George Gissing on music: Italian impressions

Musical Times, Summer 2001 by Atlas, Allan W

George Gissing on music

ALLAN W. ATLAS tracks the musical encounters of the distinguished late-Victorian novelist

THE LATE-VICTORIAN novelist George Gissing (1857-1903) - best known today for New Grub Street (1891), The odd women (1893), and The private papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903) - made three extended trips to Italy: October 1888-February 1889; December 1889-February 1890; and September 1897-April 1898.1 And though music was far from the top of his sightseeing priorities - rather, it was Gissing's love of classical antiquity that lured him there -- his numerous letters and diary entries, as well as his travelogue, By the Ionian Sea (1901), shed light on both the music that he heard and his reactions to it as he toured the country from one end to the other.2 What follows, then, first chronicles Gissing's reactions to what he heard - mainly in his own words (quoted often, but by no means exhaustively, and at times at some length) - with only an occasional pause to set his comments into a wider context, and then, far more briefly, tries to assess what they tell us about both certain aspects of music in late nineteenth-century Italy and, even more so, Gissing himself as writer and man.

The first trip: 30 October 1888-26 February 1889

Armed with copies of Goethe's Italienische Reise and a German-language Baedeker,3 Gissing arrived at Naples early on 30 October and settled in at the pensione Casa di Luca in Via Brancaccio.4 The sojourn, which fulfilled a desire to visit Italy that reached back to Gissing's teenage years, was made financially possible by a 150 advance for The nether world (published in Spring 1889),5 and after about a month at Naples would wend its way northward through Rome, Florence, and Bologna, and come to a close at Venice.

Gissing had hardly unpacked when, on 2 November, he jotted down his first impressions of Naples:

Let me see if I can put down some of the points which seem most characteristic of Naples to one who has just arrived. The amount of buying and selling, especially in poor streets; the fanciful harness of horses; the multitudes of donkeys; the hard and excellent paving, squares placed diamond-wise; the enormous houses, vast doorways, great rooms, thick walls; the madonna faces among the lower classes; the elegant appearance of officers; the abundance of clerics in the street and their leisurely walk, - including monks of mediaeval appearance; the gradoni; the soft note of the street-organs; the saints with lamps before them; the long musical cry of sellers going about the streets at night.

Diary, p.616

And one day later, 3 November, having visited Pozzuoli, Gissing noted: `Glorious little town Pozzuoli [...I I sat and smoked a pipe, and looked at the ships, and over towards Baja. One of the soft Italian organs played the while. I felt happy [...]' (Diary, p.62). Thus what struck Gissing immediately in terms of music was the seemingly everpresent sound of the street organs, something to which he would return repeatedly, not only during this trip but during the subsequent ones as well.

For the rest of the month, Gissing was relatively quiet about music. On 13 November he mentions having visited the tombs at the Campo Santo, where 'On the front of a great building, large enough to be a church, was written "Sigismondo Thalberg"'; it was the only name that he recognised (Diary, p.70).7 And on 29 November, he was 'particularly amused' by a 'lad, lithe and good looking [...] he played some airs on a little wooden whistle' (Diary, p.81).

1 December found Gissing at Rome, where he soon made his way to the Pincio. There 'a good band was playing', he wrote to Eduard Bertz on 6 December (Letters, vol.3, p.314), while some days later (17 December), he told his sister Margaret that the band played several times a week (Letters, vol.3, p.322). But the letter of 17 December is most interesting for its comparison of Naples and Rome, with Rome faring much the worse in terms of its street music: 'there is absolutely no picturesqueness in the common life of the people. Rome is very silent. Never a street organ - not one' (Letters, vol.3, p.318).8

Things became livelier with the onset of Christmas. His diary for 23 December mentions a visit 'To Vespers at Trinita de' Monti, and only wish I had been before. Exquisite singing by the nuns; a solo and a duet that enraptured me' (Diary, p.106).

Christmas Eve was spent in part at San Giovanni in Laterno:

heard a choral service - Vespers - at 3 o'clock. it was held in the Cappella del Coro; and a procession of priests went thence, first to the Altar of the Sacrament, then to the high altar, performing many genuflections etc. at each. Some good singing, but the whole affair impressed me as paltry. A swarm of curious foreigners pressing about the entrance to the chapel, and hemming in the procession; the thing became a mere exhibition. No worshipping congregation. The offices of the Rom. Cath. Church seem to be performed for the entertainment of the clerics alone (Diary, p. 107),