Abstract
This chapter, “New World Musicals: The Plumed Serpent and David”, argues that the “Songs and Hymns of Quetzalcoatl” incorporated in the text of The Plumed Serpent and the ten pieces of music Lawrence composed for his final play David are integral to their form and structure in ways that blur the boundaries between prose and poetry, music and drama. These experimental works resemble the modernist operas Le Testament de Villon by Pound and Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein, while Lawrence also draws on the rhythms of Native American songs to create “New World” music that is more comparable with the Aztec compositions of Carlos Chávez or the corporealism of Harry Partch than with the “American” music of Antonín Dvořák or Aaron Copland.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael Bell also detects “the culmination of lines of thought which had been developing since the composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love”, although he perceives The Plumed Serpent as “an effective mirror image of The Rainbow: it is both an inverted and an illusory version of the real thing” (Bell 1992: 165–168).
- 2.
As discussed later, Pound wrote the music for Le Testament. Virgil Thomson wrote the music for Stein’s Four Saints, but it is Stein’s language that is musically interesting to Brad Bucknell (2001: 165). Extracts of both works are available on YouTube. For James Moran, David is “proto-Brechtian” (Moran 2015: 134).
- 3.
For some unknown reason, the music for the opening scene was omitted from the letter to Atkins (Plays 587).
- 4.
University of Nottingham, Manuscripts and Special Collections, La Z 10/1/2.
- 5.
A recording of the premiere performance of “Music for David” is in the archives of the University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections (uncatalogued as at June 2018). Introduced and narrated by John Worthen, Bethan Jones explains how, in the absence of instrumental scoring by Lawrence, she and the musicians attempted to follow the lead of the vocal line in providing an appropriate accompaniment.
- 6.
For the performance history of David, see Plays lxxix–lxxxix. Two scenes were cut at its premiere at Regent Theatre. It was staged in Cambridge on 23–28 October 1933 (with one scene cut) and again on 4–6 February 1958 with the complete text. In addition, there was an outdoor performance on 12 May 1938 at the Hillside Theater, Occidental College, Los Angeles, attended by Frieda Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Dudley Nichols, John Spewack, Helen Gahagan, Melvin Douglas (see Squires 1991: 174 n. 1, 176). This was directed by Kurt Baer von Weisslingen, assisted by Kathy Shirley Herbig, a junior music major. As the manuscript was on display, and this contained music for two of the songs, it is possible that at least some of the music was performed.
- 7.
Christopher Pollnitz, editor of the Cambridge Edition of The Poems, has elected not to include Lawrence’s poems from The Plumed Serpent or other prose works.
- 8.
A fuller discussion of listening to Lawrence’s texts is given in my chapter on Lawrence in the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music (Reid 2020).
- 9.
This quotation is from “The Future of the Novel [Surgery for the Novel—or a Bomb]”, one of eight essays on the novel that Lawrence published in 1923–1928 (collected in STH).
- 10.
Catherine Carswell recalls that Lawrence “had some Hebridean numbers which he howled in what he ingenuously supposed to be the Gaelic, at the same time endeavouring to imitate the noise made by a seal!” (Carswell 2000: 90–91).
- 11.
- 12.
For a film of the Hopi Snake Dance from 1924, the same year that Lawrence attended, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKc6Bxif8Zg
- 13.
Marianna Torgovnick was among the first to analyse a turn in Lawrence’s perception of the “primitive” as “feminine” in Women in Love to “masculine” in The Plumed Serpent (Torgovnick 1990: 160). For further discussion of homoeroticism in The Plumed Serpent, see Stevens 2000, and for a discussion commencing with the Fenimore Cooper essay see Reid 2009.
- 14.
Susan Jones notes that Lawrence’s essay coincided with reviews of a revival of The Rite (Jones 2013: 113). See also her interesting analysis of similarities between his story “The Woman Who Rode Away” and The Rite (2013: 113–117).
- 15.
Arthur Farwell fashioned the tribal songs recorded by scholars like Alice C. Fletcher into pieces to be played on the piano, while in orchestral pieces evoking indigenous music, such as Edward MacDowell’s Indian Suite (1896), “lush chromatic harmonies and rich scoring ... obscure[d] the fact that the melodic material is drawn from another culture” (Hamm 1983: 415).
- 16.
For a discussion of the influences of Native American music in Copland’s work, see Perlove 2000.
- 17.
A first draft called Quetzalcoatl was written during Lawrence’s first visit to Mexico in 1923; it was substantially revised on his second visit and completed in February 1925. For synopses of the novel’s evolution, see PS xxiii–xli and Q ix–xxxi.
- 18.
For example, the more conventional four-line stanza scheme of “Jesus’ Farewell” (PS 279–280) may owe something to the format of Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” (available online at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44644/a-psalm-of-life).
- 19.
As Torgovnick notes, this results in a paradox that the novel cannot resolve since the oceanic “recognizes no such coherent boundaries” (Torgovnick 1990: 170).
- 20.
Lawrence began writing what became “Indians and an Englishman” (Dial, February 1923) on 18 or 19 September 1922 (MM xiii).
- 21.
Notably, these Aztec operas often had a political agenda: Purcell’s was anti-Spanish propaganda while Chávez aimed to raise national consciousness.
- 22.
Lawrence inscribed a copy of David “To Arthur G. Wilkinson / from / D.H. Lawrence / Christmas 1926”, Nottingham MSS La/15. The Wilkinsons were artists, whose children had musical leanings, and they shared many musical evenings with the Lawrences. For more about Lawrence’s relationship with the Wilkinsons, see Sagar 2011.
- 23.
A version was broadcast by the BBC in 1931, a concert version at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1926, with the first fully staged production following in 1971 and “at least a half dozen” since then (Fisher 2006: 139–144). A live recording of the 1980 performance by the AKSO Ensemble is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h87wzHikkwc
- 24.
Virginia Hyde notes that the association of David with a dove and Saul with an eagle probably derives from Lawrence’s reading of Jenner’s Christian Symbolism and traces his shifting view of David through to Sketches of Etruscan Places (Hyde 1992: 56–58).
- 25.
- 26.
The December 1926 number of The Gramophone included a “Symposium” of 27 “distinguished men and women”, who had been asked to name their favourite song, composer, tune, and singer. D.H. Lawrence supplied the following details to the editor Compton Mackenzie, which were printed verbatim: “My favourite song is, I think, ‘Kishmul’s Galley’, from the Hebridean Songs, and my favourite composer, if one must be so selective, Mozart; and singer, a Red Indian singing to the drum, which sounds pretty stupid” (5L 570). Feodor Chaliapin—famous for his rendition of the Volga Boat Song—was the most frequently named singer (five times), with mentions of other well-known figures such as Nellie Melba and Jenny Lind. Of the 27 contributors, 9 (one-third) chose Mozart, with Bach in second place with 6 votes, closely followed by Wagner with 5. The song choices, however, were more diverse and the contributors admitted that they found making a clear decision much more difficult: Schubert is perhaps the predictable winner though only marginally with five votes followed closely by various Mozart arias (confirming an operatic bias overall) and various Scottish songs, like “Kishmul’s Galley”, with four a piece.
- 27.
Rolf Gardiner (1902–1971) was a pioneer of Land Service Camps for Youth in northern Europe after the First World War, including the Musikheim at Frankfort-on-Oder, a centre of social therapy through music, art, and husbandry and the Springhead estate for students and the unemployed (Nehls 1957: 666). Initially, a disciple of Lawrence (see Ellis 1998: 308), Gardiner differed in approach, writing that “wise though much of Lady Chatterley was, it was weak in so far as Lawrence damn-well … wanted to have his revenge” (qtd. Nehls 1957: 667).
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Reid, S. (2019). New World Musicals: The Plumed Serpent and David. In: D.H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04999-7_7
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