"My Heart Is like a Singing Bird": The Poetess Tradition and Victorian Song

"My Heart Is like a Singing Bird":The Poetess Tradition and Victorian Song Mary Arseneau (bio) Victorian music was an important but critically neglected catalyst for an extension and evolution of the poetess tradition in the second half of the nineteenth century. Just as in the 1820s and 1830s, poetesses' work emerged in the context of a verbal/visual hybrid as literary annuals often presented these poems accompanied by fine illustration, so too later in the century, the poetess tradition evolved in the context of another inter-art hybrid as these poems were set to music in songs for a new and booming music market. Also parallel was the lack of critical esteem for newly forming traditions in poetess poetry and in song, notwithstanding the fact that both eventually became very sophisticated. Composers would select existing poems to set to music, and, in the case of Christina Rossetti, at the outset they selected lyric poems that fit comfortably within the poetess tradition: poems with love, loss, sentimentality, self-sacrificing women, and nature as subject-matter. In the mid-century, the parlour ballad situated song within the feminine domestic sphere and literalized the poetess's idea of poetry as song and of the lyric "I" as a warbling bird. Parlour ballads have often been criticized for "mindless facility" and "musical complacency" (Banfield 1: 3–4), but music and song grew considerably in artistic merit in this period. The annuals and periodicals that women poets edited and published in the 1820s and 1830s had enjoyed great commercial success and popularity; nevertheless, this poetry was devalued and fell into critical neglect until the literary recuperation of the poetess tradition that began in the 1990s. Similarly, the emergence of female composers in the late-Victorian period unfortunately led to future neglect of their compositions, neglect that to some degree persists today. Music was a growth area throughout the Victorian period; the piano became a fixture in middle-class parlours, and the demand for popular music steadily and exponentially increased: Nicholas Temperley observes that copyright records show that figures for music editions rose from 151 annually in 1835 to 8,063 annually in 1901 (1), an increase of over 5300 per cent. Also, while parlour ballads were not held in high esteem critically, as the century continued there emerged a smaller category of serious song or art song (to be performed by trained musicians as concert repertoire and appreciated by connoisseurs). Female composers who set Rossetti's poems gradually and over the later decades of the century approached the musical sophistication of the esteemed male composers who were leaders of the English Musical Renaissance and instructors at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music. Notably, the first Rossetti setting was composed by Alice [End Page 176] Mary Smith in 1864, setting the poem "When I Am Dead, My Dearest" and thereby establishing the trend that continues to this day, making this poem the most frequently set of all Rossetti's works: at this time, the Christina Rossetti in Music archive already has 252 settings of this one poem catalogued, and there are more to come. In spite of the fact that the mid-nineteenth century was the heyday of parlour ballads, it would be naive to assume that Smith's setting was a parlour ballad, for Smith—while unjustly neglected today—in fact was a serious and successful composer, likely the first British female composer to have written a full symphony that was publicly performed (Graham-Jones vii). Indeed, of the first nine settings of Rossetti poems (1864–68), four were by female composers, three of whom were emerging serious composers: Smith, Agnes Zimmerman, and Virginia Gabriel, all of whom have been named as leading female composers of the period. This category also included other serious female composers who set Rossetti poems: Caroline Reinagle, Mary Grant Carmichael, Amy Elise Horrocks, and Maude Valérie White. The fourth female composer out of these first nine Rossetti settings was Alice Macdonald, who was the mother of Rudyard Kipling and who set "The Bourne"; interestingly, in spite of Dante Gabriel's suggestion that Christina remove "The Bourne" from The Prince's Progress and...

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