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Somervell and Tennyson's Maud
Posted by Chris Howell on July 1, 2020, 7:32 am
Nick Barnard, in his review of Somervell’s song-cycle “Maud”, has many hard words to say about Tennyson’s poem, concluding that “From the perspective of a cynical 21st Century, when read in isolation, it is hard not to find Tennyson's original poems as over-wrought and lacking in nuance and subtlety”, even describing them as “penny-dreadful” in style. To criticize the style in this way is to overlook the fact that the narrator of Maud is mad – Tennyson’s original title was “Maud or Madness” and he drew attention to the parallel with Hamlet. The entire poem-sequence is an attempt to penetrate the processes of a deranged mind. This could hardly have been expressed in the measured tones of “In Memoriam” or the steadily unfolding narrative of “Idylls of the King”. The Hamlet parallel is fundamental since Tennyson’s narrator, too, at times feigns madness within madness, and is at his most deranged when apparently at his most sane, as in the final illusion that he can return to sanity by joining the army and going to war. The language is “overwrought” only to the extent that Shakespeare’s language in Hamlet is “overwrought”. Needless to say, I cannot agree with Nick that “Somervell's significant achievement … is to ameliorate that hot-house excess and instead draw the listener into a powerful and effective narrative - without doubt the song settings bring greater depth and humanity to the original verses”. On the contrary, I believe that, pleasing though the Somervell cycle undoubtedly is in its fluent melodiousness, it seriously diminishes the range and force of Tennyson’s original. Rather, I would compare Somervell’s achievement with that of Ambroise Thomas and his librettist, who topped and tailed Hamlet to provide a very pleasant evening at the opera.
In the light of Chris Howell's comments regarding Tennyson's intent and the quality of "Maud" as poetry, it night be illuminating to recall the link between the poem and the Rondo of Elgar's Second Symphony (I quote from Michael Kennedy's note in the Hyperion label issue): "Elgar associated this passage with lines from Tennyson’s Maud: ‘And my heart is a handful of dust / And the wheels go over my head … / The hoofs of the horses beat / Beat into my scalp and brain’. He described it to orchestras in rehearsal as ‘like that horrible throbbing in the head during some fever’.
This tends to support the idea that Tennyson adapted his habitually beautifully sonorous and mellifluous style to depict derangement in stark brutality, the main tenor of the poem contrasting vividly with the sentimentality and lyricism of its best known section, "Come into the garden, Maud", so aptly set to music by Balfe.
That's the point: most of the poem is dark, jagged and obsessive, whereas the ballad forms an ironic interlude.
Chris - thankyou for your post. I have to say that all you write is very fair and insightful. Certainly, you have made me reconsider my rather dismissive/sweeping comments about the verses Somervell set - ignorance is no defence!
I like your analogy of Ambroise Thomas 'sanitising' Hamlet. I do not know - did Somervell alter any of Tennyson's verses textually or was it simply a case of selection/reordering? If the latter, then in defence of the composer I suppose he felt he was distilling the essence of the original down into a logical/coherent/manageable sequence.
Obviously times do change, and in isolation (and ignorance), I have to say these verses alone do not resonate for me in my time as they obviously did for a wider public 150 years ago. But thankyou once again for your post - which pointed out just how wrong I was in the gentlest, most courteous manner possible!
There are a few textual variants but I would be careful here. I do know that certain textual variants in Stanford's Tennyson settings are not wilful changes but derive from earlier editions - Tennyson was wont to fidget with the details of his poems. So maybe we should give Somervell the benefit of the doubt here. Essentially, he arranged a whistle-stop tour through the poem, respecting the original sequence except for "O that 'twere possible" which Tennyson placed a little earlier. I suppose that, short of setting the whole thing as a single-narrator opera, he could have done nothing else, and inevitably the story line gets simplified. He does leave some loose ends, though, maybe supposing that listeners of his own day would have known the poem anyway. The opening song, though a striking beginning, makes no sense if we don't know why the narrator hates the "dreadful hollow" - it's because his father died there, cast into it with a rock that killed him and spattered the hollow with blood. Accident, suicide (he had just been financially ruined) or foul play? Nobody ever knew. Tennyson's opening sequence then develops the suggestion that a vein of madness ran in the family. If we have read that, then this introduction casts its shadow on the doomed love affair that follows. From Somervell's cycle, too, you get the idea that Maud was someone the narrator met and fell in love with on the spot, while in fact they had been childhood friends till her family moved away, then came back, by which time Maud was 17 and "tall and stately". Tennyson himself cuts short "Come into the garden", telling us only at the beginning of the next section what actually happened. Though Somervell does keep the line about a "cry for a brother's blood", this is hardly enough for us to understand that, at the climax of "Come into the garden", Maud did arrive, but so did her brother, who was dead against the match, wishing to marry her off to a local bigwig: The narrator struck him and, believing he had killed him, went into exile in Brittany for many years. Eventually he returns, having learnt that the brother had not died so he is not wanted for murder. But by this time Maud was "dead, long dead". The upshot is that Somervell certainly cut it all down into a "manageable sequence" and, given that the job was to be done at all, probably it could not have been done better. Musically, it also forms a "logical" and "coherent" sequence, and somebody listening to the songs is not going to ask too many questions about the story outside what he hears, but if he does start asking questions, then he will have to go back to Tennyson to find out what really happened. As for whether these verses resonate in our own times as they did 150 years ago, the original reception of Tennyson's poem was pretty mixed, hence many preferred to take "Come into the garden" out of context (or even to mock its flower imagery as Lewis Carroll did in the Looking Glass garden) and forget the rest. It is a strange precursor of expressionism and maybe Schoenberg, rather than Somervell, would have been the ideal composer to tackle it.
Chris - your last sentence got me thinking! Who do you think has set Tennyson most effectively to date? I find the idea of Tennyson set by some fin de siecle Viennese expressionist composers intriguing! If not Schoenberg then perhaps Zemlinsky or Schreker. By no means an original thought - but I find it fascinating that there was no contemporary British musical equivalent to this kind of poetry. Thankyou again for your insights.
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There are a few textual variants but I would be careful here. I do know that certain textual variants in Stanford's Tennyson settings are not wilful changes but derive from earlier editions - Tennyson was wont to fidget with the details of his poems. So maybe we should give Somervell the benefit of the doubt here. Essentially, he arranged a whistle-stop tour through the poem, respecting the original sequence except for "O that 'twere possible" which Tennyson placed a little earlier. I suppose that, short of setting the whole thing as a single-narrator opera, he could have done nothing else, and inevitably the story line gets simplified. He does leave some loose ends, though, maybe supposing that listeners of his own day would have known the poem anyway. The opening song, though a striking beginning, makes no sense if we don't know why the narrator hates the "dreadful hollow" - it's because his father died there, cast into it with a rock that killed him and spattered the hollow with blood. Accident, suicide (he had just been financially ruined) or foul play? Nobody ever knew. Tennyson's opening sequence then develops the suggestion that a vein of madness ran in the family. If we have read that, then this introduction casts its shadow on the doomed love affair that follows. From Somervell's cycle, too, you get the idea that Maud was someone the narrator met and fell in love with on the spot, while in fact they had been childhood friends till her family moved away, then came back, by which time Maud was 17 and "tall and stately". Tennyson himself cuts short "Come into the garden", telling us only at the beginning of the next section what actually happened. Though Somervell does keep the line about a "cry for a brother's blood", this is hardly enough for us to understand that, at the climax of "Come into the garden", Maud did arrive, but so did her brother, who was dead against the match, wishing to marry her off to a local bigwig: The narrator struck him and, believing he had killed him, went into exile in Brittany for many years. Eventually he returns, having learnt that the brother had not died so he is not wanted for murder. But by this time Maud was "dead, long dead". The upshot is that Somervell certainly cut it all down into a "manageable sequence" and, given that the job was to be done at all, probably it could not have been done better. Musically, it also forms a "logical" and "coherent" sequence, and somebody listening to the songs is not going to ask too many questions about the story outside what he hears, but if he does start asking questions, then he will have to go back to Tennyson to find out what really happened. As for whether these verses resonate in our own times as they did 150 years ago, the original reception of Tennyson's poem was pretty mixed, hence many preferred to take "Come into the garden" out of context (or even to mock its flower imagery as Lewis Carroll did in the Looking Glass garden) and forget the rest. It is a strange precursor of expressionism and maybe Schoenberg, rather than Somervell, would have been the ideal composer to tackle it.
Nick, I think that Maud is a pretty isolated case in Tennyson's output, though a fair number of apparently romantic ballads, like The Lady of Shallott, do hint at dark undercurrents which I suppose might have appealed to a composer of the Schreker/Zemlinsky school - maybe Tennyson's image as a pillar of the British establishment discouraged them from exploring. As for who has set Tennyson successfully to date, well, Britten's setting of The Splendour Falls certainly shows that Tennyson can be illuminated with a middle-of-the-road 20th century idiom. Of the earlier composers, Stanford seems to have been a pretty good judge of which Tennyson poems he could do successfully. Nothing from Maud, while in Crossing the Bar, God and the Universe, some of the Princess settings, The Voyage of Maeldune and Merlin and the Gleam he got under the skin of the poetry. On the other hand, for one of the poems with a darker undercurrent, Claribel, he remained on the mellifluous surface. For things like The Revenge and Jack Tar, I suppose we can say he gave the poems the music they deserved and leave it at that. To come to your other point, the lack of a British equivalent to German/Austrian expressionism, well, I suppose there are a few isolated examples like late Bridge or some of Francis George Scott's songs, though these latter always strike me as flash-in-the-pan experiments rather than a fully developed personal style. I find FG Scott more convincing when in more conventionally Scottish mode. It's curious that Cyril Scott was interested enough in Stefan George to have translated some of his poems into English, yet in his own music he remained anchored to a decadent variant of impressionism. Unless some of the many works we still don't know have surprises to spring. Dodecaphony in the UK had to wait for the "Anglicized Angst" of composers like Fricker and Searle, but would you call this expressionism? All these are subjects that deserve a treatise to themselves!