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Rosa Newmarch (1857-1940) was an extraordinary woman of many talents – ‘une femme inoubliable’ as Sibelius once called her, a phrase adopted by Lewis Stevens as the title of this fascinating biography published by Matador in 2011. She achieved considerable success in the varied roles of musicologist, critic, translator, publicist, cultural ambassador, lecturer, writer and poet. She is chiefly remembered for having done so much to introduce the music of Sibelius and Janáček to British audiences, yet deserves equal recognition for her tireless promotion over many years of Russian music and culture in general. In this she was a kindred spirit to George Calderon, although there seems to be no evidence that they ever met or even commented on each other.
Like Calderon, and at about the same time as him, she was prompted by her fascination with the country to learn Russian. In her case it was exposure to the nationalist ‘New School’ of Russian music which led her to the language. After having her translation of a French-language book on Borodin published in 1895, she realised that any further serious research would require a knowledge of Russian and began taking lessons with an émigrée native speaker. She also began corresponding with Vladimir Stasov, the influential critic and scholar who championed the nationalist music of the ‘Mighty Handful’ (Borodin, Balakirev, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov and Musorgsky) and was keen to see it better known in the West.
By 1897 Rosa was ready to undertake a visit to Russia, the first of four between then and 1915. Here, as throughout his book, Stevens includes extensive extracts from Rosa’s unfinished autobiography and her daughter’s supplementary biographical account, both previously unpublished. The lively writing and colourful detail of these make for enjoyable reading. Rosa describes having to endure the exasperating procedures of Russian customs officials who demanded, and for some time refused to accept, explanations of articles in her luggage, an experience she found ‘more ludicrous than painful’. The previous year George Calderon had portrayed his own soul-destroying encounter with Russian officialdom in his humorous piece ‘At the Custom House’. Little had changed, it seems, since the Marquis de Custine’s comment on passing through customs in 1838: ‘In Russian administration, minuteness does not exclude disorder’.
Rosa’s account of her stay in Moscow provides vivid snapshots of everyday life in the old capital: Easter church services, a concert at Sokolniki Park, meals in cheap eating houses, the hotels where she stayed, encounters with ordinary Russians, and more besides. In St Petersburg she finally met Stasov, who in his capacity as Head of the Department of Fine Arts at the Imperial Public Library helped her to pursue her researches into Russian music. He also introduced her to many figures prominent in the world of Russian culture, including the composers Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, the music publisher and patron of the arts Belyayev, the singer Chaliapin and the painter Repin.
Back in England, Rosa launched her crusade on behalf of Russian music and the arts. Between then and the end of World War I she published a torrent of articles and books on the subject, including the first full-length biography of Tchaikovsky in any language and a trio of monographs on Russian opera, poetry and art. This is not to mention her translations of books, opera librettos and songs, her extensive programme of public lectures, or her networking with English conductors such as Henry Wood and Thomas Beecham to ensure performances of Russian works. Somehow she also found time to write all the programme notes for the Promenade concerts over many years, make extensive contributions on Russian and Czechoslovak music to Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and even publish two volumes of original verse.
Although she married and had two children, judging from her letters her relationship with her husband was cool and distant. He did not share her interests, and for much of the time they appear to have led more or less separate lives. She enjoyed a much closer emotional (and possibly physical) relationship with another woman, Bella Simpson, who moved in and lived with the family for many years.
Stevens has documented well Rosa’s efforts on behalf of Sibelius, which ran parallel to her promotion of Russian music. She developed a close friendship with Sibelius which shines through their correspondence, quoted selectively by Stevens and published in full by Philip Ross Bullock (The Correspondence of Jean Sibelius and Rosa Newmarch 1906-1939, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2011). Rosa visited Sibelius several times in Finland, and organised and supervised his five visits to Britain between 1905 and 1921. She showed an almost motherly concern for the somewhat impractical composer, making sure he arrived at concerts and appointments on time and closely monitoring his consumption of cigars and alcohol in accordance with doctors’ orders. Once when she visited Sibelius in Paris, he told her he could not understand why he should be losing 25-franc gold coins on a daily basis. The obvious explanation suggested by her – that he had a hole in one of his pockets – turned out to be the case, and although no seamstress, she was able to effect a repair herself.
Rosa Newmach (image from The Women Poets Timeline Project)
Newmarch took a keen interest in the religious and spiritual life of Russia; one of her last publications on that country, The Devout Russian (1918), was a compendium of texts by ecclesiastical figures and secular writers. Disillusioned with the Bolshevik regime’s atheistic policies, she came to feel that Russian music, like its government, had as she put it ‘fallen into the wrong hands’, and turned her attention to another Slav country, the newly independent Czechoslovakia. Again she learned the language, undertook regular visits to the country and made contact with prominent figures in the world of music and politics there, most notably the composer Leoš Janáček and the country’s first president Tomáš Masaryk. Her work as publicist mirrored that undertaken for Russia, culminating in her book The Music of Czechoslovakia, published posthumously in 1942.
In 1926 she organised and supervised Janáček’s visit to England for a programme of concerts of his music, receptions, meetings and sightseeing. As with Sibelius, she fussed over his well-being, down to advising him in some detail what clothes to pack for the British weather. She had already translated the texts of some of his songs for the concerts, and later translated the librettos of three of his operas, of which she remained a staunch advocate. Sadly, she did not live to see the first performance of a Janáček opera in Britain (Káťa Kabanová in 1951).
Stevens’s self-published book provides a soundly researched factual account of Rosa Newmarch’s life and work, much enlivened by the extracts from her autobiography and letters. A number of typographical and syntactical errors, and even the odd malapropism, indicate a lack of editing and proofreading (an English person living abroad is for instance rather delightfully accorded the status of ‘ex-patriot’!).
An important point not brought out by Stevens is that (as shown by Bullock in his introduction to the Newmarch-Sibelius correspondence) Rosa championed the ‘nationalist’ music of Russia, Finland and Czechoslovakia not as an end in itself but a necessary first step in breaking free from German influences, something she also strongly advocated for British music. Thus she welcomed and encouraged Sibelius’s return to symphonic composition in a renewed, non-Germanic form that transcended nationalism, praising in particular the most ‘modern’ and at the time misunderstood of his symphonies, the Fourth, of which she published a detailed analysis.
Rosa’s final visit to Russia was made in 1915, travelling in difficult wartime conditions via Scandinavia. A year later she summed up her abiding love for the country and its people in a poem addressed to Britain’s ally and published in The Times. She praises the ‘unstinted sacrifice’ (her italics) being made, as so often in the past, by this ‘Land of vast potencies, land of my heart’, and goes on to express her hopes (soon to be cruelly dashed) for its future greatness, ‘lit by faith inviolate’. The poem concludes:
and though I die
Ere thy meridian, I am reconciled
If but one Russian, passing where I lie
Should say: ‘She loved us poor, assoil’d, reviled.’
I owe the phrase ‘and interest in Russian music’, completing a sentence on page 105 of my biography that begins ‘The early 1890s saw a sharp increase in articles about Russian literature’, entirely to pioneer writer on nineteenth-century Anglo-Russian contacts Harvey Pitcher, who suggested it whilst reading my first typescript of the chapter. Until then, I had regarded the occurrence of Russian music in the U.K. as entirely random and unorganised. A little digging about, e.g. in the publications of Philip Ross Bullock, soon persuaded me that, as with most appearances of foreign cultures in a given culture, the arrival of Russian music in British performance was anything but a matter of chance. The name Rosa Newmarch featured, but it is only this review by John Dewey of Lewis Stevens’s book that has really brought home to me what this transiently Edwardian woman achieved. I am really grateful to John for doing this for me and doubtless many others. An American professor of drama has emailed to say that he read John’s post and promptly ordered the book for his department library.
I mean this in the kindest, most admiring, most respectful sense: Rosa Newmarch was clearly an ‘enthusiast’ or ‘wonk’ for Slav music, but she was serious, dynamic, and got things done. There is something quintessentially Edwardian about both her obsession and her energy. If I may adapt what Pushkin said of translators, cultural wonks like Rosa Newmarch are the ‘post-horses of enlightenment’ (i.e. civilisation).
George owned a copy of her Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (London, 1900). I can recall no mention of her name in his correspondence, but given the range of his London cultural network, his association with Ballets Russes, and his own love of contemporary Russian composers, one is tempted to say he ‘must’ have known her and approved.