The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music 9780748693139

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The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music

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

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

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The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music

Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa

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

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

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Contents

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

xi xiv xv 1

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

16

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

25

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

31

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

39

48

5. Liturgical Music and Drama Nils Holger Petersen

63

6. Intermedial Texts Maureen Boulton

78

7. Citation and Quotation Jennifer Saltzstein

86

8. Polytextuality Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach

96

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contents

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

111 125

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

147

161 167

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

173

14. Against ‘the Music of Poetry’ Robert Stagg

183

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

189

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

195

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

202

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

209

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

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219

234 249

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vii

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

259 277

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

289

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

296

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

304

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

311

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

318 327

333

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

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340

349 360

372

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

383 395

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

405

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

415

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

423

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

429

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

437

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

447

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

453

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

462

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

476

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

483

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

495

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

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

ix 522

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

533

48. Music in Woolf’s Short Fiction Emma Sutton

544

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

552

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

559

51. Beckett, Music and the Ineffable Eric Prieto

565

52. Jean Rhys and the Politics of Sound Anna Snaith

570

53. Music in Contemporary Fiction Christin Hoene

577

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

587

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

601

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

609

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

616

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

624

59. Britten, Austen and Mansfield Park Will May

632

60. Tippett, Eliot and Madame Sosostris Oliver Soden

638

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

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

655

63. Words in Popular Songs Dai Griffiths

664

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

672

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

681

Notes on Contributors Editorial Advisory Board Index

690 694 695

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures Figure 1.1 Figure 4.1

Figure 4.2a, b, c

Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2

Figure 8.1

Figure 10.1 Figure 10.2 Figure 10.3 Figure 10.4 Figure 16.1

Figure 17.1

Figure 17.2

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

21

57

58

89

91

99 133 139 140 141

200

203 205

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xii Figure 18.1

Figure 18.2 Figure 18.3 Figure 18.4 Figure 19.1

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

Figure 26.1

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

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list of illustrations Figure 27.1

Figure 31.1

Figure 31.2

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

Figure 32.8

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

Figure 33.5 Figure 42.1

Figure 42.2

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

xiii

321

351

353 363 363 365 366 367 367 368

369

370 373 375 377 377 378

378 379

465

468

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xiv Figure 42.3

Figure 42.4

Figure 42.5

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

Figure 60.2

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

470

471

473 490 604 604 606 606

641

643

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

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

88 90 92 102 129 131 137 463

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xiv Figure 42.3

Figure 42.4

Figure 42.5

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

Figure 60.2

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

470

471

473 490 604 604 606 606

641

643

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

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

88 90 92 102 129 131 137 463

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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

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acknowledgements

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

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For David and in memory of Annelene

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Introduction Delia da Sousa Correa

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

T

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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14 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

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

36. 37. 38.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Introduction Ardis Butterfield, Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach

History and Disciplinary History

T

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ardis butterfield, helen deeming and elizabeth eva leach

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

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

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

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

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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5 Liturgical Music and Drama Nils Holger Petersen

Liturgical Ceremony: Music and Text in Ritual Performance

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

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

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

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

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

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

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

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6 Intermedial Texts Maureen Boulton

T

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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7 Citation and Quotation Jennifer Saltzstein

C

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

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

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

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

Text

vdB1149

Textless (cl. F-106)

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

I-Fl Plut.29.1, ff.158v–159r

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

single stanza motet voice

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

Quant voi le douz tans venir (RS1485)

trouvère chanson with 3 stanzas

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

trouvère chanson avec des refrains with 8 stanzas

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

final line of first strophe of text

Ier main pensis refrain of chevauchai strophe 5 (RS73)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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8 Polytextuality Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach

Definition

A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Guillaume Machaut, balade 29

Guillaume de Machaut, balade 17

Anonymous

Jean Vaillant

Sans cuer m’en / Amis / Dame

Dame vailans / Amis / Certainement

Tres doulz amis / Ma dame / Cent mille fois

Composer

De triste / Quant / Certes je di

Incipits of texted parts (in order in MS)

F-CH 564

F-Pn n.a.f.6771

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

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

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

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

MSS (*text only)

3/3

3/3

3/3

3/3

Texts/ voices

Table 8.1 Surviving examples of polytextual song before around 1400

R

B

B

B

Genre

no

refrain rhyme only

yes (all)

yes (all)

Shared rhymes?

no

yes

yes (modified)

yes

Shared refrain text?

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

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

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

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

Notes

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Composer Guillaume de Machaut, balade 34

F. Andrieu

Anonymous

Incipits of texted parts (in order in MS)

Quant Theseus / Tenor / Ne quier veoir / Contratenor

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

Espoir me faut / Revien, Espoir / Tenor / Contratenor

*US-PHu codex 902

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

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

F-CH 564

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

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

MSS (*text only)

2/4

2/4

2/4

Texts/ voices

R

B

B

Genre

no

yes (all)

yes (all)

Shared rhymes?

no

yes

yes

Shared refrain text?

(continued)

Same male voice in each part laments loss of Hope

Lament for Machaut’s death Texts by Eustache Deschamps

Song competition Ca1 (=Tr) text by Thomas Paien

Notes

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Composer Jacob Senleches

Grimace

Jean Vaillant

Anonymous; tenor Guido Anonymous

Anonymous

Anonymous

Anonymous

Incipits of texted parts (in order in MS)

Je me merveil / Tenor / J’ay pluseurs fois

Se Zephirus / Tenor / Se Jupiter

Dame, doucement / Dous amis / Tenor

Robin, muse / Je ne say fere / Tenor

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

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

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

Rescoés, rescoés / Rescoés le feu / Tenor

F-Pn n.a.f.6771

F-CA 1328

F-Pn n.a.f.6771

F-Sm M.222 C.22

F-CH 564

*US-PHu codex 902

F-CH 564

*US-PHu codex 902

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

F-CH 564

MSS (*text only)

2/3

2/3

2/3

2/3 (4/6?)

2/3

2/3

2/3

2/3

Texts/ voices

V

V

V

R

R

R

B

B

Genre

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

no

one

no

no

no

yes (all)

yes (all)

yes (all)

Shared rhymes?

no

no

no

no

no

no

yes

yes

Shared refrain text?

Mimetic (fire of desire in heart)

Same speaker (?) laments sorrowful heart

Male-female dialogue (Robin and shepherdess)

Male-female dialogue Retrograde canon

Unclear: same speaker? female? addresses Robin

Male-female dialogue (amis and dame)

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

Jeremiad about song composition Refrain canonic

Notes

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Borlet

Anonymous

Anonymous

Anonymous

Guillaume de Machaut Loange no. 26

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

Un crible plein / A Dieu / [Contratenor]

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

Dame plaisant / Se vostre colour

Composer

Ma tre dol rosignol / Rosignolin / Aluette

Incipits of texted parts (in order in MS)

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

F-CA 1328

F-CH 564

F-Pn n.a.f.6771

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

MSS (*text only)

n/a

2/3

2/3

2/3

3/3

Texts/ voices

B

V

V

V

V

Genre

yes

no

no

one

some

Shared rhymes?

yes

no

no

no

no

Shared refrain text?

No musical setting exists

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

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

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20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

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

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9 Courtly Subjectivities Helen J. Swift and Anne Stone

S

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

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

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

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34. 35. 36. 37.

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

47. 48.

49. 50.

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

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

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

T

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. 14. 15. 16.

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

17. 18. 19. 20.

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

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

21. 22. 23. 24.

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

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

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

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

29. 30. 31. 32.

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

33. 34. 35.

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

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

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

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

5. 6. 7. 8.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRANSLATION

Ego moriar pro te.

Would that I might die for thee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

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

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

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

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Introduction Ros King

Moving the Passions: Musical Poetics in Early Modern Europe

T

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘

A MUSIQUE AVANT TOUTE CHOSE’,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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14 Against ‘the Music of Poetry’ Robert Stagg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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PERFORMERS AND PERFORMANCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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17 Best-Selling Ballads in SeventeenthCentury England Christopher Marsh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(I. 1. 124–5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

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

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

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

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

C

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Introduction Suzanne Aspden

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

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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22 Thomas Arne and ‘Inferior’ English Opera Suzanne Aspden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

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

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

B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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O R AT O R I O

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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26 Maurice Greene and the English Church Music Tradition Matthew Gardner

D

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

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

25.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Burney’s departure from the epistolary format for Cecilia necessitates a more detached reporting of the characters’ experiences of listening to music; at the same time, it prompts the novel to assume a structure that both Sarah Gore and Leya Landau have explored for its analogies to opera, with its formal divisions resembling Acts and its succession of cherished sentimental episodes akin either to a series of arias or to the pasticcio, given its aggregation of favoured musical movements (albeit typically those of multiple composers).8 That the protagonist shares her name with the patron saint of music would doubtless have been known to many of Burney’s readers from the annual feast day celebrations and associated poetic and musical works. Like Evelina, the orphaned Cecilia Beverley develops a passion for music; however, in contrast to her immediate literary precursor, Cecilia, living in the care of one of her appointed guardians as she is too young to inherit her late uncle’s fortune, engages with her first visit to the opera from a slightly more informed standpoint: Burney describes her as ‘not wholly a stranger to Italian compositions, having assiduously studied music from a natural love of the art’ (p. 64). One of the novel’s early chapters crystallises around a rehearsal of Artaserse, and it is this occasion that provides Cecilia’s introduction to live opera since she attends