1The progress of knowledge requires that conceptual paradigms should constantly be re-examined. This does not mean of course that all past interpretations should be discarded altogether. The idea, rather, is to take advantage of the enormous diversity of accumulated knowledge at our disposal, as well as the wealth of sources available, in order to suggest possible links between disciplines that used to be strictly separated from one another. There has been an interesting broadening of perspectives in the humanities thanks to the rise of cultural history as an academic field in its own right (Burke, passim; Poirrier, passim), which has opened new vistas of investigation. Instead of concentrating solely on written documents (literature at large, the press, diaries, etc.), cultural historians examine all kinds of sources, artefacts, productions and records, in the light of which they attempt to provide new, deeper social and cultural interpretations of history by breaking down the partitions previously erected between disciplines. It is precisely at the crossroads between different disciplines that new meaning can emerge. The inclusion of the history of art and, more recently, music, has played an important part in this reconfiguration of historical perspectives, and this applies to the field of English studies. Long neglected by English scholars as too specialised a question, and therefore left to the sole care and attention of musicologists (who have their own agenda), music has now thankfully made its way— albeit slowly—into English studies.
2Not unlike all the recent work on “text and image,” one particular area of investigation that can yield especially fruitful results is the intersection of music and literature (or, broadly and generically speaking, “text”). In such an approach, reading consists in analyzing the exchange and cross-fertilization between a “text” proper and another, “non-semantic” medium—music. Inter-mediality—a notion the origin of which can actually be traced back to the ancient concept “ut pictura poesis”—thus becomes a special mode of inter-textuality in which the stress is put on “signifying processes which involve a plurality of discourses, an emphasis on discursive exchanges and contacts rather than on essential qualities and logocentric differences” (Wolf 2). However, this may be done in many different ways and from different perspectives, for one may indeed
differentiate between three possible general forms, in which music and literature may appear in one artifact: the form of a ‘mixture’ of music and literature (as in opera), and two forms which seem unmixed on the surface: one in which literature is present in (expressed through, or turned into) music (as in the case of programme music), and one, the reverse case, in which music appears in literature (is expressed through, or ‘translated’ into, this medium).
4The present collection of papers freely combines examples of these different types of approach.
5Natalie Roulon argues that Shakespeare’s use of music in All’s Well That Ends Well is by no means irrelevant and that its musical references are all significant. The music in the play is predominantly connected with the masculine world of war and it is used therefore, in a misogynistic perspective, as a bulwark against potential threats of any ‘feminizing’ influence. Moreover, male music in the play is always self-centred. However, though Helen is not presented as a musician, she is associated with music, sound and dance. Natalie Roulon explains that Helen attempts to draw male and female together in the play and that she proves “singularly able to combine incompatible elements within herself,” as she unites the masculine, military drum of Mars and the feminine drum of Venus, a symbol of maidenhead. By doing so, Helen turns out to be the alchemist of the play. Her ability to unite contraries is suggested in the first reference to music in the play (“jarring-concord,” “discord-dulcet”). Thus Helen appears as a puzzling combination of power and frailty striving to harmonize opposites. Whilst male music is self-centred, Helen’s use of music is “geared to restore the balance of people other than herself, even though she means to cure herself in the process.” In a play that underlines the antinomy between the masculine and feminine worlds, Helen is presented as an Orphic figure who strives after harmony. While All’s Well That Ends Well may not be one of the most musical of Shakespeare’s plays, Natalie Roulon’s close study thus highlights the fact that the play uses musical images and tropes efficiently. Whereas the principal male characters are constructed as military, self-involved figures, who feel threatened by the feminine realm, Helen, by contrast, stands for an ideal of harmony as she seeks to yoke male and female together.
6One form of relevant exchange between literature and music takes place when a literary text — poem or play — is adapted to music. Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise analyses the way Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), negotiated her own, new (female) lyrical voice in her poetry. Miller-Blaise attempts to look at how Finch’s actual engagement with Restoration and early Augustan music may shed light on the significance of Finch’s poetical voice. Anne Finch was probably the author of the first through-sung English opera, John Blow’s Venus and Adonis. Following the convention of the time, she presents herself in her own works under the pastoral guise of “Ardelia,” to preserve her privacy, as she seems to be particularly suspicious of the alleged impropriety of theatrical representation. This may have been linked to the rise of the female high voice, which contributed to the representation of women as sexual objects on the stage, and may have deterred Anne Finch from acknowledging the authorship of the libretto of Venus and Adonis. Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise argues that Finch was writing her poetry at the age of the progressive advent of the female voice, and that in its very musicality the voice was still mostly conceived of as an extension of speech. It was a rhetorical construct whereby the characters’ identity was expressed. Song and voice as a feminine, rhetorically effective mode of speech infuse Anne Finch’s poetry. In the seventeenth century, speech was gendered as male and song as female, while the performance of the latter turned the female singer into a sexual object. Song was therefore ambivalent, at once a persuasive, moving form of eloquence, and an act of performance by which the female was submitted to the male gaze. Whereas a critical tradition has considered Finch as a transitional poet between earlier seventeenth-century poets and Romantic poets, Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise suggests that Anne Finch imported into her lyric poetry the female song she found at work on stage and in the nascent opera, then “muted it in order to deconstruct its impeding eroticism, before redeploying its beautifying powers so that the beauty of the female voice could simply become the beauty of poetic lyricism more generally.” Thus Ardelia’s voice can be said to be “exactly lyrical” in the sense that it rises from the struggle between sound in performance, silence, and speech.
7The very fact of transforming a text into a libretto, or of super-adding music over verse to turn a poem into song, implies a certain number of processes, both textual and contextual. Pierre Degott analyses eighteenth-century operatic adaptations of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Turning a play by Shakespeare into an opera in the eighteenth century raised a double difficulty: first, a generic one, since spoken words had to become songs or airs; secondly, an aesthetic one, because of the “blatant incompatibility of the intricacies and heterogeneousness of Shakespeare’s plot with the aesthetic stance imposed by neo-classical precepts like order, symmetry, propriety or logicality.” The play thus underwent a process of transformation in terms of the particular aesthetic demands of the period and, in particular, efforts were made to “tone down some of the irrational and irregular aspects” of Shakespeare’s play. These adaptations were therefore not scrupulously authentic, but, Pierre Degott explains, they evinced a “strong dependence on the various newly-experimented operatic genres that had begun to infiltrate British cultural life in the decades following the Restoration.” Not only was music used as a medium, but it was treated as a theme in each of the various adaptations of the play for the lyrical stage. The expressive potentialities of music were dramatized by the composers and their librettists and thematized allegorically. Thus, in Purcell’s Fairy Queen, the text often “glorifies the opera’s own methods of fabrication, the lyrics functioning as an almost perpetual celebration of the supreme power of music.” Music was foregrounded in the lyrics as a superior form of expression endowed with “structuring and organising capacities.” Operatic adaptations of a play had therefore much more than a purely decorative function. David Garrick, notably, understood that stage music could be integrated to the dramatic development of the play, as suggested by the word “Shakespearelli,” the humorous, quasi-oxymoronic author’s name which Garrick coined for himself: two traditions, the English theatrical one and the Italian operatic one, were blended together through a process of generic hybridization and cross-fertilization. The eighteenth-century adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream thus constitute, Pierre Degott argues, “a fascinating spectrum of generic indeterminacy.” Not only do they prove the adaptability of Shakespeare’s play, but they also offer thorough re-readings of it. The study of the operatic adaptations of the play shows that, paradoxically, the eighteenth century endeavoured at the same time to canonize the playwright, and to reinterpret his work.
8Sabine Volk-Birke studies for her part the way in which Handel transformed Newburgh Hamilton’s adaptation of Milton’s psalms into (sung) music in The Occasional Oratorio, taking into account the genre of the oratorio and its performance situation. She argues that Hamilton could not have read Milton without perceiving the parallels between the political situation at the time of the Commonwealth on the one hand, and that in 1745 on the other: the “Stuart/Catholic threat, the enemy within the country, the division in the population, the need for a strong leader, all of these circumstances apply to 1653 as well as to 1745/1746.” Of course, one major difference remained that Milton’s psalms were used within a republican agenda in the seventeenth century, and in support of the reigning monarch in the eighteenth century. Sabine Volk-Birke argues that the plot of Hamilton’s libretto is “internal and psychological rather than external and based on action” and that, “far from being ‘not dramatic,’ [it] is full of dialogue, changes of mood and atmosphere.” The variety to be found in the libretto thus allowed Handel to use a whole array of moods in the music. Deciphering the literary, musical, political and historical intertextuality at work in the phenomenon of adaptation may help us better to understand what “a contemporary audience may have heard and read, remembered and associated, while going through the multi-layered process of experiencing Handel’s and Hamilton’s oratorio.”
9Another type of approach of the links between music and literature consists in analyzing the impact of music as topos in the text, in terms of the roles accruing to music in the society of the time and the people’s perception and conception of music. This is the type of approach favoured here by this author. I attempt to study the part played by references to music in a work of fiction, Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). To what purpose did the famous author of Gothic novels use music in her narratives? What does a given allusion to a musical situation add to the plot or characterization? What part may it play from the structural or dramatic point of view? Reciprocally, one can deduce from the representation of music in the novel something as to the way music was conceived, imagined or perceived in Britain in the eighteenth century, what one could call the imaginaire of music. The point in such an approach is therefore not to study the relationship of words to music when the former are set to music by a composer, as Degott and Volk-Birke do; nor is it to envisage the so-called “music of the words,” as is sometimes attempted in relation with poetic diction. Calvin S. Brown has remarked that “for fairly obvious reasons, music has exerted considerably more influence on poetry than on prose fiction. By its very nature, poetry demands a constant attention to problems of sound, and thus is likely to suggest musical analogies to its creators” (Brown 208). In the case of the novel, however, the question of sound is less central and music matters in it primarily for other reasons. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, music performs a crucial role to represent psychological states. The main function of the representation of music in the novel is to define the heroine’s sensibility. I suggest that Radcliffe used allusions to music in order to define a feminine form of the sublime, as opposed to the Burkean definition according to which the sublime was hinged on the feeling of terror. In Radcliffe, music often appears in conjunction with the perception by the heroine of particularly intense natural beauties and in scenes of perfect bliss and harmony, where the mind is overwhelmed by a sense of something almost sacred. Thus music belongs to the positive, feminine category of the beautiful as it reveals the sensibility of the heroine, yet it paradoxically partakes of the sublime as well, as it is closely associated with nature and the unknowable. At the end of the eighteenth century, the idea that music referred to something beyond rational grasp, and was of an ineffable nature, was generally accepted (Dubois passim) and it can be argued that, “although Ann Radcliffe had no theoretical position on music and saw it in a very approximate, non-technical, uninformed way, she nevertheless expressed through her fiction that broadly-shared conviction that music meant something, not only in the absence of semantic contents, but precisely because of it.”
10The last type of analysis consists in identifying the musical metaphors and symbols that happen to be used in a given text. This has often been done in relation to poetry (Barry passim), because poetry and music both summon up, and rely on auditory sensations. However, the so-called “musicalization” of literature can only exist “in an implicit and ‘indirect’ mode” (Wolf 34) and one should be wary of applying musical terms to literature, for music remains different from literature in essence. Mentioning music inside a literary text or allegedly resorting to musical techniques—such as counterpoint, canon, fugue or sonata form—does not necessarily warrant the musicalization of the text in question and one should remain cautious about the use of terms that should “only be regarded as heuristic metaphors (albeit very useful ones…)” (Wolf 34). Thus, as Claire Téchéné remarks below, “calling ‘music’ the sound of the water on the pebbles originates in a very specific conception of music.” It may be argued it is only metonymically or metaphorically that both natural sounds and poetry at large can be called musical. This creates confusion, as the metaphor contributes to the fusion of two entities — sensation and conceptualization
11In her paper, Claire Téchéné examines the way auditory sensations were treated by the main British Romantic poets (Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley) in the context of a renewed confidence in subjective perception. The Romantic poem was a laboratory for the expression of sensations, which enabled refreshing innovations. Sensations are part of the Romantic vision of the world and music is seen as a paradigm of poetic expression, because the musician can elicit immediate reactions through his discourse, yet at the same time music is also seen as a counter-model because the poet’s words are only imperfect reflections of sensations. The Romantics re-appropriated for themselves the ancient discourse on the forsaken harmony of the world, a notion inherited from Greek culture and transmitted from generation to generation. This matched their quest for the hidden unity of the universe and a feeling of nostalgia for a lost state of nature. Romantic poets retrieved the themes of the world harmony and the music of the spheres “in order to clothe them with a ‘natural’ veil tailored by the relations between subject, art and nature.” Synesthesia played a key role in the creation of the imaginative world in which melody, light and darkness often intermingled. Conversely, these poets eventually pointed to “the vacuity of music, the snare of an overenthusiastic subjectivity which can easily lapse into tautology or pathetic fallacy.” Music may trigger sensations but, unlike poetry, it remains a closed system that cannot deliver a clear, intelligible message. The strength of music is precisely that it is a frustrating hieroglyph that is alluring because of its very mystery, but poetry can be seen as a “translator,” whose superiority over music is that it is intelligible. Thus Claire Téchéné argues that for the Romantic poets “music and its universe remain a mirror of poetic expression, longing for an ideal unity, which only poetry can afford to rebuild in this world.” While this may well be what the romantic poets believed, the reverse could actually be argued. As Walter Pater was later to remark, “all art constantly aspire towards the condition of music because, in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression” (Pater 135).
12Although an attempt at a proper “musicalization” of the literary text was adumbrated and attempted by Laurence Sterne in the eighteenth century, this track was to be pursued further only at a later date (Wolf passim) and it is reasonable to think therefore that new (no less stimulating) questions, hinging on a different epistemological and philosophical context, appeared in the modern period. Nevertheless, the relationship between words and music was ripe with meaning and intricacies in the early-modern period, and it deserves therefore close attention. The following selection of papers only gives a small idea of the potential benefits accruing to research into the field of “text and music,” their cross-fertilization and the question of inter-mediality. It is too often assumed that music only features as realistic “background” in fiction, as a vague metaphor in poetry, or as the mere garment of words in plays or operas, but it does in fact perform a number of different functions in its relation to words. If there is hardly any doubt as to the crucial role it played in Shakespeare’s works (Roulon), it performed no less significant functions, and raised equally interesting questions throughout the early modern period. Music appeared in literary texts as historical and cultural context, for instance in the way the poet’s lyrical voice might be influenced by the practical reality and perception of the contemporary lyrical stage (Miller-Blaise); the question of the link between libretto and music is and endless source of enquiry: music’s compatibility with acceptable aesthetic or ethical demands of a given period raised issues of adaptation (Degott), while the interference of text and music was often ripe with political and ideological undertones (Volk-Birke); music was frequently used as a means of characterization and as a significant topos in prose narratives (Dubois); music could also be referred to as a mirror of poetic expression through which the very nature of language could be probed and questioned (Téchéné). Questions of gender, taste, religion or politics, and countless others, can find an outlet or literary mode of expression through references to, or the use of, music. Beyond these issues, the whole imaginaire of musical instruments as mediated through texts—an aspect not tackled in this publication—opens up fascinating vistas of investigation, as did the study of the pictorial representation of music not so long ago (Leppert). It is therefore to be hoped that further studies will broaden our understanding of music in relation to English studies in the future.
