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.