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The Gaze of the Listener: Representations of domestic music-making in English literature 1550-1918 Dissertation zur Erlangung des Würde einer Doktorin der Philosophie, vorgelegt der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel von Regula Hohl Trillini von Ausserrhoden Basel 2004 Basel, 27. November 2003 Genehmigt von der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel, auf Antrag von Prof. Dr. Balz Engler und Prof. Dr. Anne C. Shreffler Basel, den 13. April 2004 Die Dekanin Prof. Dr. Annelies Häcki Buhofer 2 Ich danke folgenden Personen und Institutionen für ihre Hilfe bei der Abfassung dieser Dissertation: Prof. Dr. Balz Engler, Basel, meinem Referenten, für wichtige Ratschläge und Gespräche und seine Gabe, zu ermutigen und zu fördern; und besonders für das offene Klima in der research community des Englischen Seminars der Universität Basel. Prof. Dr. Anne Shreffler, vormals Basel, jetzt Harvard, meiner Korreferentin, für wichtige Gespräche und für die Vermittlung unschätzbar wertvoller Kontakte mit englischen und amerikanischen Forschern auf dem Gebiet der word-and-music studies. Dem Schweizerischen Nationalfonds für seine großzügige Unterstützung des Projekts, und Prof. Dr. Engler und Prof. Dr. Shreffler für ihre Hilfe beim Ersuchen darum. Delia Da Sousa Correa, Markus Marti, Andrew Shields und Susan Barton Young für wertvolle Kommentare zu verschiedenen Fassungen einzelner Kapitel. Den Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeitern der Universitätsbibliothek Basel, der British Library und der Bodleian Library, Oxford. Meinen Vorgesetzten in der Schulleitung der Kantonsschule Olten, besonders Bruno Colpi, Erich Peier und Sibylle Wyss-Hug, für die Flexibilität, die nicht nur Forschungsaufenthalte und Kongressbesuche in England ermöglichte. Den Mitarbeiterinnen des Tagesheims Missionsstrasse in Basel, besonders Silvia Candoni, Alex Grimm, Stephanie Käsermann und Michèle Oschwald, für ihre liebevolle und kompetente Arbeit. Für wertvolle Hinweise, guten Rat und tatkräftige Freundschaft danke ich Roberto Adorno, Daniel Albright, Barbara Sträuli Arslan, Bernhard Atzenberger, Rosamund Bartlett, Jörg Berger, Verena Binder, Werner Brönnimann, Cornelia Brüllmann, Ruth Carney, Tili Boon Cuillé, Sarah Ebner-Walton, Doris Eckstein, Susan Guerber, Anna-Patricia Hadorn, Hartwig Isernhagen, Jenny Jermann, Doris Kunz, Irène Kurzmeyer, Ladina Bezzola Lambert, Janet Montefiore, Annabarbara Pelli, Angelo Raciti, Manuela Rossini, Alison und Robert Samuels, Pia Schubiger, Ruth Solie, Antoinette Weibel, Judith Zuber, Ruth Züllig und Sylvia Zysset. 3 Table of Contents Introduction 6 1. Performance as feminine 6 2. The piano 9 3. 'The intuition of the artist' 11 4. The gaze of the listener 14 Notes 17 I. Sex and the virginals: gender and keyboards around 1600 19 1. The abuse of music: 'Muche musike marreth mennes maners' 20 2. The use of music: Bartering brides 25 3. Shakespeare's sonnet 128 31 II. 'Musick in the House, Musick in the Heart, and Musick also in Heaven': The harpsichord 39 1. 'Musick not worth a gentleman's labor' 40 2. Female accomplishment in life and letters 44 3. 'Musick in the House and Musick also in Heaven': Family scenes 51 4. 'Musick in the Heart': New Sensibilities 56 5. Familiar warnings I 62 III. 'Accomplishments, Accomplishments, Accomplishments': The piano-forté 67 1. 'Accomplishments, Accomplishments, Accomplishments' 68 1.1. 'Rattling' and 'Pianoforting' 68 1.2. 'Accomplishments have taken virtue's place' 74 2. 'She would be a match for any man, who has any taste for music!' 80 2.1. 'The net of courtship and the cage of matrimony' 82 2.2. 'For sale in the great toy-shop of society' 85 2.3. Familiar warnings II 92 3. Heroine standards 98 3.1. Irony and subversion 98 3.2. Moral variations 102 4. Sentiment at the piano 106 4.1. Sighing songs 106 4.2. Family and friends 110 4.3. 'Most impassioned when alone' 113 5. Jane Austen in context 115 4 IV. 'Glorious disability': The piano and the mid-Victorians 120 1. Gender in life and literature 123 1.1. Men shouldn't play 123 1.2. Women must play 130 2. Handel With Care: Narrative strategies 133 2.1. Disapproving: Deprecation and denunciation 134 2.2. Devaluing: Disinfection and trivialization 140 2.3. Deflecting: 'Heroines [not] at the piano' 145 3. 'A woman was playing, a man looking on' 149 3.1. Visual elements: Silencing the pianist 149 3.2. Gentlemen prefer blondes (at their peril) 153 4. The piano within the family 159 4.1. For fathers, brothers and husbands 159 4.2. 'A good cry upstairs' 160 4.3. Practising: 'Music and Morals' 166 V. Death, the piano and the maiden: Music in nineteenth-century poetry 173 1. 'La petite mort' in earlier keyboard poetry 174 2. The Dear Dead Past and the Sweet Hereafter 176 3. 'Death or despair or disappearance': Melodramatic narratives 187 VI. Swan Song: the piano after 1880 189 1. Triumph and exasperation 192 2. Stereotypes revisited 198 2.1. Finally: Playing well. Self-expression and respectful listeners 199 2.2. From Angel to Goddess (and Medea) 206 2.3. Stereotypes of masculinity revisited 211 2.4. 'Real men' at the piano 215 3. A new perspective on the drawing room 219 4. The piano and beyond 225 4.1. 'For dead, dead, dead you are to me!' Women and texts without pianos 227 4.2. 'Too much Beethoven': A modern view of a Victorian room 226 4.3. 'If I had not struck the piano, I should have struck you': The Beth Book 227 4.4. Mary Olivier : 'Something has happened to the piano' 230 Conclusion 240 Bibliography of cited works 242 1. Primary works 242 2. Secondary titles 256 Further recommended reading 259 Endnotes 266 5 Introduction The performing arts and music in particular sit astride the great Western divide between body and mind. While dance and drama have been much feared and maligned for privileging the body, could always be cerebral, esoteric and divine as well as perniciously human. Its semantic openness makes it potentially seductive in a way which has been a worry since Plato and St. Augustine; but for the same reason, it is also especially pure, 'heavenly' in the sense of a geometrical, Pythagorean order. The music of the spheres or of the Heavenly Host is divine because it is disembodied; but when music is performed, the usual separation of the physical and the cognitive, of mind from body, is scandalously suspended in 'a suspect and transgressive pleasure which implicitly privileges the body'.1 While the enduring, abstract arts of theory and composition are connotated as masculine in the senses of both 'privileged' and 'normal', from antiquity through the Liberal Arts to the still impressive majority of men composers of art music today, the necessary involvement of the body, that desired, despised, feared and hated Other, aligns performance inevitably with inferior social groups, the alien exotic and, of course, women. 1. Performance i as feminine From the sixteenth century to the First World War, English stereotypes about music were consistently contradictory. Music was theoretically exalted as divine, even as an instrument of redemption, the most sublime and expressive of arts, while many forms of musical practice were considered trivial, if not morally dangerous to performers and listeners. Performance unites all the negative or 'feminine' aspects of music, its 'dis-orderly energies … that are constantly threatening to escape from patriarchal control, even as musical signifiance 2 threatens to escape from signification, or the semiotic to erupt into the symbolic'. i The term ‘performance’ is used throughout this study with the straightforward meaning of ‘singing or playing for one or more other person present’, not in senses complicated by, for instance, performative notions of gender as developed in Queer and (post-Judith Butler) Gender Studies. 6 Musicke is the princesse of delites and the delite of princes. RICHARD MULCASTER The study of women and the ways in which they are affected by their musical experiences offers important insights on the uses and abuses of power within our species. CAROL E. ROBERTSON English fiction and non-fiction testify to the erotic attractiveness of female musicians for the male listener / spectator, as well as to a deep mistrust of the emotional and sensual effects of music. Performance, constructed as fundamentally female, inspires fears of physicality, irrationality and uncontrollable emotion in men; but it is also highly desirable, and so a great deal of musical performing was recommended for and demanded from women, for male enjoyment and for the social function of furthering courtship. A woman's performance for a man is an exemplary enactment of gender relations in a patriarchal society in which 'pleasure in looking [and listening] has been split between active/male and passive/female'.ii Whether male listeners were constructed as gullible victims or unassailable controllers, concerns about the potentially negative sensuous effects of music performance, and the social status of those who would produce such seductive sounds resulted, from the sixteenth century onwards, in an increasing prescription of actual performance practice for women, and in increasing social limitations on this form of physical display for men. While performing music defines the subject's 'discursive position as feminine',3 a female player also encroaches on the male prerogatives of physical presence and activity; her art cannot be detached from her physical, sexual and social self. Because of this audible, visible (and sometimes palpable) presence, the woman player cannot be overlooked and suppressed,