Chapter 3 - Bantock and Browning: Reformulated Dramatic Monologue in Fifine at the Fair

Summary

I state it thus:

There is no truer truth obtainable

By Man than comes of music.

Browning, ‘With Charles Avison’, ll. 137–9

In anticipation of the Birmingham Festival of 1912, the Musical Times suggested what an audience might expect of Granville Bantock's new ‘orchestral drama’ based on Robert Browning's poem, Fifine at the Fair:

The poem is often obscure in its wanderings from the point and because of its puzzling phraseology, but the mist clears now and again, and there are glorious bursts of sunshine and clarity. Naturally, the musician makes no attempt to follow the tortuous sinuosities of the poet. He simply lifts out for musical treatment the picture of the inconstant man and the tempting ‘butterfly’ Fifine, and contrasts both with the emblem of faithfulness, the constant Elvire.

Two aspects of this description are striking: first, the writer's characterisation of Browning's text as somewhat diffuse and challenging, reflecting early literary criticism; second, the suggestion that any musical representation in Bantock's work was confined to general parallels only. The same issues were reiterated in the journal's post-performance response two months later:

The drama illustrated is that more or less clearly unfolded in Browning's celebrated poem, which is the monologue of a man who himself relates his fall to the attractions of the girl Fifine, a dancer at a fair, notwithstanding his deep regard for his wife Elvire, who is a model of purity and stedfastness [sic].[…]