One of the most fertile grounds for British music studies in the long nineteenth century and the so-called English Musical Renaissance has been the varied investigations of how British writers used music, the idea of music, and musicians within their poems, plays and stories. For more than a decade, literary scholars such as Phyllis Weliver and Alyssa Clapp-Intyre, and musicologists including Sophie Fuller, Nicky Losseff and Ruth Solie, have detailed the portrayal of music within literature, whether as sign or symbol, or as a way of creating a literary form out of a musical one. These studies are for the most part interdisciplinary, and while they tend to focus on the presence of continental music and composers (either real or fictional) within Great Britain, they have further revealed how important music was to the British reader, if for no other reason than its continued use as a trope in the non-musical arts.

Michael Allis's British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in the Long Nineteenth Century is a welcome work in this subfield of British musical studies. Allis's addition is to integrate detailed musical analysis into the discussion of literature, examining the problem from the point of view of the relationships between composers and literature, instead of authors using music. Allis claims a two-tiered purpose behind this book: to suggest ‘a new assurance with which a generation of British composers refigured poetry and literature in their works whether as musical settings or representations’ and ‘to offer suggestions on how we as modern audiences might interpret or appreciate the music-literature connections’ of four composers (pp. 6–7). Allis provides the reader with five case studies, each tracing a different aspect of artistic collaboration. All five chapters are effective, but as the case studies differ so much in design and technique, they will be discussed individually.

In the first case study, Allis pairs Hubert Parry with the poet Robert Bridges, and this chapter primarily examines their collaboration on the cantata Invocation to Music, written for the bicentennial anniversary of the death of Henry Purcell, and premiered at the 1895 Leeds Triennial Musical Festival. The study aptly demonstrates the tensions between poet and composer working collaboratively, and emphasizes Bridges's sense that Parry's requirements for the libretto compromised the intrinsic quality of his ode. Particularly rich within this chapter is Allis's discussion of the changing nature of the Invocation's text, predominantly in the mind of the poet. Bridges was so dissatisfied with the final version used as the libretto for the Invocation at its premiere that he wished the vocal score released by Novello would denote Parry's text as ‘arranged’ from the poem; instead it simply stated Bridges was the text's author. Bridges later published a version of the Invocation's text that met his own satisfaction (and differed greatly from the version that Parry used), along with a critical essay on setting poetry to music, which itself should be required reading for any music historian. The last few pages of this chapter discuss a more sympathetic setting of Bridges's poem by Holst, which conforms more to Bridges's precepts of setting music than Parry's Invocation. Throughout, Allis is careful to note how understanding Bridges was of Parry's aims as a composer, how many practical and detailed suggestions the poet had for Parry for the setting of his words to music, and the sense of disappointment Bridges felt when the project did not conform to his artistic vision or standards. It is an excellent, informative and focused discussion.

While the first chapter describes a sometimes contentious relationship concentrated into a decade, the second chapter examines Charles Villiers Stanford's many and varied settings of the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson over the course of several decades. Here, Allis's musical world blossoms, as he marshals discussion of multiple compositions, detailing the composer's efforts over the course of many years to emulate and even emphasize the poet's famous declamation and declamatory voice through music. While a strength to those familiar with Stanford's compositional oeuvre, this is also a weakness: Allis's analysis depends on more than a passing familiarity with the music in question, since he consistently hints at broader arguments through quick descriptions of Tennyson's poems and Stanford's settings of them. Frequently, Allis's discussion of poem and poet also greatly overshadows that of the composer's music, both in terms of depth of analysis and even length of discussion itself.

By the time we reach the next case study, that of Granville Bantock and Robert Browning, we realize that Allis has created an individual narrative trajectory for each of these first three chapters. After a short introduction describing the relationship between the poet and music, Allis presents a longer section which covers general aspects of the composer's settings of the poet and how it works towards resolving an interesting problem of voice (the declamatory style in the music of Parry; Tennyson's method of presenting his poems in the music of Stanford) before moving on to the proposed focus of the chapter itself. In the case of the Bantock and Browning pairing, Allis discusses the life-long fascination that Bantock had with Browning's poetry, moves through a whirlwind discussion of Bantock's song and piano miniature settings of Browning's poems to show aspects of the composer wrestling with the problem of how to set a dramatic monologue (a ‘revelatory poem delivered by a single speaker to a number of speakers in the context of a particular situation’ such as a moment of crisis; p. 141), and concludes with a long analysis of Bantock's tone-poem setting of Fifine at the Fair. But the similarities of trajectory end there, since Allis uses the discussion of Browning's dramatic monologue to interpret form within Bantock's composition, particularly as a way of explaining what some mid-twentieth-century critics have seen as frequent musical interruptions. In his introduction, Allis referred to this case study as moving from ‘music and literature’ (his first two case studies) to an analysis via ‘musical narrative’ (p. 6). It is particularly gratifying to see Allis work with this underappreciated composer, and to attempt such an interestingly informed analysis of his work.

The last two chapters further break the trajectory set up in the first three, because Allis leaves the relationship he had mined so fruitfully of a composer and a poet for a composer and a novelist (Edward Elgar and Edward Bulwer Lytton) and a composer and a genre (Elgar and travel literature). Like the chapter on Bantock and Browning, these final two case studies are analyses of musical narrative, the first of Elgar's Piano Quintet, Op. 84, and the second of his concert overture, In the South. Allis uses his theoretical stance to defend the compositions from twentieth- century criticism by such figures as Robert Anderson, Thomas F. Dunhill, Diana McVeagh, Michael Kennedy and Julian Rushton. It is no secret that the works under analytical consideration in these two chapters are ones that Elgar writers love to hate: the former because it is formally such a discursive work, and the latter, perhaps, because parts of it sound too ‘happy’ to be Elgar, and not up to his usual orchestral polish. Another difference is that Allis's work here has left the bounds of the sure text connection, as he had with Parry, Stanford, and Bantock, for something much more speculative. In chapter 4, Allis posits that Bulwer Lytton's occult novel A Strange Story may have been the template for the Piano Quintet. Allis creates a chain of circumstantial evidence from various disparate sources: Alice Elgar (the composer's wife) commenting in her diary on the mysterious quality of the work; the fact that Elgar had a copy of Bulwer Lytton's book sent to him while he worked on the quintet; and finally, that Ernest Newman mentioned the quintet had a ‘semi-programme’ without ever mentioning what that program might be. Even if the initial evidence Allis presents is somewhat cursory and contradictory, he argues that following the plot of A Strange Story can consequently help untangle what some critics have found to be structural inconsistencies within the composition, particularly in regards to recall and recapitulation.

In chapter 5, Allis considers In the South as an ‘imaginative topography’ of Italy that creates ‘a network of rhetorical and theoretical strategies for understanding and appropriating the foreign’, borrowing the concept from Chloe Chard's Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour.Footnote ¹ This discussion is more convincing than the one for the Piano Quintet, partly because Allis reveals the composer's use of Chard's topographic tropes, be they in descriptive letters to friends or in descriptive theme incipits Elgar created for the work. Demonstrative of this is the binary spectacle, where a travel writer presents the display of the visited land together with the implicit presence of the writer him- or herself, and the juxtaposition this causes. Elgar did this within the portraiture of In the South, since he titled one of his themes ‘E E and family musing’ (p. 267–8), thus placing his British-English self into the context of the composition, consequently creating a narrative interruption. Reading through these discussions, one feels that Allis could have greatly strengthened his case by resorting to the topic theory of Raymond Monelle and Kofi Agawu. Particularly since Allis is dealing with interrupting episodes, additional musical discussion based on their ideas would only add to his narrative points.

Throughout his study, Allis is extremely thorough. His command of both musicological and literary studies bibliography is immense. His knowledge and use of contemporary periodicals ventures far beyond the usually cited reviews in the Musical Times; his command of secondary literature within literary studies is equally impressive. Sometimes this leads the reader nearly to distraction: many pages of the book feel as if they feature more footnote text than regular discussion. Consequently, it is not always clear whose voice is being represented: that of Allis, or any one of his quoted authors. This problem is occasionally compounded by his rhetoric, particularly in the last three case studies. As each of these moves into increasingly interpretive territory, Allis frequently hedges. Thus, Bulwer Lytton's novel ‘… could provide an explanation’ (p. 196; italics mine) for the form and repetitive structure of parts of Elgar's Op. 84 quintet. Even though by the end of each chapter the reader is sure that Allis believes his interpretations, a stronger sense of the courage of the author's own convictions would not be amiss. A more serious flaw is that Allis assumes that the frame within each of his case-study chapters is strong enough for the reader to see the through-line of the book. Since the analytical apparatus for each these case studies differs, this through-line is not always clear, and the lack of an epilogue or conclusion to solidify it is startling. In retrospect, the opening introduction, while informative, is also not nearly long enough to create a contiguous sense of purpose throughout the volume.

Thus, even if the volume cannot be considered a cohesive whole, as a group of case studies, British Music and Literary Context is a highly successful work, and I have no doubt that each of the chapters will be valued by those who study British music as potential models for their own analyses. Allis's logic is sound, his interpretations are fascinating and his command of the literature is superb. One hopes that he will continue this method of investigation and interpretation at some point in a sustained text that contains more of his own voice and a greater sense of overarching theme, so that his valuable approach might translate outside of the field of British musical studies. Allis's excellent work here shows that this is possible, and he should be commended and encouraged.