Variations on a Theme: Baroque and Neoclassical Aesthetics in the St. Cecilia Day Odes of Dryden and Pope

A little more than a decade after John Dryden composed Alexander’s Feast; or The Power of MUSIQUE (1697), and a little more than two decades after the appearance of his cantata, A Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 1687, Alexander Pope wrote his own version of the domesticated Pindaric ode to commemorate the same annual festival. ¹ While Pope’s Ode for Musick, on St. Cecilia’s Day is heavily indebted in form and content to both of Dryden’s adaptations of the classical ode to musical performance, it is not surprising that he chose the earlier, less dramatic poem as his primary model since its apparent lack of “energy and elaboration” would have appealed to his neoclassical sense of decorum and left him greater room for invention. ² In making this observation, however, it is important to note that the seventeenth century did not develop in any comprehensive sense an original poetics of its own to account for the prevailing poetic practice of the age, but for the most part simply handed down the critical formulations of the Renaissance to the eighteenth-century neoclassical poets. Therefore, a careful examination of Pope’s adaptation of Dryden’s A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687 in terms of what he chose to appropriate and what to exclude could shed light on the differences between baroque and neoclassical aesthetics.

Dryden produced his first adaptation of the Pindaric ode entitled A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687 for performance at the fourth annual celebration of the festival commemorating the patron saint of music. Following the practices of earlier composers of these cantata, Dryden drew heavily upon Ben Jonson’s An Ode, a Song for all the Muses. In Celebration of her Majesties birth-day (1630) both in his adoption of the modified ode as a form consistent with the serious and elevated tone of an official occasion, and more specifically in his use of imitative language and aural imagery to suggest the sounds of particular musical instruments. Since the musical element is an integral feature of the lyric, the earliest writers of the St. Cecilia Day odes were able to shape the genre for instrumental and vocal accompaniment, but their efforts to arrive at a tone that was appropriately formal and festive were at best tentative, and led them to combine the lighter subjects and rhythms of the popular catches with the doctrine of musica mundana and the distinctive rhythms of the classical Pindaric ode. ³ Christopher Fishburn’s trial ode, commissioned for the first St. Cecilia Day observance in 1683, was set to music by Henry Purcell, but the libretto reads more like a Prologue welcoming an audience to a Restoration play than a classical ode:

Welcome to all the pleasures that delight Of ev’ry sense the grateful appetite! Hail, great assembly of Appollo’s race! Hail to this happy place, This musical assembly, that seems to be The art of universal harmony! ⁴

In his first encomium musicae to St. Cecilia, Dryden followed the celebratory style developed by his predecessors, Fishburn, Oldham, and Tate, but his treatment of the subject of music is more dramatic, more universal, and more faithful to the poetic conventions and the tone of his Pindaric model. Dryden’s poem captures the complex textual resonances and the impassioned tone of his classical prototypes by similarly exploiting irregular line and stanza lengths and a variable rhyme scheme to accentuate abrupt shifts in form, mood, cadence, and subject matter. In this way, he subordinates the traditional structural elements of poetry—rhyme, meter, rhythm, line and stanza length—to the subjective content, and makes them a function of the emotional texture of the poem. The result is that these poetic resources do not organize the material into recurrent and predictable verse patterns, but rather undermine order by breaking down the poem’s metrical regularity into dynamic, surging rhythms that propel the audience through the successive stanzas and into a consummation that is unmistakably baroque in its fullness and its brilliance. By allowing the...