Christina Rossetti In Music

Christina Rossetti in Music Project

HomeCommentary"Goblin Market"

"Goblin Market"

This first release in the Christina Rossetti in Music project is an exhibit of musical settings of “Goblin Market”—the complex poetic masterpiece that was the title and leading poem in Rossetti’s first commercially published collection of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Today “Goblin Market” continues to fascinate and perplex readers, attracting perpetual scholarly analysis and continuous interpretive ventures, many of them musical. There are many “firsts” in this group of musical settings of “Goblin Market” as musical composers take Rossetti’s poem to new audiences and steer it into new interpretive vectors that ultimately reshape our understanding of the poem.

Individual Settings

Overview

Composition of musical settings of “Goblin Market” got underway in Rossetti’s own lifetime with Emanuel Aguilar’s 1880 setting Goblin Market, Cantata—the only 19th-century setting, as Rossetti granted Aguilar exclusive rights to set “Goblin Market.” Rossetti met with Aguilar personally, consulted on adapting and abridging her signature poem, and gave her explicit permission to a whole range of significant changes to the original text. Aguilar’s cantata “for treble voices” tones down the poem’s erotic overtones and adapts the poem for younger singers and audiences, thereby anticipating the poem’s transition into the juvenile book market that took place at the end of the 19th century. Next, once Aguilar’s exclusive rights had lapsed, Vittorio Ricci stepped into the opening with Goblin Market (Der Gnomen Markt) in 1901, a new cantata and the first German translation of the poem that has come to light. A musical setting thus takes Rossetti’s poem to new audiences across borders. The next new setting comes over half a century after Ricci’s, and it is a harbinger of the critical recuperation of “Goblin Market” by feminist literary critics that took place later in the 20th century. Ruth Gipps’s 1954 setting interprets the poem from a female perspective and highlights the poem’s erotic and sensual meanings. Gipps’s focus on themes of female identity, relationship, sexuality, temptation and recovery is important because it is an example of a musical setting that anticipates the future direction of scholarly interpretation of the poem.           

After these cantata settings, later modern composers have embraced a variety of musical genres and performance modes in adapting “Goblin Market,” often expanding the boundaries of the poem in highly original ways. 20th- and 21st-century composers have given us choral settings (Samuel Magrill, 1995 and Lawrence Cave, 1996), a chamber opera/ballet (Joe St.Johanser, 2006), an operatic setting (Douglas Buchanan, 2011) as well as the experimental composition “Goblin Market: for solo trombonist and environment” (Joseph Klein, 1993), which the program notes describe as “a parallel or alternate realization” of “Goblin Market” and a “structural and psychological study” of the poem. Meanwhile, our grasp of the poem’s irregular and complex metrical form is advanced by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis’s 1995 setting of “Goblin Market” for narrator and large instrumental ensemble, an impressive major work in which a dramatic reading of the unaltered and unabridged poem is precisely notated rhythmically in the musical score.

Composers have also taken “Goblin Market” into the genre of drama, and many of these works make creative changes to Rossetti’s text. For example, musical theatre adaptations by Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon in 1985 and Kath Burlinson and Conor Mitchell in 2003, make significant textual additions, by adding new narrative details and dialogue as well as original musical lyrics to Rossetti’s poem. Another—Jen Jewell’s one-woman show Goblin Market—uses the original and unaltered text but reframes our understanding of it by placing Rossetti’s poem within a new setting, specifically the American South during the Depression, a resituating of Rossetti’s work that is in part achieved through the original bluegrass score by Chris Tench (2017). Today, artists keep pushing the boundaries of “Goblin Market” with their exciting inventiveness, as in the instance of the adult-themed and updated circus theatre interpretation of “Goblin Market” created and performed internationally by The Dust Palace, a New Zealand circus. The creative possibilities seem endless, and this Christina Rossetti in Music exhibit will continue to grow as more works are discovered and new works are created.