Massaging the Moral
Vittorio Ricci’s musical choices suggest a presentation of Laura’s feast on goblin fruit as a calming resolution following the goblins’ noisy, hectic, and overwhelmingly detailed advertising of their fruits. The tempo and mood of the music changes here when we are told that Laura “clipped a precious golden lock, / She sucked the yellow fruits and red” (Ricci and Gillington p. 32). Laura’s feast is musically presented as tranquil bliss rather than as an orgiastic and frenetic sensory indulgence. The musical marking “Tranquillo” and a tempo of 53-63 suggest a very leisurely, peaceful and calm musical mood for Laura’s goblin feast—Laura seems mesmerized and transported by the experience. Ricci does not musically signal a sense of danger or threat at this point.
altering the ending
In the original conclusion to Rossetti’s poem we are taken years forward in time to find that Lizzie and Laura are now wives and mothers. Rossetti writes how Laura would gather the sisters’ children her around to tell them of her experience with the goblin men and to add her moral interpretation of these events, but this ending is substantially altered in Gillington’s libretto. The cantata eliminates the poem’s framing of the moral “there is no friend like a sister” within this scene of Laura’s mature interpretation and maternal storytelling. Instead, in Ricci's cantata Laura’s restoration of health is followed immediately by a duet in which both sisters sing the poem’s moral, with the chorus later joining in as well. This does have the effect of downplaying Laura’s social recuperation and moral growth as emphasized in the poem: we lose the sense of Laura’s retrospective mature ability to give a moral interpretation to her experience; we also lose the assurance of her complete social recovery from her fall so that she one day becomes a wife with children of her own (Rossetti ll. 544-45). What the closure of Ricci and Gillington’s cantata does retain is an anthem to the saving strength of sisterhood.