Victorian Musical Scene
Historically, Christina Rossetti’s productivity as a poet overlaps with important 19th-century changes in music’s cultural presence and status. As Rossetti’s poetry was being published and welcomed by the public, the English musical scene was also transforming, and both benefitted from the resulting synergy. Christina Rossetti’s poetry was taken up by composers as text for popular parlour songs, and it also enjoyed serious and continued attention as a new generation of British composers elevated the art of musical composition and song-writing in the English Musical Renaissance. Both popular and art song settings of Pre-Raphaelite poetry have played an under-acknowledged part in the dissemination, reception and interpretation of Pre-Raphaelitism and Christina Rossetti’s poetry. Meanwhile, although there has been valuable scholarship on the representation and influence of music conceptually, visually, metrically, and formally in Pre-Raphaelite literature and art by scholars including Phyllis Weliver, Elizabeth Helsinger, Alan Davison, Diane Sachko Macleod, and Karen Yuen and others, there has been until recently less attention paid to the role of actual composed and performed music.
During the Victorian period the piano became a fixture in Victorian middle-class parlours, and there was exponential growth in demand for popular, recreational song for a mass middle-class market. Christina Rossetti’s poetry was particularly popular in this tradition of drawing-room ballads or parlour songs performed by amateur musicians and in a domestic setting. In addition to this popular music, beginning in the 1880’s and ’90’s and continuing into the twentieth century, writes Stephen Banfield, “song was emerging as a more significant art form,” “there was a new literary sensibility and a wave of creativity intent on setting English poetry to music” (vol. 1, p. 2), and Christina Rossetti’s verse enjoyed continued and more serious attention from well-trained native composers as English song-writing underwent a renaissance. Composers who played leading roles in this musical development during the English Musical Renaissance—including Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, Alexander Mackenzie, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, John Ireland, Frederic H. Cowen, Arthur Somervell and others—all composed art music based on Rossetti poems.
Popular song and art song
As Karen Yuen says, in the Victorian period there was “an explosion of musical activity” (p. 79) in the form of concerts, music societies, instrument making, music publication, better musical education, music journals, and music reporting. While it is recognized as a significant presence socially and culturally, Victorian song has generally not been considered musically or artistically praiseworthy. The vast productivity of the Victorian song market has been criticized for its “mindless facility” and “musical complacency” (Banfield, vol. 1, pp. 3-4); however, these broad strokes do not paint the whole picture. Joanna Swafford and Derek B. Scott both argue for the significance of bourgeois, domestic music, and Swafford rightly observes that both parlour and art songs “function as readings of the poems they use as lyrics” and many parlour songs “actually perform nuanced understandings of the texts they set” (Songs of the Victorians). Also, it is important not to generalize about all Victorian song, for there existed an important division in the nineteenth-century song repertory. As already noted, in addition to the very large category of popular, recreational song, there was also a smaller category of more serious song or art song, to be performed by trained musicians as concert repertoire and appreciated by connoisseurs. The art song is distinguished from popular song in several ways, and not least by its literary sensibility, reflected in the frequency with which the art song is through-composed, allowing musical creativity to be responsive to the smallest details of the text, rather than repeating the same music with different words in a series of verses. Rossetti’s poetry benefitted by being carried forward on a wave of musical development in the English Musical Renaissance; her verse was given serious attention by significant composers, and these musical settings were enjoyed on the international stage.
Musical Rossetti
In Christina Rossetti’s case, shortly following the publication of Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862, composers began requesting Rossetti’s permission to set her poems to music. Rossetti herself welcomed, encouraged and supported this creative engagement with her work, writing to her publisher Alexander Macmillan, “The more of my things get set to music the better pleased I am” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 211). Rossetti’s lyrics partake of a sensibility, vocabulary, metre and stanzaic form that make them undeniably and recognizably nascent songs, and this is a quality that is highlighted in Rossetti’s titles (a significant number of which include the word “song” or some other musical term in their titles). By all accounts, Rossetti herself was neither particularly musical nor a serious music lover. She does however mention in a letter trying out at home a new musical setting of one of her poems: “Now my mother has played and I (after a fashion) sung it, and I am able not only to return thanks for honour done me but to say how truly I like the air” (Letters, vol.1, pp. 300-301). This tableau of Frances at the piano and Christina singing is not a familiar image, even for Rossetti scholars.
Although they were not musical themselves, the Rossettis did have associations with the music world, and it seems that they increasingly recognized the value of seeing their writing converge collaboratively with music. Francis Hueffer, composer and music critic for The Times, was an early and vocal proponent of the English Musical Renaissance, and he is an important link between the Pre-Raphaelite circle and the music world: he was Dante Gabriel’s neighbour in Cheyne Walk and a close friend of both Rossetti brothers and linked to William Michael Rossetti by marriage; Hueffer edited the Tauchnitz edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poems; and he composed settings of two Christina Rossetti poems. Furthermore, Hueffer and Theo Marzials provided music at fortnightly parties hosted by Ford Madox Brown at Fitzroy Square, parties which were attended regularly by Dante Gabriel, William Michael and Christina Rossetti over the seven-year period 1868-1874 (Chapman and Meacock, p. 207). There was also a planned but abandoned collaboration between Hueffer and Dante Gabriel—“The Doom of the Sirens: A Lyrical Tragedy” (1869)—for which Dante Gabriel composed a prose sketch outlining the dramatic events for the libretto (Chapman and Meacock, p. 235).
Rossetti felt authorial pride both in her remarkable popularity with composers and in what Caroline Gemmer called the “musicability” of her verse (Letters, vol. 2, p. 217), and in the booming Victorian market for parlour music and art songs, certain Rossetti verses were set repeatedly. In Sensibility and English Song, Stephen Banfield lists the era’s 22 most frequently set poems, and two of these are by Rossetti: “A Birthday” and “Song” (“When I am dead my dearest”). Maura Ives notes that “Song” (“When I am dead my dearest”) was set at least 40 times before 1900 (p. 15). According to Banfield, only Shelley and Tennyson had more poems of such popularity with composers (vol. 1, p. 9). Rossetti’s delight in this aspect of her fame is clear in an 1890 letter to her brother William Michael, in which she remarks with good humour on a composer’s inquiry to her publisher into whether “When I am dead” had ever been set to music: “It seems ‘Macmillan’ knew not: fancy not knowing whether ‘When--’ has ever been set!!! (Authorial conceit.)” (Letters, vol. 4, p. 176).
The Rossettis were aware of the distinctions between popular and serious music, and not surprisingly aspired to a presence in the latter genre. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s comments to his mother on hearing of a setting of “Goblin Market” register this difference between domestic entertainment and public professional performances: “I was glad to hear of some venturous mortal having set Goblin Market to music, though I cannot exactly see the aim and end of the act unless he has a public performance in view and at command. It would hardly do for a five or ten minutes’ brilliant trifling at the evening piano” (Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, letter no. 2143). Leading composers’ musical interpretations of excellent poems and performed by classically trained singers and musicians discernibly rose above the banalities of the popular music market and were intended for the discerning audience that Christina Rossetti’s poetry had always cultivated.
Cultural Profile
Musical settings function to raise the cultural profile of the poetic works they select. For example, in the context of her endeavour to frame “musical Pre-Raphaelitism” as a new area of inquiry, Karen Yuen examines George A. Macfarren’s cantata setting of Rossetti’s “Songs in a Cornfield” as an early instance of the expansion of Pre-Raphaelitism into the new cultural field of music. Macfarren’s Songs in a Cornfield, published in 1868, must have been composed not long after the original publication of the poem in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, which had appeared in June of 1866; and so Macfarren’s selection of it for musical interpretation is a significant and early event in the reception history of this volume, and it serves to highlight Rossetti as a poet to take note of. Yuen persuasively paints the 18 February 1869 debut performance of Songs in a Cornfield as a significant cultural event and one that increased Pre-Raphaelitism and Christina Rossetti’s prestige: composer Macfarren was already an established and well-respected British composer (he would later become Principal of the Royal Academy of Music and Professor of Music at Cambridge, and was eventually knighted in 1883 [Yuen, pp. 7-8]); Songs in a Cornfield premiered in London’s St. James’s Hall, London’s principal concert hall and one of London’s largest performance venues; the conductor Henry Leslie was a renowned musician and conductor; and the female soloists were “two of the leading female vocalists of their generation” (Yuen, p. 25), all details that attest to the fact that music was increasing Rossetti’s public profile and prestige. This prestige is further underscored in Novello's publication of Macfarren’s score in 1870 in an ottavo edition along with The Music Composed for Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream by F. Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Acis and Galatea: A Serenata by G.F. Handel. “Songs in a Corn-Field—A Cantata for female voices, with accompaniment for pianoforte. “The poetry by Christina Rossetti, The Music Composed, and Dedicated to Miss E. D’O James, by G.A. MacFarren” is certainly published among illustrious company.
Sources:
Banfield, Stephen. Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th Century. Cambridge UP, 1985. 2 vols.
Chapman, Alison and Joanna Meacock. A Rossetti Family Chronology. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Davison, Alan. “Woven Songs and Musical Mirrors: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘symbolic physiognomy’ of Music.” The British Art Journal, vol. 13, no. 3, 2012, pp. 85-90.
Helsinger, Elizabeth K. Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Charlottesville, U of Virginia P, 2015.
Ives, Maura. Christina Rossetti: A Descriptive Bibliography. New Castle, DE, Oak Knoll, 2011.
Mendelssohn Bartholdy, F., G.F. Handel and G.A. Macfarren. The Music Composed for Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream by F. Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Acis and Galatea by G.F. Handel and Songs in a Corn-Field by G.A. MacFarren. London, Novello, 1870.
Rossetti, Christina. The Letters of Christina Rossetti. Edited by Antony H. Harrison, Charlottesville, UP of Virginia, 1997-2004. 4 vols.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Edited by William E. Fredeman, Cambridge UK, Rochester NY, D.S. Brewer, 2002-15. 10 vols.
Sachko Macleod, Dianne. “Rossetti’s Two Ligeias: Their Relationship to Visual Art, Music and Poetry.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 20, no. 3-4, 1982, pp. 89-201.
Scott, Derek B. The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour. Milton Keynes, Open UP, 1989.
Swafford, Joanna. Songs of the Victorians. University of Virginia. Accessed 23 May 2013. www.songsofthevictorians.com/.
Weliver, Phyllis. “The Silent Song in D.G. Rossetti’s ‘The House of Life.’” The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. Edited by Phyllis Weliver, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005, pp. 194-212.
Yuen, Karen. “Music and Pre-Raphaelitism: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Songs in a Cornfield’ and George Alexander Macfarren’s Songs in a Cornfield. Unpub. ms.