More on Recitation and Music

Marian Wilson Kimber has kindly sent me abstracts for two of her forthcoming papers that deal with the subject of recitation and music:

“Mr. Riddle’s Readings: Music and Elocution in Nineteenth-Century Concert Life” Nineteenth-Century Studies 21 (2007): forthcoming.

The combination of music with readings or recitations frequently took place in concerts in England and America between 1850 and ca. 1920. Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Athalie, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus, Weber’s Preciosa, Beethoven’s Egmont, and Macbeth (with music by different composers) were all performed with a single actor or elocutionist performing the play. Such readings allowed concert-goers to understand the drama associated with incidental music that was normally limited to theaters. Musical works were sometimes created specifically for “reciters,” such as Alexander Campbell Mackenzie’s large-scale choral work, The Dream of Jubal (1889). Professional elocutionists such as George Riddle, Charles Fry, and Clifford Harrison specialized in repertoire recited with piano or orchestral accompaniment; their careers demonstrate the remarkably prevalent role that elocution played in nineteenth-century concert life.

“The Peerless Reciter: Reconstructing the Lost Art of Elocution with Music.” In Performance Practice: Issues and Approaches. Edited by Timothy Watkins. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Steglein Press, due out summer 2008.

This chapter explores the performance practice of combining music with spoken recitation. It examines late nineteenth-century recitation anthologies and pedagogical publications in order to describe the informal pairing of poetry with music drawing on pieces not necessarily composed for any specific text. According to numerous elocution books, the performance style of nineteenth-century speakers would have had marked elements of pitch as well as rhythm. The specific musical intervals required of speakers were often notated in pedagogical works with a variety of graphic symbols. What was described in the elocution manuals is borne out in early recordings of actors and of performances of melodramatic works, in which spoken passages had an audibly musical basis in performance.

The latter paper looks especially interesting — expect a discussion of both papers on this blog after they have been published!

Mendelssohn, Shakespeare and Concert Readings

Wilson Kimber, Marian. “Reading Shakespeare, Seeing Mendelssohn: Concert Readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ca. 1850-1920.” The Musical Quarterly 89: 199-236.

Packed with concrete detail, Wilson Kimber’s essay gives a comprehensive overview of readings of Shakespeare’s play accompanied by Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music composed for the play, which created in effect a melodrama (for melodrama, see the earlier entry on the Tennyson/Strauss Enoch Arden).

Many Victorian commentators viewed A Midsummer Night’s Dream as unstageable, in that the stage could not adequately depict fairyland, thus destroying the beauty or magic of Shakespeare’s play (or “poem”). The solution? “Concert readings,” a form which, it was believed, could enhance appreciation of both Shakespeare’s text and Mendelssohn’s music.

Thus, concert readings were, in part, an attempt at a solution to the aesthetic problems posed by the critics…. Transferred to the concert hall, Mendelssohn’s music provided with readings presented a novelty for concertgoers that was a far less expensive undertaking than an actual theatrical performance. Having the text of the play allowed conductors to program more selections from the incidental music, including those not typically heard in concerts, the sections of melodrama where text was spoken during the music.

Thus a reading of the play would offer the audience Shakespeare’s poetry stripped of any danger of theatrical excess, while Mendelssohn’s music could evoke a fairy world in the listener’s imagination without vivid reality impinging on the dream-like state.

Wilson Kimber focuses on the actress Fanny Kemble’s readings of Shakespeare’s play to Mendelssohn’s music (premiered in New York, 1850, and in London in 1852, accompanied by “fifty instrumentalists and a chorus of twenty”) and on reciters who followed in her footsteps (Fanny Clifton Stirling, Mary Frances Scott-Siddons, George Riddle, David Bispham). One interesting observation Wilson Kimber makes in the course of this history concerns Victorian elocution’s association with music:

Although the most common term for the performances of Kemble and others was “reading,” the actual sound of their performance would have been far from that—a stylized performance that had many of the characteristics of music. Elocutionary practices of the Victorian period created Shakespeare “readings” that in no way resembled a natural speaking voice, but took place in a formal recitation style; nineteenth-century reviews of actors and elocutionists frequently describe their speech as “musical.”

Wilson Kimber then goes on to describe how “[p]eriod acting treatises and elocution books included extensive analogies to music.”

The essay concludes with an examination of the decline of the concert reading as embodied in the performances of Kemble et al. Wilson Kimber notes that even in Kemble’s day critics grumbled about what they regarded as the excessive length of the performance. Also, such concert readings were taxing on the performer, who had to contend with length, speaking over a piano, organ, or orchestra, in often large halls, and with having to perform all the parts, which put such readings beyond the abilities of all but the most skilled actor-reciters.

More interestingly, the concert readings’ hybrid form was a target of criticism. Complaints were made about the spoken text “interrupting” the music, implying that one went either to listen to music or see a play, not both at once. Instead of enhancing Shakespeare’s and Mendelssohn’s work, such as pairing now seemed to devalue by simultaneously distracting from both. This not only marks a shift away from the pairing of music and recitation, but as Wilson Kimber notes, forms part of larger cultural shift away from oratory as a major cultural phenomenon in social life.

“The Raven” on YouTube

Anna (YouTube user name ‘Annaconda1984′) compiled a video recitation of Edgar Allen Poe’s Poem “The Raven,” featuring herself and 18 others, with each participant reading one stanza:

“The Raven by Poe presented by 18 Youtubers”

There are other readings of “The Raven” on YouTube (Christopher Walken delivering it in classic Christopher Walken style; Vincent Price delivering in classic Vincent Price style; John Astin, aka Gomez Addams, reciting it in E.A. Poe get-up), but I find this the most interesting in terms of the variety of styles with which the poem is recited.

The video has garnered a huge number of comments, some of which are very disparaging about the ‘terrible’ (read: ‘overwrought’) delivery of the reciters. But the poem itself is overwrought. I don’t see how Poe’s poem cannot be delivered melodramatically: it’s pure melodrama, and its popularity as a recitation piece lies in its inflated rhetoric and its potential to be exploited for histrionic effect:

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee —
by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite — respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

The poem, after all, is about an unbalanced man obsessed with a dead woman who totally overreacts to a lost raven trained to say ‘Nevermore.’ One might want to regard of “The Raven” as a work of subtle psychological realism or as a masterpiece of terrifying horror, but it is also a very effective piece of 19th-century poetic schlock, which explains why it was so popular as a recitation piece.

Lecturing in America

“All Americans lecture, I believe. I suppose it is something in their climate.” Lord Illingworth, in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, Act II (1893).

Collins, Philip. “‘Agglomerating Dollars with Prodigious Rapidity’: British Pioneers on the Lecture Circuit.” Victorian Literature and Society: Essays Presented to Richard D. Altick. Eds. James R. Kincaid and Albert J. Kuhn. N.p.: Ohio State UP, 1984: 3-29.

Quoting from Louis B. Wright’s, Culture on the Moving Frontier (1955) – “The persistence of the English lecturer in the West [i.e. America] is one of the curious cultural phenomena of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (qtd. 6) – Collins offers a number of factors that explain this persistence: the fantastic sums of money to be made, which could not be equalled in Britain by either lecturing or writing; efficient transportation (i.e. railroads); lecture agencies; and the Lyceum movement, which created a huge demand for lectures and which, unlike the theatre, did not offend scruples informed by the New England Puritan tradition. The lectures also offered one of the only forms of ‘moral recreation’ for middle-class women, who, one observer noted in 1870, were prominent as audience members and lecturers (12).

“To simplify and generalize by decades: in the 1830s the British began to realize the possibilities of lecturing in America, and a few tried it. In the forties the first such financial killing was made (by an Irishman [Dionysius Lardner]), and American zest for lectures became so conspicuous that British travelers (like Charles Dickens in 1842) commented on it more than their predecessors had done. In the fifties, the first big stars entered the business…. In the early sixties the Civil War interrupted this development…” (7).

“The seventies and eighties seem to have been the climax of business. By the nineties, according to the leading American lecture agent, Major J.B. Pond, who had organized many of the most illustrious tours by native and imported speakers, lecturing had fallen in disrepute…. Nevertheless, as Pond reports, the demand for quantity, if not quality, was still rising. In the seventies there were five hundred Lyceums to be kept supplied with speakers; in the summer of 1900 over two hundred lecturers had announced their winter season plans for touring one state alone (Illinois)” (8).

The decline of lecturing was attributed to the growing acceptance of the theatre and the increasing availability of magazines and newspapers (13).

Reading Aloud

Collins, Philip. Reading Aloud: A Victorian Métier. Tennyson Society Monographs 5. Lincoln: The Tennyson Society, 1972.

Philip Collins is a scholar probably best known for his work on Dickens and Tennyson: he edited Dickens’ The Public Readings (1975).

Collins’ paper, published as a pamphlet by the Tennyson Society, provides a broad overview of what could be called Victorian “oral culture,” replete with a wealth of concrete detail. This detail gives weight to Collins’ assertion of the centrality of reading aloud in Victorian culture, and how reading aloud shaped Victorian literature.

Collins argues that much Victorian literature was viewed by creators and consumers as creations for reading aloud, in the home or at Penny Readings. Because literature was so often read aloud, many Victorians “met literature as a group or communal, rather than an individual experience” (27), a phenomenon of which writers were certainly aware, and which consequently, Collins argues, shaped Victorian literature: writers knew that successful literary works would be those that could be read in a family or public setting (28).

A notice in The Times (7 October 1868: 10) dated the vogue for public readings from 1844, when Charles Kemble read Cymbeline in public. The notice remarks that it had previously been thought “presumptuous” for a person to recite to a paying audience, given that members of the audiences could just recite the texts themselves. The notice observes that “there is not a literary institution that does not in the course of a year publish a programme of entertainment in which some plays or poems to be ‘read’ by some person of celebrity…do not hold a prominent place, and…’penny readings’ in the parish schoolrooms are now commonly encouraged by every clergyman who takes a practical interest in his flock” (qtd. 10-11).