Introduction to Aguilar's "Goblin Market: Cantata"
Composer Emanuel Aguilar's musical composition Goblin Market: Cantata (1880) is a significant event in the textual and publishing history of "Goblin Market." The cantata's libretto constitutes an authorially approved variant text of Rossetti’s masterpiece poem, for Rossetti personally consulted with Aguilar in adapting and abridging her poem for the cantata. Aguilar's composition is also the only 19th-century musical setting of "Goblin Market," as Rossetti granted Aguilar exclusive rights to set this poem. The adapted version of “Goblin Market” that constitutes the sung lyrics for the cantata was also available separately from the score’s publisher, Hutchings & Romer, and is advertised on the index page preceding the score: “Books of the Words 6d. each.” Unfortunately, to date no copies of this separately published libretto have been located.
Working in direct consultation with Aguilar, and as advertised on the title page of Aguilar's published score, Rossetti gave her explicit approval to the adapted text for the cantata. The pervasive textual alterations are significant, and these changes effectively simplify the poem's moral lesson and remove the sexual and erotic overtones in the original poem. The cantata's subtitle offers a clue as to what may have motivated this erasure of the poem's more adult themes: while "Goblin Market" had originally been written during the period of Rossetti's work with fallen women at Highgate Penitentiary and then published as the title poem in a volume of poetry marketed for an adult audience, the new cantata was intended to be sung by younger performers, as is indicated in the subtitle "Cantata, for treble voices"—"treble" customarily referring to young female and unchanged male voices. We might surmise that Rossetti had approved major textual changes that make her poem appropriate for juvenile performers and a new target market. In the revised text, neither soloists nor chorus would sing lines suggesting sexual knowingness unbefitting a late-Victorian adolescent.
Goblin Market, Cantata is, above all, age-appropriate. As such, it adds a significant new incident and artistic genre to Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s discussion of “Goblin Market” as a cross-audienced poem, for the cantata pre-dates the conversion of “Goblin Market” to juvenile literature that Kooistra chronicles as happening at the end of the nineteenth century (Christina Rossetti and Illustration. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002. 195). Furthermore, Rossetti’s feelings about cooperating in changing her poem for a younger audience may have evolved following her approval of the cantata adaptation in 1879, for when she was asked in 1886 for permission to reprint “Goblin Market” in A Second School Poetry Book, she consented only on the condition that the poem be printed in full, “but on no account if any portion whatever is to be omitted” (Letters 3: 348).
Sources:
Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. Christina Rossetti and Illustration. Athens OH, Ohio UP, 2002.
Rossetti, Christina. The Letters of Christina Rossetti. Edited by Antony H. Harrison. Charlottesville, UP of Virginia, 1997-2004. 4 vols.