Adapting The Mysteries of Udolpho’s Musicality into Real Music: An Impossible Task?

Abstract

The Mysteries of Udolpho was published at a time when poetry and music were being redefined, along with the notions of imitation and expression. From a precedence of word over music, theorists, musicians and composers started reconsidering the hierarchy of arts, which led to a new appreciation of both sung music and instrumental music. Ann Radcliffe’s novel is replete with pleasing sounds and mysterious melodies, working both as part of her décor and general soundscape and as a key element of the narrative. Given the novel’s musical profusion and versatility, one may wonder how to adapt its musicality into actual music. This paper, therefore, endeavors to define the balance of imitation and expression in The Mysteries of Udolpho and questions the ability of other media, especially those relying on sounds, to adapt its musical richness. It first focuses on the novel’s inscription in the larger context of musical theory, before delving into the limits of language’s sound mimesis and its counteracting expressivity. The final part is a case study of three artworks inspired by Radcliffe’s novel: John Bray’s song “Soft as yon’s silver ray that sleeps”, Catherine Czerkawska’s radio dramatization The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Marc Morvan and Benjamin Jarry’s album Udolpho.

1. Introduction

“She loved music, we are told, and often went to the opera. Back at home, having a good musical ear, she would sing the airs she had just heard and memorized. It seems she had a beautiful voice, “mellow and melodious” if “somewhat tremulous”. She sang, says her biographer, with “exquisite taste”. She particularly liked sacred tunes and worshipped Haendel—not a flagrant symptom, either, of insanity.”

(Lévy 1996, p. 37)

The Mysteries of Udolpho was published at a time when poetry and music were being redefined and when the latter was re-established at the top of the hierarchy of arts. Following centuries of Aristotelean conception of music as imitative, according to the famous rules of mimesis, the turn of the nineteenth century saw an array of theories that gave new meaning to imitation, expression, and other key concepts in musicology. Music was to be considered “the highest form of artistic experience and knowledge” (Mohr 1998, p. 119), equal and even superior to its sister arts that were painting and poetry (Abrams 1953, p. 50), thanks to its ability to mimic the power and strength of passions (Webb 1769, p. 42–3) while also giving rise to affects through its expressivity. Under the impetus of the writings of Batteux, Du Bos, and Avison, notably, expression became “the goal to which musical genius aspired” (Le Huray and Day 1981, p. 9)1, and music thereby freed itself from the domination of word over sound. Instrumental music was progressively given a place in its own right, and, no longer being under the control of poetry, emancipated itself as the artform most able to rouse the finest and most complex emotions in the listener (Dubois 2015, p. 113). In such a context, Ann Radcliffe’s passion for music could not but be influenced by these changes, which happened concomitantly to the writing of The Mysteries of Udolpho and infused the whole musical scene of the proto-romantic period2. Her text is permeated with such a profusion of sounds, noises, and musical performances that its musicality cannot be denied. Yet, considering the then-established superiority of music over words, it is of no surprise that her transcriptions of such sound- and musicscapes were deemed unrealistic and non-mimetic3. How could such an amateur of music in all its forms, and avid reader of the latest treatises in philosophy and art4, prove to disengage her words from its sister art to such an extent? The main issue that follows concerns the actual power of words to imitate music: if music is supposedly superior to poetry, how can a writer give musicality to a text? This second question provides room for an analysis of the metaphorization of music through text, and conversely raises the final point of this study: does music have the power to transcend text into sound, faithfully, and if so, to which elements should it devote most importance? This article will, therefore, first consider the soundscape in The Mysteries of Udolpho in order to gauge the balance between functionality and realism in its objects and their description, before questioning the verbal description of music and the (in)adequacy of words in sound transcription, to conclude with a case study of three adaptations of The Mysteries of Udolpho into song, radio play, and a music album.

2. Sound- and Musicscapes in The Mysteries of Udolpho

Most Gothic novels share similar soundscapes, whose use is mainly functional. This is what enables Isabella van Elferen to assert that “the advent of terror is generally preceded by an unworldly silence, aided by meteorological (wind, thunder, rain) or technical (rattling fences, hissing pipes) circumstances and announced by sounds that suggest presence (creaks, echoes, voices, music)” (van Elferen 2012, p. 19). Devandra P. Varma and Edith Birkhead add precision to the list, with the inclusion of “inexplicable groans and mysterious music” (Varma 1957, p. 96; Birkhead 1921, p. 46), and “[t]he moaning wind, a rustling oboe, a half-heard sigh, the echo of distant footsteps” (Varma 1957, p. 96). Yet, summing up the variety of The Mysteries of Udolpho’s soundscape in a few clichés would not do it justice. In the countryside, sounds are particularly picturesque; as the narrator even says, “she heard only sweet and picturesque sounds, if such an expression may be allowed—the matin-bell of a distant convent, the faint murmur of the sea-waves, the song of birds, and the far-off low of cattle” (Radcliffe 1794, p. 72). Every sonic effect that might recall an element seen on a pastoral painting is featured in the novel, including various birds, bees, sheep bells, dogs barking, horses, cattle, breezes, and other sounds of the wind in branches, water streams, torrents and waterfalls, as well as sounds of human activity (woodmen, shepherds playing the flute, vintage workers singing and dancing after a long day’s work). In more dangerous landscapes, the torrent of water is echoed by thunderstorms and the sound of the rolling tempest, and the sea is agitated, first murmuring then crashing on the shore. Out of these sublime scenes, characters find refuge in places where religion is particularly present, with the sound of organs and various bells (especially the vesper bell). Finally, several places are characterized by more specific soundscapes: first, Venice, with multiple songs on gondolas, and a veritable symphony of music that runs along the canals and turn Venice into a “fairy city […] approaching to welcome the strangers”. (Radcliffe 1794, p. 167); second, Pisa, with the animation of a more mercantile city; third, Chateau-le-Blanc, with its horn concerts and lively groups of singers and dancers, recalling the pastoral scenes of La Vallée with the more city-like activities that Emily also witnessed in Toulouse and Venice; ultimately, Udolpho, with a very different sound signature made of arms clashing, revelry, cannons, trumpets, the overwhelming wind that rocks the castle and menaces its foundations, and the great clock rhythming Emily’s life.

Additionally, among these various scenes, musicscapes also rise to the eye and ear of the reader: the multiple hymns sung at the monasteries enable Emily to feel safe within the protection of a religious haven while she is in the countryside, sounds which leave the narration as soon as she is in the vicinity of Montoni, the incarnation of immorality (he is a banditto, a gambler, a thief, and a liar). There are also various songs sung by Emily with her lute, answering the nightingale with Romantic melancholy undertones, echoed by those of Monsieur Du Pont, Signora Laurentini, and of Valancourt. To these are added various songs by secondary characters, including Ludovico and the domestics playing in the castle, vintage and wood workers, gondoliers singing serenades, armies playing martial airs, and singers and dancers in France and in Italy playing a vast array of instruments from guitars to tambourines, pipes and tabors, violins, castanets, flutes, fifes, oboes, and even the sticcado pastorale, a rare idiophone. Considering the variety and overwhelming presence of sound and music in this novel, one may wonder to what extent they are indeed “picturesque” or evocative of specific associations of ideas. Indeed, each of the sounds listed is at once realistic in that it paints a whole soundscape to the mind’s ear, but none strikes as unexpected. The violin is exposed as the first sound of “Italian music, on Italian ground” (Radcliffe 1794, p. 161), embodying this country the same way the lute, fife, pipe, and tabor are mostly evocative of Arcadian contexts and medieval times5, or the sticcado pastorale makes through its very name an explicit allusion to the pastoral scene in which it is played. Unsurprisingly, these passages are also echoed by the numerous poetic compositions of Emily and her suitors, which use the same clichéd sound- and musicscapes to provide a rhymed and rhythmed version of these sonic evocations.

In light of these comments, one could easily assume, like Isabella van Elferen, that “the definition of ‘Gothic music’ is to be found in its functionality within the larger context of the Gothic narration rather than in a neatly delineated and easily identifiable compositional style” (van Elferen 2012, p. 9). Such functionality is corroborated by Pierre Dubois’ analysis of the symbolic and metaphorical framing of musical scenes in The Mysteries of Udolpho (Dubois 2015, p. 3). Yet, while other novels might be confined to this shortened analysis, I agree with Dubois when he writes (about Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, but aptly applicable to The Mysteries of Udolpho) that “[a] radical shift is […] brought about: instead of taking literature (poetry) as a model, as the ancient theory of the l’ut pictura/musica poesis and of the Sister Arts required, music now imposes its own modalities upon the text” (Dubois 2015, p. 117). Dubois calls this process the “musicalization” of the text, a term that can redefine The Mysteries of Udolpho as no longer based on musical functionality but as essentially musical6. Ut pictura poesis and ut musica poesis are both given special treatment in The Mysteries of Udolpho, without forgetting ut poesis musica: everything in this novel blends the three sister arts, quite literally, since landscapes are accompanied by their own sound signature and poems7, and conversely the disappearance of scenery also brings about a fall of interest in reading and writing (Horrocks 2008, p. 508) and an incapacity to play music on the part of the heroine. In line with E. J. Clery’s idea that “Radcliffe’s aim was to produce a total work of art” (Clery 2000, p. 74), much like an opera, the narration of The Mysteries of Udolpho is made of acts, scenes, and various musical performances standing out before an elaborate and picturesque (meaning picture-evoking) décor worthy of Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, and Piranesi.

When it comes to the soundscapes and musicscapes of the novel, the question, then, does not so much revolve on an opposition between realism and functionality, but rather on the discrepancy between evocatory effet de réel (Barthes 1968) built on the laws of associationism realistic textual rendering of fictional sound events enabled by the richness of language nd, on the contrary, the unrealistic musicalization of the text due to the superiority of music over poetry.

3. Verbal Descriptions of Music, or Sound-Made Text

When considering the opposition between text and sound, in narrations thus permeated by music and sonic effects, the major issue raised is that of the ability of words to paint sound images. The turn of the nineteenth century saw numerous publications in which the expression “words cannot paint” was part of the writer’s etiquette and established itself as a compulsory phrase. It was associated mainly with the impossibility of transcribing faithfully the strength of emotions and passions into text, a meaning which came to question the faithfulness of writing in transcribing sound as well. Indeed, if sound, especially music, was the best means of mimicking sensibility and the motions of the soul and spirit, words, therefore, were equally inadequate in conveying the full scope of musicality.

Before this radical change in aesthetics, poetry remained superior to music through its “usefulness” (Beattie 1779, p. 9) and, auditorily speaking, through its ability to “produce harmony from a combination of notes all jarring and discordant, if they were in unison with some natural scene which from its novelty or grandeur afforded a fit subject for description” (Aikin 1777, pp. 63–4). Accordingly, the frequent composition of verses in The Mysteries of Udolpho enables the characters and narrative voice at once to do justice to the beauty of specific scenes, while also evoking a more complex idea of the focalizers’ feelings and impressions through metaphor, the association of rhymes—laying stress on key words and concepts—and rhythmic composition, conveying additional emotional tints. Such passages contribute to elevating the mind to poetic enthusiasm, much like the intradiegetic musical experience:

• Soft as the surge’s stealing note,
• That dies along the distant shores,
• Or warbled strain, that sinks remote–
• So soft the sigh my bosom pours! (Radcliffe 1794, p. 177)

This extract from Count Morano’s “Rondeau” exemplifies in a few lines the ambivalent imitation and expression of both poetry and music. Firstly, through diegetic singing and playing, Morano elevates the characters’ minds and triggers their memory through the evocation of a distant land. As a rondeau, the song alludes to Emily’s original land, in the southwest of France, and its groups of joyous dancers; and its words, especially “distant shores” and “remote”, also contribute to evoking La Vallée to her mind. Secondly, through largely visual vocabulary, the song mimics music’s volatility, and the movement of its sound waves in the air is equated to the surges of emotions in the characters’ souls. Poetic mimesis thereby encounters the musical imitation of emotion, illustrating the tripartite theory of musical expressivity8. Thirdly, the rhythm of the whole song, being a rondeau, adds circularity and roundness to the sound waves, echoing the actual waves of the water along the Venetian canals in a full harmony. Finally, this specific passage also provides an illustration of Aikin’s unison through dissonance: in only four lines, the whole variety of pronunciation of the letter “o” is exemplified ([ɒ] in “soft”/“along”, [əʊ] in “note”/“remote”/“so”, [ɔː] in “shores”/“Or”/“pours”, [ʊ] and [ə] in “bosom”), each sound metaphorically equaling an “o”-shaped water wave (or French rond d’eau) with a different sonic quality.

In this light, poetry indeed is “useful” in managing to create stronger rhythmic and rhyming impressions than prose. Nevertheless, the narrator seems to suggest that it fails to exist without an underlying addition of music. Most poems in the novel are accompanied with a lute, adding harmony to the melody of their words: “Count Morano […] snatched up a lute, and struck the chords with the finger of harmony herself, while his voice, a fine tenor, accompanied them in a rondeau full of tender sadness” (Radcliffe 1794, p. 176). It is firstly the lute, then the voice and incidentally the words that are mentioned, giving precedence to instrumental music, which in turn is improved by the addition of poetry. Adding to this precedence of music, the focalizer specifically comments on the melody, energy, and modulation of the voice, forgetting the words altogether: “The cadence with which he returned from the last stanza to a repetition of the first; the fine modulation in which his voice stole upon the first line, and the pathetic energy with which it pronounced the last, were such as only exquisite taste could give” (Radcliffe 1794, p. 177). Prose, therefore, proves more efficient in commenting on the sonic characteristics of music, while poetry enables the narrator to mimic its rhythmic and metaphorical meaning. In the end, this example does not help pick a side for one art or another: poetry, prose, and music are here sister arts in the strictest meaning.

What remains to be undertaken, then, is a more precise analysis of the lexicon used by Ann Radcliffe in her prosaic descriptions of poetic and musical effects. When Isabella van Elferen asserts that “sound and music are veiled by adjectives pertaining to the visual, the visceral and the affective” (van Elferen 2012, pp. 2–3), I assume she alludes to the vocabulary borrowed from picturesque and romantic theories and to that related to the memories evoked by such scenes. Indeed, picturesque sounds are literally sounds evoking a scene, a picture. A few lines before the rondeau, one reads:

The smoothness of the water, over which she glided, its reflected images—a new heaven and trembling stars below the waves, with shadowy outlines of towers and porticos, conspired with the stillness of the hour, interrupted only by the passing wave, or the notes of distant music, to raise those emotions to enthusiasm. As she listened to the measured sound of the oars, and to the remote warblings that came in the breeze, her softened mind returned to the memory of St Aubert and to Valancourt, and tears stole to her eyes. (Radcliffe 1794, p. 176)

From visual reflections to sonic images, sounds are constantly associated with elements referring to sight: “the passing wave” is both sound and image, the music is “distant”, the emotions are “raise[d]”. In the second sentence, the “oars” are visible, and even the “warblings that came in the breeze” feel visual, especially with the final memory and reference to the tears in Emily’s eyes. Allusions to the wind, to water streams and even to reverberation, while pertaining to a form of cratylism9 (e.g., “sigh”, “murmur” “roll”, “rush”, “flow”, “dash”, “bounce”, “rock”…), also function as picturesque sounds, simultaneously alerting to the poverty of audio-descriptive language and exemplifying the quasi-synesthetic painterly power of acoustics. Once again, effet de réel and metaphorization are set apart, opposed and reconciled.

This is eventually also the case of more “technical” musical terms like “melody, harmony and cadence” (Noske 1981, p. 165). As Noske suggests, these words are used by Radcliffe not only in reference to music, but also in her descriptions of scenery. More specifically, music listening is accompanied by the observation of surrounding landscapes, leading to similes between the two. Conventionally, “melody” is mostly associated with singing and voiced signals added on background soundscapes, while “harmony” refers to the accompanying voices and other keynote or soundmark sounds10, and “cadence” alludes simultaneously to vanishing sound and lowering pitch. Yet, notably through the personification of the wind, when music is heard in the silent intervals of the breeze, the very landscape becomes an orchestra or a choir: “Their tall heads then began to wave, while, through a forest of pine, on the left, the wind, groaning heavily, rolled onwards over the woods below, bending them almost to their roots; and, as the long-resounding gale swept away, other woods, on the right, seemed to answer the ‘loud lament;’ then, others, further still, softened it into a murmur, that died into silence” (Radcliffe 1794, p. 413). On the keynote, harmonic music of the wind in the forest is played: the melodious signal sounds of the woods on the left and right, falling into a concluding cadence to let the contrapuntal lute take the signal lead again. The reader is not surprised to see another particularly frequent musical term associated with the wind a few lines earlier, “the loud swell of the gust”, which echoes the multitudinous instances of musical “swell[ing]”, a keyword in Radcliffe’s musical lexicon. The verbal description of sound- and musicscapes in The Mysteries of Udolpho, therefore, blends theory and practice, poetry and prose, in a constant hesitation between the thorough, acoustic rendering of sound effects and the proto-Romantic, picture-evoking metaphorical language of poetry.

Consequently, the sister arts are so intrinsically linked in Radcliffe’s choice of topics, descriptions, and lexicon, that the picturesque and musical aspects of The Mysteries of Udolpho seem entangled and impossible to dissociate. Much like in later Romantic writings, everything in nature bears potential musicality and voice, while everything in man is made of chords, strings, and nerves to be struck, played, and put in unison. Considering this inextricable adequation between sight and hearing, the question of all-sound adaptation is made all the more difficult, since as it eliminates the question of lexical mimesis, it also pushes the original material closer to the limits of musical imitation and expression. In other words, the overarching tension between imitation and expression, which is so central to aesthetic (and especially music) theory, is given additional fuel by the translation from one art into another: what may be mimetic in written words is not always so in song or in instrumental music, just as the expressivity of a text does not always find equal correspondences through its adaptation into sound media.

4. Mimetic Sound and Metaphoric Adaptation: Three Case Studies

In order to “speak the pure language of nature” and “elegantly dra[w] the effects of music on the mind” (Drake 1798, p. 76), language, therefore, can show particular double meanings and acoustic effects that music simply cannot. Yet, what literature can be proved to lack is the performative aspect of music, the overwhelming power of a note or any actual sound, which in its very performance surpasses lexical expression through non-verbal expressivity. To use Daniel Webbs’s words, “expression so much depends on the music of the voice” (Webb 1769, p. 93), that a poem or song—and by extension a sound- or musicscape—devoid of its real-life acoustic rendering enhances a sense of lack in reading. This has led artists to experiment with the original material of The Mysteries of Udolpho, adapting it through various sound media. The three (seeming) adaptations I have selected illustrate three different media that show various strengths and weaknesses, each devoting specific attention to distinct elements of the novel that they transcended in their own way through sonic rendering.

4.1. “Soft as yon Silver Ray That Sleeps”, Song Composed by John Bray

“Soft as yon Silver Ray the Sleeps” is a song composed by John Bray “some time between 1805 and 1808” (Hitchcock 1955, p. 377). Most versions found online attach as much importance to John Bray’s name as to the title of the song, and add as a subtitle that it was based on “the poetry from the Mysteries of Udolpho”. On the main website of access to these versions of the song, the English words are attributed to famous actress, educator, and author Susanna Rowson11, but they are quite obviously those of Ann Radcliffe, more specifically those of Count Morano’s rondeau. On the version published by G. E. Blake, the reader learns that it was “sung with great applause by Mr Webster12”, testifying to the quality of the song, but no reviews are available to gauge the appreciation of the audience at the time. John Bray was used to composing and adapting romances, as a specialist of melodrama, whose key components include (I here quote George C. D. Odell) a “persecuted, virtuous heroine, a very villainous villain, a brave, unfortunate hero, and comic servants to assist in the relief of the good” (Hitchcock 1955, p. 378). Commenting on The Indian Princess, Hitchcock suggests that in Bray’s melodramas, instrumental music was designed to accompany the words and songs instead of overwhelming them (Hitchcock 1955, p. 379), echoing Charles Burney’s statement about lyric poetry, rhapsodies, and historical ballads, which “must have been set to the most simple and artless melody, or it would have been utterly unintelligible” (Burney 1789, p. 506). John Bray’s instrumental music in The Indian Princess is “programmatically conceived and as pithily expressive as possible of the dramatic situation” (Hitchcock 1955, p. 380), a form of “mood-music” which has much in common with the strongly associationist music in The Mysteries of Udolpho. “Soft as yon Silver Ray that Sleeps” is no exception to Bray’s overall simplicity of composition. Its rhythm remains uncomplicated, with contrapuntal ebbs and flows between voice, flute, and piano. The major tonality lends the song a mood recalling the pensive melancholy experienced by Ann Radcliffe’s heroines and heroes. Adding to the pitch and tonality, the “andante” pace contributes to giving calmness to the song, whose strength, therefore, revolves on the ability of musicians and singers to draw long, tense, and sustained notes in order to convey music’s pathos and expressivity. Although rondeaux were originally designed for dancing, and were rather set to faster tempi, in this instance, the strength of the song relies on the ability of the singer to give full range to the “ad lib” (i.e., ad libitum, free) parts of the music score. The instructions on the various scores are particularly evocative of enhanced expressivity, through a connection between the words of the song and their musical rendering.

The first fermata falls, unsurprisingly, on the first occurrence of “swells” (line 4 of the original rondeau, and at the beginning of the sixth bar of the sung part), immediately followed by two “ad lib” quarter notes enabling the repetition of “that swells”, thereby adding tension and length to the “swelling” of the music. Music, words, and effect are thus coordinated to convey the strongest impression of musical expressivity. The next instruction is, indeed, an “expressivo” falling of the two quarter notes accompanying the word “dies”, once again swelling text and music to enhance the visual evocation of the line in the poem: “Soft as the surge’s stealing note,/That dies along the distant shores” (l. 4–5). The last word of that line is concluded with a fermata, followed by a “cadenza” on the words “or warbled strain”, matching the lengthy musical image with its musical rendering. A few bars later, “sigh” is similarly allotted a fermata, at the climax of the line “So soft the sigh my bosom pours!” (l. 8). In the same fashion as “that swells”, “the sigh” is repeated in quarter notes, emphasizing the association between music, word, and melancholy. After the reprise, the same effects are repeated, with perhaps less strength for the second stanza: the first fermata falls on “to” in “Or music to Venetian seas”, followed by an “ad lib” on its repetition. The fourth stanza sees an “expressivo” on the second syllable of “upon”, which also lacks the association of ideas that gave strength to the second stanza. The fermata and cadenza for this stanza, however, highlight “breast” in “Upon the ocean’s trembling breast”, and “So soft” at the beginning of the third line, which constitute more favorable associations between music and word. The last fermata of the song similarly emphasizes a key word of the last line, “true”, which is repeated and enables a melodic conclusion to the song.

Considering this analysis, although the composition may not be particularly complex, it mostly achieves its purpose in setting Count Morano’s rondeau to actual music. The adaptation is made both through rhythmic modulation and through the overall architecture of the song, whose reprise further enhances the impression of roundness and of refrain that a rondeau implies. In many aspects, John Bray’s setting of Ann Radcliffe’s words to sound exemplifies what Edgar Allan Poe would later advocate, with the use of refrains tinted with variations that “heighten the effect, by adhering in general to the monotone of sound, while [continually varying] that of thought” (Poe 1846, p. 17). As a matter of fact, Bray’s composition heightens effects through simple instructions such as fermatas, ad libitum phrases, and cadenzas, combined with the added repetition of certain words from the original text which, while contributing to the uniformity of the song, simultaneously enhance its expressivity and subtle variation. In so doing, these modulations of the original medium draw the listener’s attention to key items of Radcliffe’s musical lexicon. By choosing this specific song, John Bray, therefore, managed to adapt one of the key poems of The Mysteries of Udolpho, keeping its overall lyricism and main musical evocations through a musical rendering that would aptly provide a sound illustration to several other songs of the novel. The recurrence of similar expressions from one description to another in Ann Radcliffe’s work does not contradict Bray’s choice to adapt only one of the songs, although there are fewer rondeaux than other music genres and styles in her novel. Indeed, Radcliffe enthusiasts may criticize this choice, as well as that of a piano forte instead of a lute, and may lack the musical variety of the gay songs of dancing groups in the countryside, but Count Morano’s rondeau nevertheless remains a convincing choice, since it recalls the most musical event of the novel and evokes the soothing melancholy that permeates the whole text of Ann Radcliffe’s novel in a form of pathetic and lyrical musicality.

4.2. “The Mysteries of Udolpho”, Radio Dramatization by Catherine Czerkawska

Among the three examples studied, Catherine Czerkawska’s radio dramatization is what comes closest to an adaptation of Ann Radcliffe’s novel taken as a whole. Cut into two parts of about one hour each in length, the radio play adapts the events of The Mysteries of Udolpho without the original narrative voice13, keeping only the substance of the main events and dialogues. Considering the length of the original material and the multitudinous visual descriptions that permeate it, the play left aside whole passages that did not fit the sound medium of radio dramatization. In a study “Dramatizing Udolpho, or the Staging of Picturesque Sounds” (Ratail 2023), I questioned the reliability of the background sounds chosen by Catherine Czerkawska and her team in the radio play, concluding that Ann Radcliffe’s original soundscape is not always made of the most picturesque sounds (meaning literally sounds evoking a picture). In order to evoke nightfall, Czerkawska replaced Radcliffe’s song of the nightingale with the hooting of an owl, the former sound being much less recognizable to the modern ear than the latter. Similarly, bees were replaced by the sound of tilling and various other noises made by cattle and chickens to better illustrate the characters’ passage through cultivated land. However, aside from these background noises, music also bears particular interest in this adaptation, since it opposes two different uses of voiced and instrumental music, the first assuming strong functionality in the narrative, while the second remains mainly decorative and associative.

Several occurrences of music in the play are direct or indirect renderings of music mentioned in the original text. Exemplifying the three main types of music playing in the novel, the play offers the listeners an instance of vintage festivity, a ball organized by Madame Clairval, and the songs of Signora Laurentini and Monsieur Du Pont. However, the adaptation of these music scenes shows specific choices made by the composer. Firstly, the music of the vintage festivities features a guitar, a violin, and a flute, instead of a guitar and tambourine, and is accompanied by clapping and laughing. In but a few seconds, the scene strikes the mind’s eye thanks to these sounds, and the listener is presented with a sound effect that matches what one could expect upon reaching a group of merry singers. This passage functions as a transition, conjugated with the “eerie singing” of Signora Laurentini: St Aubert is feeling unwell, and Emily first hears the chilling melancholy song before commenting upon the vintage in passing and coming back to her father. While the first song is given particular attention by the focalizer, the festivities function more as background noise than as a formal introduction to La Voisin. Nevertheless, even the acousmatic song fails to follow Radcliffe’s original description, since Signora Laurentini is not heard to play an instrument, while in the novel, Emily St Aubert and her father originally inquire more after instrumental music than the voice. St Aubert wonders “[w]ho touches that guitar so tastefully”, to which La Voisin answers that “[t]hat guitar is often heard at night, when all is still, but nobody knows who touches it, and it is sometimes accompanied by a voice so sweet, and so sad, one would almost think the woods were haunted” (Radcliffe 1794, p. 67). The precedence of voice over instrumental music is echoed later in the radio dramatization, when Monsieur Du Pont is only heard to sing, although the novel shows Emily recognizing the timbre of “the very lute she had formerly heard” (Radcliffe 1794, p. 413). Overall, Ann Radcliffe’s initial focalization of her heroine on instrumental music is shifted towards the eerie effect of melancholy singing, hence opposing individual singers on the one hand, and what I would call “decorative” group music, on the other hand.

Decorative music is what Pierre Dubois has often commented as emphasizing Radcliffe’s lack of interest in the actual acoustic rendering of her music scenes, which give precedence to associations of ideas over musicality. An example is the description of Madame Clairval’s ball, with its musicians playing “the lute, the hautboy, and the tabor” while hosts are “touching sportively a guitar” (Radcliffe 1794, p. 124). In Czerkawska’s dramatization, the mediaeval rhythm and overall effect is given more importance than the acoustic rendering of the original instruments, probably in part for financial reasons, considering their variety and rarity, but mostly because, once again, this music has a function in the narrative of the drama. The notes of the string instruments are reverberated by the surrounding acoustics, which allows the hearer to understand that the ball is held indoors (another change from the original), and efficiently conveys the decor of a gathering by aristocrats in the Renaissance period. Regarding the decorative and associationist aspects of Radcliffe’s music scenes, Czerkawska answers with musical transitions evoking at once a change of scenery, change of atmosphere, and change of mood. Extradiegetic music is particularly present, and enables us to come from melancholy settings to the preparation of Montoni’s wedding through joyful music (part I, 44:23), or on the contrary to provide the accompaniment for the melancholy summary of Montoni’s mischievous actions while Madame Montoni is heard to cry (part II, 12:52)14. The extradiegetic musical passages added in the dramatization, therefore, function as signifiers of transition and of the ellipsis of several scenes of the novel. Yet, the passages they replace prove to be highly musical themselves. While it is no surprise that the decorative songs played by lonely musicians (e.g., Claude, La Voisin’s son, Magdalena, the horn concerts commissioned by the Villefort) should have been removed, the most musical passage of The Mysteries of Udolpho is omitted: the voyage to Italy and arrival in Venice (Radcliffe 1794, pp. 157–81). There is no violin, no rondeau, and no carnival: Venice is only a city in passing, and Emily’s enchantment is removed from the dramatization, which leads the hearer to understand that there is hardly any room for entertainment in this adaptation.

Commenting on Ann Radcliffe’s novels, Pierre Dubois wrote that musical allusions “merely suggest that the world the characters inhabit is permeated with music. Music intervenes either to testify to important changes in the psychological situation of the heroines, or to give a moral portrait of the characters through an implicit analogy with their musical talent” (Dubois 2015, p. 169). In the end, despite the omission of this last aspect, the radio play managed to keep the overall musicality of Ann Radcliffe’s original material, while redefining its function within the main narrative. In the dramatization, song and instrumental music were set apart, enabling an opposition between the eerie singing analyzed by the characters and pertaining to the main plot, and the instrument used mainly for its ability to create associations in the hearer’s mind. Intradiegetic decorative music was mostly omitted and replaced by highly picturesque (and decorative) extradiegetic playing, further enhancing this functionality of music. This dramatization, therefore, kept the features that John Bray’s composition lacked, privileging narration over musical romantic expressivity.

4.3. Udolpho, Music Album by Marc Morvan and Benjamin Jarry

In 2009, Marc Morvan and Benjamin Jarry released the album Udolpho, a disk made of ten folk songs written in English for voice, guitar, and cello. The musicians told me15 that the composition was intended to remain minimalist, with very few superimposed voices16, which were recorded with as little modification as possible, drawing close to acoustic chamber music. The main reviews of the album bear witness to this initial intent, praising the “refinement and gallantry” (Seban 2009) of this “intimist, fragile and minimalist folk music” (Michel 2010)17. From the onset, the listener is, therefore, offered an album that recalls Ann Radcliffe’s contemplative, peacefully melancholy, and sophisticated novel. Yet, convincing though these parallels may seem, Morvan and Jarry have since revealed to me that the album was not an adaptation of the eponymous text. Considering the analysis of an inspiration as well as that of an artwork in its own sake, I was thus led to conduct a double study of Udolpho, which raised the perilous questions of hearer reception and of musical association, whose common thread is the notion of effect.

Listening to the album through the prism of The Mysteries of Udolpho colors one’s perception of the songs, leading to the possibility of a thematic analysis based on the melodies, rhythms, and lyrics. Incidentally, the first song “Down Her Nest”, through the use of lyrics including “injured wings”, “tender”, “desperate pain”, “listening to a stranger”, and “unpractical bird”, reminds one of the beginning of the novel, with Emily and her father’s observation of the nightingale in La Vallée. The song is rather melancholy, with a tint of optimism giving impetus to the album and foregrounding the heroine’s voyage. The “chiseled and delicate baroque” (Michel 2010) second song, “A Man at the Frontier”, is more misleading. Its first bars recall the voyage in the south of France and the various encounters made by Emily, but the subsequent bars start questioning the initial calmness of the song, mostly through the lyrics. Thus, the “infinity of lands you can’t define” are echoed by the “voices kept inside”, which hint at Emily’s psychological struggles once out of her home and country. This instability is further enhanced by the arrival of what sounds like a violin (but is instead a superposition of three or four cello lines, as Jarry told me), easily associable to Montoni. Remembering the Radcliffean association of violins with Italy leads the listener of “A Man at the Frontier” to hear the cello line as the musical embodiment of the Italian banditto. The man at the frontier is, indeed, described as follows in the song:

• “A man who’s a gambler, a man at the frontier;
• When a fire burns in hell, he stands behind;
• Hidden in your nerves, your brain, your blood and mind
• From his island of death, he shares his monster’s side
• He wants you to ruin her.”

While the first line is reminiscent of Montoni, the following chorus is much darker and would rather describe Lucifer in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. From banditto to devil, these lyrics, nevertheless, warn the listener about the main source of evil, corroborated by the outro’s breathtaking, terrifying rhythmic agitation and aided by the dissonance that precedes the final rallentando. These final chords enable a short transition towards a much lighter song, “Before You Say Goodbye”, which through its very title evokes Emily’s farewell(s) with Valancourt. The guitar’s arpeggios are answered by the dancing harmony of the cello, and the overall atmosphere is calm and peaceful. The rhythms of the instrumental music echo other scenes of dancing and singing groups, and its harmony transmits the permeating happiness of the time the heroine and Valancourt spend together before their separation. If the album were to follow the unfolding of the novel’s events, this song could also be a reference to Emily’s numerous evenings spent longing for Valancourt’s return and going back in thought to happier times, and the song “Emily”, with similarly peaceful tones, also refers to “the places she had known before” through its lyrics, commenting on the walks of a stressed but bold heroine. Then comes “The Murder of our Neighbour”, which despite its title recalls the rhythms of the songs evoking dancing groups: its outro, in particular, stresses beats in a frantic manner, evoking a slightly stressful circular dance. After these scenes, the stay at Udolpho seems omitted, but its escape might be read through the title “From the Lair of the Desert’s King”, whose introduction through slow, shrill, and syncopated arpeggios on the guitar is followed by the joyful superposition of lighter arpeggios answering long-drawn cello notes. From the bleak, sad, and lonely castle to new walks in the Apennines or voyage back to France, instrumental music once again paints to the reader/listener the image of Emily’s going back to nature and society. In the novel, this voyage brings the heroine back to Chateau-le-Blanc among the Villeforts and the company of Monsieur Du Pont. In this light, “Some Magnificent Days”, which Morvan called a “period costume” song, with texts “in garb”, is a “majestic Renaissance caprice” (Michel 2010), the tale of a princess in a castle, which can only bring to mind the passages when the Villeforts comment on the past glory of Chateau-le-Blanc. The impression of ebb and flow of the song also embodies the narrative focal fluctuations in the novel, mimicking this confrontation of past and present. This impression of dialogue is further transmitted in the subsequent song, “The Magical Gloves of K. S.”, in which a high-pitched cello line accompanies the singer’s voice, recalling the similarities between Emily’s and Blanche’s points of view. Finally, the joyful, dancing pace of the introduction of this song, which one may equate to the balls and other entertainment of the Villeforts, is made to contrast with the much more melancholy song that follows, “On Your Back”. The merry horn concerts on the banks of the Mediterranean answer the forlorn and lyrical songs of Signora Laurentini and the calm but entrenched melancholy of Monsieur Du Pont. Ultimately, with lyrics mentioning a prison, a desert, a fortress, vales, and mountains, as well as mental space, hid[ing], and visions of reality, and through instrumental music echoing several other songs of the album, “The Photograph of Gerry” provides a multifaceted conclusion to the work.

Eventually, readers of The Mysteries of Udolpho, when analyzing Udolpho through the prism of the novel, are given numerous arguments to justify the listening of the album as adaptation. Nonetheless, several key aspects could alert them that such a reading might prove wrong, especially when considering the titles of the songs and some of their lyrics (e.g., “Before You Say Goodbye”, in which the singer talks about someone named Gabrielle). Indeed, this album is not an adaptation of Ann Radcliffe’s novel, but a compilation of songs whose inspirations are varied and bear only a thin link to the Gothic. Although Morvan wrote that references in various songs are “traces, memories, transformed by fancy18”, and even if he was reading several Gothic novels at the time when he wrote the album, he gave it the name “Udolpho” a posteriori, only because it “sounded well”. This idea of “sounding well”, connected to that of effect, was central to Marc Morvan’s songwriting. Benjamin Jarry praised Morvan’s “haiku-like” songwriting, and even called his colleague the “ayatollah of minimalism”: every word, line, or melody was kept when he deemed that “it made its effect”. Morvan’s logic of effect also reads through his writing process: because his level of English was not optimal, Morvan wrote his songs in a radically different manner from his French songwriting. In English, he started with the melody and the sound effect he intended, before finding words which might rhyme with the phonemes he had in mind and match the number of syllables of his melodic lines. This made the composition difficult and explains the sometimes less coherent texts: effect took precedence over ideas in the music and lyrics. The reader is then led to consider the effect of melody rather than text, explaining my unfortunate equation of songs with scenes from the novel.

Despite his quest for minimalism, Marc Morvan avoided what Jarry called “forbidden melodies”, melodic lines which might be reminiscent of others. This goes singularly against Ann Radcliffe’s writing, which was, on the contrary, replete with references, quotations, and imitations of styles and topics from other celebrated writers, including William Shakespeare, the Graveyard Poets, John Milton, and William Gilpin, to quote only a few. Jarry praises Morvan’s ability to always “take a step aside”, to which I will add his capacity to create universality through a very individual and specific way of composing and writing. As concerns composition, Morvan’s main resource is again his voice, perhaps because, as Matt Foley singles out about Radcliffe herself, his “melodious voice coheres with James Beattie’s understanding of the aesthetic pleasure derived from the ‘natural voice’ as ‘the foundation of all true music, and the most perfect of all musical instruments’” (Foley 2023, p. 21). As Jarry explained, Morvan usually sings the melodies or lines he wants other musicians to perform on their instruments: his voice is, therefore, at the start of both melody, lyrics, and harmony. Like in Ann Radcliffe’s novel, music leads to music: singing (or the hearing of songs and other musical performances) anticipates musical composition and composition anticipates new music and singing. In the album, the cello bears strong similitude to the lutes in The Mysteries of Udolpho as a particularly striking and recognizable musical support, playing the third note to accompany the guitar, with more lyrical flights to assist the voice. Its versatility confers it a distinct tint and specific quality that enables it to stand out as an instrument of dialogue within the songs, despite its original role as an accompaniment. As Jarry tells his cello students, “some cellos sing, some cellos walk or dance”, and his instrument enables him to create a vast array of effects inspired by classic 50s and 60s rock music and to get out of the usual decorative “window dressing” folk cello he is used to hearing. Making vibratos and two-chord melodies allowed him to create floating effects, while at other times he manages to play what I assimilated to a violin or to intentionally sound like a barytone saxophone, notably in “The Murder of our Neighbour”.

Like incantations, his cello lines have something “magical”, able to “strike the most sensitive strings of musical emotion19” (Conte 2009). Morvan stressed the fact that there was always a form of “enchantment” when he played with Jarry, that a je ne sais quoi came out of each of their rehearsals and concerts. This, I believe, is another justification of what I thought was the adaptative aspect of their album: their enchantment is at once scene-evoking and emotion-provoking, two aspects which are intrinsically linked to Radcliffe’s understanding of music. As all music, it is not picture-evoking in the strictest sense, but its expressivity and associationist power enable it to evoke universal scenes of dance, pursuit, observation, and walking, as well as strong feelings of stress, longing, melancholy, and joy. This is the dual aspect intrinsic to music, according to Oliver Sacks: “Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation” (Sacks 2018, p. 329). Morvan and Jarry tangentially alluded to this same aspect, the former by explaining that though emotion is never the focal point of his music, there is not a song he wrote without a tint of melancholy as a result of his equation of music with the language of dreams: it is through verbalization that dreams come to sound, and similarly through music that sensation (and emotion) is given acoustic existence.

Incidentally, although Udolpho is not an adaptation of The Mysteries of Udolpho, the hearer/reader finds strong similarities between the two artworks due to common drives and focal subjects. Chamber folk music is a medium that intrinsically relies on peaceful melancholy, with instruments recalling the simple arrangements of the vocal song and instrumental accompaniment present in Radcliffe’s novel, adding a focus on tension and effect reminiscent of Gothic writing’s insistence on the triggering of strong emotions. Like Radcliffe, Morvan and Jarry attempted to present music “as a pure outburst of sensibility and emotion that speaks directly to the heart” (Dubois 2015, p. 184). This intention to create what Morvan calls “heart-piercing” music even led them to keep original, flawed first recordings instead of their re-recordings of some songs. They quoted the example of “On Your Back”, whose initially poor-quality recording of the cello line (which included the sound of buses braking outside) was eventually preferred to subsequent recordings, which lacked the spontaneity of the first take and, more importantly, were deemed not sad enough. In the end, though emotion was not the point of origin in Morvan and Jarry’s songwriting, contrary to Radcliffe’s heroine’s, it still was given specific importance in the final recording. Emotion was also a cornerstone of most reviews of the album: Jarry quoted one in particular that criticized the album, calling it “lenifying”, an adjective that contributes to linking the album and novel through an ability to soothe the hearer/reader. The album was critically acclaimed and seen as a much-sought-for return to simplicity and expressivity, enabling listeners to let their thoughts evade in the “imaginary of Ireland’s lakes and sometimes tormented valleys” (Nicolas 2009), or in the steps of Emily St Aubert, Valancourt, and Monsieur Du Pont, through hardships, tension, and dancing. Whether the associations raised are triggered by readers’ expectations or by other traces and emotions colored by other individual experiences and imagination, Udolpho strikes as a strong example of music’s expressivity and picturesqueness and as an apt adaptation of the novel, although unintentionally.

5. Conclusions: Universality of Effect and Singular Effectivity

This study, through the questioning of what makes an adaptation, and more specifically what makes a faithful adaptation, raised the main issues that have animated music theory since its beginnings, namely imitation and expression. While The Mysteries of Udolpho was published at a time when theorists endeavored to redefine the hierarchization of arts concomitantly to that of the senses, the novel does not seem to opt for one treatise over another on this respect, but rather works as a particularly striking reconciliation of all sister arts. To answer my initial question, focusing on the acoustic credibility of Radcliffe’s descriptions misses the point: her music and poetry are not really disengaged, despite apparent contradictions; they are involved in a much wider dialogue between all arts. Such association of painting, poetry, and music enhances the vacuousness of questioning the aptness of verbal language in commenting on one art or another: despite language’s entrenched referentiality in the visual field, its shortcomings in describing sound effects and music may in fact point to the very picturesque quality of all arts through their imitative aspect. Language indeed can paint the strength of emotion, passion, and the idea of music, but cannot perfectly mimic other arts, just as music cannot technically paint or speak, yet provides a powerful picture-evoking and speech-assimilated language of dream, imagination, and emotion. This is what the sound- and musicscapes of The Mysteries of Udolpho point towards, thereby answering the second issue I raised in my introduction: they contribute to creating a universal mood-music quality that permeates all types of adaptations and fixations of sound, including song and radio dramatization. My third question regarding the aspects of the novel that should be given more attention by adaptors in the end proves vain, for it fails to tackle the inherent difference between these media. All three cases studied show strengths and weaknesses in their ability to adapt the novel, but they more interestingly “create something new by making a step aside” (Jarry) and convey similar emotions and impressions built on associations of ideas. They are all Radcliffe-like yet not like Radcliffe, all pointing, like her, to the central question of hearer perception and reception as central to the creative process, yet doing it, unlike her, through media and sound choices pertaining to their own individual and specific signature and effect.