'Adapting Byron' The Byron Centre, University of Manchester 4–5 December 2008

Abstract

The phenomenal fame that Byron enjoyed both during his life and after his death meant that his words, and indeed his image, were often adapted and influenced diverse cultural fields such as music, theatre, dance and the fine arts. Laura Tunbridge of The Byron Centre, Manchester University, thus organised 'Adapting Byron', a stimulating conference in recognition of this burgeoning area of Byron scholarship, which was held on 4-5 December 2008. The conference began with an excellent song recital of Byron settings by Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf and Charles Ives by baritone Marcus Farnsworth, accompanied by Audrey Hyland. Speakers and registrants at the conference were then treated to a wealth of interdisciplinary papers, the first of which was presented by Tunbridge, whose paper on various adaptations of Byron's Hebrew Melodies by composers such as Mendelssohn and Schumann explored the ramifications of setting the text to music, and the subtle shifts in meaning and nuance these settings and translations could engender. Continuing the musical theme, Thomas Schmidt-Beste (Bangor) used Mendelssohn's preoccupations with Nationalmusik and British literature to demonstrate how Byron was perceived more as a cosmopolitan, radical figure, rather than British or Scottish. Schmidt-Beste illustrated this by discussing the dark, brooding settings that Mendelssohn wrote as accompaniments for German translations of Byron's poetry, which were very different from the folk and national inflections found in Mendelssohn's other works, such as his 'Scottish' Symphony. My own paper then explored the intertextual resonances of Byron's life and words found in three modern texts: Gertrude Stein's sustained exercise in wordplay, Byron: A Play, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and John Crowley's Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. Alan Rawes, Director of The Byron Centre at Manchester, ushered in the next session by telling us a bit about the activities and the purpose of the Centre, which has been chiefly established to act as forum for the multidisciplinary study of Byron's life, work and impact on international culture and politics to the present day. The Centre is also host to a new, already extensive and expanding Byron Archive, which is housed at the splendid neo-gothic John Rylands Library, and contains, among other items, first editions of Byron's works and artefacts relating to Byron's reception around the world. Rawes also announced that the Byron Society had recently presented the Archive with a very generous gift of books relating to Byron, worth £1000. In the next session, Martin Deasy (Cambridge) spoke on Italian operatic adaptations of Marino Falieri and The Two Foscari and showed how Donizetti's and Verdi's works often presented Byron's politics in interesting ways, invoking aspects of the dead poet that were still very clear in Italian cultural memory. As well offering this compelling argument, Deasy also informed us that Donizetti's The Siege of Calais includes the only instance of operatic swimming that he has come across, a fact both entertaining but also illustrative of how the Byronic Hero is defined by action and mobility in opposition to the impasse of the sieged city. Susan Rutherford (Manchester) followed with a paper that used the depiction of Gulnare's final moments in Verdi's opera Il corsaro to examine the obstacles facing a librettist and a composer when choosing to depict embodied emotion on the stage, especially in an intimate gaslit venue with low visibility. Her paper helped address the larger problem of adapting poetic works for the stage, and how such adaptations necessitate externalising the actions and reactions of the players through both spectacle and aural cues. …