[…] Continuation of Part I […]
Part II: “Hints are not facts”: Citing Gossip in Newmarch’s Analyses and Biographical Writings
Overtly, Newmarch’s view of biographical gossip about composers tended to be critical. Her introductory commentary to a translation of the libretto to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Motsart i Salyeri (published around 1919, almost a decade before the opera’s U.K. premiere) spends the bulk of its time historicizing the rumor at the heart of the plot:
There is not a shadow of reliable evidence to prove that Salieri really poisoned Mozart. That he was jealous of him, and did his best to keep him out of favour at the Court of Joseph II, was an open secret in the musical world of Vienna. Otto Jahn, in his “Life of Mozart”, says “I have heard upon trustworthy authority in Vienna that Salieri, even in his old age, when among confidential friends, expressed, with a passion that was painful to his hearers, the most unjust judgments upon Mozart’s compositions.” … In 1825 Gustav Nicolai wrote a novel on the subject, entitled “Der Musikfeind” (Music’s Enemy), and five years later the great Russian poet Pouskin wrote the two terse and powerful dramatic scenes which Rimsky-Korsakov has set to music in their entirety (Newmarch ca. 1919, 3).[i]
Perhaps Newmarch’s focus on the historical and poetic elements of the opera were due to the fact that her intended audience would not yet have access to the music in question and thus would primarily be mostly concerned with the story at hand. When it came to the far more well-known works by Tchaikovsky, her objections to autobiographical readings of the Pathétique and rumors connected to the composer’s death were more strident:
There is no doubt that one of the reasons of the extraordinary popularity of this work [the Pathétique] lies in the fact that it has been invested with an autobiographical interest for which there is no real warranty. It is said that in some vague and mysterious way it foreshadowed the composer’s approaching end. Perhaps it is also with the idea of supporting this theory that sensationalists have discovered that Tchaikovsky shortly afterwards committed suicide. The idea is picturesque, but neither in Russia nor abroad have I discovered any substantial ground for the report (Newmarch 1900, 106-7).
Neither her introduction to Mozart and Salieri nor her Tchaikovsky biography contain musical analysis, but both are invested in correcting the kind of easy 1:1 comparisons that a listener might read into a particularly moving performance of Mozart’s Requiem or the Pathétique. When it comes to reading Newmarch as analyst, issues of identity, musical subjectivity, and readership also come into play. Although the bulk of Newmarch’s analyses were of commonly performed (and, eventually, recorded) symphonic works by deceased composers, she seems to have idealized the potential collaborative relationship between composer and theorist:
Let me say at once that I think the best “notes for novelties” are the outcome of intelligent co-operation on the part of the composer and the programme-writer. The situation should be something like that of a confiding patient interviewing a discreet psycho-analyst. Cautiously led on, the composer will make psychological revelations and give out clues that are invaluable. And if the annotator refrains from catechizing, and remembers that hints are not facts, he will certainly find himself in a better position when he comes to look into a brand new, unperformed score.
How much more explicit Beethoven might have been if he had come in contact with the right sort of programmist!” (Newmarch 1928, 253).
The claim that we would understand Beethoven’s music better if only he had been able to work with the “right sort of programmist” to guide audiences is remarkable (although it is perhaps worth mentioning that “Confessions of a Programme-Writer” was in part an advertisement for a forthcoming collection of Newmarch’s program notes). Did Newmarch really think of herself as an invisible mole or a discreet psychoanalyst revealing “hints” about her subjects? In her analytical note on the Pathétique, Newmarch eschewed formal explanation (noting that concertgoers at the Proms would no doubt be familiar with the structure of the symphony) in favor of a defense of the work’s emotional content:
The structure of the Symphony must be familiar in every detail to the audience at these Concerts; I need therefore only speak of its poetic basis, and that from a point of view which is avowedly personal and makes no pretensions to be authoritative. Although we have Tchaikovsky’s own testimony that his unrevealed programme was ‘penetrated by subjective sentiment,’ we need not therefore narrow the emotional contents of the Symphony to a mere expression of personal apprehension in the face of death and ‘the great misgiving.’
[…]
Tchaikovsky gives utterance to thoughts and problems that lie deep down in every thinking mortal. To label such music morbid, pessimistic, neurotic; to repeat truisms to the effect that poets can always find a silver lining in every well-regulated cloud that threatens the horizon of life, is merely to take a superficially optimistic view of a tremendous and inscrutable situation. The experiences which inspired Tchaikovsky in this Symphony are identical with our own; even if we rarely allow them to ripple the surface of life, they agitate its depths in a blind, unconscious way. Therefore when we hear them expressed with such piercing and intimate feeling, Tchaikovsky’s music seems to us less a revelation of external truths than a startling emanation from our own innermost being (Newmarch 1911, 227).
Again, note the mention of documentary sources and the aversion to reducing her interpretation to individual biography. It would be easy for Newmarch to simply ignore the apocryphal or dubious stories she knew her readers enjoyed. The biography of her close friend and living contemporary Henry Wood begins with some discomfort, observing that “to write of living celebrities needs the special gifts of tact and an impartial temper, to which most probably I have no claim whatever,” and that “there is always the risk of saying more than should be said in a man’s lifetime” (Newmarch 1904, 1). For all her carefulness and skepticism in dealing with musical gossip about deceased subjects, she appeared to have thought them worth talking about (or, at the very least, knew her readers would talk about them regardless). Here we find tantalizing hints, if not necessarily facts.
What are we to make of Newmarch’s biographical and analytical “hints” in the scholarly record today, and what they do and do not reveal about both subject and author? In some ways, this opens up the current reader to speculation that is impossible to resolve. Would she consider herself a theorist today? A musicologist? A biographer? Something else entirely?
In other ways, however, Newmarch’s scholarly identity and difficult relationship with the intersections of music history, analysis, and popular gossip seem incredibly timely. What does it mean to “be” a music theorist or a musicologist? In recent years, the rise of accessible online public scholarship and the persistent lack of permanent academic jobs has led many with and without formal education in music research to explore ways of sharing musical knowledge with the public. But Newmarch’s works remind us that questions of public engagement and personal identity have always been a component of music theory and musicology. While her approach may be in some ways antiquated—as, of course, is that of her more academically established male contemporaries—her concern with how historical and musical details are explained and what readers know (or want to know) about music remains current.
Bibliography
Brown, Malcolm Hamrick. “Tchaikovsky and his Music in Anglo-American Criticism, 1890s–1950s.” In Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, 134–149. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Bullock, Philip Ross. “‘Lessons in sensibility’: Rosa Newmarch, Music Appreciation, and the Aesthetic Cultivation of the Self,” The Yearbook of English Studies 40 (2010): 295–318.
–––. Rosa Newmarch and Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009.
–––. “‘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, 108–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Chassé, Charles. “La Musique anglaise moderne: Une Interview avec Rosa Newmarch.” Bulletin français de la S.I.M. (January 10, 1908): 556-562.
Dent, Edward. Letter to Oscar Sonneck. April 2, 1914. Oscar George Theodore Sonneck Collection. Music Division. Library of Congress. Correspondence File.
Fillion, Michelle. “Tchaikovsky and the Deflowering of Masculine Love in Maurice,” in Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E.M. Forster, 93–107. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Forster, E.M. Maurice. New York: Norton, 1971.
Franseen, Kristin M. “‘Onward to the End of the Nineteenth Century’: Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Queer Musicological Nostalgia,” Music & Letters 101, no. 2 (2020): 300–320.
–––. “Talking to Ghosts: Salieri Horror and the Messiness of Genius.” VAN Magazine (April 7, 2022): https://van-magazine.com/mag/fiction-about-salieri/
M. “Mrs. Rosa Newmarch.” The Musical Times 52, no. 818 (April 1911): 225–229.
Mayne, Xavier [Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson]. The Intersexes: A History of Simisexualism as a Problem in Social Life. Rome, Florence, or Naples: Privately Printed, ca. 1909.
Moffat, Wendy. A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Newmarch, Rosa. The Concert-Goer’s Library of Descriptive Notes. 6 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1928–1948.
–––. “Confessions of a Programme-Writer.” The Chesterian 9, no. 72 (July/August 1928): 252–257.
–––. Henry J. Wood. London: Lane, 1904.
–––. Horae Amoris: Songs and Sonnets. London: Elkin Matthews, 1903.
–––, ed. and trans. The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. By Modest Tchaikovsky. London: Lane, 1906.
–––, trans. Mozart and Salieri. By Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. London and Brighton: J&W Chester, ca. 1919.
–––. Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works; with extracts from his writings, and the diary of his tour abroad in 1888. London: Richards, 1900.
Stevenson, Alfred Boynton. “Chaikovski and Mrs Rosa Newmarch Revisited.” Inter-American Music Review 14, no. 2 (1995): 63–78.
[i] The volume itself is undated, but advertising in various music journals and magazines dates it to around 1919.
Newmarch’s errors of fact here reflect trends in scholarship on Salieri and Mozart to that point that are beyond the scope of this blog post. The persistence of anecdotes about Salieri’s supposed bitterness towards Mozart in his old age reflect common (if frequently uncited or dubiously sourced) views in 19th-century biographies and biographical fiction. The misdating of Der Musikfeind to 1825 almost certainly comes from the reference to the novella in Jahn and is still occasionally repeated in Mozart scholarship, sometimes with a mention that 1825 was also the year of Salieri’s death. The novella—which references biographical details of Salieri’s life likely taken either from various obituaries or Mosel’s 1827 biography—was in fact published in 1835 (as part of a collection of music-themed short fiction) and 1838 (as an independent volume). I briefly discuss the plot and themes of Der Musikfeind in an article for VAN Magazine on 19th-century horror fiction about Salieri: https://van-magazine.com/mag/fiction-about-salieri/