revision music is the more convincingly made an occasion for memory. So ‘the great black piano appassionato’ pales beside the ‘glamour | Of childish days’, drowned by a ‘flood of remembrance’ of a mother singing parlour hymns, the speaker becoming again ‘a child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings’.18 A fine elegy to Victorian domestic music-making, the poem’s knack of making a recalled event seem present in ‘quivering momentaneity’, would be prized above ‘perfection’ in Lawrence’s manifesto ‘Poetry of the Present’, which thus reads like Henri Bergson on perceptions of music and duration.19 Bergson, who for a time fascinated T. S. Eliot, described our ever-changing consciousness as if it moved like a Wagnerian melody: ‘sensations will add themselves dynamically to one another and will organize themselves, like the successive notes of a tune’.20 Together with Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom music animated the body in creative tension, the philosophy underpinning modern literature was highly musically sensitised. By contrast with Lawrence, Pound’s early efforts to saturate poetry with music sound strained. Even if ‘viol strings that outsing kings’ does really ‘reproduce exactly the silver resonance of the viol string under the bow’,21 the music of ‘Anima Sola’, ‘Fly[ing] on the wings of an unknown chord | That ye hear not’, ends bathetically in unprepared musical terminology: ‘My chord is unresolved by your counter-harmonies.’22 Music remained technical, described not experienced: the one thing we are sure of is that we cannot hear it. We could not hear the symbolists’ music either, but unlike their subtleties these poems are rarely tethered to delicate moments of musical or temporal perception, nor yet to a form with anything musical about it. Privately printed in Venice, A Lume Spento affected not to care, making a virtue of necessity by extravagantly disclaiming any audience.

Early Music All the same live audiences would be central to poetry’s musical renaissance. Arriving in London Pound found himself at the hearth of Yeats’s old flame Olivia Shakespear, whose daughter Dorothy he would marry. Hers was a household that encouraged

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performance: she was, recalled Basil Bunting, ‘getting people to sing Elizabethan music when her influence on young poets was at its greatest’.23 Himself with ‘the organ of a tree toad’,24 Pound ‘read a short piece of Yeats, in a voice dropping with emotion, in a voice like Yeats’s own’.25 He also produced a poem evincing a dim awareness that people actually listen to music. This remnant of an earlier age’s synaesthesia, ‘Nel Biancheggiar’, might have been plucked from a nineties anthology except vocabulary and situation are so consciously anachronistic: Blue-grey, and white, and white-of-rose, The flowers of the West’s fore-dawn unclose. I feel the dusky softness whirr of color, as upon a dulcimer “Her” dreaming fingers lay between the tunes, As when the living music swoons But dies not quite, because for love of us – knowing our state How that ’tis troublous – It wills not die to leave us desolate.26 Gazing west not on nightfall but dawn’s pale hues, the persona synaesthetically perceives a living music, played as upon a dulcimer, that wills not to die. Pianos were on the wane: the old was new. In nebulous symbolist terms this represented Pound’s notice of the burgeoning early music revival. Early music had been making waves in London since the arrival of the revival’s Swiss avatar Arnold Dolmetsch. He too was depicted in Moore’s novel Evelyn Innes, as the kindly but exacting Mr Innes, who favours music conceived horizontally not vertically, shunning Wagnerian enharmonics by demanding natural tuning, attention to cadence and original notation. Dolmetsch himself, pioneering instrument maker, editor and performer, formed a domestic grouping of early instrumentalists and dancers to topple the turgid British musical scene of Albert Halls and three-choir festivals. The effect on Pound was revelatory: ‘William Atheling’, Pound’s alter-ego music reviewer, campaigned throughout the 1910s against ‘programme music and impressionist music’ in favour of early music’s ‘vortex of pattern’.27 Pound’s early draft ‘Three Cantos’ promised ‘Dolmetsch will build our age in witching music’,28 and Pound kept until his death a wedding present from Yeats, a Dolmetsch-made clavichord. As a side-effect early music transformed modern poetry. The ground had been laid by editions of Campion and Dowland’s lyrics by Yeats’s publisher A. H. Bullen: an early modern revival that allowed T. S. Eliot to be as familiar with Donne as with Browning. That James Joyce’s first publication was called Chamber Music (1907) tells us more about the times than the lasting nature of the verses, a combination of music and puns that strangely anticipated Finnegans Wake. Pitched somewhere between Verlaine, Yeats and Campion, the double-manual harpsichord on the title page told of Elizabethan experiments on airs, viols and grounds that provoked Joyce to ask Dolmetsch (unsuccessfully) to make him a lute for a singing tour. Published like Pound’s early verse by Elkin Mathews, the volume was sponsored by Arthur Symons, an early convert to Dolmetsch’s methods, and inspired by Yeats, who had conducted lecture-tours and concerts with the actress Florence Farr performing poetry to the

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lyre-like metal-strung ‘psaltery’, made by Dolmetsch as if from a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Voice Claiming Greek and Renaissance precedent, this ‘new art’, which produced Farr’s Mathews-issued tract The Music of Speech (1909) but few converts, had for a time persuaded Yeats to ‘never open a book again’.29 The idea was musical performance which respected poetry’s rhythm: so alongside unobtrusively plucked musical notes, speaking, singing and a hybrid chanting were all employed. Pound too spent the summer of 1909 ‘working at Psaltery settings’ with Farr.30 Although Pound ‘can’t sing as he has no voice [. . .] it is like something on a very bad phonograph’, Yeats was impressed by this ‘authority on the troubadours’ as helping to produce ‘more definitely music with strongly marked time and yet it is effective speech’.31 That same summer Pound was composing chapters for The Spirit of Romance which began to deal seriously with the troubadours’ magical combinations of ‘motz el son’ (‘words and sound’). How Pound saw himself on arrival in London can be gleaned from a note in the Evening Standard so discerning it seems impossible he didn’t write it himself: ‘coming after the trite and decorous verse of most of our decorous poets, this poet seems like a minstrel of Provence at a Suburban musical evening’.32 Correspondingly the most successful of Pound’s early poems were put into the mouths of poets and singers, mostly Provençal troubadours. So in ‘Cino’, a jongleur ‘Cino of the luth’ vows to ‘sing of the sun’. In ‘La Fraisne’, the ash tree, a troubadour stammers through a Yeatsian-inflected madness, with a note ‘low, slowly he speaketh it’.33 Voice thus set the tone: adopting the sirvente tradition he felt possessed more bite than the nineties’ placid hums, Pound’s ‘Sestina: Altaforte’, written for the mouth of troubadour Bertran de Born, cried ‘Let’s to music,’ and indeed the verse pivots around the word music, returning in exultation to the Yeatsian envoy ‘[a]nd let the music of the swords make them crimson!’.34 When Pound read this ‘bloody sestina’ aloud at the Tour Eiffel restaurant, his rhythmic emphasis extended to ‘blood curdling’ snarls and whoops. It was Florence Farr who brought him: here for the first time Pound found a real live audience, a group of poets and thinkers gathered around T. E. Hulme, who with H. D. would form the nucleus of the imagists. This lesson in speaking Pound never forgot. Reading aloud he thereafter recommended in musical terms: ‘[I]f young men funk that sort of thing,’ he thundered, ‘I don’t see what resonance they can expect; it is string without sounding board.’35 Dorothy Shakespear was right: the cadences of Yeats’s voice survive in Pound’s own. Recordings of ‘The Seafarer’ preserve his musical urge in rumbling kettle drums. Such experiments with words spoken to music were not as mad as they seemed. The Sprechgesang of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) went beyond conventional intonation by borrowing the slides and inexact pitches of exaggerated speech; Janáček was to derive his operas from notating the rise and fall of Czech speech patterns. Edith Sitwell’s Façade (with William Walton’s jazzy modernist stylings) made use of curtains and megaphones to fit the swirling sound of chanted words to music. Compiled amid the sounds of radio broadcasts and ballad Broadsides, Yeats’s much-maligned Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) was confessedly a broadside pitched from an aural poetic canon aimed at poetry written for the eye. Tellingly it begins modern poetry

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with a versified passage from The Renaissance, Mona Lisa listening to history as ‘the sound of lyres and flutes’.36 W. H. Auden’s Oxford Book of Light Verse was conceived as a corrective to Yeats’s solemnly-intoned aim: still, light verse required ‘intimacy with an audience’, which often meant a real audience for spoken and sung poetry.37 Before an audience poetry and music, briefly, were reconciled. Like Wagner, Pound came to believe a post-medieval fission of the two arts harmed both. He also realised that simply talking about music didn’t make a poem musical. ‘Effects of Music upon a Company of People’ satirised Schumann concert audiences and his own earlier diffuseness just as the Chopin pretensions and ‘attenuated tones of violins’ in Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ sounded whiny death-knells for aestheticism.38 Pound’s songs became canzoni, featuring intricate interlaced verbal patterns: quasimusical forms like ‘Octave’, ‘Ballattetta’, ‘Madrigale’, emerge in titles. His poems began to describe a shift from woolly conceptions of music and sound to a concrete manifestation of them in poetry. Vocal performance and music are but rarely supposed significant factors in the story of modernist poetry, at least in English. Joseph Frank’s old notion of ‘spatial form’ is wheeled out, supposing a progression from the ear to the eye, from symbolism to imagism, from music to sculpture, from orality to print.39 Rebecca Beasley itemises each occasion ‘LOOK’ is capitalised in Pound’s ABC of Reading; whereas, she gravely explains, ‘the word “listen” is not capitalized once’.40 Such contentions appear deaf to the nature of books, and to this one’s ‘warning’ that ‘poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music’; it also underplays Pound’s construction of aural ‘exhibits’ in the musical ‘laboratory’ of concerts conceived with the violinist Olga Rudge in Rapallo.41 More persuasively Vincent Sherry describes a philosophical shift, under the influence of Juan Ortega y Gasset and Remy de Gourmont, away from the organicist aurality and musical saturation of Henri Bergson towards the clean lines and hard surfaces apparently espoused by Wyndham Lewis and T. E. Hulme, once a Bergson devotee.42 Yet space and time need not clash so spectacularly. The visual impact of BLAST, its oblique capitals branding a puce cover, its radically distributed typography, to us screams modernism. And it also contains the following curious poem: Come my cantilations, Let us dump our hatreds into one bunch and be done with them. Hot sun, clear water, fresh wind, Let me be free of pavements, Let me be free of the printers. Let come beautiful people Wearing raw silk of good colour, Let come the graceful speakers, Let come the ready of wit, Let come the gay of manner, the insolent and the exulting. We speak of burnished lakes Of dry air, as clear as metal.43 Addressing his own songs, which he calls with old-fashioned punctiliousness ‘cantilations’, the poet exhorts himself to be free of the solidity of the city’s ‘pavements’ and ‘printers’ notwithstanding the poem’s own strident printed form. A poem then of surfaces, of light hitting off planes, burnished lakes and dry air, from these face

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values the poem also in cold print unexpectedly demands a return to aurality and the spoken voice in poetry. A new kind of poetry is conceived, but after the manner of the old. In this Whistlerian picture of ‘raw silk’ and ‘graceful speakers’ is commemorated an age and an audience. ‘Cantilations’ was Bernard Shaw’s (disputed) name for Yeats’s psaltery experiments; cities of ‘pavements’ and ‘printers’ were what Yeats’s poetry and prose had railed against since ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’;44 Pound also praised Yeats’s ‘quality of hard light’ in a review of Responsibilities.45 If the poem was retrospective, this served to make it new. A poetic coterie with aristocratic ambition could, through Renaissance grace, an oriental sensibility, Greek concision, Nietzschean insolence, a desiccated synaesthesia and a musical sensitivity equal to the nineties, achieve a hard-edged exulting sprezzatura. If this seems an anachronistic jumble, for Pound the troubadour ‘all ages are contemporaneous’.46 Visual lustre and oral precision are synthesised; light and music need not be incompatible, as imagism would prove.

Rhythm and Inner Form The basis for their connection was rhythm. If poetry was ‘a sort of inspired mathematics which gives us equations [. . .] for the human emotions’, The Spirit of Romance, noting Dante’s ‘mastery in fitting the inarticulate sound of a passage to the mood’, concluded such equations were resolved in sound.47 Introducing translations of Guido Cavalcanti, Pound was clearer: ‘the perception of the intellect is given in the word, that of the emotions in the cadence. The rhythm of any poetic line corresponds to emotion’. With rhythm ‘basic in poetry and music mutually’ such Italian mastery represented a refinement even of troubadour rhythms.48 Pound claimed he had followed such ‘rhythmic principles unconsciously from the time I was fifteen [. . .] There is in every line a real form, or inner form, & an apparent [. . .] I mean the thing that isn’t the beat of the metronome. The thing that “corresponds”’.49 Now following these principles consciously, Pound felt he had discovered the building block of poetry, the ‘inner form’ of the line, for which scansion or regular beat could not dictate rhythm. If the poet’s ear was sensitive he might produce, not only a grouping of images, but a rhythm precise enough to be notated as the exact ‘objective correlative’ of an emotion. T. S. Eliot almost concurred: ‘I know that a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image; and I do not believe that this is an experience peculiar to myself.’50 Inner form had profound implications for music and poetry. With Yeats railing against the mastications and vibrato of trained singers, Pound followed him (and Goethe) in concluding ‘the rhythm of poetry should not be unreasonably ruined by the musician setting it’. If poetic mastery was contained in inner form, this ‘must be preserved in music’; hence the sometimes ‘deadly strife’ between poets and musicians: ‘to join these arts is itself an art’.51 Inner form laid an obligation on poets, too: working with Yeats Pound considered: It is not intelligent to ignore the fact that both in Greece and in Provence the poetry attained its highest rhythmic and metrical brilliance at times when the arts of verse and music were closely knit together, when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity behind it.52

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So that classic imagist text ‘In a Station of the Metro’ carefully distilled its emotional correlative in rhythms with musical necessity, anapaestic lilts giving way to consummating spondees. Otherwise merely impressionistic perceptions were joined, activated, in the process, ‘charged with some musical property’, as if prefiguring Auden’s remark that painting was passive but ‘a succession of musical notes is an act of choice’.53 Correspondingly Pound’s imagist manifesto demanded the poet learnt from the techne of musicians. ‘Behave as a musician, a good musician,’ he exhorted, ‘when dealing with that phase of your art that has exact parallels in music’ and, most famously, ‘as regarding rhythm: [. .] compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome’.54 This was no arbitrary comparison: inner form was a musical revelation. Pound’s Dolmetsch essays would adduce the free articulation of early music performers as a model for poetry’s escaping metronomic regularity, the ‘hefty swat’ of iambic pentameter. What in modern poetry Eliot called ‘the constant evasion and recognition of regularity’, Pound stated more simply: ‘vers libre exists in old music’.55 That Hopkins’s theories concerning ‘Running Rhythm’, ‘Counterpoint Rhythm’ and ‘Sprung Rhythm’ emerged in print around the same time (1918) makes a nice coincidence. Such examples spurred post-war poetry to act with unprecedented freedoms drawn from music. So it is that Canto LXXXI’s portraits of aesthetic and political revolutionaries pitch disruptions in English verse (‘to break the pentameter, that was the first heave’) alongside a ‘libretto’ eulogising Lawes and Dowland and tributes to Dolmetsch’s sonic influence: Has he tempered the viol’s wood To enforce both the grave and the acute? Has he curved us the bowl of the lute?56 Articulation, timbre, resonance, rhythm, even pitch: all could be played in poetry to make it new. Line, motion, form: all could be traced back to rhythm. This central idea that rhythm underlay every art cleared the ground for imagism, vorticism and all Pound’s studies in melopoeia. For a time the unity of Noh plays, ‘incomplete speech [. . .] filled out by the music or movement’, had appeared to answer the question: could one do a long imagist poem, even if the sparseness of Pound’s best, Tristan, ended a long way from Wagner?57 The ‘musical construction’ of the form’s ‘libretto’ was realisable, however, only through collaborators like Michio Ito, the Japanese dancer who also inspired Yeats and Gustav Holst. What Pound called absolute rhythm was even found to underlie pitch: slowed down sufficiently, a note was a pattern of reverberations. Rhythmic principles thus operated as ‘bottom note of the harmony’.58 If the idea did not meet universal approval, for Pound it echoed modern music’s new rhythmic obsession. He championed the composer George Antheil, whose Ballet Mechanique pleasingly followed the controversy of Stravinsky’s hammering ballet scores. Antheil was adopted into Pound’s circle in Rapallo, collaborating with both Yeats and Olga Rudge. Thus confronted again and again by music’s rhythmic proficiency, poetry’s slackness was observable in its deficiency in notation. Although Cathay showed Pound’s dexterity at capturing the inner essence of a source-text, even this subtlest of translators remained dissatisfied. Successive attempts at translating Villon and Cavalcanti resulted in the avant-garde ‘melodrama’ The Testament of Francis Villon, and the

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projected radio opera Cavalcanti, broadcast with a ground-breaking mix of live and recorded performances.59 Pound discovered translating inner form required composing his own music, notes led by vocal patterns; which meant finally learning the mysteries of musical notation.

Notation Notation had been a preoccupation since Pound had assisted pianist Walter Morse Rummel with troubadour music. Recent books by Pierre Aubrey and Jean-Baptiste Beck reopened the subject: Pound had excitedly dug up from a library in Milan music that agreed, he said, with his own ideas: ‘I found a mss. of Arnaut [Daniel] with musical notation which accords exactly with my theories of how his music should be written.’60 Canto XX recalls him confirming his discovery with Emil Levy, an authority on all things Provençal, ‘not that I could sing him the music’.61 Pound’s poem ‘Aria’, from Canzoni, one of three original poems for which Rummel wrote an accompaniment in 1911, displays some of the fruits of the collaboration in highly original typography. Circling round itself, the form derives from music, which its printed layout is recognisably an attempt at notating: My love is a deep flame that hides beneath the waters. —My love is gay and kind, My love is hard to find as the flame beneath the waters. The fingers of the wind meet hers With a frail swift greeting. My love is gay and kind and hard of meeting, As the flame beneath the waters hard of meeting.62 In these folded over repeats and returns, as in the more famous ‘A Return’, we can discern attempts at Provençal-derived cadences that move beyond conventional notation. Rummel’s musical setting is a poor substitute. By adopting space as a rhythmic device such poems had a musical imperative. As Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine: ‘In the Metro “hokku”, I was careful, I think, to indicate spaces between the rhythmic units, and I want them observed.’63 Pound had a habit of separating words by double spaces, twice thumping the space bar of his typewriter: opening larger gaps required but one extra burst of energy. Still if such spaces poise a rhythmic system they are not simply cues

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for performance. The elements of punctuation, colon and full stop, are strangely separated from the verse. Although these marks constitute poetry’s customary notation of rhythm, thus isolated visually it is hard to consider them as having a purely aural function. Instead they gesture towards the limits of the way poetry is recorded, reminding us of more precise systems of notation. They may even remind us that printed black dots hovering in space are usually notes. Notes themselves played an increasing part. T. S. Eliot had brought musical motifs into The Waste Land by quoting music-hall songs and Wagnerian lyrics, the latter carefully transcribed in italics; Thomas MacGreevy’s Crón Tráth na nDéithe (1929) went further and included staff-notated snippets of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.64 By reminding readers of all they were missing, such desiccated excerpts chimed with a prevailing mood of cultural decline. Only the Cantos adopted written music as structural principle.

Cantos Visually Pound’s Cantos are most notable for the Chinese ideograms hovering alongside the text. With the sounds of each character nearby, the impact of this visual simultaneity is amplified by the possibility of equivalent aural simultaneity. Beyond brush strokes these speaking pictures act as reverberating instruments, sounding through the text like oriental gongs. Their vowel sounds ought to be sung, thought Pound: a grumpy note emphasises their sonic properties: the whole Occident is still in crass ignorance of the Chinese art of verbal sonority. I now doubt if it was inferior to the Greek. Our poets being slovenly, ignorant of music, and earless, it is useless to blame professors for squalor.65 As Pound railed against his age, his notations gestured not only to sound but to structure. Pound compared his Cantos to an F major chord; he told Yeats they had the form of a Bach fugue.66 This is not necessarily contradictory: even the terminal word repeats of the sestina might point to musical organisation ‘if one can conceive a counterpoint which plays not against a sound newly struck, but against the residuum and residua of sounds which hangs in the auditory memory’.67 However exquisite the spatial notation, true counterpoint in a poem was impossible; but in memory a long poem might sound its voices polyphonically. So Canto LXXV tells us how to read the rest. The long-distance transcription of Janequin’s polyphonic Chant des Oiseaux into a single-line violin part remembers its multi-layered inspiration: ‘[T]he birds were still in the music [. . .] They ARE still there in the violin part.’68 This ‘gist, the pith, the unbreakable fact’ of cultural survival was scored more musically even than Mallarmé’s bird-wings.69 So the birds populating the Pisan Cantos start to map written music. Canto LXXXII notates birdsong more precisely than The Waste Land: f f d g write the birds in their treble scale.70

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Canto LXXIX’s ‘birds on a wire | or rather on 3 wires’ ‘5 of ’em now on 2; | on 3; 7 on 4’ picture for the reader ‘the change in writing the song books’. Black dots perched on black lines recall the invention by medieval theorist Guido d’Arezzo of the five-line stave still used today.71 Thus an old/new form of written music opens Canto XCI. When Pound writes beneath these medieval melodic notations ‘light compenetrans of the spirits’ and ‘The GREAT CRYSTAL | doubling the pine’, light is not all to which he means to refer. The pine reflecting the Noh play Nishikigi, ‘Light & the flowing crystal’ is cut with the purity of music, recalling the motz e son of Arnaut Daniel. Their ‘Crystal waves weaving together’ these parts, or prismatic subdivisions, exist in sound, as much as in light.72 For the passage also remembers what Daniel Albright terms ‘the most striking music [. . .] in all modernist poetry’:73 “as the sculptor sees the form in the air . . . “as glass seen under water, “King Otreus, my father . . . and saw the waves taking form as crystal, notes as facets of air, and the mind there, before them, moving, so that notes need not move.74 This from Canto XXV recalls the philosophical troubling of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which in ‘Burnt Norton’ displaces ‘the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts’ with a Chinese jar: ‘Only by the form, the pattern | Can words or music reach the stillness’.75 Pound’s emphasis was different. Notes need not always move, nor vibrate, if caught, preserved, as in written music. Sufficient creative force created lasting tensile strength: so a melody, a line’s inner form, cannot be pulled apart. Thus thrust together with their words in imagist juxtaposition two differently resonating troubadour notations might store the requisite sensual ‘sweetness’ (‘with the sweetness that comes to my heart’ translates Pound’s near-miraculous splicing of sources). Said Pound: ALL typographic disposition, placings of words on the page, is intended to facilitate the reader’s intonation, whether he be reading silently to self or aloud to friends. Given time and technique I might even put down the musical notation of passages or ‘breaks into song’.76 Yes, and no. Musical notation merely reminds of what is already there. Small parts of Pound’s poem might be, and have been, performed by actors or musicians; but of course it makes most sense, as for Mallarmé’s ‘partition’, to read the Cantos silently. Yet we do with an imaginative sense opened up to us. That inveterate village explainer was teaching us, as he said, ‘how to read’: that the body of light come forth from the body of fire And that your eyes come to the surface from the deep wherein they were sunken77

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The Cantos are a transcription of poetry and music, reunited in all their awkwardness and complexity. So that our eyes come to the surface from the deep, the poem engages not just our ears but our musical sense. This final resounding synaesthesia finds synthesis in the organising principle of the ideograms of written music. Consummating a lifetime’s musical obsession, the Cantos are musical monuments: as Bunting said, ‘you will have to go a long way around | if you want to avoid them’.78

Notes 1. Ezra Pound, ‘Vers Libre and Arnold Dolmetsch’, in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1954), pp. 437–40 (p. 437). Hereafter Essays. 2. Marjorie Perloff, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), p. 122. 3. Ezra Pound, Make It New (London: Faber, 1934). 4. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 86. 5. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (London: Constable, 1914), p. 19. 6. Carl Nielsen, ‘Words, Music and Program Music’ (1925), in Living Music, trans. Reginald Spink (Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen, n.d.), pp. 26–37 (p. 26). 7. See Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000); Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Painting and Music in Europe 1900–1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 8. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 53. 9. Pound, Essays, p. 437. 10. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1934), p. 31. Hereafter ABC. 11. J. N. A. Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), p. 140. 12. Arthur Symons, Selected Writings, ed. Roger Holdsworth (London: Carcanet, 1974), p. 90. 13. Arthur Symons, Poems, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1902) I, p. 3. 14. T. S. Eliot, Review, ‘Baudelaire and the Symbolists, Five Essays, by Peter Quennell’, Criterion, 9 (2) (January 1930), pp. 357–9 (p. 357). 15. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 194. Hereafter Essays. 16. Stéphane Mallarmé, Mallarmé in Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 2001), p. 7. 17. Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), pp. 38–9. Hereafter Poems. 18. D. H. Lawrence, Collected Poems, 2 vols (London: Secker, 1928), II, p. 940; I, p. 148. 19. Ibid., I, p. 188. 20. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: G. Allen, 1913), pp. 103–4. 21. Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer (New York: New Directions, 1977), p. 3. Hereafter Music. 22. Pound, Poems, pp. 33–4. 23. Basil Bunting, Basil Bunting on Poetry, ed. Peter Makin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 122. 24. Pound, Music, p. 29. 25. Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, Their Letters, ed. Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1984), p. 34.

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26. Pound, Poems, p. 80. 27. Pound, Essays, p. 434. 28. Ezra Pound, ‘Three Cantos: II’, Poetry, 10 (4), ed. Harriet Monroe (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1917), p. 181. 29. Yeats, Essays, p. 13. 30. Quoted in A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), I, p. 98. 31. W. B. Yeats, Letters, ed. Allan Wade (London: Macmillan, 1953), p. 543. 32. Quoted in Moody, Ezra Pound, I, p. 88. 33. Pound, Poems, pp. 24, 22. 34. Ibid., pp. 105–7. 35. Ezra Pound, 12 April 1938, in The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber, 1951), p. 401. Hereafter Letters. 36. W. B. Yeats, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 1. 37. W. H. Auden, The Oxford Book of Light Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. xxiv. 38. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1969), p. 18. 39. Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Three Parts’, Sewanee Review, 53 (1945), 221–40, 433–56, 643–53. 40. Rebecca Beasley, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 2. 41. Pound, ABC, p. 14. 42. Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 43. Pound, Poems, p. 570. 44. See Adrian Paterson, ‘On the Pavements Grey: W. B. Yeats, William Morris, and the Suburban Paradise’, in Irish Writing London, ed. Tom Herron, 2 vols (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), I, pp. 34–53. 45. Ezra Pound, ‘The Later Yeats’, Poetry, IV (2) (May 1914), 64–9 (p. 67). 46. Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (New York: New Directions, 2005), p. vi. 47. Ibid., pp. 26, 160. 48. Pound, Poems, p. 192. 49. Ezra Pound, 20 January 1911, ‘Two Early Letters of Ezra Pound’, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle, American Literature, 34 (1) (March 1962), 114–19. 50. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry’ (1942), in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), pp. 26–38 (p. 38). 51. Pound, Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), pp. 36–8. 52. Pound, Essays, p. 91. 53. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 465. 54. Pound, Essays, p. 3. 55. Ibid., p. 440. 56. Ezra Pound, Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1996), pp. 538, 540. Hererafter Cantos. 57. Pound, Poems, p. 336. 58. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 233. 59. See Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 60. Quoted in Moody, Ezra Pound, I, p. 157. 61. Pound, Cantos, p. 89. 62. Pound, Poems, p. 159. 63. Pound, Letters, p. 44.

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64. For more on these examples, see Adrian Paterson, ‘“Try, if possible, to hear something”: Wagner in The Waste Land’, The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts, ed. Frances Dickey and John D. Morgenstern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 121–33. 65. Ezra Pound, Instigations (London: Faber, 1935), p. 37. 66. W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937), p. 4. 67. Pound, Music, p. 224. 68. Pound, ABC, p. 54. 69. Pound, Music, p. 435. 70. Pound, Cantos, p. 545. 71. Ibid., pp. 505–6. 72. Ibid., pp. 630–1. 73. Daniel Albright, ‘Early Cantos I–XLI’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 59–91 (p. 84). 74. Pound, Cantos, p. 119. 75. T. S. Eliot, Poems, p. 175. 76. Pound, Letters, p. 322. 77. Pound, Cantos, p. 630. 78. Basil Bunting, Complete Poems (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2000), p. 132.

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55 Auden’s Imaginary Song T. F. Coombes

You alone, alone, imaginary song, Are unable to say an existence is wrong, And pour out your forgiveness like a wine.1

T

he rhapsodic proclamation that ends W. H. Auden’s 1938 sonnet, ‘The Composer’, has been pondered by both musicologists and literary scholars; but rarely is it asked ‘Why imaginary song?’.2 The phrase registers music’s potential to pervade the mind, in improvised, remembered or half-remembered form. Music certainly pervaded Auden’s life and career, from the childhood activity of singing Tristan und Isolde with his mother, to playing piano duets with Stravinsky, and collaborating with major twentieth-century composers.3 Remarks in Auden’s copious prose writings suggest that his musicality could shape his poetry’s character, through his imagining texts as sung during their composition. What follows is a brief, inevitably hypothetical discussion of this compositional process and its literary outcomes. This discussion considers, then, not the subject of music in Auden’s poetry, but the so-called ‘music’ of his poetry. Studies published towards the end of Auden’s life described him as ‘a musical poet’; and conceptions of his ‘verbal music’ still permeate more popular discourse.4 In these usages, ‘musical’ means something akin to ‘lyrical’, invoking (like most literary appropriations of the term) a text’s aspect as performed sound. Contemporary Auden scholars appear to avoid the term, perhaps because it is thought to legitimate the misconception that words’ sounds are somehow separable in their expressive capacity from their meaning.5 Their objection may also be that articulated by Steven Paul Scher: musical concepts, applied literarily, usually result in ‘metaphorical impressionism’, impeding development of ‘a clearly defined set of critical terms’.6 This study sides with recent reactions against this last complaint: terms gain precision not in formal definition but in sensitive use, and critical discourse is characterised by metaphor.7 Here, use of the term ‘musical’ derives from the discussion’s musicological perspective, and aims to elucidate, in certain ways, the intuition underlying the notion of Auden’s ‘verbal music’. Auden’s remarks on the practice of imagining song appear most frequently in his discussion of libretti. He instructed librettists to ask continually: ‘can I imagine this line I have just written gaining in emotional impact if it is sung instead of being spoken?’.8 It is unsurprising, given his infatuation with song, that Auden tested out his song-texts

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musically. But this musical imagining was, judging from a remark in a late interview, more than a means of testing a pre-written line, but the means through which that line was invented: ‘if you have to write an aria or an ensemble, you naturally have an embryonic idea of a tune in your mind. [. . .] Every time Stravinsky or Henze gave us the kind of thing we had in mind’.9 Auden’s notion of ‘an embryonic idea of a tune’ suggests words inhabiting a musical space, and moving with the energy of musical rhythms and gestures, before finding the vehicle of determinate pitches. Other librettists have recorded a comparable creative process: Wagner remarked that ‘[b]efore I even begin to script a line of verse [. . .] I am already intoxicated with the musical fragrance of my creation’.10 Imagined as a gestural but pitchless music, words are, as it were, sung into being. We must, of course, avoid the reification towards which the title’s quotation tempts us: we do not hear ‘imaginary song’, but imagine hearing song. In his later remark, Auden can easily be mistaken as suggesting that he somehow pre-determined his collaborators’ compositions. What matters is that poet and composer brought to a text an analogous capacity for hearing words musically. Britten, Auden’s collaborator in the 1930s and 40s, wrote of having music ‘complete in my mind before putting pencil to paper’: ‘the actual shape of the music – the kind of music it’s going to be rather than the actual notes’.11 Despite its centrality to the overall process of song-construction, the role of ‘imaginary song’ is neglected by the many musicological examinations of that process.12 With Auden, the real site of collaboration appears to have been, and to remain, this realm of imagined ‘hearing’ inhabited by a song-text as poet developed it, and composer responded to it. This is a relatively straightforward conception of a text’s ‘musicality’: its potentiality for, and receptiveness to, being lifted into an embryonically musical state. And this state was evidently important to the creation of more than Auden’s songtexts. Indeed, as Nicholas Jenkins has suggested, in the late 1930s, when Auden was especially preoccupied with lyric forms, the distinction between writing a poem for speaking and writing it for singing was, for him, apparently vague.13 Later, lecturing in Oxford, the poet observed that ‘through listening to music I have learned much about how to organize a poem, how to obtain variety and contrast through changes of tone, tempo and rhythm’.14 Moving between sung and spoken diction, with a sense of their equivalence as modes of human utterance, Auden adopted a ‘gestural’ hearing of a passage of text, which helped to place that passage within a wider impression of structure. The implied process is, in practice, close to that of his libretto-writing: he developed his texts by imagining, in the form of musical shapes and characters, the ‘kind of thing’ that particular passages might become. Sometimes, Auden invented spoken texts through more determinate, pre-existing song. Examples include his 1937 ‘case-history ballads’, initially published with indications of the popular songs to which they were to be sung, but now known as spoken texts.15 ‘Miss Gee’, for instance, first appeared with the instruction ‘Tune, St. James Infirmary’. It is unlikely that Auden just happened to notice, after writing the ballads, that they fitted, metrically and expressively, with their respective Blues songs. He would surely have sung them into being ‘to’ these songs, their words appearing as projected in musical space, matched to the song’s melodic lines and tripping rhythms. This was undoubtedly a habitual casual practice, illustrated by

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Britten’s recollection of Auden’s enthusiasm for ‘singing unlikely words to Anglican chants’.16 Auden’s ‘embryonic’ hearings of text are more processes than ‘things’, and it would be misconceived even to attempt to reconstruct them. The example of ‘Miss Gee’, however, constitutes a limiting-case, a more determinate model of a creative process that eludes more definite description (as well as documentation). Our knowledge of the ballad’s musical origin allows us to examine how a text that is ‘sung into being’ may retain traces of that process. Miss Gee is a virtuous, lonely and sexually unfulfilled woman, who dies from cancer, of no more account in death than in life. Let me tell you a little story About Miss Edith Gee; She lived in Clevedon Terrace At Number 83. [. . .] Miss Gee looked up at the starlight And said, ‘Does anyone care That I live in Clevedon Terrace On one hundred pounds a year?’ [. . .] Doctor Thomas looked her over, And then he looked some more; Walked over to his wash-basin, Said, ‘Why didn’t you come before?’ [. . .] They hung her from the ceiling, Yes, they hung up Miss Gee; And a couple of Oxford Groupers Carefully dissected her knee.17 The brisk momentum of this twenty-five-stanza ballad, with its almost jaunty accentual metre, creates an idiom of detachment that embodies the casualness with which the world disregards Miss Gee. The ‘Tune’ of ‘St. James Infirmary’ has no uniquely authentic determinacy, its precise rhythmic, melodic and harmonic formulations varying with individual renditions. It is necessary, however, for the sake of written illustration, to construct a possible transcription (the musical examples attempt to notate what will be clear to any reader familiar with the standard).

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Figure 55.1 ‘St. James Infirmary’ One of this transcription’s sources is Louis Armstrong’s 1928 recording, popular in Britain in the 1930s and surely well-known to Auden and his readership.18 The first stanza runs: I went down to St. James Infirmary, Saw my baby there, Set down on a long white table, So sweet, so cold, so bare. If we fit Auden’s text to its ‘Tune’, not only does the poem’s metric pattern slot into the music’s rhythmic outlines (as the example below illustrates for the first verse), this reversed musical setting preserves an appropriate performance of the text. The brisk pace and crisp articulation of, in particular, Armstrong’s 1928 recording corresponds to the distanced reportage demanded by Auden’s ballad, placing at arm’s length both the lyrics’ morbid content and the Blues number’s latently melancholic gestures and harmonies. It is certainly convincing to suppose that the song functioned as a kind of sonic template through which ‘Miss Gee’ was fashioned. Of course, Auden’s verse could technically be placed against any tune supporting a similar metric pattern, and the tune’s flexible identity means that the music would alter according to the demands of the unfolding text, as well as vice versa. But certain rhythmic qualities are surely the literary residue of this particular song’s essential features. Even given the underlying accentual metre, numerous lines are surprisingly long, and their rhythm often difficult to construe on first reading. Two examples are the second line of the eighth stanza – ‘She was biking through a field of corn’ – and the first of the tenth – ‘Summer made the trees a picture’. Encountering this second example

Figure 55.2 First verse of Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’ set to the tune of ‘St. James Infirmary’

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in isolation, we might read it as trochaic quatrameter. Reading in context, we may try various ways of reading the line as trimeter, which are illustrated here by simple twolevel metrical scansions (x for stressed, ‘ ̷ ’ for unstressed).

The three unaccented syllables squashed between the first two stresses sound ungainly; but the alternative three-stress scansion is unnatural:

Now, the first two syllables are somehow rhythmically free-floating, their metric place defined only by their attachment to the accented beat on ‘made’. The metric notation is, of course, crude; we naturally stress the line’s first syllable, but lean as well on its third (as more complex scansion systems might attempt to notate). Resetting the line to the first phrase of its ‘Tune’, however, provides a similar compromise, in which the line’s initial rhythmic recalcitrance disappears. The two opening syllables find the quantitative definition provided by the defined rhythmic values of the up-beat. Within the melody’s framework (in which each metric stress naturally arranges itself to fall on each bar’s first and third beats), the first syllable is emphasised, but not stressed. Resetting the example from stanza eight achieves a similar rhythmic distribution of its rhythmically problematic opening. The prevalence, then, of a two-note up-beat to phrases (often the stanza’s first) in renditions of ‘St. James Infirmary Blues’ meant that Auden, fitting the rhythms of his text to those of the ‘Tune’, was naturally inclined to introduce multiple syllables at the beginning of lines before the first metric stress. This literary residue of the text’s musical origin appears throughout the poem: opening feet, especially in a stanza’s first line, are often unexpectedly long. Examples include:

The literary effect of this particular musical ‘trace’ is a kind of expansion, or rhythmic relaxation, at the beginning of lines, which accentuate the ballad’s ‘story-telling’

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Figure 55.3 First line of the tenth stanza of Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’ set to the tune of ‘St. James Infirmary’

Figure 55.4 Second line of the eighth stanza of Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’ set to the tune of ‘St. James Infirmary’ style, as well as the distance between its poignant content and the manner of its telling. Introducing a collection of Elizabethan lyric poems, Auden identified certain unusual rhythmic features – ‘monosyllabic feet’, and ‘changes of metrical base within a stanza’ – which, he claims, the ‘authors would not have found [. . .] had they not been writing songs’.19 It is hard not to hear this as an echo of Auden’s own creative practice: singing into being a text such as ‘Miss Gee’, Auden built into his compositional process an encouragement of comparable rhythmic complexity within a simple underlying metric scheme, multiple unaccented syllables deriving from the notes articulated between the melody’s principal beats. We could investigate further rhythmic examples, and different kinds of musical ‘trace’, such as the possible rejection of vowel-sounds that are ill-sustained in sung form, in both this and other Auden lyrics. What can this brief analysis of ‘Miss Gee’ tell us about the general significance of Auden’s ‘embryonic’ musical inventions of text? Like an ‘idea of’ anything, an imagined song – depending on its level of determinacy – has an infinite range of possible ‘realisations’. If Auden’s embryonic hearing attained a clear rhythmic shape (utterable, perhaps, in a kind of Sprechgesang), that text might well, depending on the character of the imagined music, develop the kinds of rhythmic variety identified by Auden in the Elizabethan lyrics. But even a mere awareness of words contending with, and sounding through, the dimension of musical gestures, would encourage poetic diction and vocabulary of a more ‘dynamic’ and ‘immediate’ kind – to quote from Auden’s own description of the properties of a suitable song-text.20 The literary qualities derived from singing words into being are musical, at least in the sense of being conditioned, through musical means, for relifting into sung form. The suitability of Auden’s texts for setting is variable, and debated by musicologists; but his musical creative practices surely illuminate, in part, his status as, in Northcott’s words, instigating ‘a larger number of scores [. . .] than any other poet in the 20th century’.21 We cannot establish the extent or nature of these practices, even assuming the reliability of Auden’s descriptions. Perhaps many 1930s lyrics – especially those collected as ‘Songs’, or entitled ‘Blues’ – emerged as either real or imagined popular songs. Whatever role a musical ‘hearing’ may have played in their development, poems are

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likely to have been adapted to the needs of speech (both during composition, and in Auden’s later revision of his early work). John T. Irwin suggests that the case-history ballads’ accompanying songs are actually no more than ‘indications of generally allusive background’, because ‘Victor’ lacks the two-line refrain present in its ‘Tune’, ‘Frankie and Johnny’.22 Examining the rhythmic patterns of ‘Victor’, however, does (as with ‘Miss Gee’) reveal specific traces of the song’s main verse; but Auden evidently removed the refrain at some stage of composition, presumably to avoid irksome repetition after every stanza. Such debates are only of so much interest to us, Auden’s readers. How does investigation of Auden’s compositional practices enhance our understanding of his poetry? After analysing the musical origins of ‘Miss Gee’, we may begin to imagine the ballad as imbued with the sounds and rhythms of ‘St. James Infirmary’, which haunt and augment our reading. We may similarly think of Auden’s other literary parodies of Blues lyrics as faint imaginary songs – not as actually sung, but nonetheless as having the potentiality of the rhythms and gestures of contemporaneous popular songs. This thought is not prompted by an anxiety to vindicate the concept of ‘literary music’, by defining it as literally as possible (an anxiety prevalent in many formalist studies that seek to read poetry ‘as’ music). The foregoing investigation of Auden’s imaginary singing seeks not to codify but to refresh and extend the notion of his ‘musicality’, and perhaps to question our ability to cleanly distinguish ‘metaphorical’ and ‘literal’ understandings of that notion.

Notes 1. W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, rev. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 181. 2. See, for instance, Walter Bernhart, ‘“Pour Out . . . Forgiveness Like a Wine”: Can Music “Say an Existence is Wrong”?’, in Musical Meaning and Human Values, ed. Keith Chapin and Lawrence Kramer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), pp. 170–83. 3. Auden’s many musical activities are described in Bayan Northcott, ‘Notes on Auden’, The Musical Times, 134 (1993), 6–8, 68–72. 4. Examples include Monroe K. Spears, The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 262, and Dana Gioia, ‘Auden’ [accessed 7 September 2014]. 5. Note, for instance, the implications of John Hollander, ‘The Music of Poetry’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15 (2) (1956), 232–44. 6. Essays on Literature and Music (1967–2004), ed. Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 37, 167; cited in David Evans, ‘Théodore de Banville and the Mysteries of Song’, in Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Phyllis Weliver and Katherine Ellis (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 165–82 (p. 165). 7. See Evans, and Stephen Benson, Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 5–6. 8. Auden, Secondary Worlds (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 81. 9. ‘An hour of questions and answers with Auden’ [accessed 8 September 2014]. The strength of Auden’s assertion should be interpreted within the interview’s oral context; the ‘we’ refers to his collaborator, Chester Kallman.

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10. Cited in Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 83. 11. Murray Schafer, British Composers in Interview (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 123; Britten on Music, ed. Paul Kildea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 323. 12. An engaging example of this form of words-and-music study is Jonathan Dunsby, Making Words Sing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 13. ‘Uncollected Songs and Lighter Poems, 1936–40’, in W. H. Auden: The Language of Learning and the Language of Love, ed. Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 49–59 (pp. 54–5). This suggestion conflicts with Auden’s much later assertion as to which of his poems were ‘written for music’. The phrase’s potential ambiguity, and the imperfection of memory, may account for this conflict. See W. H. Auden: A Bibliography, 1924–1969, ed. B. C. Bloomfield and Edward Mendelson (London: Camera Press, 1972), p. 182. 14. W. H. Auden, Making, Knowing and Judging (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 24. 15. See Bucknell and Jenkins, pp. 51–4. Since Auden’s 1940 collection Another Time, the ballads have appeared without indication of their ‘tunes’. 16. See Schafer, p. 115. 17. Selected verses from ‘Miss Gee’, from the version in Mendelson, Collected Poems, pp. 132–4. 18. Reissued on Louis Armstrong: Fireworks, Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five, (Disques Dreyfus, FDM 36710–2, 2000). 19. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, ‘Introduction to An Elizabethan Songbook’, in W. H. Auden: Prose, Vol. 3, 1949–1955, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), pp. 435–44 (p. 437). 20. Ibid., p. 439. 21. Northcott, p. 6. 22. ‘MacNeice, Auden, and the Art Ballad’, Contemporary Literature, 11 (1970), 58–79 (p. 75).

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56 Ivor Gurney: Embracing and Attacking A. E. Housman Kate Kennedy

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vor Gurney is probably the only composer since Thomas Campion to be as gifted a poet as he was a musician. His understanding of music is filtered through his relationship to text, and his songs, whether setting his own words or other poets’, are some of the most sensitive responses to poetry in English music. Gurney was a student at the Royal College of Music when the First World War broke out. He enlisted in 1915, and, alongside his composition, he began to write poetry about his experiences during the war, and about his native Gloucestershire. The inspiration for his poetry and his music was essentially the same, and he would often write poetry and songs concurrently. However, whilst his high standing as a war poet is widely acknowledged, and the legacy of the war has been traced through his poetry in the 1920s, the sounds of the war and his own complex emotional response to the conflict have never been considered in relation to his post-war music. This essay aims to show how the same themes can be investigated in both his music and literature. Furthermore, it explores how music can harness its relationship to text to deepen the exploration of the psychological issues raised in the song settings. In his 1919 song cycle Ludlow and Teme, Gurney uses a complex and conflicted engagement with Housman’s poetry to express his deeply ambivalent relationship to the war he had just survived. In April 1917, two years before he wrote Ludlow and Teme, Gurney was in hospital in Rouen, having been shot in the arm. His letters in the days leading up to the attack in which he was injured hint, uncharacteristically, at the extent of his desperation: ‘We should all relapse into neurasthenia were we not driven.’1 From his hospital bed he wrote to his close friend Marion Scott, ‘I wonder whether at last I might try Housman’s Shropshire Lad?’ It is striking that he is drawn to Housman’s unrealistic account of soldiering at a time when he was experiencing the real thing at its worst. His approach is tentative: ‘I wonder whether at last I might try [. . .]’, hinting perhaps either at awe or an underlying ambivalence towards the work, or even both.2 Housman’s deceptively simple verse raises a complex response. One of the primary sticking points with his work is that he appears to advocate premature and violent death in war. Housman was writing in 1896, remembering the first Boer War which was fought on a small enough scale and sufficiently far from home for such ideas to exist. We can take critic John Bayley’s view that Housman’s fantasy is not to be read literally. He argues that, for Housman: Shropshire is a kingdom of the mythical alternative, a place where ‘normal’ people lead their heroic and pastoral lives, ending in suicide, enlistment, early death; and where the opposite dream is of such a normality.3

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His poems appear to sit uncomfortably with knowledge of the suffering of the First World War. However, part of the appeal of A Shropshire Lad was its ‘Englishness’; Gurney described Housman’s text admiringly as ‘purely English words’.4 The relationship between nature and perceptions of Englishness, and the nation’s hold over its subjects is fundamental both to Gurney and Housman’s work. Gurney, suffering on behalf of his country, addresses England in his 1917 poem ‘Strange Service’ with challenges such as ‘none but you can know my heart, its tears and sacrifice, none, but you, repay’. His poetry analyses the soldier’s ambivalent and complex relationship with England; whereas Housman’s conception of nation does not include any sense of retribution for ‘the lads that will never be old’, or any awareness of the need for it. For both poets the idea of Englishness was bound up with the notion of sacrifice, but with very different conclusions. In Gurney’s weary depictions of his ordeal at the front there is no hint of the romanticised idea of death essential to Housman’s pastoral England and its exquisitely doomed youth. Housman never visited a number of the places he mentions. Housman’s pastoral is, then, an imagined space, whereas Gurney’s writing is engaged with actual experience; the war, England and Gloucestershire as he knew it. Their approaches are from opposite standpoints, but their subject-matter is the same. This combination of a shared ground and difference of opinion are fertile starting points for a work, and Gurney writes music that both embraces and attacks Housman’s text. This idea of music that can both embrace and attack its own words is the key to understanding the richness of the song cycle Ludlow and Teme. The musicologist Trevor Hold describes Gurney’s Housman settings as ‘the old-fashioned, dreamy, solemn-sided, romantic, backward-looking Gurney’.5 A critical examination of Ludlow and Teme reveals it to be precisely the opposite. The song cycle for tenor, piano and quartet was written in 1919, and later revised from within the asylum in which Gurney was a patient in 1925. Ludlow and Teme comprises seven settings of poems from A Shropshire Lad. The opening song of the cycle is ‘When Smoke Stood Up from Ludlow’; a poem that begins with an unsullied pastoral idyll, and is repeatedly interrupted with a message of death, as conveyed by a blackbird’s song: Lie down, lie down, young yeoman; What use to rise and rise? Rise man a thousand mornings Yet down at last he lies, And then the man is wise.6 Gurney’s setting is predominantly in the bright, confident key of A major, but for the blackbird it modulates into the darker, flat key of D minor. By the end of the piece the two keys become confused, and the pervasive influence of the D minor undermines the pull of the original tonic key. The drama between the two keys enacts the struggle in the poem to reconcile death versus the life-enhancing beauty of nature. The movement from one to the other and their interrelatedness are mirrored in the music, but with a degree of violence that is not present in the text. The drama and tension of two opposing impulses characterises much of the cycle, and at this early stage of the work Gurney does not allow the two to find reconciliation.

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The blackbird’s song is accompanied by brutal, violent music which, whilst only forte, is nevertheless so striking an interruption that it unbalances the listener’s perception of the song as a whole. With the full force of the strings it ruptures the previously flowing texture with abrupt, heavy-handed chords. The disruption is compounded by the passage’s replacement of the tonic A major with the much more powerful D minor. This tension between the weak tonic and the death-associated D minor effectively tears the song in two. Although A and D are related keys, the difference in temperament is that of the chasm between the civilian world and the battlefield; thus forcing our awareness of the opposition between the vivacious yeoman and the blackbird’s insistence on destruction. Gurney was not alone in writing the sounds of the war into his music. His contemporary Arthur Bliss was asked to write some incidental music for The Tempest shortly after his return from the front. He depicted the storm scene in terms of a bombardment, employing an enormous battery of timpani and other percussion. The soundscape Bliss introduced to shocked London audiences was that of the battlefield. Critic Ernest Newman wrote of the première in 1921: The only music that matters is that of Mr Arthur Bliss, who, with a fearsome array of kettledrums, has given us a storm in the opening scene that isn’t only terrifying in an ingenious way [. . .] but has the additional and great merit of reducing the scenery and the actors to their native insignificance.7 Robert Graves wrote that the most maddening and unimaginable aspect of trench warfare was the noise: ‘You couldn’t [explain]: you can’t communicate noise, noise never stopped for one moment – ever.’8 Similarly, Ford Madox Ford observed that: ‘There was so much noise it seemed to grow dark. It was a mental darkness. You could not think. A Dark Age!’9 For a composer, the effect of such an experience must have been profound. Gurney spent sixteen months in the army, during which time he was repeatedly exposed to the barrage of sound that Bliss notated. In his poem ‘On Somme’, Gurney envisages the threat of death in terms of sound: ‘Suddenly into the still air burst thudding | And thudding, and cold fear possessed me all’.10 This thudding that possesses the listener is something akin to the extraordinary weight of the chords that accompany the blackbird’s song in ‘When Smoke Stood Up’, like Bliss, gesturing towards the noise of artillery. By drawing on the sounds of the trenches, both composers created passages of music so shocking and distinctive that they reduced their pre-war musical vocabulary to its ‘native insignificance’, as Newman puts it. Gurney was aware of the popular settings of A Shropshire Lad by George Butterworth, written in 1911 and 1912. Butterworth was killed in 1916, and it would be futile to speculate as to whether he would have approached the texts differently in the light of his war experience. The most striking difference between Gurney’s 1919 settings and Butterworth’s pre-war versions of Housman, however, is the anger at the fate of the lads, and the heartfelt poignancy of the setting of lines such as ‘I wish one could know them’, written whilst the camaraderie Gurney had cherished was still a very recent memory. The third song in Ludlow and Teme, beginning ‘The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair’, takes a text famously set by Butterworth in 1911. His

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pre-war version is lilting and whimsical, in a major key, entirely in keeping with Housman’s pastoral nostalgia. Butterworth sets the text to a folksong-inspired melody, with delicate, unobtrusive accompaniment. He does not dwell on the possible implications of lines such as ‘the lads that will die in their glory and never be old’, but incorporates them seamlessly into the fluid melodic line. There is a world of difference between Housman’s lads who ‘never return’ and Gurney and his Gloucestershire lads’ ignominious return (often, as in Gurney’s own experience, to unemployment or to become a burden on those around them). This inevitably colours Gurney’s interpretation of Housman’s texts. How could a romantic notion of glorious sacrifice and uncomplicated devotion to England really exist in the light of the war and its inglorious aftermath? There is something deliberately unsettling about choosing to set a delicate, unassuming text against such an unwarrantedly relentless accompaniment. In his wartime poem ‘Strange Service’, Gurney describes the traumatised soldier having ‘wrested his soul’ in the course of serving his country.11 Similarly, the accompaniment here wrests the essence of the simple, folksong-like melody out of shape. This denaturing stands as a musical condemnation of sending young men to die, a notion Housman’s text seeks to naturalise. Gurney’s songs are universally acknowledged to be some of the most subtle and sensitive responses to text in the English language. Here his word setting is heavy-handed. For a composer-poet, this brutalising of the text is a particularly strong statement. He is both endorsing and wrestling with Housman’s words; choosing to set them and engage with them, but simultaneously hammering away at their ideology. Housman’s narrator innocuously observes the young men coming to Ludlow Fair. Gurney chooses to set this with the full force of the knowledge of what awaits these recruits. As in the blackbird’s song in ‘When Smoke Stood Up From Ludlow’, Gurney is here combining the soundscape of war with the pre-war pastoral, using the accompaniment to batter relentlessly away at the melody, and ending the song abruptly with a three-note figure that, bearing in mind Gurney was the crack shot of his platoon, is more than likely to be an echo of machine gun fire. To view mass death in war as an escape from the ravages of time and age, to ‘carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man’, is a peculiarly contradictory idea. As John Bayley sensibly points out, the metaphor is one of futility; what earthly purpose could be served by taking newly minted coins out of service, as Housman urges?12 Here the image provides one of the most climactic points of the cycle. In fact Gurney revises his original 1919 version six years later to give the crucial line ‘the lads that will die in their glory and never be old’ the maximum impact. In the revision he repeats the line, the first utterance rising to a top G on ‘glory’. He then follows it with a second attempt at a vocal illustration of gloriousness – this time rising higher, to an A flat. However, whilst raising the vocal line to these pinnacles as if to endorse Housman’s message, Gurney uses the accompaniment to undermine the substantiality of the glory he is expounding. The second hearing of the line ‘the lads that will die in their glory’ is followed by an accented, hammering figure in the accompaniment, which rises up to the highest points of some of the instruments’ tessituras to a fortissimo scream, slows and then trails off into silence. At the very moment of claiming glory for the lads that will die, the accompaniment quite literally screeches to a halt and stops its own incessant march. This musical stripping away to leave only the vocal line’s fortissimo ‘never be old’ has

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the effect of shouting at the audience – it has an immediacy that could not be possible if masked by the strings. ‘Ludlow Fair’ is followed by ‘On the Idle Hill of Summer’. In uncharacteristic lines such as ‘lovely lads and dead and rotten’, Housman comes closer in this poem than most others to imagining the reality of war. However, it is still apparently a foregone conclusion that taking part is a lad’s pre-determined destiny. Gurney reinterprets the poem in terms of a barbaric military invasion of the loveliness of the countryside. In ‘Ludlow Fair’ we heard the military represented as thuggish and aggressive through the grinding, unstoppable marching accompaniment and abrupt gunfire ending. In ‘On the Idle Hill of Summer’ a different aspect of the soldier’s relationship to the military is musically explored. Here the military invokes a musical hysteria, but its tight, regimented rhythmic motifs can also bring the music back from the point of disintegration when the singer contemplates the grisly realities of warfare. The army both destroys landscape and induces madness, but paradoxically its regimentation and order also hold the soldier (and the song) together. The army can act as a container for anxiety and horror, as well as prove the cause of such emotions. The song begins with muted strings, and a pizzicato cello providing a repeating crotchet F pedal to illustrate the ‘steady drummer’ playing in the distance. The static, hazy texture, reminiscent of the opening of ‘When Smoke Stood Up from Ludlow’, is darkened from as early as the second bar by this faintly ominous military presence. The line ‘soldiers marching all to die’ is given a feeling of rising panic as the accompaniment effectively speeds up into a run; the music embodying a level of anxiety about their intrusion into the peaceful landscape that is not found in the poem. Just as their presence is deeply ambiguous, so is the role of military music in this song. The sounds of war have so far been moments of violence. Here the line ‘All to die’ is set to piano chords that clearly invoke horror, but the emotion is actually quelled by the succeeding chromatic quavers moving downwards into the more brash (now unmuted) dotted rhythms of military music, reasserting a sense of order. Rather than being the harbinger of chaos, warfare becomes the organising force. The taut militaristic fanfares in the accompaniment can’t entirely contain the music’s sense of revulsion at the mutilation and death war incurs, however. At the thought of the ‘lovely lads and dead and rotten’ the dotted rhythm becomes transmuted into a nightmarish perversion of the order it had imposed after ‘All to die’. The strings are silent, leaving exposed a highly complicated and rhythmically confusing piano passage, in which neither piano nor voice has any reference to the beat – one of the very rare moments of direct contemplation of corpses in the text effectively derails both piano and vocal line. The piano’s syncopations do not allow it to regain its bearings until the quartet reappears, redeeming the piano from its floundering with ordered triplets. These preface the text’s references to military music ‘Far the calling bugles hollo, | High the screaming fife replies’. Military order, in the form of triplets, dotted rhythms and drums, can rein in the uncontained imagination of the speaker, saving him from musical and mental disintegration on contemplation of horrors. But what kind of redemption is this? The militaristic music becomes louder and increasingly insistent, the cello’s drumming is reintroduced, and the overall effect is to drown out any thoughts other than those of blood-thirsty militarism. This is a musical parallel to the mood of patriotic

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fervour that led to many enlisting in 1914. However, both Gurney and Housman seem in agreement that the order provided by the military music is in its own way equally as hysterical as the piano’s uncontrolled response to the ‘dead and rotten’ corpses. Housman’s military instruments ‘scream’ and ‘hollo’; accordingly, Gurney sounds all his military motifs simultaneously, creating a cacophony out of tightly regimented figures.13 Gurney’s own relationship with the army was complicated. He enlisted in 1915 in the hope of regaining his health after what appears to have been a nervous breakdown. His sister Winifred believed that he ‘would have been alright in the army, it would have been good for him, had he not had to go to war’.14 His setting of ‘On the Idle Hill of Summer’ reflects his sense of the army’s therapeutic potential; its capacity to bring soldiers back from the brink of breakdown by imposing order. The setting also manages to capture the stultifying nature of army life – the army-associated rhythms are ungainly, incessant and leave no space for beauty, tearing through the landscape just as the marching soldiers invade the peace of the hillside. This echoes Gurney’s own wartime paradox – the framework that holds him together allows no space or time for creativity. Ludlow and Teme is characterised by a vacillation between, on the one hand, the beauty of the English countryside and, on the other, the contemplation of loss and premature death. For Gurney as poet and composer, expressing the war through music would have been an obvious project. Ludlow and Teme is no less a war-influenced work than his war poetry, despite its texts pre-dating the war by eighteen years. Gurney’s musical treatment of A Shropshire Lad is less immediately obvious than his statements in his war poetry, but it represents a creative response to the war that is perhaps a unique example of the sentiments of a war poet translated into musical composition. This is more than simply war poetry in sound, of course; Gurney has chosen not to set his own texts but Housman’s, and so by definition must enter into a dialogue with them and their ideas and assumptions. By setting Housman to music, Gurney is able to harness the poems’ cultural associations (with the pastoral, England and nationhood), whilst commenting on, enhancing and interpreting Housman’s poems. By choosing such contentious and culturally meaning-laden texts, Gurney can use A Shropshire Lad to explore his own complicated post-war relationship to beauty, loss and anger through the medium of song.

Notes 1. Letter to Marion Scott, 1 April 1917, G.41.83, Collected Letters, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (Northumberland: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1991), p. 238. 2. In 1907 Gurney presented a copy of A Shropshire Lad to his godfather and intellectual mentor the Reverend Alfred Cheesman, and also sent a copy via Cheesman to Rudyard Kipling. (Cheesman’s reminiscences in an unpublished letter to Marion Scott, 19 April 1937, G.46.27.1–6.) 3. John Bayley, Housman’s Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 3. 4. Handwritten notes on Gurney’s concert programme, Wednesday 5 May 1920, G.8.36. 5. Trevor Hold, Parry to Finzi: Twenty English Song-Composers (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2002), p. 294. 6. A. E. Housman, ‘A Shropshire Lad’ and Other Poems, ed. Archie Burnett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010), p. 12.

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7. Ernest Newman, The Manchester Guardian, 10 February 1921, p. 4. 8. ‘“The Great Years of their Lives”’, Listener, 86 (2207) (15 July 1971), p. 74. Quoted in Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 126. 9. Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End (A Man Could Stand Up, 1926) (London: Penguin, 1982), part II, chapter vi, p. 637. 10. Ivor Gurney, ‘On Somme’, Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney, ed. P. J. Kavanagh (Northumberland: Carcanet, 1982) p. 157. 11. Ivor Gurney, ‘Strange Service’, in Severn and Somme (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1917), pp. 23–4. 12. Bayley, p. 38. 13. The original version of this passage is marked teneramente, and stops all movement in the accompanying instruments. Gurney replaced this static setting with the one now performed, written whilst he was resident in Dartford Asylum in 1925. 14. Winifred Gurney, letter to Don Ray, December 1950, GA.78.24, Ivor Gurney Society Journal (2005), p. 72.

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57 Music and Contemporary Poetry: Audience, Apology and Silence Will May

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n 2013, Faber published THE WORD on the Street, a collection of lyrics written by poet Paul Muldoon. The blurb takes a certain delight in announcing the author is ‘Founding Chair of the Lewis Centre for the Arts, Princeton University’, and also a lyric-writer for ‘the music collective Wayward Shrines’; the collection’s subtitle is careful to make clear these are ‘rock’ lyrics, rather than pop.1 This is a writer who straddles the academy and the counter-culture. Of course, the project is more aware of its relationship to ‘the street’ than its title suggests. The majority of the songs poke fun at the project’s authenticity: titles like ‘Comeback’ and ‘Days of Yore’ indicate a certain level of ironic posturing. While some lyrics begin with a well-worn piece of American slang that might pass for contemporary rock song (‘Go-to Guy’, ‘Good Luck with That’), Muldoon cannot quite constrain his verbal ingenuity: ‘I met Joan in Peace Studies | We soon become best buddies’ is the opening couplet of ‘Feet of Clay’ (p. 28), while another song threatens to leave a lover ‘So long as you think venison | Is a form of stagflation’ (p. 58). The lyrics offer themselves half as parodies of rock songs, and half as parodies of poets writing rock songs. The knowingness reaches its apex in the refrain, ‘If a guitar isn’t hollow | You know it won’t ring true’ (p. 40), a glib reversal which seems sure it won’t ring true either. A certain hollowness necessarily attends a book of rock lyrics written by a Princeton poetry professor. Yet the posturing becomes plaintive in the song ‘It’s Never Too Late for Rock ’N’ Roll’, which reminds us not only that ‘It may be too late to think that you’re | Never too late for rock ’n’ roll’, but that we ‘have to believe we’ve found some common ground’ (p. 42). The audience for a rock song and a book of poetry might be contrasted not only in their demographic, but in their dimensions: a rock audience might be larger, but more fickle. Muldoon’s plea for a ‘common ground’ doesn’t look forward to a future of poets’ collaboration with pop stars, but an audience attuned to the sound of both kinds of verbal music. Words from the street formed an important part of another poetry book published that year, Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients (2013), which won the Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry. The poem began its life as a commission from the Battersea Arts Centre, where it was performed over a live score composed by Nell Catchpole. Like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the poem turns to myth to tell the story of contemporary London, and, in particular, two families and their slow descent into desperation. Yet the subsequent appearance of the poem in print, stripped of its musical accompaniment, draws attention to the importance

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that musical culture plays in the poem itself. No panoramic view of contemporary Britain is complete, for example, without a vision of Simon Cowell grandstanding on X Factor. The poem describes him shaking his head in fury when one of the unfortunate contestants deigns to subject him to ‘another version | of a bridge over fucking troubled water’.2 Tempest’s poem has a keen eye for the ways contemporary culture has exhausted its faith in everyday heroism. In its place, self-appointed gods pour scorn on the last remnants of the lyric – a hopeful nobody performing a cover version of Simon and Garfunkel on a television talent show. The poem asks us to attend to a world outside of this circus, but is generous enough to afford Simon Cowell a place in the bardic tradition too, imagining a future lay by troubadours which will sing ‘the Deeds of Simon’.3 The poem is frustrated with itself for watching, but cannot quite look away. These two very different works suggest that to invoke music in a contemporary poem is not to summon up Romantic effusion, but to indicate a very particular audience, with its own set of assumptions and conditioned behaviours: the ironic audience who might attend to a poet in an aging rock band, or the transfixed television audience compelled by their own self-disgust. Yet both works attempt to find a way of exploring, through those carefully delineated audiences, a wider public. The projects also remind us that the relationship between music and contemporary poetry is most often one of praxis rather than theory. Sure enough, Tempest’s first rap recording, Everybody Down (2014), followed on from her first poetry collection. Some of Britain’s best-known poets – Don Paterson, Fiona Sampson – are accomplished musicians; many others have worked collaboratively, either as librettists (Simon Armitage, David Harsent) or in more experimental roles. All these collaborations have their own particular dynamics: a very different working relationship underpins David Harsent’s twenty-year association with the composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle, which has produced two operas, as opposed to The Voiceworks project, led by poet Carol Watts, which brings together sound artists, composers, poets and musicians to develop pieces through workshop. These encounters raise questions not just about the creative exchanges underpinning collaboration, but the ways in which contemporary poetry might explore and expand its own audience. In this sense, music prompts contemporary poetry not just to think about its form, but about its forum. This case study will consider the broad range of musical cultures invoked in contemporary British poetry, and suggest how these genres inflect its scope and range. It will conclude with a close reading of Lavinia Greenlaw’s poem ‘Silent Disco’ (2013), a poem which uses music as a starting point to consider the relationship between lyric and audience. Music has often been a cultural barometer for poetry. To suggest a lyric poet is also a musician is, of course, not a new idea. As Edward T. Cone notes, many lyric speakers make it clear they ‘regard themselves as musicians’.4 Yet, as the case of Paul Muldoon suggests, contemporary poets’ extra-curricular activities can sometimes suggest an impatience with the cultural expectations of a poet. Simon Armitage’s Gig asserts he ‘only became a poet through the process of failing to be a rock star’,5 and asks himself why he is on a university English syllabus and not Joni Mitchell. This is not just about a personal love of music, but about the institutions of poetry themselves. He wryly surmises that ‘promoters of literary events also nurse a secret desire to be organising Glastonbury rather than the Ledbury Poetry Festival’.6 Since his

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book was published, the line between the two may have dissolved. The last decade has seen the introduction of poetry tents and readings at music festivals, although these can sometimes sideline the poetry they mean to promote. The Zimbabweborn poet Tinashe Mushakavanhu casts an ironic eye over poets performing at the Green Man Festival, where the spoken word has been programmed on the ‘FOLKEY DOKEY STAGE | a caul of coloured veined lights’; he prefers it once the poets have been packed away for sound-systems, and the audience dance to ‘Robert Plant’s howl’ which ‘sounded the moment’s trumpet’.7 This is a music festival largely emptied of music: campers share cigarettes and ‘snide remarks’, while an ‘overworked waitress’ serves the long queues on the Thai food stall. The poet has returned to being a troubadour, sounding their voice in a rainy English field, but sometimes wishes they could be back in the library. This sense of the contemporary poem having an awkward or embarrassed encounter with music is not limited to popular music festivals. We can hear the sound of contemporary poetry apologising for itself in many of its encounters with music. In Christopher Middleton’s poem ‘Hearing Elgar Again’ (1980), a recording sends the poet-speaker back to the past, but unable to articulate what he finds there. He is drunk, and has ‘forgot what I have to say’, while his voice is drowned under life’s ‘curious orchestra’.8 In David Constantine’s 1998 poem ‘Musicians in the Underground’, the title substitutes poetry for music, and the poem does the same. An angelic performance of a busker leaves the poet coldly dismissive about any attempt to describe it: ‘how wrong | And slovenly my tongue felt’.9 These gestures don’t seem wholly rhetorical, and suggest that British poetry has, more widely, adopted a self-deprecating stance. The poem turns to music only to bring back silence or apology. If this gesture is a long-established one in poetry, it has come under particular scrutiny in the last twenty years in the work of poet-critic Geoffrey Hill. To turn to music can be to suggest the limits of a verbal response, but as Hill notes, it is often an elegant excuse for saying nothing: the expansive, outward gesture towards the condition of music is a helpless gesture of surrender oddly analogous to that stylish aesthetic of despair, that desire for the ultimate integrity of silence, to which so much eloquence has been so frequently and indefatigably devoted.10 As Hill’s tone suggests, much of this eloquence is labouring in vain. Once the poet surrenders to the desire for silence, music and absence, they drift into ‘marginal sentimentalities’:11 Hill puts T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘The Music of Poetry’ (1942) firmly in this category, reluctant to forgive him for writing of feelings which only music can express, and finds similar tropes amongst his contemporaries. In Speech! Speech! (2000), Hill’s collection of sonnets, he remains chary of a poet’s submission to the primacy of music, finding it akin to a ‘communications breakdown’, which makes use of a facile rhetorical trick to celebrate their ‘fanatical | expressionless self-creation on a stuck track’.12 Hill’s accusation of poetry being in a ‘struck track’ works a neat reversal: it adopts a musical metaphor in parody of the writers who would do similar only to offer it as a kind of attack. The same collection offers a telling rewrite of Walter Pater’s famous proclamation about the relationship between poetry and music, asserting that ‘Poetry aspires | to

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the condition of Hebrew’ (p. 10). Here, Hill asserts his preference for gnomic difficulty over sensuous excess, and for erudition over entertainment. Poetry requires us to think, not to abandon our thinking, and its doctrine of musical aspiration becomes, for Hill, a cop-out. This rewriting of poetic history is defiant, and, in sonnet 73, becomes pugilistic, as the speaker-poet does battle with contemporary works which are created ‘neither tó music, nor | fróm music, nór, altogether, fór silence’ (p. 37). The poet then does battle with ‘RAPMASTER’ in order to ‘disclaim spontaneity, | the appearance of which is power’ (p. 46). If Hill presented himself as a lone voice in contemporary poetry, waging a war against the writers taking up gigs at rock festivals, his critique does not capture the range of ways contemporary poetry makes use of music. For many writers, music is not an opportunity to bemoan their lack of readers or their eloquence, but rather to consider a medium both eclectic, and more democratic in its relationship with its audience. Matthew Welton is a poet whose words are often set to music: many of his performances are in collaboration with the contemporary ensemble The House of Bedlam. Yet his work, which gestures to concrete poetry, Dada and Raymond Queneau, is not interested in lyricism; its inclusion of music is not the ‘expansive, outward gesture’ that so bothers Hill. Welton turns to music not to import melody, but mathematics. In the second poem making up the thirteen-poem sequence ‘Dr Suss’ in We Needed Coffee But . . . (2009), he generates the text from a series of themes and variations on a single sentence, as in the following extract: Late in the evening over beer and cold hot-dogs, she hums me the folksongs she learned from Bobby Moore. Late in the evening over beer and cold hot-dogs, she hums me the melodies she learned from Boethius. Late in the evening over beer and cold hot-dogs, she hums me the refrains she learned from Bononcini. Late in the evening over beer and cold hot-dogs, she hums me the riffs she learned from Boris III.13 The food on offer in these sentences never changes, but the form and originator of the music always modulates. It’s a kind of verbal serialism. Here, in a baldly repetitive cycle, we listen for a range of genres. The variable list of tunesmiths galumphs alphabetically through Bruce Forsyth and Buster Keaton, while the musical variable takes in marches, quartets, jingles, ballads, concertos and preludes, before we finally come to settle on drones from Ferdinand Magellan. The barrage of musical forms is, in one sense, entirely random, as is their unlikely match. Boris III is no more likely to play a riff than Bononcini is to sing a refrain. It makes the romantic encounter between the speaker and the subject rather less amorous too: an intimate shared musical experience is repeated ad absurdum. An apparently meaningful moment between two people is revealed as an endlessly permutating pattern. Yet it might be less a mockery of this encounter than the cultural signifiers trying to keep it interesting. Stripped of their context, the writers and musicians Welton’s poem namechecks fail to summon up the cultural associations we expect. A poem with a soundworld eclectic enough to include ‘riffs’, ‘folksongs’ and ‘refrains’ makes no value judgement about their respective merits. All are rendered interchangeable. It suggests a particularly generous way of reading Welton’s poetic practice too: forms and genres are the variables, but there are structures of meaning beyond these categories.

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Christopher Reid, working with a much more traditional poetic language, is similarly interested in the ways our eclectic musical taste might free us from factional divisions in poetry. In his collection Nonsense (2012), the interplay between different musical forms is more explicit, and is linked to the deft moves Reid’s own poems might make between the grandiloquent and the workaday. The sound of piano practice from a back window, ‘intricate as hopscotch’, reminds the speakers of ‘the dauntless human musical endeavour!’ in ‘La Tartuga’;14 this brave endeavour resounds throughout the collection, which takes in poems on the raga, and the sublime thoughts prompted by a rough-and-ready pub band. Yet the most significant role music plays is not as a refuge from poetry and language, but from the institutions of poetry. In the final poem of the collection, ‘Neddy and the Night Noises’, Reid’s comic self-caricature awakes hungover in the early hours, and becomes preoccupied with his ratings in a poetry popularity contest published in the Poetry Gazette. What calls him away from this distraction, and finally prompts him to write, is the sound of the world around him, the ‘small complex fugue of the small hours’,15 and his realisation that anything he adds to it will be a welcome addition. Music is a distraction from concerns about audience. Every possible noise he might make will be ‘in tune’ with ‘this all-embracing symphony’. Unlike poetry, an institution which might threaten censure, the music of the spheres is rather more accommodating. He tests the water by farting, and hears it answered by an ambulance siren. Music is not just used as a series of figurative postures here, but as a way for the poet to negotiate questions of audience and reception. Music’s particular set of metaphors offers it a more reliable position in the cosmos than poetry. Fiona Sampson’s Bloodaxe poetry lectures, published as Music Lessons (2011), are instructive here: they present themselves as a bulwark against petty divisions in modern verse. Drawing on her training as a concert violinist, Sampson suggests that effective readers and listeners need to be good interpreters of poetry. In the same way as a performer is obliged to ‘get’ a piece and its artistic strategies, however far it may be from their personal taste, a keen poetry reader should avoid setting up oppositions between, for example ‘the contrasted eco-mythologies of Alice Oswald and John Kinsella, or the alternatives Barry MacSweeney and W. S. Graham offer Northern Modernism after Basil Bunting’.16 What Sampson calls ‘deep listening’ is a way of making both makers and readers of poetry more attentive, and appreciative of difference rather than suspicious of it. Throughout her argument, her musical and poetic examples are deliberately drawn from opposite ends of canons and genres, embracing a variety of audiences: a section on how melody can generate lyrics instinctively notes how ‘bored musicians, or football fans, improvise obscenity to fit anything from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony to Jesus Christ Superstar’ (p. 26). In part, music is an analogy which affords difficult poetry more traction, or offers a way of explaining its appeal: as Sampson argues, because melody is ‘meaningful in itself’ (p. 24), a lyric utterance needn’t make grammatical sense for it to communicate. The relationship between maths, architecture and music – the need for sequences, patterns and models – also offers a version of artistic creation which welcomes both the formalist and the avant-garde experimenters. As Sampson argues, ‘awareness of abstract form allows us to pitch our critical ear beyond habitual loyalties’, yet also to ‘hear structures’ that generate ‘the great variety of existing poetics’ (p. 44). Tellingly, her word for the

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experiential quality of the arts is ‘chromaticism’ (p. 48): what differentiates one poem from another is not its particular coterie, but the peculiar effects prompted by each particular inflection, rhythm and image. Sampson turns to music as a way of thinking about poetry’s audience more expansively, and it is a cue that many contemporary poetry critics have followed. Peter Middleton’s influential study of poetry performance, Distant Reading (2005), notes that ‘stage, authorship, sound and intersubjectivity are constitutive elements of a poetry reading that are analogous to reading itself’;17 thinking about a poem accompanied by music is also a way of reconceptualising our reading practice. Particular types of music might also prompt us to reimagine what a poetry performance could be. David Caplan argues in Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (2006) that rap musicians ask ‘rivals to match their technical skills and invite their audience’s active participation’. For this audience, silence would constitute ‘the gravest rejection’.18 Far from turning to music as a means of admitting defeat, as Hill suggests, contemporary poetry more often uses music as a way of rethinking how it might pitch itself to its readers. This generous eclecticism informs Lavinia Greenlaw’s memoir The Importance of Music to Girls (2007), where she recalls ‘it did not seem strange to me to go from the record shop to the music shop, to buy a Buzzcocks single and some Chopin Preludes in the same afternoon’.19 In this world, life’s choices are not only made to a soundtrack but defined by the possible soundtracks they might entail: an early trip to Cambridge finds her baffled by the prospect of a ‘party without music’ (p. 178); at school she fears becoming a ‘bourgeois’ person who listens to ‘terrible music’ (p. 177). Her first trip to the opera is to see Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, where she is baffled by a sonic texture which has not been mixed, produced and electrified: ‘I had thought opera was artificial when all it was was a bunch of people making the noise they really made’ (p. 142). Her description of operatic performers as apparently casual and authentic as punk thinks it is being (though her profoundly socially conscious teenage self knows different) suggests the eventual possibility of living in both musical worlds. Music allows the fledgling poet to be part of two audiences at once, and so to realise how expansively, messily and idiosyncratically a particular listener might navigate their way through art. The overlap between internal music and public song, between a poetry that lingers in libraries and takes the stage, is captured neatly in Greenlaw’s lyric ‘Silent Disco’, from The Casual Perfect (2011). The phenomenon of the silent disco, which finds revellers wearing wireless headphones and often choosing their own music to listen to, seems contemporary in two ways: its sensitivity to noise as pollution, and its acknowledgement that a large gathering of people may have very different musical tastes. Communion comes from putting a large audience together without asking them to pledge their allegiance to a particular school or orthodoxy. While silent discos have a number of historical precedents, they became popular in the twenty-first century; the term only found its way into the OED the same year as Greenlaw’s poem was published. It reminds us, as Andrew Blake notes, that ‘musical hegemony is perpetually in flux’.20 The phenomenon offers the poet an isolated collective, each dancing to their own music: a symbol of respectful difference, or indifferent individualism. It also offers the curious spectacle of a crowd apparently dancing to

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nothing, a party without a soundtrack. Yet while Greenlaw’s poem acknowledges the larger ensemble, with its female figure ‘dancing to a song you can’t hear’,21 its interest is not sociological: the focus is on an individual throughout. The poem’s addressee watches the woman dancing, conscious they have ‘never seen her so clearly’. The music that instructs her body to dance is unheard and unknown, and even her bodily gestures tell us nothing spontaneous – they are simply ‘a move perfected’, a routine she practised while she was queuing to get into the club. She becomes herself not because of her taste in music or her style of dance, but because her total immersion in both means ‘she forgets herself as seen’. She becomes, in the words of the poem, pure ‘line and ring’. This phrase, repeated twice in the poem, has hints of the Wagnerian Ring cycle, but also the way in which a poem might have affinities with the musical line. The complex interplay between unhearing and unseen here suggests a way in which a very disparate audience, or a very dispersed collective, might yet be faithful to themselves. It also offers one model for thinking about how contemporary poets engage with music. Their headsets often switch between different genres, coming in or out of sync with their fellow practitioners, but their impulse remains collectivist.

Notes 1. Paul Muldoon, The Word on the Street (London: Faber, 2013). All further references are to the edition cited and parenthesised in the text. 2. Kate Tempest, Brand New Ancients (London: Picador, 2013), p. 28. 3. Ibid. 4. Edward T. Cone, ‘Poet’s Love or Composer’s Love?’, in Steven Paul Scher, Music and Text: Critical Enquires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 177–92 (p. 179). 5. Simon Armitage, Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock Star Fantasist (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 11. 6. Ibid., p. 12. 7. Tinashe Mushakavanhu, ‘The Green Man Festival’, in Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poets, ed. Jackie Kay, James Proctor and Gemma Robinson (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2012), p. 160. 8. Christopher Middleton, ‘Hearing Elgar Again’, in The Word Pavilion and Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), p. 200. 9. David Constantine, ‘Musicians in the Underground’, in Collected Poems (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2004), p. 234. 10. Geoffrey Hill, ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”’, in Collected Critical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 3–20 (p. 11). 11. ‘Word Value in F. H. Bradley and T. S. Eliot’, in Collected Critical Writings, pp. 532–47 (p. 546). 12. Geoffrey Hill, Speech! Speech! (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 2. All further references are to the edition cited and parenthesised in the text. 13. Matthew Welton, ‘Dr Suss’, in We Needed Coffee But . . . (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009), p. 80. 14. Christopher Reid, ‘La Tartuga’, in Nonsense (London: Faber, 2012), p. 101. 15. Christopher Reid, ‘Neddy and the Night Noises’, in Nonsense, pp. 113–16 (p. 113). 16. Fiona Sampson, Music Lessons (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2011), p. 9. All further references are to the edition cited and parenthesised in the text. 17. Peter Middleton, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), p. 95.

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18. David Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 108. 19. Lavinia Greenlaw, The Importance of Music to Girls (London: Faber, 2007), p. 65. All further references are to the edition cited and parenthesised in the text. 20. Andrew Blake, The Land without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 219. 21. Lavinia Greenlaw, ‘Silent Disco’, in The Casual Perfect (London: Faber, 2011), p. 23.

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OPERA

58 LE CAS DEBUSSY: Layers of Resonance from Literature into Music Richard Langham Smith

S

ituating Debussy’s music in the complex web of artistic cross-currents of his time was a preoccupation which began before his death. Before the turn of the century it was clear that his relationship to a wide variety of literature was of considerable interest. Yet in the wake of his death, the main line of enquiry was whether or not he would be better placed alongside Impressionist painting than beside his contemporary musicians. ‘Debussy: était-il impressionniste?’ (‘Was Debussy an Impressionist?’) was the overarching question. Or was he a ‘Symbolist’? He was right to object to being boxed in by ‘isms’ – ‘termes commodes pour mépriser son semblable’ (‘useful terms of abuse’) he called them1 – yet neither comparison with Impressionism nor Symbolism emerges as entirely infertile.2 Yet to restrict his interaction with literature to the writers of the already widely diverse French and Belgian symbolist movements is somewhat off the mark. Also untenable is any approach which curtails itself to Debussy’s texted music, for so much of his output is related to extra-musical – often literary – ideas, sometimes overt in his titles (of the Préludes for example), but sometimes only evident from scraps of quotations on scores. This is the case with the Cello Sonata, for instance, where we learn that it is in some way about ‘Pierrot faché avec la lune’ (‘Pierrot angry with the moon’).3 Nearly a hundred years after Debussy’s death there are two studies still begging to be written: the first a study of the composer’s songs, of which, as yet, we have no scholarly, complete edition.4 The second would approach from the plethora of other clues about Debussy’s preoccupations, looking at the hinterland behind his texts, and to the welter of unfinished (or never-started) projects and to literary figures he confessed as important, in interviews, letters or articles. Maybe the most interesting of all are the writers we know he admired, but whose work he never set. Paramount among these, perhaps, was Jules Laforgue, as we learn particularly from his correspondence with Robert Godet.5 This brief case study will sketch two sections from these imagined unwritten books, its bifurcated approach bound to be indebted to the Debussy scholar Edward Lockspeiser who was the first to open up the composer’s literary connections as part of his ‘life and mind’. Lockspeiser’s way was to leave no stone unturned, and to dig deep behind literary sources. In an era when anglophone musicology was preoccupied with

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musical detail and structure, his angle was in some quarters found wanting because of his uninterest in writing about the ‘kitchen secrets’ of the music itself. No better place to begin than with an example of non-texted music inextricable from literary connections: the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Lockspeiser, aided by the French scholar Eileen Souffrin le Breton, was the first to stress the importance of a curious parallel development from Diane au bois by the Parnassian poet Théodore de Banville, although he was perhaps too ready to place it within the genre of a cantata whereas the text fell into a short-lived hybrid category: the Acte en vers. On the one hand this ‘Versed Act’ was a self-confessed influence on Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem – L’après-midi d’un faune. On the other hand, Debussy, in the 1880s, set a section of Banville’s poem as a substantial scène lyrique with a soprano and tenor playing the parts of Diane and Éros, and this became a prototype for ideas perfected in his later celebrated, but untexted, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.6 Lockspeiser interrogated the literary connections between Banville’s Diane and Mallarmé’s Faune: both were variations on the Pan-myth which recurrently attracted Debussy, as did poetry in general where there is a diagetic musical element. Both share a faune-figure’s flute as the agent of seduction: his improvisations in Diane render the eponymous heroine powerless to resist her conquest, but in the case of Mallarmé’s faune fancying two entwined nymphs, his playing is to no avail at all; perhaps it was only a dream . . . Certainly no coition. On three distinct levels the interrogation can be taken further: first, by a wider reading of Diane (which is perhaps more tongue-in-cheek than Lockspeiser and Souffrin seem to have realised); and, second, by comparison of the three versions of the Mallarmé poem, where the theme of music is increasingly refined. In addition, the resonances of the term ‘prélude’ reveal significance in relation to the faune’s fluteplaying, and the musical parallels between the scène lyrique and the later orchestral Prélude throw light on Debussy’s musical maturation. From the outset, Banville draws humour from a satyr called Gniphon whose total ineptitude at seducing any of Diana’s nymphs is in direct contrast to the immediate success of Eros whose improvisations (and blond pelt) at once arouse the goddess of chastity herself. By contrast, the unsuccessful Gniphon self-pityingly ‘weeps into a fountain’. It is clear from the opening stage direction that this is not to be taken too seriously: Une clairière, avec des tapis d’herbe, des ombrages, des ruisseaux et une cascade dont en entend le murmure par intervalles. On aperçoit dans le lointain les sommets d’Olympe, couverts de neige. Au lever du rideau, entre Gniphon, satyre aux oreilles pointues, aux cheveux ébouriffés, couronnés de lierre, au visage rougissant et imberbe. Il est vêtu d’une peau de chèvre, et l’on voit, attachée sur sa poitrine par un cordon en bandoulière, une flûte de roseau. Gniphon tient à la main une outre rebondie et pendant toute la première scène, il boit sans interruption, de façon à arriver graduellement à une ivresse complète. (A clearing, with grassy lawns and some shade, streams and a waterfall whose sound is sporadically heard. In the distance can be seen the peaks of Mount Olympus, covered in snow. The curtain rises at the entry of Gniphon, a satyr with pointed ears, unkempt hair crowned with ivy and with a ruddy, shaven face. He is wearing

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a goat-skin, and you can see that attached to his belt with a ribbon is a flute made out of a reed. Gniphon has in his hand a well-filled wine-skin which he drinks from continuously throughout the first scene with the aim of gradually becoming completely drunk.) The tension between the sometimes amusing subject-matter and Banville’s renowned virtuosity with the subtleties of the Alexandrine is very much the essence of this Acte en vers.7 Moreover, significant details about Gniphon accrue, contrasting with Eros’s well-honed seductive skills: his flute is much finer, borrowed from the well-practised Selenius (Silène), a demi-god and friend of Bacchus, also renowned for his drunkenness and prowess at vanquishing nymphs. Improvisatory flute-playing as a prelude to seduction is the crux of both literary texts, ‘prélude’ being the operative word. On the one hand it is associated with spontaneous foreplay, but it has a more specific meaning with regard to French music and particularly flute-playing. The celebrated flautist (from a family of flute-makers) Jacques Hotteterre (1674–1763) wrote a treatise on flute-playing and published a book of model preludes to teach the art of improvising them – a tradition which had been established by lutenists and clavecinistes of the preceding century and continued into the nineteenth. This collection, L’Art de préluder, transferred the tradition to the wind-instrument repertoire and especially the transverse flute. The pieces were essentially warm-up preludes, where the players tested the various registers and the tuning idiosyncrasies of the instrument. It was a repertoire – the foundations of the French tradition of flute-playing – which underwent a revival across the turn of the century in the hands of such masters as Paul Taffanel, who played and published music by such composers as Blavet and Hotteterre. Several of the aspects of ‘preluding’ are exploited by Mallarmé over his three evolving versions of the poem.8 In the first, entitled Monologue d’un faune there is only a brief reference to ‘la flûte où j’ajuste le pipeau’ (‘the flute where I tune the pipe’) – the word ‘ajuster’ having a dual significance: ‘to adjust’ and ‘to make just’ – i.e. ‘to tune’. This is the first seed of the poetic idea that the fluteplaying symbolises the faune’s striving for perfection. Mallarmé’s second draft is entitled L’Improvisation d’un faune. In this the faune plays two flutes at once, or perhaps a double-flute, fairly commonly seen in Hellenic imagery. In the final version there is a veiled reference to ejaculation: the nymphs are sprinkled with ‘des larmes folles ou de moins tristes vapeurs’ (‘crazy tears or less sad vapours’) – ‘vapours’ having in French, as in Victorian English, a reference to tears. The flute’s phallic symbolism has at last become explicit. The idea of perfection is reinforced in the final version of Mallarmé’s poem by the removal of an awkward rhyme on the word ‘Holà’ where the phrase is recrafted to the line: ‘Trop d’hymen souhaité de qui cherche le LA’ (‘Too much desire for union by whoever searches for the A’). ‘A’ is the note of perfection, the diapason or tuning-note of the Aeolian mode. Such refinement and amplification of the theme of music in the poem are evident as the three progressive versions of the poem develop. In both Diane and Faune Debussy chooses C sharp as the all-important root note of the flute’s improvisation. Any modern-day flautist will confirm that this is the most difficult, unfingered note on the instrument, the pipe itself sounding purely, but very challenging as regards making a nice (seductive) noise to match the other notes of the scale. Debussy has found the modern orchestral equivalent of the perfect ‘LA’

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Mallarmé makes the quest of his faune. At its première, flute-players in the audience would have raised an eyebrow at Debussy’s audacity: to begin a piece with the very note advised against by orchestral treatises, and to hold it for several seconds before repeating it.9 A closer look at the musical score reveals further connections. There are echoes of distant horns, alluded to in a stage direction in Banville’s Diane: Éros s’assied sur un banc de pierre et joue sur la flûte de Silène un chant rêveur et passionné auquel répond un bruit lointain de cors, presque étouffé. Puis il prête l’oreille et écoute attentivement. ÉROS: Rien. Là-bas c’est le bruit faible et mourant des cors. Éros reprend sa flûte et continue le chant commencé [. . .] (Eros sits down on a stony ledge and plays on Silenius’s flute a dreamy and passionate tune to which distant horns reply, almost muted. Then he leans over and listens attentively.) EROS: It’s nothing. Only the weak sound of dying horns. (Eros takes his flute again and continues playing his tune [. . .]) Thus in Diane the horns are explicitly those of Diana’s nymphs: as well as the goddess of Chastity she is the goddess of hunting, and her minions carry horns. In Mallarmé’s poem they are not alluded to but Debussy retains them as a musical idea to give depth to his soundscape, and are one way of reminding us of the Hellenic setting of Mallarmé’s poem. Delving further into Banville’s text, we find more references to the musical aspect of this imagined landscape. Omnipresent is the lyre, whose modern equivalent is perhaps the harp: prominent gestures on the two harps follow (unusual to have two in such a small orchestra). There are no strings or other wind as yet, just a pseudoHellenic, Parnassian soundscape: flute, horns and ‘lyre’. This has little to do with Impressionism although that word is bandied about in virtually every commentary on Debussy’s piece.10 A question-mark hangs over Debussy’s original intention for its genre, announced as a triptych: Prélude, interludes et paraphrase finale on Mallarmé’s poem. We have no idea what that meant: an accompaniment to a spoken recitation perhaps? All that we know is that it morphed into a prelude, and it cannot be fortuitous that the piece has the same number of bars as the poem has lines. Moving to a texted piece, it was not long after the composition of Faune that Debussy began his opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which has received far more commentary than his other literary works though there is more to be said in the light of our changing views of Maurice Maeterlinck, its Belgian playwright. Many have claimed that the play would have been forgotten had Debussy not converted it into an opera: a viewpoint less credible than it was as interest in Maeterlinck’s plays has increased considerably.

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The opera’s centenary in 2002 was celebrated by an international conference in Paris whose ‘Actes’ appeared, somewhat tardily, in 2012 accompanied by an invaluable collection of its press reviews, not exhaustive perhaps, but very substantial. Subsequent to the 2005 publication of Debussy’s correspondence,11 a brief but remarkable letter from Debussy to the critic Camille de Sainte-Croix, congratulating him on his insightful analysis of Debussy’s intentions, has turned up.12 It was very unusual for the composer to write to a critic, still more so because it was in admiring terms! Debussy thus signals Sainte-Croix’s review, published in La Petite République and Le Petit Bleu de Paris,13 as very much worthy of attention. It centres on the relationship between text and music, particularly on Debussy’s originality in this respect. A long review, it retells (most eloquently) the gist of Maeterlinck’s play. More importantly, it pinpoints Debussy’s response to each line of the drama: Tout ceci est dialogué par la musique avec une franchise de complainte qui révèle déjà le style personnel de M. Debussy. Ses mesures se renouvellent à chaque détail et suivent, syllabe à syllabe, la mélopée du discours, s’adaptant de la façon la plus souple par leur diversité continue à la diversité des mots. (The dialogue [of the first scene] is set to music with the candour of a lament, an honesty already revealing the distinctive style of Debussy. Its bars unfold with each detail and follow, syllable by syllable, the rise and fall of the conversation, adapting themselves in the most flexible way by their continuous diversity, to the diversity of the words.) When he has finished recounting the tale, he returns to Debussy’s originality: Son originalité tranche violemment sur l’ambiance. On pourrait donner à croire que cette originalité tient à des procédés spéciaux: n’être jamais dans une tonalité connue, ne se reposer jamais sur un rythme convenu, négliger des armures, au rebours des compositeurs modernes, qui, précisément, obtiennent tous leurs effets par des changements d’armures fréquents et brusques; donner à chaque note, par les seuls accidents, une sonorité imprévue; voiler la subtilité symphonique des nuances, sous une apparente monotonie dans la répétition continue des dissonances formant le tissu même de la conception harmonique, etc. etc. (His originality starkly brings out the atmosphere. It could be concluded that this originality stems from technical procedures: never being in a recognizable key, not settling on one rhythm, not bothering with key-signatures, contrary to modern composers who rely upon frequent and abrupt changes of key-signature to obtain all their effects; [Debussy] gives to each note an unexpected sound by the use of a single accidental; veiling the symphonic subtlety of nuances with an apparent monotony of repetition where dissonances make up the very fabric of the harmonic conception, etc, etc.) He is the first French musician for a long time really to open up a new way of unifying musical and literary expression.

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Sainte-Croix does hit several nails on the head. Firstly his comparison to a ‘complainte’ (‘a sad, even tragic, sung ballad about the woes of someone, perhaps – but perhaps not – legendary) is a good way of describing Maeterlinck’s simple and repetitive style and the overall gloom’.14 His detail on musical procedures is also astute, noting the composer’s economy of means in responding so subtly to the nuances (of both intonation and meaning) of the text, often with a single changed accidental. Sainte-Croix was perceptive, both on the literary roots and the details of the musical response: no wonder Debussy admired his review. Pelléas defies the conventional approach to the study of opera which goes behind the libretto to see how it relates to its sources and forward to the music to see how the ‘numbers’ of the libretto are translated into music. Essentially this was because the text to Debussy’s opera was not a libretto, it was a carefully-cut play. He wisely excised the opening where cleaning-women were pouring soap and water over the entrance to the castle, hopelessly trying to remove an indelible stain of blood. Even though this destroys one element of the circularity of the play which begins and ends with the ‘quotidien’, the simple souls who ‘know’, an opera which opens with scrubbing brushes and eau de Javel would never have been a good idea, and the symbolism is perhaps too obvious anyway. A surgical knife also removed some descriptive details, particularly about Mélisande as a princess with her clothes torn by the briars, and in the last Act the choral chanting (very effective when the play is performed) was ignored. But it is still a play not a libretto, as Maeterlinck’s widow was always quick to point out. We are left with a balance between voices and orchestra which is like nothing else; a new equilibrium which was unpopular with those who expected opera to entertain with a procession of effects, good tunes and female display. Instead we have a sung play set against what is often called the ‘décor orchestral’ or ‘orchestral backcloth’. Except that it is not that: it is much more, playing with transforming, subtle motives whose significance we cannot quite pin down, yet whose modulations are perfectly wedded to the ultra-sensitive interplay of the drama. As one early commentator remarked of the play, ‘it reveals through concealment’, an observation made by a prominent critic, William Archer, regarding a London performance of its first production (given in French) by Lugné-Poe’s company.15 What Lugné-Poe’s production was like is a particularly important line of enquiry because it provides some clues as to Debussy’s first encounter with the Maeterlinck play, about which exhaustive researches have revealed only further mystery.16 We know that he had seen the same production at its single Paris matinée on 17 May 1893 and began work on a scene somewhere in the middle straight afterwards. That we are unsure whether he had read it first in no way diminishes the importance of this staged encounter, by a company closely associated with its playwright and allied to its aesthetic. My own study of Pelléas of 1989 emphasised the Pre-Raphaelite elements behind the play but rather concentrated on the wrong production: an English one which sentimentalised the play.17 I have subsequently found no photographic records of the Lugné-Poe Pelléas although there are copious visual records of other Poe productions from which a picture of the general ethos can be gleaned.18 Similarly, there is scant press description of the production in the francophone press.19 Reception from the London critics is, on the other hand, particularly rich, especially the reviews of Virginia Crawford who wrote for high-class dailies on subjects

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as diffuse as French literature, Catholicism and horsemanship. Her description of the production, along with those of William Archer, reveal more than any other source I have been able to find to answer that all-important question: what did Debussy see and hear? Apparently it was veiled and dark, hardly discernible, and the voices were stylised, almost as if intoning.20 So much for the two examples of this very brief case study whose over-arching message is that one source leads to another: as it says on the level crossings in France ‘un train peut en cacher un autre’, and that’s the way the literature behind music must be addressed. Overall themes do emerge and the two imaginary books begging to be written could probably be chaptered fairly easily. Hellenism would provide fertile ground for exploration, as would Banville, and so would the imaginary Spain into which Debussy ventured only once but became strong in his imagination. Here, again, an early unfinished opera emerges as of considerable importance: Rodrigue et Chimène to a libretto by the rather hack writer Catulle Mendès. It was the longest piece except for Pelléas he ever wrote and he struggled with it, no doubt because it was too conventional. But he learnt a great deal from these struggles, and Pelléas would not be the same without the three Acts he managed to complete. Once again there are more important sources behind Mendès: the medieval myths on the subject of El Cid; Guilhem de Castro and Corneille. Though Mendès’s libretto is dull, his intention was to revive the spirit of a distant place before Corneille had intervened, and this intention causes Debussy to experiment with modes, structures and textures which he had not tried before. He continued to experiment right up to his last compositions: the last three sonatas, for example, seem to move away both from Impressionism and from any literary connections. Yet it is undeniable that literary influences and literary people affected his outlook considerably. He bequeathed to us a waste-paper-basket of unfinished collaborations with all kinds of literary figures, a feast for musicologists wishing to probe the mind of this fascinating artist.

Notes 1. ‘Entretien avec M. Croche’, La Revue blanche, 1 July 1901; reprinted in M. Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 47–52. Translated in Debussy on Music, trans. and ed. Richard Langham Smith (London: Secker and Warburg, 1977) pp. 44–50 (p. 48). 2. He was flattered by a comparison to Monet: ‘Vous m’honorez grandement en me disant l’élève de Claude Monet’ (‘You flatter me greatly by calling me a pupil of Claude Monet’). Letter to Émile Vuillermoz, 25 Jan. 1916, in Claude Debussy, Correspondance (1872– 1918), ed. François Lesure and Denis Herlin (Paris: Gallimard 2005), p. 1968. Before this, the critic Louis Laloy had included considerable discussion of Debussy and painting in his Claude Debussy (Paris: Dorbon Ainé, 1909), an ‘approved’ biography written during Debussy’s lifetime. 3. Debussy gave a longer description to a cellist, Louis Rosoor, who printed it in a programme note without the composer’s permission. Although Debussy protested against this ‘breach of confidence’ the description is interesting, not least because of its affinity with the Pierrot poems of Jules Laforgue: ‘Pierrot awakes with a somersault, shaking off his tiredness. He runs to serenade his beloved who, despite his pleading, rests impervious, he consoles his failure by singing a “liberty song”.’ On this, and for insights into all Debussy’s works, see the work-list by Denis Herlin in François Lesure, Claude Debussy (Paris: Fayard, 2003), pp. 463ff.

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4. The first volume of a two-volume edition of the complete songs appeared in 2016 in the Debussy Œuvres Complètes (Durand, Paris). The second is in progress. 5. See Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy, His Life and Mind, 2 vols (London: Cassell, 1962) I, pp. 130–1, 170. 6. As yet unpublished, this will appear in Debussy, Œuvres complètes. Lockspeiser worked with the French scholar Eileen Souffrin le Breton, whose several articles on Banville, Mallarmé and Debussy are central in the study of the genesis of both Mallarmé’s and Debussy’s Faune. 7. Banville was the author of a seminal treatise on versification: Petit Traité de poésie française (Paris: Charpentier, 1872). 8. These can be found in Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), I, pp. 153–66. 9. The flautist at the première was the eighteen-year-old Georges Barrère, in later life the dedicatee and first performer of Varèse’s celebrated ‘Density 21.5’ (1936). 10. A notable exception is the Portsmouth Gazette which, according to the Musical Times in June 1930, translated its title as ‘An Afternoon on a Farm’. See Percy Scholes, The Mirror of Music, 2 vols (London and Oxford: Novello, 1947), I, p. 450. 11. Debussy, Correspondance. 12. Pelléas et Mélisande cent ans après, ed. Christophe Branger, Sylvie Douche and Denis Herlin (Lyon: Symétrie, 2012), pp. 399–401. 13. Both 2 May 1902. 14. The richest modern edition of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande is that published by Editions Labor (Brussels, 1983) with extensive commentaries and reception history by Christian Lutaud. 15. The Théâtre de l’Œuvre performed Pelléas at the Opera-Comique in London in March 1895. Review by William Archer: ‘L’Œuvre’, in The Theatrical World of 1895 (London: Walter Scott, 1895), pp. 109–10 (p. 109). 16. See Denis Herlin, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande aux Bouffes-Parisiens’, in Pelléas et Mélisande cent ans après, pp. 41–57. 17. Roger Nichols and Richard Langham Smith, Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 18. See Le Théâtre de l’Œuvre 1893–1900 (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2005). 19. What there is has been presented in Denis Herlin’s article, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande aux Bouffes-Parisiens’. 20. See Richard Langham Smith, ‘Aimer ainsi’, in Rethinking Debussy, ed. Elliott Antokoletz and Marianne Wheeldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 76–95.

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59 Britten, Austen and MANSFIELD PARK Will May

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olin Matthews, in his essay ‘Going Behind Britten’s Back’, has suggested that the archives of the Britten-Pears Foundation offer less an embarrassment of riches than an anxiety: ‘[I]t is a special privilege to have access to so much material,’ he writes, ‘but it brings with it responsibilities, as well as a number of moral questions.’1 In a 1990 interview, Stephen Spender reflected that ‘the unwritten masterpiece of the century – the early part of this century – is the collaboration between Auden and Benjamin Britten [. . .] that ought to have been written and I think they both knew it ought to have been written’.2 Moral questions of another kind arise when considering the works Britten planned but never began. A literary Britten constructed from his completed operas, symphonies and song cycles offers us Hardy, James, Melville, Keats, Blake. A different roll-call informs his unwritten works: here we find on the one hand The Canterbury Tales, Anna Karenina, King Lear, and on the other Arthur Ransome and Beatrix Potter. Is it literary purpose, or only pragmatics, that links Britten to the American short story rather than the Russian realist tradition? What might a ‘reading’ of an unwritten work hope to achieve other than conjecture? Of all Britten’s operas, it is Turn of the Screw (1953) which set its sights most surely on nothing, or the possible creation of something from nothing. Myfanwy Piper and Britten were clear about making James’s ambiguous ghosts into singing presences, but still, as Mrs Grose reminds us: ‘Cradles for cats | Are string and air | If we let go | There’s nothing there.’3 The cat’s cradle constructs a web of possibilities that stimulate the desire for creation, though they are soon folded back into emptiness. Yet a cat’s cradle might offer a temporary place to rest, to construct and to contextualise. It is somewhere between string and air that we might put Britten’s unwritten opera of Mansfield Park, its libretto drafted by Ronald Duncan in 1946 and apparently not a note of it ever set. This case study will offer some possible readings of this unwritten work, and its importance (or the importance of its absence) in Britten’s oeuvre. An archival reconstruction of the opera from letters, manuscripts and, primarily, Ronald Duncan’s memoir Working with Britten (1981), tells us the following: the soprano Joan Cross suggests Mansfield Park as the subject of a new opera to Britten in 1945, just before Glyndebourne commission his new opera. It is Joan Cross who buys him a copy to reread, inscribing it with ‘hopes for the work to come’; Britten, according to Ronald Duncan, is apparently ‘anxious to get Jane Austen’s elegant urbanity on to the operatic stage’.4 Duncan notes Britten is also eager to write a lead role for Kathleen Ferrier after the ‘purity’ of her Lucretia, and, perhaps, to finally find an opera with a role for Mrs Audrey Christie’s pug. Duncan begins work on the libretto during the tour of Lucretia in Edinburgh, after working out a dramatic synopsis with Britten.

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Only after he completes Act I does he accidentally learn that Britten is now at work on another opera with Eric Crozier – what would become Albert Herring. All that remains is Duncan’s draft libretto, entitled Letters to William, accompanied by some very brief notes on the novel in Peter Pears’s hand and a draft cast list, which finds Kathleen Ferrier as Fanny Price, Peter Pears as Thomas Bertram and Joan Cross as Mrs Norris.5 Even with this small archival trace, we still find a number of contradictions. Pears’s handwritten notes promise a ‘big letter scene for Fanny’6 (as Duncan’s new title suggests), but nothing from the first Act or the sketched synopsis suggests where this would take place. Britten says he wants to write a comedy; this makes Mansfield Park perhaps the least suitable of Austen’s works. Indeed, the novel is full of allusions to King Lear – a play that was banned in Regency England for fears of offending George III. Yet these are puzzles not to be resolved, and duck larger questions. Why did Britten abandon the project? Why choose an operatic protagonist who is the ‘odd, stupid girl’, who ‘does not want to learn music’?7 Though this is all the information we have about Britten’s adaptation, a series of intertextual links between Britten and Austen via two of his most famous literary collaborators might help us construct a sort of cat’s cradle for exploring it further. W. H. Auden’s Letter to Lord Byron (1936) famously flirts with Austen as the most appropriate addressee for his poetic epistle, only to reject her as unlikely to ‘respond’ to him: There is one other author in my pack: For some time I debate which to write to. Which would least likely send my letter back? But I decided that I’d give a fright to Jane Austen if I wrote when I’d no right to, And share in her contempt the dreadful fates Of Crawford, Musgrove, and of Mr Yates.8 Significantly, Auden turns to Mansfield Park to signify Austen here, and the punishment the novel metes out to its morally vagrant men and women. Auden’s verse-letter more usually offers irreverence to its litany of dead writers, but here we find a moment of mock-unworthiness. She may rewrite him, rather than the other way round, punishing him for his impudent posthumous correspondence. The intrigue of Duncan’s putative title for the opera – Letters to William – begins to make sense. The epistolary relationship Fanny has with her sailor brother offers a metaphor for posthumous collaboration, and the difficulty of engaging with the canon. In E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, one of the few literary critical works Britten read and registered his response to,9 it is Mansfield Park which is celebrated for its dextrous moves between ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters, leading Forster to conclude, rather wonderfully, that ‘all of [Austen’s] characters are round, or capable of rotundity’.10 If it was Forster’s celebration of George Crabbe in The Listener magazine that turned Britten to Peter Grimes, might it have been the awe in which both Auden and Forster seemed to hold Austen that made her his most difficult operatic subject? In the existing libretto draft, Aunt Norris brings in scurrilous village gossip ‘at great inconvenience | to myself alone’;11 it echoes Joan Cross’s devoted errand for Britten, making a special trip to Brighton to procure him a copy of Austen’s novel. Yet perhaps Britten, too, found the novel an inconvenient or intimidating source text.

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We might build a different kind of cat’s cradle from the novel itself. Mansfield Park is a text highly conscious of the mixture of pragmatics and serendipity that inform a work’s eventual performance. The moral question that takes up most of its chapters is not Julia Crawford’s elopement, but the ethics of staging a performance of Lovers’ Vows in the house while Thomas Bertram is away. It is difficult to think of a sentence in English literature that better hints at the difficulties of choosing a literary subject for a new opera than this: There were, in fact, so many things to be attended to, so many people to be pleased, so many best characters required, and above all, such a need that the play should be at once both tragedy and comedy, that there did seem as little chance of a decision, as anything pursued by youth and zeal could hold out.12 The prolonged conversations about what to perform go beyond logistics to consider how and what we read. Henry Crawford’s masterful recitation of a speech from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is significant here. He reads from a play which, only thirtyfive years after the novel’s publication, would have its authorship disputed by Delia Bacon.13 Some 200 years later, it is widely acknowledged to be the Shakespeare play most likely to have been written by someone who is not Shakespeare.14 The changing status of the play as Austen presents it and as we read it might give us pause when thinking about the significance we attach to an author and his work. More significant is the literary affinity Crawford seems to have with the words he is reading, as if this is a play he knows down to his very bones. As he flippantly remarks while accepting their praises: ‘Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.’15 This is a literary knowledge which goes beyond what is in someone’s library at their death, or what documentary evidence we have of their reading. It is an imprint for nationhood which is inherited, absorbed, as if by osmosis. Constructing a literary Britten, when so little remains of his thoughts on the books he read, might raise similar difficulties: we find ourselves straining to divine how a person reads from what they read. Mansfield Park’s discussion of how and what we read leads us to Austen’s own sources for the novel, and it is here we find a close relationship between Austen and Britten emerging. Like Britten, Austen was a reader who gave little away. As Isobel Grundy notes, her letters show her preoccupation with George Crabbe but, ‘she does not praise or analyse’ him. Instead, she ‘launches a long-running joke about her hopes of seeing him in London and her attempts to detect his marital status from his writings, culminating in a resolve, elaborated with curlicues of fantasy, to marry him now he is a widower’.16 Like Britten in Peter Grimes, Austen took her protagonist from Crabbe. In his long poem The Parish Register (1807): Sir Edward Archer is an amorous knight, And maidens chaste and lovely shun his sight; His bailiff’s daughter suited much his taste, For Fanny Price was lovely and was chaste;17 Yet for Mansfield Park’s settings Austen turns, like Britten, to The Borough, another poetic text preoccupied with letters. She drew extensively on Crabbe’s portrait of his

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hated Aldeburgh when writing of Fanny’s dislike for her native Portsmouth, as Jocelyn Harris notes.18 This textual borrowing makes Fanny’s Portsmouth into Crabbe’s Aldeburgh. Her attempts to navigate and create a sense of belonging are not so far from Grimes’s and, in turn, not so far from Britten’s – home is very dear to her. Fanny’s homesickness for Portsmouth (and, later, for Mansfield Park) haunts Britten’s for his native Suffolk. We feel the spectre in Duncan’s abandoned libretto draft. In one scene, while star-gazing at the window, Fanny proclaims: Here’s harmony, here’s repose. Here’s what music cannot portray Nor poetry attempt to describe.19 Based wholly on the speech in Austen (which is based in turn on George Crabbe), Fanny’s outburst also recalls Peter Grimes’s recognition of peace and shelter.20 She finds in her adopted homeland what Peter Grimes finds on native soil. Yet this is also a speech about the limits of artistic representation, particularly in the competing realms of music and poetry, as if Fanny had momentarily decided on a performance of Strauss’s Capriccio (1942). Mansfield Park becomes a novel about adaptation in two senses: how we might (or might not) find home in an adopted setting, and the ethics of moving a work from page to stage. Adding Mansfield Park to Britten’s catalogue not only lets us consider its effect on later collaborations, but offers a library of literary sources and allusions to be read back through Britten. Perhaps one reason Jane Austen is more likely to ‘write back’ to Britten than either Auden or Forster is because those ‘Letters to William’ are sent on to George Crabbe. Edward Said’s influential reading of Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism (1993) has encouraged contemporary readers to see the estate as a metonym for England or empire; when abandoned by Lord Bertram, the house falls to indulgence and moral complacency.21 Britten, too, might have recognised this as a novel about his relationship with his own country. For Thomas Bertram’s exploits in Antigua, read Britten in America; for the French Revolution, read the Spanish Civil War. Yet the letters to William referred to in the title of Duncan’s draft libretto are also letters that a homesick Fanny is writing to her cousin William when she first arrives. The house is both a seat of return, an abandoned state, and an anxious experiment in living, not unlike the house Britten found himself sharing with Carson McCullers and Auden in Brooklyn, prior to his longed for return to England.22 To turn from Portsmouth back to Mansfield Park is also to remind ourselves of The Turn of the Screw, where we find another country house threatened with usurpation, and in Mrs Grose, like Lady Bertram, a figure inclined to let dangerous improprieties go unchecked. It is telling that Aunt Norris ‘always contrives to experience some evil from the passing of the servants behind the chair’.23 Compared to the devilish hauntings of Turn of the Screw, the indiscretions of Mansfield Park might seem minor, despite Julia’s elopement. Yet the moral question that hangs over many of the chapters – whether or not to put on a musical production in a country house – resonates with equal acuity for Britten. It is also an unwritten work with its own ghosts: five years after the drafts had been abandoned, the director of Glyndebourne wrote to Britten with an invitation to put on a Jane Austen opera: now, he found himself facing the same quandary as Fanny Price.24 Here is the irony of Britten’s Mansfield Park: it is an unwritten musical production he

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declines to put on in a country house about a protagonist increasingly anxious and ashamed about doing the same. Both the collaboration between Duncan and Britten and the play-within-a-play come to a sudden halt. In 2011, Jonathan Dove’s adaptation of Mansfield Park was premièred in Boughton House, Northamptonshire. A TLS reviewer paired it with the contemporary revival of Turn of the Screw at Glyndebourne, unaware of Britten’s unrealised adaptation of the same.25 Yet his assessment of Dove’s work is telling: in the new opera, the reviewer hears the musical language of Birtwistle meeting Britten, as if the never-written work was haunting a later adaptation. George Steiner has described an unwritten work as more than a void. It accompanies the work one has done like an active shadow, both ironic and sorrowful. It is one of the lives we could have lived, one of the journeys we did not take [. . .] it is the unwritten book which might have made the difference.26 Britten’s unwritten opera, in part, contains all the works he did write. It contains A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s play-within-a-play; The Turn of the Screw’s usurped country house; Billy Budd’s outsider protagonist; the Aldeburgh of Peter Grimes. But it might also serve as a way of exploring the texts unset, and the kind of unsettling they might do of Britten’s textual canon. A key scene from Mansfield Park finds a guilty Edmund visiting Fanny’s room to tell her he has assented to acting in the Crawfords’s play. Unable to read her disapproval, or perhaps fearful of reading it, he turns instead to the book on her table, as if trying to construct her thoughts from them: How does Lord Macartney go on? – (opening a volume on the table and then taking up some others). And here are Crabbe’s Tales, and the Idler, at hand to relieve you, if you tire of your great book. I admire your little establishment exceedingly [. . .]27 Her shelves provide some way of trying to discern her ‘habit of reading’, but, for many readers, Fanny Price remains an enigma, a set of textual hints and affinities that cannot easily be ‘picked up’. It may be for this reason she is the most important fictional character for constructing our own literary sense of Britten, a figure from outside that ‘little establishment’ who, in the event, inherits it. By attending to the literary-musical collaborations that never came to fruition, we can begin, like the readers of Mansfield Park itself, to learn from unexpected stories of influence, inheritance and affiliation. In Paul Kildea’s recent biography, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, the key reference to Austen comes as part of what Britten is decisively rejecting or attempting to rethink, that ‘crudely amateur’ British musical tradition with its ‘Jane Austen drawing-room feel to chamber-music performances’.28 Perhaps, with Mansfield Park, Britten came to realise what he transformed would still be his to inherit.

Notes 1. Colin Matthews, ‘Going Behind Britten’s Back’, in Britten: New Perspectives on His Life and Work, ed. Lucy Walker (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), pp. 1–16 (p. 1). 2. Interview with Donald Mitchell, 27 October 1990, Benjamin Britten Archive, Red House. 3. Myfanwy Piper, ‘The Turn of the Screw’, in The Operas of Benjamin Britten, ed. David Herbert (London: Herbert Press, 1989), pp. 231–48 (p. 246).

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4. Ronald Duncan, Working with Britten, A Personal Memoir (Welcombe: The Rebel Press, 1981), p. 84. 5. The Britten Thematic Catalogue is currently being recatalogued; the draft libretto is available at the Benjamin Britten Archive at the Red House. 6. Duncan, pp. 91–2. 7. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 43. 8. W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1991), p. 83. 9. See Benjamin Britten, ‘Some Notes on Forster and Music’, in Aspects of E. M. Forster, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1969), pp. 81–6. 10. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), p. 81. 11. ‘Letters to William’, Benjamin Britten Archive, Red House. 12. Austen, p. 103. 13. See Delia Salter Bacon, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1857). 14. See, for example, Alan Stewart, ‘The Case for Bacon’, in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 16–28 (p. 17). 15. Austen, p. 338. 16. Isobel Grundy, ‘Jane Austen and Literary Tradition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 189–210 (p. 191). 17. George Crabbe, ‘The Parish Register’, in Poems (London: 1846), p. 91. 18. Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 216. 19. ‘Mansfield Park’, Benjamin Britten Archive, Red House. 20. See Montagu Slater, Peter Grimes, in The Operas of Benjamin Britten, pp. 87–113 (p. 113): ‘What harbor shelters peace?’. 21. Edward Said, ‘Jane Austen and Empire’, in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1993), pp. 95–115 (p. 79). 22. See Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 2014) for an account of Britten’s homesickness in the US, pp. 180–6. 23. Austen, p. 187. 24. George Christie writes to Benjamin Britten for a commission for the 1964 Glyndebourne Festival, noting ‘a modern equivalent of Figaro would be marvellous or Jane Austen’, as quoted in Richard Fairman, ‘Britten at Glyndebourne’, Financial Times, 30 April 2010 [accessed 1 January 2017]. 25. Guy Dammann, ‘Jonathan Dove – Mansfield Park’, Times Literary Supplement, 31 August 2011, p. 17. 26. George Steiner, My Unwritten Books (London: Phoenix, 2008), p. iii. 27. Austen, p. 123. 28. Kildea, p. 14.

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60 Tippett, Eliot and Madame Sosostris1 Oliver Soden

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hen Michael Tippett first came across ‘Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante’ in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), he went out and bought a set of Tarot cards.2 His is an intriguing reaction to and engagement with the poem, as if he felt required to buy props with which better to understand or even perform the text. The poem played an odd joke on Tippett, who recalled his purchase without reference to Eliot’s admission, ‘I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience’ (I. 46n). But how seriously to take Madame Sosostris is part of the problem she poses, a problem that this essay will consider through discussion of her appearance in Eliot’s poem and in Tippett’s first opera, The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52, libretto by the composer). Referring to The Waste Land Anne Stillman has said that the ‘eerie comedy in the voice of Madame Sosostris resists classification’,3 hearing in one voice a discombobulating split register. Sosostris is an example in miniature of Tippett’s unique response to the challenge of rendering Eliot’s split registers in music. She pops up in the retirement-home setting of N. F. Simpson’s Absurdist play, If So, Then Yes (2010): Care Worker Two Maureen Care Worker Two Maureen

And now Madame Sosostris. Madame who? Sosostris. She’s some sort of clairvoyant. She’s been let loose on the oldies. I know people who’ve had their fortune foretold by one of them, and they all say it’s never been the same since.4

Simpson knits many jokes into one, following through the absurdity of the situation with the utmost logic: here is a character from T. S. Eliot doing the visiting rounds at an Old People’s Home, the humour derived from the writer’s assumption that his audience will be aware of the figure’s literary weight, at the expense of his characters, who aren’t. In the knot of tenses in Maureen’s last quoted line, Simpson also catches something of the way in which premature belief in the fate foretold for one can alter the way life might eventually pan out. The phrase ‘She’s some sort of clairvoyant’ captures the confusion with which we might greet this perplexing figure – Madame who? Tippett’s Madame Sosostris is an allusion to Eliot, the poet he was to call his ‘spiritual and artistic mentor’ – (‘I said to Eliot: “I’ve read all your poetry and prose and know it well”’) – on whose advice, after a mooted collaboration which came to nothing, Tippett wrote all his own libretti, claiming that ‘echoes of [Eliot’s] prosody

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sound in everything I have written for myself to set to music’.5 Aside from an off-stage warning cry, Sosostris does not appear in The Midsummer Marriage until Act III, when the extended eleven-minute aria of her visions and her introspection unravels the tangled web of Tippett’s midsummer-night scenario. In a parallel to Eliot’s harnessing of the post-war vogue for spiritualism in order to communicate with the dead, the opera’s business tycoon, King Fisher (another allusion to The Waste Land), consults the clairvoyante in order to find his disappeared daughter. David Clarke, while conceding that Eliot was an ‘important reference’ for the composer, considers that ‘unlike Eliot’s ironized fortune teller, Tippett’s Madame Sosostris is the genuine oracle’.6 But to regard the dialogue between The Waste Land and The Midsummer Marriage as a simple case of Tippett’s having translated a fraud into a genuine seer is to miss the complexity and duality of Sosostris in each work. In The Waste Land Madame Sosostris emerges like a grotesque sea-nymph from the waters of Eliot’s Wagner quotation (which she appears to refute) immediately preceding her: ‘Oed und leer das Meer’ (‘empty and waste the sea’) (I. 43). She has an angular seventeen-line verse to herself, like a water-logged sonnet, during the first section of the poem, ‘The Burial of the Dead’. Sosostris’s words, and the words about Sosostris, give few clues as to how they, or she, should sound, hovering in a haze of ambiguous pronunciation and nationality, and as muffled in their way as the words of the poem’s first seer, the Sibyl in the epigraph, who is heard speaking only through the glass of the jar in which she is hung. Sosostris has – supposedly – a European reputation, but her words are not notated to demarcate accent or vernacular. She speaks English, but perhaps with a congested snuffle born of her ‘bad cold’ (which she did not foresee). ‘Madame’ might imply a francophone title, or a deliberately exotic assumed character, at once tawdry and grand. Eliot’s 1960 recording of the poem intriguingly anglicises the word (‘Ma-dam’), as if in bawd-y humour. Tippett heard a more French pronunciation, setting the word quaver-crotchet, ‘-dame’ twice the length of ‘Ma-’ – or perhaps his setting, in King Fisher’s mouth, indicates the character’s pretentious affectation. The Waste Land’s epigraph opened the poem with the phrase ‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi’ (‘I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae’). But Sosostris’s seeings are harder to see, and embedded in verses that are oddly cataracted: four lines before the clairvoyante is introduced, a voice recalls a moment when ‘my eyes failed’ (I. 39); the shepherd in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde who declares ‘Oed und leer das Meer’ squints out to sea ‘mit der Hand überm Aug’ (‘with his hand shielding his eyes’); and an ‘Unreal City’ will soon be viewed only through ‘brown fog’ (I. 61). Even Sosostris herself is eventually ‘forbidden to see’ (I. 54). Slowly she emerges from the dark. ‘Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, | The Lady of situations’ (I. 49–50) – lines that could refer not only to da Vinci’s Madonna but also to the poisonous plant so named for its function as a cosmetic to dilate the pupils. The cards, for all their murky fakery, aid our night vision, our clairvoyance. Tucked between brackets, hidden away, although, with that curious double function of parentheses, conversely highlighted, comes a shard from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)’ (I. 48). This line, concerned with looking at eyes that can no longer look, is a prophecy of itself (it repeats elsewhere in The Waste Land), perhaps the voice of Sosostris, perhaps, in this multi-voiced poem, the interjecting voice or echo of another. The line hovers and darts, Ariel-like, between different registers: between Sosostris and the voice of another, between speech and

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song (it is sung in The Tempest). At one and the same time it elevates Sosostris to the canonical level of a Shakespeare play, and, with that rather ungainly addition of the exclamation-marked ‘Look!’, drags down Shakespeare, as if the line itself dilates and constricts in different lights, to the grungy dimness of a fortune-teller’s realm. This elastic, almost woozy quality extends to the whole of Sosostris’s verse, which forges, to use a description of Eliot’s from an essay on Marvell, an ‘alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified)’.7 The origins of Sosostris’s name, which is clogged with Sibylline sibilance, have inspired endless debate, but both Grover Cleveland Smith and Jim McCue convincingly rebut those who question the influence on Eliot of a fortune-teller in Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow (1921).8 McCue: ‘If it wasn’t a borrowing and there wasn’t a common source – in the newspapers, perhaps? – then the similarity and synchronicity [between Eliot’s and Huxley’s fortune-tellers] are uncanny.’9 Huxley’s work (which Tippett knew well) 10 contains the following scene: Mr Scogan had been accommodated in a little canvas hut. Dressed in a black shirt and a red bodice, with a yellow-and-red bandana handkerchief tied round his black wig, he looked – sharp-nosed, brown, and wrinkled – like the Bohemian hag of Frith’s Derby Day. A placard pinned to the curtain of the doorway announced the presence within the tent of ‘Sesostris [sic], the Sorceress of Ecbatana’.11 Sosostris’s possible original is a man in woman’s clothing, a direct descendant of Mr Rochester, disguised in similar colours as a gypsy fortune-teller to trick Jane Eyre: the Sibyl – if Sibyl she were – was seated snugly enough in an easy-chair at the chimney-corner. She had on a red cloak and a black bonnet: or rather, a broadbrimmed gipsy hat, tied down with a striped handkerchief under her chin.12 Eliot’s Sosostris began with a similar moment of gender confusion, the merest flick of a pencil in an early draft giving clues to her androgynous roots. In Eliot’s draft, the line reads ‘Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant’,13 either the cover-all English word, or the purely masculine French. Yet added, whether by Ezra Pound or by Eliot it is impossible to tell, is a feminine ending: a small handwritten ‘e’ (Fig. 60.1). ‘Clairvoyante’ appears with an ‘e’ at its end in the published versions of The Waste Land, though is not italicised as foreign. Early hesitancy or doubt over the letter’s inclusion creates of its seemingly solid published appearance an oddly wobbly, transparent appendage, to be lopped off ‘clairvoyante’ as easily as Eliot removed it from ‘Madame’ when reading it aloud, calling into ambiguous question the pronunciation, language and gender of the word. Tippett did not go as far as Harrison Birtwistle, who, in his opera The Minotaur (2008), created a visibly feminine oracle scored for countertenor; The Midsummer Marriage’s Madame Sosostris is a mezzo-soprano. Nevertheless, androgyny in the prophet figures of his operas fascinated Tippett. A messenger in his later opera The Ice Break (1973–6) – Astron, a single figure both sacred and profane, sung by an electronically-enhanced duet of countertenor and mezzo-soprano – was in part based on a character from Balzac, who, as Tippett described, ‘in a curious novel, Séraphîta [1834], created from his imagination a super-natural figure called Séraphitüs-Séraphîta:

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Figure 60.1 From Eliot’s drafts for The Waste Land, as reproduced in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). Reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd seen as male or female according to the needs of the petitioner and seeker’.14 Madame Sosostris’s first appearance in The Midsummer Marriage introduces a figure of indeterminate gender who, at first, cannot be seen: [The men] enter carrying in procession a figure as though enthroned, dressed in a green cloak and conical hat, masked, or holding a crystal bowl in front of its face [. . .] Jack, for it is now seen to be he, rises to embrace [Bella].15 The seer’s seeming first entrance is performed by a man in a cloak, as if recalling Mr Rochester or Mr Scogan, or Eliot’s tacked-on gender-blending ‘e’, a letter that could be read as a similar trick, a feminine cloak to be thrown off. This fake Sosostris is described in the stage direction quoted from Tippett’s libretto above as an ‘it’, a description taking refuge within a cover-all pronoun, like Eliot’s ‘One must be so careful these days’ (I. 59). Tippett’s chorus, punning on the fake’s real name, berates this ‘Jack of all trades | You in that queer cloak and comic hat | What’s your role now? | What a trick! What a fraud!’ (p. 46). The chorus’s use of ‘queer’ could imply connotations of homosexuality, or of cross-dressing, but Jack’s appearance is far from a cruel drag act, such as opens Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face (1995). Tippett teasingly sets up the possibility of a traditionally crone-like fortune-teller, an ugly-sister witchy Sosostris, joining the line of opera’s and ballet’s skirt roles. But Jack’s dress-up is something altogether more subtle. He becomes a living Tarot card, The Fool (or The Jester), and recalls Eliot’s fondness for such stage tricks and the study of the theatrical trickster in F. M. Cornford’s The Origin of Attic Comedy, a book Eliot greatly admired and which Tippett asked to be sent while imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the Second World War.16 Cornford writes of the ‘impudent and absurd pretender’ that is the imposter, taking on a variety of types ‘as priest, oracle monger [. . .] [and] the unwelcome intruder who interrupts sacrifice’ with a ‘superficial variety of [. . .] outward guise’.17 The impostor in Aristophanes was regularly mocked as the chorus mocks Jack and ‘made to wear [. . .] a set of stock masks’ as Jack has to mask his face with the bowl. As John Lloyd Davies has commented, ‘the false hero[’s] appearance highlights the eventual genuine one’ (p. 60) – an Eliot-like ‘alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified)’. This is an

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alliance unusual in twentieth-century opera, in which levity and seriousness are often juxtaposed, but rarely allianced. (The works of Richard Strauss might provide the most similar examples, in particular Ariadne auf Naxos, in which opera seria and commedia dell’arte are forced to co-exist, to intensely serious effect.) Another figure – the genuine Sosostris – appears: What you see on the stage is a huge over-lifesize veiled figure (containing of course (unknown to the audience) the divine hierosgamos [sacred marriage] of [the opera’s central couple] Mark-Jenifer verklärt [transfigured]) – whose veils wave in fantastic shapes and swirls in a surrounding night.18 Before the couple’s eventual reveal, Sosostris sees the pair in the waters of her bowl. Her vision develops into a cry of pain at the ‘bitterness of a Pythia’s fate!’ (p. 60) which Tippett described as a plagiarism from [Paul] Valéry ‘La Pythie’. That is, a gradual movement from a kind of self-pity of her own strange fate to be woman and yet no woman – to acceptance of her Pythic role, and eventual possession by the God.19 This might seem a long way from Eliot’s clairvoyante, and Tippett’s libretto only once describes Sosostris as such, rather than as a seer or an oracle (the particularly blinkered King Fisher calls her, ludicrously, his ‘private clairvoyante’ (p. 44)). Whatever music might be expected for a clairvoyante (kletzmer? a fairground band?) is far from the densely scored aria which Tippett provided. The prophecies of Eliot’s Sosostris are introduced with ‘Here, said she’ (as opposed to ‘Here, she said’), a folksy jingle of a formation that belies the ominousness of her predictions. The first line of her verse teases with its many options for scansion, but could be delivered with a trotting, almost nursery-rhyme metre, a waltz of dactyls (Ma-dam So-Sos-tris, fa-mous clair-voy-ant . . .), floating possibilities of music chirpily far from the ‘Più Lento’ entry of Tippett’s aria, in which, instead, commentators have heard the nobility of Elgar.20 Tippett cited Verdi and Mozart as influences (a key-signature is shared with the second aria of a near-anagrammatic progenitor, Sarastro, in Die Zauberflöte). However, the expression of an oracle’s sufferings remains linked to The Waste Land. Eliot’s Sosostris takes her place in a line of that poem’s visionaries. She is alliteratively linked to a further ambisexual seer, Tiresias,21 who has ‘foresuffered all’ (III. 243) and, again, to the Cumean Sibyl, who answers the question ‘What do you want?’ with ‘I want to die’.22 Tippett’s Sosostris sings ‘O horror, horror of transcendent sight!’ (p. 60), echoing Kurtz’s final words in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which also haunt Eliot’s work – Kurtz’s ‘The horror! The horror!’ was originally to have been the epigraph to The Waste Land.23 Eliot’s Sosostris and Valéry’s Pythoness were two inspirations for Tippett; other possible influences fall noticeably on the side of fakery, rather than vision. Raimund Herincx, who performed King Fisher more than any other singer, recalls conversations with Tippett about the influence on Sosostris of Helen Duncan, a fraudulent Scottish medium who, in 1944, was one of the last people convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735.24 One of Tippett’s closest friends, Francesca Allinson, published a novel containing a scene including a mechanical and genderless gypsy fortune-teller at a fairground with a ‘mysterious’ face, ‘its glossy black hair bound by a sequined handkerchief’.25

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The early drafts for The Midsummer Marriage’s libretto show that this duality between earthly and other-worldy, between trickery and vision, was to have been even more marked. The link between Tippett’s and Eliot’s mesdames was clearly stated in the libretto drafts, King Fisher introducing her with The Waste Land’s description (I. 45): ‘known to be the wisest woman in Europe’.26 Tippett planned for Sosostris to have two vocal registers: the anguished, almost hieratic, pronouncements, based on Valéry, that stayed in the libretto, and another more quotidian mode of expression whose difference from what it preceded would, presumably, have been mirrored musically, perhaps by a contrast between recitative and aria or even speech and song (Tippett initially conceived the work as a Singspiel). Her first greeting to King Fisher was to have run: ‘King Fisher what d’you want from me? You’d better tell me more precisely.’27 Later her split self was to have been explicitly expressed: ‘When once I look within the bowl, I lose all knowledge of myself.’28 Such a split was eventually discarded, perhaps as too difficult to achieve musically, or simply as too obvious, but it haunts the finished version of the opera. Jean-Philippe Heberle, in a close reading of Tippett’s published text for Sosostris’s aria, highlights a grammatical split: ‘dans les deux premières strophes on trouve trois pronoms personnels sujets différents, “he”, “you”, et “I”. Bien qu’ils soient différents, ils semblent renvoyer à la même entité’29 (‘in the two first stanzas can be found three different personal pronouns, “he”, “you”, and “I”. Although they are different, they seem to refer to the same being’). Elijah Moshinsky, for his filmed version of the opera, broadcast in 1986, cast the actress Janet Suzman to ‘act the part’ of Sosostris in classic headscarfed

Figure 60.2 Janet Suzman ‘acting the part’ of Madame Sosostris in Elijah Moshinksy’s film of The Midsummer Marriage (1984, Channel 4/Thames Television)

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‘clairvoyante’ gear, all cheekbones, heavy jewellery and painted nails (Fig. 60.2), as if she’d stepped straight from The Waste Land. The aria was played over the top of the action, without Suzman miming to the words: ‘No attempt was made to marry words and action [. . .] this Sosostris remained mute throughout [. . .] Presumably Moshinsky wished to suggest that she was entirely a fraud.’30 Another possibility is that Moshinsky perceived a teasing doubleness manifest in Tippett’s Sosostris between gypsy fortune-teller and true oracle, between a kernel of true prophecy and a figure acting a part. Tippett described his Sosostris as having a ‘peculiar flesh and blood’,31 yet she is strikingly incorporeal, and will eventually disintegrate, as her veils are pulled away, into nothing but an ‘incandescent bud’ (p. 49), which Tippett directed should bloom, petal by petal, to reveal the opera’s heroic couple entwined within, before all bursts into flame (we might think of Eliot’s ‘When the tongues of flame are in-folded | Into the crowned knot of fire | And the fire and the rose are one’).32 She is the ultimate trick: a stage trick, a coup de théâtre, described in a stage direction as a ‘contraption’ (p. 46). She never stops being a device, a literal dea ex machina, yet this, along with Jack’s practical joke (which the Chorus greets with ‘What a trick!’), is the levity which intensifies the seriousness, the falsity which highlights the genuine. Sosostris speaks to those who ‘hope to conjure with the world of dreams’, and later of ‘illusion’; nevertheless, ‘you who consult me, should never doubt me’ (p. 46, my italics). She is ‘The Sphinx and the Sibyl rolled into one’ (p. 46), a figure riddling and oracular, male and female.33 The visions and predictions of both Eliot’s and Tippett’s Sosostrises come true within the works to which they belong, although, intriguingly, the latter’s vision of Mark and Jenifer making love in a meadow is never confirmed as accurate, and is almost goading when presented to Jenifer’s father. Tippett’s allusion to Eliot is not a transformation of the ironic into the genuine; rather, in all their difference, both visionaries present, with serious trickery, a more complex embroidery of illusion and truth. This is well suited to an opera whose unique effect is in its intermingling of the fantastical with the real, a bravely unfashionable pathway for the operas of the time, mainly led by Peter Grimes (1945) into the world of what Tippett called ‘English verismo’.34 In The Midsummer Marriage staircases ascending into the clouds and the other-worldly group of temple-dwellers are pitched against and swirled with the more obviously quotidian and temporal, even political: Jack the Mechanic and King Fisher the (derided) plutocrat. In one noticeable, and humorous, combination of the everyday with the mythic, an Ancient Greek temple is equipped with a doorbell. Tippett’s placing of a mechanic in the centre of an opera anticipates the theatrical focus on a working-class figure such as Jimmy Porter. While it lacks John Osborne’s social and feminist weight, Bella’s application of make-up in The Midsummer Marriage, which premièred in 1955, is as self-consciously everyday and mundane a moment as Alison’s famous ironing-board that opened Look Back in Anger a year later. The Midsummer Marriage is an opera about the union of conflicting psychological entities; this bringing-together of supposed opposites is reflected in the bringing-together of seemingly divergent influences on the opera’s text, resulting in a twentieth-century opera unique in its libretto’s combining of the dying embers of the self-consciously un-real verse-dramas by Eliot (among others), with the storming revolutions of the Angry Young Men (for example Osborne, Arnold Wesker or Kingsley Amis). In Sosostris the opera presents this combination in one figure. Her origins in The Waste Land remind us that Tippett learned just such a technique from that poem’s author,

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in whose work a mythical seer can co-inhabit a London bedsit with the ‘typist home at teatime’ (III. 222). Tippett’s decision to write his own libretti, creating mainly original scenarios dense with allusion, allowed him to assimilate such techniques into numerous compositions without resorting simply to setting Eliot’s text, very few lines of which he ever put directly to music. In the list of works which use Eliot’s texts – for example Benjamin Britten’s fourth and fifth canticles (‘Journey of the Magi’, 1971, and ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’, 1974); Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Cats (1981); Thomas Adès’s Five Eliot Landscapes (1990); Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Assassinio nella cattedrale (1958) – a setting of The Waste Land, even in excerpt, is a significant absence. George Benjamin’s Ringed by the Flat Horizon (1980) takes its title from the poem but is purely orchestral. An opera entitled The Waste Land, by Stephen McNeff, libretto by Andrew Rashleigh, was staged at the Donmar Warehouse in 1994, but has been described as drawing ‘only in the remotest way on Eliot’s [text] [. . .]’ and being merely a ‘gleefully sustained joke about the poem’.35 A figure more famous as a writer than a composer, Anthony Burgess, produced a setting of The Waste Land in its entirety, in 1978, but the words of the poem are spoken by a narrator over the top of, or interleaved with, the music, which is scored for flute, oboe, cello and piano, with knowing references to Eliot’s musical allusions (a soprano occasionally interjects as Wagner’s Rhinemaidens). Burgess’s setting of the poem is reminiscent of Tippett’s solution to a commission, in 1959, to provide music for a selection of poems from two collections by W. B. Yeats: Words for Music Perhaps and A Woman Young and Old. The sequence was first performed, under the title Words for Music Perhaps, in 1960. Tippett toyed with Yeats’s title, catching its perhaps-ness, by interleaving spoken recitations of the poems with snatches of music. The music exists between the verses, almost teasingly, as if dangling the possibility of notes to which the words could be set, but which remain always out of reach. Tippett set to music relatively few pre-existing poems, holding fast to the words of Susanne Langer, which Eliot had sent him: ‘Music ordinarily swallows words and action creating (thereby) opera, oratorio or song.’36 He wrote that the ‘primal gift of the song-writer [is] the ability to destroy all the verbal music of the poetry or prose and to substitute the music of music’.37 Such thoughts were solidified in discussions with Eliot, who made to Tippett what the composer found a ‘lovely remark: “Don’t let the poets loose on your librettos [. . .] because they are going to do with the words what your music should do”’.38 Tippett therefore wrote his own libretti specifically to ensure that they were not the work of a poet; that there would, as he thought, be no acoustic or literary quality which would distract from or be destroyed by the music. Numerous musical settings of poems, some of them by Tippett, can be and have been used as examples against such a view,39 and Tippett was perfectly capable of adding acoustic effects to his own libretti that his music harnesses, rather than destroys (to take just one example, a line in his text to his oratorio A Child of our Time, ‘When shall the usurer’s city cease?’, is sluiced in a sibilance which, when set by Tippett in a fugue, with all four parts landing repeatedly on an ‘s’ sound, allows the line to hover in an appropriately unpleasant static of white noise). He eventually softened, or at least questioned, his own thoughts with Byzantium (1989–90), a large-scale setting of Yeats’s poem, but it is hard to imagine any musical setting of The Waste Land which might render successfully the complex ambiguous voices of Sosostris and others, and which, by making decisions of mood, tone, accent, gender, rhythm or fach, would not destroy the multiplicity of voices which can co-exist in The Waste Land’s printed words. Tippett’s variation on the theme of

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Eliot’s Sosostris is perhaps the best example of his unique method of staging and musically setting such complexities. His libretti are a collection of texts which are neither music nor literature, yet which share a frontier with each, and draw the two together. They are words for music perhaps, and show Tippett to be the only twentieth-century composer successfully and continually to put his music in dialogue with Eliot’s work.40

Notes 1. This essay has benefited immeasurably from the comments and advice of Roger Savage and Ruth Smith, and from discussions with Anne Stillman. Ian Kemp’s extensive analysis of The Midsummer Marriage’s music and words has been an invaluable guide: Ian Kemp, Tippett: The Composer and his Music (London: Ernst Eulenburg, 1984), pp. 209–77. For more recent research on Tippett, see Oliver Soden, Michael Tippett: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019); Roger Savage, The Pre-History of The Midsummer Marriage: Narratives and Speculations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). The latter transforms our understanding of the opera by showing the extent of Tippett’s collaboration on the scenario and text with the poet Douglas Newton. 2. See Michael Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues: An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1991), p. 90; The Waste Land, I. 43, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 2 vols (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), I, pp. 53–77 (p. 56). All further references to this text are from this edition and are given parenthetically within the essay as part and line numbers. 3. Anne Stillman, ‘From Philosophy to Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s Study of Knowledge and Experience by Donald J. Childs – review’, Review of English Studies, 54 (2003), 548–50 (p. 550). 4. N. F. Simpson, If So, Then Yes (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), pp. 47–8. 5. Tippett, Blues, pp. 50, 271; Michael Tippett, ‘The Relation of Autobiographical Experience’, in Michael Tippett: Music and Literature, ed. Suzanne Robinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 20–34 (p. 24). On the relationship between the two men and the continued influence of Eliot on Tippett’s work after The Midsummer Marriage, see further Oliver Soden, ‘Tippett and Eliot’, Tempo, 67 (266) (October 2013), 28–53. 6. David Clarke, The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 57. 7. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Ronald Schuchard and others, 8 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014–19), III (2015), p. 312. 8. Grover Cleveland Smith, T. S. Eliot and the Use of Memory (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1996), pp. 84–6; Jim McCue, ‘Editing Eliot’, Essays in Criticism, 56 (1) (January 2006), 1–27 (pp. 19–20). See also Ricks’s and McCue’s commentary on Sosostris’s origins, Poems of T. S. Eliot, I, pp. 609–11. 9. McCue, ‘Editing Eliot’, p. 20. 10. See Soden, ‘Tippett and Eliot’, p. 44. 11. Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (London: Chatto and Windus, 1921), p. 147. The name Sesostris appears in Herodotus, referring to a pharaoh who conquered much of Europe; the name’s provenance intensifies the gender confusion when attached to the prefix Madame, or used as the name of a sorceress. 12. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Random House, 2000), p. 291. 13. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 8. 14. Music of the Angels, Essays and Sketchbooks of Michael Tippett, ed. Meirion Bowen (London: Ernst Eulenburg, 1980), p. 54. 15. The Operas of Michael Tippett, ed. Nicholas John (London: John Calder, 1985), p. 46. All further references to Tippett’s libretto are from this edition and are given parenthetically within the essay as page numbers.

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16. Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, ed. Thomas Schuttenhelm (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 300. 17. F. M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), p. 154. 18. Letters, p. 283. 19. Ibid. 20. See ibid. and Christopher Mark, ‘Tippett and the English Traditions’, in The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett, ed. Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 25–47 (pp. 34–5). 21. Tirésias/Thérèse is also the central, ambisexual figure of Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917), a play adapted and set to music by Francis Poulenc, in the late 1940s. In female mode, she reappears as a ‘cartomancienne’ (‘tarot-reader’) prophesying life and death to various characters. She enters ‘richement voilée’ (‘richly veiled’). Tippett recalled meeting Poulenc in the late 1940s (Tirésias’s première was in 1947, a year in which Tippett was working on The Midsummer Marriage’s libretto). See Tippett, Blues, p. 159. 22. Poems of T. S. Eliot, I, p. 53 (and, for translation and commentary, I, p. 593). 23. See Eliot, Facsimile, p. 3. 24. Raimund Herincx, personal communication, 31 August 2015. See Malcolm Gaskill, Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches (London: Fourth Estate, 2001). 25. Francesca Allinson, A Childhood (London: The Hogarth Press, 1937), p. 47. 26. London, British Library, Tippett Collection (Part IV), vol. LV. Quotations from the British Library’s Tippett Collection are included by kind permission of the Trustees of the Tippett Will Trust, and the Michael Tippett Musical Foundation. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Jean-Philippe Heberle, Michael Tippett, ou l’expression de la dualité en mots et en notes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), p. 84. 30. Andrew Clements, ‘On Television’, Opera, 40 (1989), 367–9 (p. 368). 31. Eric Walter White, Tippett and his Operas (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1979), p. 54. 32. Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’, V, 44–6, in Poems of T. S. Eliot, I, p. 209. 33. The Greek sphinx was a woman; the Egyptian sphinx was typically shown as a man. 34. Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 220. 35. Kevin Jackson, ‘T. S. Eliot: The Sequel’, Independent, 4 May 1994. 36. Susanne Langer, Problems of Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 85. 37. Michael Tippett, ‘Conclusion’, in A History of Song, ed. Denis Stevens (London: Hutchinson, 1960), pp. 461–6 (p. 466). Edward Venn introduces Tippett’s views on words and music, and the reading which influenced them, in ‘Words and Music’, in Cambridge Companion, pp. 264–85. See also Robert Donington, ‘Words and Music’, in Michael Tippett: A Symposium on his 60th Birthday, ed. Ian Kemp (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), pp. 87–113. 38. ‘The Composer as Librettist: A Conversation between Sir Michael Tippett and Patrick Carnegy’, Times Literary Supplement, 3930 (8 July 1977), p. 834. 39. Peter Pears argues jovially but persuasively (perhaps subtly defending Benjamin Britten’s numerous settings of poetry) in ‘Song and Text’, Symposium, pp. 47–9. 40. Tippett continued to allude to Eliot’s work, and to The Waste Land in particular, throughout his career. See Soden, ‘Tippett and Eliot’, pp. 41–4; Suzanne Robinson, ‘The Pattern from the Palimpsest: Convergences of Eliot, Tippett and Shakespeare’, in T. S. Eliot’s Orchestra, ed. John Xiros Cooper (New York: Garland Shakespeare, 2000), pp. 149–78.

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L I T E R AT U R E , P O P M U S I C A N D S O U N D

61 Worlds of Sound in Louis MacNeice’s Early Radio Plays: ‘Figure in the Music’ Claire Davison

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rom the earliest days of the phonofilm, critics were predicting that ‘Talkies’ would be the downfall of the cinematographic avant-garde. Experience proved that despite transforming the evolution of film as an art form, record-and-playback systems favoured mimetic sound-tracks – synchronised and naturalised voices and sound-effects, dialogue rather than stylised body language, ‘suitable’ musical accompaniments, with ‘suitable’ tending to mean ‘harmonious and unobtrusive’. Improved synchronisation favoured smoother narratives, the entertainment and commercial value of which were instantly recognised.1 However, as Soviet film-makers among others asserted, avant-garde experimentalism did not have to end with recorded sound. Eisenstein, for example, seized on alternative modes of sound and visual montage to expand his own film theory – after the horizontal montage of silent camera shots came the vertical montage of film footage, sound, music and voice.2 From the mid-1930s, BBC radiophonic workshops and technicians’ training programmes were drawing on Soviet films to illustrate uses of sound and montage in broadcasting. This was how Dallas Bower, a pioneer in the domain, first prompted Louis MacNeice, then a new recruit in the Features Department trying his hand at creative documentaries in the early years of the war, to adapt Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky for radio. Even Bower cannot have foreseen how inspirational his suggestion would be. Radio work remained dominant throughout MacNeice’s life; although possibly detrimental to his poetry, it proved hugely influential in the development of the experimental radio play, exploring the potential of an inter-medial genre orchestrating voice, sound and music from the controller’s sound panel. It was nothing short of a minor aesthetic revolution, made possible by a favourable context, appropriate technological conditions, topical interest and a specific poetic sensibility. When MacNeice joined the BBC, the ‘wireless’ was becoming a staple feature of household equipment; microphones and recording tape allowed sound, volume and pitch to be modified and replayed; the war restricted access to theatres and concert-halls, and limited funding for the arts, but favoured a commitment to cultural activities continuing undaunted; broadcasting could enable a visionary poet, arguably the most auditorily sensitive of the 1930s generation, to engage with vast, socially heterogeneous audiences, and escape from the ivory tower of solitary inspiration to acquire craftsmanship alongside technicians, musicians, actors and composers.

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My focus here is on MacNeice’s years of apprenticeship, from his first commissioned play in 1941 – the adaptation of Nevsky as part of a cultural tribute to the USSR, now an ally – to his 1946 radio masterpiece, The Dark Tower, via his second commissioned play, Christopher Columbus, marking the 450th anniversary of the discovery of America.3 The plays show MacNeice refining the art of musico-literary storytelling, in ways that reach back to the classical theatre, while relying on state-of-the-art sound technology. Furthermore, they show the poet breaking new ground in collaborative partnership with a composer. With Nevsky, he explored the creative resources of the Eisenstein–Prokofiev collaboration;4 in the same vein he created Columbus with music specifically composed by William Walton, and The Dark Tower in collaboration with Benjamin Britten. As we shall see, the art-form taking shape from play to play does not just include music. Music is an integral part of the conception, realisation and even the imaginative framework, which by The Dark Tower becomes a character in its own right, whose subtly allegorical and philosophical presence celebrates the power and vulnerability of worlds of sound. Eisenstein’s compellingly visual epic was hardly an obvious candidate for the air-waves. It relies on spatial counterpointing, physical typecasting and objectified metaphors to portray Teutonic invaders as masked, aggressively armed automata descending pitilessly upon radiant, courageous individuals with makeshift weapons, culminating in the memorable battle-on-the-ice sequence. Such resources were of little use to the radio dramatist working with instruments, voice-timbre, sound patterning, microphone distance and superposed or intercalated soundtracks. Even sound-effects are notoriously clichéd on air; soliloquies and confessions work beautifully but crowd scenes and tumult – the staple of epic and warfare – are decidedly unradiophonic. MacNeice’s Nevsky is therefore a creative transposition rather than an adaptation. He uses techniques of classical drama – stylised verse, compelling repetition and bold imagery – as rhetorical equivalents of Eisenstein’s visual matrix; he invents a blind man to whom events are described, and a series of eye-witnesses, including a minstrel, to report ‘off-stage’ action. Meanwhile, he preserves Eisenstein’s formal construction, narrative drive and emotional intensity via musically-enhanced soundscapes. Musical episodes feature in various guises: interludes, underlying accompaniment, stylised sound-effects, character-drawing and dramatic intensification. Accounts of MacNeice’s working method depict him, rather like Prokofiev in Eisenstein’s workshop, with a stopwatch in hand, watching, replaying and timing extracts, reworking the script to fit the music, replacing action, camera work and sound–visual counterpointing with patterns of reconfigured sound. More interestingly, MacNeice worked less with the soundtrack (whose quality was very poor) than with the score of Prokofiev’s cantata, a musically-coherent reworking of the film music, obtained from Paris where it had premièred the year before.5 A comparison of the three sources – cantata, soundtrack and film – shows MacNeice expanding the narrative potential of Prokofiev’s music. The film’s most easily transferable sounds disappear: dialogues and mimetic representation (clashing swords, galloping hoofs, clarion calls). More experimental or non-mimetic features, however, such as layered sound, and desynchronised rhythms, are played up. Take, for example, the depiction of Pskov: Eisenstein’s three-line exchange between the Master and Hubertus leads into a long mute scene portraying the massacre of the innocents,

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sometimes with discreet orchestral accompaniment. In MacNeice’s Nevsky the scene is expanded into dialogic form: not just verbal exchanges between characters, but dialogues of words and music. Phrasing, cadence and delivery are minutely arranged to fit the cantata: HUBERTUS These Russians, my Lord, have no education [. . .] Look at the disparity in arms and in experience – Where they have ramparts of clay, we have forts of cemented stone, Where they have leather jerkins we have of iron mail; Where they have their heads bare, we have iron helmets; Where we have years of military training behind us, They have been in digging the fields or huddling over the stove. Where we have single purpose – GRAND MASTER I know all that! It is their own fault. They have asked to die, and die, Hubertus, they shall. A deaf people that will not listen to reason must listen to fire and sword. We Germans, Hubertus, have a mission from God. HUBERTUS A mission, my lord, we are bound to fulfil.6 In terms of formal architectonics too, MacNeice integrates music differently. Eisenstein’s film is separated into chapters by subtitled, black crossfades, and Prokofiev’s cantata is constructed in seven separate movements for live musical performance. In MacNeice’s montage for broadcast, however, intercalating sound-sequences blend music into previous or impending dramatic action, emphasising the dynamic pulse. In such instances, MacNeice the classicist is seemingly drawing on the tradition of the Sophoclean chorus as a way to integrate music into the play’s theatrical unity. Rather than marking a break or transition, music resounds in choric fashion, commenting on dramatic events, playing out the voice of common wisdom, while heightening and driving the action. Act I, for example, concludes with Alexander justifying his decision to take up arms: ALEXANDER Ask yourself that in the night and the morning: How are my brothers sleeping in Pskov? Ask yourselves that and train for the kill. The sun may shine and the sky be blue, And the wind will whisper in your ear: What are the Germans doing in Pskov? What is happening at this very moment? What is happening in Pskov? What is happening in Pskov?7 To which Prokofiev’s music seemingly answers, with the opening chords of the cantata’s 3rd movement, ‘Pskov’. Similarly, in scene 4’s crowd scene, his rallying call is very literally answered by the choir:

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Go and get yourselves arms. And remember! See that your arms are sharp. Remember to have a meal before you march! Remember to cloak your bodies to keep out the cold! And remember one more thing. Remember the future of Russia hangs upon you, Hangs upon you . . . alone.8 Rather than cheers from the crowd, the exhortation is answered by the triumphant rallying song from the 4th movement, ‘Arise, People of Russia’. A glance at MacNeice’s first major, epic-scale radio play written one year later shows him expanding on the musically-construed techniques, expressivity and dynamics of Nevsky. Christopher Columbus is a vast pageant, nearly two hours long, for actors (forty-eight named characters), choir and orchestra. Drafts of the script, libretto and score were readapted by William Walton and MacNeice to ensure overall musical and semantic sense, and to maintain a unity of rhythm and pace. Musical roles are attributed to certain characters; each scene has a musical theme or feature – tavern music, ecclesiastical chants, military fanfares and festive native-American songs (in each case stylised rather than authentic) – and key sequences are conceived with a dramatic counterpoint between voice and orchestra. As MacNeice’s notes confirm, the choric function of music in classical tradition is henceforth deliberate.9 Two stylised semi-choruses and allegorical spoken roles – ‘Doubt’ and ‘Faith’ – give voice both to Columbus’s ‘inner dialectic’ and to the mind of the Doxa. An uplifting overture, for example, leads into two dialogues in parallel: spoken voice and chorus, then voice and music. As voices fade, the orchestra surges through; when duos of voice and chorus return, a background orchestral ostinato is maintained. Nor is the shift from one to the other particularly distinct – spoken passages rely on a loose form of verse and accentuate the sing-song tone of the actors’ voices, while the exaggerated diction and simple text in the chanted chorus make musical meaning clear. Likewise, the orchestral interludes are tightly integrated into the narrative scheme, with no transitions outside the diegetic frame. Take the first court scene, for example. The Presiding Commissioner, Talavera, is to deliver the verdict: Spain will not back Columbus’s project. Talavera’s own disdain for the scheme is taken over by the chorus, chanting, and then singing, the will of the people, with orchestral accompaniment: Talavera Order in the Court! [. . .] This man has asked for our official approval. There is only one answer to give. Chorus (mounting) No! No! No! No! No! No! (The repeated negatives mount into a musical chorus) Doubt Chorus NO . . . No . . . No . . . Never again! His hope was thrown away And all his work in vain. (p. 28)10

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From this surge of sound, a gently ironic guitar emerges, shifting the scene to a tavern years later. Another feature of Columbus, later accentuated in The Dark Tower, is the use of place-and-setting music, the importance of which emerges in explicit technical directions: ‘a guitar creeps in and takes you to a tavern’ (p. 8), ‘Night music throws a light on Columbus talking to himself’ (p. 48), ‘The Te Deum swells up from the decks of the ship and mingles with the chanting of the Indians on the shore’ (p. 56). In other words, Walton’s music is more than programmatic or incidental; it is a fully integrated narrative presence conjuring ‘a new world’ into existence (p. 66). The same is true of MacNeice’s 1946 play, which like its two predecessors, builds on an epic intertext – in this case, Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’. The source-inspiration is made explicit by the announcer: ‘And yet, Dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set And blew. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’” Note well the words, ‘And yet’. Roland did not have to – he did not wish to – and yet in the end he came to: The Dark Tower. (p. 147)11 It is the ‘And yet’ that the play explores. Browning’s poem ends, and MacNeice’s play opens, on the clarion call. Roland’s elder brother is practising the music that he must perform at the end of his quest, a family tradition, to a land laid waste by a dragon that cannot be killed but only challenged in his own demesne – the Tower. Roland is likewise destined to embark on the quest from which there is no return. This is unsurprising, since it is a figurative quest, against figures and metaphors of evil. Roland, however, proves a reluctant apprentice, unsure of what to look for and whether he has to fulfil his destiny. He sets off on an elusive sea-journey of distraction from which his beloved, Sylvie, saves him, only to arrive in the land of the dragon. They are nearly married in a haunted chapel, when voices of conscience implore Roland to continue alone. He advances through deserts and forests of doubt, nearly abandoning his quest along with the enchanted ring his mother gave him. Riven by inner conflict, Roland finds the tower growing before his eyes; he unslings his trumpet and sounds the challenge. As well as a masterful example of MacNeice’s ‘parable art’, richly expressive and allegorically suggestive yet eluding explicit ‘meaning’, the play celebrates music’s expressive yet elusive power. Here too Britten’s music for strings and trumpet solo occupies the part of chorus, creating transitions and commentaries between scenes. The Dark Tower itself literally rises from plangent orchestral music. It first resounds as a figure of destiny, then returns to erect the tower before Roland’s eyes: (Figure in the music) Gavin The tower! The Dark Tower! Sergeant Trumpeter Quick now, my lad. Unsling your trumpet. (p. 147)12 Music equally creates the setting and all sound-effects, enabling Roland to wander through elusive geographies of sound. The ship engines, for example, are not recorded machinery but ‘orchestral engines’ (p. 133); an orchestral splash marks Roland’s leap overboard (p. 136); the chapel ‘swells’ from music (p. 139). Geographies of the mind,

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and meanderings of conscience, are likewise figured by music: orchestra and voices create the harping chants of speaking birds that emerge from ‘forest music’ (p. 141). A dramatic polyphonic crescendo marks the dénouement, combining echoes of advice, haunting jeers, a ticking clock, sing-song rhythms and a pulsating orchestral heartbeat. Music does not merely accompany the story; it performs world, meaning and action into existence by anticipating, replacing and replicating the sounds of the everyday world, the polyexpressivity of poetry and the tempo of verbal exchanges. The MacNeice–Britten collaboration also incorporates a modernist, self-referential plane as a story about, and an allegory of, musical power, told in sound. Both the play and the quester’s life begin and end with the ‘slughorn’; while the traditional knightin-arms has a horse and sword, Roland has only a trumpet, and becomes fit to set out once he has mastered the call. Music propels him through his adventure, where all the characters and places are figures of orchestral sound. This is most explicit in the scenes of temptation. One of Roland’s tempters is an ‘Old Soak’ who can summon up music, which in turn can conjure up a tavern: Soak Ho there, music! The orchestra strikes up raggedly – continuing while he speaks. Soak That’s the idea. Music does wonders, young man. Music can build a palace, let alone a pub. Come on, you Masons of the Muses, swing it, Fling me up four walls [. . .] Come on – ’Cellos! Percussion! All of you! A bar! That’s right. Dismiss! (The music ends). (p. 129) Similarly, objective and subjective worlds dissolve into a fantasy of life-as-sounds with the Circe-figure, Neaera. She plays a violin ‘in her head’, yet Roland and the listener hear the melody, scripted into the text as words and music literally performing the romance that must detract Roland from his mission: The violin re-emerges Neaera . . . Lento . . . accelerando . . . presto . . . calando . . . morendo . . . (The violin fades away; it is meant to have established an affaire between Roland and Neaera)13 In other words, there is no telling where mimetic sounds and pure music begin and end, nor whether music performs this parable world into being or is being performed within the world. But in the most playfully philosophical, yet thought-challenging way, it takes the listener into worlds of literary archetypes, cultural traditions and technological prowess, where lives and worlds themselves end when music fades. MacNeice continued to write musico-literary collaborations – They Met on Good Friday with music by Tristram Cary for example – and his radio features and poetry drew tirelessly on themes and dynamics of soundscape and auditory memory. Nevertheless, his most experimental radiophonic work remained The Dark Tower, and it fell to others to pursue his quest to play out the beguiling complexity of worlds-in-sound. The best immediate example would of course be Beckett’s six plays (or ‘Pieces’) for radio, initially prompted by a BBC commission, all of which gradually pushed the

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logic of narrative dissolution, sound control, musical semantics and auditory characterisation to their limits. His first play All That Fall (1956) picks up on the obscure quest theme, eerily echoed or pre-empted by Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, while a world of sound effects responds to the main protagonist’s prompting. The aptly named Words and Music (1961) is likewise a form of quest for meaning, in which Music seems to win. As was the case with Roland, however, any notion of a ‘victory’ is undermined by the hauntingly enigmatic nature of the adversary and the setting. His last completed radio work, Cascando (1962), extends the taunting logic of the tavern scene and the Old Soak, where Music as a named character is in dialogue or competition with Voice, both of which depend for their existence on an Opener who turns on and off a sound machine at will. Less obscure and dauntingly intellectual, MacNeice’s work paved the way to experimental sound worlds such as these, but could appeal imaginatively to far broader audiences. It deserves recognition as an impressive contribution to the early development of radiophonic modernism, which harked back to the pre-print era, and continues to flourish in forms like Hörspiel, electro-acoustics and musique concrète in our post-Gutenberg present.

Notes 1. The debates are particularly well represented in the magazine Close Up. Although shortlived (1929–33), the life of the review coincides exactly with the dawning era of synchronised sound; few contributors showed more than lukewarm enthusiasm for the new medium. See the section ‘From Silence to Sound’, in Close Up: Cinema and Modernism, eds. James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 79–94. 2. See essays on sound by Eisenstein and Vertov in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, ed. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor (London: Routledge, 1994). 3. See Ian Whittington, ‘Archaeologies of Sound: Reconstructing Louis MacNeice’s Wartime Radio Publics’, Modernist Cultures 10 (1) (2015), 44–61. 4. Detailed account in Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 217–46. 5. See Dallas Bower, ‘Sound and Vision’, in Time Was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice, ed. Terence Brown and Alec Reid (Dublin: The Dolmen Press), pp. 97–102. 6. Script unpublished. Quotations from Nevsky are transcribed from the radio broadcast on 8 December 1941, BBC Home Service (BBC Sound Archive ref. T3618, 16:10–17:23). 7. Ibid., 15:07–15:24. 8. Ibid., 27:48–28:06. 9. Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice, ed. A. Heuser and P. McDonald (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 4–5. All further references to MacNeice’s plays are to this edition and page references are given in the text. 10. First broadcast 12 October 1942, BBC Home Service (BBC Sound Archive ref. T61086, 34:35–35:15). 11. First broadcast 21 January 1946, BBC Home Service. On-line recording [accessed 13 November 2016] (BBC Sound Archive ref. T28119). 12. Ibid.: 71:18–71:43. 13. Notes from the script in BBC Written Archives Centre (not included in MacNeice, Selected Plays).

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62 ‘High Fidelity’, ‘Added Value’ and the Aesthetics of Sound Technology in Literary Modernism Sam Halliday

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n DEADLOCK (1921), the sixth instalment of Dorothy Richardson’s multi-novel cycle Pilgrimage (1915–67), Miriam, the protagonist, listens closely to a gramophone for the first time. Because of the detail with which this experience is delineated, the relevant passage is worth quoting at some length: Miriam waited, breathless; eagerly prepared to accept the coming wonder. A sound like the crackling of burning twigs came out into the silence. She remembered her first attempt to use a telephone, the need for concentrating calmly through the preliminary tumult, on the certainty that intelligible sounds would presently emerge, and listened encouragingly for a voice. The crackling changed to a metallic scraping, labouring steadily round and round, as if it would go on for ever; it ceased, and an angry stentorian voice seemed to be struggling, half-smothered, in the neck of the trumpet. Miriam gazed, startled, at the yawning orifice, as the voice suddenly escaped and leapt out across the table with a shout—‘Edison-BELL RECORD!’ Lightly struck chords tinkled far away, fairy music, sounding clear and distinct on empty space remote from the steady scraping of the machine. Then a song began. The whole machine seemed to sing it; vibrating with effort, sending forth the notes in a jerky staccato, the scarcely touched words clipped and broken to fit the jingling tune; the sustained upper notes at the end of the verse wavered chromatically, as if the machine were using its last efforts to reach the true pitch; it ceased and the far-away chords came again, fainter and further away. In the second verse the machine struggled more feebly and slackened its speed, flattened suddenly to a lower key, wavered on, flattening from key to key, and collapsed, choking, on a single downward-slurring squeak— ‘Oh, but that’s absolutely perfect,’ gasped Miriam.1

At first, it may seem that the burden of this passage is an indictment of the gramophone for all the ways it fails to reproduce music faithfully, completely, and at a consistent pitch and volume. Accordingly, we learn little about the music being reproduced, and much about what turns attention from that very issue. And yet, the remark with which Miriam concludes the passage confounds this reading – for here, that ‘struggling’, ‘waver[ing]’ and ‘feebl[e]’ thing, the gramophone itself, is

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acclaimed as ‘absolutely perfect’. Rather than the gramophone’s failure, then, the passage turns out to be ultimately more concerned with its relative success, albeit at doing something rather different from the thing we might assume it was designed for. For even as it ‘feebly’ and ‘waver[eringly]’ reproduces music, it also, to Miriam, produces it – ‘sing[ing]’, just like the singer or singers on the gramophone’s attendant disc. It is the gramophone itself, rather than singer, singers, or musicians (or at least as much as them), that is seen as falling short of the right pitch, changing speed and changing key. The gramophone is thus less a means of accessing other things than a ‘thing’ in its own right. It is the paramount object of attention, the focus of the music-seeking ear. In depicting Miriam’s response to the gramophone this way, Richardson subverts an imperative that, as Jonathan Sterne’s work indicates, grounds much thinking about sound technology throughout the twentieth, and now twenty-first centuries: the imperative of ‘high fidelity’, according to which sound technologies can only be esteemed – or even tolerated – insofar as they are faithful to, and thus non-transformative of, those sounds they reproduce.2 By challenging this imperative, Richardson in turn suggests something else, this time not so much an imperative as an attitude – one that is receptive towards precisely what the imperative denounces as anathema. By virtue of this attitude, changes or additions technologies make to sounds they reproduce are tolerated, and even cherished, especially where they accompany music or even constitute a kind of ‘music’ in themselves. To Miriam, the very failure of the gramophone, from a ‘high fidelity’ perspective, thus gives it ‘added value’ – a value we may define as an aesthetic yield in excess of that afforded by any ‘mere’ act of reproduction. This value is both grounded in the workings of sound reproduction technologies and exempt from the criteria by which, according to the imperative of high fidelity, those workings are generally judged. High fidelity and added value are thus coeval yet opposed. To say this is already to realise, however, that these two things are not mutually exclusive. Without the imperative of high fidelity, there could be no added value; correlatively, for that value to appear as such, any act of sonic reproduction must achieve at least a minimum level of fidelity to the sounds it reproduces. This indeed is intimated in Miriam’s initial stance towards the gramophone, which, insofar as it evokes her first usage of the telephone, bespeaks a desire to have sounds be ‘intelligible’ to some extent, notwithstanding the ‘preliminary tumult’ enveloping them. Squaring this desire with what Miriam says about the gramophone’s ‘perfect[ion]’, we might say that she is capable of enjoying both ‘correctly’ pitched, successfully sustained notes and their incarnation as ‘downward-slurring squeak[s]’. The listener she represents thus listens ‘through’ technology as well as to it. Through such listening, the competing claims of ‘high fidelity’ and of ‘added value’ might be reconciled. In what follows, I examine further ways in which high fidelity and added value encounter one another in representations of sound technologies by early-twentiethcentury writers such as Huxley, Woolf and Hemingway. Most of these writers focus on the gramophone, the first major sound reproduction technology, and as such the most prominent in artistic and critical interrogation of this technology in toto in the early decades of its use. My penultimate example, though, focuses instead on radio, and its use to broadcast ‘live’ music far beyond its point of origin. Here, added value is located

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not so much in what reproduction adds to music ‘musically’ as in that reproduction’s suggestion of information about the locales and social institutions in which that music is produced.

‘Golf of Sound’ or Haven of ‘Intentions’? The service that the gramophone performs for Miriam in Deadlock is not the major one conceived for it at the gramophone’s inception. For Thomas Edison, inventor of the ‘phonograph’ (the gramophone’s predecessor and, later, namesake in America), the use of gramophones to listen to music was incidental to a more important one as a dictation-taking instrument for use in offices and businesses.3 Most other early manufacturers agreed, turning to the marketing of music-bearing discs only when the office and business market for their wares started to contract.4 Throughout the first four or five decades of sound recording, this attitude was mirrored by connoisseurs and practitioners of ‘serious’ music, who tended to judge recorded music as frivolous and tawdry. Ironically, Edison’s own name became strongly associated with recorded music, as did that of Chichester Bell (cousin of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone), when the latter acquired rights to sell the former’s products in the United Kingdom. This is why the two names appear together at the start of the record heard by Miriam in Deadlock: they state the name of the company formed by Bell for his commercial purpose. There is no better guide to how, when and why attitudes towards gramophoneborne music started to change than the writer and journalist Compton Mackenzie. ‘Until lately,’ he writes in 1922, ‘I supposed [the gramophone] to be nothing but a detestable interruption of conversation and country peace, the golf of sound’ (it will be seen how the last part of this remark reprises the account of golf as ‘a good walk spoiled’ popularly attributed to Mark Twain).5 But now, Mackenzie continues, he can delight in the way that at least some apparatuses and discs render music ‘perfectly’ (p. 67). If this last remark suggests unqualified adherence to the principle of high fidelity, a piece Mackenzie wrote two years later for The Gramophone, a journal he founded as an expression of his new enthusiasm, gives that principle a subtle twist. For here, Mackenzie contends that all gramophones fall into ‘two broad divisions’, ‘romantic’ and ‘realist’, neither of which is necessarily distinguished by greater or lesser fidelity to the music they reproduce (pp. 124–6). Instead, both represent aesthetic canons, modes of representation – ways of portraying or depicting music, rather than passively conveying it. Just as realism and romanticism in literature, say, may offer contrasting views of the ‘same’ thing, so gramophones invariably highlight certain features of any given disc at the expense of others (as Mackenzie knows, no mode of representation renders everything impartially and absolutely). Both romantic and realist gramophones may ultimately flunk the test of high fidelity, but by the same token, may also offer added value. Mackenzie was one of several ‘gramophone “intellectuals”’, who, in Colin Symes’s words, ‘came to prominence in the 1920s’ by insisting that the gramophone ‘was an authentic musical instrument warranting cultural accreditation’.6 To win support for their claim, they also made another, more congenial to their opponents, according to which the gramophone neither should nor ever could attempt to emulate or overthrow what both sides thus agreed to be the supreme musical event or iteration: the

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concert.7 But to a significant number of twentieth-century composers, concerts had problems of their own. In 1935, Igor Stravinsky fumed against the ‘notorious liberty’ taken by conductors and musicians when performing composers’ works, ‘which prevents the public from obtaining a correct idea of the author’s intentions’.8 To address this problem, Stravinsky tried composing directly on the perforated paper rolls used by mechanical pianos, circumventing conventional musical notation, which he, like many, thought responsible for giving that ‘liberty’ expression and encouragement. In 1925, a German composer, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, identified the same problem, arguing that since notation has an inherent capacity to be interpreted in different ways (no two players can ever interpret instructions such as ‘forte’ to precisely the same effect), it might ideally be replaced by a new form of writing, inscribed directly upon gramophonic discs.9 All of this is worth bearing in mind in relation to a passage in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928), ostensibly reconstructing each of the historic steps making it possible for a character in the novel’s present to play a recording of one of Beethoven’s late string quartets: He wound up the clockwork; the disc revolved; he lowered the needle of the soundbox on to its grooved surface. A single violin gave out a long note, then another a sixth above, dropped to the fifth (while the second violin began where the first had started), then leapt to the octave, and hung there suspended through two long beats. More than a hundred years before, Beethoven, stone deaf, had heard the imaginary music of stringed instruments expressing his inmost thoughts and feelings. He had made signs with ink on ruled paper. A century later, four Hungarians had reproduced from the printed reproduction of Beethoven’s scribbles that music which Beethoven had never heard except in his imagination. Spiral grooves on a surface of shellac remembered their playing. The artificial memory revolved, a needle travelled in its grooves and through a faint scratching and roaring that mimicked the noises of Beethoven’s own deafness, the audible symbols of Beethoven’s convictions and emotions quivered out into the air.10 Like Stravinsky and Stuckenschmidt, Huxley emphasises the successive transformations displacing music from one medium to another – from the ‘thoughts and feelings’ prompting Beethoven’s composition in the first place to his ‘scribbled’ manuscript, and so on. And like Mackenzie, he emphasises the additional displacement inherent in the storage and subsequent reproduction of a particular performance, by particular musicians, by gramophony. But unlike any of these other authors, Huxley stresses not the ineluctable disparity of all these media but what he takes to be their radical equivalence. Rather than mourn the deviation from ‘intent’ necessarily entailed by mediation, he celebrates music’s translatability into and out of different media as the only real chance that this intent has of being realised, howeverso ‘correct[ly]’ or otherwise. Each link in the chain bringing Beethoven’s music to the ears of his character, he thus suggests, is basically efficient: it receives what is given by the one preceding it, and passes it on to the next one, without fundamental (and certainly not fatal) loss. The gramophone even has an edge on its equivalents – at least where late works by Beethoven are concerned – insofar as its very imperfections (the ‘scratching and roaring’ it adds to the sound of the string quartet) evoke sounds the composer could have

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heard while conceiving music he could not. One ‘hears’ Beethoven’s ‘stone deaf[ness]’. How’s that for added value?

Dispersal and Harmony The appearances made by gramophones in Deadlock and Point Counter Point are brief, emphatic and singular within the works of which they form parts. By contrast, the gramophone in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) is an abiding presence, often invoked in the narrative and integral to the novel’s action. This has consequences for the way the dialectic of high fidelity and added value is articulated in Woolf’s text. For it allows a more systematic separation in that text than in others we have considered between characters’ relations to the gramophone and what one might call the narrative’s estimate of those relations – its explicit and implicit commentary on how wise and discriminating (or otherwise) characters’ relations are. Thus, we may distinguish first- and second-order responses to a single set of gramophonic objects: a series of recordings that help provide the musical component of a pageant performed in the garden of a country house. The novel is itself a kind of meta-pageant, reporting and reflecting on the performance its characters witness and produce. The gramophone is ultimately adjudged a success by the meta-pageant for reasons that partly coincide with those for which, during the pageant, it mostly seems a failure. The disparity between these two things is rooted, as we should by now begin to expect, in a distinction between music the gramophone is tasked with reproducing and sounds betraying the gramophone’s status and character as an apparatus. Those latter sounds are all the audience can hear when the gramophone first tries to make ‘Music’: ‘Chuff, chuff, chuff’ it goes, without accompaniment or sequel.11 If these sounds evoke a ‘corn-cutter’ (as Woolf goes on to suggest herself), their apparent regularity also evokes the workings of another machine, the clock (p. 49). And sure enough, the gramophone later goes ‘tick, tick, tick’, much like a clock itself, leading one character to remark that it is ‘Marking time’ (p. 51). This tells us that the gramophone is, first and foremost, mechanical – a thing of rotary motion, predictable and constant (on this occasion, by contrast to that in Deadlock), whose tempo bears no particular relation to that of any music it may play. Correlatively, on its first few appearances in Woolf’s novel, the gramophone connotes an absence of music rather than music’s presence, placing music under the sign of poverty or failure. This is also true, to some extent, once the gramophone does start making music. It ‘blare[s] on one occasion, and on another’, ‘gurgle[s]’ (pp. 59, 119). But ‘blar[ing]’ is elsewhere attributed to a particular piece of music, making it potentially a thing of musical style rather than, or as well as, one of technical fidelity (p. 49). This blurring of music’s ‘how’ with music’s ‘what’ is also effected in the following description of how a certain musical effect comes about: ‘The tune on the gramophone reeled from side to side as if drunk with merriment’ (p. 53). ‘Reel[ing]’ here is neither clearly the responsibility of the gramophone nor clearly an inherent feature of the music being reproduced: possibly, it is both. Machine and musical idiom are thus conflated, as if both were manifestations of more fundamental tendencies in music that, given the vocabulary we have seen her use, it appears that Woolf holds in some disdain. ‘[P]ompous’ music gets the reproduction it deserves (p. 49).

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This is not, however, the final position on gramophony Between the Acts upholds. Clearly, the novel’s gramophone does not offer high fidelity, but it does yield added value, in the form of meta-musical ‘meanings’, italicised within the narrative, and presented as semantic or conceptual correlates of music the gramophone plays. A key instance of this coincides with the pageant’s interval and turns on the distinction noted earlier between characters’ relations to the gramophone and Woolf’s commentary on those relations. Here, the audience’s rather cloddish and literal interpretation of what the gramophone is ‘saying’ appears alongside a ‘higher’ meaning that, at this stage, only the narrator perceives: the audience stirred. Some rose briskly; others stooped, retrieving walking-sticks, hats, bags. And then, as they raised themselves and turned about, the music modulated. The music chanted: Dispersed are we. (p. 59; emphasis in original) This ‘we’ is the audience, whose collective voice the gramophone articulates. That audience interprets what the voice has said to the effect that its members may leave their seats now that the interval has started: ‘now, you may disperse’. But for Woolf’s meta-pageant, ‘Dispersed are we’ signifies something more fundamental about the audience-members’ relation to each other – their essential lack of solicitude and mutual knowledge. Music tells them this but does not, on this occasion, possess sufficient potency to make them understand it. That understanding comes, however, towards the pageant’s end, and is accompanied by a countervailing consciousness of how the audience’s dispersal may at least be mitigated. This time, the gramophone is more clearly identified as the instructive ‘voice’: The gramophone was affirming in tones there was no denying, triumphant yet valedictory: Dispersed are we; who have come together. But, the gramophone asserted, let us retain whatever made that harmony. (p. 116; emphasis in original) A musical quality, ‘harmony’, doubles as a social one, representing the solidarity audience-members have with one another (despite or alongside their dispersal) by virtue of their shared experience. Thus, Woolf’s characters derive from music a resolve to comport themselves, collectively, according to music’s own example.

Picturing Location My penultimate exhibit is Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio’ (1933), whose title signals my own shift of focus from the gramophone to radio. By the time the story was written, the latter had become a significant source of entertainment (and news distribution), broadcasting music, amongst other things, to audiences across North America (and on other continents, though that is not relevant to Hemingway’s text). Users determined what to listen to by ‘tuning’ their radios to signals transmitted from stations more or less proximate in space – at times, receiving signals sent over considerable distances. When allied with the plot-point that the story’s radio-listening protagonist, Mr Frazer, is physically confined in hospital, such distances create a kind of pathos of virtual mobility. Here, it is explained how Frazer ‘travels’ from city to

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city (or radio stations located therein) at night by tuning and retuning his apparatus (a somewhat obscure impediment to a radio’s effective function in daylight is invoked to explain why this must happen nocturnally): In that hospital a radio did not work very well until it was dusk. They said it was because there was so much ore in the ground or something about the mountains, but anyway it did not work well at all until it began to get dark outside; but all night it worked beautifully and when one station stopped you could go farther west and pick up another. The last one that you could get was Seattle, Washington, and due to the difference in time, when they signed off at four o’clock in the morning it was five o’clock in the morning in the hospital; and at six o’clock you could get the morning revellers in Minneapolis. That was on account of the difference in time too, and Mr Frazer used to like to think of the morning revellers arriving at the studio and picture how they would look getting off a street car before daylight in the morning carrying their instruments. Maybe that was wrong and they kept their instruments at the place they revelled, but he always pictured them with their instruments. He had never been in Minneapolis and believed he would probably never go there, but he knew what it looked like early in the morning.12 The power of music, then, is to inspire images – mental visualisations of the vision-free sounds radio makes audible. The power of radio, meanwhile, is to peg these images to a definite location, imprinting them with the sense what is being heard is simultaneously being produced in a specific place corresponding to Frazer’s imaginings. We cannot dissociate the ‘musical’ part of this experience from its ‘radiophonic’ one: without the latter, the former would not take its distinctive, near-hallucinatory form. In the same way, we cannot dissociate either music or the sound of radio from a certain consciousness of geography: indeed, it is because of music’s mediation by the radio that Frazer effectively experiences music as geography. What is happening here to high fidelity and added value? In the entirety of his tale, Hemingway says nothing explicit about the former, unless we infer (as in a way, we surely have to) that the radio’s sounds must be fairly close to those of the ‘live’ events it broadcasts if Frazer is to imagine as intently as he does. But what he does say functions as an extended gloss on added value – albeit one significantly different from every other gloss on this topic we have considered hitherto. For here, added value becomes distinctly extra-musical: no longer a pitched, timbred or rhythmic thing that inflects or augments a musical event with which it shares acoustic space (as it is for Richardson, Mackenzie, Huxley and Woolf), but a kind of mental cinematography or television, precipitated by the ear but ‘for’ the (inner) eye. Consider how, in the following passage, both the physical and inner eye become involved in Frazer’s ‘picturing’, as Frazer supplements his visions of specific cities with readings from their associated newspapers; consider too how, as he does this, his visions become less focused on the way that music is produced, and more so on the rooms, businesses and other built environments in which radio-borne music may typically be heard: Mr Frazer received no picture of Denver from the radio. He could see Denver from the Denver Post, and correct the picture from The Rocky Mountain News. Nor did he ever have any feel of Salt Lake City or Los Angeles from what he heard from

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those places. All he felt about Salt Lake City was that it was clean, but dull, and there were too many ballrooms mentioned in too many big hotels for him to see Los Angeles. He could not feel it for the ballrooms. But Seattle he came to know very well, the taxicab company with the big white cabs (each cab equipped with a radio itself) he rode in every night out to the roadhouse on the Canadian side where he followed the course of parties by the musical selections they phoned for. He lived in Seattle from two o’clock on, each night, hearing the pieces that all the different people asked for, and it was as real as Minneapolis, where the revellers left their beds each morning to make that trip down to the studio. Mr Frazer grew very fond of Seattle, Washington. (pp. 479–80) Radio is not at fault for yielding ‘no picture of Denver’: that fault is Denver’s own, or seems to be, given what is said about the putatively no-less insipid (or even more so) Salt Lake City. Accordingly, Denver reveals itself in print, whereas other towns, with better night life, reveal themselves via radio. So it is Seattle that is ‘picture[d]’ in vivid detail – and this time, not only as a place from which musicians broadcast (as with Minneapolis) but as a more extended and diverse milieu, in which people party, take taxis and use telephones. And in doing all those things, Frazer perceives, these people are themselves listening to radio. That is the core intuition of this passage: Frazer listens to Seattleites’ listening; their listening is his. Radio provides a mental cinema but the ‘picture’ it presents is of its own sound. ‘Added value’ ceases to appear regularly in literature in the aftermath of the Second World War. By then, developments in sound technology (many of them precipitated by that war itself, by virtue of the US and other military’s demand for high-performance sound technology for purposes of communication, navigation and surveillance) made high fidelity something users of sound technologies were beginning to expect, rather than simply hope for.13 As a consequence, the sort of experience Miriam has, in her first close encounter with a gramophone, became increasingly rare if not unthinkable.14 Ralph Ellison’s essay ‘Living with Music’ (1955) nicely documents this change. For here, high fidelity is, aesthetically speaking, the only game in town: one would not bother with sound reproduction technology at all, it intimates, if it did not represent a realistic prospect of hearing music (one notes the echo of Stravinsky here) ‘as it was intended to be heard’.15 Added value does, however, make some appearances in post-Second World War literature, none more salutatory for present purposes than in my final literary example, Walter van Tilburg Clark’s ‘The Portable Phonograph’ (1950). In this story, set in the not-so distant future, a presumably nuclear war has all but laid the world to waste. Four people meet to share artefacts that one of them has salvaged from the wreckage of ‘high’ culture. Pre-eminent amongst these artefacts is the story’s titular phonograph, which represents both the relative antiquity of sound recording (by virtue of a ‘wind[-up]’ motor dating it to the age of Edison) and the imminent eclipse of sound recording in the story’s present.16 For as the story intimates, such recording – and more generally, the entire field of cultural achievement and endurance that sound recording represents – is not long for this world. Even the styluses used to play recordings on the gramophone are in short supply; now, the phonograph’s owner tells his guest, he usually uses thorns instead (p. 184). But in tribute to a musician amongst his guests, the owner uses one of his remaining styluses to play a recording of music by Debussy.

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As they listen, the assembled company experience ‘tragically heightened recollections’ (p. 185). Thus, their memories are stoked by the ‘memory’ that sound recording is. This is what added value has become in a world transfigured by disaster: a testament to all that was, and is no more. Added value is now no more or less than simply the value music has.

Notes 1. Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage, 4 vols (London: Virago, 1915–67, repr. 2002), III, pp. 96–7. 2. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 3. See, for example, Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 1877–1977, 2nd edn (London: Gelatt, 1977), p. 44. 4. Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 49. 5. Compton Mackenzie, My Record of Music (London: Hutchinson, 1955), p. 66. Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition. 6. Colin Symes, Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), p. 6. 7. Ibid., p. 6. 8. Igor Stravinsky, Chronicle of My Life, trans. from the French, no translator credited (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935, repr. 1936). 9. H. H. Stuckenschmidt, ‘The Mechanization of Music’ (1925), trans. Michael Gilbert, in German Essays on Music, ed. Jost Hermand and Michael Gilbert (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 149–56. 10. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, intro. David Bradshaw (London: Vintage, 1928, repr. 2004), pp. 563–4. 11. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. Stella McNichol, intro. and notes Gillian Beer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1941, repr. 2000), p. 48. Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this later edition. 12. Ernest Hemingway, The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio, in the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Collier Books, 1986), pp. 468–87 (p. 472). Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition. 13. Symes, p. 68. 14. The major caveat one must enter here, of course, concerns the rise of DJ culture from the 1970s onwards. Here, ‘downward-slurring squeaks’ not unlike those that Miriam enjoys were valorised, though not as sounds produced collaterally, as it were, by sound technologies operating ‘normally’, but rather as deliberate subversions of normal operation, wrung out of sound technologies with ingenuity and skill. For a range of historical and theoretical perspectives on DJ culture, see Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2006), chapter 8. 15. Ralph Ellison, in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. and intro. John F. Callahan, preface Saul Bellow (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), pp. 227–36 (p. 234). 16. Walter van Tilburg Clark, The Watchful Gods, and Other Stories, foreword Ann Ronald (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2004), pp. 179–90 (p. 180). Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition.

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63 Words in Popular Songs Dai Griffiths

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open with an observation and a provocation. To get the provocation over with, the words to popular songs occupy a special position in our lives that’s closed to the great art-word form, poetry. Much as I enjoy reading Richard Wilbur’s poem about mayflies (‘the fine pistons of some bright machine’) the poem doesn’t lodge in the memory, and neither should it.1 However, by comparison, the list of song words embedded in my mind is endless, among which: ‘my independence seems to vanish in the haze’, ‘tramps like us, baby we were born to run’, ‘I chop down trees, I wear high heels, suspenders and a bra’, ‘punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate’, ‘so here it is, merry Christmas, everybody’s having fun’, ‘she came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge’, and ‘they tried to make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no’. It might take a little bit of their music to kick them off but, once under way, words tumble into the mind. Introducing The Faber Popular Reciter, Kingsley Amis struck tones of nostalgia and Weltschmerz (‘most of that, together with much else, is gone’),2 but there’s a fair chance that the recitation of poetry has been replaced by the words to popular songs. What’s more, those words, made up by musicians, are in some tricky sense original, as opposed to the songs of classical music which ‘set’ an already-existent text, or the musical theatre with its collaboration of a distinctly separate lyricist and composer. Words in songs are in a double trap: denied attention because they’re only a part of the song, and denied attention because poetry has a particular claim to the arrangement of words as art form. But to return to the provocation, they’re still often the words that matter. My observation makes another comparison between poets and musicians. Poets also produce critical prose: reviews of other poets’ work, and essays for various events. Not only that but ‘the poets have proved to be the best critics’, says Ricks, discussing six giant poet-critics (Jonson, Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold and Eliot)3 and, across the twentieth century, a prose collection commonly nestled alongside the selecteds and collecteds: Amis, Heaney, Muldoon, Wilbur, Rich, Larkin, de la Mare, Bishop, Enright, Empson, the list goes on. By comparison, there is a strict divide between those who make music or make up music and those who write about music, whether the latter are in turn journalists working to a commission, or academics working to peer review. Poets spend a lot of time sitting around, waiting for poems, and need to chase reviews to keep going and, to keep going, writers on music also have to produce words. On the other hand, musicians survive through a cycle of recording and concert performance, and have no time for writing about music. Those two backgrounds might explain the lack of generally accepted modes of critical engagement in the words of popular songs, and this paper bridges that gap to a

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small extent, by discussing the words to five songs and four examples of writing about song. I’ll start with the latter, in order to set up a series of readings that reflect my own preferred emphases. Exploring academic discussion of words in popular song, we soon find useful ontological discussion, where authors work out the place of words in song in general terms. Simon Frith has some important papers, and the killer title, ‘Why do Songs have Words?’,4 Keith Negus and Pete Astor have made telling interventions,5 while Lars Eckstein’s book is entitled Reading Song Lyrics.6 Clive James has a unique perspective in my view, having been the lyric-provider for Pete Atkin, a literary and cultural critic, as well as a published poet.7 Keith Negus rightly labelled as a ‘tendentious claim’ the observation made by the editor of a recent collection, who had observed ‘an astonishing lack of articles that analysed the content and techniques of song lyrics’,8 and the analytical discussion of words in song can be approached in three ways: word-led, music-led and through attempts to bring words and music together. Word-led discussions of the words in song are common currency, with the obvious danger of treating the words in song as though they were page poems. ‘It’s a desperate business,’ said Randy Newman. ‘They’re not musicians, rock critics, for the most part. So they have to write about words. And there’s nothing to write about.’9 Christopher Ricks is sometimes taken as epitomising this approach, but there’s much more to Ricks’s writing. His book on Bob Dylan begins with a chapter, ‘Songs, Poems, Rhymes’ which sets out many vital matters.10 Discussing many individual songs, Ricks works words into the body of his own prose style, so that he often ends up saying precise things about music through his verbal account. His study of ‘Not Dark Yet’ (pp. 359–74) is a meticulous comparison between the song and Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. This is bold in that there’s always the question of whether Dylan really did base his song on the earlier poem, and Ricks addresses allusion in general terms (p. 361). He attends carefully to Dylan’s rhyme and assonance (pp. 370–1), points at which words evince their own musical capacity. In addition, the song’s music infiltrates this discussion directly at three points. First, the song has a refrain (‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there’), and a refrain can also be termed a ‘burden’, a word used in the song (p. 369). Secondly, music’s temporality ties itself into the words. Lasting 6 minutes 26 seconds, ‘Not Dark Yet’ has two notably lengthy instrumental interludes (3’26”–4’26”, 5’23”–6’26”); Ricks: ‘And the rapt beauty of the long instrumental patience – a full minute – both before the final verse, and, of the same length, after it: not . . . yet, not . . . yet’ (p. 370). Finally, with Coleridge in support, Ricks suggests that ‘musically, vocally and verbally’, the song is ‘both moving and standing still’ (p. 372). Ricks’s book is a model of how to avoid referring to music itself, but at the same time to produce prose that is instinct with the musical context of Dylan’s words. On the other hand, the most music-led approach would be more or less to ignore the words altogether, a strategy which for trained musicians can be tempting: there was once a joke that a published paper had in fact studied Brahms’s Four Serious Vocalises. As with my adamant refusal to understand the Finnish song ‘Hän’ (discussed later in this essay), words can be mere necessities in a melodic line and, quite often in fact, songs abandon the meaning-capacity of words in favour of their sheer sound: Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ starts with the most stirring example. Music analysts do sometimes have a lot to say about music, with the result that saying anything about words comes a way down the list, with the thematic content of the words the most

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salient aspect. Walter Everett is a good example, having produced many books and papers on a variety of important song writers: Lennon and McCartney, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Billy Joel and Paul Simon. Their words matter, however, insofar as they reinforce a point made primarily inside the music. For example, discussing Simon’s track ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’,11 Everett’s overall argument is about the role played by chromatic harmony in Simon’s music: the paper assumes that level of engagement in Simon’s music, so that the reader needs to understand both musical notation as well as music-theoretical concepts like chromatic harmony. These are reasonable expectations. Everett’s view of the words is that they depict a mental state, so that whatever the music does then transfers, through the words, into this state. For example, discussing the bridge section of the song (at 1’25”): The bridge unfolds some time after the parting, at ‘four in the morning’. By saying that he’s ‘crapped out’, he may mean that he’s exhausted, or that he didn’t ‘get lucky’. But he is unambiguous in that he knows he is very lonely and, long after the witching hour, is far from a stable state of mind. He resolves not to worry over his emotional problem, secure in the belief that ‘it’s all going to fade’. (p. 125) In Everett’s view, words don’t have a life of their own, and are quoted directly to illustrate such psychological states, and the words progress strictly in tandem with the music. Finally, there are approaches which try to keep music and words balanced together where, to coin poor neologisms, words are ‘wordsing’ the music, while music is ‘musicking’ the words. Like Everett, both Moore and Griffiths are musicians first, but go further in engaging with words per se. Allan Moore might be described as an integrationist, bringing words and music together for a given song under a unifying metaphor, the song-derived metaphor in turn carried through to the listener’s bodily response to music. His approach recalls the world of text setting, where composers pick up on one idea from a set of words as a basis for the song as a whole: setting the poet Müller, in his song ‘Pause’, Schubert at least starts by deriving his piano accompaniment from the lute of the poem’s first line, and this selectivity necessarily results in other details in the poem passed over. So too for Allan Moore, for example in the track ‘Bridge of Sighs’ by Robin Trower, a number of words in the song might demonstrate ‘force’12 but none of them ‘enter[s] into a causative relationship’: these are unlucky losers among Trower’s words. Now the lucky winners: ‘The two that seem to me active are the cold wind, which “blows”, and the track’s persona, who spend time “crossing”.’ Moore then reads these two ideas into the opening guitar figure of the track, knowing its musical content thoroughly, and to an admirable level of detail: ‘It works thus. Recall looking at someone leaning into the wind, but observing them from the side.’ Dai Griffiths is a segregationist, whose view is set out in the preface to his study of Elvis Costello: Taken as a whole, the book comes close to realizing a view I’ve had in mind for some time, that in order to understand songs one needs to have studied only two famous textbooks: Walter Piston’s Harmony, and The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics.13

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Griffiths keeps music and words separate, bringing to each an equally thorough attention. His study of a song by Cat Stevens14 examines the music in detail, insofar as there is much to say about it. The words are then discussed both as subject-matter and as formal arrangement. The latter includes a detailed transcription of the words to the song, and an analysis of internal rhyme found in this particular instance. Griffiths transfers certain ideas from poetry criticism, crucially the line15 as musical and poetic category, which in a song provides ‘verbal space’.16 Turning now to the songs, we have an immediately important question: which songs? These five case studies are chosen and arranged by what I claim to be a conceptual chronology: pop song (c. 1965), singer-songwriter (c. 1975), anti-lyric, rap and world music (all c. 1990). The five last around three minutes each: they’re different ways of doing something with words in music in the same amount of time. As I said earlier, the words are all in some sense original, made up by musicians for the purpose of the song, although we will find an important shift in the relationship between singer and song. We start with the pop song, because this is the form most closely tied to the music industry: defining ‘popular music’ as such is difficult, and ‘best-selling’ often makes the strongest claim, alongside ‘music of the people’, to mean hymns and carols, singing at football grounds, trade union choirs and so on. ‘I’m a Believer’ was written by Neil Diamond but was purchased by millions when issued in a recording by the Monkees in 1966. The verse starts perhaps from the speed of speech, its syllables progressing like a walk: ‘I thought love was only true in fairy tales’. Now a small contrast between verse and chorus: a line ending with ‘seems’ (picking up the ‘me’ of the previous couplet) rhymes with ‘dreams’. Music has imposed its shape on the words, so that the first two and second two lines are heard to different music. After ‘Love was out to get me’, the backing vocals sing a little figure: ‘der-der-der, der-der’, important little things for the song. The brilliant chorus brings a cliché to life: the religious roots of ‘I’m a believer’ applied to being in love: ‘Then I saw her face’. That very phrase coincides with musical silence which sets the chorus in motion, the singer answered by a little figure played on the organ: call and response, vocal chorus, still churchy. Melody and harmony then reach a climactic point, the ‘oooh’ of ‘I’m in love, oooh’. ‘I’m a believer’ then rhymes with ‘I couldn’t leave her’ as a classy little rhyme, of the sort Wimsatt should have approved.17 Another verse, fade, no hanging about. These then are the words of ordinary language heightened in and by the song: to return to my claim about memorability, once heard, they’re buried deep in the head. We move to a singer-song from the 1970s: James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain’. The deal here, a big difference from the Monkees, is that James Taylor wrote the song and sings it: he controls voice, words, melody and chords. What’s more, the song is in the first person, so that we think it’s about Taylor himself, and he has in fact gone to great lengths to assure us that we’re right to do so; even the ‘you’ of the song is named as Suzanne, and existed in real life. As in the Monkees song, Taylor gives out words in a conversational way not far from ordinary speech. The first verse presents essential information, and sets up a rhyme scheme (abab: ‘gone’, ‘end to you’, ‘song’, ‘send it to’), rhymes of varying sorts, while the third line, ending in ‘song’, introduces arty, internal self-awareness: ‘I wrote down this song’. The chorus is more long-breathed in melody – Taylor’s a great singer – and brings in the title’s great pair of visual words; the chorus also rhymes fully, now abba: ‘rain’, ‘end’, ‘friend’, ‘again’. At their ‘left-hand side’,

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three lines of the chorus’s four open with the first person: three repetitions of ‘I’ve seen’ setting up the final thing not-seen: ‘I always thought that I’d see you again’. For a song like this, and for our conviction that James Taylor is sincere, the second verse is a big moment, where the song has to recognise the limitations musical form imposes on its room for manoeuvre: the verse-chorus pattern is set, a rhyme scheme is in place, the subject-matter is established. In fact, what Taylor does is gently to increase the number of words in each verse-line, what Leonard Cohen once called the ‘syllabic density’ of the line.18 The first verse-line increases from thirteen syllables in verse one to seventeen in verse two. The third verse is more garrulous throughout: the syllables of the first verse, line by line, are: 13-11-12-10, and now in the third verse: 17-14-19-13. By that point, Taylor is extending the vocal line too, while the instrumental support is louder and rhythmically more active: it’s all building up, though not necessarily to anything, and the record eventually fades out. Taylor’s rhymes are consistent in the verses, a mixture of full and half rhyme. Along the way, again on the ‘left-hand side’ of the line, there’s enough colloquial banter (‘Been walking my mind’, ‘Lord knows’, ‘Well, there’s’) to put the words on the side of a prose form like a letter or dramatic speech, and enough precise technique on the ‘right-hand side’ to put it on the side of a poem, so that we have a balance of freedom and tightness, likely the source of a sense that the words don’t work as a page poem. That’s a criticism that can easily be levelled, but it’s not one thing or the other, rather, comparably with the way that poetry is a balance between verse and prose,19 words in songs connect both to page poetry and to prose. ‘Rock lyrics are poetry (maybe)’ was Robert Christgau’s inspired summary.20 We now reach the 1980s, the association between writer and the song firmly in place, and a sense that songs consisted of lots of people going on about themselves. However, we also find some unpredictable developments: repetitive music where the words don’t follow the expectation of rhyme that we’ve seen in the pop song and singer-song; and, with rap, words spoken as well as sung, a large quantity of words and rhymes galore. Briefly, ‘Hey Jack Kerouac’ by 10,000 Maniacs (In My Tribe, 1987, music Robert Buck, words Natalie Merchant) is what I’ve termed anti-lyric.21 Once an initial full rhyme (‘mother’, ‘none other’) is out of the way, it’s evident that Merchant has a set of words on paper, so to speak, and fits them in through her melody. A good little example is found in the chorus, whose first musical line ends ‘mouths of’, followed in the next musical line by ‘babes got lost in the wood’. The music is scissors cutting through the line of words. It’s a world away from the premise of ‘I’m a Believer’, where music and words worked together to create the happy unity of song. ‘New World Water’ is by Mos Def, and was issued in 1999. Moving on from Neil Diamond and James Taylor, we’ve entered the world of the rap nom-de-plume: Mos Def was born Dante Terrell Smith. The music is restricted to a four-second loop repeated exactly forty times over the 3 minutes 12 seconds of the track as a whole, the loop occasionally suspended by way of interruption (as at 2’04–06”) but never abandoned; the track ends dead. The loop is the ‘contrary motion’ of musical counterpoint: a descending melody (D-C-Bb-A-G) over a rising bass line (D-E-F-F#-G), the descending notes expanded into four-note groups; the second ‘bar’ of the loop is a syncopated tonic chord. The voice, occasionally unison voices, and the words are thus considerably in the foreground. These words in turn consist of rhyming couplets, again with fastidious consistency, each couplet corresponding to one cycle

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of the musical loop. However, the one repeated section (1’07–22”, 2’14–28”), which includes the song’s title spoken by supporting vocals, is enough to divide the track formally: the rhymes before the first repeated section are directed towards the final syllable (half/bath, Hank/tank) or two (something/nothing, higher/fire), whereas the rhymes between the repeated sections include dactylic trisyllables (neediness/Petri dish, secretive/freakiness). As we can see even from those parenthetical selections, the rhymes vary in exactitude: their ‘end-ness’ in the line is what matters; there are also internal rhymes and enjambment. The words are spoken not sung, and so rap does indeed tend towards the recitation of poetry against music as much as to song. The theme of the track is water: water as a dangerously rare commodity, and water wasted, so that water becomes a point from which to observe the geo-political world, almost as a newspaper report; as of 2 minutes 30 seconds, the repetition of a phrase (‘It’s all about getting that cash’) heralds a coda section, and includes playful references to the singers Johnny and Rosanne Cash. Our final example is ‘Hän’, by the Finnish singer-songwriter J. Karjalainen. This is a pretty record, and I presume it’s a love song, but I have no idea whatsoever and, what’s more, no intention of finding out. Certainly, when we study songs in another language we find and trust translations or explanations, but songs enable us to experience words in any number of languages, one after the other, far more immediately and intensely than one might understand in reading: poetry in translation is a more contentious affair reflecting, among other complications, Frost’s dictum that poetry is what gets lost in translation. In my experience of the Finnish song, the vocal melody and its words veer towards being a melody played on an instrument, but not quite: it’s more like taking a holiday from meaning in what I still know to be a song. These five case studies are concerned with words in song conceived, in the Monkees, Taylor and Mos Def examples, against the background of their musical content: 10,000 Maniacs and J. Karjalainen illustrate small word-centred points. A certain fastidious attention to the detail of words in music unites all of the academic approaches that I discussed earlier, Ricks by musical analogy rather than technical detail. Everett, I think, would allow more of the ongoing persona of each song in its temporal development, while Moore, I think, would work harder to achieve a unity of idea between words and music; the readings are at their most Griffithsian in attending to quantities of words in the musical line, as well as to rhyme as a point of musico-poetic correspondence. The songs were about different and unpredictable: respectively love, mortality, Jack Kerouac’s mother, water and something in Finnish. I shall end by mentioning subject-matter, and an impressive list of eleven poetic tones (we might say, and which I italicise) identified by Robert Christgau, who sees Bob Dylan followed by: a multitude of troubadours manqué who turned out their own thousands of great songs – sometimes with bridges and changes attached, sometimes strophic versifying, sometimes three-chord rants, laments, or anthems. The urbane wit and commonplace succinctness prized by classic pop never died out, but rock’s vernacular was more all-embracing – slangy or raunchy or obscene, earnest or enraged, confessional or hortatory, poetic or dissociative or obscure or totally meaningless. Some lyricist is recombining a personalized selection of those qualities as you read this sentence.22

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‘Thousands of great songs’ is a good way to end this brief discussion, but readers should also note that ways of writing about song exist, not in their thousands, surely not, but more than enough to be getting on with.

Notes 1. Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems 1943–2004 (New York: Harcourt, 2006), p. 36. 2. The Faber Popular Reciter, ed. Kingsley Amis (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 15. 3. The Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. Christopher Ricks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xlii. 4. Simon Frith, ‘Why do Songs have Words?’, in Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Music (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), pp. 105–28. 5. Pete Astor, ‘The Poetry of Rock: Song Lyrics are not Poems, but the Words still Matter; Another Look at Richard Goldstein’s Collection of Rock Lyrics’, Popular Music, 29 (2010), 143–8; Keith Negus and Pete Astor, ‘Songwriters and Song Lyrics: Architecture, Ambiguity and Repetition’, Popular Music, 34 (2015), 226–44; Keith Negus and Pete Astor, ‘More Than a Performance: Song Lyrics and the Practices of Songwriting’, in Popular Music Matters, Essays in Honour of Simon Frith, ed. Lee Marshall and Dave Laing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) pp. 195–208. 6. Lars Eckstein, Reading Song Lyrics (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010). 7. Clive James, ‘My Life in Pop’, in Even as We Speak: New Essays 1993–2001 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 217–21. 8. Keith Negus, review of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics, ed. Charlotte Pence (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012), Popular Music, 32 (1) (2013), 149–51 (p. 150, referring to Pence, p. xii). 9. Paul Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, expanded edn (New York: Da Capo, 1997), p. 282. 10. Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (London: Viking, 2003), pp. 11–48. Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition. 11. Walter Everett, ‘Swallowed by a Song: Paul Simon’s Crisis of Chromaticism’, in John Covach and Graeme M. Boone, Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 113–53 (pp. 120–6). Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition. 12. Allan F. Moore, Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), p. 301. 13. Dai Griffiths, Elvis Costello (London: Equinox, 2007), p. x. 14. Dai Griffiths, ‘Internal Rhyme in “The Boy with a Moon and Star on His Head”, Cat Stevens, 1972’, Popular Music, 31 (2011), 383–400. 15. T. V. F. Brogan, ‘Line’, in The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 694–7. 16. Dai Griffiths, ‘From Lyric to Anti-Lyric: Analyzing the Words in Pop Song’, in Analyzing Popular Music, ed. Allan F. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 43–8. 17. W. K. Wimsatt, ‘One Relation of Rhyme to Reason’, in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 153–66 (p. 156). 18. Zollo, p. 341. 19. T. V. F. Brogan, ‘Poetry’ and ‘Verse and Prose’, in Preminger and Brogan, pp. 938–42 and 1346–51.

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20. The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, ed. Jonathan Eisen (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), p. 230. 21. Griffiths, ‘From Lyric to Anti-Lyric’, pp. 54–5. 22. Robert Christgau, ‘Let’s Get Busy in Hawaiian: A Hundred Years of Ragged Beats and Cheap Tunes’, Village Voice (2000) , my italics [accessed 27 July 2016].

Discography 10,000 Maniacs, ‘Hey Jack Kerouac’ (In My Tribe, Elektra, 1987) Bob Dylan, ‘Not Dark Yet’ (Time Out of Mind, Columbia, 1997) J. Karjalainen, ‘Hän’ (Suurimmat Hitit 1982–92, Poko, 1992) The Monkees, ‘I’m a Believer’ (Colgems, 1966) Mos Def, ‘New World Water’ (Black on Both Sides, Rawkus, 1999) Paul Simon, ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’ (Still Crazy After All These Years, Columbia, 1972) Cat Stevens, ‘The Boy with a Moon and Star on his Head’ (Catch Bull at Four, Island, 1972) James Taylor, ‘Fire and Rain’ (Sweet Baby James, Warner, 1970) Robin Trower, ‘Bridge of Sighs’ (Bridge of Sighs, Chrysalis, 1974)

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64 Notes on Soundtracked Fiction: The Past as Future Justin St Clair

T

om McCarthy opens his essay ‘Transmission and the Individual Remix’ with a description of Kraftwerk’s ‘Antenna’, a track from their 1975 album RadioActivity.1 ‘Why start this essay – this essay about literature and how it works – with a pop song?’, McCarthy asks.2 Why indeed? ‘[T]o make you listen,’ he writes: Not to me, nor even to Beckett and Kafka, but to a set of signals that have been repeating, pulsing, modulating in the airspace of the novel, poem, play – in their lines, between them and around them – since each of these forms began. I want to make you listen to them, in the hope not that they’ll deliver up some hidden and decisive message, but rather that they’ll help attune your ear to the very pitch and frequency of its own activity – in other words, that they’ll enable you to listen in on listening itself.3 McCarthy not only insists that literature is, fundamentally, the art of listening, but that ‘literature was also always, from the off, a question of broadcasting technology [. . .] a comm. tech issue’.4 As we navigate the linguistic structures of language art, he contends, ‘we are always not just (to use a dramatic term) in medias res, i.e., in the middle of events, but also simply in media’.5 This characterisation – of literature as both always already aural and also inherently in-mediate, if you’ll pardon the neologism – offers us a convenient vantage point from which to consider the once and future relationship between literature and music. While the past several decades have seen profound changes to our media technologies and digital environments, and, thus, to how we consume media in all its various forms, we would nonetheless do well to recycle, once again, what has become something of a critical aphorism: new media are never entirely new.6 ‘Every groundbreaking or innovative work turns out, when probed a little,’ McCarthy offers, ‘to be piggybacking on a precedent, which in turn had its own precedents – so much so that we should perhaps stop looking for the “radically new” and start seeking the radically old instead.’7 While amenable to this long view, I propose a lesser return: the new media of the early twentieth century, from gramophone recordings to radio broadcasting, can offer insight into our digital present, particularly as it concerns the relationship between literature and technologies of sound. For nearly a century now, literature hasn’t merely sought to represent and record the sound of music, it has engaged music coevally, coterminously, incorporating,

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remodulating and rebroadcasting the technologies of musical transcription and transmission. A case in point is the ‘soundtracked book’, a hybrid media product which combines printed text with recorded musical selections. The form was invented – or, perhaps more accurately, patented – by American Ralph Mayhew in 1917. Mayhew’s brainchild was the Bubble Book, a children’s book featuring a lonely young lad whose fairy godmother brings him a magical pipe: ‘Here, boy,’ she said, ‘is a treasure rare! The bubbles it blows into the air Are fairy bubbles, and in them dwell Old nursery friends that you love so well.’8 The protagonist is delighted by the novelty and conjures, in quick succession, Tom the Piper’s Son, Mary and her Little Lamb, and Jack and Jill. All hop from their respective bubbles and proceed to sing their eponymous songs, which appear both as print transcriptions within the versified tale and also on miniature 78 rpm recordings, tucked neatly into specially designed pockets within the book itself. And therein lay the innovation: by combining a print narrative with recorded music, Mayhew not only brought to market one of the first ‘record albums’ in history,9 but he also inaugurated a century of experimentation in hybrid media forms that couple literature and music. The original Bubble Book was a collaborative effort between the American publishing house Harper & Brothers and Columbia Records, and appeared just before Christmas in 1917. Within months, the initial offering had been expanded into a series, and retailers were soon struggling to keep the books in stock. By the early 1920s, these ‘Books that Sing’, as Harper-Columbia styled them, had transmogrified into a full-scale cultural phenomenon, underwritten by ‘the largest advertising campaign ever devoted to books’.10 Soon the Bubble Book Sales Service was staging protoDisney costume parties in theatres and department stores across the United States. A weekly radio programme followed, in an effort to exploit that nascent medium, and before you could say Jack Robinson, the Bubble Book franchise had gone global. In the UK, the series was licensed by Hodder & Stoughton, and The Sound Box deemed the newfangled media product ‘very desirable even at the published price’, which, at 7s 6d, was rather expensive.11 ‘As a means of entertaining children and as a demonstration of the valuable use that can be made of the gramophone,’ the enthusiasts’ monthly opined, ‘this issue is to be highly commended and most welcome.’12 Soundtracked fiction had arrived. While both an early example of twentieth-century multimedia and also a harbinger of hybridisation to come, Bubble Books are best understood as a pioneering instance of readalong media: soundtracked storybooks that are ‘intended to be perused by a child who listens with the book in hand, experiencing the audiobook’s narration, music, and sound effects in conjunction with the texts and illustrations’.13 Such multimedia productions exist in contradistinction both to standard audiobooks (which have no print component) and also to what I have termed hybrid audiobooks: composite multimedia productions comprised primarily of print and audio, in which the visual and aural components are complementary, each providing substantively distinct subsets of the artistic whole.14 While both readalong and hybrid audiobooks require multimodal audience engagement, readalong media tends toward recapitulation or

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re-presentation, reinforcing the message of one medium with a substantively analogous presentation in another. Bubble Books are readalong media in the sense that their songs are presented twice, once as musical recordings on the 78s, and once as lyrical verse on the printed page. Children, then, if they are so disposed, can follow along, line by line, as the music plays. As Andrew Piper insists in Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (2012), there is power in redundancy. In fact, Piper invokes redundancy as one conceptual guarantor of print’s perseverance: ‘When we think about media death, about the idea of the end of certain technologies,’ he contends, ‘we do well to remember this medieval insistence on the need for redundancy, the importance of communicating the same thing through different channels.’15 While digital technology may be ascendant, the argument goes, print can comfortably co-exist, for if magnetic tape still backs up corporate servers in the age of cloud computing, certainly books will play some role in whatever the digital future may hold. Piper extends his line of reasoning, moreover, by suggesting that books are inherently redundant. The physicality of print technologies ensures multi-channel communication, for reading is an embodied, multisensory act. Books have been important to us because of the way our interactions with them span several domains of sensory and physical experience. Whether it is through the acts of touch, sight, sound, sharing, or acquiring a sense of place, these embodied, and at times interpersonal, ways of interacting with books coalesce to magnify the learning that takes place through them.16 The irony of Piper’s position, of course, is that despite glorifying redundancy and insisting upon the multimodality of print, he simultaneously denigrates hybridised media as a ‘departure from, not an enhancement of, reading’.17 For all his insight, Piper is whistling a cognitively dissonant tune: if books are inherently multisensory, and if this, in turn, magnifies their learning potential, then why wouldn’t the addition of audio further extend the possibilities of print? Indeed, the magnification of learning has long been one of the primary arguments for readalong media. As generations raised on the long-running BBC programme Look and Read can attest, the readalong became a common educational tool over the course of the twentieth century, both as an instructional aid for new readers and also as a way to promote and reinforce children’s reading habits. If your formative years fell any time after the Second World War, chances are you also have memories of reading along to physical media – from children’s 78s in the 1940s and 1950s; to the millions of 7-inch records bundled with storybooks in 1960s and 1970s; to the kiddie cassette packages that typified the 1980s and beyond.18 As readalongs found favour in postwar domestic spaces, they inevitably ‘forged ties between a generation [. . .] and the record industry’, helping to underwrite both the ascendency of the long-playing record and also the emergence of industry-driven LP culture.19 With the appearance of ever-more-elaborate gatefold packaging on popular LPs, it was only a matter of time before soundtracked fiction conscripted that familiar physical format. Readalongs, then, as soundtracked fiction grew to include the adult market, gave way to potentially more challenging hybrid audiobooks. The 1970s and 1980s saw several high-profile productions, including original Monkee Michael Nesmith’s

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The Prison: A Book with a Soundtrack (1974) and L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientologicallytinged Space Jazz: The Soundtrack of the Book Battlefield Earth (1982). Curiously, both Nesmith and Hubbard seem to have believed they were breaking entirely new artistic ground. Nesmith went so far as to provide explicit directions, instructing his audience to access the printed text and the music concurrently: Read slowly and carefully and listen the same way. I have found that attending to two simultaneously occurring ideas takes some getting used to. At first it seems that I would attend to one and let the other figure as ambience and then the next time reverse the roles. Until finally after three or four listening / readings I was able to see both occurring distinctly and equally. It was that state of consciousness that provided thought with a new vista.20 For his part, Hubbard reinvented the wheel with his usual pomposity: ‘Now for the first time ever,’ the liner notes erroneously declare, ‘a soundtrack for a book.’21 Composed almost entirely on a Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) – which, in the early 1980s was a cutting-edge sampling synthesiser – Space Jazz was pitched as ‘the first real computer music that will appeal to [the] mass public’.22 ‘It antiquates past music like the cathedral organ wiped away blowing on a blade of grass,’ the jacket bragged.23 If those were its aims, the nearly unlistenable LP failed miserably. The soundtrack has, however, found a second life as a kitschy collector’s item. While Hubbard’s deployment of bleeding-edge digital technology did not successfully establish the book soundtrack as a viable popular form, it was, ultimately, the advent of digital media that rendered soundtracked fiction a widely feasible phenomenon. Simply, as vinyl lost ground to the cassette and the compact disc, which, in quick succession were usurped by CD-Rs, mp3s, and most recently, various streaming platforms, miniaturisation and the so-called ‘sharing economy’ simplified the process of both recording and distributing soundtracks. Slipping a compact disc inside a book jacket, in other words, is cheaper and more convenient than pressing 12-inch vinyl and designing an oversized book to match. And providing nothing more than a download code or URL reduces production costs even further. From the 1990s onward, a considerable number of these soundtracking endeavours have been the result of either collaborations between musicians and writers, or artists from one camp, as it were, moonlighting in the other. The art-punk collective The Mekons, for example, teamed up with American postmodern novelist Kathy Acker in 1996 to produce a companion CD to her novel Pussy, King of the Pirates. More recently, folkie John Wesley Harding followed his print debut, Misfortune: A Novel (published in 2005 under his given name, Wesley Stace), with a CD soundtrack titled Songs of Misfortune (released under the moniker The Love Hall Tryst). While both soundtracks originally appeared as standalone CDs, they can now be found streaming on Spotify, only a click away for any interested reader looking to augment her print experience. Indeed, the internet has arguably done more to stimulate the growth of soundtracked fiction than any other single technology over the past century. At the forefront of this mini-movement is the website largeheartedboy.com, a music and literature blog founded in 2002. Since 2005, one of its features has been the popular series ‘Book Notes’, in which ‘authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates

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in some way to their recently published book’.24 To date, hundreds of writers from all across the anglophone world have submitted playlists, some of which are integrally connected to the attendant publications, others more loosely related. Notable contributors over the past few years have included A. L. Kennedy (The Blue Book, 2011), Will Self (Umbrella, 2012), Marcel Theroux (Strange Bodies, 2013), Eimear McBride (A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, 2013) and Sebastian Barry (The Temporary Gentleman, 2014). I would argue, however, that the future of soundtracked fiction is far more likely to lie in multimedia productions than in promotional playlists. The past decade has seen the proliferation of eReaders, tablet computers and so-called smart phones, all of which offer convenient delivery systems for cross-media presentations. One of the earliest platforms to exploit the potential for soundtracking print on this latest wave of devices was the New Zealand-based start-up Booktrack, which launched in 2008. The company spent nearly three full years in research and development before rolling out their product in the United States in 2011 and the UK the following year. The software itself was (and remains) relatively simple: it delivers a film-style soundtrack, including music, sound effects and ambient noise, to readers of electronic texts. While the idea of soundtracking print is hardly novel, Booktrack’s innovations are algorithmic: they have, in short, developed a predictive system that estimates a user’s reading speed and calibrates the soundtrack accordingly. In this fluid media environment, of course, I would not care to wager on the eventual success of the company. Nevertheless, a closer examination of Booktrack’s product can serve several useful goals simultaneously, offering insight into the contemporary relationship between literature and the technologies of sound, as well as suggesting what the future of multimedia may hold. To begin then, let us consider Booktrack’s initial rollout, which not only garnered a substantial amount of media coverage, but also, as the divergent nature of that coverage made clear, exposed a host of contradictory impulses and philosophies among contemporary readers. For every early review that criticised the enterprise, in other words, another sang its praises. Writing in Wired, for example, Charlie Sorrel deemed the experience ‘incredibly jarring’: Imagine that you’re reading an intense, gripping novel, completely immersed in the virtual world it has created inside your own head. A character walks slowly down an old corridor, and suddenly you hear the click click of footsteps on wood. Music swells. And you are knocked completely out of the book and back into the mundane world you usually inhabit.25 Sorrel’s objection, in other words, is that soundtracks are distracting, a descriptor he deploys twice in his short review. And he is not alone. The media critic Paul Carr calls Booktrack ‘a laughably stupid idea [. . .] an unnecessary and unwelcome distraction’.26 Indeed, and at the risk of extending the age-old Frankfurt School debate over the desirability of distraction, it is precisely this quality that has critics divided: on the one hand those, like Sorrel and Carr, who find that audio detracts from the immersive experience of print narrative; on the other, those who insist that sound heightens immersion, either by substantiating the fictional world or by screening reallife distractions.

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Booktrack’s own promotional material – and, given the company’s ‘proactive [. . .] approach to PR’27 there is a significant amount – insistently draws comparisons between the dawn of film sound and Booktrack’s innovations. ‘Booktrack is transforming reading the way sound transformed silent film,’ the company’s website announces, with slightly less bombast, perhaps, than L. Ron Hubbard, but with the same hyperbolic chest-thumping that has characterised soundtracked fiction for well-nigh a century.28 Company co-founder Paul Cameron regularly trots out similar soundbites.29 While the technological analogy is wanting on several levels (including, of course, the fact ‘that silent film was never really silent’),30 the comparison is useful in helping to adjudicate the somewhat distracting debate over distraction. First of all, unlike the talkie revolution that transformed a relatively nascent medium, Booktrack is attempting to augment a technology – the book – that has a history spanning millennia. Print, to put it simply, is a decidedly well-established technology, and its reception is often governed by longstanding and deeply partisan traditions. It’s understandable, then, that some dissenters will emphasise distraction, as a soundtrack disrupts familiar and ingrained modes of reception. Such a critique, however, likely tells us more about contemporary readers than it does about either the emerging hybrid medium or its viability. Carr admits as much, however unintentionally, when he insists that ‘[t]he whole point of reading fiction is to remove the reader from reality’.31 Being ‘in flight from the real reality’ may be ‘the basic definition of Homo sapiens’,32 as John Fowles’s narrator coyly notes in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but fiction’s use-value cannot be so neatly pigeonholed. In other words, while escapism is certainly one reason people read, it quite simply cannot be characterised as the reason. Moreover, from moments of direct address in Victorian realism to the metafictional preoccupations of postmodernism, writers have, for generations, pointedly subverted fiction’s immersive tendencies, and to great effect. A soundtrack that functions in a similar fashion, therefore, cannot simply be written off as antithetical to the general aims of print fiction. All distraction, however, is not necessarily productive, which brings us to a second point: whatever Booktrack stands to gain by insisting that its product is the second coming of film sound, the company would certainly do well to borrow a lesson or two from that selfsame industry. Writing in The Atlantic, Betsy Morais notes that moving forward, ‘[t]he conventions of film sound-tracking will be Booktrack’s challenges too’.33 And what, precisely, are those challenges? ‘Being heard without really being heard. And contributing to the mood without overtaking the experience,’ according to musicologist Daniel Goldmark.34 Simply put, readers find certain Booktrack offerings distracting because the audio elements are insufficiently backgrounded. As cinematographers and sound editors have known for decades, a successful film score is only occasionally, if ever, part of the foreground experience. In her landmark study Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (1987), Claudia Gorbman emphasises the utilitarian function of film music. ‘Its effectiveness,’ she contends, ‘often depends upon its not being listened to.’35 Moreover, Gorbman argues, ‘the overall purpose of film music is very much like easy listening music: it functions to lull the spectator into being an untroublesome (less critical, less wary) viewing subject’.36 If Booktrack wants untroublesome subjects, then, the experience of film sound seems to suggest a twofold strategy: refine the deployment of soundtracks so they function, in a more sophisticated fashion, to induce a kind of oblivious subjectivity; and seek, perhaps, a new generation of readers, digital natives who have yet to

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develop fixed reading strategies and who, consequently, might be more amenable to a multimedia reading experience. Indeed, this is precisely the turn Booktrack has taken over the past several years. While high-profile launch parties featuring celebrities and early adopters such as Salman Rushdie (whose son deemed the app ‘super cool’)37 brought the company notice, recent endeavours have focused on encouraging soundtrack development and reaching new audiences. Taking pages from Bubble Books’s century-old playbook, Booktrack has striven to make its product more interactive, encouraging developers to upload their own soundtracks and to share their strategies for successfully integrating aurality into the print experience. In addition, Booktrack has also echoed its historical precursor by attempting to broaden its appeal to children. As part of the ‘Google for Education’ programme, for example, the company developed a platform for schools known as ‘Booktrack Classroom’. A 2015 press released boasted that ‘12,000 classrooms around the world have already adopted Booktrack Classroom to help students improve literacy and writing skills’.38 And, while it pays to reserve a healthy dose of scepticism for any CEO who claims that ‘[s]upporting education and working to increase student engagement . . . is a core company value’, such a large-scale experiment in influencing the modality of reading will, no doubt, warrant further discussion.39 While it remains to be seen how Booktrack itself will fare, soundtracked fiction is here to stay, and the implications for the relationship between literature and music are significant. Technological platforms have evolved to the point where hybridised media experiences are no longer cumbersome: on the latest generation of handheld devices, print and music can be streamed simply and simultaneously. This, of course, not only allows for more sophisticated versions of twentieth-century efforts to soundtrack literature, but it also provides opportunity for artistic concurrence (rather than merely, as has often been the case, cross-disciplinary adaptation). Moreover, this concurrence – the coincidence of music and literature that characterises soundtracked fiction – is echoed by recent developments in adjacent media. Arguably, the most notable of these – and something that could certainly serve as a similar case study – is the spectacular ascent of the audiobook. In our digital age, people appear less and less willing to spend any moment unmediated, and while this certainly gives the punditry plenty to bemoan, it also gives new life to old media forms. The radio play, all-but-moribund, has been revived in two contemporary guises: the podcast and the conventional audiobook, reimagined as a fully produced cast recording. We may live in a visual age, but more than ever audio fills our interstitial moments. As a result, one can be reasonably certain that literature will remain, as Tom McCarthy would have it, the art of listening.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Buchanan Watson, my graduate assistant at the University of South Alabama, for his contributions to my research. 2. Tom McCarthy, ‘Transmission and the Individual Remix’ (New York: Vintage, 2012), Kindle edition. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid.

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6. See, for example, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 7. McCarthy. 8. Ralph Mayhew and Burges Johnson, The Bubble Book (New York: Harper-Columbia, 1917), p. 4. 9. Today’s media metaphor, of course, began literally: albums were once pocketed binders of gramophone recordings. 10. If, that is, Harper & Brothers’s own campaign is to be believed. See, for example, the two-page advert in The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer (15 November 1920), pp. 475–6. 11. ‘The Bubble Books’, The Sound Box, 7 (1) (1920), p. 127; reprinted by the City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society, 1979. 12. Ibid. 13. May Burkey, Audiobooks for Youth: A Practical Guide to Sound Literature (Chicago: ALA Editions, 2013), p. 15. 14. Justin St Clair, ‘Soundtracking the Novel: Willy Vlautin’s Northline as Filmic Audiobook’, in Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, ed. Matthew Rubery (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 96–105. 15. Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 7. 16. Ibid., p. 154. 17. Ibid., p. 48. 18. Interestingly, the medium of choice for children’s audio tends to lag slightly behind the times, perhaps a consequence of hand-me-down technologies (i.e., adults letting the children play with the old cassette recorder after moving on to compact discs), or, alternatively, of manufacturers trying to maximise profits at soon-to-be obsolete production plants. 19. Jacob Smith, Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 48. 20. Michael Nesmith, The Prison: A Book with a Soundtrack (Carmel: Pacific Arts Corporation, 1974), p. 3. 21. Space Jazz: The Soundtrack of the Book Battlefield Earth (Applause Records, 1982). 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Largehearted Boy (2015) [accessed 17 August 2015]. 25. Charlie Sorrel, ‘Bad Ideas: Booktrack Adds Sound Effects, Music to Books’, Wired (2011) [accessed 23 August 2015]. 26. Paul Carr, ‘Booktrack: Just a Horrible Idea. Really Horrible’, TechCrunch (2011) [accessed 30 August 2015]. 27. Ibid. Carr actually calls it an ‘insanely’ proactive approach. 28. Booktrack: About Us (2014) [accessed 17 August 2015]. 29. See, for example, ‘Is There a Future for Enhanced Ebooks? Booktrack Founder Says Yes’, BookBusiness (2014) [accessed 30 August 2015]. 30. Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 193. 31. Carr. 32. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (New York: Back Bay Books, 1998), p. 97.

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33. Betsy Morais, ‘Books with Soundtracks: The Future of Reading?’, The Atlantic (2011) [accessed 30 August 2015]. 34. Ibid. 35. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 57. 36. Ibid., p. 58, italics in the original. 37. Alexandra Alter, ‘Salman Rushdie on his New Soundtrack, Sci-Fi Project and Memoir’, Wall Street Journal (2012) [accessed 13 September 2015]. 38. ‘Booktrack Joins Google as One of a Select Few for the Google for Education Partner Program’ (2015) [accessed 13 September 2015]. 39. Ibid.

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65 Origins and Destinations: A Future for Literature and Music Michael L. Klein

L

iterature in music: liturgical plays, oratorios, operas, songs. Music in literature: minstrels in Shakespeare, a composer in Mann, a little tune in Proust. Music aspiring to literature: the tone poem, opera (again), a character piece, a ballade. Literature aspiring to music: Baudelaire, Proust (again), opera (again again). Literature and music have their entanglements, their peculiar sharing of terms: rhythm, metre, pacing, motives, themes and so on. Borrowing from Lawrence Kramer’s essay on narrative in this collection, we might say that both literature and music are susceptible to migratory notions. Adrian Paterson’s essay illustrates how timbre, rhythm, pitch and other musical elements made their way into modernist poetry. Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach’s essay informs us that words in the polytextual motet were sonorous rather than semantic, musical counterpoints to musical lines. Wendy Heller’s essay refreshes our memory that early opera aspired to match in music the intonation of speech. Words become music becomes speech (or speech-like). Musical discoveries migrate to literature. Literary genres migrate to music. These migrations are characteristic of scholarly work in the separate fields of literature and music as well. Mary Breatnach’s essay in this collection makes reference to Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s book about Proust (Proust musicien). Nattiez is a musicologist and semiologist who turned that knowledge to an understanding of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. The literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes often wrote about music, including an essay on the grain of the voice in performance, which is still cited in musicology.1 The list of scholars who migrate from literature to music and back again would be a long one. From this perspective, the study of literature and music already has an important history, even if those who cross the boundary from one discipline to another may do so casually. One positive consequence of crossing these boundaries is that scholars eschew the highly technical languages that have become encrusted on these two disciplines. Regarding literary theory, with particular focus on narrative, James Phelan bemoans the dizzying array of terms: Focalization, prolepsis, analepsis, homodiegetic, heterodiegetic, intradiegetic (are we having fun yet?), heteroglossia, the narrative audience, tensions and instabilities, disclosure functions, character zones, fuzzy temporality. Who else is ready to cry, ‘Hold, enough!’?2

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Music’s technical terms are equally puzzling: hexachordal combinatoriality, retrograde inversion, elided cadence, bifocal close, medial caesura, tonic expansion, passing sixfour chord. Hold, enough, indeed. Although scholars in the separate fields of literature and music might congratulate themselves on developing a precise terminology that bolsters a sense of worthiness in the academy, one wonders whether these gains serve as barriers to a larger audience. Writing and thinking about literature and music together prompts us to express more humanely our findings about the culture that moves us so deeply. But the task at hand is to consider where the study of literature and music might go as a discipline in its own right, not merely as the by-product of an occasional breaking of scholarly boundaries. One such future, of course, is set by the very essays in this book: music setting poetry, poetry about music, portrayals of musicians in literature, literary aspirations towards music and so on. Since literature and music are migratory with regard to one another, we can follow those migrations in history up to the present. As Richard Langham Smith remarks in his essay on Debussy’s adaptation of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, one source leads to another. Beyond following the pathways opened by this collection of essays, projecting a future is a dangerous business, something that Dante warns us of in his Inferno. As the study of literature and music deepens, it will surely find new questions and methodologies. To try to understand what kind of project this twin discipline might become, though, this essay will consider the origins of literary and musical study as we know it today. I hope to show that a discipline devoted to literature and music has something to offer the projects of modernity, postmodernity, sociology, subjectivity, ideology, and on and on.

Origins To begin, I’ll consider how literature and music each constitutes itself as a separate field of study. At first, music’s ontology appears to be the problem in this task. Music is protean, unset among the world’s cultures, or even within a single culture. As Philip V. Bohlman argues, ‘what music is remains open to question at all times and in all places’.3 To speak of music already means to give it a particular form. Some cultures have no word for music, while others do not recognise as music what European culture would recognise as such. Even confining ourselves to European traditions, we can find no single ontology for music. As we read in Penelope Gouk’s essay, the study of music from antiquity to the seventeenth century was really the study of harmonics: ratios that made the primary intervals. Travelling with this conception was a more practical one, involving the training of singers, the categorisation of plainchants, and the notation of pitch and rhythm. By the seventeenth century, the study of music was folded into the natural sciences in acoustics and organology. Contemporaneously, Burmeister’s Musica Poetica (1606) argued that music was akin to oratory with its characteristic figures and constructions. Music’s ontology had become a trinity: practical (musica practica), mathematical (musica theorica) and rhetorical (musica poetica). Virtually every conception of music through the eighteenth century acknowledges this new rhetorical ontology of music, developing it into a taxonomy of affect and sensibility. Music’s mutability manifests itself again in the nineteenth century, when it becomes a new multiplicity: the language of the absolute (a transcendent realm beyond the

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quotidian anguish of culture and meaning), a narrative form in tone poems, song cycles and operas, and a poetic form in character pieces. Finally, in our postmodern world, music is conceived as embedded in culture and in practices; music is an activity in the teeming world of human endeavours. A form of mathematics, of rhetoric, of sensibility, of narrative, of poetry, of social practice, music’s ontologies refuse to remain fixed. This list of possibilities is incomplete and provisional. Because literature involves a more concrete signifying system, we might guess that its ontologies would be more stable. We would be wrong. Literature may be as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh, and English literature as old as ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’, but that does not make the literary an easy category to maintain. Terry Eagleton begins his classic introduction to literary theory by proposing and discarding various definitions for literature.4 Delimiting the literary through a distinction between fact and fiction fails us because Bacon’s Essays are literature as are Shakespeare’s plays. Formalist ideas about the strangeness of language in literature are equally problematic because everyday language has its own strangeness of expression (it’s brass monkey weather as I write this). A scene from George Eliot’s Middlemarch reveals that even in the nineteenth century, literature was difficult to define. During a short conversation between Rosamond and her brother, Fred, comes a challenge to distinguish poetry from slang. The passage begins with Rosamond: ‘There is correct English: that is not slang.’ ‘I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.’ ‘You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point.’ ‘Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox a leg-plaiter.’ ‘Of course you can call it poetry if you like.’ ‘Aha, Miss Rosy, you don’t know Homer from slang. I shall invent a new game; I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips, and give them to you to separate.’5 It may be that Fred is being cheeky with Rosamond, but he still points out a problem that modern theorists cannot solve by resorting to language itself as the index for the literary. Ultimately, Eagleton settles on the notion that literature is defined not by a quality in the text but by a relationship that a reader makes with a text. The reader approaches a text as if it is literary, and the reader’s decisions about what constitutes literature are tempered by ideologies. This approach allows us to reconfigure the question of what constitutes both literature and music, prompting us to see how culture shapes the very fields of study that we take to be stable. The study of literature as a special corpus with aesthetic and social value is a product of nineteenth-century Europe, institutionalised first in Mechanics’ Institutes, not universities, and devoted to an ideology of national pride and moral values.6 The same century also witnessed the first university departments devoted to the study of music, not in the scientific or mathematical terms that had delimited it since Boethius, but in cultural terms. At the University of Berlin, A. B. Marx focused his work on the study of Beethoven’s music as the road to Bildung, the aesthetic and moral development of the modern citizen.7 Reading and listening form a part of the project of liberalism with its emphases on freedom, self-determination and self-improvement.

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This project persists today, even among the most celebrated literary scholars. In his How to Read and Why, for example, Harold Bloom takes little time in getting to the point: ‘Ultimately we read – as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree – in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.’8 Sounds humane, certainly. Not long after this statement, though, Bloom makes the most astonishing claim that a childhood spent watching television creates a university student unable to rise to the challenges of the academy: ‘Reading falls apart, and much of the self scatters with it.’9 To imagine that the study of literature, or music, or literature and music strengthens the self is already a romantic notion, but to claim that a failure to read (or listen) leads to a scattering of the self is untenable. Bloom’s claim is wedded to another nineteenthcentury idea that history is a teleology, whose positive endpoint will be attained by the very arts that sustain and instil cultural values in the first place. This ideology is one that literature (Dickens’s Bleak House) and music (Mahler’s Symphony no. 6) had already questioned in the midst of its formation.10 But to illustrate the point, I’ll turn to a more contemporary example. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) challenges the view that history is teleological and that music enlivens the spirit in service of cultural growth (Bildung). The novel’s palindromic form tells six different stories, beginning with a tale of slavery in the South Pacific of the mid-nineteenth century, moving through time to the remaining five stories, culminating in a tale set in Hawaii in a post-apocalyptic future, and returning to complete each story in reverse order. Each chapter is akin to a morality tale, portraying grim views of the avarice, envy and wrath that plague human endeavours. Rather than improve through history, society in the novel develops more advanced technologies of exploitation until, in the final story, humankind is reduced to a pre-technological state where violence and fear still reign. That Mitchell begins this cycle with a story set in the nineteenth century marks the entirety as coincident with at least two master narratives: the rise of the first great capitalist power, Great Britain; and the period when music and literature were thought to be gateways to the betterment of the self. The palindromic structure and the returning themes of our troubled natures play against these master narratives, questioning whether history really does have a comic trajectory that will end in a glorious telos. Here history is simply tragic at every turn. The title of the novel is taken from a collection of piano pieces, Cloud Atlas I–IX, by the Japanese avant-garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Modernist composers since the 1990s have had a tendency to use allusive but intangible titles in order to eschew worn genres (the sonata, the symphony) while maintaining a poetic connection that has been associated with music at least since the character pieces of the nineteenth century. Michael Torke’s music, for example, includes the titles Ecstatic Orange and Bright Blue Music; Ann Cleare’s music includes the titles the square of yellow light that is your window and Day Two; the list could go on. As a novel title, Cloud Atlas also refers to one of the novel’s six stories, in which a young British composer, Robert Frobisher, becomes an amanuensis for an aging composer, Vyvyan Ayrs, who is dying of syphilis. The story is loosely based on the life of Delius, who also suffered from syphilis and employed an amanuensis, Eric Fenby, to write out his music in his later years. In Mitchell’s story, Frobisher’s presence clearly has a palliative effect on the creativity of the older Ayrs, and finding his own creativity renewed as well, the young composer begins to write a piece titled Cloud Atlas Sextet.

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Mitchell makes clear the Oedipal themes in the story. Vyvyan Ayrs is married to a woman named Jocasta, who initiates an affair with Frobisher. And Ayrs is both aided and threatened by Frobisher’s own talents. In one passage, after hearing of a burglary in the area, Ayrs pulls out a pistol to show Jocasta and Frobisher that he can still protect himself, which the young composer takes as a veiled threat. The first fruit of Ayrs’s newfound creativity is a tone poem (the quintessential literary-musical genre of nineteenth-century music) titled ‘Todtenvogel’ (Bird of Death), which Frobisher compares favourably though impossibly to Wagner, Stravinsky and Sibelius before bragging that ‘more than a few of its best ideas are mine [. . .] [but] an amanuensis must reconcile himself to renouncing his share in authorship’.11 The whole story could be interpreted as a staging of the anxiety of influence, Bloom’s theory that the young poet (or composer) learns his craft from an established poet (usually a dead one) and fashions a unique voice by learning to veer away from older models.12 The title of Ayrs’s tone poem fits this theme all too well, pointing both to the symbolic death of the older composer and to the voice (birdsong) that the younger composer is learning to develop. But the events of Mitchell’s tale are too fraught even for Bloom’s agonistic theory. In addition to learning his craft from the older composer, metaphorically stealing a voice, Frobisher literally steals rare manuscripts from Ayrs in order to settle his debts. In recounting how he sold the stolen items to a book collector, Frobisher’s racism shines through: ‘made the stingy Jew chase me down the corridor until he admitted the volumes were indeed “good”’.13 By the end, the influence that is supposed to work from the older to the younger composer reverses itself. Ayrs asks Frobisher to write the melodies for his next composition, but Frobisher refuses, accusing Ayrs of plagiarism. When Ayrs asks why he would need to plagiarise from a composer who failed to complete a music degree, Frobisher lashes out: ‘“I’ll tell you why you need to plagiarize! Musical sterility!” The finest moments in “Todtenvogel” are mine, I told him. The contrapuntal ingenuities of the new work’s Allegro non troppo are mine.’14 Ayrs reveals that he put Jocasta up to the affair with Frobisher because he needed the young composer to finish his tone poem. Unwilling to continue with an arrangement where his musical ideas are stolen, Frobisher sneaks away, completes his Cloud Atlas Sextet and kills himself with the pistol that Ayrs had used to threaten him. Instead of a narrative in which each new artist moves us forward through a struggle with the past, Mitchell presents us with a view of the world in which theft, intimidation and intimacy are used on all sides to prolong or advance a career. Like the clouds in the title, history is not a matter of forward progress but of an everchanging set of patterns. And in this hard-eyed portrait of an artist as a young thief, Mitchell includes a passage that nicely summarises a theme of the novel. Frobisher asks a friend, Morty Dhondt, to drive him to the cemetery where his brother is supposed to be buried. Failing to find his brother, Frobisher and Morty (death) have a conversation about war: ‘What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions, and the borders of states’.15

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Morty’s fatalistic philosophy rings true with the details of Frobisher’s relationship to Ayrs. When Frobisher complains that this view means that science is meant only to create the technology of civilisation’s destruction, Morty agrees: ‘Precisely. Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out! You’ll probably live to see it happen, you fortunate son. What a symphonic crescendo that’ll be, eh?’.16 Cloud Atlas replaces a nineteenth-century ideology of progress and betterment through the arts with the quintessential musical sign for a telos: the symphonic crescendo, which, in this case signifies a destructive end. Within a postmodern world that growingly questions the project of liberalism (to say nothing of neoliberalism), a story that upends romanticised notions about music, that most idealised artform, underscores the current belief that we live in a world turned upside down. The point is not that Cloud Atlas is closer to the truth in its portrait of composers as conniving and unethical, or of human history as a series of power struggles in service of self-interest. Cloud Atlas is a critique of modernity. The novel also illustrates that from one origin of the study of literature and music – the building of culture and the creation of the self – we can move to a different destination, one in which interpreting seeks to uncover the very ideologies that support interpretation to begin with. Uncovering such ideologies, such ways of thinking and being, is implicit in many of the essays in this collection. When Regula Hohl Trillini argues in her essay, for example, that Jane Austen’s greatness is easy to overlook because her novels seem so adaptable to popular culture despite profound differences between Austen’s social structure and our own, she is challenging the commonplace idea that people are all the same, regardless of place, history and culture. To understand Austen means to understand an ideology different from our own. From one possibility for the study of literature and music – the deepening of connections from one source to another – we have reached a second – the uncovering of an ideology behind literature and music, the warning that this discipline must look both inwards and outwards.

Destinations Strengthening the self, Bloom claims, is the point of reading (and, by extension, listening). We interpret to find our authentic interests. But the claim assumes that the selves we read about or listen to are like our own selves. They may be more eloquent, or brilliant, or Innig (inner), but they are a version of the self that we know as our self. A counter to this ideology is Wittgenstein’s aphorism that ‘to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’.17 The words we read and the sounds we hear from the past are not our words, our sounds, our form of life, however much they may appear to be so. Fredric Jameson argues that the cultural past is a mystery, ‘which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it’.18 The selves of literature and music are alien to us, speaking in words and singing in songs that we only imagine we can understand. Interpreting literature and music, then, is a way of confronting a peculiar alienation of our self from another self that we at first take to be ourselves.

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Because this collection is replete with studies about the alien nature of the past, I’ll offer only a brief example. Middlemarch again. Early in the novel, Mr Brooke has a conversation with Mr Casaubon about the education of the former’s niece, Dorothea. Mr Brooke is alarmed to discover that Casaubon is teaching Dorothea how to read Greek: ‘Well, but now, Casaubon, such deep studies, classics, mathematics, that kind of thing, are too taxing for a woman – too taxing, you know [. . .] there is a lightness about the feminine mind – a touch and go – music, the fine arts, that kind of thing – they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know. A woman should be able to sit down and play you or sing you a good old English tune.’19 Dorothea explains to her uncle that Mr Casaubon has no interest in music: ‘Mr. Casaubon is not fond of the piano, and I am very glad he is not,’ said Dorothea, whose slight regard for domestic music and feminine fine art must be forgiven her, considering the small tinkling and smearing in which they chiefly consisted at that dark period. She smiled and looked up at her betrothed with grateful eyes. If he had always been asking her to play the ‘Last Rose of Summer,’ she would have required much resignation.20 A sociology of literature and music is necessary to understand this scene properly.21 Middlemarch is set in 1829, just prior to the Victorian period (the Beidermeier period in central Europe), when a growing middle class sought artistic forms with a grounded sensibility. In music, publishers turned out small-scale pieces of modest difficulty for the keyboard, an instrument considered appropriate for young women. Although one might study these pieces today in an effort to understand the historical period and to eschew any aesthetic stance that marginalises one kind of music over another, by the end of the nineteenth century, when Eliot wrote Middlemarch, this repertoire was often held in low regard, which explains the reference to the ‘small tinkling and smearing’ of the music in ‘that dark period’. In one reading, then, Dorothea is revealed as a young woman eager to forgo the fashions of her time in order to pursue the intellect (i.e. learning Greek). Eliot uses ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ as a metonym for the entirety of this musical repertoire. It should not surprise us that this piece is its own mixture of literature and music. The Irish poet Thomas Moore wrote ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in 1805, and it was set to a traditional melody in 1813. Well into the twentieth century, because of its attachment to Moore’s poem, this melody remained popular, appearing in countless arrangements, some of which are set as virtuoso variations. In the latter form, ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ migrates from the drawing room to the concert hall, although it maintains some of its cultural associations of ‘tinkling and smearing’, since virtuosity has the danger of falling into empty display. As late as 1991, the violinist Midori performed Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst’s Variations on ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ as an encore for her Carnegie Hall debut, performing a migration and an alienation of her own: a Japanese concert violinist performed a nineteenth-century arrangement of an early nineteenth-century song by an Irish poet, and she did so in an American concert hall named after a Scottish American industrialist turned philanthropist.

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The cultural resonances continue. One impulse to set ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ is to transform its modest melody and sentimental poem. For example, among his many arrangements of folksongs, Benjamin Britten published one of ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ for voice and piano. Britten’s arrangement includes his famous chromatic tonal language with particularly evocative non-triadic harmonies on the words ‘dead’ and ‘alone’ (the last word of the poem). Britten invites us to take the song seriously, since its poem uses the last rose as a metaphor for the dwindling days of one’s life, which one faces alone. But Britten also alienates the song, giving it a modern musical language, a form of life that updates it and distances it at the same time. As such, we may be prompted to return to the scene from Middlemarch and read Dorothea’s distaste for ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ as a sign that she is unable to see the value of the very social life that she is so willing to give up to marry Mr Casaubon. Dorothea later learns that she has made a terrible mistake in hoping that the higher intellectual pursuits that Mr Casaubon offers will be enough for her happiness. To imagine the workings of this scene, this music, this taste for an intellectual pursuit, is to perform an archeology in which a self is determined by a class structure, a gender and a view of life unlike our own. Dorothea is doubly strange because she lives in a culture whose daily life and concerns are lost to us even if some of that culture’s trappings linger in our time, and because she turns out to be marked in her own historical period, pursuing a life of the intellect meant only for men in her time. When we read that Mr Brooks considers the study of Greek to be too strenuous for a woman, we are reading about the culture of Victorian-era England every bit as much as we are overhearing an opinion of Mr Brooks. That opinion, in a peculiar way, is not one particular to Mr Brooks but to his culture. And if we think that a self might fight this culture with a counter opinion, as Mr Casaubon appears to do by teaching Dorothea Greek in the first place, we are caught up later in the problem that he never intended to be the intellectual guide that Dorothea so ardently sought. His intention is to find a companion for his final days. The piece of music that Dorothea refuses to play for Mr Casaubon – ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ – is the very song that might reveal the role that is set for her in advance. Literature and music are like a double letter tossed in time to be picked up by a self for whom they were never intended, in a time for which they were not written. But when we take up these strange letters of sight and sound, we become the proper destination for their alien message simply by considering them as if they were written for us. That act of receiving literary and musical texts from the past as if they were written for us requires those looks inwards and outwards that I mentioned earlier. I look inwards to consider my thoughts and responses to the literature and music that makes an appeal to me. And I look outwards to consider the peculiar time and place of that literature and music, its customs, its sociology, its marketplaces, art forms and patterns of thought, to discover ideologies different from my own. I return to that look inwards to remind myself how my own way of thinking is itself informed by an ideology. And the growing discipline of literature and music may follow a similar pathway leading inwards and outwards. The discipline will surely develop its own methodologies and patterns of investigation, looking inwards at its own ways of thinking about literature and music. But it will also need to look outwards not only at its cognate disciplines in art, architecture, cinema, dance and so on, but also at the greater projects of modernity and postmodernity within which it operates and to which it aspires to contribute.

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a future for literature and music

689

From following the sources back and forth, to considering the ideology that makes interpretation and makes it anew, to confronting the alien history that surrounded literature and music as it took flight and migrated to us, the destination of this endlessly engaging discipline is one that asks us to historicise as we confront the peculiar heritage of our thought.

Notes 1. Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 179–89. 2. James Phelan, ‘Narrative Theory, 1966–2006: A Narrative’, in The Nature of Narrative, by Robert Scholes, James Phelan and Robert Kellogg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 283–336 (p. 283). 3. Philip V. Bohlman, ‘Ontologies of Music’, in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 17–34 (p. 17). 4. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 1–16. 5. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003), pp. 92–3. 6. Eagleton, p. 27. 7. Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 156. 8. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2000), p. 22. 9. Ibid., p. 23. 10. On the questioning of ideology within a literary body that appears to sustain it, the classic study is Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). On Dickens’s Bleak House, particularly, see Jeffrey Moxham, Interfering Values in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and the Ethics of Criticism (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), pp. 101–42. Among many studies of Mahler and the questioning of nineteenth-century ideologies, see Robert Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study in Musical Semiotics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), particularly chapter 5 (‘Musical Narrative and the Suicide of the Symphony’), pp. 133–65. 11. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 65. 12. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 13. Mitchell, p. 74. 14. Ibid., p. 455. 15. Ibid., p. 444. 16. Ibid., pp. 444–5. 17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 8e, §19. 18. Jameson, p. 19. 19. Eliot, p. 59. 20. Ibid. 21. For a discussion of music in the education of women in Eliot’s time, see Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 61–5.

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Notes on Contributors

This list provides details of author affiliations and one relevant publication. Readers should consult authors’ websites for further information about their work. Suzanne Aspden, Associate Professor of Music, University of Oxford. Author of The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel’s Operatic Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Stephen Benson, Senior Lecturer, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia. Co-editor of Writing the Field Recording: Sound, Word, Environment (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Maureen Boulton, Professor Emerita of French, University of Notre Dame. Author of Sacred Fictions of Medieval France: Narrative Theology in the Lives of Christ and the Virgin, 1150–1500 (D. S. Brewer: 2015). Mary Breatnach, Honorary Fellow and retired Lecturer in French Studies, University of Edinburgh. Former playing member (viola) of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and author of Boulez and Mallarmé: A Study in Poetic Influence (Ashgate, 1996). Marshall Brown, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, University of Washington. Author of ‘The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul’: Essays on Music and Poetry (University of Washington Press, 2010). Philip Ross Bullock, Professor of Russian Literature and Music, University of Oxford. Author of Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Reaktion, 2016). Ardis Butterfield, Marie Borroff Professor of English, Professor of French, Professor of Music, Yale University. Author of Poetry and Music in Medieval France from Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Suzannah Clark, Professor of Music, Harvard University. Co-editor, with Elizabeth Eva Leach, of Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: Learning from the Learned (Woodbridge, 2005). T. F. Coombes, Stipendiary Lecturer in Music, University of Oxford. Author of ‘The Nursery as Circus: Dancing the Childlike to Fauré’s Dolly Suite, 1913’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 142 (2) (2017), 277–325. Tili Boon Cuillé, Associate Professor of French, Washington University in St Louis. Author of Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (University of Toronto Press, 2006). Delia da Sousa Correa, Senior Lecturer in English, Open University. Author of George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

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notes on contributors

691

Claire Davison, Professor of Modernist Studies, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III. Author of Translation as Collaboration: Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Kotelianksy (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Peter Dayan, Professor of Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh. Author of The Music of Dada: A Lesson in Intermediality for Our Times (London: Routledge, 2019). Helen Deeming, Reader in Music, Royal Holloway, University of London. Co-editor, with Elizabeth Eva Leach, of Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015). David Fuller, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Durham. Author of The Life in the Sonnets, Shakespeare Now! (Continuum, 2011); now Bloomsbury, with audio companion. Denise P. Gallo, former Head of Acquisitions, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Author of ‘“Repatriating” Falstaff: Boito, Verdi, and Shakespeare (in Translation)’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 7 (2) (2010), 7–34. Matthew Gardner, Juniorprofessor für Musikwissenschaft, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Author of Handel and Maurice Greene’s Circle at the Apollo Academy: The Music and Intellectual Contexts of Oratorios, Odes and Masques (V&R Unipress, 2008). Penelope Gouk, Honorary Research Fellow in Intellectual History, University of Manchester. Author of Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Yale University Press, 1999). Dai Griffiths, Senior Lecturer in Music, Oxford Brookes University. Author of Elvis Costello (Equinox, 2007). Anthony Gritten, Head of Undergraduate Programmes, Royal Academy of Music, London. Author of ‘Music Before the Literary: or, the Eventness of Musical Events’, in Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa (London and Leeds: Legenda/Maney, 2006), pp. 21–33. Sam Halliday, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Author of Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Michael Halliwell, Associate Professor of Vocal Studies and Opera, University of Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Author of National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera: Myths Reconsidered (Routledge, 2018). Wendy Heller, Scheide Professor of Music History, Princeton University. Author of Music in the Baroque (Norton, 2013). Christin Hoene, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English, University of Kent. Author of Music and Identity in Postcolonial British-South Asian Literature (Routledge, 2015). John Hughes, Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of Gloucestershire. Author of ‘Ecstatic Sound’: Music and Individuality in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Ashgate, 2001). Berta Joncus, Senior Lecturer in Music, Goldsmiths, University of London. Author of ‘Ballad Opera: Commercial Song in Enlightenment Garb’, in The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, ed. Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 31–63. Ewan Jones, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of Cambridge. Author of Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Kate Kennedy, Weinrebe Research Fellow in Life-Writing and Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, Wolfson College, Oxford. Author of Dweller in Shadows: Ivor Gurney – Poet, Composer (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). Elizabeth Kenny, Director of Performance at the University of Oxford, and Professor of Lute at the Royal Academy of Music. Author of ‘Adapting an Adaptation: Restoration Tempest’, in Shakespeare, Music and Performance, ed. Bill Barclay and David Lindley (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 99–113.

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notes on contributors

Ros King, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Southampton. Author of The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (Manchester University Press, 2001). Michael L. Klein, Professor of Music Studies, Temple University. Author of Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject (Indiana University Press, 2015). Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and Music, Fordham University, New York. Author of The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening (University of California Press, 2019). Elizabeth Eva Leach, Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. Author of Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (Cornell, 2011). Christopher Marsh, Professor of History, The Queen’s University of Belfast. Author of Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Will May, Associate Professor in English, University of Southampton. Editor of ‘Setting Agendas’, Contemporary Music Review, 29 (2) (2010), a special issue devoted to contemporary text setting and libretti. Erin Minear, Associate Professor, College of William & Mary. Author of Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton: Language, Memory, and Musical Representation (Ashgate, 2011). Cormac Newark, Professor and Head of Research, Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Author of Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Francis O’Gorman, Saintsbury Professor of English Literature, University of Edinburgh. Editor of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Twenty-First Century Oxford Authors Edition (Oxford University Press, 2016). Adrian Paterson, Lecturer in English, National University of Ireland, Galway. Author of Words for Music: W. B. Yeats and Musical Sense (forthcoming). Nils Holger Petersen, Associate Professor Emeritus, Dept of Church History, University of Copenhagen. Author of ‘Liturgical Enactment’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance, ed. Pamela M. King (Routledge, 2017), pp. 13–29. Andrew Pinnock, Professor of Music, University of Southampton. Author of ‘Theatre Culture’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Henry Purcell, ed. Rebecca Herissone (Ashgate, 2012), pp. 165–99. Chris Price, Senior Lecturer in Music, Canterbury Christ Church University. Editor of ’As Thomas Was Cudgell’d One Day by his Wife‘, a collection of music from the Canterbury Catch Club with an introduction and editorial notes (Canterbury Christ Church University, 2015). Eric Prieto, Professor of French, Department of French and Italian, University of California, Santa Barbara. Author of Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (Nebraska University Press, 2002). Susan Reid, Editor of Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies. Author of D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Annette Richards, Professor of Music, Cornell University. Author of The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Jennifer Saltzstein, Associate Professor of Musicology, University of Oklahoma. Author of The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (D. S. Brewer, 2013). Ruth Smith, University of Cambridge. Author of Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Richard Langham Smith, Chevalier de l’Ordre des arts et des lettres, Research Professor, Royal College of Music, London. Co-author of Debussy, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ Cambridge Opera Handbook (Cambridge, 1989). Anna Snaith, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, King’s College London. Author of Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London 1890–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

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693

Oliver Soden, Independent Scholar. Author of Michael Tippett (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019). B. J. Sokol, Professor Emeritus, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Honorary Senior Research Associate, University College London. Author of Shakespeare’s Artists: The Painters, Sculptors, Poets and Musicians in his Plays and Poems, The Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2018). Robert Stagg, Lecturer in English Language and Literature, St Anne’s College, Oxford. Author of ‘Shakespeare’s Bewitching Line’, Shakespeare Survey, 71 (2018), 232–41. Justin St Clair, Associate Professor of English, University of South Alabama. Author of Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listening (Routledge, 2013). Anne Stone, Associate Professor, PhD Program in Music, CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Author of ‘Ars Subtilior’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Music, ed. Mark Everist and Thomas Forrest Kelly, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press, 2018), II, pp. 1124–46. Reinhard Strohm, Emeritus Professor of Music, University of Oxford. Author of ‘Demetrio by Pietro Metastasio and Johann Adolf Hasse: A dramma per musica for Vienna and Venice’, in Pietro Metastasio - Johann Adolf Hasse, Demetrio (facsimile edition), ed. R. Strohm and Francesca Menchelli-Buttini (Milan: Ricordi, 2014) (Drammaturgia Musicale Veneta, 17), vii–lviii. Emma Sutton, Professor of English, University of St Andrews. Author of Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Helen J. Swift, Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in Medieval French, St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Author of Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016). Regula Hohl Trillini, Research Associate, University of Basel. Author of The Gaze of the Listener: English Representations of Domestic Music-Making (Rodopi, 2008). Phyllis Weliver, Professor of English, Saint Louis University. Author of Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Helen Wilcox, Professor in Early Modern Literature, Bangor University. Author of ‘Of Music and Silence: The Harmonies of Thomas Whythorne and Rose Tremain’, in Challenging Humanism, ed. Ton Hoenselaars and Arthur Kinney (University of Delaware Press, 2005), pp. 290–310. Christopher Wiley, Senior Lecturer in Music, University of Surrey. Author of ‘Music and Literature: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and “The First Woman to Write an Opera”’, The Musical Quarterly, 96 (2) (2013), 263–95. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Langan Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of Illinois. Author of Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Nicolette Zeeman, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, University of Cambridge. Author of ‘The English Charles: Subjectivity, Textuality and Culture’, in Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing, ed. Cristina Maria Cervone and D. Vance Smith (D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 97–116.

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Editorial Advisory Board

Professor Daniel Albright,† University of Harvard Professor Suzanne Aspden, University of Oxford Dr Stephen Benson, University of East Anglia Professor Ardis Butterfield, Yale University Dr Delia da Sousa Correa, Open University Professor Peter Dayan, University of Edinburgh Dr Helen Deeming, Royal Holloway, University of London Professor Katharine Ellis, University of Cambridge Professor Robert Fraser, Open University Professor Ros King, University of Southampton Professor Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University, New York Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach, University of Oxford Professor David Lindley, University of Leeds Dr Robert Samuels, Open University Professor Emma Sutton, University of St Andrews

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Index

A discort / Virginem mire pulchritudinis, 129–36 versions, 130–4+n29, 135–6 Abbate, Carolyn, 40, 509n38 Abelard, Peter, 56 Abrams, M. H., 273 ‘absolute music’, 402, 509, 553, 577, 578–84 origin as term, 553 abstraction, 489 acoustics, 148, 161–5 Adam de la Halle, 86, 97 Addison, Joseph, 269, 297 Adès, Thomas Five Eliot Landscapes, 645 Powder Her Face, 499n11, 641 The Tempest, 499n11 Adoration of the Cross, 70–1 Adorno, Theodor, 183, 420, 503, 504n27 aesthetic events, 523–30 aesthetics, 4, 6, 8–12, 259–73, 355, 489, 515–21, 534–6 cultural issues, 503, 553, 577–84, 683, 687 interart, 523, 530 of sensibility, 320, 325 technology and, 648, 656, 662 see also ‘absolute music’ Agawu, Kofi, 18, 385 ‘Aim Not Too High’, 205 Alan of Lille, 52 Anticlaudianus, 52, 53 Complaint of Nature, 128 Albright, Daniel, 554, 597 Aldeburgh, 635 Aldrich-Moodie, James, 408

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Alfred the Great, 148 Algarotti, Francesco, 272 Allinson, Francesca, 642 allographic arts, 519 Amalar of Metz, 66 amateurism, 559–61, 563, 636 ambient sound, 417, 500–2 pop lyrics as, 503 radio as, 504 Ambrogetti, Giuseppe, 344 Amis, Kingsley, 644 Anacreontics, 350, 352–4, 356 Anderson, Katherine, 571n9 Andrieu, F., 103, 106 Anglican church music, 220, 273, 307, 311 anthems, 307–8, 312–16, 322 as topic in secular music, 667 see also liturgy Anne, Queen, 250 anonymity, 56, 86 Anselm of Canterbury, 70 Antheil, George, 594 anthems see under Anglican church music anti-lyric, 668 Apel, Willi, 129–30 Apollinaire, Guillaume, Les Mamelles de Tirésias, 642n21 Apollo, 167, 199–201, 217 Apukhtin, Aleksey, 478, 479 ‘On tak menya lyubil’, 478 ‘Zabytʹ tak skoro’, 478 Archer, William, 629, 630 Arensky, Anton, 480 Argento, Dominick, The Aspern Papers, 415–21+n4

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696

index

arias, 234, 241–3, 246, 406 da capo, 242, 243–5 simile, 260 Ariès, Philippe, 361 Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando furioso, 261, 405 Aristophanes, 641 Aristotle, 197 music theorists and, 128, 148 on probability/possibility, 149, 152 Poetics, 149, 151, 260, 261, 289, 395 Politics, 149 Armes, amours / O flour des flours, 103, 106 Armitage, Simon, 617 Arne, Cecilia, 280n11 Arne, Thomas, 278–87 Alfred, 278–80, 283, 285, 286, 287 Britannia, 278, 283, 284 Comus, 278 Don Saverio, 280–1 The Fairy Prince, 286 Love in a Village, 301 Thomas and Sally, 278, 281–3, 286 Arnold, Matthew, 456n13 Arnulf of St Ghislain, 128 Arteaga, Esteban de, 272 Arthur, King, 251–2 arts, relationships between all, 26, 151, 336, 383, 486, 489, 515–21, 554 artworks as autonomous, 419 as unstable, 16, 23 see also aesthetics Atterbury, Luffman, ‘As t’other day Susan’, 373 Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit, La Muette de Portici, 423 Aubrey, Pierre, 595 Aucassin et Nicolete, 80 Auden, W. H., 499, 588, 594 and Britten, 603, 632, 635 on Elizabethan song lyrics, 606 imagining music when writing, 601–7 as librettist, 601–2, 606 Another Time, 602n15 ‘The Composer’, 601 Letter to Lord Byron, 633, 635 ‘Miss Gee’, 602–7 The Oxford Book of Light Verse, 592 ‘Victor’, 607

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audiences, 26, 221+n8, 293, 296, 301 as defining music and literature, 496, 500–1, 683 expectations and behaviour of, 26, 286, 318, 322, 323–4, 325, 485 performers as, 98, 374–5 for polytextual motets, 97–8, 108 see also fandom, listening and reading audiobooks, 506 see also multimedia productions Augustine of Hippo, 64, 65–6, 69–70, 127, 148, 217 aulos, 149, 199, 200 Austen, Henry, 331 Austen, Jane, 26, 318, 324, 327–31, 634, 686 Auden and, 633 Britten and, 632–6 and Crabbe, 634–5 Forster and, 633, 635 as musician, 328, 331 Emma, 327, 328, 329, 330 Mansfield Park, 325, 327, 328, 329–30, 632–6 Northanger Abbey, 324, 325, 329 Persuasion, 328, 330 Pride and Prejudice, 325, 328–9, 330–1 Sense and Sensibility, 325, 327–8, 330 Austen-Leigh, Caroline, 331 Austern, Linda Phyllis, 192n11, 221 authors/authorship, 16, 22, 56 self-insertion, 117 and subjectivity, 111 avant-garde, 18, 525, 527 Avison, Charles, 459 Bach, Johann Sebastian Seth and, 578 Woolf and, 545, 546, 548 Bacon, Delia, 634 Bacon, Francis, 162n2, 683, 684 on music theory and science, 157, 161–2, 163, 164 New Atlantis, 162 Sylva Sylvarum, 157, 161–2, 163, 164 Badoaro, Giacomo, 240 bagpipes and bagpipe music, 199, 578, 583–4 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 17

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index ballad opera, 271, 298–301 ballads, 202–7 use in theatre, 219, 227 Balzac, Honoré de Massimilla Doni, 424 Séraphîta, 640–1 Bandello, Matteo, 291 Bannister, Elizabeth, 301 Banville, Théodore de, 625, 626+n7, 627 Diane au bois, 625–7 ‘Barbara Allen’, 205, 207n21 Barbieri-Nini, Marianna, 410 Barnes, William, 457 Barnfield, Richard, 167, 169, 170 Barrère, Georges, 627n9 Barthélemon, François-Hippolyte, 321 Barthes, Roland, 32, 33–5, 183, 508n35, 681 as musician, 34 Camera Lucida, 33n3, 34–5 ‘The Grain of the Voice’, 35, 681 S/Z, 19 Barton, Anne, 192, 193 ‘battle music’, 221–2 Baudelaire, Charles, 485, 489, 588 Mallarmé and, 536 Proust and, 539, 541 Swinburne and, 458–9 and Wagner, 485–7, 488, 489, 491, 534–5, 537, 538 Les Fleurs du Mal, 458–9, 484 ‘O toi qui de la Mort’, 458–9 ‘Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Oaris’, 485–6, 534 Baudouin de Condé, Li Prisons d’amours, 79 Baudrillard, Jean, 569 Baumgarten, Alexander, 259 Bayley, John, 609, 612 BBC radiophonic workshops, 648 Beardsley, Monroe, on music and meaning, 516 Beasley, Rebecca, 592 Beats, 503 Beck, Jean-Baptiste, 595 Beckett, Samuel, 497, 501, 565–9 Kurtág and, 499 on Proust, 533, 565–6, 569 All That Fall, 654 Breath, 397 Cascando, 565, 566–9, 654

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697

Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 566, 569 Ghost Trio, 568–9 Nacht und Träume, 568–9 The Unnamable, 568, 569 Watt, 566 Words and Music, 565, 566–9, 654 Bede, the Venerable, 148 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 67, 260, 683 aesthetic, 536 George Eliot and, 437–8, 439, 440 Forster and, 559, 560–2, 563, 577, 581 McEwan and, 581 and melodrama, 269, 360 Proust and, 538 Schumann and, 441 Tchaikovsky and, 481 music for Egmont, 483 Fidelio, 269 music for Leonore Prohaska, 360–1, 362, 369 ‘Neue Liebe, neues Leben’, 356 ‘Per Pietà non dirmi addio’, 440 Piano Sonata Op. 26, 361 Piano Sonata Op. 27, no. 2 (‘Moonlight’), 555 Piano Trio Op. 70, no. 1 (‘Ghost’), 568 String Quartet Op. 18, no. 1 in F major, 395 String Quartet Op. 59, no. 3 in C major, 27, 28 String Quartet Op. 131 in C sharp minor, 397 Symphony no. 2, 385 Symphony no. 3 (‘Eroica’), 517 Symphony no. 4, 385 Symphony no. 5, 386, 560–1, 577 Symphony no. 6 (‘Pastoral’), 385 Symphony no. 9, 386, 581 The Beggar’s Opera, 296–7, 299, 301 The Beggar’s Wedding, 299 Bell, Chichester, 657 Bell, Michael, 552 La Belle Dame sans mercy, 119 Bellini, Vincenzo, 407 Il pirata, 405 Benjamin, George, 499n11 Into the Little Hill, 499n11 Ringed by the Flat Horizon, 645 Written on the Skin, 499n11

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698 Benjamin, Walter, 355n14, 396, 403, 504n27 ‘The Storyteller’, 355n14 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility’, 504n27 Benson, Stephen, 580, 581 Berg, Alban Lulu, 498 Wozzeck, 498 bergerie, 87 Bergson, Henri, 448, 449, 588, 589, 592 Berio, Luciano, 419, 420 Berkeley, Michael, 499n11 Berlioz, Hector, 402, 407 Symphonie fantastique, 385 Bernard of Clairvaux, 56+n30 Bernard de Ventadorn, 113–14 Can vei la lauzeta mover, 113–15 Bernhard, Thomas, 497 Bernstein, Jane, 409 Betterton, Thomas, 252–5 Beyle, Henri see Stendhal bhajans, 582, 584 Biber, Heinrich, 260 Bible liturgy and, 39, 44 references and implied references to, 18, 19, 97, 168 texts from, 305–6, 312–14 Binchois, Gilles de, 120 Birchensha, John, 163 birdsong, 454–5, 596–7 humans compared to, 127, 392 music imitating, 162, 261, 579–80, 610–11, 685 Birtwistle, Harrison, 499, 617, 640 Bishop, Elizabeth, 588 Bizet, Georges, La jolie fille de Perth, 406 Blair, Robert, The Grave, 361, 364, 369, 370 Blake, Andrew, 621 Blake, William, 369, 370 Britten and, 632 BLAST, 592–3 Blaze, François-Henri-Joseph, 408 Blind, Mathilde, 439, 440 Bliss, Arthur, The Tempest, 611 Bloom, Harold, 684, 685, 686 Blow, John, 316 Venus and Adonis, 251, 252+n18, 253 Blues, Auden and, 602–7

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 698

index body listening and, 334, 501 musical notation and, 64 see also mind–body split Boen, Johannes, 128 Boethius, 148, 553, 683 De consolatione philosophiae, 52, 53, 78 De musica, 69–70, 161, 553 Bohlman, Philip V., 682 Boieldieu, François-Adrien, 406 Boito, Arrigo, 411, 426 Boito, Camillo, ‘Senso’, 389, 423–7 Bolton, Charles Powlett, Duke of, 297 Bonds, Mark Evan, 259n2, 268 Bonne of Luxembourg, 118 Bononcini, Giovanni, 293 Bonsignori, Giovanni, 200 books, 674 see also printing/publishing Booktrack, 676–8 Bordini, Faustina, 297 Borlet, Ma tre dol rosignol / Rosignolin, 101, 105 Bottari, Ferdinand, 342–3 Boulez, Pierre on Proust, 538, 539 Le Marteau sans maître, 499 Pli selon pli, 499 Bower, Dallas, 648 Bowie, Andrew, 4, 6, 11n48, 12+n51 boy theatre companies, 150, 219–21, 223 Boyce, William, 312, 316 Bradley, Arthur, 299n22 Brahms, Johannes, 356, 437, 439–40+n16, 442 Forster and, 577 Symphony no. 3, 402 Symphony no. 4, 28, 29, 398, 400 Brent, Charlotte, 286, 301 Brewer, Thomas, ‘O that Mine Eyes could Melt into a Flood’, 212 Brind, Richard, 311 British Empire Exhibition (1924–5), 547+n23 Britten, Benjamin, 499, 602, 632–3, 635–6 and Auden, 603, 632, 635 and Austen/Mansfield Park, 632–6 and Forster, 560, 562–3, 633 Billy Budd, 560, 562–3 canticles, 645 music for The Dark Tower, 649, 652–3

15/05/20 7:55 PM

index ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, 688 Paul Bunyan, 499 Peter Grimes, 562–3, 633, 644 The Rape of Lucretia, 632 The Turn of the Screw, 415, 632, 635, 636 broadside ballads, 202–7 tunes, 202–7 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 388–9, 499n11, 640, 641 Brooksby, Philip, ‘The Delights of the Bottle’, 203, 205, 206–7 Brouncker, William, 163–4 Brown, Calvin S., 506–8 Brown, Carleton, 53 Brown, Charles Brockden Ormond, 341 Wieland, 341 Brown, John, 269n19 Browne, Thomas, 168 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 392 Browning, Robert, 387–8, 459, 590 George Eliot and, 438, 439, 441–2 on Shelley, 345 ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, 652 Fifine at the Fair, 388 Men and Women, 438 ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, 388, 459 Bruckner, Anton, 67, 423n3 Bubble Books, 673–4, 678 Büchner, George, 498 Buelow, George J., 260n5, 268 Bullen, A. H., 590 Bunting, Basil, 174–5 on Pound, 590, 598 Briggflatts, 497n3 Bürger, Gottfried, ‘Lenore’, 361–2 Burgess, Anthony, The Waste Land, 645 Burke, Edmund, 453, 527 Burmeister, Joachim, 151–2 Musica Poetica, 151–2, 682 Burney, Charles, 321, 323, 325 on Arne, 280, 286 Burney, Esther, 325 Burney, Frances, 318, 323, 325 Camilla, 324 Cecilia, 318, 321, 323–4, 325 Evelina, 318, 321–2, 324, 325 Burnham, Scott, 1, 6, 12+n49, 383, 386 Burra, Peter, 560

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 699

699

Burrow, J. A., 41 Busnois, Antoine, 101, 120 In Hydraulis, 101 Busoni, Ferruccio, 553 Butler, Charles, 148 Butterworth, George, 611–12 Buxheim organ book, 134n29 Byrd, William, 378 ‘The Battell’, 222 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 26, 402, 407, 408n15, 429, 453 on Rossini, 408 ‘The Corsair’, operas based on, 408n15 ‘The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept’, 453–4 Caccini, Giulio, 212, 217, 238 Euridice, 158, 212 Le nuove musiche, 158, 212, 217 cadences / directed progressions, 127–8+n19, 139 Cage, John, 500–1+n13 Callas, Maria, 419n15 Callcott, John Wall, 376 Calvin, John, 191 Cammarano, Salvadore, 407, 411 Campion, Thomas, 175, 184, 223, 588, 590, 609 experiment with song by, 184 on relationship between words and music, 167, 169, 171 A New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counterpoint, 224+n15 Observations in the Art of English Poesie, 215n15 ‘When to her Lute Corinna Sings’, 184 canon, 106–7 canonicity, 10, 26, 66–7, 356–7, 503, 508, 509 Capelli, Giovanni Maria, 293 Caplan, David, 621 Carafa, Michele, 406 Carcano, Giulio, 409+n28 Carew, Thomas, 210 Carissimi, Giacomo, Jephte, 307 Carolingean reforms and standardisation of liturgy, 45, 49, 64–72 Caron, Philippe, 120 Carr, Paul, 676, 677 Carroll, Lewis, Alice books, 395, 401 Carter, Elizabeth, 320

15/05/20 7:55 PM

700

index

Cartesian split see mind–body split Cary, Tristram, 653 Cascella, Daniela, 502 Case, John, The Praise of Music, 197 Castiglione, Baldasarre, 197, 227n18 Castil-Blaze, 408 castrati, 241, 245–6, 322, 323 Castro, Guilhem de, 630 catches, 196, 209, 372–5 Catchpole, Nell, 616 catharsis, 149, 261, 272, 336 Catherine of Braganza, 251 ‘The Catholick Ballad’, 206 Catullus, Gaius Valerius, 237 Cavalcanti, Guido, 593, 594–5 Cavalli, Francesco Giasone, 241–2 Veremonda l’amazzone di Aragona, 241–2 censorship, 219, 249, 298, 301, 424, 633 ceòl mór, 578, 583–4 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 376 Cest quadruble / Voz n’i dormirés jamais / Biaus cuer / FIAT, 116–17, 118 Chailloux de Pestain, 80 Chamfort, Sébastien, 499 chant, 4, 44 learning through, 40, 44 local variants, 68, 69 use in motets, 96, 99–100, 101 see also sequences and tropes chaos, sound of, 27, 157, 170 Char, René, 499 Charlemagne, 67, 68, 70 Charles I, 210, 213 Charles II, 148, 250–5 state apartments, stage works and, 251–3 Chartier, Alain, 119, 120+n63 La Belle Dame sans mercy, 119 ‘La Complainte du prisonnier d’amours faicte au jardin de plaisance’, 119–20 La Chastelaine de Saint-Gilles, 79 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 200 Britten and, 632 Chaudhuri, Amit, The Immortals, 578, 579, 582–3 Chaupin, Ernoul, 87n15 Cherubini, Luigi, Medea, 419n15 ‘Chevy Chase’, 205 Children of the Queen’s Revels, 219, 223 children’s books, 673–4

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 700

choir schools, 148, 150, 219, 230, 312 boy theatre companies and, 150, 219–21, 223 choirs, 230, 312, 458, 560, 590, 667 in fiction, 449, 450 Chopin, Fryderyk George Eliot and, 438 Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61, 20–2 Prelude no. 14 in E flat minor, 397 Chrétien de Troyes, 126 Christgau, Robert, 668, 669–70 Christianity courtly love and, 127 paradox in, 126, 130, 193 see also Church Christie, Audrey, 632 Christie, George, 635n24 Church, 63–4 development of doctrine, 44, 71–2 and musical education see choir schools and musical notation, 49, 65–70 as patron of musicians, 195, 198, 209, 213, 311 see also Anglican church music, liturgy and mass Cibber, Colley, 297–8, 312 Cibber, Theophilus, 296 Patie and Peggy, 301 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 148, 150 Cimarosa, Domenico Stendhal and, 430, 431, 432, 434 Il Matrimonio segreto, 430, 434 cinema see film citation, 17, 86 in music, 42, 86, 87, 92 Clairmont, Claire, 340, 341–2, 343, 344, 347 Clark, Walter van Tilburg, ‘The Portable Phonograph’, 662–3 Clarke, David, 639 class, 87–8, 196, 326, 583 Claudius, Bishop of Turin, 70–1 clausulae, 59, 87, 90, 91, 99 Cleare, Ann, 684 Clementi, Muzio, 328, 345 Clive, Kitty, 296, 297–8, 301 Close Up, 648n1 clubs, 372, 373 Cocteau, Jean, 499n7 codes, cultural, 16, 19–23 Coffey, Charles

15/05/20 7:55 PM

index The Beggar’s Wedding, 299 The Devil to Pay, 298 cognition, 273 see also neuroscience Cohen, Leonard, 668 Coleman, Charles, 210 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 665 on Shakespeare, 178, 186 Shelley on, 346 ‘To the Rev. W. J. Hort while teaching a Young Lady some Song-Tunes on his Flute’, 454, 455, 457 Colette, 498 Collins, Wilkie, 439 Collins, William, 279 Colman, George, 286 The Musical Lady. A Farce, 270 coloration, 135, 139+n32 Colton, Lisa, 97 commedia dell’arte, 199 communication, 269, 333–7, 444, 555 gesture and, 115, 149–50, 334 multimedia, 672–8 music as, 9, 66, 108, 390, 429–30, 540–1, 565, 620 private/public, 45, 111, 112–15 pure sound and, 147, 536 singing as, 350–2 structure and, 536–7, 620 competitions, 372, 379 composers/composition idea of, 16, 22, 64, 68n20 process, 658 Comte, Auguste, 447 concerts, 26, 185, 316 in fiction, 318, 321–5, 441, 539, 560–1 liturgical music in, 66–7 private, 212, 441 recordings and, 657–8 see also audiences Concerts Lamoureux, 487, 536 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, 269+n18, 333 conductus, 59 Cone, Edward T., 617 Connor, Steven, 572 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 642 Conrad, Peter, 384, 389, 420 consciousness, music and, 565, 589 consonance see under harmony

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 701

701

consort playing/singing, 169, 175 Constantine I, Emperor, 290, 292–4+n18 Constantine, David, ‘Musicians in the Underground’, 618 Contra le temps et la sason jolye / Hé! mari, mari!, 101, 105 contrafact, 43, 56–9, 96, 183 conventions, 16, 18, 19, 385 strangeness and, 19, 345–6 see also topic theory Cooke, Benjamin, ‘If the prize you mean to get’, 372, 378–9 Corelli, Arcangelo, 154, 314 Corneille, Pierre, 289+n5, 290, 293, 630 Le Cid, 289 cornet (cornett), 221–2, 223, 224, 226 and voices, 222 Cornford, F. M., The Origin of Attic Comedy, 641 Cornwall, Barry, 456–7 counterpoint, poetry and, 596 countertenors, 220–1, 222, 375, 640 courtly love, 82, 101, 118, 126–7 Christianity and, 127 psychoanalytic theory and, 126–7 Cowell, Simon, 617 Cowley, Abraham, 249–50 Crabbe, George, 633, 634–5 Austen and, 634–5 The Borough, 634–5 Peter Grimes, 562–3 Cramer, John Baptist, 328 Crawford, Virginia, 629–30 creative process, allegorised, 567–8 Crimp, Martin, 499n11 Crispus, Flavius Iulius, 290, 292–4+n18 critical theory, 4–6, 16, 31, 506, 507–8 influence on musicology, 9, 384–6, 506, 507–8 criticism, writing/composing and, 664 Croft, William, 312, 313, 314 Cromwell, Oliver, 171 Cross, Joan, 632, 633 cross, theology of, 70–1 Crowne, John, Calisto, 250–1, 252, 253 Crozier, Eric, 562, 633 Cui, César, 477, 479, 481 cultural codes, 16, 19–23 Cumming, Julie E., 101 ‘Cupid’s Courtesy’, 206 Cuzzoni, Francesca, 297

15/05/20 7:55 PM

702

index

da capo arias, 242, 243–5 Dahlhaus, Carl, 536 Die Idee der Absoluten Musik, 578, 579, 580, 581, 583 Dahon, Renée, 629 Dalton, John, 309 Dame vailans / Amis / Certainement, 102, 107 Dammann, Guy, 636n25 dance, 590, 594 as communication, 333 in fiction/poetry, 554, 574, 622 in theatre/opera, 224, 227, 235, 250, 253, 280 as topic in music, 17, 118 Daniel, Arnaut, 595, 597 Dante, 115n32, 200 Pound and, 588 Darwin, Charles, 386, 391, 395, 447 Davenant, William, 249, 250, 252n17, 254 A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie, 249n3 The Siege of Rhodes, 249–50, 254 The Second Part of the Siege of Rhodes, 250 Davies, John Lloyd, 641 Davison, J. W., 440 Dayan, Peter, 4n18, 388, 522–4, 528–30 de Man, Paul, 31–2, 34, 35 death, 33, 193, 361–9 Debussy, Claude, 556, 624, 628–30 and Impressionism, 624, 627, 630 Mallarmé and, 489 ‘Clair de lune’, 555 Diane au bois, 625, 626–7 Pelléas et Mélisande, 488, 498, 627–30 Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, 402, 489, 589, 625, 626–7 Préludes, 624 Rodrigue et Chimène, 630 Sonatas, 624, 630 Delany, Mary, 307n11, 308 Deleuze, Gilles, 525, 568 ‘The Delights of the Bottle’, 203, 205, 206–7 Delius, Frederick, 684 demonstrations, 423–4 denotation, 515–18 Dent, Edward J., 255, 560 Derrida, Jacques, 31–6, 569 ‘Les morts de Roland Barthes’, 33–5 Derrida, Pierre, 32, 34

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 702

Descartes, René, 163–4, 273 Deschamps, Eustache, 42, 103, 106 desire, 87–8, 111–20, 125–41, 219, 466, 526, 548 as ‘feminising’ men, 126 determinism, 391 Diamond, Neil, 667 Dickens, Charles Bleak House, 684 Great Expectations, 19–20 Hard Times, 390+n24 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 559 Diderot, Denis Éloge de Richardson, 334 Lettre sur les sourds et les muets, 333, 334, 336–7 Le Neveu de Rameau, 335+n21, 336 Dillon, Emma, 97 directed progressions, 127–8+n19, 139 d’Isle, Henry, 185 dissonance see under harmony distraction, 676, 677 Dit de la panthère d’amours, 86 dits, 80–1, 83, 117–19 divas see prima donnas divine office (hours), 63, 65, 71, 72, 127 divisions, 213 see also ornamentation DJ culture, 662n14 Dolmetsch, Arnold, 590–1 Dolorum solatium, 56, 57 Donizetti, Gaetano Forster and, 560, 561 Il castello di Kenilworth, 406 Lucia di Lammermoor, 406, 407, 411, 560, 561 Donne, John, 590 ‘The Triple Foole’, 167, 169n18 Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.), 591 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 476 double meanings, 31–4, 296, 298, 299 Dove, Jonathan, Mansfield Park, 636 Dowland, John, 213, 590 Pound and, 594 ‘Fine Knacks for Ladies’, 198 ‘In Darkness Let me Dwell’, 169 drag, 641 drama, 219–32, 289–94, 488 boy companies, 150, 219–21, 223 chorus in, 235, 306 liturgical, 44, 63, 67, 71–2

15/05/20 7:55 PM

index narrative and, 400 poetry and, 489–91 see also opera dream states, music and, 486, 487–8 Dressler, Gallus, 151 Dryden, John, 252, 254, 270, 277 Albion and Albanius, 251, 252–5, 270 King Arthur, 252, 253, 254–5, 278 ‘A Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day’, 184 Du Fay, Guillaume, 43, 67 Dujardin, Edouard, 487, 489n16, 535, 536 Dulcis Jesu memoria, 56+n30 Dumas, Alexandre, The Count of Monte Cristo, 401 Duncan, Helen, 642 Duncan, Ronald, 632–3 Letters to William, 632–3, 635, 636 Duncker, Johann Friedrich, 360, 361 Dunstaple, John, 67 d’Urfey, Thomas, 376 Dylan, Bob, 503 ‘Not Dark Yet’, 665 Eagleton, Terry, 683 early music revival, 547, 590–1 Edgeworth, Maria, 328n15, 407 Belinda, 328 Edison, Thomas, 657 education, 147–8, 150 musical, 325, 390, 546; see also choir schools readalongs and, 674, 678 through singing, 51 see also rhetoric and universities Edwards, Richard, 153, 154 Damon and Pythias, 153–4, 158; ‘Awake, ye Woeful Wights’, 158 ‘In Commendation of Music’, 185–6 The Paradise of Dainty Devices, 154n24, 185 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 555 ‘Eighty-Eight’, 206 Einhard, 70–1 Eisenstein, Sergei, Alexander Nevsky, 648–51 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 114 Eleonora d’Aragona, 292 Elgar, Edward, 547 Eliot, George, 388, 415, 437–44 ‘Armgart’, 440, 441, 443–4 Daniel Deronda, 389, 390, 391, 437–44

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 703

703

Middlemarch, 683, 687, 688 The Mill on the Floss, 390 Eliot, T. S., 588, 589, 590, 641, 644 settings of, 645 Tippett and, 638–46 Four Quartets, 173, 597, 644 On Poetry and Poets, 173–4, 176, 181, 183, 185, 593, 618 ‘Portrait of a Lady’, 592 ‘Reflections on “vers libre”’, 181, 594 ‘To Walter de la Mare’, 175n13 The Waste Land, 596, 616, 638–46 Elizabeth I, 196 Elliott, Ebenezer, 459 Ellis, Katharine, 535 Ellison, Ralph, 662 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 684 Emery, Mary Lou, 573 emotion(s)/feeling gender ideology and portrayal of, 236–41, 242–3, 245–6 music and, 147, 212, 552–6 musical form and, 241+n27 oratory and, 150 poetry and, 173–4 rhythm and, 593 theatre and, 221, 234 see also Erlebnis/Erfahrung and laments En attendant songs, 92, 96n1 En Mai quant rose est florie, 91–2 Enlightenment, and modern concert culture, 67 Erart, Jehan, 87n15 Erlebnis/Erfahrung, 355–6+n14 Erlmann, Veit, 552n6, 555, 556, 570 Ernst August of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, 292 Ernst, Heinrich Wilhelm, 687 erotic chromaticism and, 239n20 music and, 327, 328, 431, 449, 466, 560 musical instruments associated with, 204 see also desire Espoir me faut / Revien, espoir, 103, 106 ethics see morality Eucharist see mass Euclid, 163 Euripides, 237 Alcestis, 1, 290 The Bacchae, 499 Hippolytos, 290–1, 292–3, 294 Medea, 237, 419n15

15/05/20 7:55 PM

704

index

Everett, Walter, 666, 669 Exclusion Crisis, 251, 253 exemplification, music and, 402, 515–20 experience descriptions and metaphors, 355–6 see also emotion(s)/feeling Faber, Heinrich, 151 Fairfax, Thomas, 171 falsettists, 220–1, 222, 375, 640 fandom, 429–30, 434 fanfares, 219, 222 Farr, Florence, 590–1 The Music of Speech, 591 Fauré, Gabriel, 488, 499 Fausta, Flavia Maxima, 292–4 Fausto, Count, 292 feeling see emotion(s)/feeling Feldman, Morton, score for Words and Music, 566n6 La Fenice opera house, 423–4 Fenton, Lavinia, 296, 297, 298, 301 Ferne, John, 197 Ferrier, Kathleen, 632, 633 festivals, 617–18 Fet, Afanasy, 476–7, 478–9, 480–1 fidelity in mechanical reproduction of sound, 655–63 Fielding, Henry and ballad opera, 298, 299 An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews, 325 Tom Jones, 281, 324 Fillion, Michelle, 561, 563 film, 331, 399, 400, 415, 423–7, 648 film music, 232, 423–4, 425, 427, 648, 677 Finch, Anne, 252n18 first-person narrative, 83, 100, 107, 108, 111–20 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich, 35, 354n10 Fiske, Roger, 296 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, 392, 425, 484 Fleury Playbook, 71 Flotow, Friedrich, 438 flourishes, 222, 223, 231 Fludd, Robert, 161, 162 flute-playing, 626–7 ‘Flying Fame’, 205 folk music see traditional music Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 272

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 704

Fonton, Charles, ‘Essay on Oriental Music Compared to the European’, 271 forced marriage, 231+n21 Ford, Ford Madox, 611 Forster, E. M., 559–63, 577 and Austen, 633, 635 Britten and, 633 Arctic Summer, 560 Aspects of the Novel, 561, 563, 633 ‘The C Minor of that Life’, 560n9, 561, 563 ‘Co-ordination’, 562 ‘The Creator as Critic’, 560n10 ‘George Crabbe and Peter Grimes’, 562n17 The Hills of Devi, 563 Howards End, 560–1, 562, 563, 577, 580, 581 The Longest Journey, 560, 561, 562, 563 Maurice, 560 ‘Not Listening to Music’, 559–61 A Passage to India, 560, 577, 584 A Room with a View, 559, 562 ‘A View without a Room’, 559 Where Angels Fear to Tread, 560, 561 Förster, Friedrich, 360, 361 ‘Fortune My Foe’, 205 Foster, Stephen, 574 Francis, Sam, 526 Frank, Joseph, 592 ‘Frankie and Johnny’, 607 Frederick, Duke of York, 286 Frederick, Prince of Wales, 278, 279, 306 Freud, Sigmund, 126, 386, 391, 395 Frith, Simon, 665 Frobisher, Martin, 149 Frost, Robert, 669 fugue Beckett and, 566 Pound and, 596 Woolf and, 545, 546, 548 Fuller, Sarah, 127n19, 128n20 funding, 423 see also employment and patronage under musicians Furness, H. H., 199 Gabrieli, Andrea, ‘Aria della Battaglia’, 222 Gace Brulé, 115–16+nn31,32 Quant fine amors me prie que je chant, 115–16 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 355n14

15/05/20 7:55 PM

index Galen (Claudius Galenus), 126 Galilei, Galileo, 148 Galilei, Vincenzo, Dialogo della musica antica, e della moderna, 148, 149, 235n5, 260, 261 Galloway, Janice, Clara, 578, 579–81, 582 Galuppi, Baldassare, 459 gamut, 128 see also solmisation Garrick, David, 279–80 Gautier, Judith, 487 Gautier, Théophile, 484–5, 487 Gay, John, 296–7, 298, 299, 301 The Beggar’s Opera, 296–7, 299, 301 Geminiani, Francesco, 299 gender, grammatical, 127, 130, 136 gender issues and ideology, 125–7, 141, 290–4, 408–11, 441, 443, 640–4, 688 androgyny, 222, 441, 640 casting and, 220–1+n8 commodification of women, 341 and creativity/expression, 336 and music, 127–41, 191–2+n11, 324, 325, 390–2, 441, 443, 472 and music education, 325, 390, 546 opera and, 234–41, 245–6, 270, 301 see also choir schools Genette, Gérard, 17n5, 289n3 Gennrich, Friedrich, 39, 90, 91 George I, 292, 312 George II, 312, 313 George III, 280, 313, 633 Georgiades, Thrasybulos, 352+n7 Gérard, Albert S., 291 Gerbert de Montreuil Continuation de Perceval, 126 Roman de la violette, 78, 79 Gesamtkunstwerk, 488, 534n5, 537 poetry and, 487, 588 gesture, 115, 149–50, 269, 334 Gesualdo, Carlo, ‘Sospirava il mio cor’, 154 ghazals, 582, 584 Gheradini, Giovanni, 410 Ghirardelli, Giambattista Filippo, Il Costantino, 290, 292–3 Gibbons, Christopher, 213 Cupid and Death, 213 Gilbert, Humphrey, 148–9 Girardin, Delphine de, ‘Il m’aimait tant’, 478n13 The Girl’s Own Paper, 467, 472

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 705

705

Gisborne, Maria, 340, 345, 346–7 glees, 372, 375–9 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von, 322 Armide, 271 ‘Die frühen Gräber’, 364–5, 366, 369 Godric, 55 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 335n21, 349–57, 443n31, 593 musical taste, 356 Tchaikovsky and, 480, 481 verse forms, 350 Egmont, 483 ‘Erlkönig’, 369, 438 Faust, 563 ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’/‘Über allen Gipfeln’, 352 West-östlicher Divan, 356 Wilhelm Meister novels, 355, 356 Goldin, Frederick, 112 Goldoni, Carlo, 325–6, 405 La Cecchina, ossia La buona figliuola, 326 Pamela nubile, 326 Goodman, Nelson, 515–21 Gorbman, Claudia, 677 Gordigiani, Luigi, 441 Gothic Voices, 98 Gourmont, Remy de, 592 ‘The Gowlin’, 206 Grabu, Louis, 252, 255 Albion and Albanius, 251, 252–5 graces see ornamentation graduals, 68 Graffigny, Françoise de, 333 Gramit, David, 355n15 gramophone, 505, 655–60, 662–3 Granger, Farley, 423n1, 426n20 Graves, Robert, 611 graveyards, 361–70 Gray, Thomas, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 364 Greek (classical) music/drama, 127–8, 199 modes, 149, 231 notation, 48 opera and, 149, 234, 235, 237–8, 261 Greene, Maurice, 311–13, 314–16 Forty Select Anthems in Score, 311, 313, 314 ‘The King shall rejoice in thy strength’, 314 ‘Lord, let me know mine end’, 314, 315 ‘My God, my God, look upon me’, 312–13

15/05/20 7:55 PM

706

index

Greenlaw, Lavinia The Importance of Music to Girls, 621 ‘Silent Disco’, 617, 621–2 ‘Greensleeves’, 205 Gregorian chant see chant Gregory I (Gregory the Great), 49, 68–9+n22 Gregory II, 69n22 Grétry, André-Ernest-Modeste, 483–4 Griffiths, Eric, 472 Grocheio, Johannes de, 97 Grossberg, Lawrence, 431 grounds/ground basses, 224, 239n20, 583–4 Grundy, Isobel, 634 Guarini, Giovanni Battista, Il pastor fido, 405 Guilhem de Peitieu, 112, 115 Farai un vers de dreit nien, 112–13 Guillaume de Dole/Roman de la rose (Renart), 78, 79 Guillaume de Lorris, 86, 119 guilt culture, 291 guitars, 340, 342–3 Gunn, Kirsty, The Big Music, 578, 579, 583–4 Gurney, Ivor, 588, 609–14 Ludlow and Teme, 609–14 ‘Ludlow Fair’, 611–13 ‘On the Idle Hill of Summer’, 613–14 ‘On Somme’, 611 ‘Strange Service’, 610, 612 ‘When Smoke Stood Up from Ludlow’, 610–11, 612, 613 Hageman, Philip, 414n4 Haggard, H. Rider King Solomon’s Mines, 401 She, 401 Hahn, Reynaldo, music in Proust’s Les Plaisirs et les jours, 534n5 Hakluyt, Richard, 148–9 Hallam, Arthur, 457 Hallé, Charles, 439, 440 Hamilton, Newburgh, Samson, 304–9 Hamilton-Paterson, James, 498 ‘Hän’, 665, 669 Handel, George Frederick, 312, 313–14 Arne and, 283, 286 borrowings, 309 use of silences, 154 Admeto, 292n17

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 706

Agrippina, 242–6 Alexander’s Feast, 325 Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline, 308 Giulio Cesare, 261, 268 Israel in Egypt, 308 Ode for Saint Cecilia’s Day, 184 Il pastor fido, 405n1 Riccardo primo, 271 Samson, 304–9 Saul, 308 Zadok the Priest, 322 Hanslick, Eduard on music and meaning, 516, 518 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, 577, 578–80, 581, 583 Hardy, Thomas, 391, 447–52, 457–8, 588 Britten and, 632 as musician, 448 Desperate Remedies, 448–9 Far from the Madding Crowd, 450 The Hand of Ethelberta, 449, 450 Jude the Obscure, 451–2 A Laodicean, 449 The Mayor of Casterbridge, 450 A Pair of Blue Eyes, 449, 450 The Poor Man and the Lady, 449–50 The Return of the Native, 450 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 390, 449, 450–2 ‘To My Father’s Violin’, 458 Two on a Tower, 449, 450 Under the Greenwood Tree, 449 The Well-Beloved, 452 Harington, Henry, 378 harmonics see acoustics harmony chromatic, 239–40, 352, 362, 666, 688 consonance, 161–5, 169, 187 directed progressions, 127–8+n19, 139 dissonance and resolution, 127–8 relationship to melody, 334, 397 as metaphor, 168, 171–2, 184, 187, 552–6, 594, 621, 660 Harris, James, 306, 308 Harris, Jocelyn, 635 Harsent, David, 499, 617 Hartmann, Eduard von, 447, 448 Haug, Andreas, 64 Hawker, Essex, 299 Hawkins, John, 261–8 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Twice-Told Tales, 18

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index Haydn, Franz Joseph, 67, 340, 385 Armida, 405n1 The Creation, 27, 28, 307 ‘The Spirit’s Song’, 365–9 Hayes, William, 374 ‘As Sir Toby reel’d home’, 374 ‘On the death of Wells’, 374, 375 Hazlitt, William, 273 Heaney, Seamus, 173, 174, 175 Hebbel, Christian Friedrich, 18–19 Heberle, Jean-Philippe, 643 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 335, 355–6, 386, 395 Heine, Heinrich, 477 Heinichen, Johann David, 268, 293 Helmholtz, Ludwig von, 391, 518 Hemingway, Ernest, 517, 656 ‘The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio’, 660–2 Henry, Prince of Wales, 213 Henschel, George, 444 Hensher, Philip, 499n11 Henze, Hans Werner Auden and, 499, 602 The Bassarids, 499 Herbert, George, 167 Herincx, Raimund, 642 hermaphrodites, 126 ‘Hey Jack Kerouac’, 668, 669 Heyman, Katherine Ruth, 589 ‘high’ vs ‘low’ in arts, 296, 383, 489, 582–3, 584, 621, 687 polytextuality and, 101 see also ‘absolute music’ Hiley, David, 66n9 Hill, Aaron, ‘The Messenger’, 319 Hill, Geoffrey, 618–19 Speech! Speech!, 618–19 Hilton, John, 209, 217 as composer, 210 song manuscript, 158, 209–17 Catch That Catch Can, 209 Hindustani music see Indian classical music history, 395 legendary and romanticised, 401, 405, 406, 484, 487, 488 views of, 684–6 writing / musical notation and, 69–70 Hoadly, John, 316 ‘Hockley in the Hole’, 206 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 1, 273, 386

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 707

707

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 499 Hofstadter, Douglas R., 523–4 Hogarth, William, 297, 499 Hold, Trevor, 610 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 500 Hollander, John, 196, 340, 345, 462 Holliger, Heinz, 499–500 Beseit, 499 Scardanelli-Zyklus, 500 Schneewittchen, 500 Holst, Gustav, 594 Holtmeier, Ludwig, 354n10 Homer, 148, 237 Odyssey, 25, 169, 399 Honegger, Arthur, 499n7 Hood, Thomas, 20 Hooke, Robert, 162, 163, 165 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 594 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 51 Hotteterre, Jacques, 626 L’Art de préluder, 626 hours see divine office The House of Bedlam, 619 Housman, A. E. Gurney and, 609–14 A Shropshire Lad, 609–14 Hrabanus Maurus, 71n35 Hubbard, L. Ron, 675 Hughes, Ted, 174 Hugo, Victor, 406, 456 L’Année terrible, 456 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 401 ‘Mazeppa’, 402 Hulme, T. E., 591, 592 Humphrey de Bohun, 52 Humphreys, Samuel, 314 Hunt, Leigh, 344 Hunter, Anne, ‘The Spirit’s Song’, 365–9 Huot, Sylvia, 41–2+n16, 43, 97, 101, 116 Huxley, Aldous, 656, 661 Crome Yellow, 640, 641 Point Counter Point, 548, 553, 658–9, 661 hymns, 44, 50–1, 184, 459, 573, 667 ‘I’, 111, 565 see also first-person narrative ‘I’m a Believer’, 667, 669 Ichiyagani, Toshi, 684 iconoclastic controversy, 67, 70–1 Ier main pensis chevauchai, 87–92 imperialism, music and, 148–9, 546–7

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708

index

Improperia, 70 improvisation, 520n5, 525–6, 603, 620 and conversation, 336 learning, 626 ‘In Pescod Time’, 205 indexicality, 20–2 Indian classical music Chaudhuri and, 578, 582–3 Forster and, 563, 577 Seth and, 577–8 indifferentiation, 125–7, 134, 141 Ingarden, Roman, 519 intermediality, 18–19, 78–83, 118, 418, 522 connectivity over time, 7 see also multimedia productions International Association for Word and Music Studies, 3, 506n33 internet and music/multimedia distribution, 675–6 and narrative, 399 interpretation, 399, 400n9 intersubjectivity, 2, 11, 621, 686–8 intertextuality, 5, 16–23, 96, 385, 503–4 and musical topic theory, 16–23 see also intermediality and polytextuality irrealism, 520 Irwin, John T., 607 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 497–8 Never Let Me Go, 505 Isidore of Seville, 40, 48, 126 Ito, Michio, 594 iubilus, 65–6 Ives, Simon, 209 Jackson, William, 372 Jacobites, 279 Jakemes, Roman du Castelain de Couci, 79, 86 James VI/I, 213, 231n21, 407n12, 409 James II, 250 James, Duke of Monmouth, 250, 251, 254 James, Clive, 665 James, Henry, 415, 420–1, 441 Britten and, 632 The Aspern Papers, 415–21 ‘Eugene Pickering’, 417 Italian Hours, 415–16 The Portrait of a Lady, 415 James, William, 448 Jameson, Fredric, 686 Janáček, Leoš, 591

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 708

Janequin, Clément Pound and, 596 ‘La Guerre’, 222 Janotha, Natalie, 466–9 Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique, 119 Jarry, Alfred, 488 jazz, 500 ‘Je voi ce que je desir’, 87–92 Jean de Meun, 86, 119 Jenkins, Nicholas, 602 Jennens, Charles, 308 Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus), 71 Joachim, Joseph, 439–40+n16, 442 John XXII, Pope, 66 John of Salisbury, 127 ‘John Barley-Corn’, 207 Johnson, Robert, 213 ‘Woods, Rocks and Mountains’, 213 Johnson, Samuel, 177, 181, 684 Jones, Robert, 219, 223–32 ‘Come Sorrow Come’, 226–7 ‘Dainty Darling, Kind and Free’, 224, 225 ‘Fond Wanton Youths’, 231 ‘Lie Down, Poor Heart’, 227–30 ‘She Whose Matchless Beauty’, 231 Jonson, Ben, 178, 286 Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, 292, 293 Josipovici, Gabriel, 497–8 Josquin des Prez, 67 Jourdain, Robert, 345n14, 346n15 Joyce, James, 489n16, 588, 590 Beckett and, 569 Cage and, 501 Chamber Music, 590 Finnegans Wake, 590 Ulysses, 25, 496–7, 548 Jubal, 1, 170 jubilus, 65–6 Kafka, Franz, 499 Kakerie, Baudes de le, 87n15, 88 Kallman, Chester, 499, 602n9, 606n19 Kandinsky, Wassily, 587 Kant, Immanuel, 403 Karjalainen, ‘Hän’, 665, 669 Karlin, Daniel, 460 Kay, Sarah, 45, 86 Keats, John Britten and, 632

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index Dylan and, 665 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 665 Keller, Hans, 345–6 Kendrick, Laura, 112, 113 Kermode, Frank, 27, 399 Kern, Jerome, 463 keys, 469 Khomyakov, Aleksey, 476 Kildea, Paul, 636 King’s Men, 213, 220 Kingsley, Charles, 401 Kingsmill, Anne, 252n18 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, 554 Kintzler, Catherine, 272 Kipling, Rudyard, 499n11 Gurney and, 609n2 Kittler, Friedrich, 355n15 Kivy, Peter, 582 Klein, Michael, 398 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb ‘Die frühen Gräber’, 364–5, 366 ‘Die Sommernacht’, 364 Kobialka, Michal, 71 Kock, Paul de, 425–6 Körner, Theodor, 360 Kraft, William, score for Cascando, 566n6 Kramer, Lawrence, 1n4, 2, 4, 509–10 on Schubert, 386, 441, 443n31 Kristeva, Julia, 22 on homologisation, 127, 130 on intertextuality, 16–17, 18, 20, 22 Kundera, Milan, 497 Kunigunde of Luxembourg, 292n16 Kureishi, Hanif, 505 Kurtág, György, 397 Kafka Fragments, 397, 499 . . . pas à pas – nulle part . . ., 499 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy, 189 LaBelle, Jenijoy, 408–9 Lacan, Jacques, 126–7, 128, 130 ‘The Ladies Fall’, 205 Laforgue, Jules, 624+n3 Lalli, Domenica, 291 laments, 158, 222, 234–46, 279 gender issues, 234–41, 245–6 polyphonic, 235n6, 239n20 strophic, 239n20 Lamoureux orchestra and concerts, 487, 536 Lancelot, 126 Langer, Susanne, 518, 645

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 709

709

language ‘feminine’, 192+n13 music and, 31–5, 149, 153, 189, 269, 333–5, 477, 520, 565–9 music as, 9, 259, 437–8, 536–7, 588–9 origins of, 269, 273 perception and, 273 register, 399, 683 and signification, 2 strangeness of, 683 technical terms in literature and music, 681–2 and thought, 269, 686 languages, 334, 336–7 imagining, 686 suitability for singing, 213–17, 269–71, 277 and truth, 33 Lanier, Nicholas, 210, 212 Hero’s Complaint to Leander, 210 ‘Tell Me, Shepherd’, 213, 214 largeheartedboy.com, 675–6 ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, 687–8 Lateran Council, Fourth, 71 Lawes, Henry, 209+n3, 210–12, 213–15 Milton on, 215 as performer, 210 Pound and, 594 on setting English text, 213–15 Waller on, 209 music for Comus, 278 ‘How Ill Doth he Deserve a Lover’s Name’, 210, 212 Lawes, William, 209, 211 ‘Come, my Daphne, Come Away’, 210, 211 Lawrence, D. H., 552–6, 589 beliefs, 552n4 ‘A Life History in Harmonies and Discords’, 552 ‘The Novel and the Feelings’, 552 ‘Piano’, 589 ‘Poetry of the Present’, 589 Women in Love, 552, 553n15, 554–6 Leavis, F. R., 346 Lecerf de la Viéville, Jean-Laurent, 261n11, 272 Lechevallier, Bernard, 535 Lee, Vernon, 383 Lehmann, Frederick, 439 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 519 Leighton, Frederic, 439, 444

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710 Lemaire, Madeleine, 534n5 Lemer, Gaetano, 293 Leoni, Michele, 409, 410 Leppert, Richard, 509n38 Lermontov, Mikhail, 480 Lescurel, Jean de, 80 Levi, Peter, 175 Levinas, Emmanuel, 525 Levitin, Daniel, 345n14 Levy, Emil, 595 Levy, Kenneth, 60 Lewes, Charles Lee, 439 Lewes, George Henry, 437, 438–40, 444 Lewis, C. S., 183 Lewis, Wyndham, 592 liberalism, project of, 683, 686 libretti, 411, 498–9 Auden on writing, 601–2 composers writing/co-writing, 409, 410, 498, 638–46 morality and, 289–94 plays as, 629 and their sources, 236–8, 261, 289–94, 325–6, 405–11, 421 verse forms in, 406, 409n25 Licensing Act 1737, 298, 301 Lieder, 349–57 lieto fine, 292 ligatures see neumes ‘Lilli Burlero’, 204, 205–6 Lily, William, 153+n22, 180n22 listening, 16, 342, 620–1, 683–4 acousmatic, 108 as active, 152, 345–6 anticipation in, 152, 345–6 and the body, 501 as commentary, 97 historical continuity, 444 as performing, 23 scientific aspects, 334, 345–6 vs seeing, 581 see also audience and reading Listenius, Nicolaus, 151 Liszt, Franz, 483 George Eliot and, 437, 441 Mazeppa, 402 literacy see writing/literacy literature adaptations for other media, 405–11, 421, 424 definitions, 3, 683 experimental, 390, 489, 490, 589, 597

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 710

index including music, 78–83 music as ideal for, 33, 174, 273, 383, 387–8, 392, 496–7, 547 and music, reciprocal influence, 1–2, 10, 383–7, 458, 510, 520, 681 and music as sister arts, 1, 168–72, 175–6, 345, 387 musical scores and, 23, 501 performance, 41 universities and, 40, 41, 345 literature and music as joint discipline see word and music studies Little Richard, ‘Tutti Frutti’, 665 liturgical chant see chant liturgical drama, 44, 63, 67, 71–2 liturgy, 44–5, 63–4, 65–9, 70–2 Anglican, 311–12 Carolingean reforms and standardisation, 45, 49, 64–72 development, 64 local variants, 63, 68 Romanisation, 68–9+n24 sung recitation, 44 liveness, 98, 526 Lloyd-Webber, Andrew, Cats, 645 Locke, John, 269, 273 Locke, Matthew, 213, 277 Cupid and Death, 213 Lockspeiser, Edward, 624–5 Loewe, Carl, 444 London boy theatre companies, 150, 219–21 city waits, 195 Covent Garden theatre, 277 Drury Lane theatre, 277, 297–8 Haymarket Theatre, 323, 325 King’s Theatre, 278, 322 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 296, 297–8 Little Haymarket Theatre, 298 professional choirs, 311, 312 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, Evangeline, 401 Longinus, On the Sublime, 307 Louis the Pious, 70 ‘low’ in arts see ‘high’ vs ‘low’ in arts Ludwig, Friedrich, 39 Lugné-Poe, 488, 629 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 271 Alceste, 289–90 Armide, 405n1 Roland, 405n1 Lupus of Ferrière, 70

15/05/20 7:55 PM

index lute songs, 175 Luther, Martin, 147–8 lying music and, 399 narrative and, 399 Lyly, William see Lily, William Lyotard, Jean-François, 508n35, 523–31 lyric, 41–3, 111–20, 481, 603, 617 attitudes to, 41, 384, 476, 478 as communication, 111 music as, 601 musical notation and, 112 pop and, 503, 664–9 sung and unsung, 42–3 within narrative, 78, 111, 120 women and, 392, 472 lyric drama, opera and, 484, 487 lyric subjectivity, 45, 111–20 Ma tre dol rosignol / Rosignolin, 101, 105 McCarthy, Tom, 672, 678 McClary, Susan, 509n38 McCue, Jim, 640 McCullers, Carson, 635 MacDonald, Douglas, of Strathglass, 584 Macdonald, Hugh, 469 McDonald, Russ, 192n13 Mace, Thomas, 148 McEwan, Ian, Amsterdam, 578, 579, 581–2 Machaut, Guillaume de, 43, 66, 101, 106, 139n33 De triste / Quant / Certes je di, 102, 106 En mon cuer a un discort, 134n29 J’ay tant / Lasse! / EGO MORIAR PRO TE, 136–41 Messe de Nostre Dame, 66 Quant Theseus / Ne quier, 101–6 Le Remede de Fortune, 80, 81, 117–19 Sans cuer m’en / Amis / Dame, 102, 106–7 Voir dit (Le Livre dou voir dit), 80, 81–3, 117, 119 McKendrick, Melveena, 291 Mackenzie, Compton, 657–8, 661 MacLaverty, Bernard, 497–8 McNeff, Stephen, The Waste Land, 645 MacNeice, Louis, 648–9, 653–4 Christopher Columbus, 649, 651–2 The Dark Tower, 649, 652–4 Nevsky, 648–51 They Met on Good Friday, 653

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 711

711

Macpherson, James see Ossian madrigals, 175 glees and, 375 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 488 Pelléas et Mélisande, 488, 627–30 Maffei, Andrea, 409, 411 Mahler, Gustav, 16, 385, 553 Symphony no. 6, 684 Maikov, Apollon, 476 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 33, 487–90+n16, 537, 588–9, 596 and Baudelaire, 536–7 Boulez and, 499 Proust and, 539, 541 and Wagner, 487–8, 536–7, 538 L’après-midi d’un faune, 402, 489, 589, 625, 626–7 Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, 489, 490, 589, 597 Mallet, David, 279 Malouf, David, 499n11 Malraux, André, 527 Mammel, Hans-Jörg, 354n10 Mann, Thomas, 443 Doktor Faustus, 496, 497 Mansfield, Katherine, ‘The Singing Lesson’, 562 manuscripts, 41 drafts in, 53 intermedial, 78 miscellanies, 51–6 multiple attributions in, 87 organisation, 113, 116 and subjectivity, 111 two-stage copying, 56 Marchese, Annibale, 293 Maria d’Aragona, 292 Marino, Giambattista, L’Adone, 217 Marlowe, Christopher, 456 Marschner, Heinrich Der Templer und die Jüden, 407 Der Vampyr, 405 Marston, John, 219, 227n18 Antonio and Mellida, 219–32 Antonio’s Revenge, 189–90, 219, 231 The Insatiable Countess, 219 The Malcontent, 219, 220+n3 The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image, 219 The Scourge of Villanie, 219, 227n18 Sophonisba, 219+n1 What You Will, 219+n1

15/05/20 7:55 PM

712 Marsyas, 199–201, 217 martyrdom, 361 Marvell, Andrew, 157 ‘Music’s Empire’, 168, 170–2 Marx, A. B., 683 Marx, Karl, 386, 395 Mary, Queen of Scots, 196 Mary II, 250 masque, 249, 250, 252, 255, 278, 279–80, 283 mass development of doctrine, 71–2 music for Ordinary and Proper, 65, 66–7 ‘Master Mault’, 207 mathematics music and, 148, 151, 161–5, 683 poetry and, 171, 593 Mathews, Elkin, 590, 591 Mattheson, Johannes, 261, 268 Matthews, Colin, 632 Maturin, Charles Robert, 405 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de, Réflexions philosophiques sur l’origine des langues et la signification des mots, 269+n18, 273 maximalism, 553 Mayhew, Ralph see Bubble Books meaning, 397 double, 31–4, 296, 298, 299 narrative and, 399 performance and, 9 polytextuality and, 97–8, 108 verbal ‘music’ and, 458–9 see also exemplification and under music media, 674–5 see also intermediality and multimedia productions Medwin, Thomas, 342 melisma, 59, 184 as expressive of meaning, 44, 65–6 as interpretation, 65 placing, 213–17 melodrama, 269, 360, 369, 594 Melville, Herman Britten and, 632 Moby-Dick, 17, 18–19, 20, 22 memorability, 51, 664, 667 memory, 581, 596, 602n13 linking words and music, 53–4, 78–80, 157, 206–7, 296, 298, 299, 502 music and, 44, 51, 78–80, 157, 663

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 712

index musical notation and, 49–51, 64, 70 musical quotations and, 89, 92–3 poetry and, 174 song lyrics and, 664–70 verse and, 51 see also oral culture Mendelssohn, Felix, 442 George Eliot and, 437, 442 Mendès, Catulle, 487, 630 Merchant, Natalie, 668 Meredith, George, 424 Mersenne, Marin, 162–3, 164, 165 Messiaen, Olivier, 260 Messing, Scott, 441 meta-narrative, 567 Metastasio, Pietro, 260–1, 405 Stendhal and, 432–3 Meun, Jean de, 86, 119 Mey, Lev, 478 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 389, 401, 425, 426 Middleton, Christopher, ‘Hearing Elgar Again’, 618 Middleton, Peter, 621 Midori, 687 Mihalovici, Marcel, score for Cascando, 566n6 Milhaud, Darius, 499n7 Mill, John Stuart, 447–8 Miller, J. Hillis, 397 Millico, Giuseppe, 322 Milton, John, 174, 453 as musician, 175 prosody, 157, 180 Arcades, 169 ‘At a Solemn Musick’ (‘Blest pair of sirens’), 1, 157, 168–72, 308, 376 Comus, 271, 278, 309 ‘Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’, 308 ‘On Time’, 308 Paradise Lost, 18, 180–1, 307, 308 psalm translations, 305, 308 Samson Agonistes, 304–9 ‘To my Friend Mr Henry Lawes’, 215n16 mimesis, 149, 162, 184, 260–1+n7, 271, 289 in liturgical drama, 71 see also ‘programme music’ and under music mind–body split, 552+n6, 554, 555, 556 Miner, Margaret, 534

15/05/20 7:55 PM

index minstrel shows, 570 minstrel songs, 574 Mirka, Danuta, 18n9 mishearing, 184–5 Mitchell, David, Cloud Atlas, 684–6 Mitchell, Joni, 617 Mitchell, Joseph The Highland Fair, 301 The Highland Reel, 301 modes, 148, 149, 299, 626 major/minor 205, 364–6, 376 modulation, 224 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord, 269n19 Monelle, Raymond, 21 Monet, Claude, 624n2 Monkees, 667, 669 monologue, 238, 241–3 see also laments Monteverdi, Claudio, 222, 238, 239–40+n20 Arianna, 238–41, 246 L’incoronazione di Poppea, 240n25 Lamento della ninfa, 239n20 L’Orfeo, 235–40, 246, 369 Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria, 240–1+nn25, 27, 246 Monteverdi, Giulio Cesare, 235n10 Montpellier Codex, 116–17+n50 Moore, Allan, 666, 669 Moore, George, Evelyn Innes, 588, 590 Moore, Thomas, 687 morality and gender/sexual identity, 125, 126, 290–4 modesty and, 320 music and, 147, 318, 319, 320 opera/drama and, 251, 289–94, 297, 298 Morley, Thomas, 223 A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, 149, 163, 213n12, 215n15 Mos Def, 668–9 Moshinsky, Elijah, 643–4 Mote, Jean de le, 79 motets, 45, 59, 86–93, 96, 97–101, 108, 116–17 songs and, 101n19 movies see film Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 67, 385 fans of, 344–5 Forster and, 559, 560

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 713

713

and radicalism, 344–5 Stendhal and, 430, 431, 432 Tippett and, 642 Don Giovanni, 344–5 La finta giardiniera, 326 Le nozze di Figaro, 344 Piano Concerto in C major, K. 467, 18 Symphony no. 38 (Prague), 18, 20 Zaide, 269 Die Zauberflöte, 642 Mulcaster, Richard, 191 Muldoon, Paul, 616, 617 The Word on the Street, 616 Mulliner Book, 185, 186 Mulso, Edward, ‘If the prize you mean to get’, 372, 374, 378–9 multimedia productions, 672–8 ballads as, 202 see also film and radio plays Mushakavanhu, Tinashe, 618 music as ‘absent sublime’, 388, 483–4, 489 ambiguity between composition and performance, 472–4 attention and, 425, 431–2 borrowing see quotation as character in drama, 565, 566–9+n6, 649, 651–4 commodification, 98, 375, 505 as communication see under communication comprehending words in see under words contradictory roles, 193 and cultural divisions, 9, 148–9, 577–84 definitions, 31, 40, 108, 400, 495–6, 500–1, 504–5, 682–3 description and understanding of, 1+n4 diegetic, 235, 299, 544–5 drivers of change, 72 effects, 1–2, 125, 215, 336, 430–1, 448, 486, 487–8, 653 as ‘effeminate’, 192+n11 and emotions, 147, 212, 552–6 erotic and see erotic expressivity, 65–6, 235, 243, 383, 476 form and formal analysis, 2, 5, 29, 152, 386, 402, 516–17, 565 gender issues see under gender issues history of interpretation, 444 idealisations, 2, 16, 168, 392 imagining, in writing verse, 601–7

15/05/20 7:55 PM

714 music (cont.) imitative see mimesis imitative/mimetic vs expressive, 259, 260–1, 268, 271–3 implied by words, 53–4, 78–80, 502 implying words, 157, 206–7, 296, 298, 299 improvisation, and conversation, 336 language and see under language literature and see under literature and matchmaking, 328 meaning, 2, 4, 9, 108, 383, 385, 459, 508–9 and meaning, 20–2, 516, 518, 553 mechanical reproduction see sound technology and memory, 44, 51, 78–80, 157, 663 metaphors from, 171–2, 219, 334, 391 multi-movement form, 67, 402 narrativity, 25–6, 27–9, 272, 395–404 national characteristics, 213, 269–71, 280, 286, 301, 333–7, 578, 583–4 new words to, 56–9, 114, 202–7, 603, 620 notation see musical notation origins of, 269 participatory, 372–9 performance, 209–17, 352, 438, 444, 658 performance indications, 18–19, 243, 352, 658 performers’ contribution to, 158, 209–17 philosophy and, 259–60 poetry and see under poetry and politics, 423, 426, 429–30 polytextual, 96–108 pop music as whole of, 495, 502 practising, 328, 329 purpose, 147, 430–1 recomposition, 56–9 and religion / the sacred, 148, 168, 236, 391, 457, 561, 580 rests, equivalent in verse, 154–5 and rhetoric, 151, 268, 682 and ritual, 325, 474 science of, 148, 161–5, 268–9, 334n12, 345–6+n14, 390–1, 535 sex/gender issues see under gender issues signification and, 515–21 status of, 497, 535–6, 539 and storytelling, 403–4

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 714

index survival in repertoire, 66–7 text scores, 501 time scales, 25–6, 402 titles of pieces, 684 topics in, 17–18+n9, 20–3, 152, 667 and truth, 31, 193, 399, 476 understanding, 1n4 as verb, 40 idea of works of, 22, 66–7 see also harmony music criticism/journalism, 260n5, 430 reviews of unheard music, 483–4 music hall, 570, 596 music journals, 406, 441, 535 music printing/publishing, 296, 299, 320, 340–1 music theory, 69–70, 127–8, 151–3, 682 and gesture, 150 and polyphony, 66n9 musical instruments, 31–2, 626–7, 658 associations and status, 196–201, 204, 305, 341, 626 and bodies, 342 gramophones as, 657 in theatre, 221–2 musical jokes, 204, 376–8 The Musical Lady. A Farce, 270 musical notation alphabet and, 40 in ancient world, 48 descriptive and prescriptive in, 50 literacy in, 379 in literary publications, 320–1, 534n5 memory and, 40, 49–51, 64, 70 in mixed collections, 51–6 and non-literate audiences, 54–5 origins and early history, 48–51, 59, 64, 69 partial, 51 relationship to performance, 50–1, 59, 64, 69, 209–17 of pitch, 70 and preservation of poetry, 112 as retrospective, 49–51 of rhythm, 59 scribal skills needed, 43, 51, 55–6 thematised in text, 81, 117–18 variants in multiple copies, 50, 56 verse and, 180, 595–8 visual aspect, 56 relationship to voice, 64

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index musical terminology, 127–8, 152–3, 156, 682 metaphorical use, 345, 390, 621 in theatre, 231 ‘musicality’, 340 musicians amateur, 195–6, 327+n4, 559–61, 563, 636 employment and patronage, 195, 196, 209, 210, 213, 250, 311, 324 status, 195–6, 197–8 training, 209, 219 see also singers musico-literary studies see word and music studies musicology, 39–41 literary theory and, 2–3 new/cultural, 2, 39–40, 506, 508–10, 578n5 myth, 1, 191, 199–201 ‘Nantucket Song’, 18 narrative and narrativity, 25–9, 395–404, 487 first-person, 83, 100, 107, 108, 111–20 lyric and, 111, 120 modernity and, 402 in music, 25–6, 27–9, 272, 395–404 poetry and, 488 polytextuality and, 108 text setting and, 400 time and, 25–6 see also novels and ‘programme music’ Nathan, Isaac, 453 National Anthem, 376, 378 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, 516, 681 on Proust, 534, 537, 538–9 Negus, Keith, 665 Nerval, Gérard de, 483–5, 487m489 Nesmith, Michael, 674–5 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 441–2 neumes and ligatures, 59, 70, 100 neuropsychology, 535 neuroscience, 345–6+n14 new aestheticism, 4+n18, 6 New Criticism, 41 New Historicism, 41 new musicology see under musicology ‘A New Song’ (‘Lilli Burlero’), 204, 205–6 ‘New World Water’, 668–9 Newman, Ernest, 611

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 715

715

Newman, John Henry, ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, 450 Newman, Randy, 665 Newton, Isaac, 161, 163, 164–5 Niccolò III d’Este, 291 Nicolai, Otto, 407 Nicole de Gavrelle, 86 Nielsen, Carl, 587 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 386, 395, 448, 516, 589 Nilsson, Christine, 420 Noh plays, 594, 597 noise, 571, 611 ambient, 676 Nono, Luigi, Fragmente – Stille, an Diotima, 500 North, Dudley, 167 North, Francis, 165 North, Roger, 210 North, Thomas, 197 North Indian classical music see Indian classical music Northcott, Bayan, 606 Norton, Michael, 71 notational systems, 518–19 see also musical notation Notker, 65 novels extent of reference to pop music in, 502–3 as ideal for music, 384, 402 ideology and, 22 music-making depicted in, 319–20, 327–31, 437–44, 448–52, 534–6, 539–41, 560–2, 572–5, 577–84 opera and, 323, 384, 402, 405–7 views of subject/purpose of, 334 ‘Now Ponder Well’, 205 Noyes, Alfred, 547 Oakes, Meredith, 499n11 Obrecht, Jacob, 67 obsession, 239, 241 see also fandom Ockeghem, Johannes, 67, 101, 120 octave, divisions of, 162+n2 see also scales Odell, Thomas, The Patron, 299 office see divine office O’Gorman, Francis, 462 O’Keeffe, John, The Shamrock, 301 Oldenburg, Henry, 163

15/05/20 7:55 PM

716 On the Sublime, 307 open text, 16 opera, 240, 261–71, 483–5, 498–9 audiences, 293, 296, 301 ballad opera, 298–301 conventions, 410, 485 dramatic time in, 242 effect on church music, 313, 314 in English, 232, 249–55 ensemble singing in, 235 fans, 429–30, 434 in fiction, 321–2, 323, 389, 415–21, 424, 425n15 financing, 255 laments in, 234–46 language and, 277 lieto fine, 292 limitations, singers and, 286 origins and development, 212, 234, 235, 246, 261 pasticcio, 301, 309, 323, 407 performance practice, 424n9 and politics, 423, 426, 429 relationship between words and music, 483–4 standard plots and libretti, 405 verisimilitude in, 289, 290 voice types, 241 see also arias, libretti and recitative opera houses, 423–4, 429 oral culture, 49–50, 64, 207 and literacy, 41–2, 55, 59, 64–5 see also traditional music oratorio, 278–9 in novels, 324–5 oratory, 147, 150 silence in, 154 organum, 50, 59, 64, 66 ornamentation, 209–17, 220 signs for, 212 views of, 213, 217 Orpheus, 1, 191, 235–6, 417–20, 499 Orsini, Fabio, 235n6 Ortega y Gasset, Juan, 592 Ortiz, Joseph, 189 Osborne, John, Look Back in Anger, 644 Ossian (James Macpherson), 336, 352, 376 Otto III, 292 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 86n5 Heroides, 237 Metamorphoses, 200–1, 235–6, 261

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 716

index Owen, Wilfred, 499 The Oxford Book of Light Verse, 592 The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 591–2 Pacchierotti, Gasparo, 323 Pacini, Antonio, 407 Pacini, Giovanni, 407, 408n15 Paer, Ferdinando, 344 Page, Christopher, 97–8 Paien, Thomas, 106n23 painting, 519 Paisiello, Giovanni, 291, 344 Dit de la panthère d’amours, 86 papacy, 66, 67, 68 Paradis, Maria Theresia von, 362, 369 Lenore, 362, 363, 369 The Paradise of Dainty Devices, 154n24, 185 Paris Opéra, 485 Parisina d’Este, 291, 292 parody, 183 see also satire Parr, Wolstenholme, 199 Pärt, Arvo, 67 Pascal, Blaise, 234 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 419n15 Pasqualigo, Benedetto, 293 past as a mystery, 686 as ‘natural’, 271 reconstructions of, 7 see also history Pasta, Giuditta, 417 pastourelle, 87–8, 92 Pater, Clara, 547 Pater, Walter, 187 Woolf and, 547–8+n26 Yeats and, 592 The Renaissance, 587, 592; statement on music and other arts, 10, 497, 503, 536, 547–8+n26, 553, 587; Geoffrey Hill and, 618–19 Paterson, Don, 617 patriarchal moral codes, 289–94 Patrick, Simon, 314 Patti, Adelina, 417 Pattison, Bruce, 209 Peacham, Henry, 178, 183 Pears, Peter, 633, 645n39 peddler songs, 198, 224n14 Pence, Charlotte, 665n8

15/05/20 7:55 PM

index ‘The People’s Anthem’, 459 Pepusch, Johann, 299 Pepys, Samuel, 163, 202 Perec, Georges, 502 performance, polytextuality and, 97, 108 performance practice, Italian seconda prattica and English song, 212–17, 220+n4 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, La serva padrona, 271 Peri, Jacopo, 235, 238 Euridice, 235 Perloff, Marjorie, 587 Perotinus, 64 Perrault, Charles, 271, 289–90 Perrault, Pierre, 289–90 ‘Pescod Time’, 205 Phaedra, 290–4 Phelan, James, 681 Philip II, Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, 220 Philipp of Königsmarck, 292 phonemes, non-verbal meanings, 97 phonograph see gramophone pianos, 340–1, 342 cultural significations, 341 Piatti, Carlo Alfredo, 439–40 Piave, Francesco Maria, 409, 411 Piccinni, Niccolò, 326 La Cecchina, ossia La buona figliuola, 326, 405 Pindar and Pindarics, 249–50 piobaireachd (ceòl mór), 578, 583–4 Piper, Andrew, 674 Piper, Myfanwy, 632 Pippin III, 67 Pisarev, Dmitry, 478–9 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, Five Eliot Landscapes, 645 plainchant/plainsong see chant Plato, 200 on modes, 231 on music and universal harmony, 161, 164, 168, 169, 196–7 on writing, 48 Playford, Henry, 313 Playford, John, 209+n1, 210n6, 215n13 A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick, 158, 212 playlists, 675–6 Pleshcheev, Aleksey, 478 Pleyel, Ignace Joseph, 341 Plutarch, 197, 200

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 717

717

poetry absent, 486–7 idealisation, 168 music and, 33, 35, 167–72, 173–81, 183–7, 345, 386–7, 484 as musical, 167–8, 458–60, 489–91 as ‘natural music’, 42+n16 performance of, 589–91, 617–18, 621 political, 456 purpose, 147 sound in, 156, 174–5, 177, 186–7 technique, 665, 667–9 visual aspect, 489 point of view, 111 Polidori, John, 405 politics, 407, 423–7 ballads and, 206 hymns and, 459 opera and, 249 poetry and, 456 Poliziano, Angelo, 235n6 polyphony, 72 ‘I’ as, 111 beginnings of, 64, 66 objections to, 66 and polytextuality, 96 polytextuality, 43–4, 96–108, 117 and meaning, 97–8, 108 unheard/implied, 96 pop songs, 495–6, 502–4 ballads and, 207 lyrics, 503, 664–9 as the only music, 495, 502 voice types in, 221 ways of writing about, 665–7 Pope, Alexander, 177, 316 pop-lit, 502, 503–4 Porter, Andrew, 409 Potiphar’s wife, 292, 293 Potter, Beatrix, Britten and, 632 Poulenc, Francis, 499n7 Les Mamelles de Tirésias, 642n21 Pound, Ezra, 173, 174, 175, 177 concerts, 592 and T. S. Eliot, 640 music criticism, 497n3, 590 on poetry and music, 587, 588, 591, 592–8 reading, 590 on rhythm, 593–5 translations, 593, 594–5 voice, 588, 591

15/05/20 7:55 PM

718

index

Pound, Ezra (cont.) and Yeats, 591 A Lume Spento, 589 ABC of Reading, 588n10, 592 ‘Anima Sola’, 589 ‘Aria’, 595 Cantos, 548, 589, 594, 595, 596–8 Cathay, 594 Cavalcanti, 595 ‘Cino’, 591 ‘Come My Cantilations’, 592–3 ‘Effects of Music upon a Company of People’, 592 ‘La Fraisne’, 591 ‘In a Station of the Metro’, 594, 595 ‘Nel Biancheggiar’, 590 ‘A Return’, 595 ‘Scriptor Ignotus’, 589 ‘Sestina: Altaforte’, 591 The Spirit of Romance, 591, 593 The Testament of Francis Villon, 594–5 Tristan, 594 The Praise of Music, 197 preluding, 625, 626 prima donnas, 392, 406, 417, 419, 420–1 fictional, 392, 417, 419, 421, 443 printing/publishing, 42, 296, 299, 320, 340–1, 384 broadside ballads, 202–7 literature with music notation, 320–1, 534n5 see also books and multimedia productions Li Prisons d’amours, 79 Prochaska, Eleonora, 360–1, 369 Procter, Brian Waller, 456–7 ‘The Prodigal Son Converted’, 206–7 ‘programme music’, 27, 385, 395–6, 401–2, 579–80 see also narrative progress, 128, 171–2, 271, 391, 685–6 Prokofiev, Sergei, Alexander Nevsky, 649–51 proportions, 152, 161–5 prosody English, 153–5, 157, 158, 180, 215 Latin, 51, 153 Proust, Marcel, 533–4, 537–41 À la recherche du temps perdu, 496–7, 537–41 Les Plaisirs et les jours, 533, 534n5 psalms, 65–6, 230, 319 in mass Proper, 65

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 718

psychoanalytic theory, 126–7, 128, 555 Punch/Pulcinella, 199 Purcell, Henry, 255, 316 Arne and, 282, 286 Greene and, 312, 313 catches, 372, 373 Dido and Aeneas, 251, 252, 255, 277 Diocletian, 254 The Fairy Queen, 254, 286 King Arthur, 251, 252, 253, 254–5 ‘O God Thou Art my God’, 299n28 Pushkin, Aleksander, 480, 481 Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, 152–3, 178, 183 Pyle, Howard, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, 401 Pythagoras, 148, 161, 162, 164, 197, 553 and musical meaning, 516, 518 quadrivium, 40, 147–8, 161 Quant voi le douz tans venir, 87–92 Quem queritis, 71, 72 Querelles, 269, 271, 290n6, 333 Quillin, Jessica, 344 Quinault, Philippe, 289–90 Gluck and, 271 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), 148, 150+n10 quotation, 16, 86 citation and, 17 in music, 45, 86–93, 309 polytextuality and, 96 Racine, Jean, 289, 293 Phèdre, 290, 291, 292, 293 radio, 504 radio plays, 566–9, 648–54, 678 radiophonics, 648, 654 ragas, 577, 582, 583 see also Indian classical music ragtime, 554, 573 Raguenet, François, 269–70, 271 railways, 26 rainbows, 157, 165 Ralph, James, 296, 297 The Fashionable Lady, 298–301 Rameau, Jean-François see Diderot, Denis, Le Neveu de Rameau Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 269, 271 Ramsay, Allan, The Gentle Shepherd, 301 Ramsay, Jarold, 408

15/05/20 7:55 PM

index Ramsay, Robert, ‘What Teares, Dear Prince’, 213 Rankin, Susan, 66n9, 69 Ransome, Arthur, Britten and, 632 rap, 619, 621, 668–9 rappresentativo, stile see recitative Rashleigh, Andrew, 645 Ratcliffe, Stephen, 501n20 Rathaus, Daniil, 478 Ratner, Leonard, 17–18, 20 Ravel, Maurice, L’enfant et les sortilèges, 498 razos, 113 readalongs, 673–4, 678 reading, 16, 403–4, 620, 683–4, 686 codes in, 19 historical modes, 349 intertextual, interactive and multimodal, 92, 98, 676–7, 678 and listening, 7, 23, 345–6, 460, 534, 621 as performing, 23, 41–2 see also audience and listening realism, 221, 390, 444, 476–7, 657 see also verisimilitude reality, consciousness and, 565 rebatos, 224 recitative, 149, 261–8, 269, 271 accompanied, 243, 244 classical monologues and, 238 language and, 278 origins/invention, 235 recordings, 67, 98, 444 reed instruments, 199–201 reformation, 63 Regret Guillaume, 79 Rehm, Ludger, 354n11 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich, 349–52+n4, 356 ‘Neue Liebe, neues Leben’, 350, 351 Reid, Christopher, 620 Nonsense, 620 Reimann, Aribert, 354n10 Rémond de Saint-Mard, Toussaint, 271–2 Renart, Jean, 83 Guillaume de Dole/Roman de la rose, 78, 79, 86 Renart le nouvel, 79 Renvoisiement irai / D’Amours sunt en grant esmai / ET SUPER, 98–100 repetition, 152 resolution, 125, 127–8+n25, 141, 178, 345–6 Revue wagnérienne, 487–9, 535, 536, 537

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 719

719

Reynolds, Miss, 301 rhetoric, 147, 150–1, 152, 180, 268 elocutio, 151 music and, 151, 268, 682 poetry and, 173, 178 recitative and, 261, 268 rhyme, 153 echo rhyme, 91 in song vs in poetry, 184 Rhys, Jean, 570–5 singing, 570, 571 Good Morning, Midnight, 571n5, 572 ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, 570, 572–3 Smile Please, 571 Voyage in the Dark, 570–1, 572, 573–5 rhythm, 153 body and, 180 cross-rhythms and verse prosody, 153 notating, 59 quantitative, 215n15 Rich, John, 296, 298 Richardson, Dorothy, Deadlock, 655–6, 657, 659, 661, 662 Richardson, Samuel, 318, 320 Diderot and, 334 Clarissa, 318, 319, 320–1, 324–5 The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 324–5 Pamela, 318, 319–20, 324, 325–6, 405 Ricks, Christopher, 462–3, 503, 664, 665, 669 Ricoeur, Paul, 403 Ridley, Hugh, 390 Riffaterre, Michael, 19 Righenzi, Carlo, 293 Riley, Denise, 503 Rilke, Rainer Maria ‘Der Panther’, 29 Die Sonette an Orpheus, 453 Rimbaud, Arthur, 489n15, 588 ‘Voyelles’, 588 Rinuccini, Ottavio, 235–6 Risorgimento, 424–5, 426–7, 437n4 Ristori, Adelaide, 409 Ritter, Heinrich Ludwig, 405 ritual, 63–5 in liturgy, 44–5, 63–4, 70–2 music and, 325, 474 senses in, 70+n32 Riviere, Sam, 504 Robert de Reims, 88, 89 Quant voi le douz tans venir, 87–92

15/05/20 7:55 PM

720

index

Roberti, Girolamo Frigimelica, 292 Robertson, Anne Walters, 101 Robin Hood, 206, 401 Robinson, Thomas, 168 rock lyrics, 616, 668 see also pop songs Roger, Gustave-Hippolyte, 438 ‘Rogero’, 205 Rolli, Paolo Crispo, 293, 309 Sabrina, 271, 309 Roman de Fauvel, 80 Roman de la poire, 79, 86 Roman de la rose (Guillaume de Lorris / Jean de Meun), 78, 86, 119 Roman de la rose / Guillaume de Dole (Renart), 78, 79, 86 Roman de Perceforest, 78, 79 Roman de Tristan en prose, 79–80 Roman du Castelain de Couci, 79, 86 Romanov, Konstantin, 476, 480 Romanticism, 1, 5–7, 10, 272–3, 383–4, 419, 476–7, 484–7, 497 rondeaux, 106, 107, 119–20 Rosand, Ellen, 241 Rosseter, Philip, 184, 223, 224n15 Rossetti, Christina, 392 Rossi, Francesco, 293 Rossini, Gioachino, 426, 431–2, 434 Shostakovich and, 403 Stendhal and, 430, 431–2, 433–4 Il Barbiere di Siviglia, 344 La donna del lago, 406 L’Italiana in Algeri, 433 Ivanhoé, 407 Mosè in Egitto, 424 Otello, 407, 408, 438 Tancredi, 431, 434 rounds, 107 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1, 272, 334, 336–7 Staël and, 336 Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 336n36 Essai sur l’origine des langues, 269, 272, 333–4 Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 334–5, 336 Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, 336 Lettre sur la musique française, 333 Pygmalion, 269, 336n37 Royal Society, 163, 164, 165 Rubinstein, Anton, 437+n3

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 720

Rudge, Olga, 592, 594 ‘Rule, Britannia’, 279 Rummel, Walter Morse, 595 Rusconi, Carlo, 409, 410, 411 sacraments, 64, 71–2 Sade, Marquis de, Idée sur les romans, 334 Said, Edward, 635 ‘St. James Infirmary’, 602–7 Sainte-Croix, Camille de, 628–9 Salmon, Thomas, 164, 165 Salvioni, Luigi, 291 Samber, Robert, 297 Sampson, Fiona, 617, 620–1 Music Lessons, 620–1 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 519 satire, 251, 296–7, 298, 299, 301, 405 Savaro del Pizzo, Francesco, 293 Savory, Elaine, 571n9 scales, 148 harmonic proportions and, 161–5 scansion, 604–6, 642 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 293n19 Scarlatti, Domenico, Orlando, 405n1 Schafer, R. Murray, 501 Schelling, Friedrich, 448 Scher, Steven Paul, 506n33, 601 Schiavonetti, Luigi, 369, 370 Schiller, Friedrich, 409 ‘Resignation’, 356 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 26 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 410 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 536 Schmidt, Michael, 553 Schoenberg, Arnold, 488, 553n10 Pierrot Lunaire, 591 String Quartet no. 2, 553 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 448 Beckett and, 565–9 Hardy and, 447 and musical meaning, 516, 519 Revue wagnérienne and, 487 Schubert, Franz, 350, 352–5, 356, 385, 386, 441, 443n31 Beckett and, 567, 568–9, 654 George Eliot and, 437–44 Goethe and, 350 Schumann on, 441 Wagner and, 442+n29 ‘Abschied’, 440 ‘Erlkönig’, 369, 438

15/05/20 7:55 PM

index mass settings, 67 ‘Nacht und Träume’, 568 ‘Pause’, 666 ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’/‘Über allen Gipfeln’, 352–5+nn12,13,15 Schumann, Clara, 467, 578, 579–81, 582 Schumann, Robert, 356, 437, 439, 441, 442 Beckett and, 567 George Eliot and, 441–2 music journalism, 386 Proust and, 538 Carnaval, 388 Gesänge der Frühe, 34–5 ‘Räthsel’, 355n13, 356n17 ‘Verrufene Stelle’, 18–19 science of music see under music scores books treated as, 41 as musical works, 40 text and, 489, 501 Scotch snap, 281, 282, 286 Scott, Walter, 406–7, 587 The Bride of Lammermoor, 407, 409, 411 Scott, William, 183 Scribe, Eugene, 406 Se griés m’est au cors que soie / A qui dirai / IN SECULUM, 100 seconda prattica, 212–17, 235n10 secrets, 27, 107, 111 Secretum secretorum, 126 seeing vs listening, 581 self-insertion, 117 Sellwood, Emily see Tennyson, Emily semitone, ascribed gendered meaning, 127–8+n20 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 189, 237 Phaedra, 290–1, 292, 293 Senesino, 298 Senleches, Jacob, Je me merveil / J’ay pluseurs fois, 104, 106 sennets, 219, 222, 223 sensations, 164–5 sequences (additions to liturgy), 44, 65, 66 sermons, songs in, 54–5 Seth, Vikram An Equal Music, 506, 577, 578 A Suitable Boy, 577–8, 579 sex/gender issues see gender issues and ideology sexuality, 240, 386, 441 see also erotic

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 721

721

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 4th Earl of, 306, 309 Shakespear, Dorothy, 589, 591 Shakespear, Olivia, 589–90 Shakespeare, William, 174, 178, 187, 189, 220n3, 309, 456 Beethoven and, 395 Britten and, 499, 632 portrayal of musicians, 158, 195–201 translating, 408–9 Coriolanus, 154–5, 196 Cymbeline, 189–93, 198, 199 Hamlet, 175, 196, 399 Henry IV Part I, 198 Henry VIII, 634 King Lear, 633 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 154, 178, 180, 198, 199 Macbeth, 408–11 Measure for Measure, 215, 255, 407 The Merchant of Venice, 199–201 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 286 Much Ado about Nothing, 196, 198, 199 Othello, 175, 196, 198–9 The Rape of Lucrece, 179–80 Richard II, 391 Romeo and Juliet, 185–7, 195, 198, 336 The Taming of the Shrew, 196 The Tempest, 168, 193, 195, 213, 499+n11, 639–40 Troilus and Cressida, 197, 200 Twelfth Night, 150, 155–6, 196, 198, 215, 372 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 198 Venus and Adonis, 178 The Winter’s Tale, 150, 195, 198, 200, 224 shame culture, 291 Shaw, George Bernard, 593 Sheen, Erica, 331 Shelley, Mary, 341, 343 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 340–7, 454–5, 456, 588 A Defence of Poetry, 345 ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, 345, 346, 347 ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 342, 345 ‘To Constantia, Singing’, 341, 343, 344, 346, 347 ‘To Jane’, 343–4 ‘To a Skylark’, 383, 454–5 ‘With a Guitar, to Jane’, 343, 346

15/05/20 7:55 PM

722

index

Sheppard, Jack, 297 Sherry, Vincent, 592 Shostakovich, Dmitri, Symphony no. 15, 403 Si com aloie jouer / Deduisant com fins amourous / PORTARE, 100 Sidney, Philip An Apology for Poetry, 168 The Defence of Poesy, 183 Siebold, Antonie (Nöldechen), 438–9 Siebold, Karl Theodor Ernst von, 438–9 sigh, 524–30 sight-singing, 374, 391 see also musical notation signification, 515–21 silences, 154–5 Simon, Paul, 666 ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’, 666 Simpson, N. F., If So, Then Yes, 638 singers amateur, 341–4, 375 Barthes and, 35 in fiction, 392, 417–21, 443 gramophones as, 655–6 opera soloists, 235, 238, 322, 392, 406, 417, 419, 420–1 performance practice, 209–17, 220+n4, 424n9 and small intervals, 128 technique, 286, 297, 330, 375 training, 311; see also choir schools voice types, 220–1, 222, 230, 241, 245–6, 375 singing of all text, 39, 51 ballad publishing and, 206 as communication, 350–2 sociable, 175, 196, 209, 210, 372–5 wordless, 65–6 ‘Sir John Barley-Corn’, 207 sirens, 128, 169 Sitwell, Edith, Façade, 591 Smith, Ali, 505 Smith, Grover Cleveland, 640 Smith, John Stafford, 376 ‘Sleep, poor youth’, 376, 377 social class, 19, 87–8, 326, 583 Socrates, 197 solmisation, 154, 185 songs conventions about credibility in drama, 279

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 722

memory and, 50–1, 184–5, 570–4, 596, 664–70 motets and, 101n19 and other relationships between words and music, 567–9 polytextual, 98, 101–7 relationship of music and words in, 349–57, 369 strophic, 202–4, 350 Sophie Dorothea of Celle, 292 Sophocles, 237 Sorrel, Charlie, 676 Souffrin le Breton, Eileen, 625–6+n6 sound ambient see ambient sound light and, 164–5 and meaning, 97, 147, 536 pervasiveness, 678 see also under poetry sound studies, 10, 97, 501, 570 sound technology, 495–6, 504–5, 655–63, 674, 675 soundscape, 501 soundtracked fiction, 672–8 ‘The Spanish Pavan’, 205 spatial form, 592 speech improvisation and, 336, 603 as music, 31, 552, 591, 617 oratory, 147, 150, 154 writing and, 48–9 Spencer, Herbert, 391, 439, 552+n4 Spender, Stephen, 632 Spenser, Edmund, 174, 175–8, 316, 376 The Faerie Queene, 176–7, 178 The Shepheardes Calendar, 175–6 Spink, Ian, 209n3 spirituality, music and, 391, 561, 580 Sprechgesang/Sprechstimme, 438, 591, 606 Staël, Germaine de, 334, 335–7 Corinne ou l’Italie, 336 De la littérature, 335–6 Essai sur les fictions, 334 Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J-J Rousseau, 336 Stanley, John, 316 Steele, Richard, 293 Steiner, George, 636 Stendhal, 345, 429–35 music journalism, 430 Armance, 432

15/05/20 7:55 PM

index La Chartreuse de Parme, 389, 390, 429–30, 432–5 De l’Amour, 431 Le Rouge et le Noir, 430, 432 Sterne, Jonathan, 570, 656 Stevens, John, 41, 42, 65 Stevens, Wallace, 174, 175, 183 ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, 343, 344 stile rappresentativo see recitative Stillman, Anne, 638 storytelling, 403–4 music and, 396, 403–4 see also narrative and rhetoric strangeness, 19, 20–2, 345–6, 683 Strauss, Johann, and family, 425+n14 Strauss, Richard, 499 Ariadne auf Naxos, 642 Don Juan, 396 Elektra, 553n10 Salome, 553 Stravinsky, Igor, 499n7, 523, 594, 658, 662 and Auden, 601, 602 on music and meaning, 516, 518, 588 Mass, 67 The Rake’s Progress, 499 Striggio, Alessandro, 235–6 Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 658 subjectivity, 11+n48, 111, 386, 390, 441, 448, 509, 527, 565 intersubjectivity, 2, 11, 621, 686–8 see also first-person narrative Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, 509n38 Sully, James, 391 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 261 Sutton, Emma, 563 Suzman, Janet, 643–4 ‘Sweet and Low’ see Tennyson, Alfred, The Princess swerve, 397 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 455–7, 458–9 A Century of Roundels, 455–6 ‘The Death of Richard Wagner’, 455–6 ‘In Memory of Barry Cornwall’, 456–7 Poems and Ballads, 456–7 Switten, Margaret, 39 Symbolism, 388, 553 Debussy and, 624 Symes, Colin, 657

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 723

723

Symons, Arthur, 588, 590 ‘The Opium Smoker’, 588 The Symbolist Movement in Poetry, 588–9 synaesthesia, 222–3, 231, 588, 590, 598 Tadolini, Eugenia, 410 Tagore, Rabindranath, 579 ‘Take, O Take those Lips Away’, 215, 216 Tarot, 638, 641 Taruskin, Richard, 39, 40 Tasso, Torquato Aminta, 405 Gerusalemme liberata, 261 Tate, Nahum, 252 Taylor, James, ‘Fire and Rain’, 667–8, 669 Tchaikovsky, Modest, 479 Tchaikovsky, Petr, 476–83 Forster and, 560 as writer/translator, 479–80 ‘Landyshi’, 479 ‘On tak menya lyubil’, 478 The Queen of Spades, 476 Symphony no. 4, 477 Symphony no. 5, 395–6, 402 Symphony no. 6 (‘Pathétique’), 560 ‘Zabytʹ tak skoro’, 478 technology, 686 Church and, 49 digital, 26, 674, 675 sound/communication, 495–6, 504–5, 655–63, 674, 675 teleology, history and, 684–6 temperaments (tuning systems), 148 Tempest, Kate, 616–17 Brand New Ancients, 616–17 Everybody Down, 617 10,000 Maniacs, 668, 669 Tennyson, Alfred, 401, 455, 459–60, 462–74, 588 ‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’, 457 The Princess, 460, 462–74 Tennyson (Sellwood), Emily, 463–4, 466–74 Tennyson, Hallam, 472 terminology, 63, 151, 340, 681–2 see also musical terminology text bilingual, 53–4 hybrid forms, 78–83 macaronic, 54 open, 16

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724 text (cont.) people as, 23 as sound, 97 studying through singing, 51 written to existing music, 56–9, 202–7 text painting see word painting text scores, 501 theatre see drama and opera Thibaut de Champagne, 115+n32 Thomas, Downing, 260n5, 269, 334n12 Thoreau, Henry David, 501 Tibaut, Roman de la poire, 79 Tieck, Ludwig, 499n11 time, 403, 524–30 drama and, 242 ‘in’ and ‘out of’, 456 music and, 25–6, 314, 355n14, 588 narrative, 403 polytextuality and, 108 theories of, 128 Tiplady, Jonty, 504 Tippett, Michael, 638–46 Byzantium, 645 A Child of our Time, 645 The Ice Break, 640–1 The Midsummer Marriage, 638–9, 640–6 Words for Music Perhaps, 645 Tiresias, 642 Tischler, Hans, 98–9 Tiutchev (Tyutchev), Fedor, 476–7, 478, 479, 480 Tolstoy, Aleksey Konstantinovich, 478, 479, 480 Tolstoy, Lev, 476, 632 Anna Karenina, 19 tonality, narrative and, 398, 403 topic theory, 16–23, 385 Torke, Michael, 684 Torri, Pietro, 291 total art work see Gesamtkunstwerk The Touch-Stone, 297+n8 Tovey, Donald Francis, 29 traditional music, 1, 547, 579, 584, 687 arrangements by classical composers, 547, 688 ballads and, 205–6, 207 in literature, 554, 563, 570, 574 tragedy pleasure and, 149 see also laments tragicomedy, 219–32

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 724

index translation, 406, 408, 411, 627n10 fiction as, 425–6 homophones and, 31–3 music to words, 459 poetry 409+n25, 54, 669 song as, 477 Treitler, Leo, 50, 69 Trésor amoureux, 79 Trilling, Lionel, 563 Trisagion, 70 Trois serors sor rive mer / PERLUSTRAVIT, 98 tropes (additions to liturgy), 65, 66, 71 Trower, Robin, ‘Bridge of Sighs’, 666 ‘Troy Town’, 205 truth emotional, 149 mimesis and, 149 morality and, 289, 290 music and, 31, 193, 399, 476 narrative and, 399 Tudway, Thomas, 312 tuning, 148 Turgenev, Ivan, 420, 476 Twining, Thomas, 273 Tyndall, John, 391 typography, 589, 592, 595–7 Tyutchev, Fedor, 476–7, 478, 479, 480 Uc de Saint Cirq, 114n28 Un crible plein / A Dieu, 101, 105 universe, as musical, 147, 161, 168, 553 universities, 161, 173, 506, 683 disciplines and specialisation, 39, 40–1 music in, 40 non-classical literature in, 40–1 unsexing, 408–10 Urlar, 583–4 Urtext, 40 Vaccai, Nicola, 407 Vaillant, Jean Dame doucement / Dous amis, 104, 106 Tres doulz amis / Ma dame / Cent mille fois, 102, 107 Valéry, Paul, 536, 537 ‘La Pythie’, 642, 643 Valli, Alida, 423n1 variants in attribution, 86, 87 of musical text, 50, 56 variation form, 224, 583–4, 687

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index Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 547 Vega, Lope de, El castigo sin venganza, 291–2, 294 Venés a nueches / Vechi l’ermite, 101, 105 Venice, 240 La Fenice, 423–4 liturgical tradition, 71n38 Verdi, Giuseppe, 408, 410, 426+n25, 437n4 Macbeth, 407, 408–11 Nabucco, 437n4 Otello, 408, 411 Il Trovatore, 423–4 Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 51, 174, 237 Aeneid, 237 verisimilitude, 215, 289, 290 see also truth Verlaine, Paul, 489, 553, 588 Lawrence and, 553 ‘Art poétique’, 173 Vernon, P. E., 184–5 verse and memorability, 51 see also poetry and verse forms verse anthems in masque, 286 in oratorio, 308 verse forms, 153–4, 175–6 ballad tunes and, 205 blank verse, 154–5, 180–1, 234 Pindarics, 249–50 proportional rhythm and, 153–4 versi piani, 409n25 versi sciolti, 234, 238, 240, 242, 243 Victorine stanzas, 54 Viardot, Pauline, 420–1 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste, 487 Villon, Francis, 594–5 Vincentino, Nicola, 162n2 violin, 31–2 Virgil see Vergil ‘virtuosophobia’, 320, 324, 327, 328 Visconti, Luchino, Senso (film), 389, 423–7 Vivaldi, Antonio, 268 Armide al campo d’Egitto, 405n1 L’Olimpiade, 260–1, 262–7, 268 Orlando, 405n1 voice (point of view), 111 voice (singing/speaking), 383, 572, 573 empathy and, 335

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 725

725

grain, 34, 35, 681 types see under singers Voss, Johann Heinrich, 364–5 Waddell, Nathan, 5n25 Wagner, Cosima, 442 Wagner, Richard, 426, 442, 483–91, 534–7, 553 and ‘absolute music’, 553 George Eliot and, 437–8, 440, 441, 442 T. S. Eliot and, 596, 639 Forster and, 560, 561–2, 563 French poets and, 388, 483–91, 588–9 libretti, 483–91, 602 music used in poem, 596 operas as lyric dramas, 484, 487 Pound and, 592, 594 Proust and, 534, 537–41 and Schubert, 442+n29 Shostakovich and, 403 Swinburne and, 455–6 Woolf and, 544, 547, 553 Das Liebesverbot, 407 Lohengrin, 483–4, 485–6, 487, 488 ‘On Conducting’, 442n29 Parsifal, 539n23 Ring Cycle, 401 Tannhäuser, 484–5 Tristan und Isolde, 128n25, 541, 639 waits, 195 Walkling, Andrew, 251 Wallace, Lew, Ben Hur, 401 Waller, Edmund, 185n14, 213 ‘To Mr Henry Lawes’, 209 Wallis, John, 163, 164, 165 Walpole, Robert, 296, 298 Walser, Robert, 499–500 Walton, William music for Christopher Columbus, 649, 651, 652 Façade, 591 ‘Wandering Jew’, 437 war, 609–14 Warburton, William, 269 Warlock, Peter, 555 Warner, Alan, Morvern Callar, 505 Watts, Carol, 617 Watts, John, 299 Webbe, Samuel, 376 ‘My pocket’s low and taxes high’, 376–8

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726

index

Weber, Carl Maria von, Der Freischütz, Wolf’s Glen scene, 369 Webern, Anton, 397 Webster, John, 220 Wedekind, Frank, 498 Weever, John, 227n18 Weir, Judith, 499n11 Welsh, Irvine, 505 Welton, Matthew, 619 ‘Dr Suss’, 619 Wentworth, Henrietta, 251n12 Wesker, Arnold, 644 ‘Whale Song’, 18 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 523 Nocturnes, 588 Whythorne, Thomas, 197–8 Wild, Jonathan, 297 Wilde, Oscar, 560 Wilder, Philip van, 378 Wilkins, George, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, 231n21 Willaert, Adrien, 151 Williams, Jane, 340, 342–4, 346, 347 Williams, William Carlos, 588 Wilson, John, 209 ‘Take, O Take those Lips Away’, 215, 216 Wilson, Thomas, 178 Winchester Troper, 66 wind instruments, associations and status, 196–201, 626 witchcraft, 407, 408–11, 642 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 398, 399, 686 WMA (International Association for Word and Music Studies), 3, 506n33 Wolf, Hugo, 356+n17 women see gender issues and ideology Woolf, Virginia, 449, 553, 656, 661 on Austen, 327n1 Between the Acts, 547, 659–60 Jacob’s Room, 545n10, 547 ‘The Mark on the Wall’, 548 Mrs Dalloway, 548 ‘Moments of Being: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”’, 544, 545–6, 547–9 Night and Day, 545 Orlando, 547 ‘A Simple Melody’, 546–7 ‘“Slater’s Pins”’, 544, 545–6, 547–9

6252_da Sousa Correa_Part V.indd 726

‘Street Music’, 549 ‘The String Quartet’, 545, 548 ‘Thunder at Wembley’, 547 The Voyage Out, 544, 545, 548 The Waves, 544, 547 word and music studies, 2–4, 496, 506–10, 515, 531, 681, 688–9 word painting, 149, 213, 236 word play, 31–4, 169–70, 224, 296, 298, 299 word setting, 209, 213–17, 261 as literary criticism, 151 strophic, 96 words effect of music on, 645 heard as music, 230 implied by music, 157, 206–7, 296, 298, 299 implying music, 53–4, 78–80, 502 and music, as commentary, 65, 97 music enabling, 601–7, 620 whether comprehensible in music, 66, 97–8, 108, 184–5 see also phonemes and terminology Wordsworth, William, 273 writing/literacy, 40–2, 43, 48–9, 405 attitudes to, 48–9 Carolingian reforms and, 68 oral culture and, 41–2, 55, 59, 64–5 see also musical notation Wyzewa, Teodor de, 489 Yeats, William Butler, 583, 588, 594 and music, 590, 593, 594 Pound and, 589–91, 593 Tippett and, 645 The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 591–2 Young, Edward, 364n8 ‘Young Jemmy’, 206 Zarlino, Gioseffo, 147, 149, 151 Zelter, Carl Friedrich, 349, 350+n4, 352–4+n11, 356 ‘Ruhe’/‘Über allen Gipfeln’, 352–4+n10 Zeno, Apostolo, 293 Zilliacus, Clas, 567 Zukofsky, Louis, 588

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