Otto Dresel's Loose the sail, rest the oar: A Study (In)completion

Abstract

Excluded from my 2002 edition of German-American composer Otto Dresel's Collected Vocal Music is a one-page fragment of a song, written in evident haste, with a text beginning Loose the sail, rest the oar. Unfinished, partially revised, possibly missing an additional page, it is not the norm in critical editions to include editorial completions. The text also was obscure, not to be found at the time through an internet search. As I began in 2016 to prepare my collection of Dresel's manuscripts for transfer to Houghton Library, Harvard University, I had another look and found myself thinking more about what was complete and what was incomplete. The text, I discovered, comes from Charles Kingsley's 1853 novel, Hypatia. What was conservative Dresel (1826-1890) doing reading such a book, a melange of fictionalized history, Christian apologetics, and anti-Catholic/anti-Semitic sentiments, all topped with a Doppelschlag of sadism and voyeurism? Why did he choose to set this fragmentary song, sung in the novel by the courtesan Pelagia, to music in the (probably) 1880s? Was he aware of the afflatus for Hypatia-related artworks that was emerging at just this time? This was not a song for proper Bostonians, and perhaps that is why he never finished it. Having overcome my misgivings and completed the (in)complete song, I explore the corridors down which research can lead, one where we encounter a compelling cast of characters; some as Kingsley called them, 'new foes with an old face', including such unlikely antagonists as Cardinal (and now Saint) John Henry Newman.