ABSTRACT
Despite a contemporaneous critical recognition equal to that of American peers Amy Beach and Carrie Jacobs Bond, Eleanor Everest Freer (1864–1942) has not enjoyed a corresponding rediscovery, and her oeuvre – comprising over 130 songs, 11 chamber operas and numerous piano and ensemble vocal works published in both American and transatlantic editions – are almost unknown today. Her most significant composition, the first complete setting of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, is illustrative of the early twentieth-century American art song aesthetic in its melding of late nineteenth-century Continental compositional practice with English language poetics; however, Freer’s songs exhibit an originality that transcends this convention. Recognised as ‘the best auguries for America’s art future’, the Sonnets are unique in their employment of late-nineteenth century harmonic language as a narrative tool that explicates the text and its structure. Freer subtly constructs her dramatic commentary and elucidation through the subversion of this language, using ambiguity and retrospective reinterpretation to superimpose an unfolding musical form upon each sonnet, displaying not only a keen sensitivity to Barrett Browning’s texts, but also to the nuanced variations within the sonnet form. An analysis of Sonnet I, ‘I thought once how Theocritus had sung’, parsing the elements of Freer’s narrative approach to harmony, will illustrate this innovative process, as well as the need for further exploration of her work and its contribution to the development of American art song.
