Abstract
The anonymous “Essay on Song Writing” in the 1820 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine identifies Byron’s Hebrew Melodies as pseudo-songs: “Byron’s Hebrew Melodies… are neither Hebrew nor melodies.” They are, however, imitations of Moore’s Irish Melodies, with which the “Essay on Song Writing” compares them invidiously.1 Irish Melodies was an imitation of earlier books of national melodies, including the volumes published by George Thomson and entitled A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs.2 This imitative theme characterizes the early reviews: a more positive response in the British Critic indicates that “these songs …stand a fair chance of rivaling in popularity the compositions of his friend Moore, of which indeed they often remind us.”3 The Critical Review says that among contemporaries only Moore equals or excels Byron in the writing of lyrics.4
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Notes
Byron to Thomas Moore, 8 March 1815, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (London: John Murray, 1975), 4: 279–80.
The musical scores published in the first edition of Hebrew Melodies are reproduced in the facsimile, A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988).
See, e.g., The Gentleman’s Magazine: “The expression of some parts we feel to be so true and so powerful as strongly to remind us of our old favorite Purcell’” [Gentleman’s Magazine, 85, Part 1 (June 1815): 539; quoted in Joseph Slater, “Byron’s Hebrew Melodies”, Studies in Philology, 49 (1952): 84.
Franklin, “’some samples of the finest Orientalism’: Byronic Philhellenism and Proto-Zionism at the Time of the Congress of Vienna”, in Romanticism und Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 235.
Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 110.
Letter from Murray to Byron, 17 February 1815, in The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 128.
The Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 6 vols. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983–91), 2 [1984]: 849.
Spector, “The Liturgical Context of the Byron-Nathan Hebrew Melodies,” Studies in Romanticism, 47 (Fall 2008): 396.
Evans, An Essay on the Music of the Hebrews, Originally Intended as a Preliminary Discourse to the Hebrew Melodies, Published my Messrs. Braham and Nathan (London: John Booth, 1816), 46.
Jonathan David Gross is perhaps following Slater, who simply credits Nathan’s account, when he writes that Byron “was truly collaborating with Nathan in 1814 rather than sending him poems he had previously written” [Gross, Byron: The Erotic Liberal (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 65.
Benita Eisler agrees with Ashton: “Several of the poems make no claim to biblical association” (Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (1999; New York: Vintage, 2000), 455.
In her recent and impressively critical essay, Spector suggests that “the Byronic skepticism of the lyrics” in Hebrew Melodies creates “a counterpoint to the liturgical religiosity of the music. Spector illustrates that ironic point with reference to “If That High World” and “The Wild Gazelle”: in the first, “Byron’s lyric makes a conscious choice that redounds back against what, in contrast, appears to be the blind faith inherent in the liturgy,” and in the second the “combination of lyric and liturgy can be viewed as a concrete instantiation of the criticism of blind faith inherent in the liturgy” (“The Liturgical Context of the Byron-Nathan Hebrew Melodies,” 398-400). Frederick W Shilstone writes that “Byron’s presentation of doctrine in these poems is, overall, tentative, questioning, and uncertain” [Byron and the Myth of Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 103).]
Edgar Dawson, Byron und Moore (Leipzig: Verlag von Dr. Seele &Co., 1902).
Just as Woody Guthrie adopted tunes from hymns for songs about political and social subjects (among others, “This Land Is Your Land” and “I Ain’t got No Home”), some twentieth-century Zionists have adopted and applied Hebrew Melodies to their political aspirations: e.g., Nahum Sokolow writes that “Zionist poetry owes more to Byron than to any other Gentile poet” [Sokolow, History of Zionism (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919), 1:95]
McGann, “Byron and the Anonymous Lyric”, Byron Journal 20 (1992): 30.
Marchand, Introduction to Byron’s Letters and Journals, 1: 14. For a book-length exposition of Byron’s skepticism, which involves far more than religion, see Terence Allan Hoagwood, Byron’s Dialectic: Skepticism and the Critique of Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1993).
Blackstone, Byron: A Survey (London: Longman, 1975), 144.
Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 135.
McGann, in “Byron and Romanticism: A Dialogue” (Jerome McGann and the editor, James Soderholm), Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 302.
In biblical commentaries, the Book of Daniel is a central locus for a theory of symbolic interpretation: see, for example, Sir Isaac Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (London: Printed by J. Darby and T. Browne, 1733)
Terence Allan Hoagwood, Prophecy and the Philosophy of Mind: Traditions of Blake and Shelley (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 40
For an excellent example and discussion of Byron’s illustrating this conventional and sentimental representation of nature, and then undermining it, see Daniel P. Watkins’s analysis of passages in The Siege of Corinth, a poem related (via Francesca, for instance) to both Parisina and Hebrew Melodies: see Watkins, Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), especially 119–20.
Notes from the Letters of Thomas Moore to His Music Publisher, James Power, ed. Thomas Crofton Croker (New York: Redfield, 1854), 46
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© 2010 Terence Allan Hoagwood
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Hoagwood, T.A. (2010). “It Gave Them Virtues Not Their Own” : Byron’s Hebrew Melodies. In: From Song to Print. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105706_5
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