Speranza
D. Scott
--
Bourgeois domestic drawing-room ballads branch out in three new directions in the 1840s and
'50s.
First, drawing-rooms by (or partly by) women were added to those by respectable
entertainers like Moore, Bayly and Russell.
Second, ballads from the black-face minstrel shows
are added to those taken from the ITALIAN (as per the Royal Italian Opera) and English opera.
Third, a new kind of "sacred" or religious ballad
supplements the hymns sung on Sundays.
Then there's women songwriters.
Women songwriters
attract a peak of attention in the 1860s (when they were being marketed as
something of a novelty), whereas the minstrels were still going strong in the
1880s, and the sacred drawing-room ballad proved to be one of the most durable forms of
drawing-room ballad.
There is another reason, too, for placing women composers
after a chapter on the early amateur music market.
A composer like Maria Lindsay
can be seen to be consciously tailoring her music to amateur domestic, rather
than professional public performance.
Moreover, Lindsay's songs contain features
common in amateur composition:
-- incessant two-bar phrasing
-- the
simple melodic framework which is adapted to the differing demands (especially
those pertaining to metre and stress) of individual verses.
Before
discussing the rise of the woman composer, it would be valuable to examine
briefly the social position of the middle-class woman in the nineteenth century.
The Victorian perfect lady was innocent and chaste before marriage and a
devoted wife and caring mother after marriage.
Her education took place within
the family, and the range of subjects she could study was limited by the fear of
making her opinionated and therefore less submissive to her future husband's
views.
Literary, artistic, and musical skills were thought appropriate to female
study.
The mechanics of the subjection of women were to be found in the
ideologies of purity, chastity, and the family.
Female sexuality was repressed
by the ideology of purity and found sublimation in religion, motherhood, and the
spiritual side of love.
Middle-class men had to achieve financial security
before marriage and so tended to marry late.
The ideology of chastity served to
remove the threat to family values of illegitimate children.
The virginity of
middle-class women was, ironically, protected by the large numbers of
prostitutes available.
In tacit acknowledgment of this, the state brought
forward no serious legislation against prostitution until the necessity arose of
preventing the spread of venereal disease among the armed forces (prompting the
Contagious Disease Acts of 1865-69).
The ideology of the family ensured that the
primary role of women was a breeding children.
As a consequence, there developed
a whole range of beliefs about gender behaviour which made women of all classes
victims of sexism.
A middle-class woman's roles, then, were all family
roles.
She begina as daughter and progresses in turn to being a wife and mother.
Each role had its duties and obligations, thoroughly documented in Sarah Ellis's
books,
"The Mothers of England" (1843),
"The Wives of England" (1844) and
"The
Daughters of England" (1845).
A woman's status depended on her father's economic
position before marriage and her husband's thereafter.
Prospective husbands were
influenced by the former of these conditions:
they say she's pretty but
alas
with hand extended, thus they flout
she has no cash & by they
pass
ye gods what are the men about
--- from 'Not Married Yet', words
unattributed, music by Henry Russell.
For a middle-class woman, being a
caring mother did not imply that she devoted her time to looking after children.
They would be put into the charge of nannies and governesses.
There would be
little work to do about the house, since that was attended to by servants.
Charity work for the local church was common among those who wished to be
active, but it was not admired if it became too zealous.
If a middle-class woman
failed to marry, it was usually a disaster.
The best that might be hoped for was
to become 'auntie' in a brother's house, or a governess.
Unmarried working-class
women supported themselves by going into factories, shops, domestic service, or
becoming seamstresses.
Elderly unmarried women of either class rarely received
sympathetic treatment.
The severest opprobrium, however, was reserved for the
fallen woman, for example, an adulteress or prostitute.
She posed the most
outrageous threat to family values.
When Holman Hunt, in "The Awakening
Conscience" (1854), painted a fallen woman whose conscience is stirred by the
divine power of music, many were appalled at what they considered to be Holman
Hunt's poor taste.
Even the possibility of redemption for such creatures was
resented.
Questions concerning the rights of women were regarded during the
Napoleonic Wars as akin to Jacobinism, though a minority kept alive the thoughts
of people like Mary Wollstonecraft.
The issue was revived after the war in
radical publications and was reaffirmed by Shelley's circle.
The most radical
women were workers in the northern textile districts, where demand for their
labour had effected a change in their economic status.
The debate about the rights of women was dominated in the 1860s by the arguments
of Mill and Ruskin.
Mill furnished a rational analysis of the subjection of
women and called for emancipation.
Ruskin countered with the ideology of
chivalry.
A woman has virtues unobtainable by men and can therefore 'rule' a
man's conscience.
Victorian chivalry was a hegemonic compromise which maintained
patriarchal control and contained nineteenth-century feminism by emphasizing
difference rather than inferiority.
In the 1880s the new woman emerges,
demanding an end to double standards in sexual morality and asking to be given
an active participatory role in society.
The January 1884 Westminster Review
noted with an air of revelation in 1884, 'wifehood and motherhood are
incidental parts, which may or may not enter into the life of each woman'.
During this decade enormous demonstrations were being held in cities and large
towns by the women's suffrage movement.
Many Tories were in favour of extending
the franchise to women 'inhabitant occupiers' in the hope that property-owning
women would swing the political pendulum to the right (a woman living with her
husband was not legally an inhabitant occupier).
The Movement for the Higher
Education of Women also began in the 1880s.
The new woman of this period is
satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan's "Princess Ida; or, Castle Adamant"(1884).
Gilbert's attitude to
feminism may be dismissive, but his attitude to women is never simple.
He is
often accused, for example, of cruelty towards his elderly, unmarried female
characters, an accusation which could be a largely male reaction born of
self-serving male protectiveness (in the way Ruskin's chivalry was
self-serving).
Jane Stedman makes an alternative claim that in Gilbert's hands
'the middle-aged comic spinster took on an energy and independence which
dramatists before and after him gave only to the high-spirited heroines' ('From
dame to woman', in Vicinus 1980: 37).
For women to take to musical
composition in any numbers, three conditions needed to be satisfied.
First, they had to
have the opportunity to develop the relevant musical skills
Second, they have the opportunity to
have their music performed, and
Tthird, they have examples of successful women composers to help
them achieve.
Middle-class women had leisure time they could spend on music.
The
economic stability of their position, which safeguarded a life of genteel
idleness by enabling them to delegate chores to servants, had already encouraged
them to indulge in more private forms of creative activity, such as writing
novels.
The Westminster Review, raising its eyebrows in 1856, said, whad
imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses,
because they had no other 'ladylike' means of getting their bread . . But no! .
. It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-coloured ink and
a ruby pen.
Enthusiasm for writing verse had been
scornfully referred to some years earlier, in a song called 'The Clever Woman',
composed by the celebrated burlesque composer, Jonathan Blewitt, with words by
the Hon. Grantley Fitzhardinge Berkeley.
she gets some rich victim to pay for
her pleasures
& learned revisers are waiting the same
to alter her
prose and to finish her measures
& give to her poetry all but their
name.
Leisure time for women to compose was not sufficient in itself, since,
unlike prose or verse, music exists only as sound.
Therefore, there was an
additional requirement to have the composition heard.
There were many problems
to overcome, however, in order to obtain access to the male-dominated musical
profession.
A typical example of a composer stifled by the lack of this second
kind of opportunity was Alice Mary Smith (1839-84).
The daughter of a London
lace merchant, she showed great aptitude for music, and her father arranged for
her to study with Sterndale Bennett and G. A. Macfarren.
Alice Mary Smith attracted
interested attention when the Musical Society of London included a performance
of a string quartet by her in 1861.
Alice Mary Smith was accorded exceptional
honours.
Alice Mary Smith was elected as Female Professional Associate of the Philharmonic
Society in 1867 (the year she married a QC who supported her musical activity).
And Alice Mary Smith became an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1884.
Her
output included such large-scale works as symphonies, cantatas, and a clarinet
concerto.
Yet, in spite of her honours and achievements, no publisher was
interested in anything other than her drawing-room ballads.
Thus, whereas
Bennett's and Macfarren's orchestral works were rushed into print and available
for performances far and wide, Smith stagnated with her manuscript copies in
London.
The only far-reaching admiration she acquired was for her
well-constructed duet 'Maying' (words from The Saint's Tragedy, by Kingsley),
published in 1870.
Where women are prepared to serve clearly identifiable
economic interests, publication was possible.
'Maying' was tailored to the
ballad market and proved such a success that the copyright sold for £663 the
year before Smith died.
Because publishers were unwilling to take
risks with orchestral works by women, and because women had restricted access to
tuition in compositional skills (they were rarely taught orchestration, for
example), the ballad was an obvious choice for their creative efforts.
These
facts need to be weighed when considering the sexual stereotyping of musical
forms.
But they also point to contradictions in essentialist arguments that
female cultural activity has a character of its own independent of social and
economic circumstances.
This extends from forms to moods.
As soon as one finds
something one may consider typically "masculine", like imperialist bombast, one
finds a woman who is equal to anything men can do (for example, Frances
Allitsen).
Women learned music as an accomplishment, not as a profession.
Mill remarked, in "The Subjection of Women", that since women are taught music
only for the purpose of executing it, not composing it, it was logical that in
respect of composition (and composition alone) men were superior to women.
Music
often takes pride of place among the range of leisure activities (such as sewing,
sketching, and reading) which were available to middle-class girls.
Lessons in
singing were favoured because they yielded the showiest of all a young woman's
accomplishments.
Training in the science of music rather than just
the execution of music only began to move within more general reach of women
when Conservatoires and Academies of Music started to offer scientific grounding
in music to boys as well as girls in the 1870s.
In spring 1870, Sullivan
delivers a course of lectures at South Kensington Museum in connection with a
scheme entitled 'Instruction in Science and Art for Women'.
Nevertheless, the
constant charge of the 1880s was that women lacked an inventive faculty, the
proof being that although they were almost all taught music, there was a dearth
of female composers.
The Englishwoman's Review of 15 October 1888 argues in
reply to such criticism, the mechanical and superficial acquirement, which
consumed so many hours of every girl's school-life, was not only unadapted to
bring out the higher faculties, but possibly tended to stupify them.
In 1888, the year the above was written, women were continuing to
prove themselves.
A comic opera, "Carina", by Julia Wolf was greeted with
enthusiasm at the Opera Comique in London.
A woman won first prize in
counterpoint at the Paris Conservatoire.
And women were coming to the fore in
Germany and Italy.
Women were fighting for the right to take university degrees
in music.
As early as 1856, Elizabeth Stirling had passed the 'exercise' for the
Mus. Bac. at Oxford but was refused the degree.
She was for over twenty years
the organist at St Andrew's, Undershaft, a post she won in open competition.
In
1878 Cambridge allowed women to take their music examinations and, if
successful, receive a certificate which stated that they had passed but 'for
various reasons' the degree could not be conferred upon them.
Cambridge first
awarded degrees in music to women in 1927.
In 1885 Oxford allowed women to go
part of the way towards a degree in music but were not to confer degrees in
music upon women until 1921.
The first music graduate of Victoria University
(now the University of Manchester) was, however, a woman.
She was Marian Millar
who, in 1894, became the first woman to obtain a degree in music in England.
It
may be wondered why universities in the 1880s took women students at all, when
they felt unable to award them degrees.
Perhaps it is significant that each
woman paid around £80 a year in fees, not including the cost other private
tuition.
By the end of the century there was wider acknowledgement of the
creative musical potential of women.
The chairman, winding up a discussion on
'Woman as a Musician' at the annual conference of the Incorporated Society of
Musicians (Grand Hotel, Scarborough, 2 January 1900), said he 'quite believed
the part that women had played in the past had not been because they had not the
genius, but because that genius had not been stimulated by their early
training'.
Within a few years Ethel Smyth would be hailed as the first woman
composer to establish herself on an equal footing with men, particularly after
the performance other opera "The Wreckers" in Germany in 1906.
Prior to the
twentieth century, women composers were rarely given a place in history, though
they were steadily growing in numbers from the seventeenth century onwards, when
such notable figures as
Barbara Strozzi (1619-44?)
Mary Harvey (1629-1704)
Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet dc La Guerre (1664?-1727)
were active.
Thus, there was
no 'Great Tradition' and there were no obvious role models for
nineteenth-century women.
Women usually made a reputation as performers, since
this served 'the linked economic and erotic interests of dominant culture'.
The
most glamorized performer being the singer, it is interesting to note that the
vocal arts alone have a 'Great Tradition' of women which overshadows that of
men.
Ambitious Victorian sopranos not only had the stimulus of the sensational
London appearances made by Jenny Lind (the 'Swedish Nightingale') in 1847 and
1848-49 to help them achieve, but also the knowledge that home-grown sopranos
like Elizabeth Linley and Nancy Storace had acquired international reputations
in the previous century.
Women first enter the ballad market through the
door of literature.
Women writers had been establishing themselves as novelists,
like Jane Austen (1775- 1817), or dramatists, like Elizabeth Inchbald
(1756-1821), or poets, like Felicia Hemans (1794-1835).
FELICIA HEMANS, née Browne,
was the daughter of a Liverpool merchant.
Felicia Browne Hemans demonstrated a precocious talent
for poetry, writing verse in Byronic vein at first, but always with due regard
to moral propriety.
Felicia Browne Hemans's poems won a respected place in middle-class
homes, where it was felt that mothers may safely place them in the hands of
their children, certain that nothing but moral good can be obtained from
them.
Her importance to the history of the drawing-room ballad lies in her
having written the words to a collection of songs entitled "Peninsular Melodies",
published by Goulding & D'Almaine, London.
Following Britain's liberating
efforts in the Peninsular War, there was a vogue for Spanish melody which lasted
into the mid-1850s.
Apart from Spanish subject matter, everything about Hemans'
verse was contemporary and English.
And this sets her apart, as a model to
English women lyricists, from earlier women who had written song-texts in
dialect like Susanna Blamire (who will be discussed in the next chapter).
Sometimes, even the subject matter of a Hemans Peninsular Melody is not
obviously Spanish (for example, 'Mother, O! Sing Me to Rest').
Therefore,
following the success of these songs, it was a small step for composers of
ballads to want to set her shorter poems to music.
Indeed, one of the most
famous of drawing-room ballads is a late Victorian setting of her poem 'The
Better Land' by Cowen, a poem which had already acquired popularity as a song
earlier in the century in an unattributed setting published by Z. T. Purday.
ELIZA COOK.
Another precocious female talent, Eliza Cook (1818-89), the daughter of a
Southwark tradesman, followed in Hemans' footsteps.
Like the latter, 'No vicious
thought intrudes itself into her writings', and she, too, acquired great
popularity among the middle class: '. . . her poems hit the taste of that class,
while a certain musical flow of the rhythm attracted the attention of the composers of the day, and many were set to music by Glover and other popular song
writers'.
In her early career, Eliza Cook's poems were frequently set to music by
Henry Russell.
Her reputation was at its height in the early 1850s, when Eliza
Cook's Journal, a periodical she founded in 1849, was a favourite among women
who sought modest social and political reform.
The absence of fashion-plates and
gossip vouched for its serious nature.
The moral fervour of Cook's poetry may
have dated towards the end other life, but she had proved well before then that
women could rival men in providing verse tor drawing-room ballads.
She did,
occasionally, write both words and music herself, as in 'Dead Leaves' (1852).
The importance of Hemans and Cook is seen in Davidson's "Universal Melodist",
the first large collection of 'popular, standard, and original songs'.
The first
volume of 1853 contains 800 songs, dominated 90 per cent by men.
The female side
is most strongly represented by Cook, Hemans, and a selection of Mary Leman
Rede's new texts to Moore's Irish Melodies.
Women composers are very thin on the
ground, although their numbers doubled in the second volume, published in 1854.
Nevertheless, women composers barely account for 5 per cent of the entire
collection of 1630 songs.
Another figure important to the gradual emergence
of women into the ballad market makes her appearance in volume one of the above
collection.
Her name is Caroline Norton (1808-77).
She is shown there following
Hemans' example, supplying texts to two Peninsular melodies.
But in the same
year as that volume she had an outstanding success with a 'Spanish' ballad
composed and written by herself.
'Juanita', published by Chappell, became the
first ballad by a woman composer to achieve massive sales.
Perhaps the Peninsular melody the market had been waiting for
was just what 'Juanita' provided, a decidedly English ballad with an exotic hint
of Spain in both words and music.
A pseudo-Spanish musical turn decorates the
name Juanita, and the postlude contains an imitation of the 'hammered-on' notes
common in guitar music.
Otherwise, the refrain bears a striking resemblance to
Handel's 'Lascia ch'io pianga', from Rinaldo.
Caroline Norton was a
granddaughter of the playwright Sheridan.
She had to endure a long and stormy
relationship when she married the Tory MP for Guildford, the Hon. George Norton.
It included a sensational trial when, in an attempt to be rid of Caroline and to
damage the Whig government, he brought a prosecution against the Prime Minister,
Lord Melbourne, for 'criminal conversation' with his wife.
Although the case was
thrown out of court, her reputation never fully recovered.
Through its
revelations, and more especially through the advance publicity and speculation,
Caroline had lost the indefinable aura of spotless inviolability at that time
prized above all things for a woman.
Moreover, the Hon. George
Norton was not averse, it seems, to beating his wife, causing her to seek
frequent refuge with her mother, even though she was then denied access to her
children.
These adversities may have acted as a spur to her creative activities,
if only for the money she was able to earn and the relative independence that
money bought.
In this connection it is surely no coincidence that Hemans was
separated from her husband and that Eliza Cook never married.
However, as a
result of George Norton's hiding her children, Caroline's career was diverted
from the arts to writing pamphlets and becoming the prime mover behind the
Infant Custody Bill (passed in 1839).
Reunited with her children, she lived
as an independent writer until, in 1853, George was inspired to sue her for
debt, thus laying legal claim to any money she earned from writing or songs.
1853, it will be remembered, was the year of Juanita.
Caroline was again
diverted into writing and agitating in support of the Divorce Bill and the
Married Women's Property Bill.
Some other songs clearly reflect her own
concerns, for example, 'The Mother's Lament' (1840). Others reflect them
obliquely.
"The Arab's Farewell to His Favourite Steed" (music by John Blockley,
published c. 1865) dwells upon the painful theme of separation and perhaps
transfers some of the grief she felt at parting from her children to the Arab
parting from his beloved horse.
Caroline Norton's importance to the history
of the drawing-room ballad, however, is that she set an example for other women
to emulate in producing a small body of contemporary songs of which she was both
author and composer.
In so doing, she not only paved the way for Claribel but
also improved the status of women solely interested in composing the music for
popular songs, something carried further by Maria Lindsay.
In the second half
of the 1850s, Miss M. Lindsay, as she chose to be known (sometimes giving her
married name, Mrs. J. Worthington Bliss, in parentheses), established herself as
the first commercially successful woman composer.
Her publisher, Robert Cocks
& Co., signed her up on an exclusive contract; in the 1860s she was second
only to Franz Abt as the most popular composer in their song catalogue.
She was
still popular enough in 1900 for Wickins and Co. to publish an Album of Miss M.
Lindsay's Songs.
It is difficult to see now why her songs became
such favourites.
Mary Lindsay's accompaniments rarely venture beyond banal figurations of
rocking or broken chords, and her melodic lines are undistinguished.
It may be
argued that Mary Lindsay's appeal lay in setting to music of an unobtrusive quality the
verse of the most admired contemporary poets, such as Tennyson and Longfellow.
It is obvious, too, from the preceding chapter, that a major attraction other
songs was their simplicity and consequent suitability for domestic music-making.
Mary Lindsay's songs also won approval for being of a high moral order.
Mary Lindsay''s first
best-seller, composed in 1854, admirably exemplified this trait: it was a
setting of Longfellow's 'Excelsior', the subject of which is the striving after
higher things, and the nobility attending even failure in that quest.
The song
is a lightly varied strophic treatment of seven stanzas, containing some clumsy
accentuation (musical accents contradicting verbal accents), and accompanied by
broken-chord patterns of a monotonous and predictable regularity.
Balfe's later duet version of 'Excelsior' is distinguished by his
ability to evoke a variety of moods, his inventiveness in setting the oft
repeated title word, his sense of what is musically dramatic, and his skill in
constructing a broad musical shape which increases the suspense of the narrative
by avoiding the static circular feel of a strophic setting.
Lindsay
occasionally makes a gesture of sympathy with the verse she is setting.
For
example, in 'Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead' (composed to Tennyson's verse
in 1858), Mary Lindsay responds to the wife's weeping with an urgent rhythmic agitation
of her usual banal figuration.
Lindsay's songs leave most of the questions of interpretation of the
mood of the poem and its drama to the individual singer.
The emotional intensity
other songs depends heavily on the expressive power of the singer's voice.
Sometimes Mary Lindsay's melodies are a basic skeleton of notes which can be fleshed out in
different ways to suit different lines of the poem.
'The Bridge' (words by
Longfellow), published in 1856, demonstrates this approach.
At other times, Mary Lindsay writes a clear-cut tune, as in "Contentment", being
published as late as 1911 by J. Curwen & Sons).
--------
Another woman ballad
composer who began to make her reputation in the 1850s was "Dolores", or Elizabeth
Dickson (1819-78).
Elizabeth Dickson, like Lindsay, began by setting Longfellow poems in 1854.
Elizabeth Dickson achieves a modest success with 'The Bridge', published in that year by
Charles Jefferys (London).
Elizabeth Dickson also tends to rely on various permutations of
broken-chord patterns for her accompaniments.
In Elizabeth Dickson's case, however, they are
often unpredictable in shape and rhythm.
Elizabeth Dickson's song 'The Land of Long Ago' offers
a good example.
This example dates from 1873, but Elizabeth Dickson's setting of
Tennyson's 'The Brook', published in 1857, shows the same individuality with its
delicate use of grace notes to suggest the rippling water.
Even
when lapsing into conventional figuration, Elizabeth Dickson can save the day with an
appealing melody, as she does in 'Wings'.
This was published in 1861 but
remained very popular throughout the whole decade, as is shown by the fact that
three different piano arrangements of the song found their way on to the market.
The person who did most to convince people that women could compose ballads
which would bear close comparison with anything similar by men was Virginia
Gabriel (1822-77).
Virginia Gabriel was born in Banstead, Surrey, the daughter of a
major-general.
Virginia Gabriel studied piano with the distinguished teachers Pixis, Dohler,
and Thalberg.
This was not so unusual, since professional women pianists were
now becoming accepted (mainly thanks to Lucy Anderson and Clara Schumann).
But
Virginia Gabriel also contrives to gain a proper grounding in composition from Molique
and Mercadante.
All the same, Virginia Gabriel soon encounters the same obstacles to success
as those mentioned earlier in relation to Alice Smith.
Her operetta "Widows
Bewitched" ran for several weeks, performed by the Bijou Operetta Company at St
George's Hall in 1867, but no wide-ranging interest followed.
Three
years later, as a well-known name, Virginia Gabriel had to pay to have her cantata "Dreamland"
printed privately.
Cantatas and oratorios, the major musical forms of English
concert life, and the forms which gave composers real stature, were a male
preserve.
Publishers were falling over each other, however, in competing for the
rights to print Virginia Gabriel's ballads.
A well-defined area in the ballad market had
opened up to women composers in the 1860s.
At the close of that decade, Boosey
& Co. were making a specific point of advertising songs either sung or
composed by women in their lists of popular songs.
Virginia Gabriel was driven
to writing ballads in order to achieve any reputation as a composer.
In Virginia Gabriel's early career she was fond of composing in the ITALIAN style (probably under
SALVERIO MERCADANTE's influence), as in her canzonetta
'Se mi perdi'
-- published by C.
Londsdale of London in 1854.
But when Virginia Gabriel wrote 'The Skipper and His Boy' for
the celebrated ballad singer Charlotte Sainton-Dolby in about 1860, she was
given clear proof of the acclaim which she might receive by concentrating on
this genre.
It was her first big success.
Brinley Richards made a piano
transcription in 1861, and the song itself was in its third edition in 1865.
Composing ballads did not mean selling out by tailoring her music to a
perceived market.
In 1865, Virginia Gabriel merely adapted to words by Arthur Matthison an
'Ave Maria' she had composed in 1857 and produced the successful ballad
'Nightfall at Sea'.
Virginia Gabriel's compositional training constantly shows in her
ballads.
Sometimes it is evident in the form: 'When Sparrows Build' (published
by Metzler & Co., c. 1870) is a modified sonata-form such as was often found
in the slow movements of contemporary symphonies.
Sometimes it is evident in the
harmony.
'Alone' (published by Boosey & Co., undated) shows Virginia Gabriel's harmonic
skill and adroit use of minor inflexions to create a sensitive response to the
words.
Sometimes it is evident in the rhythm.
Virginia Gabriel's 'Only' (published
by Duff & Stewart, 1871) has uncommon rhythmic verve for a drawing-room
ballad.
It is not just a matter of vigorous accompaniment.
The rhythmic
exhilaration pervades the melody too.
Note the singer's tiny but effective break
before 'nothing more'.
The extrovert style is undoubtedly related to its
having been written for a TENOR (something unusual for women composers to
do at this time).
The song shows her continuing interest in the "bel canto" style (his teacher was Mercadante)
The words (unattributed) have been carefully written to allow 'weak' phrase
endings, a feature of Italian song deriving from the natural stresses of the
Italian language.
The melody concludes with a strikingly "Verdian" cadence.
Virginia Gabriel's influence was widespread in the 1860s, and some other
procedures later became better known in association with the names of Sullivan
and Cowen.
For instance, the device of changing key from minor to tonic major
coupled simultaneously to a direction to deliver the music with heightened
expression.
Then there's 'Ruby' (published by Metzler &
Co., c. 1865).
Virginia Gabriel, herself, may have derived the idea from Schubert or
ITALIAN OPERA, though examples which closely resemble the given extract from
'Ruby' are rare.
'Yearning' sections in Italian arias tend to be in the
relative, rather than tonic, major).
CLARIBEL
The opening up of the ballad market to
women composers in the 1860s probably owed most to the exceptional commercial
success of Claribel's ballads.
Charlotte Alington Barnard, née Pye (1830-69) may
have taken the pseudonym Claribel from a poem of that name by a fellow native of
Lincolnshire, Tennyson.
Unlike other women composers who seem to have
thrived in the absence of male partners (and in this respect it is noteworthy
that Virginia Gabriel was already well established before marrying George March
in 1874), Claribel apparently only began to write songs after her marriage to
the Rev. Charles Barnard.
Her marriage does not appear to have been a close one,
however, and her true feelings may have always been attached to the barrister to
whom she was engaged for a year before giving in to her father's demands to call
it off. It is surely not entirely coincidental that Claribel had some other
greatest successes with jilt songs, like 'Oh, Mother! Take the Wheel Away'
(Performance by present author) and 'Won't You Tell Me Why, Robin?'
Claribel
was enabled to turn to composition by her removal, after her marriage, from
Louth to London.
There Charlotte Pye received a little instruction from the piano virtuoso
W. H. Holmes and took singing lessons from some of the finest women singers of
the day.
The most influential of these must have been Charlotte Sainton-Dolby
(1821—85), not only because other skill as a contralto, but also because she was
interested in composition herself.
She had enjoyed a modest success with her
ballad 'Lady, I Think of Thee' which was published by Leader & Cock in 1856,
the year before Charlotte Pye l arrived in London.
Sainton-Dolby had the advantage of
being able to promote her own songs at concerts and soirees, and she extended
this facility to Charlotte Pye.
Charlotte PYE nearly always provided her own words to
her ballads.
In this Charlotte Pye no doubt benefited from the advice and encouragement of
her close friend and cousin, Jean Ingelow (1820-97).
Ingelow, who had also moved
to London from Lincolnshire, was one of several women poets building reputations
in the 1860s; others included Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti.
Adelaide Procter (1825—64), whose poem 'A Lost Chord' was later to become one of the most famous of all drawing-room ballads
in the hands of Sullivan, was already a well-known figure in the London
Portfolio Society.
Charlotte Pye occasionally set Ingelow's verse, and Ingelow's
poetry soon became a storehouse for ballad [73/74] composers.
Sometimes, as in
the case of 'O Fair Dove! O Fond Dove!' and 'When Sparrows Build', spawning
several versions.
Charlotte Pyes songwriting career was eventually halted by a
combination of ill health and the disaster of her sudden loss of respectability.
Her father, Henry Pye, absconded as a bankrupt in 1868, having made fraudulent
use of public funds (he was, amongst other things, County Treasurer of Lincoln).
Her own financial loss as a result of this was £30,000.
But worse, she was no
longer the popular song-writer Claribel, at whose house the leading poets of the
day gathered to drink tea, and talk.
She was the daughter of Henry Pye,
swindler.
She left for the continent, the usual step in such circumstances,
but died in January 1869 shortly after returning.
Charlotte Pye's first success
was with 'Janet's Choice', written for Sainton-Dolby in 1859.
It is a typical
ballad of its time, consisting of a sixteen-bar verse and an eight-bar refrain.
The tune is attractively memorable throughout: there is never a feeling that
Claribel saves her best melodic ideas for the refrains other songs.
In this
respect, nothing has changed since Bishop's 'Home, Sweet Home!', and so the
situation continued until the heyday of the Boosey Ballad Concerts, when the
refrain develops from a standard eight bars (commonly derived from previous
material) to the largest and most musically important section.
In Charlotte Pye's day
verse and refrain form was by no means the norm.
In fact, Charlotte Pye did much to
make it the norm, since she used it more than other composers at this
time.
Writing her own words, Charlotte Pye had the option of using this form
whenever she desired.
Strophic settings were still the favourite.
Afrequent
procedure was to extend the basic sixteen-bar tune to twenty bars by repeating
the last line (both words and music).
Charlotte Pye adopts this method in 'Five o'
Clock in the Morning' (1862), subtly deflecting the tune from an anticipated
close in bar 16.
Charlotte Pye''s sustained
commercial success is indicated by her being one of the first ballad composers
to make a royalty arrangement with her publisher, rather than selling her
copyrights for a fixed sum.
Her importance to Boosey's song catalogue is evident
both from the space she occupies and Boosey's care to try to accommodate a song
with a wide range, like 'Maggie's Secret' (1863), to the amateur voice by
offering it in three different keys instead of the customary two.
Charlotte Pye's
natural melodic flair had as one of its chief attractions the mixture of the
predictable and the unpredictable.
'Mountain Mabel' (1864), for example, is a
strophic song in the familiar twenty-bar span, but although the harmonic
movement of the closing bars comes just as expected, the shape of the melody
avoids the obvious.
'Mountain Mabel' shows Charlotte Pye's widening her
harmonic vocabulary and developing confidence inhandling dissonance; yet,
formally, as remarked above, it follows a conventional pattern.
'Come
Back to Erin' (1866), written after she had taken some more lessons in
composition, has greater breadth and subtlety in its design.
The structure is
ternary.
The middle section consists of a minor variation of the melody used in
the outer sections.
Thus the song has a unity lacking in her previous attempt at
a broad ternary structure, her waltz song of 1864, 'Take Back the Heart'
(composed to words by the Hon. Mrs G. R. Gifford).
Charlotte Pye''s reputation
spread to North America, where her songs, if anything, exceeded the popularity
accorded them in Britain.
Both the last-mentioned songs were particular
favourites.
On her death the New York publisher B. W. Hitchcock introduced
several other songs into his 'half dime series of music for the million',
thereby making them even more widely known.
Even in 1883, fourteen years after
her death, she is still one of the best represented composers in Thomas Hunter's
Song Folio, an American collection of vocal music by 'favourite composers'.
Charlotte Pye''s elegantly crafted melody and melancholy charm is typified by her
song 'Oh, Mother! Take the Wheel Away'.
o mother take the wheel away & put it out of sight
for I am heavy hearted & I cannot spin
tonight
come nearer nearer yet I have a story for your ear
so come & sit beside me come & listen mother dear
you heard the village bells
tonight his wedding bells they were
& Mabel is his happy wife & I am
lonely here
a year ago tonight I mind he sought me for his bride
& who so glad at heart as I that happy Easter tide
but Mabel came among us & her face was fair to see
what wonder was it, mother, that he thought no
more of me
when first he said fair words to her, I know she did not
hear
but in the end she listen'd, could she help it, mother dear
& afterwards we met, and we were friendly all the same
for ne'er a word I said
to them of anger, or of blame
till both believed I did not care, and maybe
they were right
but mother, take the wheel away, I cannot spin tonight.
Of thirty-two bars of melody, half that number begin with what is
technically known as an appoggiatura, a note dissonant with the harmony which is
made concordant by falling on to the harmony note one step below in pitch.
The
effect of this constant contrast of tension and falling release is to create a
kind of musical sighing, which is here suggestive of the jilted woman's
disappointment.
At 'I am lonely here' (and the equivalent place in the next
stanza), the melodic phrase ends on a discord, a procedure of some novelty at
this time and furthering the yearning mood by its prolongation of musical
tension.
If each line of the song is given a letter name to indicate melodic
repetition, then the unusual pattern
A A B B C D E A
results (though the climax is
reached at a conventional point).
The evenly measured rhythmic movement is less
likely to be a sign of banality than a simple convenience of notation which
offers the possibility of interpretive flexibility on the singer's part.
The
accompaniment can only be described as basic, but enough variety is
present to maintain interest.
Claribel's songs stand or fall by the strength of
their tunes: one of the keys to her popularity must have been the ease with
which it was possible to transmit her tunes orally.
Songs like 'Come Back to
Erin' were not long confined to the drawing rooms of the musically
literate.
The text of 'Oh, Mother! Take the Wheel Away' is both a simple
narrative and a lesson in correct behaviour to the young middle-class woman.
In
a time of emotional turmoil she should confide in her mother.
Hysterics are out
of the question; she must exercise disciplined restraint, although she may be
forgiven for not being able to concentrate on other things the day her former
sweetheart marries. Jealousy is irrational: if Mabel is prettier, then it is
only natural for the man to prefer her.
Malicious feelings about the rival
should be quashed; how could Mabel help listening to the 'fair words' being
spoken to her?
Finally the young woman should react to being jilted by keeping
up appearances and assuming the quiet dignity that Millais portrays in The
Wedding Card (1854).
The song presents an ideal of middle-class social mores,
though the scene is rural and the girl may be spinning to earn money.
Claribel
is fond of rural life in her songs, and equally fond of using it to articulate
bourgeois values.
The idyllic rustic cottage was
already a myth when it was eulogized in 'Home, Sweet Home!'
REFERENCES
Englishwoman's Review, 15 January 1900.
E. Wood, 'Women
in music', in SIGNS, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, University of
Chicago, 6.2 (Winter 1980):
'Prefatory memoir' (anon.), no date (c.
1880) The Poetical Works of Mrs Hemans (London: Frederick Warne: n.d. [c.
1880]), xxiv).
Englishwoman's Review, 14 December 1889
M.
Peters, Jean Ingelow, Victorian Poetess (Ipswich: Boydell Press)
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