Linda K. Hughes

FROM PARLOR TO CONCERT HALL:
ARTHUR SOMERVELL’S SONG-CYCLE
ON TENNYSON’S MAUD¹

ARTHUR SOMERVELL’S NAME IS HARDLY A HOUSEHOLD WORD TODAY, EVEN among Victorian specialists; nor, within the framework of music history, can Somervell be said to have broken new ground in his compositions. Yet his song-cycles are certainly worth knowing, not as historical footnotes or curiosities, but as works which approach major and demanding poetic texts with extraordinary sensitivity and verve. His Cycle of Songs from Maud, for example, achieves independent life while also respecting the integrity of Tennyson’s text: the relationship between music and text is symbiotic rather than parasitic or predatory. Beyond his gift of enabling the sister arts of music and poetry to meet without subordinating the claims of either form, Somervell also claims interest as a transitional figure from the Victorian to the modern era.

Somervell was born in mid-Victorian England at Windermere in 1863, six years after the birth of Edward Elgar. He was educated at Uppingham and King’s College, Cambridge, and went abroad to study for two years at the Berlin Hochschüle für Musik. He returned to England and spent two more years as a student at the Royal College of Music, where he joined the teaching staff in 1894. During his life he was best known as a music educator and as a composer of choral cantatas suitable for competition festivals. For his achievements he was knighted in 1929. He returned to his native Lake District in his retirement, where he died in 1937.

Today most critics regard Somervell’s five song-cycles, all based on poems published during Queen Victoria’s reign, as his most important work. Maud, his first song-cycle, was published in 1898, six years after Tennyson’s death. The Maud cycle was followed by Love in Springtime in 1901, based on poems by Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Kingsley; The Shropshire Lad — Somervell’s best-known work — in 1904, based on A. E. Housman’s 1896 poem; and two cycles based on Robert Browning’s poetry, James Lee’s Wife in 1907 and A Broken Arc in 1923. All Somervell’s song-cycles, then, were based on well-known Victorian poems, but except for A Shropshire Lad all were composed after the poets’ deaths — suggesting at once Somervell’s strong attachment to Victorian poetry and his distance from it.

Somervell’s Maud was first published as a collection of twelve songs “designed for continuous performance”; and a thirteenth song was added in 1907.² (See the Appendix for a complete listing of songs in the cycle, and the passages of Tennyson’s poem to which the songs correspond.) The title page of the cycle says that it was “sung by Mr. Plunket Greene [a leading baritone at the turn of the century particularly known for his interpretations of Elgar and Charles Parry] and Mr. Keith Falkner.” The earliest performance date is not known, but the 7 March 1901 performance at St. James’s Hall in London, sung by Harry Plunket Greene and accompanied by Somervell himself, was reviewed by the Musical Times on 1 April 1901. The reviewer observed that “most music-lovers are now agreed that [the] union of musicianship, elegance, and the higher qualities of passion is found in a greater degree in Mr. Somervell’s cycle of twelve songs from ‘Maud’ than in any of his other work.” I am particularly interested in how Somervell’s “musicianship” and “passion” combined to serve as an interpretation of Tennyson’s poem, and the degree to which this interpretation represents Victorian and post-Victorian attitudes that reflect Somervell’s status as a mediating figure between the two eras.

Appearing in 1855, only five years after Tennyson published In Memoriam and became poet laureate, Maud was his only major mature work to meet hostility from the reading public. The poem’s title, it was said, had one too many vowels: the poem was attacked both for its obscurity (“Mud”) and the untempered ravings of its speaker (“Mad”).³ Even Gladstone, generally an ardent supporter of Tennyson, publicly criticized the poem’s apparent glorification of the Crimean War.⁴ In response Tennyson added additional lines to later editions of the poem to clarify narrative links — just as Somervell, interestingly, published twelve songs in his Maud cycle in 1898 and then added “Maud has a garden” (Song 6) in 1907 to provide an additional narrative link between the cycle’s beginning and end.

But the 1855 poem had its defenders, most notably R. J. Mann, whose Maud Vindicated in 1856 was personally endorsed by Tennyson. Mann stressed that Maud was dramatic, not the personal effusions of the laureate, and praised the poem’s psychological acuity and metrical virtuosity.⁵ Still, the poem continued to be a stumbling block for many Tennysonians, even while a growing number acknowledged the beauty and subtlety of its lyrics. Nor had the state of critical opinion changed much by the 1890s, the decade in which Somervell composed his song-cycle on Maud . The poem’s advocates followed the line taken by Mann, and the poem’s critics continued to object to the war theme and the hero’s hysteria. Stopford A. Brooke’s remarks are representative of the climate of critical opinion contemporary with Somervell’s composition. In Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life, first published in 1894 and reprinted thereafter for over a decade, Brooke praises the artistry of the poem but censures its handling of war, calling the poem’s subject “artistically unfortunate, for the Crimean war was the most foolish ... of all our wars.”⁶ And as for the poem’s hero, his “physical irritability transfers itself to his moral world, and becomes a weak anger with man and God without one effort to meet the evils at which he screams. His first utterance in the poem is a long shriek in a high falsetto note against the wrongs and curses which come of a vile peace” (Brooke, p. 235).

Unlike Brooke, Somervell presumably neither heard a falsetto note in the poem’s opening lines (since his song-cycle is written for baritone voice) nor faced serious obstacles to his admiration of Maud. His song-cycle is in many ways a tribute to the poem, translating into musical terms what Tennyson achieves with poetic devices such as meter and alliteration.⁷ Somervell’s scoring of the poem’s mad section (II, 239-342), for example, effectively suggests horses’ hooves beating the pavement — or a brain throbbing (S.41.9-12, 42.1); while his setting of “Come into the garden, Maud” (S.30.1ff.) employs the rhythms of the dance that Tennyson’s early readers detected in his lyrics’ meters (I, 850ff.). More subtly, Somervell parallels in musical terms Tennyson’s verbal devices in “She came to the village church” (Song 3). Tennyson indicates the increasing intensity of the hero’s emotions by expanding the number of metrical feet from three to four when Maud lifts her eyes and meets those of the speaker:

Somervell maintains a constant 4/4 time, but at the word “suddenly” shifts from the minor to the major mode to embody the sweetness of that blush and the hero’s response.

(1) Somervell, “She came to the village church” (All musical examples are lry permission of Boosey and Hawkes.)

But a song-cycle is never identical with the poem that inspires it. Lawrence Kramer, in Music and Poetry, in fact argues that the relationship of poetry and music is “implicitly agonic.” “A poem,” he says, “is never really assimilated into a composition; it is incorporated, and it retains its own life, its own ‘body,’ within the body of the music. . . . A song . . . does not use a reading; it is a reading, in the critical as well as the performative sense of the term: an activity of interpretation that works through a text without being bound by authorial intentions. . . . The song is a ‘new creation’ only because it is also a de-creation.”⁸ It is equally interesting, then, to see how Somervell’s Maud is truly a “new creation,” if one clearly related to Tennyson’s poem. In this context we can say that Somervell removed Maud from Tennyson’s parlor, where the poet in his many famous readings controlled the poem’s interpretation, and placed the poem in new guise in the concert hall.

The first point of interest is Somervell’s selection of Tennyson’s text. He used only 234 of Tennyson’s 1,324 lines, and in the sections he used he retained the exact wording of the poem.⁹ But significant reinterpretation occurs in Somervell’s prefatory notes to the cycle, and in one case in his altered sequencing of Tennyson’s sections (see Appendix). Somervell’s published notes summarize the entire plot of Tennyson’s poem and explain how each song in the cycle furthers the plot. Because of those notes, Somervell can both establish the context he desired for the cycle and omit those sections of the poem which serve primarily to develop the plot (for example, I, 285-300).

Yet the effect of the prefatory notes is to alter Tennyson’s text substantially. Somervell flatly asserts that “at the time of Maud’s birth [the fathers] planned a match between the two children who grew up as intimate playmates” (see Appendix); while in the poem the betrothal is presented as a nebulous memory of the speaker’s, and in fact readers have grounds for viewing the betrothal as a figment of the speaker’s troubled imagination, a form of wish fulfillment.¹⁰ Somervell better retains the ambiguities of Tennyson’s text in his notes to the Epilogue, which teasingly quotes lines from Tennyson’s text instead of proffering an interpretation of the ending. Similarly, his notes assert only that the circumstances in which the hero’s dead father was found “pointed to suicide” (unlike the betrothal, the suicide is merely suggested). But Somervell does give explicit directions on how to read the significance of this death: “The effect of this on his son, still a boy, is shown again and again throughout the poem, specially in the songs Nos. 1 and 6.” Tennyson’s poem precipitates the reader directly into the restless flow of the speaker’s consciousness, leaving the reader to grasp and construct, perceive and half-create all narrative links. Indeed, though Gladstone recanted his charge against the poem’s stance on the Crimean War in 1879, he, like so many readers of twentieth-century texts, wondered “whether it is to be desired that a poem should require from common men a good deal of effort in order to comprehend it.”¹¹ Somervell’s preface makes the plot concrete and delivers it whole to an audience which had largely wanted such a prologue to Tennyson’s “muddy” poem all along. By providing the prefatory notes, Somervell trims a difficult poetic text into acceptable shape for Victorian audiences.¹²

The most striking alteration of Tennyson’s poem is Somervell’s inverting the sequence of the germ of Maud (“O that ’twere possible,” II, 141-144) and the mad scene. In the poem the hero feels great guilt after the duel. But only after learning of Maud’s death, then yearning for the presence of the remembered lover rather than the wraith that haunts his mind, does the hero collapse into the raving insanity of Part II’s closing section. In Somervell the mad scene follows the expression of guilt (“The fault was mine,” Song 10) and precedes “O that ’twere possible” (Song 12). The effect is to tie madness more closely to guilt than to grief, perhaps anticipating Freudian more than Victorian interpretive patterns. The poem’s ending, problematical for Victorians and modern readers alike, is also transformed by the altered order. Tennyson’s hero moves directly from the mad scenes to his avowal of recovery and his departure for the Crimean battlefield; Somervell’s moves directly from yearning for the arms of the dead Maud to the battlefield. If Somervell seems to align desire for Maud with recovery from madness, he more strongly suggests that going to battle is the hero’s means for reunion with Maud in death. That is, the hero’s mission seems more overtly suicidal in Somervell’s text than in Tennyson’s — in the poem many readers see a nonironic affirmation of patriotism as the transcendence of (or at least consolation for) his individual sufferings and loss of his beloved.

Music is not well suited for conveying ideas or facts, and so it was natural for Somervell to exclude from his song-cycle two plot strands that figure importantly in Tennyson’s poem: the hero’s rivalry with a nouveau-riche lord seeking the hand of Maud with her brother’s encouragement, and Tennyson’s social criticism, his attack on the materialism that creates in society a state of “Civil war, as I think, and that of a kind / The viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword” (I, 27-28). But it is interesting to see what kind of poetic text emerges in the cycle as a result. Deleting the hero’s rival creates a far more attractive, accessible hero than Tennyson’s text did: in the songs we do not encounter a speaker who calls Maud’s brother an “oiled and curled Assyrian Bull” (I, 233), or brands the rival “a padded shape, ... a waxen face, / A rabbit mouth that is ever agape” (I, 358-360). Just as Somervell’s prefatory notes provided a clearly articulated plot that eliminated what for some was the poem’s murkiness, so his deleting the rivalry theme created a more acceptable surface for the hero. In the concert hall, Somervell gave listeners a hero fit to appear in parlors.

And by deleting the poem’s social criticism and religious doubt — “the yell of the trampled wife,” “chalk and alum and plaster . . . sold to the poor for bread” (I, 38-39), a “nature . . . one with rapine” (I, 123), and a world in which “the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by the veil” (I, 144) — Somervell in effect anticipated Harold Nicolson’s 1923 study, which marked a major turning point in Tennyson criticism. Nicolson argues that Tennyson suffered from being born in the Victorian age, forced to become “inevitably less and less the lyric poet, and more and more the civic prophet. . . . For whereas Tennyson was an extremely good emotional poet, he was, unfortunately, but a very second-rate instructional bard.”¹³ Nicolson’s book helped sustain interest in Tennyson during the anti-Victorian reaction of the 1920s and thereafter by positing two Tennysons, the authentic lyric poet and the sincere but misguided — and mediocre — public prophet. He invited readers to slough off the dross of instruction and concentrate on the lyric gems that remained. This is essentially what Somervell had done: he focused on the private psyche of the hero’s quest of love and death, and obliterated the social and metaphysical framework that had been an essential part of the 1855 poem.

Somervell also anticipated more recent criticism of Tennyson’s poem in the text and musical score that comprise the song-cycle. As Kramer observes, “a piece of vocal music based on a well-known poem necessarily risks a comparison that may make it seem expressively inferior. A composer . . . will have to grapple with the accumulated force of meaning lodged in the poem. . . . A song that masters a significant text, then, does so by suggesting a new interpretation — specifically a skeptical interpretation, one that rewrites the text in some essential way. In other words — slightly exaggerated but only slightly — the music becomes a deconstruction of the poem” (pp. 145-146).

Somervell composed his song-cycle amidst a reasonable consensus about what the poem meant. When Victorian audiences responded favorably to Maud, its ending was typically read in the affirmative terms Tennyson’s own note to the poem suggested:

This poem of Maud or the Madness is a little Hamlet, the history of a morbid, poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age. He is the heir of madness, an egoist with the makings of a cynic, raised to a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature, passing from the height of triumph to the lowest depth of misery, driven into madness by the loss of her whom he has loved, and, when he has at length passed through the fiery furnace, and has recovered his reason, giving himself up to work for the good of mankind through the unselfishness born of a great passion.

(Poems, p. 1039).

The reading public would have encountered this note in Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir of his father, published in 1897.¹⁴ The next year, the public was presented with Somervell’s song-cycle, which becomes the story of a morbid, poetic soul who passes from love of Maud to love of death, and whose recourse to war is a private act of suicide rather than an unselfish act of service. Somervell creates this interpretation through both textual and musical means.

Because Somervell has deleted the social criticism from all earlier sections, the singer’s assertion of patriotism in the Epilogue (“We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still, / I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind”) has absolutely no frame of reference. Unsupported by earlier references to the materialist civil war of exploitation for profit’s sake, the assertion floats in a vacuum and invites an ironic response. The only frame of reference for the lines is Maud’s military ballad (musically echoed in the Epilogue), which first aroused the hero from his torpor, and the dream of Maud following his madness. This hero seems to pursue not a public cause but a private vision:

(2a) Somervell, Epilogue

(2b) Somervell, “A voice by the cedar tree”

The “blood red blossom” passage, moreover, musically echoes the passage from “A voice by the cedar tree” (Song 2) in which the hero says Maud’s sweet voice leaves him no choice “But to move to the meadow and fall before / Her feet on the meadow grass, and adore” (S. 10.8-11; see figures 2a and 2b). The hero, this musical link or echo implies, adores war as an extension of Maud and embraces “the purpose of God” (S. 51.12-14) as a surrogate for arms that can enfold him — in death. True, his avowal of a noble cause also echoes in musical terms Maud’s earlier singing of “honour that cannot die,” and the music’s vigor, energy, and emphatic cadences in the cycle’s closing measures make the end sound glorious and triumphant. But the links forged within the cycle as a whole suggest that the closing’s swelling music, which invites auditors’ hearts to swell in unison, is a kind of patriotic and musical cliché, resting on nothing — or rather, on one man’s sad, perhaps mad, vision.

This reading of the ending is reinforced by the textual motifs embedded in Somervell’s lyrics, and by musical motifs. The two patterns that remain in Somervell’s adaptation of Tennyson’s poem are the blood/red/rose/ purple cluster of images, and the death/horror/madness theme. The opening song introduces the “blood-red heath” and “red ribbed ledges drip[ping] with the silent horror of blood” in the “dreadful hollow.” As the hero falls in love, positive images of the red rose of love appear in Songs 5, 6, and 7, the last suffused by the rose of passion and optimism. The cycle as a whole, then, oscillates (as does Tennyson’s poem) between the red/rose of love and death, and finally merges them in the “blood red blossom of war.”

The motif of death is even more interesting. The cycle opens with the hero obsessed with the dreadful hollow where his father died, and the frenetic piano interludes suggest frenzied emotions just barely kept under control in the sustained, slow notes of the sung text. The text concludes with the line, “And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers ‘Death’ “; the word “Death,” sung on a dissonant E-flat, and the uncadenced ending bespeak hysteria and loss of control (figure 3a).

(3a) Somervell, “I hate the dreadful hollow”

The second song, “A voice by the cedar tree,” is antiphonal, presenting the sweetness, energy, and beauty associated with Maud that counter the hero’s morbid melancholy. The hero participates in her music; but as he sings her song about men “Ready in heart, . . . and ready in hand, / [To] March with banner and bugle and fife / To the death,” something odd happens on the note on which “death” is sung. As opposed to the emphatically major-key, harmonious phrases up to that point, the word “death” is pitched on a similarly dissonant E-flat, briefly sustained (figure 3b).

(3b) Somervell, “A voice by the cedar tree”

Hence, when the second song continues, the hero singing that “Maud in . . . her youth and her grace, [is] Singing of Death, and of Honour that cannot die,” the reference to “death” is charged with the residual darkness of the first song, however innocent and lyrically sweet the immediate context in which the word is lodged.

Similarly, “O let the solid ground,” the fourth song, brims with quiet energy and hope; but the sustained notes held on “mad” and “sad” (S. 13.2-3; 14.6-8) highlight these words and suggest that all is not so solid as it seems. Song 5 is the first wholly affirmative song, in which even nature joins in the lover’s joy, as we see in the “bird” twitterings of the accompaniment. But it is succeeded by a song (“Maud has a garden,” Song 6) which begins brightly and ends in horror, as the hero sees the “death-white curtain drawn” round Maud’s house. One can hear the hero trying to resist his own morbidity when he sings he knew the curtains “meant but sleep” (S.23.3-4), because the music here almost recovers the major key with which the song began. But the hero’s own dark thought is too entrenched, and the song culminates in the word “death,” as did the opening song; and here the word is also sung on a sustained minor pitch.

“Go not, happy day” (Song 7) is even happier than “Birds in the high Hall-garden” (Song 5), sweet and so confidently serene that it is even playful, especially in the song’s closing measures. “I have led her home” (Song 8) sustains the warmth of “Go not, happy day” in its opening phrase, but the eighth song twice sounds darker notes as well. When the hero proclaims he has achieved his “wished-for end,” auditors are invited to respond to the word “end” in the sense of death. For not only have the accumulated meanings of the song-cycle thus far prepared listeners for this association, but the accompaniment, which has been sweetly flowing on like the hero’s surging blood, suddenly halts, taking the form of half-note chords that suggest not only calm but a somber finality. And in a passage which also functions to foreshadow Maud’s death, the pattern is repeated later in Song 8 when Maud closes the door and is gone. Indeed, here the accompaniment’s ponderous half notes bring to mind a death march, suggesting that the hero reacts to Maud’s momentary departure as if it were her death itself.

The accompaniment absorbs the dark thoughts and transforms them, at least on the surface, to sweetness by the song’s end, so that we are led smoothly into “Come into the garden, Maud” (Song 9). This central song and tour de force of the cycle is remarkable for absorbing and resolving any dissonant notes almost as quickly as they are sounded (as, for example, at “To faint in his light, and to die”). But though it is joyously articulated, the song ends on the highly charged image of the dead heart blossoming in purple and red, and the emphatic repetition and closure of this song seal off the lover’s last moment of intense joy. Up to now, love and beauty have been set against death, madness, and horror, the former expressed in plangent harmonies and rippling notes, the latter in dissonant, dark, minor notes, and either almost immobilized or else frenetic rhythms.

In the wake of the duel, however, the pattern begins to reverse itself; life and consciousness are now the source of distress, and death and obliteration a sweet haven. “The fault was mine” (Song 10) begins by echoing the melody and darkness of “I hate the dreadful hollow” (Song 1), and the darkness and dissonance are sustained until the final two measures.¹⁵ The hero sings that he will hear Maud’s passionate cry “till I die,” and as he reconsiders, rethinks, and repeats “till I die,” the music resolves into a cadence on the phrase in a major key — suggesting both that the final resolution of the hero’s fate will be death, and that the hero recognizes death as a resolution of his sorrows. Similarly, in the marvelous “Dead, long dead” (Song 11), we gradually realize amidst the whirling fury of a disordered mind that the hero’s dilemma is being alive. For when he imagines quiet, peaceful death — actual, not living death — the music expresses a lyric yearning for this state, and it prepares for the singer’s recognition that he is “but half dead.” He ends pleading for more emphatic burial, and the close does not resolve but rather remains suspended: until the hero is dead and buried indeed, he cannot attain resolution.

In this context the succeeding lyric cry for the lost Maud in “O that ‘twere possible” (Song 12) is a cry for union that will heal the “long grief and pain” of madness and guilt at any cost. With all these accumulated links, we then move into the complex Epilogue, which deliberately echoes the various strands of the cycle now established. The opening, dark octaves of the accompaniment echo similar passages in “The fault was mine” and “Dead, long dead” (for example, S.38.15-19; 44.13-18ff.), establishing the speaker’s guilt and madness as starting points. And when the music shifts to a sweeter tone as the speaker declares his mood has changed, telling how Maud “seemed to divide in a dream from a band of the blest,” (S.48.6-10; figure 4a), we hear an echo of “Maud has a garden” (S. 19.4-8: “And thither I climbed at dawn / And stood by her garden gate”; figure 4b), a song which began sweetly but ended with a vision of death.¹⁶

(4a) Somervell, Epilogue

(4b) Somervell, “Maud has a garden”

The hero’s dream of Maud which yielded such delight is sung to the tune of “O that ‘twere possible,” and the echo suggests, as the text alone could not, a longing for union with the dead Maud of the dream. True, the echo could signify that the dream brought momentary union with Maud, yielding renewed energy that shores up the hero’s psyche. But the accumulated associations, especially the pattern of death as sweet resolution (from Song 10 onward), suggest the darker interpretation. Thus, Somervell’s ending gives us a hero speeding towards death. If he is heroic at all, it is only, perhaps, in a desire for love so strong that he will have union by death with Maud and her military fervor rather than life and sanity without her.

Somervell’s song-cycle on Maud, then, is a fascinating cross section of Victorian and modernist elements. In many ways it is strikingly faithful to Tennyson’s mid-Victorian text; Somervell’s ability to capture the swings and shifts, the despairs and exultations of Tennyson’s hero is an impressive achievement in its own right. Moreover, by eliminating the least attractive utterances of Tennyson’s hero (especially his vituperations against others) and by providing a plot summary at the outset, Somervell revised Tennyson’s poem in ways wished for by so many of the laureate’s contemporaries. Somervell’s selection of the text thus provides a Victorian compromise.

But in his wholesale elimination of social prophecy and his re-creation of a poem focused squarely on a lonely, melancholy hero who pursues a private vision and a private voice, Somervell adumbrates by more than a decade the critical approach to Tennyson undertaken by Nicolson and a generation to whom poets as social prophets were laughable at best, intolerable at worst. Most interesting of all, Somervell anticipates the interpretation which our current skeptical, Freudian, and deconstructive generation finds congenial, whereby the hero’s departure for the Crimean War is no victory over madness but an expression of it, and perhaps a self-willed suicide.¹⁷ So far as I am aware, no one at the time of Somervell’s composition had proffered such an interpretation; if readers did not endorse Tennyson’s interpretive notes to the poem, they refrained from doing so because they understood the poem to offer war as affirmation, not because they viewed the ending ironically. As Kramer claims that successful song-cycle composers always do, Somervell achieves a new creation independent of Tennyson’s by pursuing the darkest threads of meaning embedded in Tennyson’s text. In doing so Somervell gives us a song-cycle striking in its own right and returns us, as the best criticism always does, to the poem with fresh insight. Having heard Somervell’s Maud in the concert hall, listeners can go back to their own parlors to read Tennyson anew.

APPENDIX

SOMERVELL’S PREFATORY NOTES

The prefatory notes are given in their entirety below. I have indicated in brackets the title assigned to each song by Somervell, and the lines of Tennyson’s poem which are sung in each song.

(This Cycle of Songs being designed for continuous performance, no pause should be made between the numbers).

The fathers of Maud and of the singer (the “I” of the songs) were close friends while the singer was a little boy — so close in fact that at the time of Maud’s birth they planned a match between the two children who grew up as intimate playmates, until a crash came. “A vast speculation” failed; the boy’s father was beggared, while Maud’s father, his supposed friend, became a millionaire. Shortly afterwards the body of the ruined and desperate man was found in the “dreadful hollow behind the little wood,” in circumstances that pointed to suicide. The effect of this on his son, still a boy, is shown again and again throughout the poem, specially in the songs Nos. 1 and 6. At the beginning of the poem, Maud, who is now 16, has returned to the Hall after an absence of several years.

THE CYCLE

1. The singer expresses the horror he feels for the “dreadful hollow” where his father’s body was found. [“I hate the dreadful hollow”; Tennyson, I, 1-4]

2. He hears Maud singing a battle song in the Hall garden. He tries to shut out the sound, but in the end is fascinated by the beauty of the voice. [“A voice by the cedar tree”; Tennyson, I, 162-189]

3. He sees Maud in church; their eyes meet, and she blushes. [“She came to the village church”; Tennyson, I, 301-307]

4. From that moment he is on fire for love of her. [“O let the solid ground”; Tennyson, I, 398-411]

5. They meet in the wood. [“Birds in the high Hall-garden”; Tennyson, I, 412-427, 432-435]

6. He goes out at dawn to Maud’s garden. The curtained house where she is sleeping suggests to his haunted mind the house of death. [“Maud has a garden”; Tennyson, I, 489-494, 516-526]

7 and 8. Young love. [“Go not, happy day”; Tennyson, I, 571-598. “I have led her home”; Tennyson, I, 599-610]

9. There is a dance at the Hall to which the lover is not invited. He stands in the garden listening to the music, and his excitement rises to ecstasy when he hears her coming to the appointed meeting place. (They are surprised by her brother who hates the lover, and strikes him in their quarrel. There follows a duel in the “dreadful hollow,” in which Maud’s brother is killed). [“Come into the Garden, Maud”; Tennyson, I, 850-867, 902-923]

10. The lover flies the country, and during his absence [“The fault was mine”; Tennyson, II, 1-5, 34-35]

11. he goes temporarily mad, and Maud dies. [“Dead, long dead”; Tennyson, II, 239-258, 334-342]

12. He sings of his longing to hold her once more in his arms. [“O that ‘twere possible”; Tennyson, II, 141-144]

EPILOGUE. He sees her in a vision, when she speaks of “a hope for the world in the coming wars” (in the Crimea). The song ends with self-dedication to his country. He “embraces the purpose of God, and the doom assigned.” [Tennyson, III, 1-5, 9-11, 15-17, 34-37, 53-55, 58-59]

A.S.

______________________

¹ This essay was originally part of a session initiated and organized by Nicholas Temperley and presented at the 1985 meeting of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association (MVSA) in Chicago. I wish to thank Professor Temperley for first suggesting this project to me, and for graciously allowing me to draw from his own MVSA presentation the biographical facts of Somervell’s life and the de tails of the cycle’s public performance in 1901.

I also wish to thank Boosey and Hawkes for permission to publish excerpts from Somervell’s Cycle of Songs from Maud.

Finally, I wish to thank Margaret D. Hughes, Organist Emeritus of the First Christian Church, Topeka, Kansas, without whose performance and recording of Somervell’s song-cycle I could not have begun work on this study.

² Ernest Walker, A History of Music in England, 3d ed., rev. by J. A. Westrup (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 341.

³ Cited by R. J. Mann in his Maud Vindicated, selections reprinted in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 197-198.

⁴ [William Gladstone], “Tennyson’s Poems,” Quarterly Review, 106 (October 1859), 454-485. Partions of this essay are reprinted in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, pp. 241-266

⁵ Portions of Mann’s book are reprinted in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, pp. 197-211.

⁶ Stopford A. Brooke, Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modem Life (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1894), p. 230.

⁷ References are to Alfred Tennyson, Maud, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (1969; rpt. ed. New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 1037.93; and Arthur Somervell, Cycle of Songs from Maudlry Alfred Tennyson (London: Boosey & Co., 1898, 1907). Citations of the song-cycle are by page number and then measure number(s) on individual pages (preceded by an “S” to distinguish the song-cycle from the poem).

⁸ Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1984), p. 127.

⁹ Only two minor departures exist. In Song II Somervell changes Tennyson’s “And here beneath it is all as bad” (II, 252) to “And here in the grave it is just as bad” (S .42.10-13), since Somervell omits the preceding lines of Tennyson’s text establishing the antecedent of “here” as the grave. In the same song Somervell also alters “O me, why have they not buried me deep enough? I Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough?” (II, 334-335) to “Ah me, why have they not buried me deep enough? I Is it kind to give me a grave so rough?” (S .44. 16-18, 45 .1-3). The “give” is perhaps more ironic than “have made,” but the changes are so minor that they do not bear significantly on interpretive issues.

¹⁰ Marilyn J. Kurata points out that none of the hero’s characterizations of Maud or of their relationship can be assumed true; the inner life he posits in Maud could from start to finish be mere projection or fantasy. See Kurata, “ ‘A Juggle Born of the Brain’: A New Reading of Maud,” Victorian Poetry 21 (1983), 369-378.

¹¹ Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1897), I, 399.

¹² Interestingly, in the Memoir, Hallam Tennyson also provides a plot outline of the poem, noting that many readers desired such an outline (I, 402-405).

¹³ Harold Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character and Poetry (London: Constable, 1923), p. 5.

¹⁴ In the Memoir, the passage has slightly different punctuation than in the passage cited in Ricks’s edition; in the Memoir, the opening phrase through “Hamlet” is enclosed in quotation marks, implying that the succeeding words are Hallam Tennyson’s, if based on his father’s words.

¹⁵ This musical echo parallels Tennyson’s verbal echoes. Part II of the poem opens as the hero recounts the duel and remembers that “a million horrible bellowing echoes broke / From the redribbed hollow behind the wood” (II, 24-25). Tennyson, in other words, verbally echoes his poem’s opening sections, as Somervell musically echoes his opening song.

¹⁶ The echo is clearly deliberate. Somervell wrote the Epilogue first, in 1898, then composed “Maud has a garden” in 1907 and incorporated into the later song a short melodic passage from the EpiIogue. To listeners, the Epilogue appears to echo Song 6 rather than vice versa.

¹⁷ See, for example, the reading of the poem given by James R. Bennett in “Maud, Part III: Maud’s Battle-Song,” Victorian Poetry 18 (1980). 35-49.