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.

Hafiz between Nations: Song Settings by Daumer/Brahms and Peacock/Beamish

Consciously ‘othered’ cultural practices have long allowed musicians and poets to express different national identities to varying extents, without having to relinquish a geographically rooted sense of home. My aim is to examine such transnational links, symbols, and ties through a consideration of the songs ‘Wie bist du, meine Königin’ by Johannes Brahms (1833–97) and ‘Fish’ by Sally Beamish (b. 1956). Both are settings of translations of poetry by the Persian poet Hafiz, made respectively by Georg Friedrich Daumer (1800–72) and Jila Peacock (b. 1948). I offer insights into changing attitudes to Hafiz over time (the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries) and place (Germany, Persia/Iran, and Great Britain). I employ text- and score-based analysis, supplemented by interviews with Peacock and Beamish carried out in early 2019, which probed approaches to translation, text setting, and music, as well as issues of biography and national identity. I conclude that selective transnationalism, as I describe it, is a means of expanding one’s artistic range, while not entirely alienating the familiar self.

Paul Verlaine in Parallel: Loeffler, Fauré, Debussy

The contrasts between song settings of Verlaine’s poetry by Fauré, Debussy, and Hahn have long attracted comparative essays from scholars and singers. The songs of the American composer Charles Martin Loeffler offer yet another Verlaine. His settings of ‘La lune blanche’ and ‘En sourdine’ are particularly puzzling when heard after Fauré’s songs on the same poems. This essay seeks to make sense of some of Loeffler’s most idiosyncratic settings and show them as competent and as sensitive in their way as the more famous settings of Fauré and Debussy. I argue that Loeffler draws on the habits of ironic theatricality he would have observed in the cabarets and cafés-chantants he enjoyed frequenting in Paris. He applies the effects of popular urban song to Verlaine’s lyric and in this way is able to move very independently from Fauré or Debussy even as he raises a popular form to a high artistic level. In this context, Fauré and Debussy appear more similar than different, but we may array the three composers in a metaphorical geography moving from the countryside to the heart of the city: Fauré the pastoral, Debussy the suburban, and Loeffler the urban.

Exploring Biblical Women in Music

This essay explores various musical works that retell the stories of biblical women who are largely silent in the biblical text. It analyzes operas and oratorios featuring biblical women with prominent roles in more than one musical work. These are: Sarah, Hagar, and Rebecca in the book of Genesis; Jochebed, Pharaoh’s daughter, and Miriam in the book of Exodus; and Michal and Bathsheba in the books of Samuel. This research draws on my previous scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera, oratorio, and song settings of biblical women. Many musical settings of biblical narratives focus intensely on the women. The women’s singing voices add new elements to their depictions, and librettos almost always enlarge the women’s roles. Composers and librettists together turn the women into three-dimensional characters. The essay presents various threads in numerous musical works that tie together the re-visioning of several biblical women. The goal is to illustrate how the selected women move from the biblical background to the musical foreground, and to offer new and surprising perspectives on biblical women.

The Poetics of Singing Roman

This chapter traces a poetics of emergent meaning in sözlü Roman oyun havası from static iconicity drawn from çingene references in kanto songs through musicians’ creative incorporation of improvised poetic mani and shouted hocali forms. While expressing communal reactions to specifically Roman experiences, the inclusion of patricularistic references from mani and hocali inscribed revised social distinctions along gendered, generational, class, and status lines. Through musical analysis and observations of musicians creating new songs, I demonstrate how musicians drew on keriz-style improvisations to expand melodic repertoires for song settings in response to the increased demand for new and relevant dance tunes. Commercial circulation and copyrighting of these songs also increased tensions between artists themselves and studio heads, thus reshaped community-based practices of borrowing and performing. The chapter ends with narrations of three performance events to illustrate the dynamic relationship between an ongoing metaphoricity of sound to a mimesis of enlarged presence and pluralized identities.

Bridging the Safavid–Ottoman Divide

In both Persian and Turkish art-music traditions, despite their significant current differences, the musical idiom of the 15th-century Timurid court is regarded as a significant forbear. Late 15th-century theoretical literature, however, refers to regional variations across the Middle East; these were exacerbated by a lack of continuity in Safavid and Ottoman court patronage during the 16th century, resulting in loss of repertoire and eventual replacement. Yet in the late 17th century commonalities between Safavid and Ottoman art-music practices re-emerge. Although not identical, indeed partly divergent, these practices share a core of frequently used modes and rhythmic cycles and use the same structures for complex song-settings; they even have elements of vocal repertoire in common, while certain Ottoman instrumental pieces are labelled ‘Persian’. There is evidence for the maintenance in both traditions of aesthetic constants in the domains of modulatory practice and formal articulation that can be observed much earlier.

Collaboration as Communication in the Works of W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, 1935–1941

W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten's 1941 opera Paul Bunyan marked the most public production of their almost decade-long collaborative relationship. Like the song settings that preceded it, the opera highlights the influence of Britten on Auden's aesthetic regarding musical and literary collaborations. This article argues that the poems Auden dedicated to Britten, and that Britten subsequently set to music, establish collaboration as a form of communication through which Auden challenges Britten to respond to public statements he has made about Britten's sexuality – trying to coerce him to bring private sentiments into the open. Without the Britten material, much of what would be known of Auden's engagement with music would come from the essays he wrote about music in the 1960s, thirty years after this first major musical collaboration. Despite the fact that Auden's own account of the relation between words and music later shifted toward an aesthetic in which words must be subordinate to music, particularly in operatic works, in his work with Britten, Auden explored more fluid and indirect forms of collaboration. In fact, their direct collaborative relationship evolved out of mutual admiration for the products of their initial, indirect collaborations.

Notions of the Universal and Spiritual in Percy Grainger’s Early British Folk-Song Settings

Between 1905 and 1908 Percy Grainger made a major contribution to the corpus of British folk-song, collecting melodies and words of ballads, shanties and work songs, and devoting himself not just to the faithful capture of pitch and rhythm, but also the nuances of performance, with his pioneering use of the phonograph. These folk-songs became for Grainger a wellspring of compositional inspiration to which he returned time and time again. Yet while he was still a student in Frankfurt, Grainger had been making settings of British traditional tunes sourced from published collections. This article contends that these early arrangements hold the key to a deeper understanding of his later persistence in folk-song arranging and collecting, and that they prefigure the recurrent textual themes in the songs he later chose to arrange. It is argued that Grainger’s attraction to folk-song was textual and musical, tied to notions of purity, freedom and an unorthodox spirituality inspired by nature and shaped by the writings of Whitman, whereby Grainger perceived folk-song as a universal utterance. For Grainger, British folk-song was not simply a source of profound melody for appropriation; the window into a nation’s soul became a door into the souls of all humanity.