Byronies
Those who have attended my pre-concert talks know that I have been engaged in a lonely struggle to shift The American Symphony away from programs celebrating murder, cannibalism, dismembering, decapitation, and other forms of violence and instead point it in the direction of what are commonly known as family values. I have enjoyed only limited success. For example, one recent program was devoted to incest. This is not one of the family values I had in mind. Our guide was Lord Byron. Lord Byron came by his knowledge of this subject, as it were, honestly—his father, known as “Mad Jack” Byron—had an affair with his sister (Byron’s aunt) whose name was Frances Leigh. Frances had a son George who married Augusta, the daughter of Byron’s father by a first marriage. It was with Augusta Leigh—his half-sister--that Byron famously had—despite her marriage to George and his to Annabella Milbanke--a passionate affair. Did you follow that?
The one with Augusta was not Byron’s only sexual attachment. He had hundreds of others. He had them with young girls, women his own age, women a generation older, adolescent boys, men his age—even his great love of animals was suspect. When he went as a student to Cambridge, where they had a ‘no dogs allowed’ policy, he—a dog lover-- acquired a pet bear just to aggravate the authorities. A poem written at the time suggested that Byron’s relationship with the bear—a live bear, mind you—was not entirely Platonic. Byron’s recent biographer, Fiona MacCarthy assures us that this was a malicious suggestion. There is no actual evidence that the bear was a “sex toy.”
My own theory is that Byron may have needed eye glasses, was too vain to wear them, with the result that he often did not know with whom or with what he was ‘making a connection’—to use the expression of the time. A phrase from Beyond the Fringe comes to mind:
“High marks for enthusiasm; zero for accuracy.”
He was born George Gordon Byron in Aberdeen in 1788. Upon the death in 1794 of William Byron, grandson of the 5th Lord Byron, George inherited the title. Thus at age six, he became Lord Byron. He also inherited a property in Scotland that was originally acquired by an ancestor, Sir John Byron, from Henry VIII. By 1794 it was largely in ruins with not enough money to repair it. When he could afford to, Byron had certain rooms extravagantly decorated. He failed, however, to repair the roof—with the result that, in time, rain destroyed the lavish decorations. This and many other tidbits can by found in Fiona MacCarthy’s book—you can read about his violent mood swings, his excessive drinking, his cruelty. But these are not what was known by, or what inspired, so many of his contemporaries. His poetry was immensely successful and influential. After the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were published, in his own words: “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” The very day that the poem The Corsair was published, it sold ten thousand copies. Byron’s publisher—John Murray—grew rich from Byron’s poetry. Byron, however, felt it was beneath him to accept payment for work that he composed so effortlessly—this despite his ever-increasing burden of debt.
When efforts to sell his ancestral pile fell through, he married Annabella in hopes of benefiting from her inheritance prospects. The marriage was a disaster, and to escape the scandal of their separation as well as rumors about his relationship with his half sister, Byron left England for the Continent—an exile that lasted eight years until his death. He traveled in an enormous, lavish carriage modeled on that of his hero Napoleon. It contained sleeping quarters, dining space, and much of his library. Custom made, it was never paid for.
Byron made for Switzerland and settled for a while in Sécheron on Lac Leman. Staying at the same hotel was Percy B. Shelley and two women—Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who was not yet married to Shelley but with whom Shelley had a son now four-months old; and her step sister Clair Clairmont, whom Byron had impregnated while still in London. The four became a congenial group that met (no longer in the hotel but in separate rented houses) daily and—in time—amused themselves inventing ghost stories. Out of this came Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN—The Modern Prometheus. Byron’s effort at ghost story writing took the form of a fragment of a novel about an aristocrat vampire named Augustus Darvell. Byron’s physician, who was traveling with him, a certain Dr. John Polidori, stole Byron’s idea and wrote a story called The Vampyre. This somehow found its way back to England where it was published under Byron’s name. It immediately triggered a vampire mania that spread back to France and Germany, resulting in many plays and related works on vampire themes. Polidori’s story is the basis of Marchner’s opera Der Vampyr of 1828. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, from the end of the century, stems directly from what Byron and Polidori started.
It was in the context of Frankenstein and vampires, enriched by Byron’s coming upon the first part of Goethe’s Faust, that the dramatic poem MANFRED was written.
Byron’s influence on his contemporary writers was immense, and ranged from Victor Hugo to Heinrich Heine to Alexander Pushkin. Composers who were, so to speak, Byronized include Schumann, who read Manfred at age 19; (Schumann’s father, a bookseller, had published his own translations of portions of Child Harold)Schumann also began an opera on The Corsair—left unfinished; Berlioz, whose work for viola and orchestra, Harold in Italy, is a response to Childe Harold, and whose Corsair Overture was inspired by that poem; Liszt, who at age 21 practiced the piano four to five hours a day but read during the breaks. He mentions Homer, the Bible, Plato, Lock and Byron, saying “I study them, meditate on them, devour them with a fury.” Rossini changed the title of an opera to The Siege of Corinth and Tchaikovsky wrote a Manfred symphony. Byron’s poems were set to music by Loewe, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wolf, Musorgsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Gounod and Busoni. Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon and Virgil Thomson’s opera Lord Byron show that the mania for Byron did not end with the 19th century.
The one with Augusta was not Byron’s only sexual attachment. He had hundreds of others. He had them with young girls, women his own age, women a generation older, adolescent boys, men his age—even his great love of animals was suspect. When he went as a student to Cambridge, where they had a ‘no dogs allowed’ policy, he—a dog lover-- acquired a pet bear just to aggravate the authorities. A poem written at the time suggested that Byron’s relationship with the bear—a live bear, mind you—was not entirely Platonic. Byron’s recent biographer, Fiona MacCarthy assures us that this was a malicious suggestion. There is no actual evidence that the bear was a “sex toy.”
My own theory is that Byron may have needed eye glasses, was too vain to wear them, with the result that he often did not know with whom or with what he was ‘making a connection’—to use the expression of the time. A phrase from Beyond the Fringe comes to mind:
“High marks for enthusiasm; zero for accuracy.”
He was born George Gordon Byron in Aberdeen in 1788. Upon the death in 1794 of William Byron, grandson of the 5th Lord Byron, George inherited the title. Thus at age six, he became Lord Byron. He also inherited a property in Scotland that was originally acquired by an ancestor, Sir John Byron, from Henry VIII. By 1794 it was largely in ruins with not enough money to repair it. When he could afford to, Byron had certain rooms extravagantly decorated. He failed, however, to repair the roof—with the result that, in time, rain destroyed the lavish decorations. This and many other tidbits can by found in Fiona MacCarthy’s book—you can read about his violent mood swings, his excessive drinking, his cruelty. But these are not what was known by, or what inspired, so many of his contemporaries. His poetry was immensely successful and influential. After the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were published, in his own words: “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” The very day that the poem The Corsair was published, it sold ten thousand copies. Byron’s publisher—John Murray—grew rich from Byron’s poetry. Byron, however, felt it was beneath him to accept payment for work that he composed so effortlessly—this despite his ever-increasing burden of debt.
When efforts to sell his ancestral pile fell through, he married Annabella in hopes of benefiting from her inheritance prospects. The marriage was a disaster, and to escape the scandal of their separation as well as rumors about his relationship with his half sister, Byron left England for the Continent—an exile that lasted eight years until his death. He traveled in an enormous, lavish carriage modeled on that of his hero Napoleon. It contained sleeping quarters, dining space, and much of his library. Custom made, it was never paid for.
Byron made for Switzerland and settled for a while in Sécheron on Lac Leman. Staying at the same hotel was Percy B. Shelley and two women—Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who was not yet married to Shelley but with whom Shelley had a son now four-months old; and her step sister Clair Clairmont, whom Byron had impregnated while still in London. The four became a congenial group that met (no longer in the hotel but in separate rented houses) daily and—in time—amused themselves inventing ghost stories. Out of this came Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN—The Modern Prometheus. Byron’s effort at ghost story writing took the form of a fragment of a novel about an aristocrat vampire named Augustus Darvell. Byron’s physician, who was traveling with him, a certain Dr. John Polidori, stole Byron’s idea and wrote a story called The Vampyre. This somehow found its way back to England where it was published under Byron’s name. It immediately triggered a vampire mania that spread back to France and Germany, resulting in many plays and related works on vampire themes. Polidori’s story is the basis of Marchner’s opera Der Vampyr of 1828. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, from the end of the century, stems directly from what Byron and Polidori started.
It was in the context of Frankenstein and vampires, enriched by Byron’s coming upon the first part of Goethe’s Faust, that the dramatic poem MANFRED was written.
Byron’s influence on his contemporary writers was immense, and ranged from Victor Hugo to Heinrich Heine to Alexander Pushkin. Composers who were, so to speak, Byronized include Schumann, who read Manfred at age 19; (Schumann’s father, a bookseller, had published his own translations of portions of Child Harold)Schumann also began an opera on The Corsair—left unfinished; Berlioz, whose work for viola and orchestra, Harold in Italy, is a response to Childe Harold, and whose Corsair Overture was inspired by that poem; Liszt, who at age 21 practiced the piano four to five hours a day but read during the breaks. He mentions Homer, the Bible, Plato, Lock and Byron, saying “I study them, meditate on them, devour them with a fury.” Rossini changed the title of an opera to The Siege of Corinth and Tchaikovsky wrote a Manfred symphony. Byron’s poems were set to music by Loewe, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wolf, Musorgsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Gounod and Busoni. Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon and Virgil Thomson’s opera Lord Byron show that the mania for Byron did not end with the 19th century.
posted by Richard Wilson at 2:01 PM
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