I Shall But Love Thee Better After Death: A Rediscovery of Eleanor Everest Freer’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, Op. 22 (1910)
Though largely unheard of today, Chicagoan Eleanor Everest Freer (1864-1942) was a relentless and effective supporter of early American vocal music and an accomplished composer. Freer not only possessed musical talent and a refined compositional craft, but also the foresight and means to preserve her work for posterity. This dissertation focuses on Freer’s magnum opus: a forty-four song cycle Sonnets from the Portuguese (1910). Freer is still the only composer to have ever set and published all forty-four poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s masterwork of English poetics, yet this work remains mostly unknown. The initial chapter of this dissertation offers a biographical background of the composer, including her musical training, advocacy for American vocal music, and compositional work. Chapter 2 discusses the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her masterwork of the Sonnets, and Freer’s composition of the cycle. Chapter 3 gives a performance and critical reception history of the song cycle. The next sections outline notable aspects of the cycle as a whole, offers a table of performance practice guidance for each of the forty-four songs, and highlights notable features of each of Freer’s sonnet settings. Chapter 6 considers other settings of the poems by women (Larsen, Hall, and Branscombe), comparing them to the work of Freer. Conclusions and suggestions for continued scholarship and performance follow. Ultimately, this paper shows that because of Freer’s persistent advocacy for American vocal writing and her own compositional masterwork Sonnets from the Portuguese (1910), Freer deserves not just to be remembered, but celebrated for her accomplishments.
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