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Disembodied Vocal Innocence: John Addington Symonds, the Victorian Chorister, and Queer Musical Consumption

Riddell, Fraser

Disembodied Vocal Innocence: John Addington Symonds, the Victorian Chorister, and Queer Musical Consumption Thumbnail


Authors



Abstract

In the early 1890s, both John Addington Symonds and Arthur Symons were fascinated by Paul Verlaine's sonnet “Parsifal” (1886)—in particular, by its final line, which dwells on the voices of singing children. Symonds enthused to Symons that it was “a line [to] treasure forever,” while, nevertheless, noting his reservations to Horatio Forbes Brown that “fine as it is, [it] looks like it […] must be rather of the sickly school.” In an article on Verlaine, Symons praised the poem as a “triumph [of] amazing virtuosity,” echoing the sentiments of his friend George Moore, who in Confessions of a Young Man (1886) exclaimed that he “kn[ew] of no more perfect thing than this sonnet.” With its repetition of assonant vowel sounds, Verlaine's closing line captures the gentle rise heavenward of the ethereal voices of Richard Wagner's offstage choristers, resounding above the stage at the conclusion of the opera. The hiatus with which the line opens functions as a sigh of renunciation, as the listeners abandon themselves to the inexpressible force of the transcendent. In Verlaine's sonnet, these children's voices become the epitome of the “disembodied voice” that Symons sees as so characteristic of Decadent poetics. They sing of the delicate immateriality of spiritual experience, the transient fragility of existence.

Citation

Riddell, F. (2020). Disembodied Vocal Innocence: John Addington Symonds, the Victorian Chorister, and Queer Musical Consumption. Victorian Literature and Culture, 48(3), 485-517. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150319000020

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 15, 2019
Online Publication Date Aug 5, 2020
Publication Date 2020
Deposit Date Oct 29, 2019
Publicly Available Date Oct 30, 2019
Journal Victorian Literature and Culture
Print ISSN 1060-1503
Electronic ISSN 1470-1553
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 48
Issue 3
Pages 485-517
DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150319000020
Related Public URLs https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a4835261-8f01-43c6-9f13-fdd1e3781d58

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.





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