Alfred, Lord Tennyson once enjoyed extraordinary popularity as a poet. His Arthurian sequence Idylls of the King undoubtedly had a great impact on Victorian and Edwardian notions of proper societal behavior. Tennyson's next volume (1864) was Enoch Arden and Other Poems, which one source says brought the poet to the peak of his popularity. When I began my secondary education nearly 70 years later, the title poem was still required reading in the Virginia public schools.
The poem is a deliberate descent from the previous concern with chivalry to the experiences of real people (with hearts of gold). No doubt the treatment is unfashionably sentimental; but the theme is basically that of the Odyssey, and the story is based on an actual happening of a sort not improbable in those days of navigation by sail. In a small seaside town three children are inseparable playmates: they are the orphan Enoch, the rich kid Philip Ray, and Annie Lee. As time passes both boys fall in love with Annie, but Enoch wins her.
Having sired two children, he sees the need for more lucrative employment than sailing his own fishing boat, and signs on with a clipper for the Orient to seek his fortune. He is not heard of again. The bachelor Philip sees to Annie's comfort and the children's education and, when at the end of 10 years Enoch has not returned, persuades the woman to marry him.
Enoch has, in fact, been shipwrecked on a desert island with two companions, both of whom die in the course of time. When a ship puts in for water, he, wildhaired, bearded, and weatherbeaten, is rescued. Back home, unrecognized, he finds his house deserted, then observes Annie happy in the bosom of her family. Rather than disturb that happiness, he takes his secret to the grave, confessing his identity on his deathbed to his landlady. The idea may be corny, but Tennyson's treatment is, given a chance, very moving.
In musical terms, melodrama is not concerned with mustache-twirling and who'll pay the rent. It is a form in which dramatic reading is accompanied by music, and survives in some operas still in the repertoire, such as Fidelio. Credit for its "invention" is shakily granted to Rousseau, who considered himself a composer, though the Greeks no doubt had a word for it.
In the late 18th and the 19th centuries it had a certain popularity and was explored by such major composers as Schumann and Liszt. Richard Strauss had two goes at it, the other being a setting of Uhland's Das Schloss am Meer (The castle by the sea). Enoch was composed, to a German text, in 1897 for the actor Ernst von Possart, with whom Strauss "toured" it the next spring. (As an autobiographical note, one of my only public musical outings was in this work. I read the post-shipwreck half of the poem, young Enoch being done by my then-student Willet Weeks III, Professor Edward Cone of Princeton graciously doing the pianistic honors.)
Strauss' contribution is frankly sporadic and episodic--a few bars of tone painting here, a patch of emotional underpinning there. In his three-volume critical biography, Norman Del Mar gives it short shrift ("that curious melodrama"). Of the two prior recordings known to me, that by Claude Rains and Glenn Gould is the classic. On this one, Mr. Hough plays splendidly and Ms. Rowan exhibits a lovely speaking voice and considerable dramatic talent.
Review of Richard Strauss' Enoch Arden Pg 53
