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In art, literature, theatre and music, Victorians demonstrated increased interest in the supernatural and nostalgia for a lost mythic time, a response to rapid technological change and increased urbanization. Romanticism generated a new regard for Shakespeare, also fuelled by British nationalism. The immortal bard's plays began to receive theatrical performances that more accurately presented their original texts, partially remedying the mutilations of the previous century. The so-called ‘fairy’ plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, were also popular subjects for fairy paintings, stemming from the establishment of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in 1789. In such a context, it is no wonder that Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream was so overwhelmingly popular in England and that his style became closely associated with the idea of fairies. This article explores how the Victorians’ understanding of fairies and how the depiction of fairies in the theatre and visual arts of the period influenced the reception of Mendelssohn's music, contributing to its construction as ‘feminine’. Victorian fairies, from the nude supernatural creatures cavorting in fairy paintings to the diaphanously gowned dancers treading lightly on the boards of the stage, were typically women. In his study of Chopin reception, Jeffrey Kallberg has interpreted fairies as androgynous, but Victorian fairies were predominantly female, so much so that Lewis Spence's 1948 study, The Fairy Tradition in Britain, includes an entire section on fairy gender intended to refute the long-standing notion that there were no male fairies. Thus, for Mendelssohn to have composed the leading musical work that depicted fairies contributed to his increasingly feminized reputation over the course of the nineteenth century.
1 Two substantial studies of the various cultural ramifications of the Victorian obsession with fairies are Silver, Carole G., Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Bown, Nicola, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) . See also Purkiss, Diane, ‘Victorian Fairies’, in At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things (New York: New York University Press, 2001): 220–64.
2 Kallberg, Jeffrey, ‘Small Fairy Voices: Sex, History, and Meaning in Chopin’, in Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History and Musical Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996): 62–86.
3 Spence, Lewis, The Fairy Tradition in Britain (London: Rider & Co., 1948): 142–4.
4 An excellent, succinct summary of Mendelssohn's changing reputation is found in Todd, R. Larry, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003): xix–xxvii . Extensive treatment of posthumous criticism in Germany and England, with numerous period writings, is found in Brown, Clive, A Portrait of Mendelssohn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003): 447–500 . On Mendelssohn's relationship to England, see Krummacher, Friedhelm, ‘Composition as Accommodation? On Mendelssohn's Music in Relation to England’, in Mendelssohn Studies, ed. Todd, R. Larry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 80–105 . See Temperley's, Nicholasrefutation of the idea that Mendelssohn's style dominated English music in ‘Mendelssohn's Influence on English Music’, Music & Letters 43 (1962): 224–33.
5 See Kimber, Marian Wilson, ‘The Composer as Other: Gender and Race in the Biography of Felix Mendelssohn’, The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History, ed. Cooper, John Michael and Prandi, Julie (London: Oxford University Press, 2003): 335–44.
6 Grove, George, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn(reprint of articles from Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1878–89; London: Macmillan, 1951): 391.
7 Chorley, Henry Fothergill, Modern German Music (1854; reprint ed., New York: Da Capo Press, 1973): 51–2.
8 Bourne, C.E., The Great Composers, or Stories of the Lives of Eminent Musicians, 9th ed. (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1902): 243–44.
9 Hubbard, Elbert, Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians (London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1905): 191, 201, 211.
10 In The Savoy 8 (Dec. 1896): 63, reprinted in Reade, Brian, Beardsley (London: Studio Vista, 1967): n.p.
11 See Kimber, Wilson, ‘Composer as Other’: 344–9.
12 Christa Jost has suggested that the women to whom Mendelssohn dedicated the Lieder ohne Worte were all accomplished pianists, even if most of them were not professional musicians. See Mendelssohns Lieder ohne Worte (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1988): 55–63.
13 Review of 23 Feb. 1889, reprinted in The Great Composers: Reviews and Bombardments by Bernard Shaw, ed. Compton, Lewis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978): 122.
14 ‘Mendelssohn and his Music (From an English Review)’, Dwight's Journal of Music 10 (7 Feb. 1857): 147.
15 The first English performance took place at the Argyle Rooms on 24 June (Midsummer Night) at a concert of flautist Louis François Philippe Drouet, where it was encored. It was played there again on 13 July at a benefit for Silesian flood victims. George Smart conducted a third performance by the Philharmonic on 1 March 1830. Todd, R. Larry, Mendelssohn: The Hebrides and other Overtures, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 17.
16 Foster, Myles Birket, History of the Philharmonic Society of London (London: John Lane, 1912): 570–71 . Typically programmed were the Overture, Scherzo, Nocturne and Wedding March.
17 The Star (10 Jan. 1890), quoted in Haywood, Charles, ‘George Bernard Shaw on Incidental Music in the Shakespearean Theater’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 105 (1969): 177 ; ‘L’Amico Fritz’, The World (1 Jun. 1892), in Shaw's Music, 3 vols, ed. Laurence, Dan H. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1981): 2: 632.
18 ‘Mr Alfred Mellon's Concerts’, Musical World 42 (24 Sep. 1864): 617 , and ‘Mr Alfred Mellon's Concerts’, Musical World 39 (24 Aug. 1861): 539.
19 Lunn, Henry C., ‘Fairy Music’, Musical Times 23 (1 Mar. 1882): 135.
20 Fitzgerald, Percy, Shakespearean Representations: its Laws and Limits (London: Elliot Stock, 1908): 57.
21 ‘St James Theatre’, Musical World 30 (7 Feb. 1852): 88 . Another review of the performance is ‘St James's Theatre, – “A Midsummer Night's Dream”’, Athenaeum 1267 (7 Feb. 1852): 178. Performances of this type also took place in Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, Brighton, Edinburgh and at the Norwich Music Festival. The practice continued in America until as late as 1921. See Kimber, Marian Wilson, ‘Mr Riddle's Readings: Music and Elocution in Nineteenth-Century Concert Life,’ Nineteenth Century Studies 21 (2007): forthcoming.
22 Williams, Gary Jay, ‘“The Concord of this Discord”: Music in the Stage History of A Midsummer Night's Dream’, Yale/Theatre 4 (summer 1973): 53, 55 . This free use of the overture seems to have been the origin of the notion, incorrectly repeated by several mid-nineteenth-century writers, that this was the first occurrence of Mendelssohn's incidental music in a British production, though it was actually not composed until three years later.
23 15 Mar. [1841], quoted in Chorley, Henry, Recent Art and Society as Described in the Autobiography and Memoirs of Henry Fothergill Chorley, ed. Hewlett, Henry G. and Jones, C.H. (New York: Holt, 1873): 171–2.
24 Williams, , ‘“The Concord of this Discord”’: 54.
25 Hubert Foss even stated that Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture shares an ‘airy-fairyness’ with his Midsummer Night's Dream Scherzo. The Heritage of Music, vol. 2, ed. Foss, Hubert J. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934): 166.
26 Quoted in Williams, , ‘“The Concord of this Discord”’: 66.
27 Williams, , ‘“The Concord of this Discord”’: 67.
28 See Seaton, Douglass, ‘Mendelssohn's Dramatic Music’: 204–22 , and Grey, Thomas, ‘The Orchestral Music’: 460–65 and 493–8, in The Mendelssohn Companion, ed. Seaton, Douglass (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001) . Elizabeth Sara Paley describes how Mendelssohn's music creates a narrative that allows the listener ‘to get into Fairyland’, in ‘Narratives of “Incidental” Music in German Romantic Theater’ (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1998): 136–205 . See especially her explication of how the supposedly dramatically static Nocturne, heard while the lovers are sleeping, actually reflects ongoing fairy magic (pp. 174–94).
29 Fitzgerald, , Shakespearean Representations: 62.
30 Macfarren, George, ‘Sir G.A. Macfarren on the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture’, The Musical Times 40 (1 Aug. 1899): 532.
31 Grove, , Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn: 382.
32 Todd, , The Hebrides and other Overtures: 98–9 , gives precedents in the scherzo of the Octet, op. 20; also the Capriccio in F# minor for piano, and scherzo from the Piano Quartet op. 3 in B minor, all from 1825, and the following later examples: Neue Liebe op. 19a, no. 4 (Heine setting, 1833), Scherzo in B minor (1829), Rondo capriccioso, op. 14; Caprice, op. 16, no. 2; Scherzo a capriccioso (1836); scherzos of the Piano Trios opp. 49 and 66, and String Quartet op. 44, no. 2; and the last movement of the Violin Concerto, op. 64. The final movement of the Second Piano Concerto op. 40, might also be considered in this group.
33 Macfarren, George, ‘Mendelssohn’, Musical World 24 (1849): 37.
34 Niecks, Friedrich, ‘On Mendelssohn and Some of His Contemporary Critics’, Monthly Musical Record 5 (1875): 162–4 , in Mendelssohn and His World, ed. Todd, R. Larry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991): 383.
35 Chorley, , Modern German Music: 2: 13.
36 Sheppard, Elizabeth Sara, Charles Auchester, 2 vols (London, 1853; reprint ed., Chicago: A.M. McClurg, 1894): 2: 92.
37 Polko, Elise, Musical Tales, Phantasms, and Sketches, 2 vols, trans. Maudslay, Mary P. (London: S. Tinsley, 1876), 1: 53–9. (The original German version can be found in Musikalische Mährchen, Phantasieen und Skizzen, 23rd ed., 2 vols (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1896): 1: 78–86.)
38 Ibid.: 54–5.
39 Silver, , Strange and Secret Peoples: 168.
40 Polko, , Musical Tales: 56–7.
41 Silver, , Strange and Secret Peoples: 168.
42 The most comprehensive treatment of Victorian fairy painting can be found in Martineau, Jane, ed., Victorian Fairy Painting (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997) . Wood, Christopher, Fairies in Victorian Art (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors's Club, 2000) contains several examples not found in Martineau's volume. Also useful are Schindler, Richard Allen, ‘Art to Enchant: a Critical Study of Early Victorian Fairy Painting’ (PhD diss., Brown University, 1988) , Philpotts, Beatrice, Fairy Painting (London: Ash & Grant, 1978) , and Packer, Alison, Beddoe, Stella and Jarrett, Lianne, Fairies in Legend & the Arts (London: Cameron & Tayleur, 1980) . Less often reproduced paintings can be seen in Pressly, William L., ed., A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library: ‘As Imagination Bodies Forth’ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993) . On the association of Mendelssohn's music with the visual arts, see Grey, Thomas S., ‘Tableaux vivants: Landscape, History Painting, and the Visual Imagination in Mendelssohn's Orchestral Music’, Nineteenth-Century Music 21 (1997): 38–76 , and ‘Fingal's Cave and Ossian's Dream: Music, Image and Phantasmagoric Audition’, in The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Morton, Marsha L. and Schmunk, Peter L. (New York: Garland, 2000): 63–99 ; also Todd, R. Larry, ‘On the Visual in Mendelssohn's Music’, in Cari amici: Festschrift 25 Jahre Carus-Verlag, ed. Mohn, Barbara and Ryschawy, Hans (Stuttgart: Carus-Verlag, 1997): 115–24.
43 17 Sep. 1837, in The Mendelssohns on Honeymoon, ed. and trans. Jones, Peter Ward (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997): 96–7.
44 27 Dec. 1847, no. 978 in the collection of Nicholas Mackenzie, quoted in Hilarie Faberman and Philip McEvansoneya, ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel's “Shakespeare Room”’, Burlington Magazine 137 (Feb. 1995): 109.
45 Smith, Alison, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996): 144.
46 Faberman, and McEvansoneya, , ‘Brunel's “Shakespeare Room”’: 113.
47 See Smith, , The Victorian Nude: 227–34.
48 Turpin, John, ‘German Influence on Daniel Maclise’, Apollo 97 (1973): 173.
49 Celia Suzanne Stahr has discussed the overt sexuality of Paton's The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania in ‘The Sexualization of Fairies in British “Fairy Painting” from 1840–1870’ (MA thesis, San Francisco State University, 1989): 17–26 . Schindler, Richard (in ‘Art to Enchant’: 196) , finds both of Paton's Oberon and Titania paintings to have been influenced by Fuseli. Paton's paintings are also perceptively discussed by Brown, , Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature: 91–6, and Silver, , Strange and Secret Peoples: 159–64.
50 Griffiths, Trevor, ed., A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 26.
51 Bown, , Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature: 95.
52 Sir Paton, Joseph Noël, Poems by a Painter (Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1861; reprint ed., New York: AMS Press, 1972): 39–41.
53 The Spectator (3 Aug. 1850): 732, quoted in Smith, , The Victorian Nude: 92.
54 Philpotts, , Fairy Painting: 14.
55 12 Sept. 1857, The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, 2 vols, ed. Green, Roger Lancelyn (London: Oxford University Press, 1954): 1: 122.
56 From before 1834.
57 Schindler, , ‘Art to Enchant’: 81.
58 Philpotts, , Fairy Painting: 10.
59 ‘Royal Academy’, The Athenaeum 1288 (3 Jul. 1852): 727.
60 Smith, , The Victorian Nude: 92 . On the controversies surrounding the female nude, see also Nun, Pamela Gerrish, Problem Pictures: Women and Men in Victorian Pictures (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1995): 139–59.
61 Altick, Richard, Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1985): 264.
62 Ormond, Richard, Sir Edwin Landseer (New York: Rizzoli, 1981): 8 ; Ormond, Richard, ‘Daniel Maclise’, Burlington Magazine 110 (1968): 686.
63 ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’, Westminster Gazette, 11 Jan. 1900, quoted in Kachur, B.A., ‘Herbert Beerbohm Tree: A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Case in Point’, Theatre Studies 26/27 (1978–1980/1980–81): 115 . Tree's production did, in fact, feature live rabbits.
64 Edinburgh Review 87 (Apr. 1848): 418–19.
65 For an overview of the fundamentally visual nature of Victorian theatre, see Booth, Michael R., Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–1910 (Boston, London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), especially the chapters on Shakespeare, 30–59 , and melodrama and pantomine, 60–92. Nicola Bown notes that, although Paton's arrival in London postdates Vestris's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, he would have heard of it from S.C. Hall, who promoted ‘theatrical fairy painting in the Art-Union . Bown, , Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature: 94–5.
66 Fontane, Theodore, Shakespeare in the London Theatre, 1855–58, trans. Jackson, Russell (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1999): 46.
67 The issues surrounding women in male roles in theatre, ballet, pantomine and music hall are far more complex than can be dealt with here. See, for example, Garafola, Lynn, ‘The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet’, Dance Research Journal 17 and 18 (1985–1986): 35–40 ; Dudden, Faye E., ‘Female Ambition: Charlotte Cushman Seizes the Stage’, in her Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1879 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994): 75–103 ; Edmonds, Jill, ‘Princess Hamlet’, and Bratton, J. S., ‘Irrational Dress’, in The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre, 1850–1914, ed. Gardner, Vivien and Rutherford, Susan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992): 59–76 and 77–91; Senelick, Lawrence, ‘The Evolution of the Male Impersonator on the Nineteenth-Century Popular Stage’, Essays in Theatre 1 (1982): 29–44 , and Mayer, David, ‘The Sexuality of Pantomine’, Theatre Quarterly 4 (1974): 55–64.
68 Coleman, John, Players and Playwrights I Have Known (Philadelphia, PA: Gebbie & Co., 1890) , quoted in Williams, , ‘“The Concord of this Discord”’: 55.
69 ‘Madame Vestris’, The British Stage and Literary Cabinet (Jan. 1821): 3 and ‘Drury Lane’, The British Stage and Literary Cabinet (Jan. 1821): 14; quoted in Kathy Fletcher, ‘Planché, ‘Vestris and the Transvestite Role: Sexuality and Gender in Victorian Popular Theatre’, Nineteenth Century Theatre 15 (summer 1987): 22 . On the Victorian association between actresses and prostitution, see Davis, Tracy C., ‘Actresses and Prostitutes in Victorian London’, Theatre Research International 13 (1988): 221–34.
70 Davis, Tracy, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991): 108.
71 Williams, , ‘“The Concord of this Discord”’: 64.
72 Pall Mall Gazette (11 Jan. 1900), quoted in Williams: 64.
73 Morley, Henry, Journal of a London Playgoer from 1851–1866 (London: G. Routledge, 1866): 68.
74 Cook, Dutton, ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’, in Nights at the Play: A View of the English Stage (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883): 274.
75 ‘St James's Theatre, – “A Midsummer Night's Dream,”’Athenaeum 1267 (7 Feb. 1852): 178.
76 Williams, Harcourt, Old Vic Saga (London: Winchester, 1949): 157.
77 Quoted in Davis, Tracy C., ‘The Spectacle of Absent Costume: Nudity on the Victorian Stage’, New Theatre Quarterly 5 (1989): 326.
78 Fletcher, ‘Planché, Vestris and the Transvestite Role: Sexuality and Gender in Victorian Popular Theatre’: 13.
79 Dickens, Charles, ‘Gaslight Fairies’, Household Words 11 (10 Feb. 1855): 25–6.
80 Music by Eaton, W.G., words by Lonsdale, T.S. (London: Charles Sheard, 1879), in The Novello Music Hall Songbook, ed. Meadwell, Robert and Brawn, Geoffrey (London: Novello, 1997) : 15 and 34–7. This gives the chorus as ‘wigs’, not ‘wings.’ Quoted in Lionel Lambourne, ‘Fairies and the Stage’, in Victorian Fairy Painting: 50, as ‘wings’. It is ‘wing’ (singular) in Anderson, Jean, Late Joys at the Players' Theatre (London: T.V. Boardman, 1943) . The song was originally sung by George Leybourne (1842–1884), a music hall performer who typically depicted the ‘archetypal “heavy swell” – the swaggering man about town in over-correct evening dress’ (Novello Music Hall Songbook: 15).
81 Davis, , Actresses as Working Women: 110.
82 Davis, Tracy C., ‘Sexual Language in Victorian Society and Theatre’, The American Journal of Semiotics 6 (1989): 33–5.
83 Cruikshank, Robert, ‘The Green Room of the King's Theatre in the early eighteen-twenties’, in Guest, Ivor, The Romantic Ballet in England (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972) : plate 1a, opposite page 16. Cruikshank's brother George illustrated important fairy-tale collections, such as the English translation of the brothers Grimm.
84 Davis, , Actresses as Working Women: 109.
85 Ibid.: 110.
86 Kennedy, Judith M., ‘Oberon Viewed in the Nineteenth Century’, in Shakespeare and the Visual Arts, ed. Klein, Holger and Harner, James L. (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2000): 341.
87 Lunn, , ‘Fairy Music’: 136.
88 Fitzgerald, , Shakespearean Representations: 58.
89 Davis, , Actresses as Working Women: 132.
90 Kimber, Wilson, ‘Composer as Other’: 343–44.
91 See Wood's chapter, ‘Fairy Illustrators After 1900’, for notable examples of paintings of small children with fairies. Fairies in Victorian Art: 172–83.
92 Crowest, Frederick, Great Tone-Poets, Being Short Memoirs of the Greater Musical Composers, 5th ed. (London: Bentley, 1885): 315 ; Hadden, J. Cuthbert, The Master Musicians: Stories of Romantic Lives (Boston: Le Roy Phillips, 1909): 160.
93 Williams, Gary Jay, ‘Madame Vestris’ A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Web of Victorian Tradition’, Theatre Survey 18 (Nov. 1977): 8.
94 Lunn, , ‘Fairy Music’: 136.
95 Grant, Charles, ‘The Fairyland of Shakespeare’, The Gentleman's Magazine 26 (1881): 439.
96 Barnett, T. Duff, Notes on Shakespeare's Play of ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ (London: George Bell & Sons, 1887), 8 , quoted in Kennedy, , ‘Oberon Viewed in the Nineteenth Century’: 347.
97 Cole, John William, The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, F.S.A, 2 vols (London: R. Bentley, 1859; reprint ed., New York: Garland, 1986): 2: 195–6.
98 Kipling, Rudyard, Puck of Pook's Hill (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1924): 14.
99 The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, ed. Bradley, Ian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996): 361 . See the bad review quoted from The Times (p. 360) comparing Sullivan's music unfavourably with Weber and Mendelssohn, and complaining that ‘the chances of the musician have been sacrificed to the humour of the poet’.
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