[Note: Areas labeled “Example” in brackets mark where I used my digital project, “Songs of the Victorians,” to provide musical examples to illustrate my analysis. The examples are included at the end of the essay.]

As technological advances gave rise to greater quantities of sheet music, Victorians across the socioeconomic spectrum gained access to music in a newly mediated way, with affordable printed scores providing clues for the correct performance methods to translate the silent page into sound. The Victorian period is marked by an explosion of such settings, and in fact much of the British public may have been more familiar with the now canonical poems through their musical counterparts than through the silent print of the page. The popularity of these song settings makes an understanding of the poems incomplete without an understanding of their musical reception history. Song settings are not mere melodious historical oddities with no analytical relation to poetry. According to Lawrence Kramer, a setting 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” (127). This paper will examine Sir Arthur Sullivan’s 1877 setting of Adelaide Procter’s “A Lost Chord” as a case study. Although Procter’s “A Lost Chord” has frequently been cast as a straightforwardly domestic and religious poem, its original publication in The English Woman’s Journal (March 1860) challenges that interpretation, as the poem appears to meditate on the role of women’s rights and the possibility of a resolution to issues of domestic disharmony. In the context of its second publication, the collected works volume Legends and Lyrics (1861), Procter’s poem might seem to embody the sentimental ideal, but instead dramatizes the speaker’s failed attempt to express in words the importance of lost harmony. Sullivan’s musical setting subverts the expected sentimental solace and subtly grants the poem new access to the political and social message of its original publication context while giving voice to the silent song on the page. By examining the musical reception history of Procter’s poem through multiple incarnations and remediations, we can find this “lost chord” and its overlooked commentaries on women’s lives and religious doubt, and attempt to reinstate it in the polyphony of critical discourse.

Adelaide Procter (1825-1864) was extremely popular during the Victorian period, and her works were greatly admired by many pivotal figures: Charles Dickens wrote an introduction to the 1866 edition of Legends and Lyrics, and Coventry Patmore once claimed that the “present demand” for her poetry was “far in excess of that for the writings of any living poet, except Mr Tennyson” (qtd. Gregory 1). In spite of her popularity during the Victorian era, she is generally known today only for her poem “A Lost Chord” and remembered primarily because of Sullivan’s musical setting (3). “A Lost Chord” is a short poem spoken from the point of view of a young woman who, while absent-mindedly improvising at the organ, plays a chord so transcendent and calming, she believes it must have been sent to her from heaven. Although she tries to find it again, she fails, and concludes that she may have to wait until the afterlife to hear it, saying “It may be that only in Heaven / I shall hear that grand Amen” (27-28).

Although “A Lost Chord” has frequently been cast as a straightforwardly domestic and religious poem, the history of The English Woman’s Journal, founded in March of 1858 and produced until 1864, complicates that interpretation. The Journal had a progressive agenda; according to David Doughan, it was known as a feminist journal, and its offices were located in the Langham Place Circle, the unofficial headquarters of the early British feminist movement (2). In its original publication in the March 1860 edition of The English Woman’s Journal, the poem appears to meditate on the role of women’s rights and the possibility of resolving domestic disharmony. In the context of articles on the trials and tribulations of women’s lives, the speaker’s description of her feeling “weary and ill at ease” (2) and of her “discordant life” (16) appear to result from the unequal state of affairs between men and women. Even the divine chord that sounds like “a great Amen” (8) meditates on gender relations because of its acoustical similarity to “all men.” The “pain and sorrow,” “strife” (13-14) and “perplexed meanings” (18) that plague the speaker also resound with her frustration at social discord. Additionally, if we assume the speaker is a woman, then her organ playing itself is a sociopolitical statement, since women were not frequently permitted to be church organists (Barger 38). Either she is a rebel, sneaking into a church to practice, or she is playing on a harmonium, a domestic organ, as the only outlet for her musical worship. In this context, the religious turn at the poem’s end provides the only glimpse of consolation, and a rather defeatist consolation at that: although inequality may be resolved in the afterlife, it will most likely never be resolved on Earth.

This interpretation becomes more clear when the poem is placed in the context of the issue in which it was published. The section in the Journal that precedes the poem discussed the cruel effects of ship conditions on women emigrants and ended with an implicit question about the future of these people and this cause: “How the matter will be eventually decided we cannot venture to predict” (“Emigrant-Ship Matrons”). Procter’s own questioning conclusion (which reads “It may be that only in Heaven / I shall hear that grand Amen” (17-28)) therefore hauntingly echoes its predecessor’s sentiments and further casts it as part of a feminist project.

Arthur Sullivan’s setting in many ways echoes the poem’s feminist project. His decision to set Procter’s poem to music also speaks to the poet’s popularity, since Sullivan was one of the premier British composers of the Victorian era. However, none of his songs outside of his collaboration with W.S. Gilbert achieved the fame of “The Lost Chord,” which Phillip Dillard describes as “the most frequently criticized of all his works—and yet undoubtedly one of the most popular songs of Victorian England” (131). Throughout the song, Sullivan carefully conveys the speaker’s unease and desire for gender equality harmonically through the search for the chord that she hopes will resolve these issues. For the first line and a half, the soprano, or tenor in this recording, sings the same note (an “F,” the tonic of the piece) to enact the dejection the words describe. [Example 1@ See Appendix for all musical excerpts.] The music also enacts the fingers as they “wander’d idly / Over the noisy keys”: the vocal line absent-mindedly retraces its own path. In the next two lines of text, “I know not what I was playing / Or what I was dreaming then,” both the vocal part and accompaniment become highly chromatic and proceed by half steps and by incorporating accidentals (notes not in the key of the piece) to accentuate this musical exploration. [Example 2] Additionally, the accompaniment modulates to the key of C major for this section to enact the described search before it returns to the key of F for the next verse.

To further dramatize the search for the solution the chord promises, Sullivan ventured into even more unexpected harmonic territory for the penultimate stanza; when the words speak of seeking the chord, the accompaniment modulates to the key of D minor (the relative minor for F major), and remains there for the rest of the verse. [Example 3] To make the search even more pronounced, during the two measures of piano interlude between the penultimate and final verses, Sullivan incorporates a pedal point on C that makes many of the chords include a seventh, a dissonance that promises resolution, but delays the full cadence until the first chord of the final verse.

Even the vocal part and the accompanying organ help further a feminist interpretation. Although the recording we just heard was sung by a tenor, the song was composed for and made famous by female singers: first Antoinette Sterling (Scott, Metropolis, 36), then Sullivan’s mistress, Fanny Ronalds (Jacobs 110). Since the song incorporates a harmonium rather than a church organ part, its very orchestration alludes to the musical limitations on women.

The poem’s other publication context foregrounds a second interpretation: in Legends and Lyrics, although the words remain the same, the absence of a political context augments the poem’s contradictory images and dramatizes the speaker’s failed attempt to express in words the importance of the lost music. For example, the chord is “the sound of a great Amen” (8), and is therefore associated with prayer and church music, and yet this chord can’t possibly be “the sound of a great Amen.” In the hymn tradition, when congregations sing “Amen,” they sing two chords that form what is called a plagal cadence. By describing a progression that consists of two chords as one chord, the speaker implies that this one sound confounds not only Western music traditions, but also our ability to describe them. The chord also provides her “with a touch of infinite calm” (12) but appears hardly to last at all: it “trembled away into silence’” (19). Likewise, the speaker questions whether so irresolute a chord can really resolve anything: it only “quieted,” not eliminated, “pain and sorrow” (13), and, although she likens it to “love overcoming strife” (14), the strife still exists. Perhaps the most surprising contradiction occurs in a description of heavenly transcendence. This chord appears to be divine, and yet it is “the harmonious echo / From our discordant life” (15-16). This line describes a musical impossibility, since a discordant chord on its own cannot resolve into harmony through its echo. These lines blur the chord’s relationship to the divine and the earthly, thus calling into question the consolation of the final claim: “It may be that only in Heaven, / I shall hear that grand Amen” (27-28).

Sullivan’s setting incorporates this religious questioning by combining elements of sacred and secular music to show the chord’s earthly connections and subverting expected harmonic progressions to discount the speaker’s claims. The accompaniment invokes divine music by imitating a voluntary, a type of religious music based on suspensions. However, this religious music accompanies the singer’s repeated notes I mentioned earlier that convey the speaker’s dejection. [Example 1 again] These repeated notes also invoke the secular operatic recitative tradition and the liturgical chant tradition, and therefore immediately juxtapose the sacred and the secular, the public and the domestic.

In the song’s final stanza, Sullivan harmonically subverts our expectations to critique the text’s declamatory belief that the speaker will hear the chord again in Heaven. Instead of returning to the key of F major as we would expect, the accompaniment temporarily returns to D minor, the key associated with the earlier futile search for the chord, before returning to F major for the final chord of the piece [Example 4]. This musical hesitance to confirm the chord’s transcendence further dramatizes the speaker’s uncertainty, in spite of her repeated attempts to recreate its sound.

In both publication contexts, “A Lost Chord” addresses many of the same thematic concerns as other Victorian poems set to music. In particular, it thematizes repeatability as a desire to stave off loss: the speaker repeatedly searches for the transcendent chord she once played out of fear that it will remain elusive until her death. This combination of music, compulsive repetition, and fear of loss also helps to explain the compulsion behind some of the musical remediations of these poems, as though setting them to music makes the silent song audible and repeatable and diminishes the chance that it will disappear. The poem’s obsession with repetition of both language and music compels further repetition through the proliferation, first in multiple musical settings, of which Sullivan’s is the most famous, and then in performances in the parlor and concert stage. This poem is again remediated with the help of new technology in 1888: a version of Sullivan’s setting for coronet and piano was one of the first musical recordings ever made (“Historic Sullivan Recordings”). Victorian sound technologies appear to be the logical continuation of this trajectory; what better way to permanently capture sound than to record it?

In fact, the very acts of recording poetry and composing musical settings of Victorian poetry appear to participate in the same anxieties that concerned poetic voice itself. These anxieties also arise from the diffusion of voice as a result of the seemingly endless proliferation of text. Eric Griffiths argued that as a result of Victorian print culture, written text, instead of a unitary poetic voice (61), has “a mute polyphony through which we see rather than hear alternatively possible voicings” (Griffiths 66); I believe that song settings give voice to certain strands of this mute polyphony. The rise of both musical settings and recording technology seems to have come out of a desire to affix voice to the silent polyphony of poetry; in a song setting, the pitches and notes will always be the same, while in a recording by the author, the voice is fixed to its “original,” as though the authentic voice has been produced. However, neither of these projects can fully achieve its goal: the individual performer’s interpretation breaks free from the printed score’s instructions, and the recording distorts the voice by having it be a “mechanical (re)production detached from [the speaker]” (Prins 49). As the Victorians themselves were aware, the process of fixing sound was doomed to fail; precisely this is what made it a central preoccupation, endlessly repeated throughout the century.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the digital project that enables my presentation today is itself a Victorian endeavor, as it attempts to reclaim Victorian music through its audio files and the scholarly arguments it facilitates. “Songs of the Victorians” has an archival component that lets users see the silent song through high-resolution scans of first edition printings of the score, and then gives voice to this image by integrating an audio file with the score so each measure is highlighted in time with the music. The scholarly component, which you have seen today, enables users to click on segments of my argument to play the corresponding section of the song; I hope this project will make such interdisciplinary scholarship accessible to non-specialists and help us all become better attuned to this musical poetry and poetic music.

Although we can never actually recreate the songs as they were sung or the thoughts the Victorians had as they listened to songs or read with music in mind, we can at least pay closer attention to the evidence (or fiction) of its presence, and, if not fully reclaim, then at least recontextualize, the lost chords of Victorian poetry.

Appendix

Works Cited

Armstrong, Isobel. “’A Music of Thine Own’: Women’s Poetry—an Expressive Tradition?” Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993.

Barger, Judith. Elizabeth Sterling and the Musical Life of Female Organists in Nineteenth Century England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

Dillard, Philip H. Sir Arthur Sullivan: A Resource Book. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

Doughan, David. Feminist Periodicals, 1855-1984: An Annotated Critical Bibliography of British, Irish, Commonwealth and International Titles. Brighton: Harvester, 1987.

“Emigrant-Ship Matrons” English Woman’s Journal. March 1860.Nineteenth Century Serials Edition. Web. http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk/ 28 Dec. 2012.

Gregory, Gill. The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, Feminism and Fathers.

Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998.

Griffiths, Eric. The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

“Historic Sullivan Recordings.” Gilbert and Sullivan Archive. Web. http://diamond.boisestate.edu/gas/sullivan/html/historic.html 8 Dec. 2009.

Jacobs, Arthur. Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician. 2nd edition. Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1992.
Kramer, Lawrence. Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Prins, Yopie. “Voice Inverse.” Victorian Poetry. 42.1 (2004): 43-59.

Procter, Adelaide Ann. “A Lost Chord.” Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses. Second Volume. 9th ed. London: Bell and Daldy, 1873.

---. “A Lost Chord.” English Woman’s Journal. March 1860. Nineteenth Century Serials Edition. Web. http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk/ 28 Dec. 2012.

Scott, Derek. Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

Sullivan, Sir Arthur. “The Lost Chord.” A Choice Collection of Vocal Music. Boston: W. A. Evans & Bro., nd.

Temperley, Nicholas. “The Athlone History of Music in Britain, V.5. ” The Romantic Age, 1800–1914. London: Athlone Press, 1981.