The Domestic and the Disruptive: A Musical Setting of Tennyson’s Maud

Although critics have recently focused attention on the connections between music and poetry, few have addressed the relationship between Victorian poems and their musical song settings. The increased demand for inexpensive sheet music and pianos caused a proliferation of such settings, and much of the British public may have been more familiar with now-canonical poems through their musical versions than through the silence of the page. Because these songs were so popular and culturally significant, only by examining them can we fully understand the poems that served as their text. Michael William Balfe’s famous 1857 setting of lyric 22 of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s monodrama Maud (1855) provides an example of a setting as “a reading, in the critical as well as the performative sense of the term” (Kramer 127). Although the piece can be played to sound like a naive love song, its dissonances, unexpected harmonies, and constantly shifting tonal centres subtly undercut the speaker’s sense of certainty and sanity, as does the text itself, making the song, like the poem, both participate in and disrupt the sentimental tradition.¹

In this segment of Maud, the speaker praises Maud, a young woman whom he believes promised to him from birth, and entreats her to leave a party for an illicit meeting in her garden. The poem resembles a traditional love lyric in which the speaker invokes the pastoral tradition and extols the beauty of both his beloved and his surroundings:²

Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown.

(1–6)

The speaker’s allusions to flowers and belief in his love’s strength cast the poem as part of the Victorian sentimental and domestic tradition. Balfe’s setting emphasizes this domestic, sentimental quality. It is in a major key and has a gracefully lilting melody (measures 1–11), and its repetition and ornamentation adhere to the generic conventions of the parlour song: the singer repeats the phrase “I am here at the gate alone,” as well as words and phrases such as “come” or “shine out” to dramatize the speaker’s desperation. Balfe also wrote a fermata over the word “gate” to indicate the speaker’s passion and attempts to restrain himself. In a later verse, as Robert Inglesfield points out, the speaker describes Maud as “Queen lily and rose in one” (56), an allusion to the verse in the Song of Solomon (2.1) in which the bride declares, “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys” (qtd. in Inglesfield 122). This allusion conveys the speaker’s belief in his beloved’s transcendent beauty and in the Biblical perfection of their love. To portray this sentiment, the music is marked dolce and pianissimo, directions that when coupled with the harp-like arpeggios in the accompaniment, appear to render this section as the idyllic garden that the Song of Solomon describes.

In the final verse, the speaker breathlessly expresses his excitement at Maud’s arrival, the anapests echoing his pounding heart:

She is coming, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed.

(68–71)

Balfe’s setting again performs the speaker’s emotions through a sequence of dissonances followed by resolution (measures 72–80). This pattern, marked accelerando, creates the sense of excitement and forward momentum the speaker feels, and the setting ends on a triumphant cadence that expresses joy at the lovers’ impending union.

Even the circumstances in which this song would be performed emphasize a sentimental interpretation: as Derek Scott has observed, parlour songs, also known as drawing-room ballads, encompassed many different styles designed for performance in the middle-class home. They were frequently dismissed as sentimental because of their focus on love, gardens, and other such domestic themes (Metropolis 65). As the piano became the “pre-eminent bourgeois instrument,” its appearance...