Tennyson’s poem Enoch
Arden is one of his least known
today, though in his day this was far
from the case. Its story is that of
a fisherman who undertook a long voyage,
was shipwrecked and believed lost only
to return and find his wife had remarried.
He resolved to keep silent about what
he had discovered for the rest of his
life.
Tennyson was fastidious
in attaining factual accuracy, even
going so far as to discover all details
of a sailor’s life and career from nautical
Suffolk. The poem was published in 1864,
coincidentally the year of Richard Strauss’s
birth, and its initial print run was
an enviable 60,000. Strauss lit upon
the idea of writing this melodrama in
1896. Hermann Levi had resigned the
conductorship at the Munich Court Opera,
and the eminent actor Emile von Possart
(then Intendant) was instrumental in
securing the post for Strauss. As Possart
was a renowned exponent of the art of
recitation, Strauss decided to write
this melodrama for him as a gesture
of gratitude. Poet and composer never
met, the former having died some four
years earlier, but there was a satisfactory
translation available written in 1889
by Adolf Strodtmann, though this CD
reverts to the original English. It
was given its first performance in March
1897 at Munich followed by successful
tours around German theatres (at one
of which the composer received news
of the birth of his only son Franz).
The models from which
Strauss may have taken his inspiration
are the melodramas of Schubert and Schumann,
followed by the concert melodramas of
Berlioz and Grieg. His successors in
this form were Schoenberg, Prokofiev
and Walton. Melodramas within a play
become so-called incidental music such
as Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s
Dream or Strauss’ own Le bourgeois
gentilhomme. But what is immediately
striking in Enoch Arden is the
relative paucity of contribution from
the piano. There are extensive passages
of unaccompanied narration, as many
as fifty to a hundred lines. Whether
Strauss wanted to leave the field clear
for Possart or whether he found the
tragedy sufficiently affecting on its
own is unclear.
Certain focal points
bring the two elements together and
create a Wagnerian leitmotif
principle in its wake. There is the
childhood triangle of Enoch Arden, Annie
Lee and Philip, Enoch’s courtship of
Annie and Philip’s witnessing their
first kiss, Enoch’s farewell as he sets
off on his sea journey, Philip’s courtship
of Annie, her dream and marriage to
him, Enoch’s shipwrecked years on the
island, his return (now aged), his unseen
spying upon Philip and Annie, his despair
and self-sacrificial resolve to keep
away, and finally his death. This rambling
tale is effectively glued together by
Strauss’s musical building blocks. Two
years later he wrote another shorter
melodrama, this time a setting of Uhland’s
Das Schloss am Meer, again for
himself and Possart.
This is a curiosity
worth the revival, especially with these
two performers, Hewitt’s idiomatic pianism
ably matched by Garrett’s rich voice
(he was once an excellent narrator in
a performance of mine of Bliss’s Morning
Heroes). It would be hard to put
Enoch Arden into a recital programme,
the poem itself dangerously turgid in
places, but, if you’re in the mood,
it makes good armchair listening.
Christopher Fifield
Peter Hewitt: piano 
