Future Opportunities
There are many other areas for further analysis within the topic of Christina Rossetti in music: for instance, the frequent and serious musical attention paid by leading composers to Rossetti’s nursery rhymes in Sing-Song; or the new textual resonances generated in “song cycles,” groups of songs performed as a single entity, which can be profitably analyzed for how they place Rossetti’s work in new intertextual dialogues, sometimes within a sequence of selected Rossetti poems, and sometimes within a poetic sequence that places Rossetti’s poems among, and in conversation with, the works of other poets. Other composite forms bring Rossetti’s writing into similarly fresh contexts, for example, Matthew Hindson’s choral work “Heartland” (2004), commissioned by the Sydney Gay & Lesbian choir, which includes the “Did you miss me? / Come and kiss me” passage from “Goblin Market” and sets it among selections from Sappho, Keats, Shelley, Book of Ruth and others.
Diachronic analysis
Also, some very frequently set poems offer potential for diachronic critical study of musical interpretations’ historical evolution. For instance, “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”) was set at least 93 times up to 1979, and it has been more recently set as part of a humanist oratorio Rossetti Requiem (Lambert), as a successful popular song in Chinese entitled “歌” by pop singer Luo Dayou, with lyrics translated into Chinese by renowned Chinese poet Xu Zhimo (Dayou), and as a track on the debut album of the Australian alternative rock band “The Goblin Market.” Similarly, there are at the very least 47 settings of “A Birthday” (the lyric that Virginia Woolf quotes when remembering luncheon parties before World War 1 and their “humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves” [p. 15]). For Woolf, Rossetti’s poem articulated an illusion of love that was lost after the Great War; nevertheless, “A Birthday” has continued to be taken up by composers since then, and occasionally with interpretive swerves that substantially influence its meaning. Typically, the poem is set for a solo singer, usually female, but sometimes male; but “A Birthday” has also been set as a part-song for multiple singers, a choice that teases out the communal and universal meanings in what most readers would see as a lyric poem expressing a very personal experience of love. “A Birthday” was recently adapted musically as the anthem for BBC International Women’s Day 2015. Meanwhile, another recent setting of “A Birthday” by Ruth Byrchmore—this time set as a hymn in eight-part harmony for a full SATB choir—won the 2005 British Composers Award in the Liturgical category. Commenting on her choice of text (which was chosen in collaboration with Westminster Abbey’s director of music), Byrchmore remarks on the poem’s “ambiguity in its sacred or secular leanings” and the openness of its last lines ("Because the birthday of my life is come, / My love is come to me") to “the idea that love can be divine love or earthly love” (qtd in “Birthday Honours”).
Sacred and secular song
The border between sacred and secular can also be crossed in the opposite direction, as in the major 2010 composition Rossetti Requiem, in which Edward Lambert arranges a sequence of selected Rossetti poems that trace the individual’s journey through life. Significantly, the work is labeled a “humanist oratorio,” and while there are few changes within the individual poems, the selection and arrangement of lyrics erases any hint of Rossetti’s specifically Christian faith. The journey that the composition traces is personal and spiritual, but it is detached from any religious or theological reference. Rossetti’s poetic use, here and elsewhere, of the Tractarian doctrine of reserve (which encourages a delicate reticence and veiled utterance in writing about religious themes) allows her work to cross over between the sacred and secular repertories—her most famous religious song, Gustav Holst’s “In the Bleak Midwinter” being a prime example. Finally, the widespread adoption of Rossetti texts in hymnals for a wide range of Protestant denominations (helpfully profiled on Hymnary.org) is a significant topic that invites further study.
Translation and Modernization
Music has clearly been instrumental in extending the reach of Christina Rossetti’s poetry and aesthetics: settings by foreign composers are often the occasion of translations into languages including French, German, Italian, Welsh, Dutch, Catalan, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese, and music is a vehicle for the presentation of Rossetti’s work to a variety of new audiences around the world. New musico-literary works based on Rossetti’s poems also bring innovative modern updates to her poems, as for instance in contemporary musical adaptations of “Goblin Market” that reference drug addiction or AIDS, or modernize the sexual mores implied in the poem to reference current scenarios of casual sex, teenage pregnancy, or date rape. Analysis of these new creative collaborations between the long-dead poet and musical composers of today reveal just how energizing a force music can be in helping to keep Rossetti’s poetry alive.
Looking forward
In closing, the time is ripe for a deeper and wider study of musical interpretations of Rossetti’s poetry, but information about this body of compositions is currently partial and scattered, contained in various library and music catalogues, published bibliographies, and a wide range of other print and web resources. Moreover, new entries will constantly need to be added as works are discovered or created. Given that the most useful resource would not only provide text-based bibliographical and composer information, and composition and performance history, but would also include for further study PDFs of musical scores, audio-files of recorded performances, and links to other resources, it is clear that this information needs to be gathered and organized into a multi-media database that would form the basis of a searchable database-driven website. The Christina Rossetti in Music digital humanities project sets out to assemble such an archive, and we invite others to contribute their discoveries or new creative works to the growing collection (contact us). The musical/textual interart exchange in Rossetti studies is a subject area ripe for further exploration, and this digital archive and website will hopefully serve as useful increments in this emergent area of Rossetti studies.
Sources:
“Birthday Honours.” Choir & Organ, vol. 14, no. 2, 2006, p. 2. Music Index. Accessed 9 Apr 2013.
Byrchmore, Ruth. “A Birthday.” Words by Christina Rossetti. London, Novello, 2004.
Dayou, Luo. “When I am dead my dearest.” Inspiring Chinese. Accessed 21 Oct 2017. https://claryxue.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/%E6%AD%8C/
Hindson, Matthew. “Heartland: for large massed choir and two pianos” Commissioned for Festival of combined Gay and Lesbian Choirs, 2001. Australian Music Centre. Accessed 26 Jan 2017. www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/workversion/hindson-matthew-heartland/11976.
Kelly, Jeff and Christina Rossetti. “When I am Dead.” The Goblin Market: Ghostland. Camera Obscura, 2000. www.discogs.com/Goblin-Market-Ghostland/release/1872096.
Lambert, Edward. Rossetti Requiem: a setting of texts by Christina Rossetti for soloists, choir and orchestra. 2010. Accessed 21 Oct 2017. https://www.lambertmusic.co.uk/rossetti-requiem.html.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own; Three Guineas. Edited by Morag Shiach. Oxford UP, 1992.