The deeps have music soft and low': Sounding the Ocean in Elgar's Sea Pictures

Music & Letters,Vol. 97 No. 1, � The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.doi:10.1093/ml/gcw009, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org

‘THE DEEPS HAVE MUSIC SOFTAND LOW’: SOUNDINGTHE OCEAN IN ELGAR’S SEA PICTURES

BY KAREN LEISTRA-JONES*

SEA PICTURES, ELGAR’S ONLY COMPLETE SONG CYCLE, was a resounding success with hisearly audiences. The orchestral songs premiered at the Norwich Music Festival on 5October 1899, with Elgar conducting and the famous contralto Clara Butt singing thesolo part. Elgar reported four curtain calls at this concert, which was followed by asold-out performance at St James’s Hall in London two days later, and a commandperformance for Queen Victoria at Balmoral two weeks after that.1 In the followingmonths and years, Sea Pictures was a recurring feature on English concertprogrammes. Clara Butt continued to champion the songs, and other well-knownsingers also added Sea Pictures to their repertory.2 The initial critical response toElgar’s new cycle was also overwhelmingly positive, in marked contrast to its ambigu-ous status in critical assessments of Elgar’s work today.3 Many reviewers singled outthe charm of his melodies and the inventiveness of his orchestration for praise; comingfast on the heels of the success of the Enigma Variations earlier that year, Sea Picturesseemed to consolidate Elgar’s reputation as one of the foremost up-and-comingEnglish composers of his generation.Nevertheless, even sympathetic critics were sometimes perplexed by aspects of the

cycle. At a time when the song-cycle genre was increasingly defined by expectations of

*Email: [email protected]. This article draws on collections at the Elgar Birthplace Museum and theBritish Library. Unless noted otherwise, contemporary reviews of Sea Pictures are from Alice Elgar’s collections ofpress clippings at the Elgar Birthplace Museum. News reports on oceanographic discoveries and the culture of seabathing are from the 19th-Century British Library Newspapers Database at the British Library. The music examplesand the poems are taken from the piano-vocal score published by Boosey & Co. (London and NewYork, 1899); theydo not always agree. I should like to thank James Hepokoski and Danielle Ward-Griffin for their critical feedbackon this article, and Sue Fairchild and Chris Bennett for their assistance at the Elgar Birthplace Museum. Researchfor this article was supported by the Office of College Grants Resource Fund at Franklin & Marshall College.

1 Elgar wrote to August Jaeger: ‘The cycle went marvellously well & ‘‘we’’ were recalled four times ^ I think âfter that I got disgusted & lost count. She sang really well.’ Letters to Nimrod: Edward Elgar to August Jaeger, 1897^1908,ed. Percy M. Young (London, 1965), 62. Clara Butt sang the cycle at the St James’s Hall performance, with Elgar ac-companying at the piano. The performance at Balmoral was byAda Crossley on 20 Oct. 1899.

2 Programmes at the Elgar Birthplace Museum (collected byAlice Elgar) document eleven performances betweenthe premiere and June 1901. Soloists included Clara Butt, Muriel Foster, Gertrude Lonsdale, Helene Valma, andAda Crossley.

3 For many later critics, the social register and intended audience for these songs has been an important factor, as(especially in the version for piano and voice) they seemed destined for drawing room and variety concert perform-ances. Robert Anderson, for example, wrote that ‘the sentiments of the verses chosen rarely transcend their period,for Elgar was aiming often enough at the ballad audience of the miscellaneous concert. From 1900 the majority ofElgar’s songs were published by Boosey, the arch-purveyor of such music.’ Robert Anderson, Elgar (NewYork, 1993),286. For a consideration of Elgar’s positioning relative to the English balladry and art-song traditions, see StephenBanfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1988).

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poetic and musical unity, Elgar had chosen to set texts by five different poets:4 RodenNoel (‘Sea Slumber-Song’, 1892), Alice Elgar (‘In Haven’, adapted for the cycle froman earlier poem), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (‘Sabbath Morning at Sea’, 1839),Richard Garnett (‘Where Corals Lie’, 1859), and Adam Lindsay Gordon (‘TheSwimmer’, 1870).5 Furthermore, in the words of one critic, Elgar’s portrayal did not‘contain anything representing what may be called the characteristically Englishview of the sea’.6 Sea-themed music, after all, was familiar to late-Victorian audiences,for whom it most commonly took the form of such drawing-room favourites as seashanties and songs of the fleetçsongs that tended to celebrate the lives of sailors andthe Royal Navy as a source of imperial power and national pride. Elgar’s songs, onthe other hand, seemed to eschew ‘any forcible suggestion of the ‘‘breezy’’ or the‘‘briny’’’, and featured none of the expected ‘rollicking ditties’.7 Another critic wishedthat Elgar had ‘chosen at least one lyric, salt in flavour, one verse, if no more, eloquentof the ocean when its waves dance in the sunshine, and the ship, as Jack Hatton oncesang, ‘‘goes with a pleasant sail ^ give it to her, boys, now, give it her’’’.8

There were numerous other representations of the sea in nineteenth-century orches-tral music and opera. The ocean had long been an important theme for Romanticcomposers, for whom its vast distances and vanishing horizon inspired a range of com-plementary emotions: fantasies of travel and adventure (as in Berlioz’s overture LeCorsaire), feelings of longing and separation (as in Act III of Tristan und Isolde), and in-timations of the infinite.9 Indeed, Ralph VaughanWilliams’s Sea Symphony, composedjust a few years after Sea Pictures (1903^9) and based on selections from WaltWhitman’s Leaves of Grass, incorporated both the ‘breezy and briny’ and grand

4 To the critic for the Manchester Courier, for example, the poems, ‘having no special connection with one another,could not in any way tell a story, or even present us with a series of mood pictures evolved one from the other’. Man-chester Courier, 6 Oct. 1899.

5 Elgar most likely found the poems by Richard Garnett and Adam Lindsay Gordon in a collection entitled Sea-Music:An Anthology of Poems and Passages Descriptive of the Sea, ed. MrsWilliam Sharp (London, 1887). Brian Trowell has shownhow Elgar often used pre-selected anthologies as the source for song texts, and has noted an as yet untraced ‘Sea Poems’an-thology fromwhich Elgar drew Longfellow’s ‘Seaweed’ (sketched in British Library, Add. MS 63159, fos. 34v^35v) for a dif-ferent setting. Given that Elgar wrote ‘Longfellow Sea poems p. 168’ in that manuscript, and Longfellow’s ‘Seaweed’ is infact on p. 168 of the Sea Music anthology, it seems likely that Elgar owned a copy of that anthology. See Brian Trowell,‘Elgar’s Use of Literature’, in Raymond Monk (ed.), Edward Elgar: Music and Literature (Aldershot,1993),182^326.

6 Manchester Courier, 6 Oct. 1899.7 The first quotation is from Yorkshire Post (6 Oct. 1899); the complaint about the lack of ‘rollicking ditties’ is from

Modern Society (14 Oct. 1899). On the Victorian tradition of sea songs, see J. S. Bratton, The Victorian Popular Ballad(London, 1975), 42^5, and Derek B. Scott,The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour (Philadel-phia,1989),169^80. In 1900, the publishing house Hopwood & Crew offered a whole Navy and Army Patriotic Album. Stan-ford’s Songs of the Sea, including the very popular ‘Drake’s Drum’ from 1904, and his Songs of the Fleet from 1910 continuethe popular balladry tradition of sea songs. Elgar himself later contributed to this tradition in The Fringes of the Fleet, asetting of four sea songs by Rudyard Kipling that premiered at a variety show in 1917, starring four baritones dressed assailors. See Charles Edward McGuire, ‘Functional Music: Imperialism, the Great War, and Elgar as PopularComposer’, in Daniel Grimley and Julian Rushton (eds.),The Cambridge Companion to Elgar (Cambridge, 2004), 214^24.

8 Daily Telegraph, 5 Oct. 1899.9 Other important examples includeWagner’s stormy sea music in the Flying Dutchman, which evoked endless wan-

dering and liminality while simultaneously portraying the ocean as something immense and individual; and Men-delssohn’s overturesThe Hebrides and Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. Notably, Elgar quoted from the latter Mendelssohnpiece in Variation XIII of the Enigma Variations, wherein the Mendelssohnian theme is transformed into an emblemof yearning for ‘***’, a ‘pretty Lady’ who ‘is on the sea & far away’. Julian Rushton, Elgar: ‘Enigma’ Variations (Cam-bridge, 1999), 52^3. There was also a long tradition of depicting sea tempests in opera. Important 19th-c. examplescan be found in Act II of Weber’s Oberon (‘Spirits of Air and Earth and Sea’) and the opening of Verdi’s Otello. Foran overview of 19th-c. musical depictions of the ocean, see Dolores Pesce, ‘The Other Sea in MacDowell’s SeaPieces’, American Music, 10 (1992), 411^40. Also see Stephen Downes’s account of Romantic representations of musicalwaves in ‘Modern Maritime Pastoral: Wave Deformations in the Music of Frank Bridge’, in Matthew Riley (ed.),British Music and Modernism, 1895^1960 (Farnham and Burlington,Vt., 2010), 93^108.

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Romantic themes. It emphasized travel across immense distances and feelings of tran-scendence, and it combined these topics with a celebration of the lives of sailors. In thefirst movement, for example, the line ‘Waves spreading and spreading as far as the eyecan reach’ is set to staccato, march-like motifs in the woodwinds that evoke a distinctlymaritime world of ships and sailors, while in the fourth movement this restless explor-ation becomes a pathway to the infinite; it is through ‘launching out’ on ‘trackless seas’that one can glimpse the ‘transcendent, Nameless, the fibre and the breath, Light of thelight, shedding forth universes’çthe great Soul that unites the world.10

But even in this broader context, the sense that the sea in Sea Pictures is an unusualone has continued to inform the cycle’s reception. The Elgar Society’s programmenotes for the cycle, for example, note its separateness from a more general tradition of‘grand’ musical depictions of the sea: ‘Elgar’s settings make little attempt at a grandportrayal of the sea as other composers have successfully attempted.’11

In fact, one of the most important aspects of Sea Pictures that set it apart from othernineteenth-century sea music was a focus on depth rather than distance, and verticalrather than horizontal motion.Whether they emphasized travel, yearning, transcendence,or imperial power and conquest, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century musicalrepresentations of the ocean share an important commonality, in that the symbolicmeanings they ascribed to the ocean were activated by considerations of its vast horizontaldimensions: by gazing towards the vanishing horizon, voyaging across great distances, orimagining faraway, unseen lands. Such concerns are typical of modernWestern represen-tations of landscape, which have traditionally focused on modes of visuality predicatedon the perception of distance.12 Even in Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overtureçarguablythe archetypal musical seascape of the nineteenth century and certainly, with its rockingwave motions and sense of brooding subjectivity, an important reference pointfor Elgarçthe virtual landscape is one in which waves break forth into epic vistas.13

Yet even though a focus on the deep sea was atypical, Sea Pictures was very much aproduct of its time. It was during the second half of the nineteenth century that theocean’s depths, previously an unstudied and unknown realm, became the subject of a newwave of scientific exploration. As new oceanographic discoveries were reported to abroader public, they opened up new ways of thinking about and experiencing the ocean,which often drew on established literary and cultural tropes in order to assign meaning to

10 Tellingly, the symphony ends with the lines ‘O my brave soul! O farther farther sail! O daring joy, but safe! Arethey not all the seas of God? O farther, farther sail!’ Set to rocking motifs and overlapping polyphonic entrancesthat convey a sense of endlessness, in the end Vaughan Williams’s music fades into the distance as shimmeringstrings dwindle to a vanishing point.

11 www.elgar.org/3seapics.htm. The Elgar Society has provided programme notes for a number of Elgar’s pieces,available at www.elgar.org. Complaints about the quality of Elgar’s poetry choices often refer to his own reportedremarks: ‘it is better to set the best second-rate poetry to music, for the most immortal verse is music already’.Quoted in Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford, 1999), 280.

12 For a summary of this tradition, seeW. J.T. Mitchell, Preface to the second edition of Landscape and Power: ‘Space,Place, and Landscape’, in idem (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago, 2002), pp. vii^xiv, and Denis Cosgrove, ‘Land-scape and Landschaft’, Bulletin of the German Historical InstituteWashington D.C., 35 (Fall 2004), 57^71. On the social andpolitical underpinnings of distance and perspective in representations of landscape, see Denis Cosgrove and StephenDaniels (eds.),The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cam-bridge, 1988).

13 Thomas Grey has argued that Mendelssohn’s overture was a remarkably ‘picturesque’ musical representation oflandscape, the musings of a gazing subject prompted by the vista offered by the ocean and a distant feature in thelandscape, Fingal’s Cave. See Thomas Grey, ‘Tableaux vivants: Landscape, History Painting, and the Visual Imagin-ation in Mendelssohn’s Orchestral Music’, 19th-Century Music, 21 (1997), 38^76. For an alternative reading of thisoverture that emphasizes embodied subjectivity, see Benedict Taylor, ‘Seascape in the Mist: Lost in Mendelssohn’sHebrides’, forthcoming, 19th-Century Music, 39/3 (Spring 2016).

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the newly discovered depths. At the same time, the increasing popularity of the seasideholiday meant that Victorian beachgoersçthrough therapeutic bathing and recreationalswimmingçhad begun to associate the ocean with a vast range of new subjective andbodily experiences.In this article, I explore how these new discoveries and experiences informed the

poetic and musical representations of the ocean in Sea Pictures. Focusing on the songs’use of spatial metaphors, I discuss how Sea Pictures’ depths were imagined andexperienced in dialogue with scientific, literary, cultural, and bodily discourses at thetime. Despite its diverse poems and lack of a clearly unified voice, these spatial tropesprovide the cycle with a linking thread. Indeed, by exploring how various meaningsattached to the sea combine across the songs, it is possible to take Elgar’s designation ofSea Pictures as a‘cycle’ seriously and discern in it a thematic interconnectedness and a nar-rative framework that have previously been overlooked.14 In Sea Pictures, experiencesand fantasies of the ocean’s depths contributed to a typically Elgarian theme ofyearning for better realities and states of being that were imagined in different waysçwith different resultsçacross the various songs. But this familiar yearning often con-tained notes of ambivalence or danger. What did it mean to long for the fantastic andterrible world beneath the ocean’s surface? And what were the ultimate implications ofplunging into the ocean’s depths, or losing oneself in the powerful forces of its waves?

ENTERING THE DEPTHS

The cycle opens with a setting of Roden Noel’s ‘Sea Slumber-Song’. Inspired by Corn-wall’s Kynance Cove, Noel’s poem describes a liminal place where water meets land:rocks and caves are caressed by ‘whispering waves’ and ‘veil’ their bright colours. Thesetting, however, is not an everyday shoreline; the poem’s descriptions draw on thefamiliar trope of the enchanted island, a mysterious ‘Elfin land’ in which one is lulledinto a dream-like stateçin this case, by the alluring song of the ‘Sea Mother’, whoselullaby offers sleep, peace, and forgetting:15

Sea-birds are asleep,The world forgets to weep,Sea murmurs her soft slumber-songOn the shadowy sandOf this elfin land;

14 See Elgar’s use of the term‘cycle’ in n. 2. By the end of the 19th c., song cycles had become increasingly defined byexpectations of unity and coherence. While in actuality cycles existed on a continuum from tightly to loosely con-structed, the very presence of the generic designation ‘cycle’ functioned as an invitation to listeners to seek out connec-tions and hear meanings develop across various songs. On the generic expectations of unity in the song cycle, seeLaura Tunbridge,The Song Cycle (Cambridge, 2010), 1^18, and Ruth Bingham, ‘The Early Nineteenth-Century SongCycle’, in James Parsons (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to the Lied (Cambridge, 2004),101^19. On genre as an interpret-ative lens, see James Hepokoski, ‘Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero? Strauss’s Don Juan Reinvestigated’, inBryan Gilliam (ed.), Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and his Work (Durham, NC, 1992), 135^75, andJames Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (NewYork and Oxford, 2006), 604^7.

15 The most important literary antecedent for this trope was Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which the enchantedisland, home to mysterious music and fairy spirits, can produce intoxicating and soporific effects on its visitors.Closer to Noel’s and Elgar’s time, Charles Kingsley had made a fairy island (St Brendan’s Isle) the home of his fic-tional water-babies, who slept and played under the island: ‘When Tom got there, he found that the isle stood all onpillars, and that its roots were full of caves. There were pillars of black basalt, like Staffa; and pillars of green andcrimson serpentine, like Kynance . . . all curtained and draped with seaweeds, purple and crimson, green and brown;and strewn with soft white sand, on which the water-babies sleep every night.’ Charles Kingsley,TheWater-Babies: AFairy Tale for a Land-Baby (NewYork, 2008; orig. pub. London, 1863), 107^8.

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‘I, the Mother mild,Hush thee, O my child,Forget the voices wild!Isles in elfin lightDream, the rocks and caves,Lulled by whispering waves,Veil their marbles bright,Foam glimmers faintly whiteUpon the shelly sandOf this elfin land;Sea-sound, like violins,To slumber woos and wins,I murmur my soft slumber-song,Leave woes, and wails, and sins,Ocean’s shadowy mightBreathes good-night,Good-night!’

Elgar’s setting, however, often leaves the shore behind (see Ex. 1). In this song, the seais a physical, as well as an audible, presence, as a number of musical devices simulate sen-sations such as floating, sinking, and immersion in and re-emergence from the water.While the poem opens with a description of sleeping seabirds and the ocean meetingthe ‘shadowy sand’ of an ‘Elfin land’, Elgar’s setting emphasizes a sense of buoyancy. Awave gesture in the violins recurs throughout the initial five lines, alternating with anundulating 6̂-5̂ voice-leading figure in the accompaniment that mimics the rockingeffect of waves.16 Throughout this entire first section, the repeated use of plagalharmonic gestures (at bb. 1, 7^8, and 9) enhances the feeling of sinking into something:a state of repose defined by aquatic immersion, dream-like enchantment, or both. Themelodic contour of voice line also contributes to an immersive effect. When thevoice enters, its melodic line is initially remarkably flat, floating between only threenotes (e0, f #0, and g0). For the words ‘slumber-song’, however, the vocal melody suddenlyrises to d 00 and then descends a precipitous octave and a half in the space of two bars,reaching the extreme low limit of the singer’s range for the cycle on the g in bar 9.17 Itis a vocal plunge into the depths, its symbolism made all the more potent by the darktimbre and uncommon sonority of the contralto voice at that range.As the sea-mother begins her song, the sound world changes. Now in E major, the

dynamic drops to a muffled ppp, and the strings create a remarkable sense of depth andvertical space by playing a unison line doubled at four octaves, extending from e0 downto E0 . Time seems to stand still, as harmonic stasis and the endless repeatability of themelody in the strings eradicate any sense of forward momentum. This ‘slumber-song’clearly evokes the rocking of a lullaby, but there is also a distinctly ‘underwater’ feelingto this section, created by the muffled sonorities (tam-tams and bass drum seem tomimic the distant, regular sound of waves crashing on the shore), the rocking motion,and the depth and registral spaciousness of the string lines.18 The world underneath the

16 On musical wave shapes see Downes, ‘Modern Maritime Pastoral’, 93^6.17 Elgar did provide an ossia for this plunge down to g in the published edition for Boosey & Co., but it seems likely

that this was added as a practical matter to make the song marketable to a broader range of singers, many of whomwould not be comfortable singing at such a low register.

18 Elgar actually called for a ‘gong’, but Julian Rushton (following Norman Del Mar) notes that it was likely thathe used ‘gong’ in a generic sense, and that a tam-tam was intended. Julian Rushton, Foreword to the Elgar CompleteEdition, xiv: Solo Songs with Orchestra (Ricksmansworth, 2012), p. xi.

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waves, in this setting, is somnolent, peaceful, and comforting, a return to a womb-likestate that combines with vaguely sinister resonances of oblivion through drowning.At the end of this section, a rising motif seems to pull out of the quiescent

underwater world of the ‘slumber song’, breaking once more into the wave fig-ure from the opening. But the sea-mother continues to sing, now describing the shoresof the enchanted isle, a bright and mesmerizing fantasy world, rather than the somno-lent oblivion of the depths: ‘Isles in elfin light / Dream, the rocks and caves / Lulledby whispering waves, / Veil their marbles bright.’ The remoteness of this uncannyworld is underscored by a sudden change of key to the submediant region of C

EX. 1. ‘Sea Slumber-Song’, piano and vocal score, bb. 1^28

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EX. 1. Continued

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major.19 At the same time, filigree melodic lines and a harp glissando on the words‘elfin land’ emphasize its magical and fantastic qualities.A sudden orchestral descent leads to a recapitulation of the first section for the

lines ‘Sea-sound, like violins’, which in turn leads to a reprise of the sea-mother’slullaby for the final lines of the poem, ‘Ocean’s shadowy might / Breathes good-night,

EX. 1. Continued

19 On the semiotic connotations of the flat submediant, see Susan McClary, ‘Pitches, Expression, Ideology: AnExercise in Mediation’, in her Reading Music: Selected Essays (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt., 2007), 3^14. It is alsoworth noting that Elgar’s original draft of this song set this section in E flat, rather than C. On Elgar’s ‘escapist’flatward digressions, see Matthew Riley, ‘Elgar the Escapist?’, in Byron Adams (ed.), Edward Elgar and his World(Princeton, 2007), 39^58.

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/ Good-night!’ Elgar’s ending, however, adds a layer of ambiguity. The entire song hasbeen tonally fluid: the E minor/major of the opening and the ‘slumber-song’ lullaby co-exist closely with the C major of the fantastic Elfin land, with frequent 6̂-5̂ voice-leading and pauses on VI (C) in the E minor sections (b. 7), and similar pullstowards iii (E) in the C major sections (bb. 23 and 27). The E major ‘good-night’ atbar 43 seems to promise a conclusion in the tonic major, but the ‘slumber-song’, withits timeless repetition and lack of harmonic motion, is unable to produce an ending assuch (Ex. 2). Instead, there is a retreat from the depths of the ‘slumber-song’ to themusic of the ‘elfin land’ in bar 44, which appears first in E major, and then, througha cycle of root motion by thirds, in A flat major and C major; in fact, there is aperfect authentic cadence in this key in bar 47. However, in the last two bars theopening wave-figure reappears, and the 6̂-5̂ motion of its crest resolves definitively toan E minor chord.20 The result is that this final tonic sounds unprepared and markedby a sense of loss or disappointment: the E major embrace of the ocean’s depths andthe C major ‘Elfin’ fantasy have retreated out of reach, making the framing ‘reality’ ofthe song sound suddenly empty.

DISCOVERING THE DEEP SEA: NIGHT, SILENCE, DEATH

The entrancing representations of the ocean in ‘Sea Slumber-Song’ drew heavily onnew ways of thinking about and experiencing the ocean that arose in the second halfof the nineteenth century, inspired in part by a developing culture of deep-sea explor-ation. Prior to the 1850s, little was known about the sea beyond the depth of a fewtens of metres.21 In the words of pioneering oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury,the deep ocean was a ‘sealed volume’, and the seal that covered it ‘was of rollingwaves many thousand feet in thickness’.22 This began to change in the 1850s and1860s, when a number of developments coalesced into the establishment of themodern science of oceanography. Technological advances in fathoming techniquesallowed for more accurate measurements of the ocean’s great depths, while at thesame time improved dredging equipment made it possible to collect specimens ofaquatic life from those depths. In general, increased state and commercial resourceswere devoted to exploring the deep sea, impelled by a sense that it offered a newfrontier of exploration. Scientific discoveries about the ocean were breathlesslyreported in the popular press, and followed avidly by the reading public.23 With theproliferation of new discoveries and information, the way the deep sea was imaginedand invested with meaning was continually changing.Early studies of the bottom of the sea tended to emphasize its utter remoteness from

life on the surface, as well as its calm, smooth, and peaceful qualities.24 Once again,

20 On Elgar closing in the ‘right’ key at all costs, see J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge,2006), 196^7.

21 As Helen Rozwadowski notes, the 1823 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry for ‘Sea’ stated: ‘Through want of instru-ments, the sea beyond a certain depth has been found unfathomable.’ Helen Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean:TheDiscovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 5.

22 Matthew Fontaine Maury,The Physical Geography of the Sea (NewYork, 1856; orig. pub. 1855), 244.23 This public included large numbers of amateur naturalists and beachcombers who followed scientific develop-

ments and spent their own seaside holidays prowling shorelines and dredging from fishing boats, in order to collecttheir own specimens. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean,104. Indeed, it is unsurprising that the most famous 19th-c. fic-tional account of the underwater world, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, was first published in 1870.

24 Significantly, one of the main motivating factors for oceanic exploration was the laying down of the transatlantictelegraph cable in the 1850s and 1860s. This involved coordinated efforts at research and speculation, includingfathoming surveys that tried to ascertain the depth of the cable’s path across the Atlantic, and attempts to describe ac-curately the conditions at the bottom of the sea. As part of a publicity campaign, entrepreneurs provided popular

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Fontaine Maury was a key figure in interpreting data from deep-sea soundings, which,in his words, showed that ‘the quiet of the grave reigns everywhere in the profounddepths of the ocean; that the repose there is beyond the reach of the wind; it is soperfect that none of the powers of the earth, save only the earthquake and volcano, can

EX. 2. ‘Sea Slumber-Song’, piano and vocal score, bb. 42^9

media with representations of the deep ocean intended to prove that it was a safe environment for a cable. FontaineMaury was a key figure in this project, contributing scientific credibility to the speculators’ assurances. SeeRozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean, 82^92.

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disturb it’.25 In fact, this vision of the ocean’s depths drew heavily on another influentialtheory, propagated by the naturalist Edward Forbes, that beyond about 500 metres’depth the seas must be totally lifeless due to darkness, high pressure, and intense cold.Forbes proposed a bathymetrical distribution of marine life into clearly defined zones:the Littoral, Laminarian, Coralline, and the Region of the Deep-Sea Corals. This lastzone extended from about 90 metres to an unknown depth. In Forbes’s words, ‘as wedescend deeper and deeper in this region, the inhabitants become more and moremodified, and fewer and fewer, indicating our approach towards an abyss where life iseither extinguished, or exhibits but a few sparks to mark its lingering presence’.26 The‘life-zero’ point, according to Forbes, was probably around 300 fathoms, or 550 metres.27

In reports on these scientific theories for a more general audience, the deep-sea con-ditions they described often became the starting point for more imaginative descrip-tions that assigned meanings to the depths based on established cultural tropes. Anarticle in The Cosmopolitan (‘The Abysmal Depths of the Sea’, 1894), for example,described the depths as ‘everlasting habitations of night and silence. Time itselfslumbers here, where all seasons are one and nothing occurs to mark the changelessyears.’28 In other accounts, these connotations of stillness, solitude, and silence couldbe equated with a deeply interior subjective space, one that existed apart fromsociety’s noise, activity, and demands. In an 1865 issue of Hardwick’s Science Gossip, themysterious sea was capable of ‘hiding . . . its inhabitants from the gaze of the ‘‘lords ofcreation’’’.29 Finally, the qualities of darkness, silence, and timelessness lent themselvesto an association of the deep ocean with death itself. The idea of the ocean floor as awatery graveyard for those lost at sea had a long history, and to this was added newdiscoveries of the abundance of dead marine organisms in the ocean bed. As FontaineMaury described it, ‘we should view the surface of the sea as a nursery teeming withnascent organisms, [and] its depths as the cemetery for families of living creaturesthat outnumber the sands on the sea-shore for multitude’.30 Despite these morbidaspects, the death represented by the deep sea was often depicted as a form of

25 Matthew Fontaine Maury, Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts, 8th edn.(Washington, DC,1858), 157^8.

26 Edward Forbes,The Natural History of the European Seas (London, 1859), 26.27 Forbes’s theories were so influential that decades later the writers of the report on the HMS Challenger’s pioneer-

ing oceanographic expedition (discussed in more detail later in this article) complained that his theory had beenossified into dogma by his followers: ‘The disciples of all great men tend to assert dogmatically what their master sug-gested hypothetically, and so it was with the followers of Edward Forbes. They viewed the life-zero, not as a probabil-ity, but as a certainty, building their belief more on the a' priori absurdity of creatures being able to live in theabsence of light and air, and under the great pressure which must prevail in the depths of the sea, than on any directevidence.’ T. H. Tizard et al., Narrative of the Cruise of H.M.S. Challenger, with a General Account of the Scientific Results ofthe Expedition (Edinburgh, 1885), p. xl.

28 ‘The Abysmal Depths of the Sea’,The Cosmopolitan, 14 (1894), 535.29 Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury (5 Aug. 1865), excerpt from ‘THE DEEP, DEEP SEA!’ [From Hardwick’s

Science Gossip]. Indeed, in a translated poem by Friedrich Schiller (‘Fame’) that was widely reprinted in Victorianmedia, the deep ocean’s remoteness and stillness provided a symbolic escape from fleeting earthly contingencies suchas fame and fortune:

Remember aye the ocean deeps are mute ^The shallows roar;Worth is the ocean ^ Fame is but the bruitAlong the shore.Translation from the Berkshire Chronicle (23 Sept. 1865).

30 Maury, Physical Geography, 256.This was echoed by other scientists: theWorcestershire Chronicle quoted Challenger sci-entist Sir John Murray as saying: ‘It thus happens that over nearly the whole floor of the ocean we have mingled theremains of animals which had lived at the surface of the water in tropical sunlight, and the remains of those whichhad lived all their lives in darkness.’ ‘Life in the Great Depths’,Worcestershire Chronicle (23 Sept. 1899).

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peaceful oblivion: beyond time, beyond worldly concerns, beyond consciousness; inMaury’s words, the repose it offered was ‘perfect’.

DISCOVERING THE DEEP SEA: DREAMS, ENCHANTMENT, ALTERITY

Just as the image of the bottom of the ocean as a silent, peaceful, and untouchablerealm gained widespread currency, discoveries of life forms in the deep sea began tocomplicate the picture. The oceanographic expedition that did the most to study andpublicize these discoveries was the voyage of the HMS Challenger. A former Britishnavy vessel repurposed as a floating research lab, the Challenger left Portsmouth on 21December 1872, circled the globe, and returned three and a half years later withabout seven thousand specimens from the ocean, many of them new to science, withsome dredged from previously unheard-of depths of over three thousand fathoms.31

The British press covered the Challenger’s travels and discoveries extensively, and onthe ship’s return to England many individual members of the scientific team and crewpublished accounts and travelogues and embarked on speaking tours.32 Ultimately,the Challenger’s voyage resulted in a fifty-volume report that is still touted as a seminalwork in modern oceanography.The Challenger’s findings contested previous theories about the lifelessness of the deep

ocean. Its chief scientist, CharlesWyville Thomson, summarized one of the expedition’smain conclusions:

The bed of the deep sea . . . is not a barren waste. It is inhabited by a fauna more rich and var-ied . . .and with the organisms in many cases apparently even more elaborately and delicatelyformed, and more exquisitely beautiful in their soft shades of colouring and in the rainbow-tints of their wonderful phosphorescence, than the fauna of the well-known belt of shallowwater . . .which fringes the land.33

These types of colourful descriptions of an alien and fantastic underwater world wereoften accompanied by striking illustrations of the newly discovered flora and fauna.The German biologist Ernst Haeckel, well known for his work promoting Darwin’stheories for a broader audience, worked on several volumes of the Challenger report.34

A talented illustrator, his detailed drawings were not only scientific renderings of thespecimens in question; they also strove to capture a sense of wonder at the beauty ofthe newly discovered world (see Pl. 1).35 This was even more apparent in his famous

31 Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean, 166.32 See Charles Wyville Thomson et al.,The Depths of the Sea (London, 1873); William J. J. Spry,The Cruise of Her

Majesty’s Ship Challenger: Voyages over Many Seas, Scenes in Many Lands (London, 1876); and Henry Nottidge Moseley,Notes by a Naturalist: An Account of Observations Made during the Voyage of H.M.S. ‘Challenger’ Round the World in the Years1872^1876 (London, 1879).

33 Thomson,The Depths, 4.34 When the Challenger returned to England in 1876, its chief scientists contacted an assortment of well-known

chemists, physicists, and marine biologists and asked them to contribute analyses and reports of various specimensand findings. Haeckel was charged with producing vol. 14 (Report on the Deep-Sea Medusae dredged by the H.M.S. Challen-ger), vol. 18 (Report on the Radiolaria), vol. 28 (Report on the Siphonophorae collected by the H.M.S. Challenger during the Years1873^1876 ), and vol. 32 (Report on the Deep-Sea Keratosa Collected by the H.M.S. Challenger during the Years 1873^1876). SeeRobert J. Richards,The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago, 2009), 76.

35 Ernst Haeckel, ‘Report on the Siphonophorae collected by H.M.S. Challenger during the years 1873^1876’, vol.28 of Report on the Scientific Results of the Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger during the years 1873^76, ed. C. Wyville Thomsonand John Murray (Edinburgh, 1888), pl. 50.

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PL. 1. Haeckel, Report on the Siphonophorae, pl. 50: Disconalia gastroblasta

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later collection, Kunstformen der Natur (1899^1904; published in English as Art Forms inNature, 1904) (see Pl. 2).36

As with descriptions of the silence and darkness of the deeps, reports on underwaterlife forms for a more general audience tended to amplify their fantastical and alienqualities, such that the boundary between scientific report and imaginative fantasywas often blurred. In a series of immensely popular lectures on botany intended forthe general public, for example, the German scientist Matthias Jakob Schleidendescribed the underwater world in fanciful, even phantasmagorical terms:

We dive into the liquid crystal of the Indian Ocean, and it opens to us the most wondrous enchant-ments of the fairy tales of our childhood’s dreams. The colouring surpasses every thing. . . . Softly,like spirits of the deep, the delicate milk-white or bluish bells of the jelly-fishes float through thischarmed world. . . .Then come the fabulous cuttle fish, decked in all colours of the rainbow, butmarked by no definite outline, appearing and disappearing, intercrossing, joining company andparting again, in most fantastic ways; and all this in the most rapid change, and amid the mostwonderful play of light and shade.37

Schleiden’s description is also noteworthy for the way he assimilates these characteris-tics into a cultural vocabulary of alterity. References to fairy tales, enchantment,and a charmed worldçalso a feature in ‘Sea Slumber-Song’çconnect theaquatic world to a widespread Victorian fascination with fairies and the fairy worldas a way of escape from the everyday, a realm in which a sense of wonder, enchant-ment, and mystery (perhaps recaptured from dreams or childhood) could berestored.38

This emphasis on alien realms that are mysterious, colourful, alluring, and whollyOther also connected ideas about the deep sea with exotic fantasies of foreign landsand cultures. Orientalism played a significant role in the optics of Victorian seasideculture. Victorian piers, for example, often ended in grand pavilions in an ‘Oriental’style, a visual reminder of the British Empire extending across the waves to foreignlands.39 Unsurprisingly, an imperialist impulse to explore and conquer new worldsalso played a role in the way deep-sea exploration was understood in VictorianBritain. As Helen Rozwadowski has shown, Victorian scientists often presented theirown work according to the literary framework of the voyage narrative, ‘rhetoricallyplacing themselves in the role of great explorers . . .who charted and named the farcorners of the world’.40 Edward Forbes, for example, compared the deep-sea samplestaken from fishermen’s catches, before the advent of comprehensive scientific dredginginitiatives, to

the few stray bodies of strange red men which tradition reports to have been washed on theshores of the OldWorld, before the discovery of the New, and which served to indicate the ex-

36 Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (Leipzig and Vienna, 1899^1904), and Art Forms in Nature (Leipzig, 1904).37 Matthias Jakob Schleiden,The Plant: A Biography in a Series of Thirteen Popular Lectures, trans. A. Henry (London,

1853), ii. 403^5.This passage seems to have achieved popularity in its own right. Maury quoted it inThe Physical Geog-raphy of the Sea, 182, and it also appeared in a popular reading-lesson anthology,The Graduated Series of Reading-LessonBooks, Book V (London, 1861), 439.

38 See Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford, 1999).39 Examples include the pavilion at the end of Brighton Pier (built in 1901), which included four large towers topped

with onion domes, and the Hastings Pier pavilion, also built in an Orientalist style with onion domes toppingminaret towers (1872). See Lynn F. Pearson,The People’s Palaces:The Story of the Seaside Pleasure Buildings of 1870^1914(Buckingham,1991), 25^7.

40 Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean, 29.

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PL. 2. Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, pl. 49: Actiniae

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istence of unexplored realms inhabited by unknown races, but not to supply information abouttheir character, habits, and extent.41

After his first deep-water dredging expedition, he reported standing before his samplesfeeling like a ‘Spanish conquistador’ surveying his captured ‘painted Indians’.42

Indeed, many Victorians collected such ‘painted Indians’ for themselves during theaquarium craze that began in the 1850s, in which curiosities of the deep weredomesticated and displayed for the voyeuristic gaze of their captors.43 Such practicesand rhetorical strategies explicitly linked fantasies about what lay across the sea withfantasies of what might be discovered in its depths.In fact, Elgar hinted at these cultural associations in the music for Sea Pictures, par-

ticularly in the fourth song, a setting of Richard Garnett’s ‘Where Corals Lie’:

The deeps have music soft and lowWhen winds awake the airy spry,

It lures me, lures me on to goAnd see the land where corals lie.

By mount and mead, by lawn and rill,When night is deep, and moon is high,

That music seeks and finds me still,And tells me where the corals lie.

Yes, press my eyelids close, ’tis well;But far the rapid fancies fly

To rolling worlds of wave and shell,And all the lands where corals lie.

Thy lips are like a sunset glow,Thy smile is like a morning sky,

Yet leave me, leave me, let me goAnd see the land where corals lie.

Although there are no explicit mentions of eastern regions in this poem, the repeateddescriptions of the undersea world as a mysterious ‘land’ seem to have inspired Elgarto write a musical setting infused with subtle Orientalist tropes: many contemporarycritics heard in this song ‘suggestions of the East’, or a ‘charming suggestion ofan Oriental style’.44 For Elgar, of course, ideas of the East were evocative, and likemost of his contemporaries, he was well versed in the musical vocabulary of the

41 Edward Forbes,The Natural History of the European Seas, ed. and continued by Robert Godwin-Austen (London,1859), 11^12.

42 Ibid. 12. Forbes’s account was also quoted in T. H. Tizard et al., Narrative of the Cruise of H.M.S. Challenger, with aGeneral Account of the Scientific Results of the Expedition (Edinburgh, 1885), p. xxxvi.

43 For a description of the widespread popularity of aquariums in Victorian households, see Bernd Brunner,TheOcean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium (NewYork, 2005).

44 The Star (6 Oct. 1899): ‘Next comes a most delicious song with suggestions of the East, as the words import,‘‘Where Corals Lie’’.’ The critic for The Times (7 Oct. 1899) also praised this song for ‘its charming suggestion of anOriental style in its accompaniment’. These observations were echoed by the critic for the Morning Post, who noted‘the faint suggestion of Oriental colouring in the accompaniment’ (7 Oct. 1899), and The Standard (6 Oct. 1899), whowrote that ‘in the accompaniment there is a touch of Eastern musical idiom that imparts a fascinating individualityto the music’. As Nalini Ghuman and Corissa Gould have pointed out, Orientalist musical styles were widelypopular at this time in music-hall pieces, theatre, and salon pieces; such popular uses helped to establish a musical vo-cabulary that audiences could easily apprehend as a representation of the East. For a discussion of Elgar’s later appli-cation of these tropes in The Crown of India (1912) see Nalini Ghuman, ‘Elgar and the British Raj’, and CorissaGould, ‘‘‘An Inoffensive Thing’’: Edward Elgar,The Crown of India and Empire’, in Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon(eds.), Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s^1740s: Portrayal of the East (Aldershot, 2007), 147^64.

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exotic.45 He set much of the song in the Aeolian mode, often found in nineteenth-centuryEuropean evocations of the Orient, and the opening flourish has a distinctly pentatonicflavour (Ex. 3(a)).46 Other hints included the ostinato accompaniment over a B pedalpoint, a preponderance of open fifths, the inclusion of ornamented melodies with arab-esque turns (such as that found at b. 16; see Ex. 3(b)), and the scoring, which emphasizedharp, pizzicato strings, and solo lines for double-reed instruments.47 These features harkback to the parts of ‘Sea Slumber-Song’ that described the colourful and fantastic ‘Elfinland’. Indeed, in that song, the sudden harp glissando, trill, and ‘arabesque’ turn on thewords ‘Elfin land’also hint at the faraway and exotic (see above, Ex.1).48 Such devices as-sociate the ocean’s depths with the East not as a defined place, but a fantasyça locusof desire that beckons precisely because of its strange, alien qualities.And yet, it is clear that the song’s exotic allure beckons from within, not across,

the ocean; as one contemporary reviewer described it, the song depicts ‘the iridescentmystery of the sea-bottom’.49 In the poem, this ‘land where corals lie’ irresistibly luresthe poetic subject onward and downward, a point that Elgar underscores with severalmusical devices similar to those employed in the first song.50 The song begins with arepeated musical motif that descends more than two octaves in the space of two bars,and there is a similarly dramatic vocal descent later in the song, for the words, ‘far therapid fancies fly, to rolling worlds of wave and shell, and all the land where corals lie’(Ex. 4). Here the singer intones a descending four-note sequence that begins on c # 00

45 Alice had been born in India, where her father, Major-General Sir Henry Gee Roberts, had had a distinguishedmilitary career. Even after her father’s death in 1861, service to the British Empire remained an important part of herfamily’s identity, and, indeed, the family’s colonial past had an ongoing and tangible presence in Elgar’s life: upon hismarriage to Alice in 1889, he lived surrounded by Indian objects and furnishings they had inherited from her father.Robert Anderson, ‘Elgar’s Passage to India’, in Cockaigne: Essays on Elgar ‘In London Town’ (Rickmansworth, 2004), 170^5,and Nalini Ghuman: ‘Elgar and the British Raj: Can the Mughals March?’, in Adams (ed.), Edward Elgar and hisWorld,249^86.

46 Ralph P. Locke, ‘Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and Timeless Sands: Musical Images of the MiddleEast’, in Jonathan Bellman (ed.),The Exotic inWestern Music (Chicago, 1998), 104^36, and Derek Scott, ‘Orientalismand Musical Style’, Musical Quarterly, 82 (1998), 309^35. On the broader context for such musical representations ofthe East, both in 19th-c. Britain and in Elgar’s music in particular, see Clayton and Zon, Music and Orientalism in theBritish Empire, and Bennett Zon, Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Rochester, NY, 2007).

47 Scott, ‘Orientalism’, 327.48 There is significant overlap, in fact, between the musical vocabulary of Orientalism and that associated with

fairy music; common features include hushed wind sonorities, modal harmonies, and elaborate ornamentation. SeeFrancesca Brittan, ‘On Microscopic Hearing: Fairy Magic, Natural Science, and the Scherzo fantastique’, Journal of theAmerican Musicological Society, 64 (2011), 527^600.

49 The critic for theManchester Guardian used this phrase on two separate occasions, first on 3 Oct. 1900 (‘I was oncemore struck by the absolute success of No. 4, ‘‘Where Corals Lie’’, a most fascinating tone-picture rendering the irides-cent mystery of the sea-bottom.’) and again on 16 Oct. (‘Our impression that the one called ‘‘Where Corals Lie’’ isthe most perfect of them remains unchanged. The music is a sort of incantation, creating an atmosphere that is notof the ordinary world and lapping the imagination about with the iridescent mystery of the sea-bottom. This expres-sion we have used before. But as it happens to correspond better with the impression than any other that we canthink of, we venture to repeat it.’).

50 Like ‘Sea Slumber-Song’, this poem echoes Shakespeare’s descriptions of the sea in The Tempest, as one contem-porary observer (in the Manchester Guardian, 19 Jan. 1900) noted: ‘The characterization in this . . . song seems, in somemysterious way, to bring back the very taste of the Shakspearean [sic] lines: ^

Full fathom five thy father lies;Of his bones are coral made;Those are pearls that were his eyes;Nothing of him that doth fade,But doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange,Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell;Hark! now I hear them ^ ding-dong, bell.

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and gets progressively lower, ending once more in the low, dark area of the singer’srange on an a # and b below middle C for the words ‘land where corals lie’.As in ‘Sea Slumber-Song’, two tonal realms coexist closely in ‘Where Corals Lie’: the

tonic key of B minor (rendered somewhat mutable due to the emphasis on the naturalform of the scale) and the relative major, D. While B is never truly threatened as atonic (it is used throughout as a pedal point and achieves a strong perfect authenticcadence at the end of the third stanza), the song’s harmonic language is characterizedby a strong sense of a pull towards the ‘other’ realm of D major. Towards the end ofthe first two stanzas, there is a pause on V6

5 of D (bb. 12 and 25), which, however,resolves to B minor with a return of the opening flourish in the next bar. Next, thevoice strongly implies a cadence in D for the words ‘where corals lie’, with a descending3̂-2̂-1̂ melodic gesture in that key. But the bass line, instead of providing plagalmotion from G to D, moves to B, denying the cadence and re-establishing the tonicpedal that introduces each stanza.In the final stanza, however, the pull towards D proves irresistible (Ex. 5). This time,

for the cadence on ‘where corals lie’, the voice’s 3̂-2̂-1̂ gesture is accompanied by a des-cending perfect fourth (G^D) in the bass, rather than a return of B minor, and bars48^9 rest in the new tonic. The effect is that of a sigh-like release of tension, a longed-for relaxation into a harmonic realm that had been tantalizingly close, but unreachable,earlier in the song. It also harks back to the opening plagal gesture that had introducedthe dreamlike sea fantasies in ‘Sea Slumber-Song’. As in that song, it is only the orchestrathat reasserts the putative tonic (B) in the last two bars. Here, however, the effect isvery different. The final chord is transformed to B major by a tierce de Picardie, themusical texture suddenly broadens out across a wide register, and shimmering stringsand harp arpeggios create a sense of beatific transfiguration; in this case, the vision ofescape to another realm has not produced emptiness or dissatisfactionçinstead, there isa kind of re-enchantment of reality.

EX. 3. ‘Where Corals Lie’, piano and vocal score: (a) bb. 1^6; (b) bb. 10^17

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ESCAPISM

In the second half of the nineteenth century, then, new experiences, discoveries, andrepresentations changed how the ocean was conceived, and in doing so offered up aplethora of ideas and images that could be invested with symbolic significance.51 Thenewly fathomed depths of the ocean inspired fantasies of perfect repose, silence,darkness, and oblivion. Phantasmagoric representations of aquatic life came to be

EX. 3. Continued

51 Elgar’s use of these ideas and images shows a process similar to his adaptation of Victorian literary strategies inhis music, such as In the South, which portrayed foreign landscapes. As Michael Allis has shown, such representationsfrequently drew on a shared ‘imaginative topography’, a network of tropes and rhetorical forms commonly used tounderstand and assimilate the foreign. See Michael Allis, British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in theLong Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2012), 245^89.

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associated with exotic lands, fairies, and the enchantment of dreams or childhood.Many of these experiences and fantasies can be found in Sea Pictures, particularly in‘Sea Slumber-Song’ and ‘Where Corals Lie’. But by combining these tropes across thesong cycle, Elgar also invested them with a new layer of meaning. Specifically, in SeaPictures, these themes all participate in the expression of a well-known Elgarian pre-occupation: an escapist yearning for idealized worlds and states of being that lie justbeyond the realm of everyday experience.52

This longing occurs even in those songs that are not explicitly concerned with theocean’s depths. In the cycle’s ordering, ‘Sea Slumber-Song’ and ‘Where Corals Lie’ areseparated by two C major songs that emphasize lighter, more ‘positive’ or ‘healthy’types of yearning for escape through a reliance on spatial metaphors of surfaces andheights. ‘In Haven’, a setting of a poem by Alice Elgar, presents love (rather than theocean’s depths) as a space apart from the world:

Closely let me hold thy hand,Storms are sweeping sea and land;Love alone will stand.

Closely cling, for waves beat fast,Foam-flakes cloud the hurrying blast;Love alone will last.

EX. 4. ‘Where Corals Lie’, piano and vocal score, bb. 33^6

52 For more detailed explorations of this theme, see Matthew Riley, Edward Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination (Cam-bridge, 2007); idem, ‘Elgar the Escapist?’; Christopher Mark, ‘Elgar and the Idyllic: ‘‘By the Wayside’’ and otherPerspectives’, in J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Julian Rushton (eds.), Elgar Studies (Cambridge, 2007), 78^98; and JamesHepokoski, ‘Gaudery, Romance, and the ‘‘Welsh Tune’’: Introduction and Allegro, op. 47’, in Elgar Studies, 135^71.

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Kiss my lips, and softly say:‘Joy, sea-swept, may fade to-day;Love alone will stay.’

The accompaniment represents the gentle lapping of waves (the sea in question is asunny Mediterranean one, as indicated by the subtitle, ‘Capri’), and its musical worldis remarkably flattened when compared with other songs of the cycle: melodic linesfall in a narrow range, there are no extremes of register, and no dramatic descentsinto the depths.53 Furthermore, in contrast to the tonal instability of the first song, this

EX. 5. ‘Where Corals Lie’, piano and vocal score, bb. 44^51

53 The texture here is also remarkably light and transparent, lacking the vertical spaciousness found in several ofthe other songs.

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song never strays from an almost completely diatonic C major tonality. The sea hereseems to represent the threatening vicissitudes of life, and the song’s ‘haven’ isachieved by remaining on the surface, buoyed by gentle waves, and avoiding the deeps.The third song, a setting of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem, is similarly con-

cerned with higher realities apart from the everyday, but in this case escape isachieved through ecstatic spiritual transcendence:

The ship went on with solemn face:To meet the darkness on the deep,

The solemn ship went onward.I bowed down weary in the place;For parting tears and present sleep

Had weighed mine eyelids downward.The new sight, the new wondrous sight!The waters around me, turbulent,

The skies, impassive o’er me,Calm in a moonless, sunless light,As glorified by even the intent

Of holding the day glory!Love me, sweet friends, this sabbath day.The sea sings round me while ye roll

Afar the hymn, unaltered,And kneel, where once I knelt to pray,And bless me deeper in your soul

Because your voice has faltered.And though this sabbath comes to meWithout the stole' d minister,

And chanting congregation,God’s Spirit shall give comfort. HeWho brooded soft on waters drear,

Creator on creation.He shall assist me to look higher,Where keep the saints, with harp and song,

An endless sabbath morningAnd, on that sea commixed with fire,Oft drop their eyelids raised too long

To the full Godhead’s burning.

Significantly, Browning’s poem opens with metaphors of sinking, descent, depth, andslumber (‘the darkness on the deep’, bowing down with weariness, and eyes weighteddownward with tears and sleep). Elgar responded to these images with the ‘slumber-song’ motif from the first song of the cycle, which appears once more in low-reachingconsecutive octaves in bars 5^6 (Ex. 6). For the description of drooping eyelids, begin-ning at bar 13, this motif itself (now in consecutive sixths) begins to sink lower, and itreturns throughout the song. Unlike in ‘Sea Slumber-Song’, however, this musical ideafunctions here not necessarily as signifier of underwater immersion, but rather as aconstant reminder of the ocean’s depths extending beneath the ship.In the first stanza, however, these musical ideas are set in juxtaposition to a steeply

rising ‘chorale’ motif (bb. 1^2, 17^18), and, indeed, the main expressive trajectory ofthe song seems to be concerned with the rejection of the deeps for the heights of spiritu-

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ality. The crucial turning point comes with the lines ‘He who brooded soft on watersdrear, Creator on creation’, referring to Genesis 1:2: ‘The earth was formless and void,and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving overthe surface of the waters.’ Fittingly, these lines are sung over the sinking ‘depth’ motif,and yet this vision of the Spirit brooding on or over the deeps ultimately inspires a reso-lution to ‘look higher’ towards the saints and God above. Once more, Elgar seems tohave responded vividly to these spatial metaphors. In the final stanza, he decisivelyabandoned the ‘Slumber-Song’ material in favour of the rising chorale motif and othermusical material (including the opening wave figure from ‘Sea Slumber-Song’, begin-ning at b. 75), which is treated via rising sequences (Ex. 7). Eventually, the chorale

EX. 6. ‘Sabbath Morning at Sea’, piano and vocal score, bb. 1^18

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motif builds to a triumphant ending in which the singer soars to a penultimate highg00ça fitting counterpart to the low g in the first song.And yet, ultimately, it is the allure of the deepsçand the more ambiguous forms of

escapism that they representçthat win out over love and spirituality, surfaces and

EX. 7. ‘Sabbath Morning at Sea’, piano and vocal score, bb. 75^85

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heights, in this cycle. Immediately after the triumphant C major climax of ‘SabbathMorning’, love (and the appeal of heights and surfaces) is undermined by twodescents at the beginning of ‘Where Corals Lie’: a tonal fall from C major to Bminor, and a two-octave melodic descent, as described above. That the allure of thesedeeps ultimately proves most appealing is evident from the final lines of the song:‘Thy lips are like a sunset glow, / Thy smile is like a morning sky, / Yet leave me,leave me, let me go / And see the land where corals lie.’The final song of the cycle, a setting of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s ‘The Swimmer’,

seems to emphasize further this triumph of the depths over love and God, endingwith a fantasy of dwelling in total submersionçand oblivionçin the ocean.54 Itsstormy ocean scene opens with a gesture that ‘descends through four octaves, asthough into the depths of the ocean’, according to a programme note for a performanceby Elgar and Clara Butt on 10 May 1900.55 The storm scene provides the backgroundfor a meditation on lost love, and with it a nostalgic yearning for a prelapsarian stateof wholeness in which ‘God surely loved us a little’. This idealized past is linked poetic-ally with the more bright and dazzling aspects of the sea:

Love! when we wandered here together,Hand in hand through the sparkling weather,From the heights and hollows of fern and heather,God surely loved us a little then.

The skies were fairer and shores were firmerçThe blue sea over the bright sand roll’d;

Babble and prattle, and ripple and murmur,Sheen of silver and glamour of gold.

Fittingly, Elgar associated these lines with imagery from‘Sea Slumber-Song’ and ‘WhereCorals Lie’ that had accompanied depictions of the sea as an enchanted, alluring, andremote world. The words ‘fern and heather’ are accompanied by a quotation of thecaptivating instrumental ‘arabesque’ melody from ‘Where Corals Lie’, and the line ‘Godsurely loved us a little then’ is set to the descending sequence that had set the lines ‘Farthe rapid fancies fly . . . to the land where corals lie’ (Ex. 8). The final note of thatmelody elides with the beginning of the theme from ‘Sea Slumber-Song’ that hadaccompanied the description of an enchanted island (‘Isles in elfin light, Dream, therocks and caves, Lulled by whispering waves . . . .’) for the line ‘The skies were fairerand [the] shores were firmer’. Through these musical associations, love and closeness toGod are linked with a form of sea escape that involves alluring fantasy worlds, far fromthe everyday, beckoning with promises of beauty and difference.But in ‘The Swimmer’, love is revealed as fleeting, as is the idyllic vision of dwelling

in God’s love. Instead, these give way to fantasies of a more immediate, bodily, and per-manent form of escape. After returning to the storm scene, the poetic subject fixateson the ocean’s powerful waves:

O, brave white horses! you gather and gallop,The storm sprite loosens the gusty reins;

54 The original key for this song was E, the same key as the opening ‘Sea Slumber-Song’; Elgar probablytransposed it down to D to accommodate Clara Butt’s range. See Rushton, Elgar Complete Edition, xiv, p. vii.

55 The performance was given at the Philharmonic Society; the programme, along with others, is in the collectionat the Elgar Birthplace Museum.

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EX. 8. ‘The Swimmer’, piano and vocal score, bb. 48^62

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Now the stoutest ship were the frailest shallopIn your hollow backs, on your high-arched manes.I would ride as never a man has riddenIn your sleepy, swirling surges hidden;To gulfs foreshadow’d through strifes forbidden,Where no light wearies and no love wanes.

The word ‘gulf ’ here refers to a deep chasm or abyss, a meaning that becomes clearwhen these stanzas are read in the context of omitted lines from earlier in Gordon’spoem:

I would that with sleepy, soft embracesThe sea would fold me ^ would find me rest,In luminous shades of her secret placesIn depths where her marvels are manifest;So the earth beneath her should not discoverMy hidden couch ^ nor the heaven above her Âs a strong love shielding a weary lover,I would have her shield me with shining breast.

Interestingly, Elgar may not have had access to these additional lines, as his sourceseems to have been an anthology that presented an abridged version of the poem,omitting these stanzas.56 Nevertheless, he responded to the image of deep ‘gulfs’ withfitting musical symbolism: the ‘slumber-song’ motif from earlier in the cycle appearsin the low orchestra precisely under the words ‘gulfs foreshadow’d through strifesforbidden’. The connection is clear. Here and in the Sea-Mother’s lullaby in the firstsong, the lyrics describe the deep sea as a remote and dark realm where one can findpeace, nothingness, and oblivion. Indeed, in this final song the nihilistic implicationsof this fantasy are made more explicit: the poet yearns to throw himself into themighty ocean’s depths and there, presumably through drowning, finally achieve astate of peaceful unconsciousness.57

But have we really entered those depths at the end of this song? While the low or-chestra continues to allude to these depths, filling in the vertical space beneath thesinger and her melody with the familiar dark lullaby, the singer and melodic instru-ments continue to toss and twirl in sequential wave figures. In fact, wave motifs are aconsistent feature in Elgar’s setting of this poem. The lines ‘O, brave white horses!’ areset to a motive (labelled x in Ex. 9(a)) that, when repeated in a rising sequence, resem-bles overlapping arched waves. This is followed by another wave motif (labelled y inEx. 9(b)) that accompanies the lines beginning ‘Now the stoutest ship . . . ’. Here thewave contour is the combined effect of the vocal line and accompaniment, and it isrepeated a step higher at bar 108. Thus while the lullaby motif hints at ‘gulfs fore-shadow’d through strifes forbidden, Where no light wearies and no love wanes’, theupper textureçthe part that contains the speaking ‘voice’ of the cycleçcontinues to‘ride as never man has ridden, In your sleepy, swirling surges hidden’. Indeed, the

56 Sea-Music: An Anthology of Poems, ed. Sharp. For more on this anthology, see above, n. 5. Elgar’s use of Sea-Music as asource also resolves one of the enduring questions about his setting of The Swimmer: the reason for his replacement ofthe word ‘straits’ in the original poem with ‘strifes’. Sea-Music, in what must have been an error, had also printed thepoem with the word ‘strifes’.

57 When Elgar set this poem in 1899, it was well known that Adam Lindsay Gordon had taken his own life, a bio-graphical detail that has inevitably influenced the reception of the poem.

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singer’s final gesture is to ride a crest up to an unprecedented high a00, before the orches-tra finishes the cycle triumphantly in D major (see Ex. 9(c)).

SEA BATHING, SWIMMING, AND AQUATIC IMMERSION

In its final section, then, ‘The Swimmer’ describes a form of escape that is achieved byimmersing oneself bodily in the powerful forces of the ocean. This way of talkingabout and experiencing the sea was indebted to another important development inVictorian culture: the growing popularity of the seaside holiday. In Elgar’s time, thepractice of vacationing at the seashore had been around for well over a hundredyears. But by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, what had been a predomin-

EX. 9. ‘The Swimmer’, piano and vocal score: (a) bb. 96^8; (b) bb. 106^9; (c) bb. 118^28

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antly upper-class ritual had spread to nearly all levels of society, aided by the creationof direct railway routes from urban centres to popular coastal resort towns such asBrighton, Bournemouth, and Newquay.58 Similarly, the practice of bathing in theocean had evolved into a widespread activity. While early seaside resort culture hadfocused on sea bathing as a cure for wealthy invalids (who would be repeatedlydunked into the frigid water, and often held underneath for a limited time by profes-

EX. 9. Continued

58 JohnWalton,The English Seaside Resort: A Social History, 1750^1914 (Leicester, 1983), 2^3. Also see John Gillis,TheHuman Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago, 2012), 143^9.

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sional bathing attendants), by the later nineteenth century bathing was not nearly sobrutal, nor was it limited to convalescents.59

Nevertheless, belief in the salubrious effects of total immersion in seawater remainedstrong. Instructions to bathers who wanted to achieve the most benefit from thisactivity emphasized the importance of a quick and decisive entrance from the bathingmachine (a carriage-like contraption that wheeled bathers into the ocean) into thewater, in order to achieve the maximum shock to one’s nerves. It was also consideredbeneficial to immerse one’s entire body, including the head, in the water, and to allowoneself to be submerged, and even briefly overcome, by the rolling waves.60 Such an ex-perience was thought to invigorate the bather, toughening and strengthening his orher body and mind.61 As such, bathing was particularly beneficial to intellectuals andsufferers from nervous ailments. The London Standard declared:

There is nothing more exhilarating and refreshing to a healthy person than sea bathing. Nowonder then that its charms have been celebrated by poets and prose writers, and that morethan one famous man has left on record his appreciation of a ‘dip in the sea’. . . . It is indeednot surprising that men who used their brains actively and constantlyçsuch, for instance, asDickensçshould declare their obligations to sea bathing when we remember how valuablethe stimulus it affords is to all who are overworked, and whose constitutions, to use thecommon phrase, need a fillip.62

The reasoning here was that immersion in seawater could take one ‘out of oneself ’ to abodily and mental state that was temporarily free of everyday concerns.But as historians of the seaside have noted, the Romantic generation of poets was in-

strumental in assigning meanings to swimming that went beyond its health effects, es-sentially ‘inventing’ swimming as a recreational activity that could be a source ofpleasure, terror, and spiritual edification. In the process, they discovered an entirelynew range of physical sensations and ways of experiencing the body.63 The classicaccount of swimming in the English Romantic literary tradition is located at the endof Childe Harold, in which Byron describes immersion in the sea as an escape fromsociety and a chance to mingle with the universe:64

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joyOf youthful sports was on thy breast to beBorne like thy bubbles, onward: from a boyI wantoned with thy breakers ^ they to meWere a delight; and if the freshening seaMade them a terror ^ ’twas a pleasing fear,

59 Alain Corbin,The Lure of the Sea:The Discovery of the Seaside in theWesternWorld, 1750^1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps(NewYork, 1994), 73^75.

60 For example, an article on ‘Sea Bathing’ in the London Standard (23 Aug. 1877) stated that ‘The best way [to enterthe water] is undoubtedly to take a header if the depth of the water and your own position allow of it; and again thereason is clear, for the plunge gives you the maximum of shock and of consequent reaction. But as a good manypeople are timid, and cannot summon up courage to enter the water this way, they have to walk into it, in whichcase they ought to take the first opportunity of ducking the head and the whole body.’ The same article particularlyrecommended bathing when waves are strong, as ‘each recurrent body of water repeats on a small scale the originalshock, and so does good.’

61 For a summary of the development of medical thinking on the health benefits of sea bathing, see Corbin,The Lureof the Sea, 57^72.

62 ‘Sea Bathing’, London Daily Standard (23 Aug. 1877).63 Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker,The Beach:The History of Paradise on Earth (NewYork, 1998), 96.64 See Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Chicago, 1900), Canto Four, Stanza 184 (p. 286).

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For I was as it were a child of theeAnd trusted to thy billows far and near,And laid my hand upon thy mane ^ as I do here.

Later generations of poets would elaborate on Byron’s characterization of the experi-ence of swimming as immersion in the currents of something vast and powerful. Forexample, in his epic poem Tristram of Lyonesse, Algernon Swinburne included a scenein which the medieval knight throws himself into the ocean for a final ecstatic swimbefore heading into the battle that ultimately kills him. Alone at dawn, Tristramswims further and further from the shore,

. . . and stillDelight within him waxed with quickening willMore smooth and strong and perfect as a flameThat springs and spreads, till each glad limb becameA note of rapture in the tune of life,Live music mild and keen as sleep and strife:Till the sweet change that bids the sense grow sureOf deeper depth and purity more pureWrapped him and lapped him round with clearer cold . . . .

Here, swimming provides a deliverance from one state of being into another. In thislatter state, one is released from gravity and experiences ease and freedom ofmovement; in turn, this allows a sense of oneness with something deeper and ‘morepure’ that may only be intimated while in a more mundane, earthbound state. Swin-burne’s real-life descriptions of swimming mirrored this poetic description of immer-sion in water. In 1889, he wrote to his sister of his own transcendent experienceswimming off the coast of Sussex in November:

I ran like a boy, tore off my clothes, and hurled myself into the water. And it was but for a fewminutes ^ but I was in Heaven! The whole sea was literally golden as well as green ^ it wasliquid and living sunlight in which one lived and moved and had one’s being. And to feelthat in deep water is to feel ^ as long as one is swimming out, if only for a minute or two âs if one was in another world of life, and one far more glorious than even Dante everdreamed of in his paradise.65

Like the seaside holiday itself, this type of experienceçin which swimming becamea way to escape the everyday and live and move in harmony with existence or lifeitself, experiencing a mental and physical state of graceçgradually entered main-stream consciousness over the course of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Elgar’s own ex-perience of bathing and the seaside may hint at some of these themes. Elgar, ofcourse, has most often been associated with the pastoral countryside aroundWorcester-shire, a landscape defined by hilly expanses and the gently flowing Severn River.66

Yet he took several seaside holidays during his lifetime, including his honeymoon withAlice on the Isle of Wight (a later comment on a diary entry from that time recalled

65 Algernon Swinburne, letter (11 Nov. 1889), quoted in Algernon Charles Swinburne: Personal Recollections by his Cousin,Mrs. Disney Leith, with Extracts from Some of his Private Letters (New York, 1917), 182. In this account, Swinburne’sallusion to Acts 17: 28 (‘For in Him we live and move and have our being’) implies that this is akin to a state ofdivinity or spiritual transcendence, a sensation of moving ‘in’ God.

66 On the extent of Elgar’s identification with this landscape in popular and biographical accounts, see MatthewRiley, ‘Rustling Reeds and Lofty Pines: Elgar and the Music of Nature’, 19th-Century Music, 26 (2002), 155^77.

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‘Had to wade, Kissed her wet foot. She remembered this the week she died.’).67 Thefullest account of Elgar’s experience of the sea comes from Rosa Burley. In 1901, shehad taken a house at theWelsh seaside village of Llangranog, and invited Elgar (whowas in a mood of ‘black depression’) to join her and her family.68 She described howthey fashioned a bathing suit for him out of an old pair of pyjamas, and how thereafter‘we were in and out of the water all day. . . .Edward was quite unrecognizableçheshouted with glee and played about like a little boy’.69 Elsewhere, she wrote that ‘thechildren, with whom he made great friends, laughed and danced around him whenhe ventured into the water’.70

And yet, escape through bathing into these joyful states of wholeness and ease inevit-ably contained hints of danger. Swimming was a new form of recreation in the nine-teenth century, and drowning remained a tragically common outcome as people tookto swimming out from shore in increasing numbers. Indeed, it was precisely the ‘pure’sensations of harmony and well-being that could lull an inexperienced bather into afalse sense of security in the ocean. Inspired by public safety concerns, the LondonStandard printed a cautionary tale in 1881 about a fictional young man on the firstmorning of his seaside holiday, so wrapped up in the glorious sensations of his firstswim that he nearly drowns:

To let a few of those gentle breakers, curling over in foam on the shallow sand, roll above thehead, would sweep away not only bodily languor, but all the cobwebs which fatiguingmonths of mental effort have stretched around the mind. It is only to plunge in and swim outto be at once revived. . . . All the old sense of buoyant joy returns . . .he feels that he canswim as well as ever. . . . As the tide rises the waves double in size, and far from shore he feelshimself lifted up on the rolling billow, but dives into the hollow and is again hoisted on thecoming ridge. The strength of the sea seems to pass under in those deep heaves and to fill theframe with vigour. . . . It is so delicious that he becomes unconscious of all but motion.71

67 Diary entry, 14 May 1889. Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham.68 In the Elgar literature, this seaside holiday is famous for the role it played in the genesis of the ‘Welsh tune’ in his

Introduction and Allegro, Op. 47. This melody has long been interpreted as an emblem of nostalgia or yearning for amore natural or peaceful state of wholeness or simplicity: Burley described its origins as follows: ‘We were on theseashore when we heard a sound of distant singing. At first we did not realize where it came from but presentlynoticed a group of people, on the hillside across the bay. At that distance no melodic line could be identified. . . .Thesinging heard in this way had a strangely ethereal beauty which deeply impressed us both.’ Rosa Burley, EdwardElgar: Record of a Friendship (London, 1972), 155. On the one hand, Burley’s account seems to emphasize distance; themelody floats across the bay from afar, and can only be grasped imperfectly. And yet, in the overall context of heraccount of the holiday, the state of being in which Elgar encounters this music is not that of an alienated modernartist (in a mood of ‘black depression’) but rather of one who is immersed in this world in a very real (if temporary)way, through his experience of the seaside holiday, his interactions with the Welsh people and the children inBurley’s family, and, of course, through the activity of repeatedly bathing in the ocean. These experiences seem tocreate the innocent sense of physical release, well-being, and wholeness that Burley implicitly associates with themelody itself. Notably, Burley’s account contrasts with Elgar’s own description of the melody’s origins, in which hewas situated alone: ‘On a cliff, between the blue sea and blue sky, thinking out my theme, there came up to me thesound of singing.’ As James Hepokoski has pointed out, Elgar’s account is much more indebted to the Romantictrope of the melancholy modern artist positioned above the naive or natural world, a world from which he has beenexiled. See Hepokoski, ‘Gaudery, Romance, and the ‘‘Welsh Tune’’’, 142.

69 Rosa Burley provided two accounts of this holiday; they agree on the broad outlines of her description but differin language and some minor details. This quotation is from Burley, Edward Elgar, 155. The second source for thisaccount is unpublished notes by Rosa Burley, reproduced in Letters to Nimrod: Edward Elgar to August Jaeger, 1897^1908,ed. Percy M. Young (London, 1965), 140^2.

70 Letters to Nimrod, 142.71 ‘Sea Bathing’,The London Standard (25 Aug. 1881).

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Thankfully, as the swimmer is increasingly overwhelmed by the waves and begins tosink under, he is rescued by a passing fishing boat. The article concluded with a discus-sion of swimming’s dangers, and suggested sensible precautions against drowning.Yet for some bathers, the sensations attendant on swimming might actually inspire a

desire to dwell in such a state more permanentlyçto swim out and never come back.In Swinburne’s account of his plunge into the English Channel, the feeling of being‘in another world of life’ lasted only as long as he was swimming out. The poetMatthew Arnold described this feeling more specifically when he recounted a visit tothe Mediterranean bay where Shelley had drowned. Arnold hired a boat to row himoffshore, dove into the water, and found himself in such a pure and happy state thathe was reluctant to surface; it was difficult, he wrote, to ‘ever bring one’s head up outof it’.72

The various meanings assigned to swimming and bathing in Victorian culture castnew light on the motion in and out of the ocean’s depths in Sea Pictures. Some of thepositive associations with swimmingçthe sensations it afforded of release, wholeness,and harmonyçseem to fit perfectly into the broader Elgarian discourse of escapism,with its yearning for better states that exist beyond the everyday.73 However, the linger-ing association of swimming with drowning adds additional resonances to the unchar-acteristically dark or ambiguous nature of the deep-water ‘escapes’ in Sea Pictures. Thisis particularly true of ‘the Swimmer’, the final song of the cycle, which ends with afantasy of permanent subjective and bodily escape into the ocean’s deepest abysses.

ELGARIAN AMBIVALENCE

In this light, it is worth returning to the final bars of ‘The Swimmer’: to what extentdoes Elgar’s music realize the poem’s description of plunging into the ocean andriding to ‘gulfs foreshadow’d through strifes forbidden,Where no light wearies and nolove wanes’? As discussed above, Elgar responded to these lines with the ‘slumber-song’ motif from the cycle’s first songça theme that, across the cycle, has beenassociated with the ocean’s depths, and in ‘Sea Slumber-Song’ had implied underwaterimmersion. And yet, at the same time, other musical rhetoric seems to undermine thenihilistic allure of these depths. Over and above the ‘slumber-song’, the voice tossesand turns in rising wave-figure sequences, eventually climbing to a high a00 in bar 125(see Ex. 9(c) above). Furthermore, the voice’s final triumphant 5̂-1̂ gesture harks backto the ending of ‘Sabbath Morning at Sea’ (bb. 83^4; Ex. 7 above), a moment thathad affirmed being on (rather than in) the water and turning one’s gaze upward tothe heavens rather than downward into the depths. Indeed, from the moment the a00

falls to the tonic d00 in bar 127, the ‘slumber-song’motif disappears from‘The Swimmer’.

72 Quoted in Lencek and Bosker,The Beach, 104.73 Matthew Riley’s investigation of the musical rhetoric that accompanies many Elgarian moments of release or

escape certainly suggests such a connection. As Riley shows, moments in Elgar’s music such as pastoral interludes,nostalgic thematic reminiscence, moments of ‘withdrawal’ to a more introspective realm, and abrupt tonal shifts,share several common features: ‘On the one hand, there is a certain relaxation; on the other, suspense, like aholding of the breath. The relaxation is partly rhythmic . . . and partly the result of the harmonic shift. . . .Theharmonic logic that might otherwise link the music’s past and present and point on to its future is suspended. For amoment, as it were, things seem easy: a weight is lifted; the pressure of directed motion is released . . .upward leapsat the moments of tonal shift, followed by unhurried descents, accelerating only gradually, present unmistakableimages of floating.’ Recognizing that such descriptions rely heavily on metaphors of weight and motion, Rileyargues that these moments represent an ‘escape of the body’, a glimpse of what he terms (quoting from H. G. Wells’sHistory of Mr. Polly) ‘pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind’. In fact, much of the language employed inhis description (‘suspension’, ‘holding of the breath’, ‘weight lifted’, ‘pressure released’, and ‘floating’) could evenmore specifically describe an experience of immersion inçor beneathçthe water. Riley, ‘Elgar the Escapist?’, 53.

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One reading of these bars, then, might be that Elgar’s music deliberately mitigatesthe pessimism of the poem’s conclusion; unable ultimately to commit to the ocean’sdepths (with their dark implications of achieving oblivion through drowning), thecycle ends with an affirmative gesture evocative of the third song’s spiritual heights.However, for a number of reasons, this moment rings hollow. First, the climactic higha00 and the build-up preceding it occur to the words ‘no love’, creating an odd disson-ance between poetic meaning and musical rhetoric. Indeed, the words ‘no love’ are par-ticularly ironic given that in ‘Sabbath Morning’, the equivalent 5̂-1̂ gesture hadaccompanied descriptions of God’s love: a listener familiar with the cycle will experi-ence this moment with ‘the full godhead’s burning’ still ringing in her or his ears. Fur-thermore, as the singer reaches her high a00, the bottom drops out of the orchestraltexture as the drone on D and A in the low instruments disappears, and the accom-panying sonorities offer little harmonic support: the dominant-seventh chordoscillating with chromatic auxiliary notes lacks its third, and the resulting sonority(A-E-G) has a decidedly empty sound, especially when it is sustained with a fermatain bar 126. It might be argued that this was simply an attempt to allow the voice tofloat free in a final moment of triumph, but if this was the case, it seems that ClaraButt found it to be ineffective. In a letter to Elgar dated ‘Friday’, she wrote:

I have asked the band parts of Sea-Pictures to be sent you as I should like you to be kind &alter the bars where I don’t sing now in The Swimmer ^ put a lot of stuff into it & more ifyou can directly I come off the top A & last note ^ it will make a huge effect.74

Elgar seems not to have made any changes in response to this request.75

Finally, the voice’s last 5̂-1̂ gesture implies an important harmonic point of arrivalça final resolution to a long-awaited tonic. But this is not prepared by any harmonictension or momentum. Instead, for the preceding eight bars there has been a tonicpedal (beginning at the words ‘gulfs foreshadow’d’ in b. 118). Harmonic closure, inother words, has already been achieved, making the inflated rhetoric and sense ofarrival in the voice’s final ‘cadence’ sound strangely redundant. Indeed, it might evenbe argued that it is the presence of the ‘slumber-song’ motif, with its harmonic stasis,in bars 118^25 that makes it impossible to utter that final 5̂-1̂ gesture with realconviction.Thus while Elgar seems to retreat from the depths at the end of this song, alternative

courses (escape through spiritual revelation, or more generally, triumphant gestures ofaffirmation befitting a ‘grand’ conclusion to the cycle) are rendered disappointing inthe wake of such compelling but unsettling possibilities. Such an interpretation reson-ates with recent studies of Elgarian hermeneutics, which have shown how in many ofElgar’s works, glimpses or intimations of better worlds are alluring yet unsustainable,and inevitably give way to the return of more prosaic realities. In turn, framing realitiesare rarely elevated through contact with the ‘beyond’; although they ultimately

74 As Julian Rushton notes, the reference to ‘band parts’ implies that this letter was sent after a rehearsal or per-formance. There is no part where the singer is silent in the bars preceding the high a00, and it seems unlikely thatClara Butt would have concerned herself with the short orchestral conclusion following that moment. It would makesense, though, if this letter came after a rehearsal and Butt was referring to parts where she marked her part or wassilent instead of singing full voiceça likely scenario for the climactic moment on the high a00. See Rushton, ElgarComplete Edition, xiv. p. vii. The letter can be found in Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: Letters of a Lifetime(Oxford, 1990), 79.

75 Rushton, Elgar Complete Edition, xiv, p. vii.

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prevail, they are somehow diminished.76 Indeed, J. P. E. Harper-Scott has argued thatthe principle of non-reconciliation is at the heart of Elgar’s characteristically ‘modern’world-view. In contrast with Romantic expressive trajectories, which tended to empha-size the synthesizing of opposites and narratives of self-determination, Elgar’s musicoften seems to posit that ‘human beings are either too scared to make self-definingchoices or else get so bound up with the needs and demands of individual others orthe expectations of society as a whole that they fail to break free and find themselves’.77

We are left in the subjunctive mood: ‘I would ride . . . ’.What links the various songs, then, is not merely sea imagery and thematic reminis-

cences, nor is it only a general theme of escapism. It is also an insistent question: whateffect will these glimpses of escape have on musical and expressive outcomes? Theanswer is different in each song, and in these outcomes it is possible to discern a loosenarrative across the cycle. In ‘Sea Slumber-Song’, the final collapse to E minor showsa framing reality that has been discredited through contact with the ocean’s alluring al-ternatives. ‘In Haven’ is a true ‘haven’ in the context of the cycle, as its simplediatonicism and focus on musical surfaces propose love as an escape from the seaçand from the various types of yearning for escape that occur across the cycle. In‘Sabbath Morning’, yearning reasserts itself and an alternative is offered: spiritualheights as a deliverance from the ocean’s depths. These heights, however, do not last;they are followed by a tonal and rhetorical descent into the fourth song. ‘WhereCorals Lie’ comes closest to granting the depths staying power, as a relaxation into Dmajor towards the end effects a new, transfigured reality in the final bar: a vision of are-enchanted world. ‘The Swimmer’ seems initially to pursue this promise of seaescape, with its musical reminiscences of the first and fourth songs and its poeticemphasis on riding to the ocean’s deepest ‘gulfs’. But this outcome is ultimatelywithdrawn; in a characteristically Elgarian way, commitment to a grand telos isimpossible.

SOUNDING THE OCEAN

As Harper-Scott has argued, however, in Elgar’s music, escapist fantasies are rarelypure idylls. Instead, they are often internally compromised in some way, such thatthey cynically ‘show up the folly’ of the fantasy itself.78 This interpretative frameworkmight also shed light on the nature of the sea escapes offered in this cycle. After all,not only is the yearning for a state of peaceful unconsciousness at the bottom of theocean tinged with nihilism (the sense of release, wholeness, and harmony attendanton aquatic immersion are shadowed by the possibility of death); the allure of thedeeps in other songs’ symbolic frameworks is similarly ambiguous. In ‘Where CoralsLie’, for example, the call of the enchanted, mysterious, and exotic deeps is insistent, in-sidious, and ultimately equivocal.Yet there is something more here. The escapes offered across this cycle fascinate un-

relentingly, and when they are undermined or abandoned, it is not with moderncynicism, but rather with a sense of disquiet or ambivalence. In fact, there is onemore meaning attached to Sea Pictures’ depths that adds additional resonance to theirsingular ambiguity. In ‘Sea Slumber-Song’, the sea allures through music; the sea-mother literally sings her siren call, and the ocean has a ‘sound like violins’ça point

76 Riley, ‘Elgar the Escapist?’, 48.77 Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, 229.78 Ibid. 212.

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that Elgar immediately underscores by having the violins play the opening wave-figureat that moment. ‘Where Corals Lie’ makes the connection between music and theocean’s depths even more explicit. The first line of the poem describes how ‘the deepshave music soft and low’, and once more, Elgar’s music emphasizes this symbolism:an alluring motif repeatedly descends into the depths, and in repeated musical inter-ludes the voice falls silent, apparently to listen to the mysterious music of the deeps.79

It was a common trope in Victorian poetry to refer to the ocean in terms of musicalsound. The anthology of sea poetry from which Elgar most likely drew the poems byRichard Garnett and Adam Lindsay Gordon, for example, was entitled Sea-Music,and numerous poems in the anthology described the ocean’s mysterious depths assound.80 Often this went beyond the tangible sense of the noise made by waves, andinstead spoke to an idea that the sea’s vast depths and caverns are sonorous, echoingwith a thundering or otherworldly music.81 Similarly, in the swimming passage fromSwinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse, quoted above, bathing in the ocean is described interms of a musical metaphor: immersed in water, Tristram’s limbs become ‘notes’ inthe ‘tune of life’.Just as the ocean’s depths could engulf with musical sound, music could be

experienced in terms of ‘oceanic’ sensations such as depth and immersion. In a poementitled Beethoven, Roden Noel reimagined the occasion of Beethoven conducting thepremiere of his Ninth Symphony in terms of watery metaphors: tides, engulfment,and ‘imperial surges’ overwhelm the audience, transporting it to ‘alien realms, andhalls of ancient awe’:

The mage of music, deaf to outward soundRehearsing mighty harmonies within,Waved his light wand; the full aerial tidesEbbed billowing to rear of him, o’erwhelmedAll listening auditors, engulphed, and sweptUpon the indomitable, imperial surgeTo alien realms, and halls of ancient awe,Which are the presence-chambers of dim Death . . . 82

79 This musicôcean similitude might be read as yet one more example of a familiar trope: the tendency to hearmusic as nature, or to hear nature ‘speaking’ through Elgar’s music. This theme often manifested itself in equationsof music with moving air or wind, a comparison that Elgar himself was known to make, as in his famous remark:‘there is music in the air, music all around us, and ^ you ^ simply ^ simply take as much as you require!’ (EdwardElgar, interview with R. J. Buckley, reproduced in Christopher Redwood (ed.), An Elgar Companion (Ashbourne,1982), 112.) Indeed, it overlaps in some ways with the air- or wind-music that Riley has shown as a recurring themein Elgar’s music and its reception. See Riley, ‘Rustling Reeds and Lofty Pines’, 155^77.

80 On this anthology, see n. 5.81 A selection by E. G. A. Holmes, for example, spoke of:

The everlasting thunder of the deep,And there is never silence on that shore Âlike in storm and calm foam-fringes girdIts desolation, and the Atlantic’s roarMakes a mighty music. Though the sea be stirredBy scarce a breath of breeze, yet evermoreThe sands are whitened, and the thunder heard.E. G. A. Holmes, ‘Liscannor Bay’, in Sea-Music: An Anthology of Poems, ed. Sharp, 148.

82 Roden Noel, ‘Beethoven’, in The Collected Poems of Roden Noel, ed. Victoria Buxton (London, 1902), 353^4.

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At the conclusion of the symphony, the deaf Beethoven finally turns to see that theaudience’s applause has become a ‘loud storm’of ‘ocean joy’.83

The early reception and performance history of Sea Pictures hint at a similar type oflistening experience, in which the music itself is equated with the ocean, and theauditor experiences ‘oceanic’ sensations. In response to various features in its text andmusic, some critics noted an impression that ‘immersive’ experiences had played a rolein Elgar’s compositional process. Following a performance on 20 January 1900, forexample, a critic for the Bradford Observer wrote that Elgar had ‘steeped himself in thebrine-breath of the sea, opened his heart to the calling of its mystic voices, chose theverses of those who praised it with a kindred spirit, and set their words with echoingrhythm and sympathetic melody’.84 The composer, in other words, is not imagined asa stationary and detached observer of the ocean; instead, he has allowed himself to besubsumed in, and even penetrated by, it and its music.The visual presentation of Sea Pictures in early performances by Clara Butt may also

have contributed to this impression. In many of her performances of the cycle, Buttdonned an unusual green dress covered by layers of shimmering sequins. This strikingcostume was often mentioned in descriptions of her performances, as it reminded observersof the scales of a fish or a mermaid, or the sparkling green of the ocean itself.85 In perform-ance, the effect could be that the ‘source’ of the music, or the subject-voice of the cycle,was speaking from within the ocean itself, as in this account from the Liverpool Courier:

Miss Clara Butt is an artist in dress as well as in music . . .her dress at the Philharmonic concerton Tuesday was wonderfully in keeping with the cycle of songs she sang, ‘Sea Pictures’. . . . Herdress, which was entirely composed of shimmering sequins, resembled nothing so much as thescales of a fish seen through green sea water, and . . . recalled paintings of mermaids. She was par-ticularly fine in ‘The Swimmer’, and you could almost imagine her breasting the waves, so mar-vellous was the effect of her singing, together with that of her dress.86

Finally, at least one review of the cycle’s premiere described the audience’s reaction interms similar to those that Noel used for his imagined premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth:

[In ‘The Swimmer’] the swinging air in the major is thoroughly nautical in design. Itcarried away the audience, and they doubtless bore the haunting melody away with

83 Ibid. 354.

. . .Drear Silence seems to him to reign; when lo!A touch, at which he turns! the audience,Vast, thronged, innumerous have risen before him!Unhearing the loud storm of their applause,He sees the tumult of their ocean joyThunderously jubilant, in eloquent eyes,And flashing gems, waved kerchiefs, and moved feet!So then the solitary master feelsThe heart-clasp of our infinite human world,And bows rejoicing not to be alone.

84 Bradford Observer (20 Jan. 1900).85 Elgar described Butt’s attire as follows in a letter to Carice: ‘As it was all about the sea she dressed like a mermaid

^ all scales’ (17 Oct. 1899. In the Elgar Birthplace Museum collection). Manchester City News described how Butt was‘robed apparently to suggest the green gleaming sea ‘‘where corals lie’’’ (20 Jan. 1900), and the Weekly Dispatchconcurred with Elgar’s description: ‘By the way, she had appropriately attired herself in a glittering, shimmeringgreen that gave her a sort of mermaid appearance’ (12 May 1900).

86 Liverpool Courier (22 Feb. 1900).

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them. . . . Awhiff of the sea pervades each song, and at every bar almost the wash of the wavescan be heard.87

Here, once again, the experience of listening to Elgar’s music is filtered throughimagined and remembered sensations; the audience is not only ‘carried away’ by thesound-ocean, but eventually becomes a watery mass itself, ‘bearing away’ thehaunting melody.These ocean^music equivalencies might encourage us to hear Sea Pictures in terms of

what Daniel Grimley has called ‘immersive audition’, in which the musical environ-ment surrounds, consumes, or overwhelms the listener.88 As we have seen, the cycle’srecurring focus on depth and submersion and its simulated motion in and out of thewaves encourage modes of listening and interpretation that move beyond the trad-itional focus on visuality and distance in Western representations of landscape. Fromfantasies of perfect repose deep under the waves, to transporting dreams of exoticunderwater lands, to repeated simulated motion above and below the ocean’s surface,the cycle re-enacted experiences, discoveries, and motions that were newly experiencedrealities during Elgar’s time. The widespread Victorian experience of bathing andswimming meant that representations of the ocean’s depths could be informed bythese new physical experiences and sensationsçby imagined or remembered move-ments having to do with the ocean.But what were the ultimate implications in this song cycle of experiencing music in

this immersive, oceanic way? Of letting oneself be ‘carried away’ by its tides, or‘steeping’ oneself in its depths, or allowing one’s body and self to become one with itswaves’ ‘tune of life’? Inevitably, the association of music with the ocean evoked afamiliar Romantic discourse in which music’s ‘inner’ content and its retreat from the‘external’ world were described using spatial metaphors of depth. In this discourse, aretreat from the surface to the depthsçin music or in the oceançcould signify anescape to the most inward recesses of an experiencing subject.89 But in Sea Pictures theambiguous retreat into the depths is not a departure from the physico-sensory world.Instead, it presents bodily and subjective escapes as interdependent; it is throughphysical submersion that escapes to pure and authentic states are achieved. Further-more, as we have seen, the cycle’s expressive effectiveness was due in part to the audi-ence’s familiarity with such bodily experiences. In addition to the physical experienceof weightlessness, oceanic immersion implied a loss of complete control as one wascaught up in the grip of something more powerful than oneself; such immersion was

87 Norfolk Chronicle and Norwich Gazette (7 Oct. 1899).88 Daniel Grimley, ‘Music, Landscape, Attunement: Listening to Sibelius’s Tapiola’, Journal of the American Musico-

logical Society, 64 (2011), 394^8. Also see HollyWatkins’s contribution to the same colloquy, which outlines the ways inwhich music’s ‘virtual environments’ can be related to actual environments, and suggests how movement and spatialrelations experienced in the world may inform physiological and interpretative responses to musical motion. HollyWatkins, ‘Musical Ecologies of Place and Placeness’, ibid. 404^8.

89 See HollyWatkins, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought, from E.T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (Cam-bridge, 2011), and eadem, ‘From the Mine to the Shrine: The Critical Origins of Musical Depth’, 19th-Century Music, 27(2004), 179^207. In Wagner’s writings on music, for example, the most common metaphor for harmony involved theocean’s depths, which were similarly equated with the infinite depths of the human heart: ‘Man dives into this sea [ofharmony] in order to return once more, refreshed and handsome, to the light of day. His heart feels wondrouslywidened when he peers down into this depth, pregnant with unimaginable possibilities, whose bottom his eye shallnever plumb and whose unfathomability thus fills him with astonishment and presentiments of infinity. It is the depthand infinity of nature itself. . . .This nature is, however, none other than the nature of the human heart itself, whichholds within the feelings of love and longing in their infinite essence . . .’. Richard Wagner, ‘The Artwork of theFuture’, in Gesammelte Schriften, x, ed. Julius Kapp (Leipzig, 1914), 90. Translated inWatkins, Metaphors of Depth, 129.

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also marked by a lingering awareness of danger, risk, and closeness to death. ThroughSea Pictures’ alluring and unsettling ocean, the auditor could be immersed in musicthat was explicitly about the ambiguities of such an immersion.To return full circle to those early performances of Sea Picturesçto consider the cycle

in context, as musical soundçwe might understand the cycle on one level as an enact-ment of personal and cultural ambivalence about the escapes afforded through music.As is well known, in Elgar’s England, music continued to possess an ambiguous statusin respectable society, and numerous anecdotes have shown that he often felt a needto walk a fine line between music’s ambivalent cultural meanings and the socialapproval he so desperately craved.90 After all, music could be assigned a dangerousmoral power and the capacity to lure the unsuspecting away from more ‘healthy’ or‘normative’ ways of being, and in particular away from the strict codes of masculinitythat characterized the ideal English gentleman. This was especially true of those typesof music that were seen as overly sensual or emotionally extremeçexactly the kind ofmusic, in other words, that might, like the ocean, ‘carry away’ a listener or cause himto momentarily forget himself.91 To allow oneself to be subsumed by an ocean ofmusic was to court these possibilities. One might dive into this sea and temporarily ex-perience a state of emotional and physical release, a loss of self-control, access tostrange and wondrous lands, or a descent into the murkiest recesses of one’s psyche.The frisson of disquiet that runs through Sea Pictures stems from its fantasies of non-return; it thematized the possibility that a swimmer might swim out and not turnback, eventually sinking into the depths, never to return to his carefully constructedself and position in the world.

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which Elgar’s Sea Pictures engaged with late-Victorianthought about the ocean and its depths. During the second half of the nineteenthcentury, the deep sea, previously an unknown realm, became the subject of a newwave of scientific exploration. At the same time, the increasing popularity of seasideholidays meant that Victorian beachgoersçthrough therapeutic bathing and recre-ational swimmingçhad begun to associate the ocean with a range of new subjectiveand physical experiences. Throughout the song cycle, spatial tropes of depth, submer-sion, and vertical motion provide a linking thread. In the process, the deep oceanacquires a number of symbolic meanings in dialogue with these emerging scientificand bodily discourses.

90 See Corissa Gould, ‘Aspiring to Manliness: Edward Elgar and the Pressures of Hegemonic Masculinity’, in IanD. Biddle and Kirsten Gibson (eds.), Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (Farnham and Burlington, Vt., 2009),161^82.

91 As Byron Adams has demonstrated, ‘decadent’ and ‘effeminate’ behaviours such as emotional and erotic excess,nervousness, homosexual desires, and hysteria, were all thought to be endemic to the musical temperament. Elgarexpended considerable energy attemptingçwith various degrees of successçto distance his public artistic identityfrom these undesirable associations. See Byron Adams, ‘Elgar’s Later Oratorios: Roman Catholicism, Decadenceand theWagnerian Dialectic of Shame and Grace’, in Grimley and Rushton (eds.),The Cambridge Companion to Elgar,81^105, and ‘The ‘‘Dark Saying’’ of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox’, 19th-Century Music,23 (2000), 218^35. Also see Aidan Thomson’s discussion of the way these values were used by anti-Elgar critics intheir assessments of Elgar’s music in ‘Elgar’s Critical Critics’, in Adams (ed.), Edward Elgar and hisWorld, 193^223.

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Documents

The deeps have music soft and low': Sounding the Ocean in Elgar's Sea Pictures