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Robert Louis Stevenson's Musical Interests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert Stevenson
Robert Stevenson*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles 24
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Extract

“Robert Louis Stevenson's earliest preserved efforts at musical composition are contained in two manuscript books owned by the Huntington Library in California and date from his thirty-first year, the year Treasure Island was completed. But almost a decade earlier he confessed that music had already become his ”consuming passion.“ From Frankfort in 1872 he had written home telling of his ”terrible excitement“ at a performance of Halévy's La Juive, and adding: “An opera is far more real than real life to me… It seems as if… opera would never stale upon me.” The next winter back in Edinburgh he heard his first Beethoven quartet, and with typical impetuosity forsook his love of opera for other loves. Later he was to write from Saranac Lake: “Wealth is only useful for two things—a yacht and a string quartette. For these two I will sell my soul. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as anybody can possibly want.”

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1957, pp. 700 - 704
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

1 The Huntington notebooks (HM 2397a and 2397b) containing Stevenson's earliest preserved music were bought by Henry E. Huntington at the J. L. Clawson-Stanley K. Wilson sale in the Anderson Galleries (New York), 19 Jan. 1917. For the 1881 date assigned these 2 notebooks 1 am indebted to Tyrus G. Harmsen, Cataloguer, Department of MSS, Huntington Lib. HM 2397a and 2397b contain gatherings of folio-size music paper with 12 staves to the page. On some of the pages are mere scrawls, but most contain either original attempts at composition or arrangements of Scottish folksongs and dances for such combinations as flute, violin, and clarinet.

Among the numerous Stevenson memorabilia at the Huntington Lib. one other manuscript deserves passing attention—a letter written 5 Sept. 1874 to George Grove, first editor of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Grove, who was in 1874 editor of Macmillan's Mag., had invited Stevenson to contribute 2 articles.

2 For accounts of his “consuming passion” written with a reading audience of music professionals in mind, see J. Cuthbert Hadden, “Robert Louis Stevenson and Music,” Monthly Musical Record (London), XLII (1 Feb. 1912), 32–34, and Joshua Bannard, “Stevenson and Music,” Musical Standard (London), VI (25 Sept. 1915), 241.

3 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Sidney Colvin (New York: Scribner, 1902), I, 43.

4 Ibid., II, 77;

5 Quoted in J. A. Hammerton, Slevensoniana (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1910), p. 137.

6 Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Scribner, 1901), II, 11. Consecutive fifths are disliked by theorists because they sully the purity of the part-writing. In music two simultaneous sounds comprise a (harmonic) interval. Of the various types of ntervals, successive thirds and sixths are favored, whereas successive (consecutive) fifths and octaves are prohibited. “Hidden” fifths are consecutives, disguised by opposite motion between the voices involved. The interval of a fourth, when used alone, is usually felt to be a bare and meager sound.

7 Letters, II, 44. The whereabouts of his Opus 1 and Opus 2 are not known to the present writer.

8 His Opus 2 was announced as a Scherzo in G Major (see Letters, II, 44).

9 His musical jottings, if the Huntington examples provide sufficient material for judging his creative gift, show his was an utterly commonplace one. But they win the professional's sympathy because they are no worse than most beginning students' efforts. The first efforts of even great 19th-century composers such as Wagner and Verdi were just as mediocre.