When the poet becomes the muse

Women are ubiquitous in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, presented either as ideal, unattainable figures, or as earthly, abominable creatures. Instead of examining the gaze of the poet on women, it is interesting to reverse the roles and to explore the gaze of women on Baudelaire, or more precisely what women hear in Baudelaire’s poetry: what happens when the poet becomes the muse? While the most famous musical settings of Baudelaire’s poems have been composed by men (Duparc, Fauré, Debussy), this article aims to uncover musical settings of Baudelaire’s poetry by twentieth-century female composers. In a first instance, this article offers an overview of twentieth-century songs by female composers; from the mélodies of Marie Jaëll to the contemporary settings of Camille Pépin, what do song settings of Baudelaire tell us about the visibility of female composers? Secondly, the article provides a detailed analysis of L’Albatros (1987), a music-theatre piece by Adrienne Clostre. By deconstructing Baudelaire’s poems, Clostre offers a reflection on creativity that cannot be separated from a general understanding of the place of female composers in society.

By the waters of the Tiber: Viacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Grechaninov and Russian culture in interwar Europe

In Russia, the impact of the end of World War I was subsumed under the far greater impact of the October Revolution, which led to a bifurcation of Russian culture into Soviet and émigré branches. This article examines a hybrid literary and musical work from the interwar period: Viacheslav Ivanov’s nine Roman Sonnets ( Rimskie sonety, 1924) and the musical settings that the composer Aleksandr Grechaninov made of five of these as his Sonetti Romani in 1939. Here, both poet and composer seek to convey the experience of finding oneself in one of Europe’s most evocative historical and cultural locations. At the same time, their evocation of Rome forges a powerful historical narrative of the city’s prior inhabitants. Accordingly, Rome emerges as an intertextual palimpsest of literary and artistic references, which together create a powerful sense of cultural continuity to offset the loss of the artist’s original homeland.

Translating the Hebrew Psalms to be Sung: The 2010 Revised Grail Psalms, a Case Study

This article explores the theme of “translating poetically organized discourse to be sung.” The 2010 English translation of the Hebrew Psalms, entitled The Revised Grail Psalms: A Liturgical Psalter (RGP), is presented as a case study. The Hebrew Psalms, for the most part, were composed to be sung, yet more often than not, they are translated to be read. Such translations are primarily characterized by the absence of poetic rhythm, despite the plain evidence and significance of poetic rhythm in the Hebrew. The RGP, on the other hand, privileges the rhythmic dimension of the Psalms. As a result, the RGP is said to be remarkably “adaptable to the exigencies of different musical settings,” and more importantly, eminently singable. Nonetheless, the challenges of translating and formalizing a text according to a given rhythmic principle are in practice formidable, for when translators set out to feature a lyric’s rhythmic dimension, its semantic, rhetorical, and syntactic art is often found lacking. This article examines some of the principal reasons the translators of the RGP chose to re-emphasize the Hebrew Psalms’ rhythmic art and, more importantly, how those translators negotiated some of the more problematic translation challenges that ensued from that choice.

CHARLES WESLEY, METHODISM AND NEW ART MUSIC IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

ABSTRACTThis article considers eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Methodism's relationship with art music through the original settings of poetry by Charles Wesley by five notable musicians: John Frederick Lampe, George Frideric Handel, Jonathan Battishill, Charles Wesley junior and Samuel Wesley. It argues that the strong emphasis on congregational singing in popular and scholarly perceptions of Methodism, including within the movement itself, masks a more varied engagement with musical culture. The personal musical preferences of John and Charles Wesley brought them into contact with several leading musical figures in eighteenth-century London and initiated a small corpus of original musical settings of some of the latter's hymns. The article examines the textual and musical characteristics of these the better to understand their relationship with both eighteenth-century Methodism and fashionable musical culture of the period. It argues that Methodism was not, contrary to popular perception, uniformly opposed to or detached from the aesthetic considerations of artistic culture, that eighteenth-century Methodism and John and Charles Wesley cannot be regarded as synonymous and that, in this period, sacred music encompasses rather more than church music and cannot be narrowly defined in opposition to secular music.

Johanna Müller-Hermann’s Lied der Erinnerung: Austria, America, and Beyond

Scholarship on musical settings of Walt Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d has only briefly looked into one of the most ambitious pieces composed on the poem in the earlier twentieth century: the Austrian woman composer Johanna Müller-Hermann’s orchestral cantata Lied der Erinnerung, premiered in Vienna in 1930. Through the piece has not remained in the repertoire, seen in light of its original context the cantata was a rich site for negotiating a complex terrain of ‘American’, ‘Austrian’, and ‘universal’ concepts. Through her structural decisions involving Whitman’s poem, her attempts to have the work reach American audiences, her use of borrowed melodies, and claims made in the work’s program notes, Müller-Hermann situated the work carefully between these competing frames while seeking to achieve critical success as a woman composer. The Whitmanesque vision of America that Müller-Hermann created would have also had a politically charged significance in both Austria and the U.S. in the period surrounding the work’s premiere.

The Émigré Walt Whitman: Songs of Mourning, 1943–1948

Musical settings of Walt Whitman’s poetry were ‘beyond the nation’ from the very beginning. The first of them was composed in 1880 by an Alsatian immigrant to the US, Frédéric Louis Ritter, and until around 1930 the majority of Whitman settings came from German and British composers. The majority of those settings, in turn, dealt with war and its aftermath in mourning. Whitman’s poetry of the American Civil War provided a template for grappling musically with later conflicts, from the Boer War to World War I to World War II. The years 1942 and 1948 saw major war-themed settings from four German and German-émigré composers: Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith in America, and Hans Werner Henze and Karl Amadeus Hartmann in Germany. A common thread among these pieces, exemplified most explicitly in Weill’s setting of ‘Come Up from the Fields, Father’, is the question of whether and how the act of transposed mourning can make the collective trauma of war ‘livable’ – in a sense of the term derived from T. W. Adorno and Judith Butler, for whom ‘livability’ is measured by the power of publicly avowed mourning to integrate trauma into the symbolic systems on which social life depends.

Traces of Tourism and Transnationalism in Liszt’s Heine Settings

Shortly after touring the Rhinelands in the early 1840s, Liszt began setting two poems by Heine that feature the Rhine: ‘Im Rhein’ (S. 272) and ‘Die Lorelei’ (S. 273). They were published together in 1843 in a collection of mostly German songs and one Italian song, which Liszt titled Buch der Lieder after Heine’s own collection of poems published in 1827 and from which ‘Im Rhein’ and ‘Die Lorelei’ are drawn. Based on a public letter written while Liszt was on holiday in Nonnenwerth and published in Paris during his lifetime, this essay argues that two life experiences that happened within days of each other in the summer of 1841 indelibly link these two songs in Liszt’s biography and offer insights in how to read his musical settings. Firstly, Liszt travelled passed the Lorelei rock by steamship, which was so noisy and created so much smoke that he complained he could not properly take in either the landscape or the soundscape of the famed location along the river, which, according to a newly minted legend, inhabited by a siren-figure called Lorelei. Secondly, he was invited by the citizens of Cologne to provide a benefit concert to help raise funds to finish the construction of the Cologne cathedral, which had lain incomplete since the fifteenth century. Although he had already composed ‘Im Rhein’, shortly after his success in Cologne, he composed ‘Die Lorelei’. In 1856, Liszt published substantially revised versions of both songs. By then, he had settled in Weimar and was no longer the cosmopolitan visitor with a multitude of national allegiances, which opens the different versions to an analysis through Liszt’s own lived experience – that is, through the lens of tourism versus transnationalism. The essay compares the two versions as contrasting reactions to the loco-descriptive elements in Heine’s poems. Through a close analysis of Liszt’s choices of form, harmony, melodic contour, and accompanimental figuration, I argue that, in the case of ‘Im Rhein’, Liszt’s revision reveal a greater intimacy with the monuments described in Heine’s poem and, in the case of ‘Die Lorelei’, the setting becomes more idyllic over time, suggesting an erasure of Liszt’s own traumatic journey and the technological developments in shipping that had drowned out and obscured the sonic and visual aura of the famous and perilous bend in the river. In both cases, the transnational perspective brings to the fore ways in which the sense of flow, movement of light, navigation, boundaries, and the crossing of thresholds are either facilitated or hampered in Heine’s poems and Liszt’s music.

Performance Matters in Heine: The Case of Pauline Viardot’s ‘Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter’

Heinrich Heine’s poem ‘Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter’ (Die Heimkehr 29) can be read as a meta-poem about the ambivalence of his ironic art. The poet looks through his window into the stormy darkness, and we cannot tell if his perceptions of a mother carrying groceries and her daughter sitting at home are real or imagined. Reception of the poem has been similarly divided, with some critics likening the poem to a genre painting in a realist vein, and others citing it as another manifestation of Heine’s love-hate relationship with Romantic idealism. Literary translations and musical settings of the poem each take their own stand on the poem’s ambiguities, but the manner and context of performance will be crucial to what any presentation or adaptation of the poem might mean. A particularly cosmopolitan example of such a context is Pauline Viardot’s intimate Karlsuhe salon in the winter of 1869. In performing her own musical setting of the poem in this environment, Viardot seems to have identified with the mother represented in the poem and performs herself as a caring, nurturing matriarch to her own daughters. Ivan Turgenev must have been present at this performance, and his Russian singing translation of Viardot’s song corroborates this sentimental interpretation. Meanwhile, Louis Pomey’s French singing translation, decidedly more acerbic and cutting, may have been prepared for a more public audience interested primarily in Heine’s wit rather than Viardot’s personal family relationships. Finally, a contemporaneous passage in Viardot’s correspondence reveals her offense at Richard Wagner’s recently re-published essay Das Judentum in der Musik and suggests a political performance context for her song in which Viardot now expresses quasi-maternal sympathy for her Jewish colleagues maligned by Wagner’s screed and defends the notion of a cosmopolitan, international family of artists.

Of Music, Morals, and Salads

This article uses music and the discourse about music to understand the practice of tolerance in Prague during the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Drawing on Las ensaladas (Prague, 1581), a collection of vernacular polyphony compiled by the Spanish composer Mateo Flecha the Younger, and Harmoniae morales (Prague, 1589–90), comprising musical settings of Latin texts by the Slovenian composer Jacobus Handl, the article argues that such music offered Prague's diverse citizens a medium for reflecting on how to live morally and peaceably. Ultimately, this article challenges the commonplace that musical harmony offered an effective model for social harmony, arguing that the practice of singing together exposed the limits of tolerance even as it illuminated how difference might be accommodated.

“Loud and Open Speaking in ‘the People's’ Mighty Name”: Eliza Cook, Music and Politics

In 1849, the working-class poet Eliza Cook (1818–89) expanded her international profile by venturing into weekly periodical publication with Eliza Cook's Journal. Not only was this the first British journal named after a female editor but it also placed an unusual emphasis on music—unusual not least because few women in that epoch were given the opportunity to participate in the broader critical discourses on music. Cook's poetry was already widely disseminated through various musical settings by composers from William Balfe to Henry Russell; in her new journal, music further emerged as central to her philosophy of liberation for all. Placing street musicians alongside opera and salon concerts in an exhibition of remarkably eclectic taste, Cook saw the propensity for music making in all layers of society. She regarded musical culture as a soundscape of experience, emotion, and agency to which she, and all those from the laboring classes, not only had a right to access, engage in, and share but was part of their own innate being. Music symbolized imagination, freedom from the mundane, and limitless human potential. Efforts to secure music for “the people” were thus indissolubly linked to broader political rights for suffrage and equality.