Keats’ ‘Isabella’ in symphony

by Gwen Herat

It was a vision...... In the drowsy gloom
The dull of midnight, at her couch's foot
Lorenzo stood, and wept; the forest tomb
Had marr'd his glossy hair which one could shoot
Lustre into the sun and put cold doom
Upon his lips, and taken the soft lute
From his lorn voice and passed his loamed ears
Had made a miry channel for his tears......

Two combined verses from his 1818 long poem. ‘Isabella’ (or The Pot of Basil).

‘O Meloncholy, turn thine eyes away ‘O Music, Music, breathe despondently ‘Echo, Echo, on some other day......                                                                - From Isabella

A robust tragedy spiced in romance and death, laid upon a helpless, beautiful girl who is at the mercy of her two brothers. The story has high quality value, seeped in romance and cold-blooded murder; a story as remarkable as its heroine but Keats fail to rise to its depth.

The verses are filled with unwarranted melancholy and stereotype, run-of-the-mill poetry. It is sad that he failed to draw out the essence, the aura that surrounds the subject. Compared to Keats’ ‘Endymion’, ‘Isabella’ takes a back seat with so much potential that has gone untapped. Given to Shakespeare, ‘Isabella’ could have been dialogued to such scaling heights with a spectacular rise, that ‘Isabella’ would have been among his top tragedies.

But Keats has failed to seize the significance of his own story and build around it. instead, his mile-long stanzas are painful to read and if the reader was not updated with the story, he would have felt reading nonsense.

Poetic play

In fairness to Keats, we must realise that he never wrote a play rather a narrated story that would have been better written to a tale rather than a poem. May be he was intent conveying the poem into a poetic play but it never occurred.

When the poem was published, it met with a lashing from some while others saw a glimmer of hope in the flagging poetry scene. This tale was praised by Charles Lamb but in 1853, Mathew Arnold picked it for criticism. But later, the reader was given the option to decide for himself on a comparison with his ‘Isabella’ as with ‘A Sicilian Story’ written by his friend, Barry Cornwall in a version of modern refinement. It was conceived with love and misery of Isabella.

But still the question remains; Why did it have to trail behind ‘Endymion'? or for that matter, why did Keats have to trail behind Wordsworth? Keats confined himself to his own art of writing and drew heavily upon archaic and pseudo English that produced a sense of public disgust not so much for ‘Isabella’ but in general.

By this time, poetry readers were tired of antiquity and were looking for robust Romanticism and his style was static where certain spellings could have been removed.

I am not a great poet to sit in judgement on Keats but taking for granted that poets such as Shelley, Coleridge, Milton, Wordsworth, Robert Browning and lesser known English poets had left him behind in spite of his spectacular ‘Endymion’ and the rest. However, ‘Endymion’ was the target for the criticism against Keats but later, one critic asserted it on the failure of those criticism to understand the beauty and meaning behind the literary saga. Keats genius rose after his death.

‘Isabella’ resurrected

Keats died in 1821 and Frank Bridge in 1879, 58 years later. Bridge was to resurrect ‘Isabella’ as well as Keats to phenomenal heights of fame and popularity. Keats was buried after his head, hand and foot were taken before his body was interred in the Protestant cemetery according to his wishes where violets grew and was his own elegy. Bridge was the Messiah for the awakening of ‘Isabella’ in symphony.

I attended the massive orchestration in September, 2011 at the Royal Albert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra with the rare notation by Frank Bridge whose music had been a regular feature at the RAH.

Bridge had been only 27 years old when he scored ‘Isabella’ after its tone-poem inspired by the most horrible, gruesome story of the innocent eponymous heroine whose brothers kill her lover, Lorenzo and who visits her in a dream and informs her whereabouts her buried body.

Isabella finds the grave, cuts off his body and conceals it in a pot of basil. Later the brothers discover it and steal whereupon, she pines and dies. Great was her love for Lorenzo.

Bridge completed the score of Isabella in 1907 and was his most effective orchestral work. It established him as a recognised individual music voice. It was conducted by Sir Henry Wood and was a smashing success. In 1935, the BBC Orchestra played the score with Bridge conducting for the first time.

Sadness

The grisly story related in John Keats’ Isabella (or Pot of Basil) was derived from a narrative, the Decameron. No other work by Bridge follows a literary program so closely as this poem. The composer has segmented the score into four divisions in order to retain the elements of sadness, horror and love tragedy.

It is a simple diatonic melody which reflects Isabella's bold character as suggested by Keats. Apparently Bridge had studied Liszt's symphonic poems as well as Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and perhaps some of Richard Strauss’ essays in genre.

But the radiant orchestral outpourings that Bridge combined Lorenzo's and Isabella’ theme, pointed forward to his maturity in mixing tone poems in symphonic scores, to outshine many who tried to follow him.

Thus Isabella remain resurrected
And so she pined and so she died forlon
Imploring for her Basil to the last.
No heart was there in Florence but did mourn
In pity of her love, so overcast

And a sad ditty of this story was born
From mouth to mouth through all the country pass'd
Still in the burthen sung, ‘O cruelty,
‘To steal my Basil-pot away from me. ‘

Epilogue to Isabella