Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies

Volume 3

Peter Horton, Bennett Zon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429627170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Originally published in 2003 and selected from papers given at the third biennial conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, this volume, in common with its two predecessors, reflects the interdisciplinary character of the topic. The introductory essay by Julian Rushton considers some of the questions that are key to this area of study: what is the nineteenth century, what is British music, and did London influence the continent? The essays that follow are divided into broad thematic groups covering aspects of gender, church music, national identity, and local and national institutions.

This collection illustrates that while nineteenth-century British music studies is still in its infancy as a field of research, it is one that is burgeoning and contributing to our understanding of British social and cultural life of the period.

Part One
Issues of Gender

Chapter One
‘Leader of Fashion in Musical Thought’

The Importance of Rosa Newmarch in the Context of Turn-of-the-Century British Music Appreciation

Charlotte Purkis

In 1911 an article in the Musical Times surveyed the career of Rosa Newmarch (1858-1940), then in her early fifties. It indicated three key reasons for her attainment of ‘distinction’ and ‘recognition’ in the contemporary musical world. The author, ‘M’, praised Newmarch first for ‘the eloquence, penetration and lucidity of her programme notes’, secondly, for her abilities as a ‘critical biographer and historian’, and last but not least, for the way she brought ‘a poetic temperament to bear on all her literary tasks’.¹ Newmarch’s contributions to British cultural life had been received with enthusiasm for some years. Between 1900 and 1904, for example, on the occasions of presentations of her papers on ‘The Development of National Music in Russia’, the Vice-President of the Musical Association Charles Maclean had described her not only as ‘so complete a mistress of her subject’ but had also commented how ‘her services to our English musical literature’ were ‘becoming very considerable’.² Today Rosa Newmarch’s name continues to feature significantly in biographical studies of late nineteenth-century musical personalities, for example, in Arthur Jacobs’s work on Henry Wood and David Brown’s on Tchaikovsky.³ There have been several calls for a substantial biography, for example, by Alfred Boynton Stevenson, the author of a recent article, ‘Chaikovski and Mrs Rosa Newmarch Revisited’.⁴ In 2001 four of her books were reissued by Best Books.⁵ In spite of this resurgence of interest, there has been little scholarly evaluation of Newmarch in her own right. Although she features significantly in a number of biographical studies of those great male contemporaries whose musical careers she dedicated considerable time and effort to promoting, the full range of her achievements continues to be obscured.

In recent decades a ‘traditional’ evaluation of Newmarch’s work has become established which continues to reinforce the assessment made at the time of her death. In 1940 obituaries had presented her predominantly as what we recognise today as a musicologist. The Monthly Musical Record simply records: ‘Newmarch, Rosa Harriet. Translator and writer on Russian music.’⁶ The Musical Times lists a selection of her books, editions, translations and articles within its brief appreciation but in such a way as to separate this body of work from the rest of her output, which it then further subdivides by distinguishing what it terms her ‘utility writings’ (programme notes for the musical public) from her poetry ‘at the other end of the scale’. Concluding comments again foreground her more academic work, which it calls ‘authoritative’ and reflective of ‘specialized knowledge’.⁷ Although H.C. Colles and Peter Platt in their 1980 New Grove article highlight her ‘analytic’ work as official programme writer to the Queen’s Hall orchestra from 1908 until 1927 for the way it demonstrated her ‘great sympathy with every kind of high artistic aim’,⁸ by the 2001 edition of New Grove the sense of a creative individual at work has effectively been bypassed. Greater emphasis falls on her academic work, for example by the use of such expressions as she ‘did much to further’, she was ‘a source of information’, she ‘took up the cause’ and ‘showed great insight and sympathy with’.⁹ Although there is mention of the impact of Newmarch’s work on musicians and on composers, there is no explicit reference either to her approach to the interpretation of music or to her role in the formation of British musical taste.

In short, far greater emphasis has been placed on Newmarch’s importance as a facilitator than on her role as original thinker. This works to the detriment of furthering understanding of late nineteenth-century British musical culture because it is in and through her own words and the method and context through which she shaped these that her creative ideas were expressed, rather than in those translations and editions of the words of others in which she merely mirrored the talents of composers, conductors and other authors. This is not to imply that Newmarch’s knowledge and expertise - demonstrated, for example, in her role as ‘midwife’ of Russian culture for British audiences - is in any way unimportant, or that there was no connection between the spheres in which she worked, but rather that her ‘artist-critic’ persona is as deserving of attention as is her ‘musicological-academic’ writing.

In this connection, it is highly significant that several of Newmarch’s contemporaries attributed her critical talents and her popularity amongst her audience to a thoroughly creative mind. Although the closest she got to musical performance was to accompany song recitals with lectures and to have several translations from the Russian set to music by Elgar,¹⁰ in the 1904 discussion at the Musical Association meeting her new book on Henry Wood was applauded as ‘a very brilliant performance’.¹¹ Much later Henry Wood’s own comment, that ‘Mrs. Newmarch’s analytical notes still attract me, for they are not merely a synopsis of the works she treats, but are beautiful specimens of English literature’, is also indicative of how her work was considered to be intrinsically creative.¹² Furthermore, in summarising her life story in the Musical Times of 1911, ‘M’ commented how ‘she was ... always moving in a musical atmosphere, both executive and critical’, and this contextual observation strengthened the remark that ‘poetic temperament’ pervaded all forms of her writing.¹³ Moreover, in the brief overview of her overseas connections in the same article, ‘M’ quotes from an interview with Newmarch conducted by M. Charles Chasse in May 1908 in the Bulletin Français de la Société Internationale de Musique. Referring to her poetry - she published two volumes: Songs to a Singer and Other Verses (1906) and Horae Amoris, Songs and Sonnets (1903) discussed here - ‘M’ stated: ‘the role of interpreter has not been enough for her; for she also has her own song, and the sorrowful cadence of “Horae Amoris” has revealed to the public a soul which “sees life through the curtain of music, and music through the curtain of life’”.¹⁴

By the time of the appearance of The Russian Opera (1914) Newmarch was heralded by the Daily Sketch for occupying ‘a peculiar position with regard to music in this country’ because ‘she finds herself to be quite a leader of fashion in musical thought’.¹⁵ The originality of her contributions, both to thinking about music and to thinking musically, was perceived to lie in a set of interconnected approaches to listening. These created appreciation as an art form and can be summarised as follows. First, just as performers and conductors are interpreters whose actions construct musical meaning, so listeners are themselves involved in a chain of response to the musical conceptions which originate with composers; secondly, music should be responded to with one’s whole being; thirdly, technical analysis can be unhelpful if it serves to inhibit the development of such reception. While it is fair to say that Newmarch herself might not have thought of the style of music appreciation she exhibited in her programme notes and review articles as either particularly innovative or aesthetically ‘primary’, that is, as itself art, her many references to the critical act and to the responsibility of the interpreter vis-à-vis the audience’s response are acutely self-aware. As such these references, which are woven into every different type of commentary on music which she practised, reveal her aims to be inseparable from her interpretative approach to music in performance and are crucial to understanding her unique way of approaching the appreciation of music as a listener, placing her as an equal amongst the audience of her readers.

Newmarch’s view of her writing, specifically with regard to programme notes, as quoted in the Musical Times 1911 article, provides clear evidence of her aim to stimulate an appreciation of contemporary music:

In writing of a new work, I make it a principle to avoid criticism of a kind which might in the smallest degree check or cool the enthusiasm of the public who are not yet familiar with it. On the other hand I think the ‘programmât’ is more than justified in pointing out what strikes him, or her, as characteristically beautiful in a work. This may seem one-sided, but in reality it effects the right kind of balance. Most people are capable of some sort of carping criticism for themselves. But to point - with due discrimination - to the things which seem lastingly beautiful in a work can do no harm, and must do good. I think the lack of balanced appreciation is one of our worst faults as a musical nation. I only mention this because, little as I concern myself with the ephemeral criticism which withers during the day - or the night - according to whether it appears in a morning or an evening paper, I have noticed a tendency to fall foul of some of my programmes because I have tried to set some details in a poetic rather than prosaic light.¹⁶

Observations that Newmarch made elsewhere about audience expand the picture of her emerging motivation and provide evidence of her reputation as an authority on public taste. In a 1928 retrospective, A Quarter of a Century of Promenade Concerts at Queen's Hall, she discussed how, at the time of the opening season of 1895-96:

there was a growing public which, deprived of operatic nourishment and satiated with what the Handelian legacy provided, desired something more adventurous and sensational in music. An omnivorous and uncritical generation, perhaps, but one which craved for living forms, energetic movement, colour and passion, and the genius of race. Only in modern orchestral music could this awakening hunger for a vital, secular art, find satisfaction at that juncture.¹⁷

Rather than blowing her own trumpet as programme-note writer, Newmarch laid the laurels implicitly at the feet of the programmer- conductor, Henry Wood, by going on to say: ‘the first series of Promenade Concerts comprised forty-nine concerts, and if anyone doubts the rapid education of public taste effected by these Concerts, let him compare the programmes of 1895 with those of two or three years later.’¹⁸ Earlier in the book’s introduction she had commented that: ‘It is hardly too much to claim for these concerts that they have been the greatest educative power in music that we have had in this country.’¹⁹ There is no doubt that, although her modesty prevented explicit mention, readers of this commemorative booklet would have associated Newmarch’s own widely acclaimed ‘analytical programme notes’ with this observation.

More can be gleaned of her attitudes to the critical act from the introductions she furnished to her translated and edited biographical studies as well as her many journalistic pieces. In 1912, for example, in a review article of recently published British writings on music aimed at the encouragement of British composition, entitled ‘Chauvinism in Music’, which discussed Hubert Parry’s Style in Musical Art and Cecil Forsyth’s Music and Nationalism among others, there are significant subtextual references to the effect that not all criticism is useful to ‘the public’ - a group at whose door blame is most consistently laid for lack of appreciation of native composition at the turn of the century, and the people at whom she is targeting her work:

Loud are the complaints that native work is neglected in our concert- rooms, and still more in our homes, yet when a novelty of British manufacture is produced the criticism it evokes ... is often of a very perfunctory kind, and fails entirely to help the public to form any sound criteria as to the national music about which they are expected to show increasing enthusiasm.²⁰

She went on to propose that ‘the critical energy, which is largely wasted in worshipping one artist and advising another, might be very helpfully employed in laying before the public some clearer and more definite conclusions as to where we actually are moving, and where we can move, in the matter of a national school of music’.²¹

Newmarch’s preoccupation, however, was not the promotion of native British music, but the elevation of the profile of foreign music in Britain. A crucial aspect of this process was the cultivation of British taste to respond to the humanity in all music, however unknown and unusual, regardless of cultural-political boundaries. Time and again in her writings she commented that her work was not geared towards the needs of the music profession, but to those of a wider public. For example, in her 1906 edi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables and Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Editors' Foreword
• Introduction: Learning in London, Learning from London
• Part One Issues of Gender
• Part Two Church Music
• Part Three National Identity
• Part Four National and Local Institutions
• Index