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Hemans published this poem in 1828 in Records of Woman and it is interesting for what it tells us about Hemans's lyrical sense and her musical training. W. M. Rossetti, in his "Prefatory Notice" to The Poetical Works of Mrs. Hemans, writes that before taking private lessons with Zeugheer Herrmann at the end of 1830, Hemans "so far cultivated her faculty in music as to be able to invent airs for some of her own lyrics. Playing on the harp and the pianoforte had been among her earlier accomplishments. . ." In a book dedicated to Joanna Baillie, a book that centers on the lives of women, the fact that Hemans would write this poem about Mozart and assume a male persona within the poem is of interest here. Essentially, I chose this poem for the archive because of the intertextual connections between it and the composition by Mozart. Although Mozart died before completing the piece in 1791 (it was subsequently completed, initially, by his student and colleague, Süssmayr), because it is one of his last works there are some prefigurations of Romantic music in his score. As "romanticism" took hold in various European countries at varying times, Mozart's music is generally considered the epitome of Classical music, while Hemans is read as forging a poetic bridge between the Romantic and Victorian eras in England. Nonetheless, there are clear parallels between the two works.
With "Mozartıs Requiem" I had attempted to draw out the connections between the meter of Hemans' poem and the original composition by Mozart. What lead me to first read the ballad lines quickly was the fact that four lines in each six line stanza are short measure ballad lines, giving the verse a rather quick tempo. The only two hints that the lines may not be as fast as I had originally thought come from the two long iambic pentameter lines in each stanza, and the word "dirge" in stanza 1. This syncopation between common meter and slow tempo which is typical to Mozart also appears in the poem, for it would be a while before Beethoven began composing and making metronome notation for scores, therefore regulating tempo. Here, Hemans's long lines slow the tempo down every third line, contrasting with the meter of the trimeter lines; a dirge is a slow song of lamentation, the word perhaps acting as a note to readers for how to read the poem. By listening to Mozartıs piece, and playing a selection for the class, I could hear faint reverberations between Hemans' poem and the musical piece. Since Mozart's piece varied in tempo in several main parts, Hemans' poem may be a response to just a single section of the dirge, which "One more then, one more strain" (l. 13) would suggest. The heavy caesurae in the penultimate stanza, "Burn calmly, brightly, in immortal air," echo the slowing tempo of the final section, "Communio," in Mozart. Other connections between the meter and the content of the line showed Hemans' attention to craftsmanship with the lines: "The beautiful comes floating through my soul" (l. 33), and "Of the deep harmonies that past me roll!" (l. 36). Expansive ideas, images, and emotions are placed in the pentameter line to mimic aurally and visually the content. However, the isochrony here implies that the time it takes to read the pentameter lines equals the duration of the trimeter lines, a form of compensation Mozart uses with his canon phrasing technique in measures 11 to 38 of the "Sanctus" section with the lyric "Osanna in excelsis!". This larger project of mine has as its goal to do a canonical prosodic reading of a non-canonical text in order to recenter Hemans as a Romantic poet of importance and not the popular prolific poet celebrated for her espousal of Victorian values in her poems, a trait that made her books outsell and outpublish Tennyson in the 19th century.