Travel Writing

This chapter discusses the ways in which music has been represented, referenced, and discussed in nineteenth-century travel literature. In the context of the expanding opportunities for travel in the nineteenth century, a plethora of travel-related literature was created—guidebooks (Murray, Baedeker), poetry, novels, and descriptions of travel by writers such as Goethe, Heine, Dickens, Stendhal, Henry James, and Mary Shelley. Focusing on the latter category (writings descriptive of travel) from c.1800 to 1914, the chapter begins by establishing the significance of these texts in terms of documenting performing practice, referencing composers and performers, and commenting upon the status and power of music, including its ability to intoxicate or evoke nostalgia. Tensions in the portrayal of musical “otherness” are identified, along with the sense of competing levels of musicality between nations, communicated by a range of literary strategies that include binary opposition, hyperbole, and scenic absorption. The invocation of musical metaphor or parallel is highlighted as an important feature of writing style in these narratives, and the significance of a particular group of travel writings by musicians such as Edward Holmes, Marquis Chisholm, Hector Berlioz, Jacques Offenbach and Granville Bantock is also established. Composers’ engagement with literary models of travel narrative offers clear parallels in the nature and sequence of events in several musical works, creating real potential for new readings of specific compositions.