Part I: “Isn’t it supreme!”: Newmarch and Musical Knowledge
How do we glean knowledge from and about music? And how do we determine whether that knowledge is reputable? In E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice (written in 1913 but published posthumously in 1971), the titular character finds himself at a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (commonly known as the Pathétique Symphony) as part of a half-hearted attempt at courting his sister’s friend Violet Tonks. Maurice, in denial of his homosexuality, runs into an old friend who is all too happy to explain what he sees as the real meaning behind the symphony:
Unfortunately, after the concert he [Maurice] met Risley.
“Symphony Pathique,” said Risley gaily.
“Symphony Pathetic,” corrected the Philistine [Maurice].
“Symphonie Incestuese et Pathique.” And he informed his young friend that Tchaikovsky had fallen in love with his own nephew, and dedicated his masterpiece to him. “I come to see all respectable London flock. Isn’t it supreme!” (Forster 1971, 161-2)[i]
After the concert, Maurice seeks out further information on this shocking bit of gossip:
But he got a life of Tchaikovsky out of the library at once. The episode of the composer’s marriage conveys little to the normal reader, who vaguely assumes incompatibility, but it thrilled Maurice. He knew what the disaster meant and how near Dr Barry had dragged him to it. Reading on, he made the acquaintance of “Bob,” the wonderful nephew to whom Tchaikovsky turns after the breakdown, and in whom is his spiritual and musical resurrection. The book blew off the gathering dust and he respected it as the one literary work that had ever helped him (Forster 1971, 162).
This fictional episode might not at first appear to have much to do with music theory. Risley’s claims about Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique are not seemingly based in anything to do with the music, but rather biographical claims. In my larger research project about musical gossip, however, I argue that stories about music history and biography—true, false, and somewhere in between—attach themselves to what people claim to hear in particular works. U.S. music critic and amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson, for example, attributed secret queer programs to the Pathétique:
The death of the brilliant and unhappy Russian composer Tschaikowsky has been affirmed (if denied with equal conviction) as a suicide, not a sudden illness, in consequence of terror of a scandal that hung over him—a relative being spoken of as the persecutor. Some homosexual hearers of Tschaikowsky’s last (and most elegiac) symphony, known as the “Pathetic” claim to find in it such revelations of a sentimental-sexual kind that they have nicknamed the work the “Pathic” Symphony (Prime-Stevenson ca. 1909, 396-7).[ii]
For his part, the supremely unmusical Maurice needed help in his musical revelations. The “life of Tchaikovsky” that so enthralled Maurice is probably Rosa Newmarch’s 1906 translation of Modest Tchaikovsky’s biography of his brother, which Forster described similarly in his so-called “Locked Diaries.”[iii] The twenty-first-century reader of Rosa Newmarch’s Tchaikovsky scholarship would probably be surprised to see Rosa Newmarch’s work play such a revelatory role. Her work on Tchaikovsky—which began with a series of articles and translations in the 1890s and wound up spanning several decades and formats, including two biographies, a lengthy article in the second edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and numerous analytical program notes—can come across now as cautious or even closeting. Malcolm Hamrick Brown observes that “…however one might interpret what could be discreet hints and veiled allusions, the matter of homosexuality as such remains unspoken and deep in the shadows. The very word found its way into English medical, legal, and social parlance only in the late 1890s, and even were Newmarch to have known it, the constraints of propriety would probably have prevented an English lady from acknowledging familiarity with the subject” (Brown 2002, 139).
“Discreet hints and veiled allusions” are also a good way to describe how Newmarch positions herself in her scholarship and how she was viewed during her lifetime. In a review of her sonnets, critic John Douglas describes Newmarch’s poetry as “her own song to sing” in contrast to her more academic work (Douglas, as reprinted in Chassé 1908, 557). Part of a lengthy tradition of British women intellectuals as popularizers of scientific and historical knowledge, Newmarch’s biographical and analytical writings tend to emphasize the authority of other sources rather than her own interpretation.[iv] Much of her first biography of Tchaikovsky is taken up by translations of firsthand accounts of people who knew him and excerpts from his music criticism, so as to let the subject speak for himself. Later scholars have occasionally critiqued Newmarch for this reliance on other’s words, sometimes casting doubt on her command of languages or access to certain archival materials.[v]
I argue that at least some of Newmarch’s partial invisibility in her scholarship was a deliberate authorial strategy in line with her stated views on the role of the music scholar. What did Rosa Newmarch think about her subjects, her readers, and her place as a biographer and analyst? In a 1928 article for the Chesterian entitled “Confessions of a Programme-Writer,” Newmarch showed both a deep awareness of the gendered nature of her position and ambivalence towards how much someone analyzing music should have a visible presence in their writing:
The work of the annotator, like that of the mole, is accomplished in obscurity. He (or she) never appears in public; floral tributes and encores never come his way; never is it granted to him (or her) to contemplate his portrait in the programme-book. The instrument-porter and the piano-tuner live more in the limelight than the annotator. And yet, I know that there are curious-minded people who ask, as of the mole or the burying beetle: how does this industrious little creature work behind the scenes? For such as these the crepuscular annotator has written this article (Newmarch 1928, 253).
Newmarch’s parenthetical references to a female annotator are noticeable, especially in a context where it is all too easy to slip into the universal masculine—and where, as she notes in the article’s opening pages, her gender made some view her work with skepticism and others view her as only a respectable “lady amateur.” Her work frequently fell somewhere between academic and public scholarship. She was well-regarded enough in academic circles for Edward Dent to include her in a list of British musicologists sent to Oscar Sonneck (even if he does describe her work in dismissive terms).[vi] But her writing was also aimed at a broader public, including a series of program notes originally written for the Proms at the request of her good friend and long-time collaborator, conductor Henry Wood. And, as Forster demonstrates, part of the appeal of her Tchaikovsky project for readers was tied to the popular gossip about the composer (including—at least in some circles—a reading of the Pathétique that encompassed both his sexuality and death).
[…] Continuation: Part II […]
[i] Risley’s insistence on “Pathique” is a pun on the similarity between the term “pathic” for sexual passivity and the then-common English rendering of the symphony’s subtitle.
[ii] This same passage also proposes a “legendary [queer] ‘in-reading’” of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 111, and “the ultimate homosexual message by symphonic music” in unnamed symphonies by Brahms and Bruckner. For more on Prime-Stevenson’s approach to surprising queer musical interpretations, see my “‘Onward to the End of the Nineteenth Century’: Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Queer Musicological Nostalgia,” Music & Letters 101, no. 2 (2020): 300–320.
[iii] For further discussion of the Locked Diaries, see Michelle Fillion, “Tchaikovsky and the Deflowering of Masculine Love in Maurice,” in Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E.M. Forster (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 93–107 and Wendy Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
[iv] The role of women as biographers, popularizers, and translators of scholarly knowledge in early 20th-century British intellectual life is a major theme of Philip Ross Bullock’s work on Newmarch. See Bullock, Rosa Newmarch and Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), “‘Lessons in sensibility’: Rosa Newmarch, Music Appreciation, and the Aesthetic Cultivation of the Self,” The Yearbook of English Studies 40 (2010): 295–318; and “‘That More Liberal Mode of Life’: Rosa Newmarch, Aestheticism, and Queer Listening in Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” in Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject, ed. Sarah Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019): 108-–126.
[v] For more critical readings of Newmarch as a Russian music scholar, see Alfred Boynton Stevenson, “Chaikovski and Mrs Rosa Newmarch Revisited,” Inter-American Music Review 14, no. 2 (1995): 63–78.
[vi] Asked by Sonneck for a list of British musicologists who might be interested in collaboration, Dent observed that “Rosa N’s only claim to fame is that she knows Russian, but she will write yards of stuff for you, no doubt.” Edward
Dent, letter to Oscar Sonneck, April 2, 1914, Oscar George Theodore Sonneck Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Correspondence File. I thank Annegret Fauser for graciously sharing this letter.
[…] Continuation: Part II […]