The Song Cycles of Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head.” by Amanda Jacobs (review)

For me, as long-time editor of Charlotte Smith’s letters and novels, the highlight of the 2017 British Women Writers Association Conference was the world premiere of the complete song cycles based upon her epic Beachy Head (1807).

The project came about in 2014 when Elizabeth Dolan, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University, was doing research on Smith at Chawton House Library in England, where she met Amanda Jacobs, then composing a musical setting for Jane Austen’s household prayers. Intrigued, Dolan invited Jacobs to consider Beachy Head for similar treatment. Jacobs, a classically trained concert pianist turned composer, came on board immediately, and the new team set out to shape the text of Beachy Head into several groupings: “Fancy’s Day Cycle,” “Historical Contemplation Interlude,” “Happiness Cycle,” “Nature Cycle,” “Stranger’s Cycle,” and “Hermit’s Cycle.” Dolan explained this background as part of a brief lecture that preceded the performance.

After absorbing dozens of cutting-edge scholarly papers at the conference, I trekked across campus to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s newly renovated Hill Hall Auditorium. I had no idea what to expect—a state of mind probably shared by my hundred or so fellow attendees. But from Dolan’s introductory lecture and Jacobs’s and Shelley Waite’s first notes, we were rapt.

Remarkably, Jacobs’s score is by turns subtle and dramatic. From the strident, clamorous chords of war to the clash of stormy waves upon the shore in the dark of night, the score matches Smith’s words at every pass, capturing each nuance from her revolutionary protests, to her ballad-like tributes to shepherds and laborers, to her lyrical empathy for young lovers. Motifs follow through and linger. Arpeggios and trills capture our ears. In Waite, Dolan and Jacobs found exactly the right voice to embody and ennoble the poem’s complex emotions—marching in military time in war, grating on injustice, almost weeping with sadness, and ever celebrating the vibrant natural world where Smith found her strength.

Before Waite sang her first note, she was a vision: a column of beauty in a remarkable floor-length cream-colored dress. Her rich mezzo-soprano (opera’s traditional voice for the worldly-wise woman who plays the foil to the soprano ingénue) matched every moment of Jacobs’s composition, wrapping itself around each song cycle, rising to inhabit the anger of the revolutionary scenes, then softening but also enlivening Smith’s pastoral vision. Together, Dolan, Jacobs, and Waite illuminated Smith’s vision, embracing this poem as it represented the new Romantic ethos.

The song-cycle form suits Smith’s material historically as well as emotionally. During her lifetime, but going back centuries, audiences were accustomed to plotless “song cycles,” usually based on a progression of emotions and therefore deeply congruent with Smith’s lyric sensibility. The term “song-cycle” wasn’t coined until 1865, shortly after the career of the form’s most famous practitioner, Robert Schumann. What we see again and again with Smith is that she was deeply grounded in historical forms (her allegiance to the Petrarchan sonnet is one example) but also ahead of her time in introducing a narrative song cycle.

Smith almost singlehandedly reintroduced the sonnet to England, influencing William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and countless others. With The Emigrants (1793) she also wrote a much-quoted revolutionary blank-verse poem. Her posthumously published Beachy Head was an epic undertaking for a dying poet and a bellwether poem for the period. Many of us struggle to teach this unfinished, messy, exquisite poem.

After this premiere, Romanticists and scholars of women authors alike will want a recording of The Song Cycles of “Beachy Head”—in addition to the excerpts and additional resources currently available...