Notes

Notes 58.4 (2002) 942-944

Music Review

The Sea-Fairies, Opus 59

The Sea-Fairies, Opus 59: A Cantata for Women's Voices, Soli, and Accompaniment

Amy Beach. The Sea-Fairies, Opus 59. Edited by Andrew Thomas Kuster. (Recent Researches in American Music, 32.) Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, c1999. [Acknowledgments, p. vi; introd., p. vii-xiii; 3 plates; score, 69 p.; crit. report, p. 71-73. ISBN 0-89579-435-7. $40.]

Amy Beach. The Sea-Fairies, Opus 59: A Cantata for Women's Voices, Soli, and Accompaniment. Words by Alfred, Lord Tennyson; introduction by Adrienne Fried Block. Bryn Mawr, Penn.: Hildegard Publishing Co., [1996]. [Introd., editor's corrections, and text of Tennyson's poem, 3 p.; vocal score (reprint of the Arthur P. Schmidt 1904 ed., A.P.S. 6577-17), p. 2-35. Pub. no. 09648. $45.]

In "Singing Values," a paper delivered at the conference Feminist Theory and Music 6 (Boise, 2001), J. Michele Edwards addressed, among other things, the potential of women's choruses on one hand to empower women, and on the other to reinforce negative gender stereotypes. She raised questions about the availability of repertory by women composers, the suitability of texts sung by women's choruses, and stylistic limitations stemming from cultural values rather than physical vocal characteristics. Her paper provides a useful framework for this review of The Sea-Fairies, a choral work for women's voices composed by Amy Beach (1867-1944), a prominent American Victorian woman composer, to a text by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809- 1892), an even more prominent older English Victorian male poet.

Part of the fabric of middle-class society, music clubs (including separate women's and men's choral societies) were very widespread in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American cities and towns. They served an important function by supplying patronage for many kinds of musical activities. Until World War II, the culture of the music club provided many performers and composers with both audiences and markets for their music. It offered one of the few venues where American composers, and not only female ones, could get a hearing. From the ranks of the music clubs came much of the audience for symphony, opera, and traveling virtuoso performances as well. Although relentlessly satirized and frequently marginalized by mid-twentieth-century writers and critics for its nonendorsement of "ultramodernism" and its allegedly crippling femininity, this culture was by far the most important source of support for the careers of many American musicians. Beach, who supported herself comfortably from her performances, commissions, and royalties after her husband's death in 1910, was one of the most prominent among them. Thus, it is not surprising that The Sea-Fairies is dedicated to the Thursday Morning Musical Club of Boston.

Well aware of Beach's competence as a composer and the already well-established appeal of her music, her principal publisher Arthur P. Schmidt issued virtually all of her scores as she submitted them. (His judgment is borne out in this case by the fact that The Sea-Fairies was reprinted at least once.) Two years before publication of The Sea-Fairies in 1904, Beach indicated her interest [End Page 942] in Tennyson's text by asking Schmidt whether it had already been set to music. Presumably, then, she found nothing about the poem's meaning that would interfere with her interest in the musical possibilities she saw in it. If anything, her setting suggests that she delighted in its imagery.

The subject of The Sea-Fairies, the sirens' song, is a hoary one, dating back at least to Homer. Tennyson begins his treatment of the song with six lines setting the watery scene, and then devotes the balance of the poem's forty-two lines to the lyrics he imagined the sirens might have sung while tempting the "weary mariners" of the poem's introduction. The mythical figures take their familiar role of temptresses whose function is to attract and destroy (male) mariners with their...