Abstract
Benjamin Disraeli’s Lady Maud may exhibit a rather patronizing attitude to factory workers throughout the pages of Sybil (1845), one of the most influential mid-century political novels, but the character nonetheless expresses an enthusiastic belief in the beneficial alliance between music and industrial society. She makes her comments in response to the model factory community of the novel, where singing classes are “the greatest fun we ever had” (130), according to laborers. The novel thus sets up music education as one of the successful philanthropic efforts of humane factory owners; it is an attainable ideal, which contrasts with the otherwise squalid conditions of working-class England.
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Notes
Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil: or The Two Nations (1845; London: Penguin, 1980) 228. Further page references appear in parentheses.
Jessie A. Middleton, introduction, Charles Auchester: A Memorial by Elizabeth Sara Sheppard (1853; London: Dent, 1911) vii-xii.
Benjamin Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography (London: Colburn, 1852) 492.
Mendelssohn. Nicholas Temperley, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 2001) 11: 740.
Eric Werner, Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Composer and His Age (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963) 194.
Beginning in 1819, Zelter instructed Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn at the Berlin Singakademie. The school was oriented toward eighteenth-century sacred choral music, especially Bach, just like the fictional Cecilia. R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 11, 44–6; the entry for Felix Mendelssohn by Todd, New Grove, 16: 390. However, while Sheppard represents Charles Auchester as a pupil of Aronach/Zelter, Charles Horsley did not study with Zelter but with German violinist and composer Moritz Hauptmann in Kassel.
The title literally means “The Return from Abroad,” but Chorley translated it into English in 1850 as Son and Stranger. I am grateful to Clive Brown for this reference and for suggesting that if Sheppard was aware of the private performance of Mendelssohn’s operetta before it was published posthumously in 1850, then the novel shows just how much knowledge was available in London non-professional musical circles about Mendelssohn’s private life. Of course, as Charles Auchester was not published until 1853 and the performance of the fairy operetta does not occur until late in the book, it may be that Sheppard learned about the private performance of Heimkehr aus der Fremde from Chorley’s preface to the published edition of 1850 and simply included it in her novel at that late date. She did not revise the novel, so it could not have been added retrospectively. For the revision process, see Harriet E. Prescott, “Elizabeth Sara Sheppard,” Atlantic Monthly 10 (October 1862): 499.
Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, Charles Auchester: A Memorial (1853; London: Dent, 1911) 261. Further page references appear in parentheses.
H. Chorley, Charles Auchester, The Athenæum (1853) 1352.
Robert Terrell Bledsoe, Henry Fothergill Chorley: Victorian Journalist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998) 92–111.
Shaw, The Star (23 February 1889). Cited in Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) 5.
For discussions of inaccurate portraits of Charles and Sophy Horsley in the novel, see Rosamund Brunei Gotch, “Prologue,” Mendelssohn and his Friends in Kensington: Letters from Fanny and Sophy Horsley written 1833–36 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) 5.
Jennifer L. Hall-Witt, “Representing the Audience in the Age of Reform: Critics and the Elite at the Italian Opera in London,” Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in honour of Cyril Ehrlich, eds Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 137. Hall-Witt derives her idea of “event” from Carl Dahlhous, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 9; Lydia Goehr, Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An essay in the philosophy of music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 100–01, 113, 118, 121, 222.
Sophie Fuller, “ ‘Cribbed, cabin’d, and confined’: Female musical creativity in Victorian fiction,” The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction, eds Nicky Losseff and Sophie Fuller (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) 28–30.
William Leonhard Gage, editor’s preface, Life of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy by Wilhelm Adolf Lampadius, ed. and trans. William Leonhard Gage (London: William Reeves, 1876) vi.
Wilhelm Adolf Lampadius, Life of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, ed. and trans. William Leonhard Gage (London: William Reeves, 1876) 132.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto, 1958) 56–65, 326–7. For music and utilitarian reform, see Gordon Cox, A History of Music Education in England 1872–1928 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1993) 9–11.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995) 205.
Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 309–20.
Louis Spohr, Autobiography (London: Longman, 1865) 2: 82.
[John Ella], Morning Post (27 May 1829). Cited in Adam Carse, The Orchestra from Beethoven to Berlioz: A history of the orchestra in the first half of the 19th century, and of the development of orchestral baton-conducting (Cambridge: Heffer, 1948) 300. Original emphasis.
The gaze and the baton were also crucial to systems of teaching sight-singing around the same time. See J.S. Curwen, The Story of Tonic Sol-fa, 10th edn. (London: J. Curwen and Sons, [1891]) 2.
Sebastian Hensel, The Mendelssohn Family (1729–1847): From Letters and Journals, trans. Carl Klingemann, 2nd rev. edn. (London: Sampson Low, 1881) 2: 161.
Elliott W. Galkin, A History of Orchestral Conducting: In theory and practice (Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon, 1988) 283, 310.
Hector Berlioz, A Treatise upon Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, trans. Mary Cowden Clarke, 2nd edn. (London: Novello, 1858) 245.
John Vincent, Disraeli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) 90.
Benjamin Disraeli, “What is He? by the Author of ‘Vivian Grey’ ” (1833) in Lord Beaconsfield on the Constitution (London: Field and Tuer, 1884) 15.
Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) 228.
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872) in Erewhon; Erewhon Revisited (London: Dent, 1932) 26. Further page references appear in parentheses.
For more on Utopian communities in the nineteenth century and their critique of capitalist exploitation, see A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1952) 114–48.
Morton, English Utopia, 144. See also Sue Zemka, “Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism,” ELH 69.2 (Summer 2002): 469; Simon Dentith, “Imagination and Inversion in Nineteenth-Century Utopian Writing,” Anticipations: Essays in Early Science Fiction and its Precursors, ed. David Seed (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995) 139.
Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 158.
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993; London: Vintage, 1994) xii, xiii. Original emphasis.
Samuel Butler, review of “Performance of Israel in Egypt at Exeter Hall,” The Drawing Room Gazette (2 December 1871), rpt in Michael Allis, “Samuel Butler and Handel; A Study of Obsession,” Händel-Jahrbuch 44 (1998): 269.
Alexander Rehding, “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 19th-century Music 26.1 (Summer 2002): 52.
Hector Berlioz, “The Musical Celebration at Bonn,” Second Epilogue in Evenings with the Orchestra, ed. and trans. Jacques Barzun (1852; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 340, originally published in the Journal des Débats (22 August and 3 September 1845). There were also eighteenth-century monuments to Handel in England (in Vauxhall Gardens and Westminster Abbey), but the enormous size of the Erewhonian statues makes them more aptly compared with nineteenth-century monuments, such as the Bonn Beethoven Monument. For the Handel statues, see Suzanne Aspden, “‘Fam’d Handel Breathing, tho’ Transformed to Stone’: The Composer as Monument,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55.1 (Spring 2002): 39–90. My thanks to Anna Celenza for mentioning Rehding’s article to me.
Robert Schumann, “Monument für Beethoven: Vier kritische Stimmen Hierüber,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 4 (1836): 212. Cited in Rehding, “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 60. Rehding’s translation.
Anna Celenza helpfully shared this information with me. See Manuela Jahrmäker, Ossian: Eine Figur und eine Idee des europäischen Musiktheaters um 1800 (Cologne, 1993).
Jennifer Davis Michael, “Ocean Meets Ossian: Staffa as Romantic Symbol,” Nineteenth-Century Worlds: Local/Global, an Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference (INCS), University of Notre Dame London Centre, UK, 12 July 2003. My thanks to the author for allowing me to reference her paper. See J.M.W. Turner, Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (1832; Yale Center for British Art); John Keats to his brother Tom, July 1818, Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, ed. Hayder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958) 1: 348–50; Wordsworth’s four sonnets on Staffa in the series Poems Composed or Suggested During a Tour, in the Summer of 1833. 1833 is the year after Mendelssohn’s Overture, “The Hebrides or Fingal’s Cave,” Op. 26, premiered in London.
Katharine Ellis, “The criticism,” The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 158. Gazette musicale later became Revue et gazette musicale.
Hector Berlioz, Evenings with the Orchestra, ed. and trans. Jacques Barzun (1852; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 269. Further page references appear in parentheses.
Katherine Kolb, “The Short Stories,” The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 150.
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© 2006 Phyllis Weliver
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Weliver, P. (2006). Germanic Music Ideals in Utopian Communities: Charles Auchester, Erewhon and “Euphonia”. In: The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598768_3
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