Review of Kristin M. Franseen,
Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson , Liverpool: Liverpool University Press & Clemson University Press, 2023. ISBN 9781638040583. eISBN 9781638040590. 280 pages
The book is organized in three parts of two chapters each, mini-monographs really, offering comparative analyses between the three chosen authors, and completed by very interesting appendices (Vernon Lee’s English Questionnaire, Edward Prime-Stevenson’s annotations and “Literary Agent’s Press-Circular” and list of Dedicatees in Long-Haired Iopas), various Tables like that of musical references in Rosa Newmarch’s poetry, beautiful illustrations, endnotes, an index, but no List of References. In her substantial Acknowledgements section, Kristen Franseen was too shy to mention the Prize she was awarded by the Scientific Committee of the International Vernon Lee Society in 2018 for her essay “Ghosts in the Archives: Queerness and Ambiguity in Vernon Lee’s Castrato Scholarship”.
Though this book is “not a biography of its three central subjects”, Franseen studies private moments and public (or semi-public) scholarship, framing them in their respective contexts, and comparing the interdisciplinary music research of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch and Edward Prime-Stevenson — who knew one another and whose networks intersected–, arguing that their research can be seen not so much as “music criticism” but as musicologists’ artistic creative acts –musicology being defined as a form of literature produced by human beings. And this angle accounts for an immensely readable book, full of illuminating analyses, like that of the role of the phonograph in bringing together “a sort of imagined –if geographically dispersed—musical community” as well as allowing “artists new ways to produce ‘ghostly’ encounters and scientists new ways to attempt to record paranormal phenomena.”
Part I studies Vernon Lee’s efforts to fully capture the “ghosts” of deceased performers, her fantasied experiences of eighteenth-century opera, and “the place of memory and identity in her music perception research”. “Part II considers Rosa Newmarch in the mold of the Holmesian detective, sorting through documentary evidence to reveal some (but pointedly not all) of her subject’s secrets while remaining essentially outside of the mystery at hand. Part III outlines Prime-Stevenson’s layering of identities and nostalgic use of repetition, revision, and dedication to rewrite his real and imagined musical selves and ‘return’ to various possible musical pasts (while hinting at additional potential futures).”
Vernon Lee’s fascination for 18th castrati and abhorrence for the sensuality of Wagnerian opera and its adherents is delved into, illuminated and confirmed by Newmarch’s Tchaikovsky research and Edward Prime-Stevenson’s autobiographical music criticism.
Franseen analyses the obsessive pattern at the core of Vernon Lee’s “Ghostly Musical Encounters” with Castrati from the Eighteenth Century and even in her last book Music and its Lovers: An Empirical Study of Emotional and Imaginative Responses to Music –“an eclectic blend of music perception studies, aesthetics, and self-reflection on how and why people discern meaning from different types of art music”—overhearing and “the anxiety of mishearing”: “What if it “should turn out hideous?” In other words, “her writings on beauty and emotion emphasize the sense of the present not as resulting naturally from certain events in the past, … but as continually haunted by its repercussions and resonances ….”
Like Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch lays emphasis on the listener’s experience, “draw[ing] from psychological theory of emotional responses to the visual arts” (95) and experiences “the struggles of musicology with biography as a source of insight into the past” (80) in her work about Tchaikovsky after his death in 1893, rumours (homosexuality, suicide, melancholy music, etc). Similarly, Franseen struggles through Newmarch’s “rhetoric of secrecy, subjectivity & ambiguity”. While “little is known of her marriage to Henry Charles ‘Harry’ Newmarch”, Rosa “encountered many women known for romantic friendships: Vernon Lee, Ethel Smyth, Mary Wakefield; and argues that “Symphonic listening” provided a “space for women’s homosocial or homoerotic relationships” (104), which Newmarch explored with Bella Simpson.
According to us, the best part remains Franseen’s study of Edward Prime-Stevenson’s The Intersexes and of his musical anthology Long-Haired Iopas, seen as an “attempt to establish a queer artistic canon” and a community. Both books were published under the pseudonym “Xavier Mayne”, and are sadly omitted by existing scholarship, even in Literature and LGBTQ studies. Characterized by “eccentricity and self-reference”, Prime Stevenson aka Mayne posed as an authority in music criticism & sexology though without any training in either field. In the chapter “Queering the Canon: musicality, biography and listening in The Intersexes” Franseen shows how EPS draws from personal experience (like Lee in her Music and its lovers) and “tries to create musical-sexual knowledge” (like Newmarch in her Tchaikovsky research). She analyses how “Mayne” explains “the secret message hidden in mainstream works” (131), “suggests alternative narratives of Beethoven’s unhappy relationships with women” and unveils “the ‘real story’ of Wagner, Ludwig II, and Parsifal.” (141) Indeed, Mayne describes Wagner as an aphrodisiac for “uranians” esp. Tristan & Isolde, writing that“The Bayreuth Wagner Festivals represent a kind of homosexual forcing-house …. Wagner himself chose a covertly homosexual subject for his ripest & most sensuous music-drama, Parsifal.” (EPS quoted on p. 141) Profoundly misogynistic, Parsifal, he writes, is “a continuous insult to woman as a sex” (Mayne, quoted on p. 144).
Prime Stevenon’s analyses of “the sexual appeal, the neurotic spell of Wagner” (EPS quoted on p. 151 note 66) splendidly confirm Vernon Lee’s Wagner criticism. True enough, “The inclusion of such meaning-laden works as the transformation scene from Parsifal and the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde take on possible queer meaning in light of Edward Prime Stevenson’s writings on sexuality and knowledge of Wagner’s popularity among German sexologists.” (166)
Indeed, as Philip Brett writes, “Much academic musicology and music criticism increasingly attempted to exclude women themselves along with the feminine.” (145; Philip Brett note 48). No wonder Ethel Smyth encountered such difficulties in establishing herself as a composer…
“Who knows?”, Franseen invitingly wonders. “Perhaps a future incarnation of this research could be in the form of a mystery novel. I can easily picture Rosa Newmarch untangling a complex paper trail or Vernon Lee and Edward Prime-Stevenson stumbling across some intrigue while arguing about opera in a glamorous Italian resort.” What an interesting suggestion to Mary F. Burns for her Paget-Sargent detective series!
We also invite our readers to read Fraser Riddell’s book, from his 2018 Doctoral thesis: Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle , DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108989541? Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Other work about Queer musicology includes Frankie Dytor’s article: “Thanking, and Begging, Her for Music”: Ethel Smyth, Vernon Lee and Queer Musical Community in the British Music Collection.” https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/article/thanking-and-begging-her-music-ethel-smyth-vernon-lee-and-queer-musical-community-british
