Bantock and Southey: Musical Otherness and Fatalism in Thalaba the Destroyer

Abstract

This article focuses on the epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer by Robert Southey (1774–1843) and its musical refiguring as an ‘orchestral poem’ of 1899 by the British composer Granville Bantock (1868–1946). Just as the recent reappraisal of Southey’s literary status has focused on concepts of orientalism and imperialism, this ideological framework can be used to explore Bantock and Southey’s contrasting attitudes towards the East. The complexities highlighted in Southey’s orientalism find a parallel in a range of stylistic layers identified in Bantock’s musical refiguring of ‘otherness’ in Thalaba; these include musical tropes associated with Tchaikovsky, confirming Bantock as a significant figure in the reception of Russian music in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Bantock’s approach to musical structure in Thalaba, contextualized via James Hepokoski’s theory of sonata deformation, highlights his experimental approach to the relationship between musical text and paratext, suggesting that his status should be reassessed.