The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

Phyllis Weliver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351544535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

How was music depicted in and mediated through Romantic and Victorian poetry? This is the central question that this specially commissioned volume of essays sets out to explore in order to understand better music's place and its significance in nineteenth-century British culture. Analysing how music took part in and commented on a wide range of scientific, literary, and cultural discourses, the book expands our knowledge of how music was central to the nineteenth-century imagination. Like its companion volume, The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (Ashgate, 2004) edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff, this book provides a meeting place for literary studies and musicology, with contributions by scholars situated in each field. Areas investigated in these essays include the Romantic interest in national musical traditions; the figure of the Eolian harp in the poetry of Coleridge and Shelley; the recurring theme of music in Blake's verse; settings of Tennyson by Parry and Elgar that demonstrate how literary representations of musical ideas are refigured in music; George Eliot's use of music in her poetry to explore literary and philosophical themes; music in the verse of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the personification of lyric (Sappho) in a song cycle by Granville and Helen Bantock; and music and sexual identity in the poetry of Wilde, Symons, Michael Field, Beardsley, Gray and Davidson.

Chapter 1

Scotch Drink & Irish Harps: Mediations of the National Air

Celeste Langan

Sometime early in the nineteenth century, or perhaps the late eighteenth, students of the science of music discovered the national idea, adopted it, lived and wrote within it, and often, but not always, made it central to their assessments of what music was excellent and what not, where music had come from and where it was going.¹

After Williams & I had sung one of the Irish Melodies, somebody said, “Every thing that’s national is delightful” — “Except the national Debt, Ma’am” says Poole …²

It was not primarily “students of the science of music” who discovered the “national idea” in the nineteenth century — unless, that is, we extend our definition of “students” of music to include poets and lyrists of the Romantic period. Musicians who began to cite or thematize folksongs in a variety of musical genres in order to gesture toward the national idea frequently owed their knowledge of those folksongs to the collaborative efforts of poets and publishers who, around 1800, flooded the market with collections of “national melodies,” “national songs,” “national airs.” Indeed, interest in what is now called the folksong tradition began first as an interest in all things “national,” despite the fact that, as Carl Dahlhaus puts it, “folk music … is more regional and social than national in its definition and localization.”³

That poets should have contributed significantly and substantially to the development and popularity of the “national idea” may seem hardly surprising; we are used to thinking about literature as national expression. While the discipline of literary study is ostensibly organized by reference to “history,” in fact the national idea continues to take precedence, even in periods prior to the emergence of the modern idea of the nation, and even now, when the power of nationality to organize identity and expression is recognizably put in question by global capitalism. But my purpose in this essay is to argue that, even in the period where the “national idea” powerfully informed the production and reception of the work of art, that idea is more complex than the version of nationality often associated with the Romantic movement: organic, essentialist, transhistorical. By focusing on how the idea of the “national air” is understood by its two chief popularizers, Robert Burns and Thomas Moore, I seek to demonstrate how the “factitious”⁴ idea of the national that they promote offers an antidote both to the undertheorized assumption that literature, music, and other arts are forms of national expression, and to the counterargument that national expression is largely an ideological illusion.⁵

First, a definition: in The New Grove Dictionary, there is no separate entry for “national air,” but a partial definition can be found in the entry on Scotland — itself a significant fact, since it suggests the way in which the “national” in music is usually identified with a category like “ethnicity” or “culture” in opposition to Culture (the “high” tradition of “Western” music whose name is Beethoven).⁶ Describing the contribution to Scottish folk music made by the poets Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns, the entry reads,

It can be said that the poets mentioned above created a golden age of Scots song … It was not allied to the true evolutionary process of folksong, but to literary creation expressly intended for the printing press and for enjoyment in the drawing room … Though these songs may contain some traditional elements, they cannot be termed folksong in the real sense of the word; “national” is the more accurate description.⁷

However distant the national air may be from the supposedly “true” or “real”meaning of folksong, it became a virtual obsession during the Romantic period, inspiring not only Burns’s work in collecting “Scotch airs” for publication in a Scots Musical Museum (as the volumes published by James Johnson in 1787–1790 were titled), but also creating such a taste for Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808–1834) that, even after his supposed farewell to Irish airs in “Dear Harp of My Country” (one of the few Irish Melodies still included in anthologies of the Romantic poetry), he produced four more volumes of Irish Melodies (ten, all told) as well as a collection of European melodies called A Select Collection of National Airs (1818).⁸

It is certainly the case that, as Grove suggests, the emergence of the “national”air was intimately linked to print; in each case the publishers (James Johnson and George Thomson in the case of Burns; William and James Power in the case of Moore) were instrumental not only in soliciting new lyrics for the traditional airs from poets with a recognizably “national” (that is to say, not English) identity, but also in soliciting new musical settings from those composers whose fame seemed likely to attract buyers.⁹ In fact, the publishing ventures themselves may offer the clearest evidence of how the “national” character of artistic expression began to be articulated. The publishers of A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs and A Selection of Irish Melodies were eager to secure a poet with a recognizably “national” identity for the new verses (in English) that were to accompany and so to make popular the traditional airs; but for the musical arrangement, no such national identity seemed required — perhaps because the “air” itself, prior to the addition of harmonies and ornaments, was deemed sufficiently national.

One might say, then, that, insofar as the “national air” is defined as the annexation of new verses and harmonies to traditional melodies in printed collections, it confirms Benedict Anderson’s influential argument that nineteenth-century nationalism is largely a product of print culture, print capitalism.¹⁰ Indeed, there are few more interesting cases of an emergent “print capitalism” than the speculations of Burns’s second publisher, George Thomson, as he negotiated with Beethoven to make his arrangements for Burns’s songs sufficiently simple for the British piano-playing public.¹¹ Here we discover a certain tension between what Thomson calls “national taste” and high musical “Culture”: when Thomson writes to Beethoven that “your great predecessor Haydn [also commissioned by Thomson for settings to Scottish airs] invited me to point out frankly everything which was likely not to please the national taste,” (original emphasis) it quickly becomes clear that by “national taste” he means the taste of a piano-playing, book-buying public. “There is not in this country one pianoforte player in a hundred who could make both hands go properly together in the first ritornello; I mean, play four notes with one hand and three with the other at the same time,” he writes of one objectionable setting; “for a work like mine to succeed,” he insists, Beethoven must keep in mind that “there is not one young lady in a hundred who will so much as look at an accompaniment if it is ever so little difficult” (Haddon, 323–324).

Anderson’s description of the nation as an “imagined” community, “conceived in language, not in blood” (133), has had considerable appeal both because of its anti-essentialist stance and because it has seemed to confirm the value of the nation as an organizing principle for the study of cultural expression. But what is most interesting about the peculiar product of print capitalism known as the national air, I suggest, is that it disables too easy an identification of print-language as the basis of national identity, and, as I will argue, demands more attention to the understudied role of capitalism, not just print-capitalism, in the formation of subaltern nationalisms. Anderson points out, of course, that there is no isomorphism between language and nation; indeed, he argues that a separate Creole nationalism develops despite the fact that a colony might share the language of the metropolis from which it seeks distinction. Moreover, the dominant “print-language” bears chiefly an imaginary relation to the variety of languages and dialects spoken within the space of a putative nation. The national airs produced by Burns and Moore certainly prove this point: even if one were to accept unequivocally the idea that Burns’s poetic idiom adequately represented the “lallans” dialect spoken in the Lowlands, he also employed that idiom when providing verses for airs collected from the Highlands, where Scots Gaelic, or Erse, was still spoken. Likewise, Moore famously “Englished” versions of airs that had been traditionally accompanied by Gaelic verses. The projects of both writers, in other words, are best characterized as prototypes of the “cover,” that practice most usually associated with the advent of recorded sound.¹² It is the peculiar character of this practice, in which a song popularized by one singer, sometimes of a different era, is reprised by another performer, that the affect of the song depends on the perception of difference. The difference between the “naive”and “sentimental,” famously proffered by Friedrich Schiller in 1798, while it is only one such possible affect, is one that seems peculiarly pertinent to understanding the work of Burns and Moore.¹³ While readers of the Scots Musical Museum and the Irish Melodies could not be expected to know the originals thus “covered,” the print matter itself pointed to that material as a significant absence, or rather a haunting presence. Whether the verses were published with music or not, in both cases the printed text would usually identify by title (often Gaelic) the original “air” for which the new verses and harmonies had been created.¹⁴ This naming of the air or “tune” foregrounds the text as an act of mediation — the transmission of one (oral-acoustic) medium by another (print-visual) medium.¹⁵ The “national” is identified partly by its difference from print, by its identification with the remainder, “air,” that print cannot fully capture. The “air” thus referenced seems to haunt, or to hover slightly beyond, the printed page, in the same manner, one might say, that the “national” character of music seems to depend on a certain distance from metropolitan centers of cultural and political power. For in the early nineteenth century, in London and even in Edinburgh, the “national air” was definitely not a local product; it was, crucially, imported from the periphery.

What follows might be described as an extended meditation on what it means to identify the nation with “air.” For if at first that identification threatens to reinforce the illusoriness of the nation, its reduction to “airy nothing,” I will argue that Burns and Moore both resist this reduction by narrating the transformation of “airy nothing,” into something. For Moore, this something will frequently be no more substantial than a tear or a sigh. William Hazlitt, in unfavorably contrasting Moore to Wordsworth (that most “English” of poets), nonetheless offers the most telling assessment of what constitutes the “national” character of his verse:

The fine aroma, that is exhaled from the flowers of poesy, everywhere lends its perfume to the verse of the bard of Erin …. [Moore] enjoys an ethereal existence among troops of sylphs and spirits, and in a perpetual vision of wings, flowers, rainbows, smiles, blisses, tears and kisses …. Mr Moore hardly ever describes entire objects, but abstract qualities of objects …. It might as well be the lights of heaven he describes, or the voice of Echo — we have no human figures before us, no palpable reality, answering to no substantive form in nature.¹⁶

Too often these topoi of the Irish Melodies have been read — and criticized — as signs of Moore’s sentimentalization of Ireland and Irishness.¹⁷ When read in the context of Burns’s prior experiments with the national air, however — experiments which include the Poems, Chiefly in the Scots Dialect (1786) — we learn to recognize in Moore’s tears and sighs what we might call the lyrical equivalent of Burns’s thematic and narrative emphasis on the national value of “Scotch Drink.” In both cases, the moment of distillation or liquidation is crucial. Prior to this distillation or liquidation — prior to its nationalization, that is — the air which is its material basis must be regarded as either too universal or too particular.

The same might be said of the general term for which “air” is the national representative in the Romantic period: music. The philosopher of music Peter Kivy has insisted both that “we know better than to think that music is the ‘international language”’ and that, once we dispense with the dream that music transcends the contingencies of time and place, and functions as a kind of universal grammar, then we must also recogniz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Music Examples
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Scotch Drink & Irish Harps: Mediations of the National Air
• 2 “Suspended” Sense in Alastor: Shelley’s Musical Trope and Eighteenth-Century Medical Discourse
• 3 On Music Framed: The Eolian Harp in Romantic Writing
• 4 Music and Inspiration in Blake’s Poetry
• 5 “Music their larger soul”: George Eliot’s “The Legend of Jubal” and Victorian Musicality
• 6 Musical Reactions to Tennyson: Reformulating Musical Imagery in “The Lotos-Eaters”
• 7 “Monna Innominata” and Christina Rossetti’s Audible Unhappiness
• 8 The “silent song” of D.G. Rossetti’s The House of Life
• 9 “The Music Spoke for Us”: Music and Sexuality in fin-de-siècle Poetry
• 10 Sappho Recomposed: A Song Cycle by Granville and Helen Bantock
• Index