Interpreting “Goblin Market: Cantata”
Rossetti and Aguilar’s revised text for Goblin Market: Cantata eliminates much of the original poem’s moral complexity, sexual imagery and sacramental language and renders the text appropriate for performance by and for a younger market. In the simplified morality of the revised text, correct judgment and moral behaviour are very clearly defined. Lizzie is sharply contrasted to Laura and is consistently a model of what is upright: for instance, Lizzie sings lines that had been Laura's in the poem, "We must not look at goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits" (Rossetti, "Goblin Market," ll. 42-43; Aguilar and Rossetti, p. 6), and in the cantata Lizzie urges Laura to plug her ears and run away from the goblins (rather than simply fleeing and abandoning her sister, as Lizzie does in the poem). Various musical cues also reinforce the moral significance and dire consequences of giving in to temptation: for example, descending passages in the piano score indicate musically Laura's imminent fall, as she prepares to clip "a precious golden lock" (Aguilar and Rossetti, p. 14).
melody as meaning
In significant musical gestures, Aguilar uses melody lines to indicate characters' inner states and their current states of agreement and attunement. For instance, immediately after eating their fruits Laura sings with the goblins, merging with them tonally by joining the goblins' melody line (Aguilar and Rossetti, pp. 16-17).
melodic distinction
Subsequently, after Laura has feasted on the tempting goblin fruits, she returns home to Lizzie, who voices her concern and "wise upbraidings" (Rossetti, l. 142); meanwhile, Laura expresses delight in the memory of her feast and anticipates eating more delectable goblin fruit the next night. The sisters are now internally divided: they are no longer thinking, feeling or behaving the same way, and this lack of solidarity is reinforced musically. On Laura's return home to Lizzie following her feast, the sisters sing a duet, simultaneously singing different words set to two melodic lines that move independently tonally and rhythmically (Aguilar and Rossetti, pp. 21-22). Laura is audibly no longer unified with her sister, and in such ways musical gestures are used to reinforce the textual meaning.
removing the sexual meaning
The adapted text clearly moralizes about resisting temptation, but this temptation is never depicted as sexual or erotic. Lizzie relates Jeanie's tale as a warning that accepting goblin fruits leads to decline and untimely death, but there is no mention that Jeanie "should have been a bride," or that it was "for joys brides hope to have" that Jeanie "Fell sick and died" (Rossetti, ll. 313-15). Lizzie's physical assault and symbolic rape at the hands of the goblins has been toned down to an "interview with the goblins" (Aguilar and Rossetti, p. 33), and on Lizzie's return home Laura exclaims:
Lizzie, Lizzie, Have you tasted
For my sake the bitter sweetness?
Must your life like mine be wasted,
Maim'd and marr'd before completeness?
Tomorrow and tomorrow
Still waking us to sorrow,
Goblin haunted, driven, daunted. (Aguilar and Rossetti, p. 46)
The effect of the change from Rossetti's original text in lines 478-84 is dramatic: gone is the unmistakable sexual connotation of "fruit forbidden" (Rossetti, l. 479) that leads to "undoing" (Rossetti, l. 482) and "ruin" (l. 483), vocabulary in the poem that had intimated a sexual fall. Likewise omitted in the cantata is the line "Eat me, drink me, love me" (Rossetti, l. 471) with its Eucharistic, carnal and lesbian overtones. Meanwhile, "Suck my juices" (Rossetti, l. 468) becomes "suck these juices" (Aguilar and Rossetti, p. 45), rendering them simply curative fruit nectar and eliminating the suggestion of an exchange of bodily fluids. In addition, the emphasis on repeated sucking and kissing that characterizes the poem's intense orality is markedly reduced. Also, in the cantata the poem's moral coda--"there is no friend like a sister" (Rossetti, l. 562 ff.)—is sung by the chorus, with the result that we never hear the restored Laura voice her own wisdom from a final position of social and moral recuperation. As Maura Ives rightly observes, changes in the revised text "contradict aspects of the poem that have been influential in contemporary readings of it" ("Introduction," Christina Rossetti: A Descriptive Bibliography, p. 16).
Sources:
Ives, Maura. Christina Rossetti: A Descriptive Bibliography. New Castle, DE, Oak Knoll, 2011.