Byron and Music: An Intermedial Study of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold in Nineteenth-Century Programme Music

Lord Byron’s poetry was instrumental in programme music production in nineteenth-century Europe. European musicians’ penchant for the cult of Byronism was influenced by the gloomy Romantic hero meditating on the ruins of history, art, and mortality, as narrated in Byron’s poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818). While musical and literary scholars have examined the associations between the two artistic media, poem and music, in terms of fluctuating moods, Byronic character, and subversive form, to date, there has been little attempt to identify and critically evaluate the influence of Byron’s poetics on the musical compositions. This thesis is an attempt to understand the intermedial relationship between the poetic techniques and the analogous musical devices. The works in question are Berlioz’s Harold in Italy (1834) and Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage, Book I: Switzerland (1858), compositions that were directly inspired by Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This study assesses the correlations using musical semiotics and melopoetics, which combines linguistics and prosody. Alongside the context behind the Byron reception, this combined method grants equal weight to the analyses of the music and poetry. The extent of congruence between the media reveals overarching philosophical and cultural underpinnings of Romantic art, particularly Byron’s Romantic irony, through which the composers seek to come to terms with the artistic, theological, political, and ethical complexities conveyed in the verse.