Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce by Gerry Smyth

Author:Gerry Smyth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030612061
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4 IV

Before going on to consider that response in more detail, it will be useful to summarise the novel in which Moore’s Wagnerism is most obviously engaged. Evelyn Innes is a young woman living in the south London suburb of Dulwich with her widowed father; the precise date is unmentioned but the action would appear to take place sometime during the decade before the book’s publication in 1898. Mr. Innes and his daughter are Catholics: he is an instrument maker and a devotee of early modern church music, much in vogue during this period, and represented in the text by composers such as Palestrina and Victoria. The Innes family is modelled to a significant extent on the Dolmetsch family with whom Moore deliberately cultivated an acquaintance as part of his research for the novel. Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) was a French-born musician and instrument maker who spent much of his working life in England and established an instrument-making workshop in Haslemere, Surrey. He was also a leading figure in the revival of interest in early music.4

Evelyn’s deceased mother had been an opera singer, and at the outset of the novel Evelyn is depicted as a good, although untrained, singer. Mr. Innes feels a degree of guilt over this, because he realises that his daughter could be as great a diva as her mother. She comes under the influence of a wealthy middle-aged bachelor, Sir Owen Asher, who visits her father’s workshop to find out more about the early music movement. When he hears Evelyn sing at a religious concert Asher realises that she has the potential to be a successful opera singer—at least, a successful singer of a certain kind of opera: Wagnerian opera, which, as the novel makes abundantly clear, is not at all the same thing.

Evelyn is increasingly conflicted during the opening half of the novel: she is depressed by the curtailed life she leads with her father in the appropriately named suburb of Dulwich, and at the same time dazzled by Asher’s wealth and culture. She loves her father, and realises that a liaison with Asher will compromise the Catholic strictures within which she has been raised. Personal ambition and sexual desire win out over paternal devotion and Catholic morality, however, and she elopes with Asher to Paris to begin her training.

Seven years later Evelyn is an internationally acclaimed Wagnerian diva. She and Asher are back in London where she is engaged to sing the part of Princess Elizabeth in Tannhäuser at Drury Lane. She makes the acquaintance of a young Irish composer named Ulick Dean, a character modelled (at least in the first couple of editions) on W. B. Yeats, with whom Moore had become acquainted and to whom (along with Arthur Symons) the novel is dedicated. Ulick is working on an opera based on the Celtic legend of Grania, the leading role of which he hopes Evelyn will sing. Like Yeats, Ulick is a mystic and an idealist: like Owen he rejects the dogma of organised

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