[A] song, for him, was music first, and then whatever you please afterwards, so long as it suggested, never told, some delicate sentiment, a sigh or a caress; . . . the song seems to have been made by some fastidious amateur of grief, and it has all the sighs and tremors of the mood, wrought into a faultless strain of music.
Arthur Symons, Studies in Prose and Verse (1904)Contemporary academic interest in the culture of late-Victorian decadence focuses almost entirely on literature, but literature is only one of the forms whereby decadence finds cultural expression. It is known experientially through the senses—through smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing—and manifests in a variety of blended and traversed or, we might say, translational cultural forms. One of these blendings / traversings / translations—of poetry, music, and song into late-Victorian decadent song literature—is the subject of this article.
Up until about a decade ago, there was very little research into decadent song literature. There were separate studies of Victorian music and decadent style in music—of Wagnerism, mainly, and of the musical aesthetics of selected decadent poets and artists who professed an interest in music and musical form (Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley, in particular). There were also studies of the impact of music and musical performance on Victorian social and cultural life and the relationship between literature and classical music. But up until Michael Craske began working on the musical legacy of Algernon Swinburne's verse, little was written specifically on translations of decadent poetry by musicians and the translation and adaptation of fin de siècle decadent literature into music and song.Footnote 1 As Bryan N. S. Gooch bemoaned as far back as 1974, the lacuna in research on Ernest Dowson in particular was of “lamentable regret.”Footnote 2
Quite recently a whole new field of research has emerged, much facilitated by technologies in the digital humanities that have inspired large collaborative multidisciplinary projects, like the Sounding Victorian project directed by Phyllis Weliver and Sophie Fuller, which brings together a group of digital projects that “use sound as an experiential way of conceptually thinking through archives that document lived experiences of literature and music in nineteenth-century Britain” (http://www.soundingvictorian.org); the Re:dress Women Composers Project, directed by Kate Kennedy, a collaboration between the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, Oxford University, BBC Radio 3, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that works to “create a resource to facilitate performances of music written by women” (http://www.centreforwomencomposers.com); and the magisterial Baudelaire Song Project, directed by Helen Abbott, that “brings together for the first time all the song settings ever of Charles Baudelaire's poetry, looking at classical music and popular music settings, in French original and in translation, with music scores and in audio format” (http://www.baudelairesong.org). These digital humanities projects, with their ability to reach beyond the academic community to engage also with creative practitioners and the general public, together with the publication of book-length studies of late nineteenth-century Victorian music and music history, have changed the research landscape dramatically. Not only have they increased the accessibility of resources for scholars interested in the music culture of the Victorian period more broadly, but they have led to new conceptualizations and insights into relationships between the arts. The study of “singing translations,” as Helen Abbott calls them, whether they are adaptations/translations of Swinburne by Percy Grainger or riffs on Baudelaire by heavy metal bands, is now a rapidly expanding field of research that draws on a wide range of discussions which connect literature and music as well as debates about gender, national character, the role of intellectuals, and the relationship of Britain with continental Europe.Footnote 3
This article explores the vogue for setting poetry to music in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, focusing particularly on the circles and networks that brought composers such as Cyril Scott and Frederick Delius to the work of decadent poets like Ernest Dowson. The routes to discovery were not always direct or obvious. Scott and Delius, for example, did not find Dowson for themselves in English-speaking contexts; they were gifted his work by European writers, artists, and musicians working on the Continent, and most notably by members of the Frankfurt Group. Dowson's poetry was presented to Scott by the German symbolist poet Stefan George almost as foreign literature.
Decadence signified a variety of things to different composers. To women musicians and composers, for example, such as Radclyffe Hall, Adela Maddison, Ella Overbeck, and Ethel Smyth (who worked a passage between the mainstream musical establishment and semiprivate concerts and musical evenings), decadent literature resonated with the themes of unconventional sexuality, violence, and death. From what can be pieced together from cultural-historical studies of the period, biographies, memoirs, letters, newspaper and journal articles, and original sheet music, it is evident that the proliferation of decadent literature in the British and European musical scene of the time provides a remarkable testimony to the richness and variety of the best of late-Victorian decadent verse.Footnote 4
1. Decadent Song Literature
The poetry of late-Victorian English decadents sustained a substantial popular song literature at the fin de siècle and in the early decades of the twentieth century. Of the English decadents whose poems were set to music, the most popular were Ernest Dowson and Arthur Symons, compared to a modest number of musical settings of poems by Beardsley, Alfred Douglas, Lionel Johnson, and Oscar Wilde.Footnote 5 A preliminary survey of the musical settings of late-Victorian and modern British literature reveals that the collections most favored by composers were all published in the 1890s and included Douglas's The City of the Soul (1899), Dowson's Verses and Decorations (1899), and Symons's Silhouettes (1892), London Nights (1895), Amoris Victima (1897), and Images of Good and Evil (1899). Meanwhile, the most popular poems set to music were Dowson's “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae” (better known as “Cynara” and hereafter cited as “Non sum qualis”) (five settings) and “Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam” (nine settings), and Symons's “Fountain Court” (eight settings) and “Memory” (seven settings).
Among the composers inspired by late-Victorian decadent poetry were Roger Quilter and Arnold Schoenberg,Footnote 6 but the English composers Scott and Delius were particularly drawn to the slim volumes of Dowson's verse. While Delius was transported by the wistful longing and diminuendo in the poet's evocation of mood and atmosphere, which he expressed with lavish orchestration and chromaticism, Scott found inspiration for his modern soundscapes and Pre-Raphaelite archaism, and saw the potential in Dowson's crafting of language for radical formal experimentation. In a letter of 1959, he reflected that Dowson was “the poet that inspired me most at the start of my career.”Footnote 7
This is perhaps not surprising. Of all the English decadents working at the fin de siècle, Symons and Dowson were the most musically minded and attentive to matters of form. Music was for Symons both the supreme expression of the imaginative life and a “divine hallucination,” full of foreignness and mystery. His reflections on the “interpenetration of substance and form” and his concern with what he called the “universal science of beauty” represented an emergent direction in modern aesthetics toward greater freedom of association between the arts.Footnote 8 Symons could actually read and play music (he was a decent pianist, able to sight-read and improvise, and he had a piano carted up six flights of stairs to his rooms in Fountain Court), but Dowson had a finer ear for sound. In much the same way as a musician creates music from a combination of sounds and silence, so Dowson attempted to produce sound-patterns in his poems that override narrative intelligibility. His lexical range was not so much narrow as distilled. He deployed a core range of sounds expressive of personal emotion and punctuation to control the pace and the length of the pauses.Footnote 9 In “Villanelle of Sunset,” for example, as Stephanie Kuduk Weiner demonstrates, the use of pauses is archaic and poetical, drawing on a system of punctuation dating back to early printed books. “The graduated system of stops, drawn from rhetoric and its interface between written and spoken language,” she writes, “pertains to sound rather than organizing syntax.”Footnote 10
Dowson's emphasis on visual and aural patterns in his poetry, what he described in a letter dated March 20, 1891, to Victor Plarr as “mere sound verse, with scarcely the shadow of a sense in it,” has a symbolist-inspired musicality that finds a correlation in the purity of Beardsley's fine line.Footnote 11 In the poems of Dowson and the black-and-white drawings of Beardsley, we encounter a resistance to, rather than a rejection of, representation in favor of a formalist aestheticism that emphasizes purity of tone and rhythm. In their mastery of form, Dowson's and Beardsley's work represents a high point in late-Victorian aesthetics that intersected with innovations and experimentation by modern British composers like Scott. As R. K. R. Thornton and Caroline Dowson comment in the note to “Chanson sans paroles,” a poem in imitation of Paul Verlaine's Romances sans paroles (1874), Dowson “frequently suggested that he was interested more in the music of his poems than their meaning.”Footnote 12 He may not have been musical or professed any knowledge of music, but the beauty of his choice of words and his loosening of syntax, as well as rhythm (mainly in relation to the alexandrine), made an enduring impression on early twentieth-century music.
2. Cyril Scott: Composer, Mystic, Translator
Cyril Scott (1879–1970) was admired by Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Richard Strauss, and Igor Stravinsky, and he was described by the conductor Eugène Goossens as “The Father of British Modern Music.”Footnote 13 His experiments in free rhythm, generated by expanding musical motifs (above all in his revolutionary First Piano Sonata of 1909), are said to have exerted an influence on Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Scott was a transitional avant-garde figure at the fin de siècle. As biographer Sarah Collins notes, he “occupied an unusual in-between space[;] . . . his unconventional harmonic and rhythmic practices positioned him as a modernist, yet his underlying aesthetic sensibilities were steeped in romantic allusion.”Footnote 14
Scott was born in 1879 in Oxton, a village in the north of England, near Liverpool. He was the youngest of three children, his father a scholar of Greek and a businessman in shipping. Scott showed a precocious talent for music, picking out tunes on the piano almost before talking, and in 1891, at the age of twelve, was enrolled in the Frankfurt conservatoire to study piano. He returned to England two years later to continue his piano studies, but in 1895—at the age of sixteen—he went back to Frankfurt to study with Ivan Knorr at the Hoch Conservatory, and there he met Balfour Gardiner, Percy Grainger, Norman O'Neill, and Roger Quilter, who came to be known as the Frankfurt Group.
This second period in Frankfurt made a huge impression on Scott. In 1896 he met the German poet Stefan George and the German illustrator Melchior Lechter, both of whom influenced his outlook and personal aesthetic. Of George, Scott writes in his biography, Bone of Contention, “besides being a remarkable poet he looked like one to a superlative degree, with [a] pale and somewhat Dantesque face, very deep-set, rather melancholy eyes and his imposing head of long black hair. . . . He both loved and radiated power.”Footnote 15 Through George, Scott became interested in arcana and Pre-Raphaelite otherworldliness, and he easily plugged into George's cosmopolitan dandified style and antibourgeois sentiments. George had attended Mallarmé's famous mardis and instilled in the young English musician “disinterestedness, a pure fervor and obedience to the cult of beauty.”Footnote 16 Scott self-consciously fashioned for himself a Romantic spiritual persona, wearing expensive suits and watch chains, playing chess intensely, and reading books on reincarnation and oriental occultism. In a photograph of 1902, now in the Grainger Museum Collection in Melbourne, he fixes the viewer with a severe stare, his hair swept back and leonine, his starched white collar crisp against a black velvet cravat (fig. 1). Like J.-K. Huysmans's fictional neurotic Des Esseintes, and indeed George and Lechter, who furnished their apartments with medieval minichapels, Scott created an “ecclesiastical atmosphere” in his own home, building his own gothic furniture, replacing his windows with church stained glass, and burning incense.Footnote 17
Figure 1. Photographic portrait of Cyril Scott, October 1902, by Barraud Studio, Grainger Museum Collection, Melbourne, Australia.
Scott discovered Dowson through George, who had met Dowson in London in 1898. Little is known about this meeting, but George was familiar with the work of English decadents and had translated poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, and Dowson. Of his encounter with Dowson in London, George wrote to his Dutch friend Paul Verwey in 1898, “my repeated encounters with E D were happy ones,” and he compared Dowson's appearance to the “unnatural contorted faces by Aubr. Beardsley . . . somewhat life-less.”Footnote 18 Scott was immediately smitten with Dowson's “pale nuns and Horatian courtesans,” declaring that “Previous to that, poetry had not interested me in the least, but henceforward it became almost a passion, though for many years I could find no other English poet to appeal to me” (My Years, 30, 32). He made twenty-one song settings of Dowson's verse between 1900 and 1915, including “Yvonne of Brittany” (1903), “A Valediction” (1904), “Amor Umbratilis” (1905), “His Lady's Treasures” (1908), “Evening” (1910), “Beata Solitudo” (1911), “A Roundel” (1911), “Villanelle of the Poet's Road” (1911), “Retrospect” (1913), “Soli Cantare Periti Arcades” (1914), “The Pierrot of the Minute” (1937), and “Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam” (pre-1940). The modern soundscapes of Dowson's verse appealed to Scott. Although he did not hold to any abstract philosophizing about art, Dowson was fastidious about form, constantly revising and experimenting with stresses, pauses, inversions, repetitions, and refrains to create exquisitely wrought melodies. As both a romantic and modern innovator, and “under the influence of modern metrical experiments in verse (to which he himself contributed),”Footnote 19 Scott appreciated the refined lyrical beauty of Dowson's poetry, its emphasis on patterns of words and phrases, and silence.
Scott had many talents (some contemporaries thought too many): as well as composing music, he painted and wrote and translated poetry. When in 1898 he left Frankfurt to return to settle in Liverpool, he shared an apartment with Charles Bonnier, a professor in French literature at the university.Footnote 20 Bonnier was an ardent Wagnerite and lifelong committed socialist, and he instilled in Scott a deep love of poetry, especially the French decadents (Bonnier had known Mallarmé). For the next few years Scott lived a life of radical politics and aesthetics in equal measure, surrounded by figures prominently involved in the Fabian Society, women's suffrage, and pacifism, and infused with the aesthetic principles of Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, William Morris, and Rossetti. Bonnier taught Scott versification and persuaded him to translate Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal into English. After meeting Arthur Symons in London, who was—by Scott's account at least—very encouraging, he published a selection of the poems with Elkin Mathews in 1909, followed a year later by a volume of translations of Stefan George's lyrics.
Scott's selection of Baudelaire's poems from Les Fleurs du mal reveals his increasing preoccupation with mysticism and beauty. As a young man he transitions, mainly through the influence of his friend Hans Lüthy, away from the dogmas of the Christian religion so dearly held by his mother, through agnosticism to the teachings of certain Western and Eastern esoteric traditions, and finally to occultism and Vedantism. His closest women friends were spiritualists. In 1902 he met the pianist and Christian Scientist Evelyn Suart, who championed his music and premiered many of his works. Through her, he became interested in metaphysics. After separating from his wife, Rose Allatini, in 1943, he met the clairvoyant Marjorie Hartson, who remained his companion until his death. He was also a close friend of author and clairvoyant Janet Melanie Ailsa Mills, who wrote under the pen name H. K. Challoner.
Eschewing those poems in Les Fleurs du mal that deal with the shock and thrill of modern life (there is no mention of Paris, the text is depoliticized, dehistoricized), Scott selects poems that are sensuous and romantic (“La Chevelure”), atmospheric (“Evening Harmony”; “Mists and Rains”), and evocative of longing and loss (“To a Passer-By”; “The Set of the Romantic Sun”), attempting to retain a musicality through the shapes of sounds in English, often at the expense of sense. Bonnier might have taught him how rhyme and meter work, but Scott's translations are pedestrian and somewhat flawed. His translation of the title of Baudelaire's “La Vie Antérieure” (from Spleen et Idéal) as “Interior Life,” for example, mistakes the word antérieure, which in French means “previously” or “prior,” for “interior” (the correct English translation of the title would be “A Former Life” or “A Past Life”). The syntax of Scott's English translation adheres doggedly to the French. He changes the word order only in the third stanza to retain the original rhyme scheme, effecting a rhyme between “waves” and “slaves.” Here, for comparison, are Baudelaire's original poem and Scott's translation in full:
Scott cut his translating teeth on Baudelaire, just as George had done ten years earlier, but his translations overlay Baudelaire's subtle, resonant, labile use of language with a sentimental musicality and youthful amateur enthusiasm. Given the poor quality of some of the translations, it is somewhat surprising that Symons should have endorsed Scott's translation when they met in London, but we only have Scott's word for that.
Scott's London circles were intensely cosmopolitan. His introduction to Symons, for instance, came via a series of social connections made by his friends the composer Percy Grainger, the socialite Lilith Lowrey, and the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who knew Symons well. The Frankfurt Group met regularly in London to perform and discuss each other's work. Balfour Gardiner's house in Kensington was a regular meeting place, and Scott attended along with Frederic Austin, Arnold Bax, Benjamin Dale, and Gustav Holst, among others. It was at one of these gatherings that Scott probably met Delius. He found rooms for him in London in 1907, but they were not the closest of friends. Scott was considered very avant-garde and was not part of Delius's circle.
3. Frederick Delius: Songs of Sunset
Like Scott, Frederick Delius (1862–1934) was gifted a copy of Dowson's poems, most likely by either his great friend Gardiner or his wife, the painter Jelka Rosen. He was immediately enamored and set eight of them to music: “Moritura”; “Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad”; “Autumnal”; “O Mors! ”; “Exile”; “In Spring”; “Spleen”; and “Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam,” which were published as Songs of Sunset by Leuckart, in both full and vocal score, in 1911 (fig. 2). He kept the poems intact apart from a couple of minor changes and the omission of the third stanza of “Moritura,” the second and fourth stanzas of “Cease smiling,” and the final stanza of “Autumnal.”
Figure 2. Cover page of Frederick Delius, Songs of Sunset (Leipzig: F. E. C. Leuckart, 1911), © The British Library Board, F585.hh.(36).
By the time Delius encountered Dowson's poems in 1908, he had a reputation for large-scale concert works (between 1902 and 1905, he wrote three large works for orchestra and voice: Appalachia, Sea Drift, and A Mass of Life), but he was inspired by the melancholy of Dowson's poems. They energized him and fulfilled “just about every criterion for the composer in terms of his personal world-view: all his philosophical raisons d’être are here, ranging from the poignancy of Man's transient existence on Earth compared with Nature's eternal renewal, to the austere belief that we come from nothing and return to nothing.”Footnote 21 Delius originally gave the piece an elegiac title, Songs of Twilight and Sadness, for he envisaged the eight poems as a song cycle, a unified structure expressing in variant form the feelings of world-weariness and lost love. He set the eight poems into self-contained sections divided by a double bar, with various vocal settings, ranging from choral in the first and third sections, single soloist (soprano in the fourth, baritone in the fifth and seventh), a duet for two soloists in the second, and all voices together in the sixth and eighth.
The song cycle was first performed by the Beecham Symphony Orchestra at Queen's Hall in London in June 1911, and it received fair reviews from the critics, who were on the whole appreciative of the emotional expression given to the words. It was Delius's original idea to put “Non sum qualis” as the climax of Songs of Sunset, but he stopped work at the words “feast is finished” and did not take up the composition again until 1929, when Thomas Beecham asked him if he had an unpublished work for voice and orchestra to include in a festival of the composer's music. The performance of Cynara in October 1929 as part of the Delius Festival was critically acclaimed. The Times noted that its “most marked characteristic which seems to reflect his inmost musical temperament is a kind of nostalgic emotion. . . . Cynara . . . deals in something stronger than home-sickness, but the kind of reaction portrayed in Ernest Dowson's poem is just that tinge of regret that lies at the heart of almost all Delius's contemplative music.”Footnote 22
Delius was not the only composer to create a song cycle from decadent poetry. The song cycle was a genre that had grown in popularity throughout the nineteenth century through the work of French composers like Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, and Jules Massenet.Footnote 23 Fauré (1845–1924) composed Cinq melodies “de Venise” (op. 58) in 1891, based on five poems by Verlaine from the collections Fêtes galantes and Romances sans paroles: “Mandoline” (from Fêtes galantes); “En sourdine” (from Fêtes galantes); “Green” (from Romances sans paroles); “À Clymène” (from Fêtes galantes); and “C'est l'extase” (from Romances sans paroles) (fig. 3). According to Fauré, the song cycle looped a number of musical themes from one song to another (he used a similar technique for his later song cycle, La bonne chanson [1892–94], based on nine of Verlaine's poems from Fêtes galantes). In a letter to his patron, Winnaretta Singer, princesse de Polignac, he claimed that he had created a new form whereby the return of the themes of the other songs in the final one, “C'est l'extase,” made the songs into a kind of suite, “a story.” Thus “Mandoline” sets the Watteau-esque dreamlike atmosphere in which the four love poems were to be played out; “En sourdine” is tender and lyrical, mirroring the carnal and spiritual link that unites the lovers; “Green,” more upbeat, more mischievous, is a playful declaration of feeling; “À Clymène” is a sensuous and mystical portrait of the beloved; and “C'est l'extase” brings everything together in what Jean-Michel Nectoux in his biography describes as “a pantheist expression of human love.”Footnote 24
Figure 3. Gabriel Fauré, “Mandoline,” song cycle based on Paul Verlaine's poetry, flyleaf (London: Metzler & Co., 1891), © The British Library Board, H. 1798.j.(59.).
4. Adela Maddison: Musician, Translator, Cosmopolitan
“Mandoline” (fig. 4) was translated into English by Adela Maddison (1866–1929). She retains Verlaine's light, synaesthetic touch, transforming his sensory emphasis on aural, visual, and textural details (“écouteuses”; “chanteuses”; “vestes de soie”; “robes à queue”; “molles ombres bleues”; “rose et grise”) into verbs and adjectives that suggest a gentle and atmospheric musical rhythm and harmony (“gaily”; “Trailing”; “Pointing”; “Swaying”; “humming”; “dreamy”), bringing the poem round to a cyclical finish that reiterates the idea of a timeless (“oft-told”) youthful courtship situation (“gaily singing”; “alleys shady”). Here are Verlaine's original poem and Maddison's translation/adaptation in full:
Figure 4. Photographic portrait of Adela Maddison, The Sketch, October 16, 1902, © The British Library Board, HUI. LD52 pg 160.
Maddison was allegedly the lover of Fauré, and in many biographies this dubious fact is the one that stands out, but Maddison was one of a number of women musicians and composers at the fin de siècle who embraced a decadent aesthetic and challenged traditional ideas about the role of women artists. These include Mabel Veronica Batten, Ella Overbeck, and Ethel Smyth, as Sophie Fuller has revealed in her seminal essay, “‘Devoted Attention’: Looking for Lesbian Musicians in Fin-de-Siècle Britain.”
Katherine Mary Adela Tindal was born probably in London in 1866 into an upper-class family, her mother of Anglo-Irish descent and her father, Louis Symonds Tindal, an English vice-admiral (fig. 4). Nothing is known about her early musical education, but at the age of nineteen she married Frederick Brunning Maddison, one of the senior directors of the music-publishing firm Metzler & Co. He was more than thirty years her senior, and after a couple of years of marriage they had two children (in 1886 and 1888). Fred published her first pieces of music, a song and a piano piece, in 1882, and together they hosted a successful musical salon in London in the 1890s, frequented by Fauré, who was contracted to Metzler & Co. in 1896. During the 1890s he had much to do with the couple: he taught Adela musical composition, his music was performed often at their musical salon, and he stayed at their villa in Brittany. Fauré thought Adela was “extraordinarily gifted.”Footnote 25
In 1898 Adela left her husband and children and went to Paris, perhaps to be with her lover—as Fauré's biographers believe. However, as Fuller argues, her decision likely was a professional one; she was well known in French musical circles, and several of her works had been published in Paris.Footnote 26 In 1906, to the astonishment of her friends, Adela moved to Berlin, a city she did not much like but where lived the family of Marta Gertrud Mundt, secretary to the princesse de Polignac (the dedicatee of “Mandoline”). After Fred Maddison's death (probably in 1906), Mundt and Adela developed a close companionship and became lovers. Adela reentered London's music scene during the war but was less involved in lesbian society circles. She died in a nursing home in Ealing, West London, in 1929.Footnote 27
Unsurprisingly perhaps for an Irish woman traveling between London, Paris, and Berlin, Adela's music was cosmopolitan in style and deemed decadent by contemporary critics. In a round-up of weekly music events, the Athenæum described her compositions performed with Fauré at St. James's Hall in London in May 1896 as “somewhat Wagnerian in character.”Footnote 28 She bridged the gap between languages and cultures, translating and adapting a variety of writers’ works into song. Her Twelve Songs, Op. 9 & 10 (1895) includes “Bleak Weather” (Ella Wilcox Wheeler), “Before Sunset,” “The Triumph of Time,”Footnote 29 “Stage Love,” “An Interlude,” “Rococo” (Swinburne), “A Little While,” “Insomnia” (D. G. Rossetti), “O That ’Twere Possible” (Tennyson), “A Lament” (Shelley), “No. 1. Liebe” (Heine), and “No. 2. An Den Mond” (Altes Volkeslied).
Maddison's preference for an impressionist style of Continental music over the academic British type was probably the reason why, at the turn of the century, she invited Cyril Scott to her home in Paris to meet Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel. During that visit, Scott and Ravel spent many hours together performing their compositions for each other,Footnote 30 but Scott was ambivalent toward Debussy. “[W]ith his somewhat Christ-like face, marred by a slightly hydrocephalic forehead,” Scott writes in My Years of Indiscretion, Debussy “was neither an unpleasant personality nor an impressive one.”Footnote 31 About his hostess, however, Scott had little illuminating to say. In his biography, Bone of Contention, he describes her as a “composeress,” “a married woman who moved in London society.”Footnote 32 Apart from devising a witty conundrum round her surname,Footnote 33 he seems to have regarded her merely as a conduit to meeting other like-minded male composers. Like the public perception of so many independent women artists at the fin de siècle, Adela's musical talents were eclipsed by her role as Fred's wife.
Maddison was not a mere conduit, however. She was an accomplished translator and composer with an international reputation who moved between the public-facing male musical world and the private spheres of lesbian music performance in the early twentieth century. Her work on the Continent was followed by the newspaper press in England, which suggests, despite the paucity of accessible material on her now, that she had a much greater public profile than currently thought. At the foot of a column titled “Affairs in Berlin” in the Observer for November 13, 1910, for example, Maddison's opera Der Talisman is singled out for praise, albeit rather circumspect praise. “The management of the Leipzig opera,” the correspondent writes, “has given Mrs. Maddison's production a first-rate cast and an exceptionally fine mounting.” He goes on, “German critics await its initial performances with the liveliest interest,” concluding that “Leipzig was the scene of the only other English opera ever produced in Germany, Miss Smythe's ‘The Wreckers,’ recently seen at Covent Garden. It is considered an interesting coincidence that both ‘The Wreckers’ and ‘The Talisman’ are the work of English women.”Footnote 34
5. Conclusion
The study of the interrelationship of decadent literature and music offers new perspectives on transnational social networks and artistic circles and the publication and circulation of new translations. The techniques of musical arrangement and composition often overlapped with literary translation. Two of the composers I have discussed in this article were also translators, and two of them boldly adapted the literary text, taking individual poems out of published sequence and grouping them into song cycles. Moreover, there is growing evidence that women played a significant if undervaunted role in the proliferation of late-Victorian decadent song literature. As Fuller demonstrates, there were many semiprivate concert-performance circles of women musicians and composers who were setting the poems of Swinburne, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Verlaine to music.
Decadence in England may have been seen by many as a spent force by the turn of the century, derided as a mannered confection, “a movement of elderly youths,” as Holbrook Jackson put it, “who slipped away to die in taverns and gutters,”Footnote 35 but in Britain and Europe there was a renaissance of interest among musicians and composers in late-Victorian decadent poetry. The traffic of artists, writers, and musicians across the English Channel at the fin de siècle led to a cross-pollination of traditions, movements, and coteries and created new readerships and literary markets. These networks of exchange mediated cultural production while the circulation of translations of literary and musical texts had an effect on the development of literary and musical styles. The writers, artists, musicians, translators, and publishers who gathered at the Café des Tribunaux in Dieppe in the 1890s, for example, constituted a dynamic cross-continental knowledge exchange, a vibrant mix of writers, artists, musicians, and composers, a cosmopolitan community that included Beardsley, Charles Conder, Debussy, Fauré, Maeterlinck, George Moore, Albert Roussel, and Wilde.
The risk of moving across boundaries—whether they be temporal, physical, or related to discipline and specialization—is the loss of a certain identity and purpose, but as this article aims to show, approaching song literature from a late-Victorian decadence perspective opens the way to understanding more about cosmopolitan networks of exchange at the fin de siècle and uncovering various transnational alliances forged within those networks. A follow-on study could quite feasibly be a collaborative multidisciplinary project in the digital humanities involving Victorianists, decadence scholars, musicologists, historians, and translators to generate a more detailed map of the relational structures that shaped late-Victorian decadent song literature. Such a project would create an invaluable archive of material for scholars working on a range of disciplines and interdisciplines within the broad field of humanities and foster new conversations and engagements. One simple benefit of this kind of collaboration would be the sourcing of original sheet music, which, before 1900, was not routinely cataloged by major national repositories like the British Library. The original sheet music of four of Fauré's Cinq mélodies “de Venise” (1896), which includes Maddison's translations of Verlaine, for example, has proven extremely elusive.
Late-Victorian decadent song literature constituted no more perhaps than sentimental salon music. The public was soon fatigued by its delicate world-weariness. Delius's Songs of Sunset was dedicated to Hans Haym's Elberfield Choral Society, but it did not perform the cycle until 1914 as Haym regarded the piece as being niche. In a letter to the painter Ida Gerhardi in 1913, he wrote, “this is not a work for a wide public, but rather for a smallish band of musical isolates who are born decadents and life's melancholics at the same time.”Footnote 36 While that might be true of Dowson—that the singing translations by both Scott and Delius were for life's mystics and melancholics only—it is not true of Maddison, whose translations, adaptations, and librettos were favorably received in the musical press. Standing outside the British musical establishment as she did, fluid in sexuality and friendship, many years a resident of France and Germany, Maddison is perhaps an important starting point to understanding the mobility of decadence as a transnational, translational cultural form at the turn of the twentieth century and its legacy beyond purely literary manifestations.
