A major theme across Imagining Musical Pasts is the connections between my three subjects’ scholarly work and more literary writings. In the case of Rosa Newmarch, these associations were made fairly immediately by many of her contemporary readers. While best known during her lifetime for her biographical writings and analytical programme notes, Newmarch also published two original volumes of poetry, Horae Amoris: Songs and Sonnets (Mathews, 1903) and Songs to a Singer and Other Verses (Lane, 1906), as well as English translations of Russian poems. Her poetry consists primarily of two sonnet cycles, with many poems on musical subjects.
The temptation to read such works as secretly autobiographical is strong, particularly in light of Newmarch’s documented concert attendance alongside her longtime companion Bella Simpson. (Lewis Stevens’s biography of Newmarch, An Unforgettable Woman (Matador, 2011), contains a thorough overview of what is documented about Newmarch’s and Simpson’s relationship.) These works, however, should also be considered in light of their widespread publication and distribution, as well as the multiple meanings attached to women-authored sonnets around the turn of the twentieth century. (It is here where I–as an admittedly very novice poetry fan–must turn to literary scholars Natasha Distiller and John Holmes for their work on contextualizing the early 20th-century sonnet genre and providing examples of queer and feminist readings of these sorts of works.)
One theme that Distiller and Holmes identify in sonnet cycles is the relationship between a narrator and an inaccessible (often unhappily or inconveniently married) female beloved. This convention dates back to the Italian humanist tradition–think of Laura and Petrarch or Dante and Beatrice–and continues into the modern English versions of the form. While many sonnet narrators have been presumed to be male, the ambiguity at play in many sonnets by women is noticeable. Even if the question of autobiographical meanings remains frustratingly vague, a few poems are of definite interest when read alongside Newmarch’s contributions to biography and musical analysis. “The Symphony (Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky),” from Horae Amoris, seems to find Newmarch grappling with the “universality” of emotion she finds in Tchaikovsky’s work and contains the only moment of physical touch between the narrator and beloved:
Hearing the first notes of the symphony,
Rosa Newmarch, “The Symphony (Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky),” in Horae Amoris (London: E. Mathews, 1903), 37.
Where as in a quadriptych, fold on fold,
’Gainst a black ground, lit by Hope’s star of gold,
Is shown the strife ’twixt man and destiny—
Her eyes for tears in mine I could not see.
But when Hope’s star had set, and dark out-rolled
That life’s last message, whereby we are told
That sure mortality of things that be,
And brought with frozen hearts and catching breath
To look adown the abyss where all things dear,
Achievement and desire, and all belief
Pass into nothing, leaving only Death
The one thing certain and the one thing near—
I felt her hand in mine shake like a leaf.
There is a striking contrast between this seemingly quite personal reaction to Tchaikovsky’s music and the documentary, at times skeptical responses to popular (mis)readings of the music found in her biographical writings. While her scholarly work on Tchaikovsky repeatedly cautions against projecting particular emotions or motives onto the composer himself, she emphasizes the pull of potential personal and subjective experiences in reaction to the Pathétique. (A similar contrast is found between the discussion of Tchaikovsky’s biography and his reception history in her article for the second edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which I will discuss at greater length in a future blog post.)
Many of Newmarch’s poems deal to varying degrees with a narrator’s secret feelings, which may or may not find expression through music, as in the standalone poems “The Double Life” and “The Song Unsung” in Songs to a Singer.
I am cautious to claim these poems as particularly expressive of Rosa Newmarch’s true feelings or possible double life–for one thing, her poetry was published for a public readership–but they do show her active engagement with a literary tradition that focused on secret emotions and musical experiences.
Newmarch’s interest in poetry also overlaps with her work as a translator of Russian history and literature and engagement with British musical life. Edward Elgar set her translation of Apollon Maykov’s “Love’s Tempest” (1914). (If you want to listen to the piece, check out this recording from the Cambridge University Chamber Choir. The sheet music is also available here via IMSLP.)
Songs to a Singer is available online via the Internet Archive. I also recommend Natasha Distiller’s and John Holmes’s excellent critical edition Horae Amoris: The Collected Poems of Rosa Newmarch (Rivendale Press, 2010), which collects all of her original poetry and selected translations into a single volume and provides very helpful contextual endnotes for various historical and literary allusions!