Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767-1867 9780748684625

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LITERATURE AND MUSIC IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1767–1867

EDINBURGH STUDIES IN TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES Series Editors: Colleen Glenney Boggs, Laura Doyle and Andrew Taylor Founding Editor: Susan Manning Modern global culture makes it clear that literary study can no longer operate on nationbased or exceptionalist models. In practice, American literatures have always been understood and defined in relation to the literatures of Europe and Asia. The books in this series work within a broad comparative framework to question place-based identities and monocular visions, in historical contexts from the earliest European settlements to contemporary affairs, and across all literary genres. They explore the multiple ways in which ideas, texts, objects and bodies travel across spatial and temporal borders, generating powerful forms of contrast and affinity. The Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures series fosters new paradigms of exchange, circulation and transformation for transatlantic literary studies, expanding the critical and theoretical work of this rapidly developing field. Titles in the series include: Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois, Daniel G. Williams Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, Michèle Mendelssohn American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation, Daniel Katz The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag, Ellen Crowell Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells, Frank Christianson Transatlantic Women’s Literature, Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective, Günter Leypoldt Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money, Erik Simpson Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826: Rewriting Conquest, Rebecca Cole Heinowitz Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion, Paul Giles South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970–2010, Ruth Maxey Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World, Leslie Elizabeth Eckel Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism, Eric B. White Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages, Jeffrey Einboden Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson and Nature, Samantha C. Harvey Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767–1867, Catherine Jones Forthcoming Titles: Emily Dickinson and her British Contemporaries: Victorian Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America, Páraic Finnerty Visit the Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures web site at www.​euppublishing.​com/​series/​estl

LITERATURE AND MUSIC IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1767–1867 ◆ ◆ ◆

CATHERINE JONES

In memory of Susan Manning (1953–2013)

© Catherine Jones, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Baskerville MT by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8461 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8462 5 (webready PDF) The right of Catherine Jones to be identified as 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). Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1. Magic Numbers and Persuasive Sound 2. Cosmopolitanism and the Nation 3. The Life in Music 4. Chants Democratic and Native American 5. The Musical Sublime

1 33 64 97 129 162

Notes 196 Index 269

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure I.1 William Billings, The New-England Psalm-Singer (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1770), engraved frontispiece by Paul Revere. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society. 15 Figure I.2 William Billings, The New-England Psalm-Singer (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1770), title page. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society. 16 Figure 1.1 Thomas Colley, ‘Peace porridge all hot, The best to be got’ ([London]: Richardson, 1783). © Trustees of the British Museum. 54 Figure 1.2 Thomas Colley, ‘A political concert; the vocal parts by 1. Miss America, 2. Franklin, 3. F--x, 4. Kepp--ll, 5. Mrs. Britania, 6. Shelb--n, 7. Dun--i--g, 8. Benidick Rattle Snake’ ([London]: Richardson, 1783). Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-10082. 55 Figure 2.1 Barham Livius, The Freyschütz; Or, The Wild Huntsman of Bohemia. A Romantic Opera, in Three Acts, Altered from the German by Barham Livius [. . .] First performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, Thursday, October 14, 1824 (London: Miller, 1824). © The British Library Board. 72 Figure 2.2 Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia: Playbill for Der Freischütz/Robin des bois – presented by the French Opera Company of the New Orleans Theatre, 10 October 1828. Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection, Acc. No. 87-877-RL. 88 Figure 3.1 [Anton Schindler], The Life of Beethoven, ed. Ignace Moscheles, 2 vols (London: Colburn, 1841), 1: frontispiece

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portrait, engraved after the painting by Joseph Karl Stieler of 1819–20. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland. 108 Figure 3.2 Charles Ives, Second Pianoforte Sonata. ‘Concord, Mass., 1840–60’ (Redding: Ives, 1920), ‘II. Hawthorne’, p. 21. © The British Library Board. 127 Figure 4.1 Broadside ballad, ‘The Free Kirk and her Boy Tammy’ (Edinburgh: Sanderson, 1846?). Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland. 141 Figure 4.2 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860–1), title page. © The British Library Board. 151 Figure 5.1 John Sebastian Bach, Passion Music, (according to the Gospel of St. Matthew) [. . .] The English Translation and Adaptation by John S. Dwight (Boston: Ditson, [1869]), p. 193. Reproduced by permission of the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library of the Harvard College Library. 179 Figure 5.2 James M. Trotter, Music and Some Highly Musical People (Boston: Lee and Shepard; New York: Dillingham, 1878), Appendix, p. 127, ‘Mass for Three Voices. Gloria’ by Samuel Snaër. Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection, Acc. No. 2005.0174. 193

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

But for the inspiration and friendship of Susan Manning this book may never have materialised. Over many years I benefited from her expertise, initially as a PhD student working under her supervision in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, and later as a colleague when we worked in our respective universities in Scotland. Sadly, this book now has to be dedicated to her memory. I am particularly grateful to Andy Taylor for reading and commenting on the complete manuscript; to the editorial and production staff at Edinburgh University Press, especially Jackie Jones, James Dale, Rebecca Mackenzie and Dhara Patel; to my copy-editor, Nicola Wood; and to the Press’s anonymous readers. John Cairns, David Duff, Tony La Vopa, Alexandra Lewis and Helen Lynch gave generous and helpful advice on draft chapters, while Ian Duncan shared opera enthusiasms from the project’s beginnings. For lively exchanges and convivial gatherings during the research and writing of the book, I also thank Betta Adams, Jim Adams, Mark Godfrey and Donald Jardine. My family encouraged my early interest in literature and music and have supported me throughout. I am indebted to the University of Aberdeen, the British Academy and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for giving financial support to enable me to conduct my research in many British and North American libraries. The Carnegie Trust also generously awarded me a grant towards the cost of the book’s illustrations. I have been aided significantly by staff in, and the resources of, Aberdeen University Library, the American Philosophical Society Library, the Bodleian Library, the Boston Public Library, the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Edinburgh University Library, Harvard College Library, the Library

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Company of Philadelphia, the National Library of Scotland, the New York Public Library, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, the University of Virginia Library and the Williams Research Center of The Historic New Orleans Collection. I warmly acknowledge, too, the advice, encouragement and hospitality I received from Georgia Chadwick, John Lovett and Vernon Palmer during my visit to the Crescent City in 2012; in the same generous spirit, Jack Belsom shared his incomparable knowledge of opera in New Orleans. The University of Aberdeen gave vital periods of study leave. Finally, I thank my Head of School, Cairns Craig, for facilitating the project’s completion. Quotations from the poems of Emily Dickinson are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Quotations from the letters of Emily Dickinson are reprinted by permission of the publishers from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1958, 1986, The President and Fellows of Harvard College; 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson; 1960 by Mary L. Hampson. Part of Chapter 1 was published as a chapter in Enlightenment and Emancipation, ed. Susan Manning and Peter France (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006). Earlier versions of parts of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared in Translation and Literature (20: 1 [March 2011], 29–47) and Symbiosis (14: 1 [April 2010], 103–22).

INTRODUCTION

‘[T]he Arts delight to travel Westward’1 In 1815 Thomas Jefferson sold his personal library of more than 6,000 volumes to the American government in order to ‘recommence’ the collection of the Library of Congress, the holdings of which had been burned by British forces during their occupation of Washington, DC, the previous year.2 Thirteen books about music are known or believed to have been in Jefferson’s library when it came to Congress, several of which develop analogies between rhetoric and music – a topic of particular interest to Jefferson as politician and statesman, as well as musician and violinist.3 Amongst these is a copy annotated in Jefferson’s own hand of the Italian violinist-composer Francesco Geminiani’s The Art of Playing on the Violin (1750), one of the most influential violin manuals to appear in the eighteenth century.4 Geminiani combined remarks of a purely technical nature with broader commentary on music in general and on music performance. ‘The Intention of Musick,’ he argues, ‘is not only to please the Ear, but to express Sentiments, strike the Imagination, affect the Mind, and command the Passions.’ Accordingly, the art of playing the violin consists ‘in giving that Instrument a Tone that shall in a Manner rival the most perfect human Voice; and in executing every Piece with Exactness, Propriety, and Delicacy of Expression according to the true Intention of Musick’. An early exponent of the Italian style of violin playing in England (where he lived for most of the first half of the eighteenth century), Geminiani opposed the French tendency towards imitation in its most descriptive sense, inveighing against ‘imitating the Cock, Cuckoo, Owl, and other Birds; or the Drum,

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French Horn, Tromba-Marina, and the like’. But imitation of speech and oratory is implied when he states with respect to piano (soft) and forte (loud): ‘as all good Musick should be composed in Imitation of a Discourse, these two Ornaments are designed to produce the same Effects that an Orator does by raising and falling his Voice’.5 At the bottom of page 8 of the treatise, Jefferson quoted almost verbatim the British music historian Charles Burney’s footnoted comment, in The Present State of Music in France and Italy: Or, The Journal of a Tour through Those Countries, Undertaken to Collect Materials for a General History of Music (1771), on the ‘close shake’, a subject addressed by Geminiani at the top of page 8. The close shake is a method of vibrato whereby ‘one finger is pressed firmly on the fret and a second finger makes a rapid beating or shaking very close to the pressed-down first finger (hence the name “close shake”)’.6 Jefferson wrote: ‘[T]he Beat upon the unison, octave, or any consonant sound to a note on the violin, which so well supplies the place of the old Close-shake, if not wholly unknown, is at least neglected by all the violin performers I heard on the continent, tho’ so commonly and successfully practised in England by those of the Giardini school. Burney’s journ. Nov. 16, 1770.’7 Where Geminiani was of the opinion that the close shake is so effective that ‘it should be made use of as often as possible’, and developed his technical discussion of the subject into a striking commentary on the role of emotional expression,8 Burney suggested that the close shake was out of fashion by terming it ‘old’.9 He also avoided mentioning Geminiani’s influence in the area of violin playing, citing Felice Giardini, an Italian violinist and composer of French descent, whom Burney would later call the ‘greatest performer in Europe’.10 The annotation is revealing, in the words of Sandor Salgo, ‘because it demonstrates that Jefferson was interested in the technical problems of the vibrato, but at a level far above the standards of a beginner or amateur violinist’.11 More generally, the annotated treatise shows the transatlantic movement of musical ideas in the eighteenth century, based in an international book trade, which was slanted in a westward direction, from centre – especially London – to periphery.12 Anglophone lines of transatlantic circulation and exchange have been the focus of much recent work in the newly developed field of transatlantic literary studies.13 In the introduction to the collection of essays, Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830 (2012), Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning argue that, considered through the lens of literature, ‘the political independence of the American colonies was not so much a severing of ties as the renegotiation of a relationship. However strident their national feelings, Anglophone writers continued to be concerned

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with transatlantic issues, just as they continued to inhabit a changing, but ever-powerful matrix of continuity and dissonance’.14 The paradoxical relationships between English and American literature are the subject of Paul Giles’s study Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (2003). Giles sought to highlight some of the contortions and reversals that emerge within both national traditions when they are brought into dialogue with each other. William Byrd’s Virginia, Timothy Dwight’s Connecticut and Washington Irving’s New York, he suggests, ‘all refract the world of old England in a different manner, but in each case we see at work an implicit double perspective which serves to formulate the indigenous culture comparatively, in terms of what it is not’.15 Looking beyond the British-American nexus to encompass continental Europe and Africa, Colleen Glenney Boggs, in Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773–1892 (2007), defines the transatlantic as a methodology that focuses on ‘the multilingual dimensions of texts that show us how international national American literature has always been’. ‘Far from fetishizing an isolated literary “originality,” ’ she claims, ‘[American writers] imagined the mark and measure of literary innovation to lie in practices of translation.’16 Such work represents and promotes the conceptualisation of American literature within a transatlantic framework. This book seeks to contribute to the development of new paradigms of exchange, circulation and transformation for transatlantic literary studies, and to expand the critical and theoretical work of the field, by addressing the interaction of literature and music in the Atlantic world in the age of Enlightenment and Romanticism. It focuses on the relationship of rhetoric and music in the era’s intellectual discourses, texts and performance cultures. Adopting a comparative perspective that includes continental Europe as well as the countries and continents on both shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the book spans the period from the implementation of the Townshend Acts in Great Britain’s North American colonies in 1767, which provoked colonial anger and culminated in the Declaration of Independence (1776), to the American Reconstruction Act, in the wake of the American Civil War, and the confederation of the colonies of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia into the Dominion of Canada, in 1867.

Burney, Jefferson and Freneau Burney had undertaken his tour of France and Italy in order to acquire material for what would become his four-volume A General History of Music,

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From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (1776–89). Shortly before setting out from London for the Continent in early June 1770, he wrote to William Mason on 27 May of his disillusion with earlier writings on the origins of music: The prospect widens as I advance. ’Tis a Chaos to which God knows whether I shall have Life, leisure, or abilities to give order. I find it connected with Religion, Philosophy, History, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, public Exhibitions & private life. It is, like Gold, to be found, though in but small portions, even in lead-ore, & in the Coal Mine; which are equivalent to heavy Authors, & the rust & rubbish of antiquity.17

By engaging in research in the leading cities of France and Italy, Burney hoped ‘to allay [his] thirst of knowledge at the pure source’.18 According to Roger Lonsdale, the particular attraction of Italy lay not only in the musical collections of its great libraries, but in the fact that Burney believed it to be the home of the most important contemporary music; and since he believed unlike the other arts, the music of antiquity could in no sense be described as ‘classical’ and that music had only recently approached perfection, modern music was in many ways the most important subject of his historical survey.19

Burney’s published account of this tour established him as one of music history’s keenest observers and most entertaining commentators.20 On 20 August 1771 Christoph Daniel Ebeling, a writer and teacher at the Hamburg Commercial Academy, who was engaged in translating The Present State of Music in France and Italy into German, issued Burney with an invitation to make a similar tour through German-speaking central Europe.21 Motivated by his desire to know more about the music in these countries, Burney set out on a tour of the Low Countries, Germany and Austria in 1772. Less than a year later he published The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces: Or, The Journal of a Tour through those Countries, Undertaken to Collect Materials for a General History of Music (1773). This second travelogue made for a natural sequel to the first, for, as Burney argued, where Italy had ‘carried vocal music to a perfection unknown in any other country, much of the present excellence of instrumental is certainly owing to the natives of Germany’.22 However, while the reception of the work in Britain was mainly positive, Burney’s many unfavourable observations on German taste, manners and travelling conditions aroused protest. What especially infuriated Ebeling was the judgement made in the

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text on German lack of genius: Burney had unwisely quoted with approval a remark made by the British Minister Plenipotentiary in Munich, Louis Devisme, in a letter to Burney of 20 June 1773, that ‘if innate Genius exist, Germany is certainly not the seat of it; but it is that of perseverance and application’.23 Nevertheless, the way Burney mixed descriptions, observations and miscellaneous matter with his account of ‘the State in which [he] found practical Music in most cities [he] visited’, gained him, as he later recalled, many more readers than ‘mere students and lovers of music’, and secured his admission to the polite literary coteries of London.24 Burney’s two musical travelogues are listed in the earliest surviving catalogue of Jefferson’s personal library – the so-called ‘1783’ manuscript – as titles that he owned, and Burney’s A General History of Music as a title that he hoped to obtain.25 The catalogue also reveals that Jefferson possessed a broad collection of European vocal and instrumental music, including several works by Italian composers, such as Antonio Vivaldi, Arcangelo Corelli and Carlo Antonio Campioni.26 Jefferson participated as performer and listener in amateur musical circles in colonial and revolutionary Virginia.27 Yet writing from Williamsburg, in the midst of the American Revolution, to Giovanni Fabbroni, a young Florentine scholar, on 8 June 1778, Jefferson described the New World as musically impoverished. ‘If there is a gratification which I envy any people in this world,’ he declared, ‘it is to your country its music. This is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.’28 Burney’s travelogues would almost certainly have informed Jefferson’s encounter with the music of continental Europe, when he left America for Paris in 1784. Like Jefferson, Burney was an admirer of the music of Italy; indeed, with regard to the Querelle des Bouffons (The War of the Buffoons), the pamphlet war that had raged in Paris in the 1750s over the relative merits of French and Italian opera, Burney was vehemently pro-Italian.29 Jefferson was invited by Congress in May 1784 to travel to Paris to become one of three negotiators (with American Ministers Plenipotentiary Benjamin Franklin and John Adams) of commercial treaties with European states. When Franklin returned to America in 1785, Jefferson’s post changed to that of First Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States in Paris.30 On 30 September 1785 Jefferson wrote to Charles Bellini (an Italian émigré living in Virginia, who had been appointed to the first chair of modern languages at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg): Behold me at length on the vaunted scene of Europe! [. . .] Were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture, sculpture, painting, music, I

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Literature and Music in the Atlantic World should want words. It is in these arts they shine. The last of them particularly is an enjoyment, the deprivation of which with us cannot be calculated. I am almost ready to say it is the only thing which from my heart I envy them, and which, in spight [sic] of all the authority of the decalogue I do covet.31

Where Burney disliked French music and musical taste, and was less concerned to inquire into the present state of music in Paris than to collect fresh evidence at concerts and the Opéra to confirm his prejudice, Jefferson was an enthusiastic concert- and opera-goer the entire time he was in the French capital from 1784 to 1789.32 He was equally active in music in his travels to other countries: while visiting his diplomatic colleague, John Adams, in London, for example, he appears to have bought a seat for Antonio Salieri’s opera buffa, La Scuola de’ Gelosi (The School of Jealousy) (1778), at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, London; he also attended at least one concert.33 Jefferson briefly met Burney in the spring of 1786, during his visit to London.34 On his return to Paris, he sought Burney’s advice over the purchase of a harpsichord for his daughter Martha (Patsy).35 In addition, he exchanged information with Burney on experiments that he or others had carried out to improve musical instruments. On 12 February 1787, for example, he informed Burney about the attempts of ‘a friend of [his] in America’, Francis Hopkinson, to add a keyboard to the armonica (or glass harmonica), an instrument that had been developed by Benjamin Franklin from the musical glasses. ‘However imperfect this instrument is for the general mass of musical compositions,’ Jefferson concluded, ‘yet for those of a certain character it is delicious.’36 The progress of the fine arts in America is a central theme of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), which he drafted before travelling to Europe as a direct response to a questionnaire circulated during the summer of 1780 to members of the Continental Congress by François Marbois, the secretary of the French legation at Philadelphia.37 Shortly after arriving in Paris, Jefferson engaged the printer Philippe-Denis Pierres to produce a small English-language edition of the work comprising 200 copies. The Paris edition was completed on 10 May 1785, and Jefferson distributed the copies to a select list of European and American friends. An authorised French-language edition appeared in early 1787, followed by a second authorised English-language edition, published in London.38 Historians of the Atlantic world have shown how, over the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several Atlantic worlds, each with distinctive features but also having much in common, were fashioned.39 In a sequence of essays, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World

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c. 1450–c.1850 (2012), edited by Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, distinguishes between the four major European Atlantic empires: ‘the Spanish Atlantic’, ‘the Portuguese Atlantic’, ‘the British Atlantic’ and ‘the French Atlantic’.40 Later contributors make the case that each of these Atlantic worlds, which had achieved a degree of self-sufficiency, was gradually absorbed into a larger unit of interdependency until a single functioning Atlantic world, shaped and continuously influenced to varying degrees by European, African and American peoples, flourished through much of the eighteenth century.41 Indeed, as Canny and Phillips argue, ‘the interconnectedness of this world explains why challenge and collapse in any given part usually led to significant disruption of neighbouring areas, if not of the entire system’.42 Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia gives insight into what Emma Rothschild describes as ‘the inner experiences of the Atlantic world’.43 It also engages with and extends to the New World the discourse on genius that had informed Burney’s musical travels. Notes on the State of Virginia is, in part, a rebuttal of the degenerationist theories of Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, director of the Jardin du Roi in Paris and author of the massive thirty-six-volume Histoire Naturelle: Générale et Particulière (Natural History: General and Particular) (1749–88).44 Buffon had argued that the soil and climate of the New World were inhospitable to growth and that all animal and plant life, including humans, would therefore degenerate in America. This argument was developed and furthered by the writings of his fellow philosophes, such as the abbés Guillaume Thomas François Raynal and Cornelius de Pauw.45 Jefferson directly attacked Buffon’s theory of American degeneracy in Query VI of the Notes (‘A Notice of the Mines and Other Subterraneous Riches; Its Trees, Plants, Fruits, &c’), where he not only refuted Buffon’s claim that animals are small in the New World by drawing up descriptive statistics to the contrary, but also defended Native Americans from the aspersions of Buffon by presenting the already well-known speech of Logan, a Mingo chief, on the loss of his family in an attack by a white settler, as an example of their eminence in oratory. ‘I may challenge,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage, superior to the speech of Logan.’46 Jefferson also poured scorn on Raynal’s application of Buffon’s theory from ‘nature’s productions on this side of the Atlantic’ to ‘the race of whites, transplanted from Europe’: ‘On doit etre etonné ([Raynal] says) que l’Amerique n’ait pas encore produit un bon poëte, unhabile mathematicien, un homme de genie dans un seul art, ou une seule science.’47 Jefferson insisted that Raynal’s sweeping claim about the lack of genius of transplanted Europeans was ‘as unjust as it is unkind;

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and that, of the geniuses which adorn the present age, America contributes its full share’. Figures such as George Washington, Franklin and David Rittenhouse, he argued, were ‘hopeful proofs of [American] genius’, at the same time as it seemed that ‘the sun of [Great Britain’s] glory [wa]s fast descending to the horizon’.48 In Query XIV (‘The Administration of Justice and Description of the Laws’), Jefferson compared Native American and African American achievement and potential in the fine arts: The Indians [. . .] will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.49

Jefferson’s views on the racial inferiority of African Americans can be traced both to his experience as a slave owner and to his reading on race and slavery.50 Jefferson claimed that circumstances alone accounted for the seeming differences between whites and Native Americans: if the circumstances of Native American life changed, then Native Americans could achieve equality with European Americans, a status which, he argued, Africans could never achieve.51 Jefferson clearly recognised African musical ability, referring not only to the slaves’ accuracy of pitch and time, but also to their singing of ‘catches’, a term used in British-American musical discourse to refer to a type of round originally composed for three or four male voices, exceptionally for as many as eight or ten; catches were popular in the eighteenth century amongst informally and formally constituted singing groups in Britain, Ireland and North America.52 Jefferson also had an interest in African musical traditions: he included a footnote in Query XIV – in the style of the musical travelogues of Burney, or of the narratives of encounter with primitive peoples of Captain James Cook and his companions on their voyages to the Pacific (1768–71, 1772–5 and 1776–80) – on ‘the Banjar’, defined as the ‘instrument proper to [the blacks] [. . .] which they brought [to America] from Africa, and which is the original of the guitar,

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its chords being precisely the four lower chords of the guitar’.53 However, having expressed doubts as to the ability of African Americans to compose ‘a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony’, Jefferson presented ‘as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances’, were ‘inferior to whites in the endowments both of body and mind’.54 This ‘suspicion’ developed an opinion put forward by David Hume in an infamous footnote on Africans (added in 1754 to his essay ‘Of National Characters’ [1748]). ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kind),’ Hume wrote, ‘to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No generous manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences.’55 Jefferson, however, based his claim of supposed African inferiority on empirical observation and comparison with Europeans.56 While Jefferson denounced slavery, he contended that Africans – unlike Native Americans – were incapable of the intellectual development necessary to participate in civil society, and proposed the relocation of emancipated blacks apart from whites, and beyond the limits of the American colonies, now the United States of America.57 Jefferson’s positions on race provoked controversy. David Ramsay, a Charleston physician and historian of the American Revolution, wrote to Jefferson from New York on 3 May 1786 on reading Notes of the State of Virginia: ‘I admire your generous indignation at slavery; but think you have depressed the negroes too low.’58 Benjamin Banneker, an African-American mathematician, surveyor, astronomer and publisher of a popular almanac, challenged directly Jefferson’s ‘suspicion’ of black intellectual inferiority. He argued in a letter to Jefferson of 19 August 1791 that ‘however variable we may be in Society or religion, however diversified in Situation or colour, we are all of the Same Family, and Stand in the Same relation to him [God]’.59 At Banneker’s suggestion, and with the strong agreement and support of several leading Quaker abolitionists, the exchange of letters between Banneker and Jefferson was published in 1792 in a variety of forms for ‘the express purpose of advancing the antislavery cause by demonstrating that black failure to match the intellectual achievements of whites was the result of slavery rather than nature’.60 In the second edition (1810) of his Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787), Samuel Stanhope Smith, seventh president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), insisted that, given the ‘abject servitude of the negro in America’, it was ‘unfair [of Jefferson] to compare the feeble efforts of the mind which we

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sometimes behold under slavish depression, with the noble ardour [of the Native American] which is often kindled even in the wild freedom of the American forest’.61 As secretary of state, vice-president and president of the United States, Jefferson pursued an Indian policy that had two main ends: ‘First, Jefferson wanted to guarantee the security of the United States and so sought to bind Indian nations to the United States through treaties [. . .] Secondly, Jefferson used the networks created by the treaties to further the program of gradual “civilization”.’62 The Revolutionary poet Philip Freneau, founder of a republican political journal, The National Gazette, where he satirised Jefferson’s opponents in the Hamiltonian Federalist party (provoking George Washington to call him ‘that rascal Freneau’),63 reflected critically upon Jefferson’s vision of Native American assimilation and incorporation, and upon the power of music to move and to control, in his poem ‘The Musical Savage’, which was first published in his A Collection of Poems on American Affairs and a Variety of Other Subjects Chiefly Moral and Political (1815). The historical setting of ‘The Musical Savage’ is the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–6, an enterprise launched by Jefferson who was fascinated by the West, and motivated by ideas of exploration and of expansion of the national boundaries of United States. One of the members of the expedition, Pierre Cruzatte, who was of French and Omaha Indian descent, brought his violin with him; this circumstance forms the startingpoint of Freneau’s poem.64 ‘The Musical Savage’ narrates in the form of a dramatic monologue the ecstatic emotions experienced by a Missouri Indian on hearing the music of a violin: ‘A god resides within that shell – Who taught it how to sing so well? And such a pleasing story tell?65

Freneau highlights the Native American’s susceptibility to the tone of the violin: ‘A wild delusion turns my brain, All pleasure now, and now all pain. I live, I die, I live again! ‘O stranger! make me not so glad – O christian! make me not so sad: You may be kill’d, if I go mad.’66

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The poem recalls and revises John Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast; Or The Power of Musique. An Ode, in Honour of St. Cecilia’s Day’ (1697), which describes the domination of the listener (Alexander, the Macedonian king) by the musician (Timotheus). Alexander is celebrating at Persepolis the defeat of the Persian King Darius, when Timotheus is called to perform. Timotheus ranges disinterestedly through a set of specific emotions that compel Alexander into a set of specific actions: The trembling Notes ascend the Sky,          And Heav’nly Joys inspire [.  .  .] The Master saw the Madness rise; His glowing Cheeks, his ardent Eyes; And while He Heav’n and Earth defy’d Chang’d his hand, and check’d his Pride.   He chose a Mournful Muse   Soft Pity to infuse: [. . .] Now strike the Golden Lyre again: A lowder yet, and yet a lowder Strain.67

‘The force of Timotheus’s music,’ as Kevin Barry argues, ‘and (in a slightly different sense) of Dryden’s ode is the gathering of detail into climactic strokes of Joy, Pity, Love and Revenge. Saint Cecilia’s music is its spiritual equivalent: in terms of specific power hers is equal to his.’68 Freneau was an admirer of Dryden’s poetry;69 he may also have known George Frideric Handel’s setting of ‘Alexander’s Feast’, which had premiered in London at Covent Garden on 19 February 1736 to immediate acclaim.70 Like Dryden, Freneau celebrates the directive force and specific range of music. But the conclusion of ‘The Musical Savage’ – the Native American’s vision of his being moved to murder the violinist – suggests both the power and the limits of the magic exercised by European or European-American music. In his account of the senses in the Atlantic world, and of how novel sensations of pleasure and pain might have changed peoples, David S. Shields describes how the songs of certain African and American peoples rivalled the music brought by European adventurers to the New World in complexity and communicative piquancy. Pointing to the development from the encounter of Europeans and indigenous peoples of hybrid forms of music (such as gospel, ragtime and jazz in the southern region of North America), he characterises the ear as ‘the organ that enabled newer and stranger forms of “we” ’. But he also suggests that the opening of the Atlantic world may have brought to the attention of many peoples the possibility that the

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complex ways the senses worked and the sensorium held together might be different for different peoples: ‘Perhaps there was no unitary sensus communis, but rather multiple communities of sense that did not map neatly upon each other, yet coincided sufficiently to permit trade and the sharing of pleasure and pain.’71 This book explores how the experience of music in a range of settings (public and private) influenced self-understandings of Western and non-Western peoples of the Atlantic world, with particular attention to the development of concepts of belonging and non-belonging in the nationalising milieu of the nineteenth century.

The Organisation of Musical Knowledge When Jefferson began to catalogue his library sometime before 1783 he chose a classification scheme that aimed at encompassing all knowledge and that was based on the faculties of the mind, a scheme set forth by Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and promulgated in the eighteenth century by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert in the first volume of the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopaedia or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts), which was published under the direction of Denis Diderot and d’Alembert in seventeen volumes of articles and eleven volumes of plates between 1751 and 1772.72 Jefferson’s system was his own adaptation, but he followed Bacon and d’Alembert in embracing a correspondence between the faculties of memory, reason and imagination and the three principal categories of human knowledge: history, philosophy (moral and mathematical) and fine arts.73 Like Diderot and d’Alembert, Jefferson classified music as a fine art (he subdivided the ‘fine arts’ into gardening, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, oratory and criticism).74 However, some of the works of music theory listed under the principal fine arts category in the 1783 catalogue demonstrate the continuing connection of music and mathematics, such as William Jackson’s A Scheme Demonstrating the Perfection and Harmony of Sounds (1726) and John Holden’s An Essay Towards a Rational System of Music (1770).75 In the Medieval and Renaissance periods, music was classified as a mathematical discipline – typically as part of the quadrivium with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy (by analogy the trivium denoted the verbal disciplines of grammar, rhetoric and logic).76 However, the emergence in the Renaissance of a new literature on musical poetics, in which the effects of music were grounded in rhetorical rather than mathematical principles, saw a movement away from the classification of music as a mathematical discipline towards its association with the verbal disciplines.77 ‘That Diderot unhesitatingly located music among the fine arts in his Encyclopédie,’

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observes Penelope Gouk, ‘shows just how much Western sensibilities had altered in the two centuries since [Gioseffo] Zarlino [. . .] identified music as a mathematical science in his Institutioni harmoniche (1558).’78 The teaching of music as a part of the quadrivium in the medieval university was derived from Boethius, who, in his De institutione musica (Fundamentals of Music) (sixth century CE), codified music in ascending order of importance as musica instrumentalis (practical music, that is, singing and instrumental performance), musica humana (the harmony of the human body and soul) and musica mundane (encompassing the motion of the heavenly bodies and the cycle of the seasons).79 Underpinning this hierarchical division was the fundamental belief derived from Pythagoras and Plato ‘that cosmic music embodies “true” music – or rather harmony – while instrumental music merely offers an imperfect approximation of these divine and unchanging proportions’.80 Boethius’s text was of little relevance to most practising musicians by the sixteenth century, but his Pythagorean conception of music remained of vital interest to university scholars, mathematicians, philosophers, dramatists and poets of the early modern period.81 During the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, experimental acoustics began to replace the Pythagorean number mysticism upon which the older music theory had been founded.82 Yet significant explanatory force could still be derived from unifying frameworks of cosmic harmony. The core principles of musica humana, for example, were translated into the language of experimental philosophy in the work of three figures who revolutionised medical understandings of the body: ‘William Harvey, René Descartes, and Thomas Willis all used musical analogies for conceptualizing the hidden workings of the body and its relationship to the soul.’83 Speculative music theory also persisted within the newly defined field of experimental physics, notably in the work of Isaac Newton and his contemporaries in the Royal Society: ‘musical sympathy especially came to serve as a model for other hidden forces in nature, most notably gravity and magnetism’.84 In the eighteenth century, medical theorists tried to apply their experimental knowledge of hydraulics and chemistry to the body more systematically, at the same time as invoking the principles of Newtonian dynamics.85 However, while the language of mechanics was fashionable in Enlightenment discourse on the body, the neo-Platonic concepts of universal harmony and the microcosm–macrocosm analogy did not entirely disappear. Their continuing importance is shown, for example, in the vitalist theories of the Scottish physician George Cheyne, who asserted in his An Essay of Health and Long Life (1724) that the soul resides in the brain, ‘where all the Nervous Fibres terminate inwardly, like a Musician by a well-tuned

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Instrument’. On the basis of this analogy, he suggests that if the organ of the human body is in tune, its ‘music’ will be distinct and harmonious, but if it is ‘spoiled’ or ‘broken’, it will not yield ‘true Harmony’.86 The Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer, inventor of ‘animal magnetism’ or ‘mesmerism’, also identified harmony with health; indeed, music was part of Mesmer’s system of healing, which enjoyed great success in the salons of pre-revolutionary Paris.87 However, a royal commission appointed in April 1784 to investigate Mesmer’s findings that included Franklin amongst its members found no evidence to support animal magnetism.88 On 13 January 1785 Jefferson reported to Hopkinson: ‘The madness of animal magnetism is absolutely ceased [. . .] It has been brought on the stage, ridiculed in the public papers, and is an imputation of so grave a nature as would bear an action at law in America.’89 Yet the mesmerist movement would continue to shape popular attitudes and interests on both sides of the Atlantic well into the nineteenth century. Enlightenment acoustic theory and the Pythagorean system of interval calculation were disseminated in colonial New England through William Billings’s The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770), which included an ‘Essay on the Nature and Properties of Sound’. Billings disclaimed credit for it himself, but wrote that the author’s modesty forbade him to reveal his identity; later authority has assigned it to the Harvard-educated physician Charles Stockbridge.90 The essay gives an account of the propagation of sound waves; an anatomical description of the ear and how it receives sounds and transmits them to the mind; and an account of musical intervals and consonance and dissonance in Pythagorean terms. It concludes with an account of how victims of sometimes-fatal tarantula bites are able to dance off the effects to musical accompaniment.91 David P. McKay and Richard Crawford suggest that it ‘would be difficult to find another single publication in the history of American music – in the history of western music for that matter – whose priority in its tradition is more conspicuous than that of Billings’s collection’.92 The New-England Psalm-Singer was Billings’s first published collection of his music; it was also the first tune book devoted solely to compositions by a single American composer.93 The striking engraved frontispiece, by Paul Revere, shows a company of men singing a canon around a table, perhaps in a parlour or tavern (Figure I.1). As Elizabeth B. Crist notes, the engraving is valuable as both iconology – an ideological image of musical performance – and iconography, revealing the actual practice of music making: Tunes were certainly sung in social as well as religious settings, but singing schools and congregations included women as well as men [. . .] [A] group

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Figure I.1  William Billings, The New-England Psalm-Singer (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1770), engraved frontispiece by Paul Revere. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

of men alone could not perform all of the music in the tunebook. Therefore the fraternity does not necessarily portray a particular performance setting but rather an abstract masculine community – perhaps even a political gathering, should the setting be perceived as a tavern [. . .] As the author of the collection’s contents, Billings is implicitly included in this homosocial, musical fraternity.94

Surrounding the scene is circular musical notation with notes, rests, a continuous staff and the text ‘Wake ev’-ry Breath & ev’-ry String. To bless the great Redeemer King, His Name thro ev’-r Chime ador’d. Let Joy & Gra-ti-tude, and Love, Thro’ all the Notes of Mu-sic rove; And Je-sus found on ev-ry Chord’. In script beneath the image is the text ‘A Canon of 6 in One with a Ground, the Word by ye Rev. Dr Byles: Set to Music by M. Billings’. At the bottom are the words ‘MB the Ground Bass to be continually Sung by 3 or 4 deep Voices with the 6 other parts’.95 The idea of a picture encircled by a canon notated on a musical staff was not original with Revere, but was almost certainly derived from the English psalmodist William Tans’ur’s Royal Melody Complete (1755), which uses that design, but with a picture very different from The New-England Psalm-Singer

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(Tans’ur’s frontispiece shows a man working in a book-lined study, apparently noting down music in a manuscript music book).96 Nevertheless, the title page of Billings’s tunebook advertises the work’s newness (‘Never before Published’) and American origins (‘Composed by WILLIAM BILLINGS, / A Native of Boston, in New-England’) (Figure I.2).97 The increasingly strained relationship between Britain and New England is also hinted at in the third scriptural quotation on the title page (a paraphrase of Tate and Brady’s versification of Psalm 135): ‘O praise the Lord with one consent, and in this grand design, / Let Britain and the Colonies, unanimously join.’98 The ‘local topical twist’ of this quotation is a harbinger of the licences Billings was to take in the future with the biblical texts he set to music.99 The instructional part of Billings’s introduction to The New-England Psalm-Singer includes statements that have been interpreted as a manifesto for American artistic independence.100 ‘Perhaps it may be expected by some,’ he wrote, that I should say something concerning Rules for Composition; to these I answer that Nature is the best Dictator, for all the hard dry studied Rules that

Figure I.2  William Billings, The New-England Psalm-Singer (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1770), title page. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

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ever was prescribed, will not enable any Person to form an Air any more than the bare Knowledge of the four and twenty Letters, and strict Grammatical Rules will qualify a Scholar for composing a Piece of Poetry, or properly ­adjusting a Tragedy, without a Genius. It must be Nature, Nature must lay the Foundation, Nature must inspire the Thought.101

By privileging ‘natural gifts over acquired skill and asserting the authority of individual expression’, Billings secured ‘artistic space for himself and other American composers, for whom there were no established means of musical education akin to those in Europe’.102 Yet he also warned against misinterpretation of his aims. Admitting that ‘some may think I mean [. . .] to throw Art intirely out of the Question’, he denied the charge, treating ‘Art’ as a synonym for ‘Rules of Composition’. ‘The more Art is display’d,’ he argued, ‘the more Nature is decorated. And in some sorts of Composition, there is dry Study requir’d, and Art very requisite. For instance, in a Fuge, where the Parts come in after each other, with the same Notes; but even there, Art is subservient to Genius, for Fancy goes first, and strikes out the Work roughly, and Art comes after, and polishes it over.’103 He followed quite closely the compositional precepts set out by Tans’ur in his A New Musical Grammar (1746).104 According to McKay and Crawford, ‘The key to Billings’s works other than plain tunes lies less in his melodic-harmonic idiom, his sense of form, even his ability to write simultaneous independent lines, than in his ability to set words convincingly to his music: his declamation.’105 Billings was attracted to the poetry of Isaac Watts, and the great majority of the texts he set were taken from Watts’s psalms and hymns.106 However, several of the texts chosen by Billings for The New-England Psalm-Singer were by New England poets such as Mather Byles and Perez Morton.107 Billings himself wrote the patriotic text to ‘Chester’: Let tyrants shake their iron rod And slav’ry Clank her galling Chains We fear them not we trust in god New englands god for ever reigns[.]108

In the wake of the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend duties and the Boston Massacre on 5 March 1770, ‘Chester’ speaks to ‘the whiggish sense of injustice and illustrates the tension between the British empire and her colony’.109 Boston’s patriot community may have facilitated the publication of Billings’s tunebook by Benjamin Edes and John Gill, who also produced

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the Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal, a noted patriot magazine, in which Billings’s collection was advertised in December 1770. ‘Friends with such patriots as Paul Revere and Samuel Adams,’ as Crist observes, ‘the composer was at least familiar if not involved with the Sons of Liberty and their political activities.’ Furthermore, in the prefatory material to New-England Psalm-Singer, ‘Billings calls attention to the patriot cause by noting that publication of the collection had been delayed while he gathered a sufficient supply of American paper. He likely participated in the boycott of imported goods subject to British taxes under the Stamp Act and Townshend duties, acting in concert with Boston’s nonimportation association and its founder, Adams.’110 Adams was generally known to be an exponent of psalmody.111 One of Adams’s Tory opponents, Judge Peter Oliver, who in 1776 was forced into exile chiefly through Adams’s instigation, accused Adams of using his musical talents for political purposes: ‘He had a good Voice, & was a Master in vocal Musick. This Genius he improved, by instituting singing Societys of Mechanicks, where he presided; & embraced such Opportunities to ye inculcating Sedition, ’till it had ripened into Rebellion. His Power over weak Minds was truly surprizing.’112 Billings may well have been Adams’s collaborator in enlisting music for the patriot cause.113 Certainly, ‘Chester’ appeared in Billings’s second collection, The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778), published during the American War of Independence, with four added stanzas in which the anti-British references were made more specific than the more or less general indictment of tyranny of earlier version.114 Billings also composed anthems for that collection paraphrasing Scripture to link the plight of present-day Bostonians with that of the Israelites in Egyptian captivity, such as ‘Lamentation over Boston’ (on the British occupation of Boston in 1775–6).115 Billings included in The Singing Master’s Assistant a lengthy and fanciful account of certain aspects of musical history: ‘An Historical Account of G. Gamut, as related by herself, taken in short hand by the Author.’116 G. Gamut, it is revealed, is the musical scale, invented by David, who slew the giant Goliath with a ‘Dominant Tone taken from [Gamut] and discharged out of a canon’. (Here, Billings explains in a footnote that a canon is ‘a sort of musical composition variously composed and performed’.)117 The account describes biblical events illustrating the marvellous powers of music when used for righteous purposes, then goes on to mention Pythagoras, Guido d’Arezzo and Jean deMuris, showing that Billings had consulted musical historians available to him – probably Burney and his great rival Sir John Hawkins in particular, as well as the historical sketch in Tans’ur’s The Elements of Musick Display’d (1772).118

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The publication of Burney’s History and of Hawkins’s five-volume A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1776) may be said to mark the emergence in Britain and the wider Atlantic world of a historical framework for the study of music.119 Lonsdale describes how Burney’s professional jealousy of and personal animosity towards Hawkins, a lawyer, antiquarian and member of the Academy of Ancient Music, prompted him to arrange a devastating reception of the rival history.120 The two Histories and their respective authors have since been viewed as ‘a study of contrasts’.121 As a practising musician, Burney saw music history as a continuous development that was reaching its zenith in his own day, whereas Hawkins was convinced that music had achieved ‘its greatest perfection in Europe from about the middle of the sixteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth Century; when, with a variety of treble-instruments, a vicious taste was introduced, and harmony received its moral wound’.122 Yet some sections of Burney’s History are based in whole or part on Hawkins’s work.123 Furthermore, both Burney and Hawkins argued that music history should be made independent of belles lettres, on the one hand, and scientific theory, on the other.124 By insisting upon the intellectual credentials of the music historian, as distinct from the biographer or the historian, or from the natural philosopher active in music theory, they prepared the ground for the rise of the modern academic discipline of musicology in the nineteenth century. In the broadest sense of the term, ‘musicology’ refers to ‘the scholarly study of music’.125 However, until the second half of the nineteenth century, the study of music was regarded ‘not as an independent discipline but as that part of general knowledge which gave theoretical handling to specifically musical questions. It was [the German] [Friedrich] Chrysander who [in founding his Jahrbuch für musikalische Wissenschaft (Yearbook for Musical Knowedge)] in 1863 contended that musicology should be treated as a science in its own right, on a level equal to that of other scientific disciplines’.126 A celebrated exposition of this idea is to be found in the Austrian Guido Adler’s ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’ (‘Musicology’s Scope, Method and Aim’) (1885), which laid down the chief principles of the new discipline and was the first to emphasise the importance of style criticism in music research.127 Historically based study of European music, with the Austro-German tradition at its heart, came to constitute the centre of musicology (although the systematic investigation of the musical style of other periods and countries was an outstanding feature of Adler’s ‘Vienna School’).128 Musicology developed in North America in close contact with Europe and the emigration in the 1930s of a number of European musical scholars to Canada and the United States ‘greatly h ­ astened the a­ daptation

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of European traditions of research in Western music to the American scene’.129 Throughout the twentieth century, the attention of many musicologists in America was turned almost wholly away from the musical intellectual and performance cultures of the New World. The bias of the modern academic discipline of musicology on both sides of the Atlantic towards the Austro-German tradition is especially apparent in histories of the nineteenth century. As Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter comment: ‘When musicologists place Finnish, Czech, Russian, or Spanish musical compositions under the heading of “musical nationalism”, they implicitly compare them against a universally accepted German music and presume that other nations tried to distinguish themselves by deviating from the German standard.’130 The German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus reflected in his Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (Foundations of Music History) (1977) on the practical difficulties that he had encountered in trying to devise a history of nineteenth-century music. ‘Music history,’ he wrote, ‘fails either as history by being a collection of structural analyses of separate works, or as history of art by reverting from musical works to occurrences in social or intellectual history cobbled together in order to impart cohesion to an historical narrative.’131 In posing this methodological problem, Dahlhaus adapted a statement made by René Wellek and Austen Warren in their Theory of Literature (1949): ‘Most leading histories of literature are either histories of civilization or collections of critical essays. One type is not a history of art; the other, not a history of art.’132 Influenced by the work of the German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno (a leading member and eventually director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research), Dahlhaus emphasised the value of proceeding primarily from the evolution of musical genres. ‘It was here,’ he insisted in Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Nineteenth-Century Music) (1980), ‘that aesthetic and compositional principles intermingled with conditions from intellectual and social history, so that a history of musical genres outlines a structural history relating the various facts of music-historical processes.’133 Dahlhaus also sought to establish and defend what he saw as the proper conceptual categories for viewing his material; these included, for nineteenth-century music, ‘the autonomy principle that suppressed or vitiated functionality in music; bourgeois concert life as an institutionalisation of the ideal of autonomy and yet, in radical contrast as a manifestation of mercantilism in music; [and] the emancipation of instrumental music’.134 Dahlhaus advocated a narrative method closer to Marcel Proust and James Joyce than to the Waverley Novels of Walter Scott. ‘A modern

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historian,’ he claimed, ‘who is aware of the literary dimension to his metier does not presume to be an “omniscient observer” recounting “the way it really was”; instead he prefers to present an occurrence from several different perspectives that may at times contradict rather than complement one another.’135 However, while he avowed the principle of steering clear of ‘History’ on the large scale in order to turn instead towards separate individual ‘histories’, Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts also works to construct a ‘History’ (in the singular) of the Germanic institution of autonomous music. As a consequence, the other ‘histories’ encompassed in the book – French, Italian, ‘nationalist’, ‘trivial music’ and so on – often appear, in James Hepokoski’s words, ‘as claiming little more status than that of obligatory diversions whose primary interest for the author resides not in the specific social and musical preconditions from which they might actually have arisen, but rather in the degree to which they may be understood as opposing, aspiring to, or tilting toward Germanic artistic categories’.136 Building on the work of Dahlhaus and Adorno, the Anglo-American ‘new musicology’ of the 1980s and 1990s imported concerns of political, gender and feminist analysis to the interpretation and history of music.137 These developments inspired and informed the collection Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism (1996), edited by Ian Bent.138 Sanna Pederson, for example, connects theoretical debates about Romantic music to broader and more specific historical contexts (the European Revolutions of 1848), while Brian Hyer attempts to show how the musical structures of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (Eroica), which premiered in public on 7 April 1805, at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna, organise subjectivity in historically specific ways.139 More recently, however, the American musicologist Richard Taruskin has sought to revise the legacy of Adorno and to challenge the ‘pernicious’ influence of Dahlhaus.140 Paraphrasing questions raised by Dahlhaus in the second chapter of his Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte, Taruskin attacks in the introduction to The Oxford History of Western Music (2005) what he describes as ‘the pseudo-dialectical “method” that cast all thought in rigidly – and artificially – binarized terms’: ‘Does music mirror the reality surrounding a composer, OR does it propose an alternative reality? Does it have common roots with political events and philosophical ideas; OR is music written simply because music has always been written and not, or only incidentally, because a composer is seeking to respond with music to the world he lives in?’ [. . .] The whole chapter, which has achieved in its way the status of a classic, consists, throughout, of a veritable salad of empty binarisms.141

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Nevertheless, as Harry White argues, it is difficult to deny how much Taruskin owes to Dahlhaus’s Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte and Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, if only because Taruskin’s own work ‘so strikingly insists upon music as a vital expression of the history of ideas, and upon musical works as a nexus of social, political and aesthetic thought’.142 Commenting on recent changes in the academic discussion of music, in particular the blurring of disciplinary boundaries, Michael P. Steinberg observes in Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (2004): ‘Literary scholars write about music; musicologists are concerned with culture, politics, and society.’ And yet, he notes, the ‘case for music as a dimension of history, and therefore as a concern of professional historians, seems still to require special pleading’.143 John W. Toews identifies two reasons why historians have been cautious in embracing, appropriating and participating in the project to integrate the history of music into the history of culture: One is the abstract formalism that has been so prevalent in the analysis of musical works by musicologists in university music departments during the last half century. The amount of technical expertise [. . .] required to comprehend analyses of the internal structures of classical music is formidable [. . .] [A] second source of trepidation for historians [. . .] [is] the widespread belief that musical experience is an experience of the ineffable, that what music does cannot be adequately redescribed or represented in words or images [. . .] From this perspective, writing about music can quickly begin to look like, and be judged as, a series of empirically verifiable subjective responses to a transcendent reality that cannot be rationally described or verbally communicated.144

Both the autonomous structures of musical forms and the ineffable nature of musical experience constitute cultural constructions of the nature of music that work, in Toews’s view, ‘to isolate music from other cultural phenomena and erect barriers against the specific contextualizing [. . .] methods of historical analysis’. But, he argues, these ascribed characteristics of musical reality and musical experience are ‘historical residuals of the cultural construction of the tradition of European classical music in the nineteenth century. They are connected to the historical emergence of a particular kind of music at a particular time and place and are thus themselves primary objects for historical analysis’.145 The ideological uses of definitions of music as a self-referential autonomous structure of tones are the subject of works by (amongst others) Dahlhaus, Daniel K. L. Chua and Berthold Hoeckner.146

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This book seeks to contribute to the project to integrate the history of music and the history of culture by exploring music’s connections to, and interactions with, the textual and visual arts in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It aims to extend into an Atlantic framework Steinberg’s analysis, in Listening to Reason, of music and subjectivity in German culture, and Celia Applegate’s account, in Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the ‘St. Matthew Passion’ (2005), of the reverberations in German-speaking central Europe of the rediscovery of Bach’s Matthew Passion (1727), when Felix Mendelssohn rehearsed and conducted the work in a performance at the Singakademie, Berlin, on 11 March 1829.147 Scholarly interest in Romanticism and music is evident from a number of recent publications, such as Leith Davis’s Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1724–1824 (2006); Maureen N. McLane’s Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (2008); and Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (2010).148 However, none of these considers American literature and music in any detail. While Jay Fliegelman, in Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (1993), examines the link between oratory and music in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, this book offers the first full-length discussion of the connections of rhetoric and music in revolutionary, early national and nineteenth-century America.

Rhetoric and Music Rhetoric and music have a long history of interaction, reaching back to classical Antiquity: Quintillian, for example, pointed to the expressivity of music as a model for the orator.149 This view was reiterated and reformulated in terms of new Enlightenment notions of rhetoric by eighteenthcentury theorists and practitioners of the art of persuasive communication, who prescribed the codes and character of public speaking in Britain, Ireland and North America.150 Rhetoric also played an extensive role in music theory, composition and performance from the sixteenth century, not only in the German musica poetica tradition with which it is particularly associated, but also more widely in the musical intellectual and performance cultures of the Atlantic world.151 Franklin’s correspondence shows the close association of rhetoric and music in the eighteenth century.152 His collaboration in London in 1772 with the Abbé André Morellet, influential French law reformer and political economist, on a list of fifty-one emotions capable of expression

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by music, also suggests certain differences between the mid- to lateeighteenth-century view of music and the previous Baroque terminology, arising from changes in the apparent specificity of the relation between certain sounds and certain passions, and therefore changes in the kind of response thought to be appropriate. Franklin had first met Morellet in the spring of 1772 at a house party of Lord Shelburne, held at Loakes, his estate in High Wycombe.153 Music was one of the many interests that Franklin and Morellet discovered they had in common.154 The previous year, Morellet had published a treatise on music, De l’expression en musique, et de l’imitation dans les arts (Of Expression in Music, and of Imitation in the Arts) (1771), in which he argued that imitation in music was more metaphorical than literal.155 Sometime after his return to London, Franklin compiled with Morellet a list of fifty-one emotions capable of expression by music. Under the heading ‘Musical Expression: [Passions and Sentiments] Capable of Expression by Musick’, Franklin wrote: Desire, Joy, Grief, Complaint, Expostulation, Resignation, Patience, Boldness or Courage, Resolution & Firmness or Fortitude, Anger, Rashness, Contempt, Peevishness & Quarrelsomeness, Tranquillity & Composure of Mind, Consolation, Pity, Tenderness, Fondness, Reverence or Veneration, Resentment, Courtesy, Magnanimity, Regret, Meekness, Satisfaction, Triumph, Insolence, Caution, Diffidence, Fear, Prudence, Terror, Distraction of Mind, Delicacy, Indifference, Yielding, Obstinacy, Moderation, Condescension, Frankness, Gravity, Moroseness, Pride, Sullenness, Presumption.156

Morellet rendered these terms into French. The term ‘expression’ had formally entered theories of music in Britain in 1752 with Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression. Although Avison still looked for the meaning of music in an audience’s response to it, he avoided discussion of specific rhetorical effects. The relationship between the listener and the music was conceptualised as a relatively vague one.157 According to Avison, ‘The Energy and Grace of Musical Expression is of too delicate a Nature to be fixed by Words’ because the peculiar joys of music are ‘Beyond the Power of Words to express’.158 Developing Avison’s theories, Adam Smith proposed in his essay ‘Of the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called the Imitative Arts’, on which he was at work in 1777, that the pleasure provided by the imitative arts was chiefly due to the difficulty of the imitation. ‘A well-composed concerto of instrumental Music,’ he claimed, ‘presents an object so agreeable, so great, so various, and so

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interesting, that alone, and without suggesting any other object, either by imitation or otherwise, it can occupy, and as it were fill up, completely the whole capacity of the mind, so as to leave no part of its attention vacant for thinking of anything else.’159 Franklin and Morellet’s list of passions and sentiments capable of expression by music suggests a mode of pleasure in the arts that derives from structures of signs with little or no representative function. Music was a key part of the social activities of Morellet’s circle in France. On 5 June and 3 July 1774, for example, Morellet hosted at Auteuil, near Paris, two private performances of the Bohemian composer Christoph Willibald von Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice (Orpheus and Eurydice), a new version of the original Italian reform opera that had premiered in Vienna on 5 October 1762. Orphée would open at the Opéra on 2 August 1774.160 The performances at Auteuil could be seen as extensions of Morellet’s philosophical interest in musical expression: It was at the dinners given by Abbé Morellet . . . that for the first time in Paris was heard Gluck’s Orphée, which Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] had desired either never to hear or to hear constantly. At the first sounds of Millico singing the romance, all hearts were touched, and all eyes shed tears . . . At the supplication to the spirits and the furies, hell itself seemed moved. And when Gluck alone, representing all the furies, made the terrible cries of ‘No!’ ring out . . . one seemed to see Millico surrounded by demons and flares, like Orpheus in hell.161

Earlier in his career, from 1745 to 1746, Gluck had held the post of house composer at the King’s Theatre, London. During this period, he encountered the new, more naturalistic acting style of Garrick (whose pupil Gaetano Guadagni became the first Orpheus of Gluck’s opera).162 In conversation with Burney in Vienna in 1772, Gluck reputedly claimed that ‘he owed entirely to England the study of nature in his dramatic compositions’. Furthermore, it was after observing ‘the English taste’ for ‘plainness and simplicity’ that he decided to write for the voice ‘more in the natural tones of the human affections and passions, than to flatter the lovers of deep science or difficult execution’. ‘Most of his airs in Orfeo,’ Burney comments, ‘are as plain and simple as English ballads.’163 Franklin’s diplomatic mission to France coincided with the War of the Gluckists and Piccinnists, a Parisian press war or querelle, between partisans of Gluck and the Italian composer Niccolò Piccinni (or Piccini), who had arrived in Paris in late 1776.164 Franklin refused to take sides in the controversy and to admit any preference. However, he reflected upon the

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War of the Gluckists and Piccinnists in his ‘Lettre à Madame B.’ (‘Letter to Madame B.’), also known as the bagatelle ‘The Ephemera’ (written in 1778). The generic title ‘bagatelle’ had particular currency in eighteenthcentury French music, and implied ‘a trifle, a short piece of music in light vein’.165 Franklin gave this title to the literary works that he wrote and printed at his own press at Passy, while serving as commissioner to France. Dated 20 September 1778, Franklin’s ‘Lettre à Madame B.’ is addressed to Madame Brillon, a French harpsichordist, pianist and composer, who maintained a salon in the village of Passy, near Paris.166 Franklin had become Madame Brillon’s neighbour and close friend, after he moved from Paris to the Hôtel de Valentinois, Passy, at the end of February 1777. In ‘The Ephemera’, Franklin simultaneously plays philosopher, wit and flirt. Explaining ‘some few Circumstances’ of the piece’s composition in a letter to the American diplomat William Carmichael (then stationed in Madrid), Franklin wrote on 17 June 1780: ‘I spend an Evening twice in every Week [at Madame Brillon’s house]. She has among other Elegant accomplishments that of an Excellent Musician, and with her Daughters who sing prettily, and some friends who play, She kindly entertains me and my Grandson with little Concerts, a Dish of Tea and a Game of Chess. I call this my Opera; for I rarely go to the Opera at Paris.’ ‘At the Time when the Letter was written,’ he added, ‘all conversations at Paris were filled with Disputes about the Musick of Gluck and Picciny, a German and an Italian Musician, who divided the Town into Violent Parties.’167 Franklin opens ‘The Ephemera’ with recollections of the ‘happy Day’ he spent with Madame Brillon in ‘the delightful garden and sweet Society of the Moulin-Joli’, a small island in the Seine, which formed part of the country estate of the financier and painter Claude-Henri Watelet.168 ‘We had been shewn,’ Franklin writes, ‘numberless Skeletons of a kind of little Fly, called an Ephemere, all whose successive Generations we were told were bred and expired within the Day.’ Claiming to understand ‘all the inferior Animal Tongues’, Franklin describes listening to the discourse of a ‘living Company’ of ephemera on a leaf, who, in ‘their national Vivacity’, were speaking three or four together (a hint to French habits of conversation). ‘I found,’ Franklin recalls, ‘by some broken Expressions that I caught now and then, they were disputing warmly the Merit of two foreign Musicians, one a Cousin, the other a Musketo; in which Dispute they spent their time seemingly as regardless of the Shortness of Life, as if they had been Sure of living a Month.’169 In a ‘brilliant meiosis’, Franklin reduces the War of the Gluckists and Piccinnists to the buzzing of two similar flies.170 He also considers the political implications of the quarrel in a marginal addition to the first manuscript copies: ‘Happy People! thought I,

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you live certainly under a wise, just and mild Government, since you have no public Grievances to complain of, nor any Subject of Contention but the Perfections or Imperfections of foreign Music.’171 Franklin is o­ stensibly praising the French government, but he is also commenting upon the curious condition of ‘great States’, where, as he put it in a letter to the Chevalier de la Luzerne, French foreign minister to the United States, on 5 March 1780, ‘the Calamity occasion’d by a foreign War falls only on a very small Part of the Community [. . .] Thus, as it is always fair Weather in our Parlours, it is at Paris always Peace. The People pursue their respective Occupations, the Playhouse, the Opera, & other publick Diversions, are as regularly & fully attended, as in Times of profoundest Tranquility, and the same small Concerns divide us into Parties’.172 In ‘The Ephemera’, however, Franklin’s attention turns from the disputatious (French) ephemera to an old grey-headed one, who sits alone on another leaf, and appears to share with Franklin a New World identity. ‘Being amus’d with his Soliloquy,’ Franklin observes, ‘I have put it down in writing, in hopes it will likewise amuse her [Madame Brillon] to whom I am so much indebted for the most pleasing of all Amusements, her delicious Company, and her heavenly Harmony.’173 The grey-headed ephemera begins by observing that ‘learned Philosophers of [his] race’, who lived long before his time, believed that the ‘vast World’ of ‘the Moulin Joli’ could not subsist for more than eighteen hours. He finds himself inclined to agree with them, as he has noticed over the course of his own lifetime the decline of the sun – ‘the great Luminary that gives Life to all Nature’ – towards the ocean. With the conclusion of that process, the ephemera surmises, the world will be left ‘in Cold and Darkness’, which will result in ‘universal Death and Destruction’.174 The ephemera’s description of the death of the sun and the end of the world parodies contemporary debates about the cooling of the earth and the disappearance of life from the planet, in particular the ‘fanciful computations’ of Buffon, whose Époques de la Nature (Periods of Nature) would appear in 1779.175 But in his reflections (at the ‘great Age’ of seven hours) on the brevity of life, and the insignificance of most human endeavours, the ephemera also speaks for Franklin: What now avails all my Toil and Labour in amassing Honey-Dew on this Leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political Struggles I have been engag’d in for the Good of my Compatriotes, Inhabitants of this Bush; or my philosophical Studies for the Benefit of our Race in general! For in Politics, what can Laws do without Morals! Our present Race of Ephemeres will in a Course of Minutes, become corrupt like those of other and older Bushes, and consequently as

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wretched. And in Philosophy how small our Progress! Alas, Art is long, and Life short! My Friends would comfort me with the Idea of a Name they say I shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough, to Nature and to Glory: But what will Fame be to an Ephemere who no longer exists? And what will become of all History, in the 18th Hour, when the World itself, even the whole Moulin Joli, shall come to its End, and be buried in universal Ruin?’176

The quotations (in italics) serve to emphasise the present truth of ancient thoughts and experiences (‘what can Laws do without Morals’ is from Horace’s Odes; ‘Art is long, and Life short!’ is from Hippocrates’s Aphorisms; ‘lived long enough, to Nature and to Glory’ is from Cicero’s Pro Marcello, and refers to a thought Caesar supposedly expressed).177 There is no longer any strong ridicule of the idea of millenarianism. Instead, echoing Franklin, the greyheaded ephemera concludes the piece with the observation that ‘after all [his] eager Pursuits, no solid Pleasures now remain, but the Reflection of a long Life spent in meaning well, the sensible Conversation of a few good Lady-Ephemeres, and now and then a kind Smile, and a Tune from the ever-amiable Brillante’.178 Franklin would comment in a different register on ‘Peace’ in Paris in a letter to David Hartley of 15 December 1781. Hartley had sent Franklin a proposition relating to the securing of spectators in the opera and playhouses from the danger of fire (in the wake of the fire at the opera hall at the Palais Royal on 8 June 1781).179 ‘Your concern for the security of life,’ Franklin replied, even the lives of your enemies, does honour to your heart and your humanity. But what are the lives of a few idle haunters of play-houses compared with the many thousands of worthy men and honest industrious families butchered and destroyed by this devilish war! O! that we could find some happy invention to stop the spreading of the flames, and put an end to so horrid a conflagration!180

Franklin incorporates anti-theatrical sentiments into this letter in order to express his rage at the continuing ‘conflagration’ of the American War. Yet he regularly attended theatrical performances (and indeed was in attendance at the opera hall with his grandson William Temple Franklin on the night of the fire). And while he mocked the War of the Gluckists and Piccinnists in ‘The Ephemera’, he shared the interest of both sides in the dispute in the reform of opera and the musical expression of passion. Just as Gluck would seek to achieve a beautiful simplicity in his reform operas, so Franklin would argue in his correspondence for the aesthetic and ethical merits of ballads and songs.

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The first chapter of this book (‘Magic Numbers and Persuasive Sound’) examines attitudes to music and its performance of leading figures of the American Enlightenment and Revolution, notably Franklin and Jefferson, and the attempts of Hopkinson and others to harness the Orphean power of music so that it should become a progressive force in the creation of a new society. It shows how the association of rhetoric and music that has its roots in classical Antiquity acquired new relevance and underwent new theorisation and practical application in light of revolutionary Atlantic conditions. The decline of rhetoric as a model for music is traditionally pinpointed to the beginning of the nineteenth century, which saw the emergence of the concept of ‘pure’ or ‘autonomous’ art music.181 With the liberation of instrumental music as the maker of its own meaning from its traditional functions in devotional practice, as a support for political power or social distinction, or as a servant of visual spectacle or of the written and spoken word, the notion of musica poetica, and the composer as musicus poeticus, became outdated.182 Yet theorists and critics continued to use the metaphor of rhetoric as a model for music.183 Stendhal, for example, wrote in his Vie de Haydn (Life of Haydn) (1814): The symphonies of Haydn, like the harangues of Cicero, form a vast magazine, in which all the resources of the art are to be found. With a piano-forte, I could make you distinguish, in one way or other, twelve, or fifteen musical figures, as different from one another, as the antithesis and metonymy in rhetoric; but, at present, I will only point to you the suspensions.184

As Tom Beghin and Sander M. Goldberg observe: ‘Even in this “new” century, listeners evidently still found it helpful to describe their musical experiences in a rhetorical way and remained at ease with the invocation of such technical terms as antithesis and metonymy.’185 The chapter suggests that the theory and practice of rhetoric continued to shape the musical intellectual and performance cultures of the Atlantic world throughout the Romantic period. The second chapter (‘Cosmopolitanism and the Nation’) considers Jefferson’s view of the proper relation of the United States to the wider world, as articulated in his first inaugural address, the correspondence between Jefferson and Madame de Staël on the French Revolution, Napoleon and American foreign policy, and the role of music and music theory in the development of ideas about cosmopolitanism and the nation in the nineteenth century. It focuses on Washington Irving’s collaboration with the English dramatist and composer Barham John Livius on

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a t­ranslation of Carl Maria von Weber’s Romantic opera Der Freischütz (1821), which premiered at Covent Garden on 14 October 1824. The chapter retrieves from the historical record Irving’s role in the undertaking with Livius, analyses his translation practice as akin to the activity of the orator situated between a subject and a public, and considers early responses both to the Irving–Livius version and to other rival translations and stagings of the opera in Europe and North America – specifically in London, Paris and New Orleans. It also considers more generally how New Orleans and its peoples mediated continental European musical culture to other states in the American Union, with particular reference to the career of the composer and virtuoso pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (an emissary from New Orleans to Europe, then from Europe to North America, and finally between the Americas). The third chapter (‘The Life in Music’) examines the significance of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, and of European constructions of his life and works, to New England Transcendentalism. In so doing, it shows the development and transformation of rhetorical theories of music, with the emergence in the nineteenth century of the idea of a musical work as an organic identity – an image that emphasises the autonomy of the work.186 It focuses on the impact of transatlantic ideas of the hero and the heroic on the musical discourse of Margaret Fuller (with particular reference to her letters, journals and contributions to The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion [1840–4]); on her reviews of books and concerts for the New-York Tribune; and on her dispatches from Europe for the Tribune (1846–50), especially her engagement with theories of the utopian instrumentality of music, such as those of de Staël and of Giuseppe Mazzini. The chapter also analyses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sceptical relation to the musical discourse of de Staël and the New England Transcendentalists in his novel The Marble Faun (1860). The fourth chapter (‘Chants Democratic and Native American’) explores attitudes to music and its performance of leading figures of the American abolition movement, such as Frederick Douglass, and the attempts of Walt Whitman and others to reimagine the American nation through poetry and song in the era of the Civil War. It focuses on connections, parallels and contrasts between Douglass’s view of slaves’ songs in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and the theories of music articulated by Thomas Moore in the prefaces to his Irish Melodies (1808–34); and Whitman’s engagement with ideas of musical nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Leaves of Grass (1855–82) and Drum-Taps (1865). In ‘Proud Music of the Sea-Storm’ (1869) (later titled ‘Proud Music of the Storm’ in Leaves of Grass [1881–2]), Whitman identifies musical style with national origin:

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All songs of current lands come sounding round me, The German airs of friendship, wine and love, Irish ballads, merry jigs and dances, English warbles, Chansons of France, Scotch tunes, and o’er the rest, Italia’s peerless compositions.187

Yet all musical nationalisms, as Lawrence Kramer describes, ‘funnel in Whitman’s poetry into the transcendental melting pot of American nationalism’.188 The chapter analyses the reception of Whitman’s work on both sides of the Atlantic in the light of his blending or transcending of national borders. The fifth chapter (‘The Musical Sublime’) examines the tension in North America and Europe between claims that music is a universal language, and the interest in directing musical experience towards the construction of exclusionary identities, particularly of nationality. It addresses this tension by focusing on the history, theory and representation of the musical sublime. The concept of the musical sublime emerged in the Atlantic world in the arena of commentary on the works of Handel;189 it would later be extended to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. The discourse on music’s sublimity also flourished in close association with the development of the symphony.190 Richard Wagner reflected in his 1870 essay on Beethoven: Surveying the historical advance which the art of Music made through Beethoven, we may define it as the winning of a faculty withheld from her before: in virtue of that acquisition she mounted far beyond the region of the aesthetically Beautiful, into the sphere of the absolutely Sublime; and here she is freed from all the hampering of traditional or conventional forms, through her filling their every nook and cranny with the life of her ownest spirit. And to the heart of every human being this gain reveals itself at once through the character conferred by Beethoven [. . .] on Melody, which has now rewon the utmost natural simplicity [. . .] Melody has been emancipated [. . .] and raised to an eternal purely-human type. Beethoven’s music will be understood throughout all time.191

This chapter addresses John Sullivan Dwight’s attempts to make sense of the musical sublime in his lectures, essays and reviews in the context of his division of the history of music into the Scientific Era (exemplified by Bach), the Expressive Era (represented by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Beethoven) and the Age of Effect (illustrated by Nicolò Paganini and the Modern Piano);192 connections between the discourse of the

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musical sublime and the discourse of subjectivity; and Emily Dickinson’s engagement with, and resistance to, the musical sublime in her letters and poems. The book concludes with an examination of Romantic and later nineteenth-century appropriations of Enlightenment visions of the public ethical function of music, with particular reference to James Monroe Trotter’s Music and Some Highly Musical People (1878); and Charles Callahan Perkins’s and Dwight’s History of the Handel and Haydn Society, of Boston, Massachusetts (1883–93).

CHAPTER 1

MAGIC NUMBERS AND PERSUASIVE SOUND

Franklin on Music In an open letter to Franklin, dated 20 May 1771, prefaced to a new edition of his book on electricity Dell’ elettricismo artificiale, e naturale (Of Natural and Artificial Electricity) (1772), Giambatista Beccaria, Professor of Experimental Physics at Turin, wrote of his correspondent: ‘to you it is given to enlighten human minds with the true principles of the electric science, to reassure them by your conductors against the terrors of thunder, and to sweeten their senses with a most touching and suave music’.1 Franklin is closely identified in this description with the age of Enlightenment: he is the experimental philosopher and contributor to electrical research, the inventor of the lightning conductor, and the improver of the bell-type instrument known as the musical glasses. The letter to which Beccaria is replying is one that Franklin had sent from London almost a decade earlier and had published in the fourth edition of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America (1751; 4th edn, 1769). Franklin, who participated in an extensive network of European investigators linked to one another by visits, publications and technological exchange, regrets in that letter that he has no new information on the subject of electricity to share with his correspondent, but offers instead ‘an account of the new instrument lately added here to the great number that charming science was before possessed of’.2 That ‘charming science’ is, of course, music, and the new instrument to which Franklin refers his adaptation of the musical glasses into the ‘Armonica’ so named, as he informs Beccaria, in honour of the musical language of Italy.3 In ‘entertaining’ his correspondent with a description of the armonica, sufficiently detailed to enable Beccaria and

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his friends to ‘imitate it [. . .] without being at the expence and trouble of the many experiments [he] ha[s] made in endeavouring to bring it to its present perfection’, Franklin reveals the co-existence of science and music in the eighteenth century: electrical and musical experimentation are presented as alternative yet related activities.4 Influential scientific societies of Europe, notably the Royal Society of London (founded in 1660 and formally incorporated in 1662) and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris (founded in 1666), were interested from their institution in musically related topics of inquiry. The Philosophical Transactions, the earliest scientific journal and the principal publication of the Royal Society, contained a significant number of articles on the science of music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: topics discussed included general acoustics or the properties of sound, musical instruments and other inventions (such as speaking and hearing trumpets, and non-Western instruments), comparisons of music and language, and the music of the ancients compared to modern music.5 Franklin’s letter to Beccaria on the armonica may be seen in the context of the considerable interest in music amongst members of the Royal Society: Franklin was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1756, and many of the letters and papers that formed the Experiments and Observations on Electricity were addressed to its members or had previously been published in the Philosophical Transactions. Furthermore, it was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the classicist and scientist Edward Hussey Delaval, who had first introduced Franklin to the musical glasses. ‘Being charmed with the sweetness of its tones, and the music [Delaval] produced from it,’ Franklin wrote to Beccaria, ‘I wished only to see the glasses disposed in a more convenient form, and brought together in a narrower compass, so as to admit of a greater number of tones, and all within reach of hand to a person sitting before the instrument.’6 The science of music, as shown in this instance, is based in sensation and observation: Franklin is enchanted by the pure sound of the musical glasses, while at the same time observation of the mechanics of the instrument stimulate his active powers of mind to invention. Devotion to experiment is a key aspect of Franklin’s self-fashioning and subsequent status as ‘admirable’ representative of the Enlightenment; his inquisitive empiricism also secured his reputation within the Royal Society and later the Académie Royale des Sciences, where he was elected an associate member in 1772.7 Franklin combines the methodology of inductive science associated with modernity with the descriptive tradition of rhetoric – the formal art of eloquence – in his discussion of music and its affective aspects in the fourth edition of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity. This combination is

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not revolutionary; rather, it is part of a tradition that goes back to Francis Bacon, who was particularly interested in the nature of sound and the production of extraordinary sound effects.8 Bacon derived his critical language of music from the rhetorical thinking that dominated Renaissance discourse. Like Bacon, Franklin draws on rhetorical analogies to describe music’s role in communication and its power to affect people’s emotions. The 1769 edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity includes two letters with a musico-rhetorical dimension: an undated letter to his brother Peter Franklin, written in the early 1760s, on ballads, taste and musical style, and a letter of 2 June 1765 to Henry Home, Lord Kames, a leading figure of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, on melody, harmony and the national music of Scotland. In both letters, Franklin is especially concerned with the moral and ethical effects of music, which, like rhetoric, persuades through the emotions rather than by reason. Franklin’s letter to Peter Franklin, a merchant and shipmaster in Newport, New England, was written in response to a request from his brother that Benjamin arrange for a composer to set to music a ballad composed by Peter. Neither Peter’s letter nor his verses has survived, but it is almost certain that Benjamin was replying from England.9 The ostensible purpose of Peter’s ballad was that of ‘discountenancing expensive foppery, and encouraging industry and frugality’. Benjamin agrees to ‘get it as well done’ for Peter as he can, but expresses surprise that his brother chose ‘so uncommon a measure in poetry’ that it fits none of the tunes ‘in common use’. This makes it less likely to be sung in America, and thus diminishes its possible moral effect: Had you fitted it to an old one, well known, it must have spread much faster than I doubt it will do from the best new tune we can get compos’d for it. I think too, that if you had given it to some country girl in the heart of the Massachusets, who had never heard any other than psalm tunes, or Chevy Chace, the Children in the Wood, the Spanish Lady, and such old simple ditties, but has naturally a good ear, she might more probably have made a pleasing popular tune for you, than any of our masters here, and more proper for your purpose, which would best be answered, if every word could as it is sung be understood by all that hear it, and if the emphasis you intend for particular words could be given by the singer as well as by the reader; much of the force and impression of the song depending on those circumstances.10

In emphasising the importance of setting text to music in such a way that every word can be understood, Franklin follows Joseph Addison in The Spectator, who wrote on 21 March 1711 of the prevailing taste for Italian

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opera in London and the peculiarity of audiences listening to performances in an ‘unknown Tongue’: ‘Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us incapable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of humane Nature: I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Commonwealth.’11 Like Franklin, Addison admired the ‘Simplicity of Thought’ in the songs and ballads of the ‘common People’, offering a critique of the ballad of ‘Chevy Chase’ on 21 May 1711. Such works please ‘all Kinds of Palates’, whereas the rhetorical complexities of what he terms the ‘Gothick Manner in Writing’ please only those who have ‘formed to themselves a wrong artificial Taste upon little fanciful Authors and Writers of Epigram’.12 Addison insists that taste should not conform to art, but art to a democratic notion of taste, writing on 3 April 1711: ‘Musick is not design’d to please only Chromatick Ears, but all that are capable of distinguishing harsh from disagreeable Notes. A Man of an ordinary Ear is a Judge whether a Passion is express’d in proper Sounds, and whether the Melody of those Sounds be more or less pleasing.’13 Franklin expresses similar sentiments on natural and artificial taste in his letter to Peter Franklin. Of English composers he states: ‘they are admirable at pleasing practised ears, and know how to delight one another; but, in composing for songs, the reigning taste seems to be quite out of nature, or rather the reverse of nature, and yet like a torrent, hurries them all away with it; one or two perhaps only excepted’.14 Franklin takes up the question of the music of the ancients compared to the moderns that had featured in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: You, in the spirit of some ancient legislators, would influence the manners of your country by the united powers of poetry and music. By what I can learn of their songs, the music was simple, conformed itself to the usual pronunciation of words, as to measure, cadence or emphasis, &c., never disguised and confounded the language by making a long syllable short, or a short one long when sung; their singing was only a more pleasing, because a melodious manner of speaking; it was capable of all the graces of prose oratory, while it added the pleasure of harmony.15

Franklin legitimates Peter Franklin’s (and his own) vision of the power of music to influence national ‘manners’ by appealing to the traditions of ancient Greece, whose bards, such as Orpheus and Amphion, were often legislators of the early states. Although he gives no source for his

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i­nformation, Franklin is abreast of theoretical discussion of the musical techniques of the Greeks, who, it was thought, had achieved their marvellous effects through use of a single melody that exploited the natural expressiveness of the voice. In contrast, he argues, a modern song ‘neglects all the proprieties and beauties of common speech, and in their place introduces its defects and absurdities as so many graces’. He then proceeds to analyse, as proof of this point, the Israelitish Woman’s aria, ‘Wise men flatt’ring may deceive us’, in Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus (1746). Franklin lists six ‘defects’ and ‘improprieties’ of ‘common speech’: first, ‘Wrong placing the accent or emphasis, by laying it on words of no importance, or on wrong syllables’; second, ‘Drawling; or extending the sound of words or syllables beyond their natural length’; third, ‘Stuttering; or making many syllables of one’; fourth, ‘Unintelligibleness; the result of the three foregoing united’; fifth, ‘Tautology’; sixth, ‘Screaming, without cause’.16 These ‘defects’ of modern song are illustrated with musical examples from Handel’s aria. Stuttering is especially condemned. ‘I have seen in another song that I cannot now find,’ he writes, ‘seventeen syllables made of three, and sixteen of one; the latter I remember was the word charms; viz. Cha,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a,a, a,a,a,a,a,arms. Stammering with a witness!’17 Drawing his brother’s attention to how few words, discounting the repetitions, make up the text of the Israelitish Woman’s aria and the ‘shower of notes’ with which they are accompanied, he concludes: ‘You will [. . .] perhaps be inclined to think with me, that though the words might be the principal part of an ancient song, they are of small importance in a modern one; they are in short only a pretence for singing.’18 Franklin further criticises the art music of his day in his letter to Kames of 2 June 1765, where he distinguishes between the ‘natural Pleasure’ that arises from hearing ‘Melody or Harmony of Sounds’ from the artificial and exclusive pleasure that arises from hearing or performing rhetorically complex works, which he compares to ‘the Pleasure we feel on seeing the surprizing Feats of Tumblers and Rope Dancers, who execute difficult Things’. Many fashionable pieces, he claims, are mere ‘Compositions of Tricks’: ‘I have sometimes at a Concert attended by a common Audience plac’d myself so as to see all their Faces, and observ’d no Signs of Pleasure in them during the Performance of much that was admir’d by the Performers themselves; while a plain old Scottish Tune, which they disdain’d and could scarcely be prevail’d on to play, gave manifest and general Delight.’19 Franklin had been brought into personal contact with Kames during his first visit to Scotland in 1759, spending several days with Kames at the latter’s country seat in Berwickshire.20 This contact was renewed in 1771,

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during Franklin’s second visit to Scotland, when he again stayed with Kames (now resident at Blair Drummond, near Stirling).21 In addressing the topic of music in his letter of 2 June 1765, Franklin was responding specifically to Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1763), one of the most influential publications on the ‘fine arts’ in the eighteenth century. Franklin writes of his admiration of the Elements, but, wishing that Kames had examined more fully the subject of music, suggests in his letter a possible line for further inquiry. Taking as the starting point for his discussion Kames’s observation that ‘Melody and Harmony are separately agreeable, and in Union delightful’, Franklin sets out to explain the continuing vitality of distinctively Scottish music – ‘folk’ music of an oral–aural tradition.22 He argues that ‘the Reason why the Scotch Tunes have liv’d so long, and will probably live forever (if they escape being stifled in modern affected Ornament) is merely this, that they are really Compositions of Melody and Harmony united, or rather that their Melody is Harmony’. Franklin explains this assertion in terms of auditory memory (the retention and comparison of a past with a succeeding sound), the structure of Scottish tunes (the ‘emphatical’ notes, that is, those which are stressed in singing, are almost always in ‘concord’ or harmony) and organology (the harp’s structure).23 Each note harmonised with the vibration of the preceding note, thus translating the simultaneity of harmony into the sequentiality of melody. ‘The Harp was strung with Wire,’ Franklin writes, and had no Contrivance like that in the modern Harpsichord, by which the Sound of a preceding Note could be stopt the Moment a succeeding Note began. To avoid actual Discord it was therefore necessary that the succeeding emphatic Note should be a Chord with the preceding, as their Sounds must exist at the same time. Hence arose that Beauty in those Tunes that has so long pleas’d, and will please for ever, tho’ Men scarce know why.24

Franklin conjectures that tunes that are really ‘ancient’ are without the artificial ‘Half Notes’ of the chromatic scale, being constructed from the ‘natural Scale’ alone; they are ‘simple Tunes sung by a single Voice’.25 According to Franklin, the minstrels played the tunes on the harp with voice accompaniment; like the Greek bards of old, they united the arts of poetry and music. The powerful effect of their combination of words and music can be imagined, but not experienced: I believe our Ancestors in hearing a good Song, distinctly articulated, sung to one of those Tunes and accompanied by the Harp, felt more real Pleasure

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than is communicated by the generality of modern Operas, exclusive of that arising from the Scenery and Dancing. Most Tunes of late Composition, not having the natural Harmony united with their Melody, have recourse to the artificial Harmony of a Bass and other accompanying Parts. This Support, in my Opinion, the old Tunes do not need, and are rather confus’d than aided by it. Whoever has heard James Oswald play them on his Violoncello, will be less inclin’d to dispute this with me. I have more than once seen Tears of Pleasure in the Eyes of his Auditors; and yet I think even his Playing those Tunes would please more, if he gave them less modern Ornament.26

James Oswald is a fallen descendant of the ancient minstrel: the Scottish musician possesses the power to move his audience to sympathetic tears, but his playing shows the corruption of primitive simplicity by artificial refinement. Franklin adds a note to the extract of the letter to Kames published in Experiments and Observations on Electricity which links his views about natural and artificial harmony to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, as these were articulated in his Dictionnaire de Musique (1767). Franklin cites a passage from the article ‘Harmonie’ in the Dictionnaire in which Rousseau attacks Jean Philippe Rameau’s principle of the fundamental bass and compares modern European music unfavourably to that of the ancient Greeks for having lost the expressive power of melody in the ‘gothic’ and ‘barbarous’ invention of the science of harmony.27 Rousseau was opposed, as Lydia Goehr argues, ‘to the Enlightenment inclination to turn aesthetics into a purely empirical or scientific matter of sensory experience, on the one hand, or of pure intellection, on the other.’28 Although Franklin never doubts the empirical method of the science of music or the science of criticism, he is concerned, like Rousseau, with music’s function as a moral agent in society. Both Rousseau and Franklin resist the dissociation of sensibility of the academic age of science and look back to Athens – a state where laws were sung – as a point of reference from which to assess the purported decline of culture and society in the age of Enlightenment. Franklin sought to influence Anglo-American ‘manners’ through ballad composition in the 1760s and 70s, particularly as conflict escalated in colonial politics. Franklin’s song opus, as Ellen R. Cohn describes, is not a large one, but it is remarkably varied, consisting of ballads and chorus songs, both serious and comic: ‘Most of his original manuscripts have been lost, but the texts have been preserved either in copies, by Franklin or others, or in published sources. Franklin never transcribed music notation for any of his songs, nor did he compose their melodies. He followed the common practice of setting new lyrics to well-known tunes.’29

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Franklin was aware of the revolutionary potential of bringing the masses into choral consensus, having observed the response of colonial Americans to the preaching of the evangelist George Whitefield in 1739 and 1740. Recalling in his memoir (now often termed his ‘autobiography’) in 1788 the ‘extraordinary Influence’ of Whitefield’s oratory in Philadelphia, Franklin wrote: ‘It was wonderful to see the Change soon made in the Manners of our Inhabitants; from being thoughtless or indifferent about Religion, it seem’d as if all the World were growing Religious; so that one could not walk thro’ the Town in an Evening without Hearing Psalms sung in different Families of every Street.’30 Franklin presents himself in his memoir as a curious, yet sceptical observer of Whitefield’s oratory and the ‘Change’ in ‘Manners’ that the preacher’s visit occasioned. Yet during the revolutionary era, Franklin would draw on the knowledge that he acquired from the visit of Whitefield of the transformative power of harmony on the masses. Like Whitefield, Franklin sought to create a choral consensus that would be a force for change. Cohn suggests that Franklin’s first attempt at political verse is an undated song text entitled ‘The Mother Country’, which employs the established ballad refrain ‘Which nobody can deny’. The song encourages conservative over radical principles, but nevertheless gives expression to a powerful collective voice that asserts protest and obedience as it considers the question of British authority over the colonies. Of the ‘peevish’ ‘old Mother’, who forgets that her ‘Children’ are ‘grown up and have Sense of [their] own’, Franklin writes: Her Orders so odd are, we often suspect That Age has impaired her sound Intellect: But still an old Mother should have due Respect,             Which nobody can deny, &c. Let’s bear with her Humours as well as we can: But why should we bear the Abuse of her Man? When Servants make Mischief, they earn the Rattan,             Which nobody should deny, &c.31

Setting his text to a tune that was well known, Franklin employs the combined powers of poetry and music that he associated with the ‘ancient legislators’ to establish a distinctively American voice and influence emotion and action on both sides of the Atlantic. When colonial protest escalated to war against Britain, Franklin again turned to balladry, publishing in the Boston-Gazette on 27 November 1775 a song text entitled ‘The King’s Own Regulars’, which exposes the cowardice and ineptitude of the royal

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troops. Set to the tune of the song ‘An Old Courtier of the Queen’s, and the Queen’s Old Courtier’, the verses were to be chanted on a single note, allowing for a free expansion and contraction of syllables.32 Like the music of the ‘ancient legislators’ discussed by Franklin in the letter to his brother Peter Franklin, this kind of singing is ‘a melodious manner of speaking’.33 Although Franklin’s purpose is party polemic, rather than law giving, the ever-present ‘we’ of the song texts brings into collective union every discriminating American self.

Orpheus the Enchanter When Franklin visited Scotland in 1759 and 1771, he would have encountered a vibrant musical intellectual and performance culture, especially in Edinburgh, where the Scottish composer and musician Thomas Erskine, sixth Earl of Kelly, was director (from 1757) and then governor (from 1767) of the Edinburgh Musical Society (Kelly imported from Mannheim a new style of orchestral writing, called the Mannheim School, associated with Johann Stamitz and characterised by homophonic music or melody with accompaniment, as opposed to the old contrapuntal style).34 Founded by gentlemen amateurs in 1728, the Edinburgh Musical Society was the most prominent subscription concert organisation in eighteenth-century Scotland.35 The society organised regular Friday concerts in St Mary’s Chapel, on Niddry’s Wynd, which were performed by a mix of gentlemen members and professional musicians; there were also concerts for special occasions (including an annual concert in honour of St Cecilia, and memorial concerts for the society’s directors and other luminaries).36 While the regular Friday concerts belonged to the realm of the private, male connoisseur, the society held a number of ‘Ladys Consorts’ during the winter season, the programme usually consisting of one of Handel’s oratorios. As Katharine Glover notes, ‘by attending performances of these most fashionably patriotic compositions combining the rousing music of Britain’s then favourite composer with the moral propriety of the religious text, women could confirm their membership of a culture of shared taste, experience and priorities that defined the polite in concert halls across Britain’.37 In 1753, the popularity of the society’s meetings led to a decision to move the concerts from St Mary’s into temporary accommodation in the Assembly Hall. At the end of 1762, the society opened its own concert venue, St Cecilia’s Hall, which formed the east side of a courtyard of older houses set back from Niddry’s Wynd.38 Franklin’s contemporary, the English traveller Edward Topham, wrote from the Scottish capital in 1775:

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[T]he degree of attachment which is shewn to Music in general in this Country, exceeds belief. It is not only the principal entertainment, but the constant topic of every conversation; and it is necessary not only to be a lover of it, but to be possessed of a knowledge of the science, to make yourself agreeable to society [. . .] Music alone engrosses every idea. In religion a Scotchman is grave and abstracted; in politics serious and deliberate: it is in the power of harmony alone to make him an enthusiast.39

Topham represents music as a threat to polite discourse: he contrasts the autonomous self or bounded subjectivity of the ‘Scotchman’ in the sphere of religion or politics to the unbounded self of the same person in the character of musical enthusiast.40 Yet the enthusiasm for music of many of the Scottish literati led to the publication of a number of philosophical treatises that critically explore the ‘power of harmony’, such as John Gregory’s A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World (1765); James Beattie’s An Essay on Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind (1776); and Thomas Robertson’s An Inquiry into the Fine Arts (1784).41 Like Franklin, Gregory, Beattie and Robertson pay particular attention to music’s interaction with ethics. Gregory, for example, suggests that the ‘influence of Music over the Mind is perhaps greater than that of any of the fine arts. It is capable of raising and soothing every passion and emotion of the Soul’.42 The Edinburgh Musical Society exerted a distinctive influence on the development of musical culture in the American colonies. Music became, for example, a regular feature of the activities of the convivial Tuesday Club of Annapolis, Maryland, which was founded in 1748 by the Scottish-born physician Alexander Hamilton, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh.43 Hamilton’s family had participated in the growth of the Edinburgh Musical Society, and Alexander would almost certainly have attended the society’s Friday evening concerts.44 Deciding to emigrate to North America, Hamilton established a medical practice in Annapolis in 1738. After a summer touring the American colonies to the North in 1744, he returned to Annapolis, determined to refashion the town’s social life, with Edinburgh and Boston as models.45 For eleven years, the Tuesday Club met every other week, usually at Hamilton’s home. The first concert of the club was held on 26 November 1745, but music did not become a regular feature of club activities until 1750.46 The club encouraged participation of members as vocalists, instrumentalists and composers, thus providing the first outlet in Maryland for the performing and composing talents of local residents.47 Most men of any note who came to Annapolis

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visited the Tuesday Club: Franklin, for example, attended a meeting of the club on 22 January 1754.48 Hamilton reflected on the role of music in his fictionalised account of the proceedings of the club (The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club): ‘perhaps [the Longstanding (or regular) members] might Intend it for the same purpose as Orpheus did, to polish, soften and humanize their rough and Savage L: Stand: members if any such might possibly be, or come among them’.49 The Edinburgh Musical Society was also a model for the establishment of more formal musical institutions in North America. It is likely, for example, that the Edinburgh society was behind the emergence of the St Cecilia Society of Charleston, South Carolina, which was formed in 1766 as a subscription concert organisation.50 During the eighteenth century, there was a strong increase in the emigration of Scots and Ulster-Scots to North and South Carolina.51 Significantly, Charleston’s St Andrew’s Society, founded in 1729 by Scottish immigrants as a social and charitable society, was the first organisation of its kind outside Scotland.52 Nicholas Michael Butler notes that the first president of the St Cecilia Society, John Moultrie, studied medicine in Edinburgh, and was also president of Charleston’s St Andrew’s Society when the musical organisation was founded in the city. Furthermore, the officers of Charleston’s St Cecilia Society in the second half of the eighteenth century ‘included men with such Scottish family names as Gordon, Inglis, Kinloch [. . .] [and] Ramsay’.53 There are connections, too, between the Edinburgh Musical Society and concert organisation in Philadelphia. In the early 1760s, James Bremner, previously a salaried performer in the Friday evening concerts of the Edinburgh Musical Society, arrived in Philadelphia, where he set up a ‘Music School [. . .] at Mr. Glover Hunt’s near the Coffee House in Market Street’, offering instruction in harpsichord, violin, German flute, and guitar.54 In 1764, as Anne McClenny Krauss describes, he successfully launched his plan for subscription concerts in Philadelphia, based on the model of the Edinburgh Musical Society. Through these concerts, Bremner acquainted Philadelphians with the Mannheim style, and specifically with the music of the Earl of Kelly, giving the city the distinction of premiering his works in America.55 Furthermore, influential Scottish educators encouraged musical or musical theatrical activities in the colleges of colonial America. For example, William Smith, Episcopal clergyman and graduate of King’s College, Aberdeen, who was appointed first as head of the Philadelphia Academy in 1753 and, two years later, as provost of the College of Philadelphia, into which the Academy developed, not only taught courses in logic, rhetoric, and moral and natural philosophy, but also promoted both drama

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s­ pecifically and oral performance in general.56 Notably, he adapted Thomas Arne’s masque of Alfred (1740) for the College’s first official production in the Christmas holidays of 1756 to 1757. ‘Alfred fitted the bill,’ in Jason Shaffer’s words, ‘as both an exercise in the civic education of Smith’s students and an occasional patriotic performance in the midst of the Seven Years’ War.’57 In Williamsburg, Virginia, William Small, son of a Presbyterian minister and graduate of Marischal College, Aberdeen, who was appointed in 1758 to a chair of natural philosophy at the College of William and Mary, may also have encouraged student engagement with music. Small, who became a mentor of Jefferson, taught at the College of William and Mary for six years, returning to Britain in 1764 (settling in Birmingham, where he practised medicine and joined the town’s embryonic Lunar Society).58 Jefferson wrote of Small in his memoir of 8 January 1821: It was my great good fortune, and what probably fixed the destinies of my life that Dr. Wm. Small of Scotland was then professor of Mathematics, a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication correct and gentlemanly manners, & an enlarged & liberal mind. He, most happily for me, became soon attached to me & made me his daily companion when not engaged in the school; and from his conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed.59

Jefferson states that Small was ‘the first who ever gave in that college regular lectures in Ethics, Rhetoric & Belles lettres’.60 Small’s lectures on these topics would have been informed by the work of the Scottish literati, including his teachers at Marischal College, such as Alexander Gerard, who, in his An Essay on Taste (1759), addressed the properties and effects of music in a section entitled ‘Of the sense or taste of harmony’ (Gerard argues that music’s ability to ‘operate’ on the passions or emotions is ‘its most important virtue’).61 Small also helped introduce Jefferson to Governor Francis Fauquier and George Wythe; together they participated in musical evenings.62 This commitment to music may reflect the influence of Gregory: Small had established during his student-days at Aberdeen a friendship with Gregory that lasted until the latter’s death in 1773.63 Jefferson’s early interest in music is reflected in his Literary Commonplace Book, which he kept from his student years until his marriage on 1 January 1772.64 There are five groups of entries in the bound manuscript: ‘Works in Prose’, ‘Classical Poetry’, ‘English Poetry’, ‘English Dramatic Verse’ and ‘Poetic Miscellany’.65 Within the grouping ‘English Poetry’ are three entries on music dating from Jefferson’s years of formal education.66 These

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entries appear to have been copied from a particular collection of extracts from English plays, Thesaurus Dramaticus: Containing all the Celebrated Passages, Soliloquies, Similes, Descriptions, and Other Poetical Beauties in the Body of English Plays, Ancient and Modern (1724). This collection was intended to serve as a compendium of the most noteworthy passages in English drama, ordered by topic. The extracts transcribed by Jefferson into his Commonplace Book are found in Thesaurus Dramaticus under the heading ‘Music’. The source of the first entry on music is the final scene of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (V, i), in which Jessica and Lorenzo, awaiting the return of Portia and Nerissa to Belmont, contemplate the night to the accompaniment of music. They make reference to several of the most powerful musical traditions extant in the English Renaissance: ‘These include the notion of the music of the spheres, the Orphean myth about music’s affective powers, the philosophical understanding of differences between musica practica (actual sounding music) and musica speculativa (the intellectual perception of music), and contemporary beliefs about music’s moral efficacy and influence on human behavior.’67 Jefferson transcribed part of a speech of Lorenzo that draws on both Orphean and Pythagorean traditions. However, he invented the entire first line and formed of his second line a question that is not part of the original: — What so hard, so stubborn, or so fierce, But Music for the Time will change its Nature? The Man who has not Music in his Soul, Or is not touch’d with Concord of sweet Sounds, Is fit for Treasons, Stratagems, & Spoils, The Motions of his Mind are dull as Night, And his Affections dark as Erebus: Let no such Man be trusted. — 68

The second entry on music is from Almeria’s speech at the beginning of William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride (1697) (I, i). Like Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice, Almeria alludes to the power of Orpheus’s music before his savage dismemberment at the hands of the Thracian women: Music has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak. I’ve read that Things inanimate have mov’d, And, as with living Souls, have been inform’d By magic Numbers & persuasive Sound.69

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The third entry on music is from Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent (1703) (II, i). Sciolto, a nobleman of Genoa, declares: Let there be Music, let the Master touch The sprightly String, & softly breathing Lute, Till Harmony rouse ev’ry gentle Passion, Teach the cold Maid to lose her Fears in Love, And the fierce Youth to languish at her Feet. Begin: ev’n Age itself is chear’d with Music, It wakes a glad Remembrance of our Youth, Calls back past joys, & warms us into Transport.70

These lines recall Shakespeare’s exploration of the affective power of music in The Merchant of Venice and elsewhere (the importance of Shakespeare to Rowe is noted by Samuel Johnson in his life of the poet and dramatist).71 Jefferson also transcribed several extracts from the works of Ossian, the third-century Celtic bard discovered or (some claimed) invented by James Macpherson, a Highlander and former classmate of Small at Marischal College. The Ossian extracts belong to the final period of significant activity in Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, and coincide with his career as a lawyer.72 Several of the extracts imagine the union of poetry and music in song.73 Jefferson copied, for example, an extract from ‘Carthon: A Poem’ (first published in The Works of Ossian [1763]): Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers. they have but fallen before us: for one day we must fall. Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers to day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desart comes; it houls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn sheild. and let the blast of the desart come! we shall be renowned in our day. the mark of my ar[m] shall be in the battle, and my name in the song of bards. raise the song; send round the shell; and let joy be heard [in] my hall. when thou, Sun of heaven, shalt fail! if thou sha[lt] fail, thou mighty light! if thy brightness is for a season, [like] Fingal, our fame shall survive thy beams. such was the song of Fingal, in the day of his joy.74

In a letter dated 25 February 1773, Jefferson requested the assistance of a relative of Macpherson’s in obtaining a copy of Ossian’s poems in their original language and such grammars and dictionaries as to make possible the mastery of the language. ‘I am not ashamed to own,’ he wrote, ‘that I think this rude bard of the North the greatest Poet that has ever existed.’75 Jefferson may well have been drawn to Macpherson’s alternation between

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‘eloquent bouts of lament, and the silence of fragmentation’, strategies which lent ‘a strong Orphic aspect to Ossianic speech’.76 Jefferson would have been aware of philosophical interpretations of the legend of Orpheus, such as Bacon’s De sapientia veterum (1609; published in translation in 1619 by Sir Arthur Gorges as The Wisedome of the Ancients), as well as literary engagements and dramatic stagings.77 Bacon writes of the mythic episode recalled by Congreve that follows the second loss of Eurydice and Orpheus’s return from the Underworld: From that time Orpheus falling into a deepe melancholy became a contemner of women kinde, and bequeathed himselfe to a solitary life in the deserts, where by the same melody of his voice and harpe, hee first drew all manner of wild beasts unto him, who (forgetful of their savage fierceness, and casting off the precipitate provocations of lust and furie, not caring to satiate their voracity by hunting after prey) [. . .] stand all at the gaze about him, and attentively lend their eares to his Musicke. Neither is this all: for so great was the power and alluding force of his harmonie, that hee drew the woods and moved the very stones to come and place themselves in an orderly and decent fashion about him.78

Bacon interprets this music as moral or civil philosophy. He argues that the figure of Orpheus symbolises philosophy because his music was of two kinds, ‘the one appeasing the infernal powers, the other attracting beastes and trees’.79 The first music applies to natural philosophy, the second to moral or civil philosophy. Bacon viewed the death of Orpheus as an allegory of the historical process. The cornets of the Thracian women render inaudible the sound of Orpheus’s harp, with the result that Harmonie, which was the bond of that order and society beeing dissolved, all disorder beganne againe, and the beasts (returning to their wonted nature) pursued one another unto death as before: neither did the trees or stones remaine any longer in their places: and Orpheus himself was by these femall Furies torne in pieces, and scattered all over the desart. For whose cruell death the river Helicon [. . .] in horrible indignation, hid his head under ground, and raised it againe in another place.80

Bacon’s interpretation of this episode is that tumult, sedition and war inevitably arise after kingdoms and commonwealths have flourished for a time: ‘lawes are silent, men returne to the pravity of their natures, fields and townes are wasted and depopulated, and then [. . .] learning and

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­ hilosophy must needs be dismembered, so that a few fragments onely, and p in some places will bee found like the scattered boords of shippewracke’. A barbarous age follows, and the streams of the river Helicon, sacred to the muses, are hidden under the earth until a ‘few fragments’ of learning and philosophy ‘breake out againe and appeare in some other remote nation’.81 Drafted by Jefferson at the behest of the Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence is a fragment of learning and philosophy ‘salvaged’ from the shipwreck of the Anglo-American empire. Written with a view to being read aloud, the Declaration catalogues the colonists’ grievances against the king in a rhetorical act of defiance and bid for freedom that looks to the ‘laws of nature and of nature’s God’ for its justification.82 In its narrative of enforced separation and loss, of grief and rage at the catalogue of the king’s atrocities, the Declaration is ‘an Orphic song of savage dismemberment and lyric survival’.83 Yet Jefferson resists the pessimism of Bacon’s view of the inevitable rise and fall of civilisations. Dissolving and creating political connection, the Declaration focuses on the prospect of the ‘road to happiness & to glory’ that the United States will ‘tread’ apart from Great Britain.84 Asserting union out of dismemberment, the Declaration employs musico-rhetorical strategies to ‘charm’ assent: marks on the still-surviving rough draft, for example, show that Jefferson sought to divide the composition rhythmically into parts as a piece of music is divided into bars.85 Jefferson persuades through the emotions, as much as, if not more than, through reason. In a dialectical process that Robert A. Ferguson identifies as characteristic of the American Enlightenment, the Declaration seeks to emancipate and enslave ‘the good people of these states’ through its musical oratory.86 If the Declaration promises liberation, it also provokes domination: it is an Orphic song of the kind identified by Bacon as applying to moral or civil philosophy. The role of music and the verbal arts in the civilising process was a subject that preoccupied leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Hugh Blair, who was Professor from 1762 of the newly created Regius Chair in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh. In his immensely influential Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), Blair argues that ‘Poetical Numbers’ (versification) are the ‘remains’ of poetry’s original connection with music. The nature and function of that connection, he claims, may be inferred from the testimony of travellers to the New World, who have observed tribal meetings of the Native Americans and noted the centrality of music and song in their public ceremonies: Cool reasoning, and plain discourse, had no power to attract savage Tribes, addicted only to hunting and war. There was nothing that could either rouse

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the Speaker to pour himself forth, or draw the crowd to listen, but the high powers of Passion, of Music, and of Song. This vehicle, therefore, and no other, could be employed by Chiefs and Legislators, when they mean to instruct, or to animate their Tribes.87

Before writing, only songs could be remembered, and it is this mnemonic function that Blair emphasises. History, eloquence and poetry were combined in primitive culture; from song emerged an oral tradition of national ballads that conveyed all the historical knowledge and all the instruction of the first ages. But the progress of society and the invention of writing led to the separation of the arts and professions of civil life. The historian turned away from the ‘buskins of Poetry’ for the sobriety of prose. The orator sought to persuade by reasoning, and became circumspect in his use of the ‘ancient passionate, and glowing Style’.88 Poetry became an art of pleasure, confined to such subjects as related to the imagination and the passions, and separated, to a great extent, from music. This fall into division rendered unknowable to modernity the powerful effects of music told in ancient story, and associated in particular with the bards of the Greeks. ‘Certain it is,’ Blair writes, that from simple Music only, and from Music accompanied with Verse or Song, we are to look for strong expression, and powerful influence over the human mind. When instrumental Music came to be studied as a separate art divested of the Poet’s Song, and formed into the artificial and intricate combinations of harmony, it lost all its ancient power of inflaming the hearers with strong emotions; and sunk into an art of mere amusement, among polished and luxurious nations.89

Blair’s source is John Brown, who argued in his A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions of Poetry and Music (1763) that poetry and music were separated in Roman times and that their reunion is vital if the two are to regain their former power.90 Brown’s musical primitivism – his insistence that the power of music to move the emotions has been corrupted by modern refinement – finds its parallel in the writing of Rousseau and Franklin, who compare the music of the Enlightenment unfavourably to that of the ancient Greeks. However, while Jefferson shared Franklin’s taste for the folk music of Scotland, he is able to look back to the remarkable effects of Orpheus’s music without advocating the reunion of poetry and music. For Jefferson, music, as an art of pleasure and a science of Enlightenment, was less a force for emancipation during the War of Independence than a c­ osmopolitan theory

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and practice that promised the partial transcendence of history and politics. Nevertheless, ballads and songs could enable political dialogue between representatives of the United States and of Britain. In the autumn of 1778, for example, Franklin and Hartley explored the question of a possible reconciliation between the American revolutionaries and the British state by means of an exchange of verse. Franklin was convinced of the impossibility of Hartley’s hopes of reconciliation. ‘[T]he extream Cruelty,’ he wrote to Hartley on 3 September 1778, ‘with which we have been treated has now extinguish’d every Thought of returning to it [our British Connection], and [has] separated us for ever.’ But he softened his unequivocal rejection of the British proposals for the restoration of peace by quoting ‘those beautiful Lines of Dante to the late Mistress of his Affections’.91 These lines were not transcribed in the surviving copy of the letter (held in the Library of Congress). However, Franklin may have had in mind Dante’s last words to Beatrice in Canto XXXI of Paradiso (Paradise) (the third book of Commedia [Comedy]): Tu m’hai di servo tratto a libertate per tutte quelle vie, per tutt’ i modi che di ciò fare avei la potestate. (From servitude you’ve led me to be free by all those pathways and by all the means you have within your power to exercise.)92

Hartley responded by sending the Scots ballad ‘Auld Robin Gray’, written by Lady Anne Lindsay in 1771.93 In this ballad, young Jamie ‘is sent to sea and parts tearfully from his Jenny; when news of his shipwreck reaches Jenny’s impoverished parents, they force her to marry the rich, kindhearted, elderly Robin Gray. Four weeks after the wedding, a bedraggled Jamie returns. The lovers have a brief, bittersweet reunion, and then part forever. Jenny, ever-honorable, remains true to her husband but becomes distracted with grief’.94 Franklin replied on 26 October 1778 that he appreciated the ‘natural Sentiment and beautiful Simplicity’ of the ‘old Scotch Sonnet’. But he found that he had to take the text in parts, ‘changing Persons’, in order to extract any applicability to current events: First Jenie may be supposed old England and Jamie America. Jenie laments the Loss of Jamie, and recollects with Pain his Love for her, his Industry in Business, to promote her Wealth and Welfare, and her own Ingratitude [. . .]

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Towards the Conclusion we must change the Persons, and let Jamie be Old England, Jennie America and old Robin Gray, the Kingdom of France. Then honest Jenie having made a Treaty of Marriage with Gray expresses her firm Resolution of Fidelity in a manner that does Honour to her good Sense and her Virtue.            

I may not think of Jamie For that would be a Sin But Inum [I must] do my best A good Wife to be For auld Robin Gray Is VERY KIND TO ME95

Having offered an allegorical interpretation of the marriage of Jenie and Robin, Franklin stated to Hartley: ‘I must [. . .] tell you fairly and frankly that there can be no Treaty of Peace with us in which France is not included.’96

Hopkinson’s America Independent Francis Hopkinson sought to unite music and poetry in defence of the revolutionary cause, compiling and arranging performances of America Independent: An Oratorial Entertainment (1781), a combination masque and oratorio, at the residence of the Chevalier de la Luzerne, in Philadelphia on 21 March 1781, which was repeated on 11 December 1781 as part of a concert with George Washington in the audience.97 Hopkinson had become involved in amateur theatrical performances as a student at the College of Philadelphia in the 1750s.98 Like Smith’s Alfred, Hopkinson’s America Independent is an exercise in oratory. Set in the Temple of Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, the work is arranged for soloists and a chorus accompanied by an orchestra. In the first scene, the Genius of France, the Genius of America and the High Priest of Minerva praise the goddess and ask for her blessing and protection for the new nation, Columbia. In the second scene, Minerva emerges from her sanctuary, celebrates Columbia’s friendship with France, and proclaims Jove’s promise that ‘If [Columbia’s] sons united stand, / Great and glorious shall she be.’99 Hopkinson wrote the libretto to fit arias, songs and choruses by Handel, Thomas and Michael Arne, and other composers popular in England. The work thus carries on ‘the tradition of the contrafactum typical of political song’.100 Franklin’s daughter Sarah Bache described the performance of 21 March 1781 in a letter to her brother William Temple Franklin of 22 June

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of that year. ‘I never was so much affected with any thing,’ she wrote, ‘particularly that part “If her sons” when I could not for my life help crying.’101 Yet the work suffers from the same ‘defects’ and ‘improprieties’ of ‘common speech’ that Franklin enumerated in his critique of the Israelitish Woman’s aria in Handel’s Judas Maccabeus. The final chorus, for example, which Hopkinson set to the tune of ‘See the conquering hero come’, from Judas Maccabeus, could be attacked for ‘Drawling’ and ‘Stuttering’: Great Minerva! Pow’r divine, Praise! Exalted praise be thine. Thus thy name in songs we bless, Thus in songs thy power confess. Let loud pæans rend the skies; Great Minerva! Pow’r divine! Praise! Exalted praise be thine.102

Indeed, Hopkinson expressed reservations about the text when he sent a copy of the libretto to Franklin on 3 October 1781: ‘The Oratorial Affair, is I confess not very elegant Poetry but the Entertainment consisted in the Music, & went off very well – In short the Musician crampt the Poet.’103 The prospect of ‘America Independent’ no longer seemed so distant when, on 19 October 1781, the combined French and American armies defeated the British at Yorktown. In a letter congratulating Franklin ‘on the glorious Conclusion of the Campaign’, Hopkinson wrote on 30 November 1781: ‘The Capture of Lord Cornwallis with near 10,000 Men is an Event honourable to the allied Arms of France & America, & cannot avoid attracting the respectful Notice of the Neutral Powers. We are all in anxious Expectation of the Effects this will produce in Europe – & particularly impatient to know how the Court of London will digest this military Pill.’104 The ‘military Pill’ of Yorktown would encourage the British to open peace negotiations the following year. Franklin would establish the framework for a peace agreement with Britain in the spring and summer of 1782. Negotiations began soon after the resignation of British Prime Minister Lord North on 20 March of that year. Franklin was able to initiate contact with the Earl of Shelburne – one of the two secretaries of state in the new government announced by the Marquess of Rockingham – through the Earl of Cholmondeley, an acquaintance of Madame Brillon.105 A peace commission under Sir Guy Carleton was also making overtures to Congress from New York.106 Meanwhile, La Luzerne seized upon Louis XVI’s announcement of the birth of a dauphin to cement Franco-American ties, holding a celebra-

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tory fête at his residence in Philadelphia on 15 July 1782. Benjamin Rush described the dancing room provided for this ‘splendid entertainment’ as a scene of ‘enchantment’. ‘[H]ere we saw the world in miniature,’ he wrote on 16 July 1782. ‘All the ranks and parties and professions in the city and all the officers of government were fully represented in this assembly [. . .] The company was mixed, it is true, but the mixture formed the harmony of the evening.’107 At the same time, Rush found it impossible to partake of the joy of the evening without being struck with the occasion of it. ‘How great the revolution in the mind of an American!’ he declared; ‘to rejoice in the birth of a prince whose religion he has been taught to consider as unfriendly to humanity. And above all, how new the phenomenon for republicans and freemen to rejoice in the birth of a prince who must one day be the support of monarchy and slavery!’108 Preliminary articles for peace were signed at Versailles between Britain, France and Spain on 20 January 1783. The Treaty of Paris, formally ending the American War of Independence, was signed on 3 September 1783. A truce was made with Holland at the same time, but the Dutch demands were refused and a definite peace was not made until 20 May 1784 on terms more favourable to Britain.109 Shelburne’s peace would become a focus for caricaturists. The British etcher Thomas Colley, for example, satirises the preliminary articles of peace in his print ‘Peace porridge all hot / The best to be got’, published on 11 February 1783, with some verses to be sung to the tune ‘Roast Beef of Old England’ (Figure 1.1). In the print, John Bull or an Englishman and his servant offer bowls of porridge to be shared in the peace. An American Indian woman says, ‘I rest Contented with a dish of Independent Soup.’ England says to France and Spain, ‘my loss is your gain for my Soup is very Thin.’ France replies, ‘By gar John English has well Crumb’d my dish,’ and Spain says, ‘my peace soup is made very good by Stewing down Minorca & the Floridas.’ Holland says, ‘I will not taste it yet as it is not relish’d to my mind.’ The waiter says, ‘Taste it Mynheer ’tis better than you deserve.’ The song explicates the cartoon: The Frenchman & Spaniard are both Cock a hoop With America too they have got such rich Soup Yet a Blow or two more might have made them all Stoop.   O’ the rare Soup & the Cooks boys   And O’ the rare Cooks & the Soup Their dishes, well crumb’d they have reason to Boast The France & America have got the most

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54 ]

SoNG 'JJ,L bote/unurz- $( St-t,•S"'f"

13,.,& ;c,'.?laruJfUu!,.ltuv vvybr.titti>,lur ,_c IJ

TJu,Jl.uklunan deot'4 ?1-r'l.~.;,n•'t,m./uuk T 1z..full flc>v-U';!' tt'ult-.i/uru/v"'mr-d l•lMu La.lrim d«licr;t/u. mai..rTfluU.; 7 "tudl ,...,:.,,~ .ou~• 11• 'i""'~~ s,,_,,

.Jr..

'T/,6 :u,/nj" IW~t>)""' thfo fer"'"'?.

'"'" ~nfot;

1/e&,um4il.lamen&.~ uo m11re- tl..aiL HJNt

IJ.tit. ttJtut:lttNtul'cantHit:t(Bttd.mnlte/l u /;l.;:t; .

o.:uu. ,.,.. ,s""!""\"·.................... .

. ......... ·-··--·---···

Figure 1.1 Thomas Colley, ‘Peace porridge all hot, The best to be got’ ([London]: Richardson, 1783). © Trustees of the British Museum.

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But England finds hers very thin to her cost   O’ the rare Soup &c The Dutchman seems glouty, & is not in haste The full flowing dish that’s presented to taste Let him sulk as he will he must take it at last   O’ the rare Soup & the Cooks &c110

Colley would also attack Shelburne’s peace in a print entitled ‘A political concert; the vocal parts by 1. Miss America, 2. Franklin, 3. F--x, 4. Kepp--ll, 5. Mrs. Britania, 6. Shelb--n, 7. Dun--i--g, 8. Benidick Rattle Snake’, published on 18 February, 1783 (Figure 1.2). At this time, the Ministry of Shelburne was falling, and Shelburne had made unsuccessful overtures first to Charles James Fox and then to North, who had clearly been drawing together.111 The print shows a number of figures, sitting and standing, the words of their catch or song issuing in large labels from their mouths, their identity indicated by numbers referring to an explanation engraved beneath the title. In the centre stand (1) America, as an Indian

Figure 1.2 Thomas Colley, ‘A political concert; the vocal parts by 1. Miss America, 2. Franklin, 3. F--x, 4. Kepp--ll, 5. Mrs. Britania, 6. Shelb--n, 7. Dun--i--g, 8. Benidick Rattle Snake’ ([London]: Richardson, 1783). Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-10082.

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woman, on the left, and (5) Britannia, on the right, each with a hand on a pole topped with a liberty cap. America, wearing her head-dress of feathers and a draped kirtle with sandals, holds a sword; she sings, ‘Oh give me death or liberty O give me &c.’ Britannia, holding her shield and spear, sings, ‘Britons never shall be Slaves.’ On each side of these two is a seated figure: (2) Franklin (on the left) next to America, and (6) Shelburne (on the right) next to Britannia. Franklin, a dignified figure, wearing a fur cap, as in recent French portraits, his left hand thrust into his waistcoat, sings, ‘We’ll return it untainted to heaven well [sic] return &.’ Shelburne, with a more jaunty air, sings, ‘Oh what a charming thing a Battle, Oh &c. &c.’ Behind Shelburne, on the right, his hand resting on the back of his chair, and in profile to the left, stands (7) the British politician and barrister John Dunning, in councillor’s wig, gown and bands, singing, ‘hum hum hum crick crack crick crack Cannons rattle Oh what a Charming thing a battle’ (Dunning was known as ‘Orator Hum’). Behind Dunning, on the extreme right, stands (8) Benedick Rattle Snake, a creature with a man’s body but a snake from the waist downwards and with the head of a snake. He wears the coat of a military officer; from the pocket hangs a paper, ‘dying Speech of Major Andree’. He is singing, ‘Blood & plunder oh what a Charming thing a Battle.’ Over his head is suspended a hatchment, entitled ‘Benedict Rattle Snake’s Arms’, showing a gallows on the cross-beam of which sits a devil playing a fiddle. Benedick Rattle Snake is Benedict Arnold, the American officer whose treacherous design to surrender West Point in 1780 involved the death of Major André as a spy. After serving as brigadier-general with the British, Arnold came to England in 1782. This protest against Shelburne’s peace objects to Arnold retiring to England after hostilities when the hero André is dead. Behind Franklin, on the left, stands (4) Augustus Keppel, an admiral in the British Navy, one hand thrust in his waistcoat, the other in his breeches pocket, singing, ‘Then a Crusing we will go then a Crusing we will go.’ On the extreme left, next to Keppel, stands Fox, his hands in his breeches pockets, singing ‘Give Peace America with you & war with all the World.’112 Hopkinson would present himself in the united character of poet and musician in the dedication to George Washington of his Seven [recte Eight] Songs for the Harpsichord or Forte Piano (1788). Acknowledging receipt of the work in a letter to Hopkinson of 5 February 1789, Washington wrote: We are told of the amazing powers of musick in ancient times but the stories of its effects are so surprising that we are not obliged to believe them [. . .] and if I before doubted the truth of their relations with respect to the power of musick, I am now fully convinced of their falsity – because I would not, for the honor

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of my Country, allow that we are left by the Ancients at an immeasurable distance in everything; and if they could sooth the ferocity of wild beasts – could draw the trees & the stones after them – [. . .] I am sure that your productions would have had at least virtue enough in them (without the aid of voice or instrument) to soften the Ice of the Delaware & Potomack – and in that case you should have had an earlier acknowledgement.113

Hopkinson replied on 3 March 1789 with a light-hearted defence of his music’s ‘melting’ powers, but also considered ways of resolving the debate concerning the music of the ancients compared to modern music. Like Bacon, Hopkinson applies Orpheus’s music to moral or civil philosophy: ‘Orpheus was a Legislator and civilizer of his Country. In those Days Laws were promulgated in Verse and sung to the Harp, and the Poets by a Figure in Rhetoric have attributed the salutary Effects of his Laws to the Tune to which they were play’d and sung.’114 Hopkinson adopts the pose of bard of the United States in Seven Songs, not to ‘promulgate’ laws, but to link together citizens of the new nation through musical ‘sympathy’. In a letter to Jefferson of 1 December 1788, enclosing a copy of the collection, Hopkinson wrote: ‘The last Song, if play’d very slow, and sung with Expression, is forcibly pathetic, at least in my Family.’115 Jefferson replied from Paris on 13 March 1789: ‘I will not tell you [. . .] how well the last of them merits praise for it’s [sic] pathos, but relate a fact only, which is that while my elder daughter was playing it on the harpsichord, I happened to look towards the fire and saw the younger one all in tears. I asked her if she was sick? She said “no; but the tune was so mournful.” ’116

Jefferson, Piccinni and the French Revolution Jefferson had been appointed minister plenipotentiary to France on 7 May 1784, charged by Congress with the role of assisting John Adams and Benjamin Franklin in obtaining advantageous commercial treaties.117 His ticket purchases for musical performances while he was minister to France show that he was an enthusiastic concert- and opera-goer throughout his European sojourn.118 Yet these records also understate his intense participation in Parisian musical life. As Sandor Salgo argues: ‘It is beyond question that [ Jefferson] was frequently a guest of highly-placed friends in many of the concerts, operas, recitals, and soirées that were constantly taking place in the French capital. He had no need to purchase tickets for those events, so he, of course, did not record them as expenses.’119 Jefferson does not appear to have stated publicly his opinion of the relative merits of Gluck and Piccinni.120 It is likely, however, that he sided with

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the Piccinnistes, for external reasons at least.121 Jefferson had an introduction to Piccinni from his friend and neighbour in Virginia the Italian physician Philip Mazzei.122 Furthermore, Jean François Marmontel, Piccinni’s principal collaborator, was a regular guest at Jefferson’s table during his stay in Paris.123 Jefferson also had little regard for Marie Antoinette, who was a supporter of Gluck.124 Two of Jefferson’s three recorded visits to the Opéra were to hear works in the genre of tragédie lyrique by Piccinni. On 9 October 1785 he saw Piccinni’s Didon (composed to a libretto by Marmontel, after the story in Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 4); and on 20 January 1786 he saw Piccinni’s Pénélope (composed to a libretto by Marmontel, after the story in Homer’s Odyssey).125 Marmontel sought in his librettos to represent the psychological complexities of his main characters, showing – within the structure of rhyming verse – the emotions that animate them and guide their actions. The opening recitative of Act II, scene vii of Didon, for example, depicts the contrasting emotions of Didon and Enée to their anticipated separation: Didon: Notre hymen est par vous différé! Enée: Aux Troyens, à mon fils, je dois Un autre Empire. Didon: Malheureuse! Achevez. A peine je respire. Enée: Tel est l’ordre des Dieux. C’est à moi d’accomplir Cette loi, pour nos cœurs si fatale et si dure; Et je suis impie et parjure, Si rebelle à mon sort, je tarde à le remplir. Didon: Il est donc vrai! Enée: Juget des tourments que j’endure. A peine le sommeil appesantit mes yeux, L’ombre d’un père m’épouvante. Je l’entends, je la vois plaintive, menaçante Presser nos funestes adieux. (Dido: You are postponing our hymen! Aeneas: I owe the Trojans and my son Another Kingdom. Dido: Wretched me! Continue, I hardly breathe. Aeneas: This is the will of the gods. I must obey Their law, so fateful and harsh for our hearts; And I shall be a wretch and a perjurer If, going against my fate, I hesitate to observe it. Dido: Then it is true! Aeneas: Look at the tortures I am enduring.

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As soon as sleep closes my eyes My father’s ghost comes to haunt me. I hear him, I see him mournful, threatening, Hasten our woeful farewells.)126

In the music to Didon, Piccinni strives to embody the aesthetic principles of Marmontel, who had declared, in his Essai sur les révolutions de la musique en France (Essay on the Musical Revolutions in France) (1777), that ‘passions are indeed expressed with cries, shouts, piercing and terrible sounds; but if, in imitation, these accents are not embellished they will give, as it happens in nature, but the impression of suffering [. . .] Wanting to banish melodic singing from opera is as odd a proposition as wanting to banish beautiful verses from tragedy’.127 In encountering the ‘embellished’ accents of the passions in Piccinni’s operas, Jefferson may have discovered a way of reflecting upon the ‘divided empire’ of his own psyche.128 Jefferson’s letter to Maria Conway of 12 October 1786 – the ‘dialogue [. . .] between [his] Head and [his] Heart’ – dramatises the passions in a manner perhaps shaped by Piccinni’s Didon.129 Jefferson approached the beginning of the French Revolution as a theatrical spectacle. In a letter to Carmichael, dated 8 May 1789, for example, he describes the opening of the Estates-General in a hall built for the occasion on the premises of the Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs, Versailles, on 5 May 1789, as an ‘Opera’ as well as a ‘scene of business’. ‘[A]s an Opera,’ he writes, ‘it was imposing; as a scene of business the king’s speech was exactly what it should have been and very well delivered, not a word of the Chancellor’s [Charles Louis François de Paule de Barentin, Keeper of the Seals] was heard by any body, so that as yet I have never heard a single guess at what it was about. Mr. [ Jacques] Neckar’s [sic] [Minister of Finance] was as good as such a number of details would permit it to be.’130 The city itself would become a theatre, for example, his description in a letter to John Jay, dated 19 July 1789, of Louis XVI being led in triumph by his people through the streets of his capital on 17 July: The king’s carriage was in the center, on each side of it the States general, in two ranks, afoot, at their head the Marquis de la Fayette as commander in chief, on horseback, and Bourgeois guards before and behind. About 60,000 citizens of all forms and colours, armed with the muskets of the Bastille and Invalids, as far as they would go, the rest with pistols, swords, pikes, pruning hooks, scythes &c. lined all the streets thro’ which the procession passed, and, with the crowds of people in the streets, doors and windows, saluted them everywhere with cries of ‘vive la nation’.131

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For the main, he expresses a sense of optimism about the progress of the Revolution. ‘I have so much confidence in the good sense of man, and his qualifications for self-government,’ he wrote to Count Diodati, minister plenipotentiary of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin at the Court of Versailles, on 3 August 1789, ‘that I am never afraid of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force; and I will agree to be stoned as a false prophet if all does not end well in this country. Nor will it end with this country. Here is but the first chapter of the history of European liberty.’132 He does not, however, address the opposite: where reason is not left free. In his memoir dated 8 January 1821, he describes hosting at his house a dinner of the moderates: The discussions began at the hour of four, and were continued till ten o’clock in the evening; during which time I was a silent witness to a coolness and candor of argument unusual in the conflicts of political opinion; to a logical reasoning, and chaste eloquence, disfigured by no gaudy tinsel of rhetoric or declamation, and truly worthy of being placed in parallel with the finest dialogues of antiquity, as handed to us by Xenophon, by Plato and Cicero.133

Both Jefferson as the spectator and his guests as discussants refuse the theatrical coups that Johann Joachim Winckelmann had associated with the orators of Ancient Greece, and that Gluck had approximated in his operas. But logical reasoning and chaste eloquence would prove inadequate to events of the Revolution. Indeed, Jefferson’s rhetoric at times approximates to the coolness of the fanatic. On 3 January 1793, after his return to America, he wrote to William Short: ‘My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.’134 In a letter to Richard Price dated 8 January 1789 Jefferson claimed that the American Revolution had awakened ‘the thinking part of this nation [France] in general from the sleep of despotism in which they were sunk’.135 Of this awakening, however, the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre wrote: ‘I fear we might all become barbarous; I thought of the Saint-Bartholomew’s Day Massacre [. . .] and I asked myself, painfully, if we were even worthy of being free.’136 In his essay ‘An Account of the Influences of the Military and Political Events of the American Revolution upon the Human Body’ (1789), Benjamin Rush would describe how the political life of the Revolution produced a frenzied energy in the body politic that continued after the peace, when Americans found themselves ‘wholly unprepared for

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their new situation’. ‘The excess of the passion for liberty,’ he observes, ‘inflamed by the successful issue of the war, produced, in many people opinions and conduct, which could not be removed by reason nor restrained by government.’ The very passions that had engendered and sustained the Revolution and War of Independence, Rush feared, would undo the American people’s capacities to exercise independent judgement necessary for republican citizenship. Rush characterised this rage for liberty as a ‘species of insanity’ named ‘anarchia’.137 The French Revolution and the outbreak of war in Europe inflamed partisan divisions in America to a fever pitch. The Federalist party, formed by William Hamilton, saw their Republican adversaries as incipient Jacobins, while the Republicans, led by Jefferson and James Madison, viewed the Federalist administration of George Washington, the first President of the United States, as toadies of the British.138 America’s relation with France was a central concern throughout the administration of Washington and his successor John Adams. On 29 December 1798, Madison wrote to Jefferson about Adams’s annual presidential message to Congress, delivered on 8 December 1798. Adams had praised ‘the manly sense of national honor, dignity, and independence’ which had arisen in the country to defy French aggressions. He had noted, on the one hand, the failure of negotiations with France, but on the other described France as appearing solicitous to avoid a rupture with the United States. Adams affirmed, however, that until France changed policies with regard to neutral shipping and her diplomatic stance ‘to prescribe the qualifications’ of United States ministers, the country would continue to build its defences. The president concluded that vigorous war preparations would alone give the United States ‘an equal treaty’ with France and ensure its observance. He then advocated that Congress take further measures to strengthen the naval establishment.139 ‘The P[resident]’s speech,’ Madison comments, corresponds pretty much with the idea of it which was preconceived. It is the old song with no other variation of the tune than the spirit of the moment was thought to exact. It is evident also that he rises in his pitch as the Ecchoes of the S. & H. of R. embolden him, & particularly that he seizes with avidity that of the latter flattering his vigilance & firmness agst. illusory attempts on him, without noticing, as he was equally invited, the allusion to his pacific professions. The Senate as usual perform their part with alacrity in counteracting peace by dextrous provocations to the pride & irritability of the French Govt. It is pretty clear that their answer was cooked in the same shop, with the Speech. The finesse of the former calculated to impose on the public mind

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here, & the virulence of the latter still more calculated to draw from France the war, which can not be safely declared on this side, taste strongly of the genius of that subtle & malignant partizan of England [Hamilton] who has contributed so much to the public misfortunes. It is not difficult to see how A. could be made a puppet thro’ the instrumentality of creatures around him, nor how the Senate could be managed by similar artifice.140

In Madison’s representation, there is a failure of agency on the part of the orator. Adams responds unwisely to the ‘Ecchoes’ of the Senate and the House of Representatives. He is also a puppet, controlled by Hamilton. Madison’s account suggests frustration at the direction of the United States’s foreign policy. Yet there were continuities between foreign policy aspirations of Adams and Jefferson. On 26 January 1799, Jefferson wrote to Elbridge Gerry: ‘I am for free commerce with all nations, political connections with none.’141 The Convention of Mortefontaine of 1800 terminated the Franco-American alliance. While signed by Adams’s commissioners, it could not have gone into effect without the approval of Jefferson as vicepresident and president.142 John Quincy Adams wrote of the superiority of ancient over modern oratory in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (1810), which he delivered at Harvard University from 1806 to 1808, as the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. ‘In the flourishing periods of Athens and Rome,’ he commented, ‘eloquence was POWER. It was at once the instrument and the spur to ambition [. . .] The most powerful of human passions was enlisted in the cause of eloquence, and eloquence in return was the most effectual auxiliary to the passion. In proportion to the wonders, she achieved, was the eagerness to acquire the faculties of this mighty magician. Oratory was taught, as the occupation of a life.’143 Yet in the only countries of modern Europe where the semblance of deliberative assemblies has been preserved, he argues, corruption, in the form of executive influence, or in the guise of party spirit, by introducing a more compendious mode of securing decisions, ‘has crippled the sublimest efforts of oratory, and the votes upon questions of magnitude to the interest of nations are all told, long before the questions themselves are submitted to discussion’.144 However, he sees parallels between Ancient Greece and the United States of America: ‘Like them, we are divided into a number of separate commonwealths, all founded upon the principles of the most enlarged social and civil liberty. Like them, we are united in certain great national interests, and connected by a confederation, differing indeed in many essential particulars from theirs, but perhaps in a still higher degree favourable to the influence and exertion of eloquence.’ ‘Persuasion, or the

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influence of reason and of feeling,’ he concludes, ‘is the great if not the only instrument, whose operation can affect the acts of all our corporate bodies; of towns, cities, countries, states, and of the whole confederated empire. Here then eloquence is recommended by the most elevated usefulness, and encouraged by the promise of the most precious rewards.’145 As a coda to the lectures, Adams proposed that the lyre of Orpheus figure on a new seal for ‘the federal association of American States’, noting in his diary entry for 7 September 1816: ‘After the death of Orpheus, his lyre was placed among the constellations, and there, according to the Astronomics of Manilius, still possesses its original charm, constituting by its concords the music of the spheres, and drawing by its attraction the whole orb of heaven around with its own revolution.’146 The seal would depict the American eagle with thirteen stars around it projected into the heavens in the midst of the constellation of the lyre. The ‘moral application’ of the emblem is that the same power of harmony which originally produced the institutions of civil government to regulate the association of individual men, now presides in the federal association of the American States; that harmony is the soul of their combination; that their force consists in their union, and that while thus united it will be their destiny to revolve in harmony with the whole world, by the attractive influence of their union. It is the lyre of Orpheus that now leads the stars, as it originally drew after it rocks and trees. It is harmony that now binds in its influence the American States, as it originally drew individual men from the solitude of nature to the assemblages which formed states and nations.147

Adams is drawn to the speculative tradition of the music of the spheres. His account of the Orpheus legend culminates in a vision of cosmic harmony or order that provides a pattern for harmony in the American States. The lyre is an appropriate emblem for the new Republic and its hopes for the union of States. But the emblem obscures the connection of Orpheus’s music to the verbal arts. That connection was central to Renaissance interpretations of the legend and continued to be of importance to the musical intellectual and performance culture of the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Atlantic world.

CHAPTER 2

COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE NATION

The Science of Nations On 4 March 1801 Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office as the United States’s third president before delivering his first inaugural address in the Senate chamber of the not yet finished Capitol building. The occasion presented, in the words of one observer, Margaret Bayard Smith, ‘one of the most interesting scenes, a free people can ever witness’. ‘The changes of administration,’ she wrote to her sister-in-law Susan B. Smith, ‘which in every government and in every age have most generally been epochs of confusion, villainy and bloodshed, in this our happy country take place without any species of distraction or disorder. This day, has one of the most amiable and worthy men taken that seat to which he was called by the voice of his country.’ According to Bayard Smith, Jefferson delivered his address in ‘so low a tone that few heard it’; but early that morning he had given an advance copy of the text to her husband, the local Republican publisher Samuel Harrison Smith, for printing in the Washington, DC National Intelligencer, ‘so that on coming out of the house, the paper was distributed immediately’.1 This imprint served as the basis for the newspaper, pamphlet and broadside printings that followed over the next two to three weeks.2 The text of the address circulated through the United States with remarkable rapidity; it was also widely republished and commented upon abroad.3 Characterising the presidential campaign of 1800 as a contest of opinion, not a difference of principle, Jefferson sought in his speech to assuage the bitter rivalry between Federalists and Republicans that had culminated in the deadlock election (the deadlock had eventually been

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broken by Congress’s election of Jefferson on the thirty-sixth ballot on 17 February 1801).4 American political attitudes of the 1790s had been marked by intolerance, evident in the ‘violence of opinion [. . .] to be met with in a greater or less degree in all cities’, and the ‘disgraceful and hateful appellations [. . .] mutually given by the individuals of the parties to each other’, remarked upon by François-Alexandre-Frédéric, Duc de La Rouchefoucauld-Liancourt, in his Travels through the United States of North America [. . .] in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (1799).5 In contrast, Jefferson employed conciliatory rhetoric, reinforcing the moderate sentiments of his speech through sound, in particular the musical arrangement of sentences (theorised by Hugh Blair in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres).6 Jefferson attributed the loss of harmony and affection in the United States chiefly to the struggle in Europe and concern for national security. ‘During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world,’ he declared, during the agonising spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some and less by others; and should divide opinions as to measures of safety; but every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.7

Jefferson’s unifying exhortation, ‘We are all republicans: we are all federalists’, became the iconic shorthand for the moderate sentiments of the address.8 The speech won praise from commentators in the United States on both sides of the political divide. James A. Baynard observed in a letter to Alexander Hamilton of 8 March 1801 that it was ‘in political substance better than we [the Federalists] expected; and not answerable to the expectations of the Partizans of the other side’.9 Republicans, however, could read into Jefferson’s words an affirmation of liberties they felt had been undercut by the Adams administration’s Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Benjamin Rush wrote approvingly to Jefferson on 12 March 1801: ‘You have concentrated whole chapters into a few aphorisms in defense of the principles and form of our government.’10 In one of his aphorisms or statements of principle, Jefferson articulated his view of the proper relation of the United States to the wider world: ‘peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none’.11 The principle of avoiding entangling alliances

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had emerged out of the partisan politics of the Washington era, and had its origins in the economic-political system of Hamilton. According to Alexander DeConde, ‘Since the Hamiltonians were anti-French, in their view the French alliance was entangling. Ironically, they saw no evil in close connections with Great Britain; under the circumstances, in Federalist eyes there could be no “entanglement”, with its evil connotations, with Great Britain.’12 However, where the Federalists opposed the French Revolution and sympathised with their British trading partners in their struggle against the forces of mob rule and anarchy, the Republicans were warm supporters of revolutionary France.13 In a letter to Elbridge Gerry dated 21 June 1797, urging him to accept his nomination as an envoy to France, Jefferson wrote of this fracture in American public opinion: ‘Our countrymen have divided themselves by such strong affections to the French and the English, that nothing will secure us internally but a divorce from both nations. And this must be the object of every real American, and it’s [sic] attainment is practicable without much self-denial. But for this, peace is necessary.’14 With the ascendancy of Napoleon, Jefferson’s administration sought to dissociate itself from the French Revolution, and to redirect the universalist ambitions that American Republicans had projected onto France to the uncharted territory of the Louisiana Purchase.15 Jefferson envisioned, as Peter S. Onuf describes, ‘an American imperium in the New World, insulated from the corruption of European politics and free from the “blot” of an alien and inimical African presence’.16 Yet he continued to see Britain as a significant threat to American security. On 21 August 1807 he wrote to Thomas Leiper: ‘I never expected to be under the necessity of wishing success to Buonaparte. But the English being equally tyrannical at sea as he is on land, & that tyranny bearing on us in every point of either honor or interest, I say, “down with England” and as for what Buonaparte is then to do to us, let us trust to the chapter of accidents, I cannot, with the Anglomen, prefer a certain present evil to a future hypothetical one.’17 Jefferson was willing to use deadly force to protect American commercial interests. However, he drastically reduced the United States’s military, arguing that to maintain a large standing army and navy would be to invite war with a foreign power; this was in opposition to the Federalists, who insisted that preparation for war was the best guarantee for peace.18 Jefferson’s decision not to maintain a large standing army and navy closely interrelated with his economic policy: he sought to discharge the public debt and at the same time to lower internal taxes.19 These efforts would be satirised in both the New York periodical Salmagundi; Or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others (1807–8), co-authored by

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William Irving, Washington Irving and James Kirke Paulding, and in Washington Irving’s A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty [. . .] by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809). ‘Economy [. . .] is the watch-word of this nation,’ declares the fictional Tripolitan correspondent Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, a prisoner of the United States in the Barbary War, now on parole in New York, in Salmagundi No. V, attributed to William Irving and published on 7 March 1807; ‘I have been studying for a month past to divine its meaning, but truly am as much perplexed as ever. It is a kind of national starvation, an experiment how many comforts and necessaries the body politic can be deprived of before it perishes. It has already arrived to a lamentable degree of debility, and promises to share the fate of the Arabian philosopher, who proved that he could live without food, but unfortunately died just as he had brought his experiment to perfection.’20 The narrator of Washington Irving’s History does not become as intemperate about politics as William’s Mustapha; nevertheless, through Knickerbocker, Washington ‘imitates his brother’s political thinking, particularly concerning government by those who orate while they do nothing to protect the nation from foreign invasion’.21 With its focus on the period of the ‘Dutch domination’ from 1609 to 1664,22 Irving’s History made many explicit or implied comparisons between seventeenth-century New Netherlands and contemporary America; it also reflected, in Henry Adams’s words, ‘the political passions which marked the period of the Embargo’ from 1807 to 1809, when the United States was closed off to all foreign commerce.23 Persistent difficulties over commercial and maritime issues during the presidency of Jefferson and of his successor to the presidential office, James Madison, led to the American declaration of war with Britain in 1812.24 There was considerable opposition to this war in the United States, especially amongst Federalists.25 The War also attracted criticism from prominent opponents of Napoleon in Europe, such as Madame de Staël. Jefferson and de Staël had first become acquainted in the salons of Paris in the 1780s.26 Their correspondence brings into focus pressures on the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment in the early nineteenth century. On 25 April 1807 de Staël wrote to Jefferson from France of the death of her father Jacques Necker, of her condition of exile from Paris under a decree of Napoleon, and of her plans to emigrate to America – plans that she later dropped.27 She also promised to send Jefferson a copy of her recently published novel Corinne, ou l’Italie (Corinne, or Italy) (1807), a courtship novel set in Italy and Britain between 1794 and 1803, with a brief remembered liaison in revolutionary France. The novel opposes to Napoleon’s imperialistic designs de Staël’s own pluralistic vision of

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national differences.28 In so doing, it presents translation as a vehicle for cosmopolitan exchange, and as a cultural, even a moral, imperative.29 Jefferson replied on 16 July 1807: ‘I shall read with great pleasure whatever comes from your pen, having known its powers when I was in a situation to judge, nearer at hand, the talents which directed it.’ He went on to invoke the ‘wonderful scenes’ that had passed in the Old World since his departure from Paris, commenting: ‘Whether for the happiness of posterity must be left to their judgment. Even of their effect on those now living, we, at this distance, undertake not to decide. Unmeddling with the affairs of other nations, we presume not to prescribe or censure their course.’30 De Staël challenged this rhetoric of detachment following the outbreak of war between the United States and Britain. On 10 November 1812 she wrote to Jefferson from Stockholm: You tell me that America has nothing to do with the continent of Europe. Has she nothing to do with the human race? Can you be indifferent to the cause of free nations, you the most republican of all? Are you indifferent to the cause of thinking men, you, my dear Sir, who are placed in the very first rank of them? If you were to pass three months in France your generous blood would boil in your veins and you could not bear to serve Napoleon’s projects, even though believing it for the good of your country.31

For de Staël, the War of 1812 undercut the universal spirit of the American founding, the idea that the revolutionary ‘Cause’ of the United States was ‘the Cause of all Mankind’.32 While she claimed not to be acquainted with the circumstances that had led to the recent differences between the United States and Britain, she expressed her regret at the war, which she characterised as a civil war, ‘for free people are all of the same family’. Britain, she argued, was the sole barrier against Napoleon’s despotism. ‘When a nation of twelve million souls is obliged to struggle against one hundred millions coerced by one man,’ she asked rhetorically, ‘is it astonishing that certain abuses creep into the means it is obliged to employ in order to resist?’33 In his reply of 28 May 1813, Jefferson characterised Napoleon as ‘the greatest of the destroyers of the human race’. But he defended the United States’s decision to declare war on Britain, arguing that, while Napoleon would die and his tyrannies with him, ‘[t]he English Government and its pyratical principles and practice have no fixed term of duration’.34 For Jefferson, the exigencies of national security had to take precedence over the putative claims of the cause of free nations. De Staël’s fervent defence of liberty in opposition to Napoleon recommended her to the British press, in particular the Edinburgh Review, which

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published favourable reviews of her work in 1813 by Francis Jeffrey (on her philosophical treatise De la littérature considerée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales [On Literature Considered in its Relationship to Social Institutions] [1800]), and Sir James Mackintosh (on her biography of German-speaking lands, De l’Allemagne [Of Germany] – a work that had been pulped by Napoleon’s troops as anti-French on its first appearance in 1810, and reprinted by the London publisher John Murray in 1813).35 Under Washington Irving’s editorship, the Analectic Magazine reprinted both these reviews (during his first extended tour of Europe from 1804 to 1806 Irving had met the exiled de Staël in Rome, on 4 April 1805, at the house of Baron von Humboldt, the Prussian Minister).36 Irving also engaged with de Staël’s new science – the science of nations – in his original contributions to the magazine, writing, for example, in his biography of the American naval officer Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (1813): One of the dearest wishes of our hearts is to see a firm and well grounded friendship between us [Britain and America]. But friendship can never long endure unless founded on mutual respect, and maintained with mutual independence; and however we may deplore the present war, this double good will spring out of it, we will learn our own value and resources and we will teach our antagonists and the world at large to know and estimate us properly. There is an obsequious deference in the minds of too many of our countrymen towards Great Britain, that not only impairs the independence of the national character, but defeats the very object they would obtain.37

In such passages, Irving developed de Staël’s art of analysing ‘the spirit of nations, and the springs which move them’ by applying her theory and practice to the American condition.38 Following the British attack on Washington, DC, in August 1814, Irving joined the New York militia as an aide-de-camp to Governor Daniel D. Tompkins. However, his war adventure ended abruptly in December 1814 when Tompkins returned to the session of the legislature at Albany; shortly afterwards, on 15 February 1815, Madison ratified the treaty of peace with Britain. Disillusioned with post-war America, Irving set sail on 25 May 1815 for Liverpool, hoping to assist in the family import business, which had been badly affected by the war.39 During his second period of extended contact with European culture from 1815 to 1832, Irving collaborated in Dresden and Paris with the English dramatist and composer Barham Livius on a translation of Carl Maria von Weber’s ‘Romantic Opera’ Der Freischütz (1821) (originally composed to a text by Friedrich Kind after Johann August Apel’s novella

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Der Freischütz: eine Volkssage [The Freeshooter: A Folktale, 1810]). Like de Staël, Irving viewed translation as an alternative to narrow nationalism and as a form of mediation, akin to the activity of the orator situated between a subject and a public. Just as the rhetorically aware speaker knows that there is no one right way of expressing a given set of ideas or feelings, so it is with the translator, who, in Peter France’s words, ‘is faced with choices at every turn, negotiating between [. . .] source culture and target culture (or cultures, since translations are not confined to a particular cultural moment)’.40 A choice of tactic is inevitable, and the awareness of this can be paralysing or exhilarating.

Weber, Livius and Irving Der Freischütz premiered at the Schauspielhaus, Berlin, on 18 June 1821, to immediate acclaim. The opera depicts two sharply contrasting musical worlds: hunting life, and the rule of the demonic powers as personified by the Black Huntsman, Samiel.41 The world of simple rustic life and trust in God is treated primarily, in the words of the New Grove, ‘in a lyrical fashion that is rhythmically square, euphonious, consonant, diatonic and in the major mode. The purest examples of this type approximate to folk music’. The powers of evil, on the other hand, ‘are consistently characterized through antitheses to the foregoing: minor mode, dissonance, chromaticism, rhythmic disturbance and unusual sonorities [. . .] in conjunction with vocal styles that are either non-cantabile, inappropriate [. . .] or not even song at all’. Features that cut across this dichotomy serve to characterize the overall ambience, like strophic form, which is taken up as an emblem of folk life both by the villagers and by Caspar (but to very different effect), and the sound of the horns, which characterize not only the hunting activities of Max’s colleagues but also the demonic ghostly huntsmen in the Act 2 finale. Max also cuts across the dichotomy, inasmuch as he is caught between the two spheres.42

The Berlin audience embraced the opera’s theatricality and tuneful, folklike melodies and also ‘welcomed it as a potent symbol of German cultural resistance to the Franco-Italian style’ of King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia’s unpopular protégé, Gaspare Spontini.43 Within six months the opera was heard in Berlin the exceptional number of seventeen times, always to full houses, and was taken up rapidly and widely by other theatres.44 ‘Here,’ Richard Wagner would later write, ‘the most opposite tendencies of political life met at one common centre: from

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one end of Germany to the other the “Freischütz” was heard, sung, and danced.’45 In the first significant biography of Weber, that written by his son Max, Weber’s achievement, and in particular Der Freischütz, is portrayed in national, even militaristic, terms, as an act of liberation of German culture from pernicious foreign influences.46 However, the biography also describes Weber’s popularity beyond German-speaking central Europe, and how a ‘veritable Freischütz mania [. . .] flooded all England’ as rival productions of the opera opened in London in 1824 at the English Opera House (Lyceum), Covent Garden and Drury Lane.47 The handbills for the Covent Garden production, which premiered on 14 October 1824, attributed the adaptation to the popular playwright James R. Planché, with musical supervision by Livius. But the title page of the libretto that appeared a few weeks later carried these words: The Freyschütz; Or, The Wild Huntsman of Bohemia. A Romantic Opera, in Three Acts, Altered from the German by Barham Livius, Esq. The Music Composed by the Chevalier Carl Maria de Weber, Mâitre de Chapelle to the King of Saxony, and Director of the Opera at Dresden (1824) (Figure 2.1). In the preface Livius accorded to Planché ‘whatever of poetic merit this opera may possess’,48 but this profession of indebtedness appears to have been largely gestural, for on 22 October 1824 Livius, then resident in Paris, read to Irving what the latter described as ‘a very conceited ungentlemanlike letter from Planche about Freyschutz’.49 The letter, in which Planché apparently took credit for a greater portion of the libretto than Livius was prepared to grant, seemed to Irving so unfair that he immediately wrote to John Miller, the publisher of the libretto, on Livius’s behalf.50 Irving would have been able to comment authoritatively on the rival claims to authorship of Livius and Planché because he had worked with Livius on the text from January 1823, first in Dresden and later in Paris. Irving, however, had insisted upon anonymity, wishing to allow his dramatic apprenticeship to go without public recognition, at least until the success of his endeavours was established.51 Livius did indeed refrain from naming Irving in the Preface to the Freyschütz libretto, but acknowledged his obligation to a friend ‘whose name, were he permitted, it would be his pride and his pleasure to declare, for various valuable hints and emendations’.52 Clear evidence of Irving’s independent input into the collaboration with Livius and Planché on the Freyschütz survives in the form of a manuscript owned by the New York Public Library which contains two drafts of the work, a few associated notes and a fragment of the ‘hints’ Irving gave Livius for the introduction to the 1824 Freyschütz text.53 Irving’s lifelong interest in the theatre – not merely in dramatic

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/;i .:

~~ >c; t., ~uf­ THE FREYSCHUTZ; on,

TilE

WILD HUNTSMAN OF BOHEMIA. A ROMANTIC OPERA, I N THREE ACTS, ALTERED PROII TOE OERMA!< B\'

BARHAM LIVIUS, Esq.

'fHE MUSICoCOMPOSED BY

The Chevalier CART. MARIA DE WEBER, M:lilrc de Chapclle to the King of Saxony, and Director of the Opera at Dresden.

_.._ FIRST PERFORMED AT TilE

'fiiURSDAY,

OCTOBER

14, 1824.

Uonnon: PRINTED FOR JOHN !\fiLLER, NEW BRIDGE STREET, Dt.ACKPRIARS.

•

1824.

Figure 2.1  Barham Livius, The Freyschütz; Or, The Wild Huntsman of Bohemia. A Romantic Opera, in Three Acts, Altered from the German by Barham Livius [. . .] First performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, Thursday, October 14, 1824 (London: Miller, 1824). © The British Library Board.

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l­iterature but in actors, acting and stagecraft as well – is foreshadowed in his first series of publications, the nine ‘Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle’ (1802–3), addressed to his brother Peter Irving’s daily newspaper, the New York Morning Chronicle. Adopting the character of the Old Bachelor, the type of persona found in the eighteenth-century British or American periodical essay, Irving offered, in Letters III to VIII, a satirical ‘view of a New-York theatre’, specifically the Park Theatre, which had opened its doors on 29 January 1798, under the management of William Dunlap.54 Yet he would frankly declare himself ‘a friend to the [American] theatre’, if not to all its shortcomings, in a letter written from Genoa on 20 December 1804 to William Irving.55 On his first extended tour of Europe, Irving regularly attended the theatre. He commented, for example, on ‘the brilliancy of the theatres, operas, &c.’ at Paris, in a letter to his brother Peter Irving of 15 July 1805;56 and on the reputation and acting of Charles Kemble, ‘the “grand Colossus” of Tragedy in London’, in a letter of 26 October 1805 to William Irving.57 While in London in 1805, Irving was introduced to Kemble. Returning to Britain in 1815, he found Kemble and his wife acting in Liverpool, and soon renewed his acquaintance with them.58 Excursions from the ‘sordid cares’ of the family business in Liverpool included several visits to London, and outings to the theatre.59 There is no evidence that he attended the first British performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1786), which took place in Italian at the King’s Theatre, London, on 12 April 1817. But he would have been aware of the translation and adaptation of the opera to the English stage by Isaac Pocock and Henry Bishop as The Libertine, with Kemble in the title role; in this version it premiered at Covent Garden on 20 May 1817. Irving would have had the opportunity to discuss continental European drama and literature in relation to the work of his British contemporaries in London at the house of the publisher John Murray, whose drawing room was renowned as a gathering place for writers, especially those whose books he published.60 In particular, Byron’s verse drama Manfred, which had been published by Murray in June 1817, might well have stimulated Irving’s interest in the creative reworking of German literature. Although Byron insisted that Manfred was not intended for the stage, its scenes of ‘Incantation’, its renewal of Gothic tropes, and its treatment of the guilty remorse of an individual make it a likely model for Irving’s Freyschütz translation. German literature and legend would also have been a topic of discussion between Irving and Walter Scott in late August and early September 1817.61 Scott had been ‘German-mad’ in the 1790s, and had undertaken

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t­ranslations from Goethe.62 He had also published translations of two supernatural ballads from Gottfried Augustus Bürger, ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ and ‘Lenore’, in 1796, under the title The Chase and William and Helen.63 ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ has particular affinities with the legend of Der Freischütz. Scott may well have imparted to Irving his views of the theory and practice of translation. In his preface to his translations from Bürger, Scott describes himself ‘as more anxious to convey the general effect, than to adhere very closely to the language or arrangement of the original poems’.64 Such an aim accords with the precepts set out by Alexander Fraser Tytler in his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791). Tytler had also produced, in 1792, the first English version of Schiller’s Die Räuber (The Robbers) (1789). Scott had attended Tytler’s ‘class of History’ during his time at the University of Edinburgh between 1789 and 1792, and would have been encouraged by his teacher and friend in his experiments in German translation.65 According to Tytler, a good translation is ‘That, in which the merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another language, as to be as distinctly apprehended, and as strongly felt, by a native of the country to which that language belongs, as it is by those who speak the language of the original work.’66 He therefore proposed three general rules: I. THAT the Translation should give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original work. II. THAT the style and manner of writing should be of the same character with that of the original. III. THAT the Translation should have all the ease of original composition.67

Reviewing the practice of translation from ancient times to the present, Tytler found that some translators had been too much in thrall to the ‘style’ of the source text. Tytler thought of translation instead as continuing the process of composition, adjusting the source text to suit its changed circumstances. But he also wished to clarify the limits of the translator’s freedom. Tytler argued that the liberty of ‘adding or retrenching’ is more allowable in verse than in prose, citing the opinion of the seventeenthcentury Royalist poet and translator Sir John Denham.68 Samuel Johnson, in his life of ‘Denham’ (1779), had characterised the Royalist poet as ‘one of the first that understood the necessity of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting lines, and interpreting single words’.69 Scott’s translation of Bürger’s ballad is done in conformity with these principles; Scott, for example, turns the original six-line stanzas into quatrains. Indeed, William Taylor of Norwich, whose 1790s translation of ‘Lenore’ had led

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Scott to Bürger, questioned some of the liberties Scott had taken when the latter presented him with a copy.70 Irving began his study of German following his visit to Abbotsford. He had a double purpose: a recreational one in the wake of the bankruptcy of the family import business, and an intellectual one, German figuring as ‘a gateway to European folklore’.71 Three tales in The Sketch Book make use of German legendary material: ‘Rip Van Winkle’, ‘The Spectre Bridegroom’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’.72 It is likely that Scott’s and Taylor’s translations of Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ are behind ‘The Spectre Bridegroom’, which burlesques the ballad, and alludes to its translation history, the narrator describing how an evening of ghostly storytelling ‘nearly frightened the ladies into hysterics with the history of the goblin horseman that carried away the fair Leonora; a dreadful, but true story, which has since been put into excellent verse, and is read and believed by all the world’.73 In his second collection, Bracebridge Hall: Or, The Humourists: A Medley by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1822), Irving would also refer to ‘the wild huntsman, the favorite goblin in German tales’ in his essay ‘Popular Superstitions’, and to ‘pistols loaded with silver bullets’, reminiscent of the legend of Der Freischütz, in his tale ‘Dolph Heyliger’.74 Knowledge of Scott’s early interest in German literature and legend may well have contributed to Irving’s decision, shortly after the publication of Bracebridge Hall, to travel from England to German-speaking central Europe. Seeking to escape the distractions of the fashionable world, to gain relief from a ‘cutaneous complaint’ that had troubled him for almost a year, and to gather material for a planned ‘work on Germany’ in the style of The Sketch Book, Irving set out from London on 6 July 1822.75 This excursion into German lands would last an entire year, and include a particularly memorable winter in Dresden, where Weber held the post of Royal Saxon ‘Kapellmeister’ and director of the Opera. Irving sought to extend his knowledge of the history and culture of German-speaking central Europe by reading significant works of German Classicism and Romanticism, such as Goethe’s Faust (part 1, 1808) and Schiller’s Wallenstein (1798–9), and by attending the theatre. On 20 September 1822, he noted in his journal: ‘Go to Darmstadt. See opera Freischutz’.76 Weber’s opera quickly became a favourite of Irving, who saw further performances of the work at Munich on 13 October 1822, at Dresden on 8 May 1823 (probably with Weber conducting), and at Prague on 8 and 20 June 1823.77 Irving’s tour of central Europe coincided with the emergence of Weber as the leading exponent of German opera, and as an international celebrity. In Dresden, Irving visited the home of Johann Ludwig Tieck, a

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prominent representative of early German Romanticism, who would later complete A. W. von Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare’s works.78 He also saw at first hand the hunting traditions that figure so prominently in Bürger’s ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ and Weber’s Der Freischütz, writing in his journal on 21 January 1823: Horns sounded from the Kings escort to call whippers in to lay on the hounds – ride to place where the king is – the whippers in surround the hounds – Sound horns – whip the dogs into a heap – at particular note hounds cast loose and away every body goes – follow a young piqueur on a white horse – darting about of piqueurs thro the wood – sound of horns – dogs &c [. . .] Scrambling among trees coverd with snow – Roads one way marked with letters – another way with figures – men stationed by fires to give notice which way the animal goes – lose the hounds – fall in with Kings train – thrown out – stop – listen – picturesque attitudes of huntsmen[.]79

Irving began working with Livius on the translation of Der Freischütz in the same month as this journal entry.80 Livius had come to Dresden shortly before Irving in order to purchase from Weber the scores of Der Freischütz and Weber’s early opera Abu Hassan (1811), and the right to adapt them for the English stage. According to Wayne R. Kime, Irving’s capacity to contribute to the enterprise was at first ‘severely limited’ because of the standard of his German, but as the weeks passed, the two men gradually came to work together on an equal basis.81 Irving’s initial draft of the play extended to forty-eight sheets of paper, thirty of which are included in the extant manuscript. In preparing his first draft, Kime explains, ‘Irving did not include lyrics corresponding to the various songs in the opera, but he indicated them (“Aria”, “Recitative”, and so on) at the points where they were to be inserted. He did write texts of at least two songs and fragments of two more on unnumbered pages following the draft; but in light of his and Livius’ attention to the songs earlier in 1823, it is by no means certain that he made an attempt to translate the other lyrics.’82 Later that year, in Paris, Irving commented twice in his journal on his difficulties with the songs.83 Observing that ‘poetical translation is less subjected to restraint than prose translation, and allows more of the freedom of original composition’, Tytler had argued in his Essay on the Principles of Translation that ‘to exercise this freedom with propriety, a translator must have the talent of original composition in poetry; and therefore, that in this species of translation, the possession of a genius akin to that of his author, is more essentially necessary than in any other’.84 Irving, however, had little confidence in his abilities as a poet. He was able to contribute more easily to other aspects of

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the collaboration, arranging the play into a three-act structure, adjusting the plot and composing the spoken dialogue. The joint intentions of Irving and Livius are brought into focus in Irving’s manuscript ‘hints’ for Livius, and in Livius’s preface to the published libretto, which draws closely on them. According to Irving, the audience is left in doubt, in Friedrich Kind’s version, as to how far the protagonist Max had committed himself in his ‘half sealed dealing with the fiend’: ‘Whether he was to be saved or Damned, or whether indeed, from his weakness & indecision of character, he were worthy of either’.85 In Irving’s and Livius’s work, as Irving describes it, ‘the Hero is made to rise superior to temptation; to spurn at all base & underhand means of securing success, and by his steadfastness & faith to merit & receive the protection of heaven’.86 Irving goes on: To carry on the supernatural part of the story however another person is made to yield to temptation & to seek the assistance of infernal agency. He is represented as inflated by the vanity of temporary success & the moment of successful temptation is when he is in the midst of dissolute revelry. The character of Caspar, the hunter who has sold himself to the fiend, & who seeks to gain a respite by furnishing fresh victims, has been heightened and extended. A more poetical tone has been given to it, as more suited to a being who holds communion with the invisible world, and is familiar with such terrible agencies[.]87

The translators also sought to give a more vague and indistinct character to the ‘machinery of the fable’, that is, the play’s supernatural action.88 Aligning himself with the traditions of popular theatre, Weber had insisted upon the need for a maximum amount of realistic depiction of the mysterious and the spooky. Others, however, including the set designer for the Berlin premiere of Der Freischütz, Carl Wilhelm Gropius (working under the supervision of Karl Friedrich Schinkel), held the view associated with theatre for higher social levels that the stage action is a symbolic representation of the action, and the stage set a symbolic evocation of the world in which the action happens to be situated.89 Siding against Weber in this clash, Kind wrote after the Dresden premiere of Der Freischütz that poetry and works for the stage should represent ‘those mysterious [ghostly] forces in an unspecified manner as possible’, avoiding such things as ‘horrible images distorted to the point of repugnance’.90 Irving and Livius may have been influenced by Kind’s argument. ‘A veil of uncertainty,’ Livius writes in the preface to the published libretto, ‘has been thrown over the evil power invoked and he appears shrouded in the fanciful and picturesque

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superstition of “the Wild Huntsman”, that favourite hero of the forest legends of Germany.’91 Livius does not analyse in detail the technical means used by Weber to develop an overall colouring or unity for the opera. But he does comment upon the relation of sound to sense in the original, as posing a particular challenge to the translator. ‘It is,’ he writes, the distinguishing characteristic of the composer of the Freyschüts, that he marries sound to sense. Unlike the production of the modern school of Italy, the music of this great master is always in beautiful keeping with the general character of the subject to which it is applied: each particular sentiment finds the tones to which it is allied; every particular word its appropriate note. The difficulty of adapting words to music – such music especially under the changes which have been instituted in this piece, may readily be conceived; the Author therefore trusts, that the liberal critic, appreciating the arduous nature of the task, will regard his labours with indulgence.92

Adaptations for the English stage, Livius implies, are incompatible with the German ideal for opera, as defined by Weber: ‘a self-sufficient work of art in which every feature and every contribution by the related arts are moulded together in a certain way and dissolve, to form a new world’.93 The Irving–Livius version struggles for such coherence, alternating instead between song and spoken dialogue in the ad hoc tradition of Pocock and Bishop’s The Libertine. Weber, in a letter to Planché of 6 January 1825, would remark ruefully that the ‘cut of an English opera is certainly very different from a German one – the English is more a drama with songs’.94 A reader of Livius’s libretto put it more bluntly: To preserve entire and uninjured the delicate and beautiful structure of the music of Der Freyschutz has been the proclaimed object of the author’s chief attention and anxiety. His real object seems to have been to treat the music of Weber as having been composed for no other purpose but for being thrown aside at the pleasure of an unmusical director or a writer[’]s melodramatic spectacle. His treatment of Weber’s music is in perfect keeping with his treatment of the German drama which with affected sentiment and double refined feelings of morality he so mercilessly condemns.95

The change in the plot and the introduction of the forester who yields to the temptations of Caspar, in the place of the hero, required some ‘throwing aside’ of Weber’s music. There is no place, for example, in Irving’s draft or Livius’s published version of the libretto, for Kaspar’s menacing aria,

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which occurs in Kind’s version at the end of Act I, scene vi (after Kaspar has persuaded Max to meet him at the Wolf’s Glen at midnight): Schweig, schweig – damit dich niemand warnt! Der Hölle Netz hat dich umgarnt! Nichts kann vom tiefen Fall dich retten, Nichts kann dich retten vom teifen Fall! Umgebt ihn, ihr Geister, mit Dunkel beschwingt! Schon trägt er knirschend eure Ketten! Triumph, Triumph, Triumph, die Rache gelingt! (Hell has snared you in its net! Nothing can save you from the deep abyss, From the deep abyss nothing can save you! Surround him, you spirits winged with darkness! Already he lies in your chains, gnashing his teeth! Triumph, triumph, triumph. Revenge is assured!)96

Like Kemble’s Don in The Libertine, Irving and Livius’s Caspar does not sing. Instead, he soliloquises in the manner of the hero of early nineteenthcentury melodrama. There are also echoes of Shakespeare and the ‘Old Dramatic Writers’ listed in Irving’s manuscript notebook of 1818, such as Christopher Marlowe.97 Caspar’s soliloquy at the end of Act I, scene i, for example, which introduces the audience to the ‘machinery of the fable’, recalls Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ and Faustus’s final speech, ‘Ah Faustus / Now hast thou but one bare hour to live’: Enter Caspar from the Inn Are they then gone? So – my spirit is free again. Curse on their piping & their dancing – their shallow, broad mouthed merriment – Ever more music – ever more frolick – as if ’twere done to mad me. And I must go about with evil luck, but fretting festering heart, a cursed being in a happy world – a lost one – a hopeless crawler upon earth – No matter, still I am on earth – Still still I breathe this cooling air of heaven – better be here however bad than elsewhere. But how to keep here that’s the question – This very night my term of compact ends, and ere tomorrow’s sun, this unknown being claims me for his own, unless I soothe him with another votary. Strange magic bond in which I have involved myself! Little did that dotard think when prating about magic spells, how near he touched upon the truth. The Wild Huntsman! inexplicable being! Still he has kept his word, and Albert spell bound by his arts is driven to despair. Thus far my project thrives. Yes yes. Albert is in the very state of mind that suits my purpose – now to work on him, to tempt him to the scene

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of incantation and throw him into the Wild Huntsman’s power. But should he shun the snare! Some other victim must be had – no time is to be lost – why – a little wine and flattery will make an easy dupe of that poor – &c &c &c98

It is easy to dismiss such passages as awkward bombast: the alliterative style in particular is archaic, a throwback to the popular theatre of the ‘Old Dramatic Writers’. But the manuscript also reveals the complexities of the rhetorical situation of the translator. Like Scott in ‘The Chase’, Irving seeks to add a new ‘spirit’ to the work, as he continues the process of composition. In his relation to his original, he becomes a translator of the ‘second epoch’, as defined by Goethe in his notes to his West-Östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan) (1819). Conceptualising the history and progress of translation as three epochs, Goethe argues that the translator of the second epoch aims not merely ‘to acquaint us with the foreign country on our own terms’ (the task of the translator of the first epoch), but ‘to transport himself into the foreign situation’. However, he ‘actually only appropriates the foreign idea and represents it as his own’. Like Wieland, in Goethe’s description, Irving reveals in his draft ‘his own peculiar understanding and taste, which he adapt[s] to antiquity and foreign countries only to the extent that he f[inds] it convenient’. Both Irving’s manuscript and the published Freyschütz libretto exist at a considerable distance from Goethe’s ‘third and final epoch’, the highest stage in this conceptual history of the progress of translation, in which the goal of translation is ‘to achieve perfect identity with the original, so that the one does not exist instead of the other but in the other’s place’.99 Nevertheless, Irving was able to bring to the collaboration with Livius and Planché his knowledge and experience of the successes and failures of performances of Der Freischütz in central Europe, in particular as these related to the problem of representing supernatural action on the stage. He provides detailed instructions, for example, for the celebrated ‘Scene of Incantation’ in the Wolf’s Glen (Act II, scene ii), during which Kaspar and Max, in the original version of the opera, obtain magic bullets from Samiel, ‘in a spectacular nocturnal scene, filled with ghostly apparitions and novel stage effects inspired by popular theatre’.100 In Irving’s draft libretto, Samiel is renamed Urian, and Andreas, ‘a Roistering Braggart’ (rather than the hero Albert), meets Caspar in the Glen: Chorus &c &c Urian – appear – appear Rock opens & Urian appears – (P.S. I should prefer that the goblin should appear in some other manner than from the center of a rock – this shoving aside of

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canvas – or trap door has too barefaced a look of mechanism, for any good effect – These tricks always appear paltry to me – Let him rise thro a trap door which is concealed by some small rocks –) [. . .] Andreas appears among the rocks (omit the appearance of ghosts – they always to my notion spoiled the grandeur of the scene of incantation – which ought to have a singleness in its nature – Something magical not ghostly. Besides, though they might be sent to warn Albert – they would hardly trouble themselves about such a random blade as Andreas –) [. . .] (Snakes & other reptiles surround Andreas – he endeavours to drive them off) Caspar. Thou’rt yet a novice – come within this circle – ’tis a magic wall between us and all evil spirits that reaches from the centre to the firmament – The time approaches – fear not, whate’er thou seest or hear’st – ’Tis not without severest struggles that nature yields her secrets up to us weak mortals. – Be silent now until thou seest me fall & cry for aid – then call thyself. Else Andreas we are lost – (He points to the moon which is partially eclipsed) See – this is the moment – the moon already is eclipsed – NB – Private note – (In the process of the incantation let the uproar of the scene gradually encrease – The apparition of the Wild Huntsman hounds &c in the air [should] be at the sixth Ball – And at the seventh let the trees fall – rocks roll on the stage &c &c &c – & the Wild Huntsman appear from behind a rock &c &c &c – But omit the phantasmagoria of Bertha – Death &c which in my opinion would give a commonplace character to the whole and be a complete Bathos – The scene as an incantation may be made grand and awful – but care must be taken to avoid all commonplace stage trickery – such as rocks opening by slides – transparencies of queer faces appearing on rocks as in the representation at Dresden &c &c –101

Livius, unlike Irving, portrays the actual casting of the seven magic bullets, specifying in his stage directions the necessary visual accompaniments.102 Yet the scene remains consistent with Irving’s vision. In particular, Livius’s translation of the ghostly chorus ‘Durch Berg und Tal, durch Schlund und Schacht’ (‘Over hill and dale, through gorge and ravine’), reveals a shared influence – Bürger’s ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ and ‘Lenore’ in English translation: Hurray, hurray! o’er hill and wold Through storm and night our course we hold! O’er field and forest, tow’r and tide, Hurrah, hurrah! How swift we ride! Yoho! Hurrah! Yoho! Hurrah! &c.103

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The most striking divergence between Irving’s manuscript and Livius’s published text occurs at the conclusion of the two plays. Irving’s final scene ends on a positive note consistent with that sounded by Kind: Caspar is dead, Bertha (Kind’s Agathe) and Albert (Max) are about to be married, and Andreas is conditionally forgiven by the Duke. In contrast, omitting the other elements of Irving’s concluding scene, Livius presents a chilling portrayal of Caspar being overcome by the Wild Huntsman (Act III, scene iv): Caspar. Ha! caught in my own snare! – Defeated! – Lost! – Must I then fall, and drag no ruin with me? Let me go hence – the day grows dark – the air is thick and stifling! – Stand off, and let me breathe! He comes! – He comes! I am beset! – Off! – Off! – They tear me! – Save me! Save me from their fangs! [He rushes towards a groupe of Hunters, who are standing before the tree. They fly from him with horror – he staggers and supports himself by clinging to a projecting, withered branch. The stage darkens, the thunder rolls, the tree disappears, and the figure of the Wild Huntsman is seen in its place, grasping CASPAR by the hand that seized the withered branch, which has become the arm of the Demon. A terrible crash of thunder follows, the Huntsman disappears with CASPAR. The stage becomes rapidly light again, and the curtain falls upon a general picture.104

‘Perhaps the blue pencil of the stage manager,’ suggests Walter A. Reichart, ‘or of the more experienced Planché, eliminated the dreary verbiage of Irving’s closing scene.’105

Romantic Opera in Translation Reviews that followed Der Freischütz throughout the German-speaking world celebrated the opera as a distinctive icon of national cultural identity.106 They anticipated Wagner’s presentation of the work as the authentic expression of the German Volk. Wagner declared: My glorious German fatherland, how can I else than love thee, how fondly must I dote upon thee, were it only that from out thy soil there sprang the ‘Freischütz’! Needs must I love the German Folk that loves the ‘Freischütz’, that eke to-day believes the marvels of its most naïve Saga, that e’en to-day, in full-grown manhood, still feels those mysterious thrills which made its heart beat fast in youth!107

Arguably, Der Freischütz was only displaced as the definitive German national opera by Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers

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of Nuremberg) (1868), with its more overtly nationalistic-political m ­ essages.108 The London press of the 1820s, on the other hand, gave little attention to the relation of Der Freischütz to the emergent concept of German national opera, or to ideas of the cultural rebirth of the nation (as articulated, for example, by Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his Reden an die deutsche Nation [Addresses to the German Nation] [1807–8]).109 Indeed, George Cruikshank parodied the opera’s connection with Gothic horror and with German national identity in twelve burlesque etchings after sketches by ‘Alfred Crowquill’ (Alfred Henry Forrester), which accompanied a travesty translation of the opera’s libretto.110 Reviewers tended instead to approach the Covent Garden production as a case study of the problems and possibilities of Romantic opera in translation. Comparing the Covent Garden production with the earlier English Opera House version, which had premiered on 23 July 1823, the Examiner declared for the latter.111 The reviewer objected in particular to the plot changes of the Irving–Livius–Planché version: The difference consists in the resistance on the part of [the hero] to the suggestions of Caspar, who in consequence exercises his powers of persuasion on the vainglorious peasant Killian, who, like himself, has been rejected as a suitor by Agnes, here called Bertha, inflamed by wine and vanity, and the hope of becoming warden of the forest, easily falls into the snare of this enfant perdu. The alteration produced by which change is very great, as it reduces [the hero] to a mere spiritless and unadventurous lover, to the loss of all the fine vocal music of the incantation scene, the sole human actors in which at Covent Garden are Caspar and the half intoxicated peasant.112

The reviewer praised the ‘very full and complete orchestra’; the ‘remarkably [. . .] perfect’ choruses; the standard of the acting; and the scenery, especially the ‘Salvator Rosa sort of conception’ of the Wolf’s Glen, ‘and its terrific accompaniments’.113 The Harmonicon also commented favourably on the stage effects of the Covent Garden production, describing the ‘Incantation scene’ as ‘a combination of every horror that the painter and machinist could imagine’.114 Max Maria von Weber considered the productions of Der Freischütz at both the English Opera House and Covent Garden as ‘crippled and deformed’.115 He also claimed that Carl Maria von Weber ‘was struck to the heart’ by the accounts which reached him of ‘the shameful and tasteless arrangement’ of Der Freischütz for the Parisian stage by François Henri Joseph Blaze, Robin des bois (Robin of the Woods), which had opened on 7 December 1824 at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, ‘not only to the infinite detriment of [Weber’s] own good fame in France as well as to his rightful

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pecuniary interests, but to the destruction of his hopes of producing it in its proper shape, under his own direction’.116 Castil-Blaze made significant alterations to Weber’s opera, renaming the characters, shifting the action from Kind’s Bohemian mountains at the end of the Thirty Years’ War to Wentworth in Yorkshire at the end of the reign of Charles I, and introducing musical changes too.117 However, Max Maria’s von Weber’s account of his father’s quarrel with Castil-Blaze reflects, at least in part, a later critical perspective that emphasised the sanctity of the work of art and the complete authority of the composer. Carl Maria von Weber appears himself to have accepted – albeit reluctantly – the necessity of reworking stage music for different local circumstances. He writes, for example, of a Vienna performance of Pierre Gaveaux’s Échelle de soie (The Silken Ladder) (1808), translated by Georg Friedrich Trietschke as Die Strickleiter (1814): Only a few of Gaveaux’s musical numbers remain in this version, as four other numbers [by Weigl, Spontini, Isouard and Gyrowetz] were substituted for the originals in Vienna. But these extraneous additions are so well chosen, belonging [. . .] to the same musical world and forming together such a charming bouquet, that on this occasion we can only applaud what is, in principle, deplorable and unhappily becoming increasingly common – I mean the prejudicing of the uninstructed against a composer by inserting what are often the most alien pieces into his works.118

Hector Berlioz would describe Robin des bois as a ‘gross travesty’, and Castil-Blaze as a ‘plunderer’ and ‘veterinary surgeon of music’.119 But Weber’s own complaint against Castil-Blaze, set out in two open letters in Le Corsaire and L’Étoile, lay less with artistic considerations than with the fact, as Mark Everist argues, ‘that he had missed the chance to exploit the financial possibilities of Der Freischütz [. . .] in Paris and was anxious not to miss similar opportunities in the future’.120 Yet Weber also sought to promote what he saw as the distinctive cultural aspirations and achievements of Germany. ‘No people,’ he suggests, in an article addressed to ‘the art-loving citizens of Dresden’, ‘has been so slow and so uncertain as the German in determining its own specific art forms’: Their peculiarity has been to adopt what seems best in other [operatic] schools, after much study and steady development, but the matter goes deeper with them. Whereas other nations concern themselves chiefly with the sensuous satisfaction of isolated moments, the German demands a self-sufficient work of art, in which all the parts make up a beautiful and unified whole.121

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While such pronouncements suggest a belief that Germany was travelling a special path, a Sonderweg, based on her cultural aspirations and achievements, Weber’s analysis of the creative relation of German culture to other national traditions also has affinities with the cosmopolitanism of Goethe. Goethe declared in 1827: I, for my part would like to draw the attention of my friends to the fact that I am convinced of the formation of a general world literature, in which an honourable role is reserved for us Germans. All nations look round for us, they praise, censure, adopt and dismiss, imitate and disfigure, understand or misunderstand us, open or close their hearts: we must receive all of this with equanimity, since the whole is of great value to us.122

The London and Paris adaptations of Der Freischütz may be seen as part of this new formation. Der Freischütz premiered in North America in the Irving–Livius version on 2 March 1825 at the Park Theatre, New York, and remained in the repertoire for the remainder of the season.123 Karl Bernhard, Duke of SaxeWeimar-Eisenach, commented on its popularity in his Reise [. . .] durch Nord-Amerika in den Jahren 1825 und 1826 (Travels through North America, During the Years 1825 and 1826) (1828). At Springfield, Massachusetts, in August 1825, he attended a musical party at the house of Jonathan Dwight. ‘The ladies sang very well,’ he observed, ‘and played on the piano-forte several pieces from “Der Freischütz”, an opera which is at present a favourite in America.’124 At New Orleans, in March 1826, he went to a performance of the opera at the Camp Street Theatre or American Theatre. ‘This drama,’ he wrote, ‘[. . .] which has followed me even in America like an evil genius (since detached pieces of it were sung and played in almost all companies) I had never yet witnessed [. . .] The orchestra was very weak and badly filled, hardly any of the performers could sing; I was told that the handsomest pieces of music are either abridged or entirely omitted. The decorations, nevertheless, were tolerably good.’125 The American Theatre, which had formally opened on 1 January 1824 under the English-born actor-manager James T. Caldwell, was the first ‘permanent’ English-language theatre in the city. When the United States bought the Louisiana Territory from France, enterprising Americans, lured by the prospect of opportunity, poured into the newly acquired territory. New Orleans also experienced a flood of French-speaking newcomers to the city following both the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1803 and the expulsion of French-speaking settlers from Spain’s Caribbean colony of Cuba in 1809. While these circumstances created tensions between the

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old inhabitants and the immigrants, they contributed to the city’s rapid economic and cultural growth, and in particular to the development of its theatres.126 The Théâtre d’Orléans or French Theatre was the most significant venue for French-language productions from its reopening in 1819 under the management of John Davis, a Paris-born Saint-Domingue émigré.127 Professional and amateur productions in English had been given in New Orleans before the opening of the American Theatre: as early as 1818 Noah M. Ludlow and his American Theatrical Commonwealth Company had presented an entire season of plays, but the Caldwell troupe, arriving from Virginia in 1820, inaugurated an annual season. For the first few years Caldwell and his actors shared, on alternate nights, the stage of the Théâtre d’Orléans with Davis’s company. Caldwell, however, believed that the English-speaking people of the city would support a theatre devoted exclusively to productions in their native tongue. He secured investment and capital locally and began construction of his American Theatre on Camp Street in 1822, which held its first performance in May 1823. In addition to the regular stock company, Caldwell employed guest artists in limited engagements.128 Carl Postl, an escaped Moravian monk who assumed the name of Charles Sealsfield on arriving in the United States, included a sketch of the French and American Theatres of New Orleans in his Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nord Amerika (1827), which was published under the pseudonym C. Sidons, and translated into English and abridged as The Americans as They Are: Described in a Tour through the Valley of the Mississippi (1828). PostlSealsfield had arrived in New Orleans in 1823; he would not return to Europe until 1826.129 Postl saw the acquisition of Louisiana from a political view as ‘the most important occurrence in the United States since the revolution; and, considered altogether, it may be called a second revolution’. Yet he found that the inhabitants of the valley of the Mississippi, and in particular of Louisiana, entertained ‘a feeling of estrangement from their northern fellow citizens’.130 Comparing the French and the American Theatres, he presents the American as having the advantage of becoming more and more national and popular, although at present it is only resorted to by the lower class of the American population; boatmen, Kentuckians, Mississippi traders, and backwoods-men of every description. The French theatre [on the other hand] performs the old classic productions of Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, with the addition of some new ones, such as Regulus, Marie Stuart, and William Tell.131

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Postl describes the productions of the American Theatre as ‘execrably performed’. Weber, he declared, would not have been much delighted at witnessing the performance of his Der Freyschutz, here metamorphosed into the wild huntsmen of Bohemia. Six violins, which played anything but music, and some voices far from being human, performed the opera, which was applauded; the Kentuckians expressed their satisfaction in a hurrah, which made the very walls tremble. The curtain consists of two sail cloths, and the horrible smell of whiskey and tobacco is a sufficient drawback for any person who would attempt to frequent this place of amusement.132

Kentuckians, together with Yankees, are the villains of Postl’s account of post-cession New Orleans. ‘The moment the cession was made,’ he writes, ‘crowds of needy Yankees, and what is worse, Kentuckians, spread all over the country, attracted by the hope of gain; the latter treating the inhabitants as little better than a purchased property.’133 In his description of the American Theatre’s production of Der Freischütz, the Kentuckians are shown as lacking in sophistication and taste. This is part of his implicit contrast of American and Creole manners. Postl may well have been correct in his assessment of the standard of the orchestra and singers. Yet Caldwell’s Der Freischütz was a success. Indeed, rivalry with Caldwell encouraged Davis to stage Castil-Blaze’s French adaptation of Weber’s opera, Robin des bois, which opened in the Théâtre d’Orléans on 22 May 1827.134 Robin des bois was one of a variety of operas exported by Davis to cities across the Northeast during his company’s first tour of the region in the summer of 1827. It was sung on 13, 15 and 21 August in New York and later, on 3 and 15 October in Philadelphia, and finally, on 29 October again in New York.135 ‘As a whole,’ the Philadelphia Monthly Magazine reported in December 1827, ‘this work presents a noble example of the power of music on the mind, when associated with objects of mystery and terror.’136 Robin des bois was in the repertory of the touring company from 1827 to 1831; it was also performed at the French Theatre in New Orleans during these years and beyond (Figure 2.2).137 Like Postl, Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the process of Americanisation and the persistence of French culture in New Orleans in the notes of his tour of North America from 1831 to 1832. He had two significant encounters in New Orleans. The first was a meeting with Étienne Mazureau, a distinguished early member of the Louisiana bar. Mazureau was born in La Rochelle, France, and was in Paris when the French Republic fell to Napoleon Bonaparte. Different accounts relay that he

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