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The Music of Robert Louis Stevenson

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Robert Louis Stevenson began studying the piano and composition at age 36 and learned the penny whistle two years later. He played the flageolet, a version of the whistle equipped with keys, almost until the end of his life. His arrangements and compositions include more than 120 pieces. This site describes his complete works through facsimiles, transcriptions, recordings, quotations and commentary.

"An interesting chapter in his life will be written when all his scattered pieces are brought together, and the musical side of his character unexpectedly revealed to the vast public that knows him now only as the winsome versifier and the accomplished romancer."

Robert Murrell Stevenson in Robert Louis Stevenson's Musical Interests, 1957.

If you search this website for Stevenson's 5th Symphony, you will be disappointed. If you expect to find another Moonlight Sonata, you will look in vain. You will discover nothing Für Elise, für Fanny, or Belle, but there are several for Lloyd, and an Ode to Joy.

If you have read Stevenson and succumbed to his charm, if you call him Louis rather than Robert, or if you play any musical instrument, sing, whistle, or even just listen, this website will provide an entirely new way to experience the friendship of Robert Louis Stevenson.

A composer's development is often fostered by the environment of his childhood. His or her home is frequently filled with music and musical relatives, and someone is always playing the piano or violin, strumming or singing. Like the special toys or the special foods of childhood, these sounds or songs later recall for the adult a time that may have been happy or not, but which was still from a previous life and therefore mysterious and sacred.

In his essay Child's Play, Stevenson says of children,

Stevenson's biographers claim that his nurse Alison Cunningham sang to him, and he dedicated his first book of poems, A Child’s Garden of Verses to her, but he never mentions her singing in his letters or even in his autobiographical writings. His father deplored his early artistic inclinations, but ironically had a greater and more fateful effect on Louis's musical development than his nurse, as the following letters demonstrate.

The first was written at the age of 23 after an argument about Louis's agnosticism. As he is lying in bed, he hears his father go out for the morning papers:

Later he gives a friend a book of Scotch airs to play on the piano and is overwhelmed at hearing them again.

These letters reveal how much his father's music mattered to him. He longs to hear him whistle and loves the music he whistled. Unfortunately his father did not feel the same way about Lou's musical talents:

Only someone who had musical sensibility would suffer as RLS did at his father's barbaric attack on his musicality. If he could not have his father's approval of his artistic nature in real life, he could manufacture it in fiction in the Story of the House with the Green Blinds (1882).

It is no coincidence that about fourteen years later, at the time of his father's final illness, music and the penny whistle became central to Stevenson's life. The whistling father died in 1887, and from then on almost until his own death, the son whistled instead.

People are capable of producing unaided melody only through the voice or by whistling, but Stevenson had no confidence in his ability to do either.

Since he felt he could neither sing nor whistle, he chose to express himself through the next best thing, the flageolet or penny whistle.

Stevenson’s original title for A Child’s Garden of Verses, published in 1885, was Penny Whistles. He even wrote an introductory poem in defense of the instrument, pointing out that bad players gave the instrument a bad name:

Stevenson never mentions anyone in his family actually playing the instrument until a letter from July of 1886:

This letter is very significant because if Stevenson was only just beginning to learn to read music, then none of his compositions were written earlier than 1886, when he was 36. If you can’t read music you can’t write it.

Although the dates of Stevenson's compositions are often uncertain, a timeline can been found in The Music Manuscripts of Robert Louis Stevenson in Historical Order 1886-1892 . The period from 1886 through 1888 accounted for at least 1/3 of his works, and nearly half of his entire production consists of solos for penny whistle.

A rented piano had been delivered to his home in Bournemouth, England sometime in April or May of 1886, and it was on this instrument that both Stevenson and his stepson Sam first learned to read music. Louis often used only one or two fingers, "pickling" as he termed it. He could also play slowly with all the fingers of both hands, but he had limited technique and lost patience with music that was not beautiful in all its parts. It was melody he loved the most:

The piano is not a melodist's instrument. The most famous compositions of Chopin and Liszt usually depend on intricate support by the left hand or additional right hand figures to give the illusion of cantabile otherwise lost because of the quick decay and lack of control of the piano tone. Without that technique, piano was not an instrument that would satisfy a demanding melodist and serious “pickler” like Stevenson. It also may have been bad for his health. In July of 1887 Stevenson had just suffered through two lung hemorrhages, and his wife Fanny said in a letter:

The next month Stevenson and his entire family moved for his health to Saranac, New York. By October of 1887 he again had a piano and again played on it for hours at a time. The difference now was that the climate agreed with him and his health was much better.

The Stevenson Memorial Cottage and Museum at Saranac displays a tin whistle which he is supposed to have played.

A letter to his wife written in April of 1888 is the first mention of Stevenson actually playing the instrument himself, and it makes clear what kind he played:

Wooden instruments often crack in extreme weather, while no tin whistle would ever need Band-Aids, so it must be concluded that Stevenson’s instrument was not metal.

This is emphasized again in Stevenson’s novel The Wrong Box, written in 1889:

His passion for the whistle so increased in the same month he received it, that he wrote to a friend saying he had quit the piano entirely. He may have quit playing, but he was still planning where to put a piano in the yacht he took to the South Seas that same year. He had a piano later when he lived in Hawaii and by 1891, he had one in Samoa.

His Andante Tranquillo is based on a melody he heard in Samoa in 1892 and is probably his last piano piece and his last composition.

His father and his nurse inspired him in childhood with a love of folk song. As a young man his attendance at concerts filled him with a love of serious music. From the age of 17 to 37, the description of professional and amateur concerts often appears in his letters, and more than half of Stevenson's compositions reproduce some form of serious music.

In answer to the question, "Why did he write this music?” it should be enough to say, "Because he was a compulsively creative person who could write music and did." Certainly he was also motivated to provide easy music for himself and his stepson to play on piano or penny whistle. In any case, Stevenson gives his own reason:

Besides at least ten pieces for piano and fifty for solo flageolet or penny whistle, he wrote duets, trios and two quartets. In his effort to understand music he felt he had to write in several parts. Initially, Stevenson gave up writing in four parts because he believed he couldn't do it.

In reality what he couldn't do was write according to the rules of 18th century musical practice his friends and relatives said he should learn, although contemporaneous composers had long abandoned those rules. One textbook he used for that study was John Stainer’s Composition.

Stevenson’s still missing first work, Threnody, would have been extremely interesting to hear, because it was written regardless of the rules, as he explains in a letter to his favorite cousin Bob, who criticized it severely, saying it was “confoundedly crabbed” and had a “dreary hymnal character.”

If his later music had not been constrained by academic theory, it might have progressed much farther and been better known and respected.

Indeed, in the Heidenröslein Quartet, an arrangement of the Schubert song which probably dates from after 1889, he seems to have overcome all his previous inhibitions. One of only two surviving quartets by Stevenson, it is written for the charming combination of flageolet, violin, guitar and mandolin and is competently written in four distinct parts. Among all his works, it probably best conveys the sound of his family band.

He also wrote music for multiple players because it's simply more fun to play in groups. In Rosaline Masson's I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson, his cousin Graham Balfour wrote:

Creative urge and desire to understand art in Stevenson are probably not the first cause of his need to compose. The effect on the adult of the singing and whistling in childhood was a pleasurable return to that "mythological epoch" whenever the music was heard again. More than remembering the images of that childhood was remembering the intense emotions that pervaded it. The result was to make his constant and final task the emulation and eventual transfiguration of those childhood melodies into the music found in this website, a persistent attempt to attain the ideal melody. Like his infamous simian character Hyde, Stevenson could then return to that other emotionally uninhibited existence at will.

In his essay Memories and Portraits, written at the age of 37, Stevenson explained his creative method, that of the sedulous ape, and at the age of 43 restated it in his essay on the genesis of the Master of Ballantrae:

After hearing Stevenson’s music, the conclusion that he emulated other composers is inescapable. Many pieces are in the style of the Baroque. The songs show the influence of his favorite composer Schubert. Some works are like Schumann and Robert Burns, while almost everything else is a folk song or dance. His pieces modeled after the great composers certainly lack their complexities, but he captures their stylistic essence so well that on hearing them one is forced to say, "This sounds like ..."

In Stevenson's creative method, emulation is the first exercise to be mastered before original style can be attempted. Adelaide Boodle, penny whistler, violinist and creative writing student of Stevenson from 1886 to 1888 explained the method in relation to fiction, but it applies equally to music:

Since at least a third of Stevenson's pieces were written while he was coaching Adelaide in this emulative technique, it would be surprising if he did not use the same approach to instruct himself in composition.

Stevenson wrote many songs, two of which duplicate his creative process in miniature. His Air de Diabelli copies the first four bars of a piano sonatina by the early 19th century Viennese composer Anton Diabelli. He then continues in a similar style but without copying and completes the song in a wholly original manner.

Here Diabelli’s theme is above and Stevenson’s version below. Except for a change in rhythm and an extra note at the end, they’re the same.

In the song called Ditty, Stevenson has imitated in a similar way the first three bars of Bach’s second gavotte from the sixth English Suite. In this case he has been more ambitious and changed the rhythmic emphasis and added several notes.

These two songs demonstrate that Stevenson was able to go beyond his first creative task of emulation, in spite of the misconceptions of his friends and relatives, and his own low opinion of his abilities.

In his biography of Stevenson, his cousin Graham Balfour wrote:

In the preface to the novel St. Ives, Stevenson’s wife Fanny wrote:

It was habitual among Stevenson's family, friends and biographers to make such supercilious statements about his music. But musical facility should never be confused with musical ability. Berlioz played the flageolet, too, and never mastered it, while Beethoven's piano playing deteriorated as he produced his greatest works.

A simple examination of the facts will decide the question of Stevenson's musical ability.

He wrote more than 120 pieces, almost 1/3 of which were original. His compositions consisted of songs, dances, instrumental works, counterpoint exercises and at least ten pieces that used piano. He wrote in 19 different keys, including five modes. Using six different meters he wrote at least 65 solo pieces, 27 duets, 14 trios and two quartets for various combinations of flute, flageolet, clarinet, violin, piano, guitar, mandolin and voice. He frequently transposed pieces and knew how to modulate from one key to another. He played piano, Boehm flageolet and penny whistle.

Never having studied music or any musical instrument as a child, and never having studied music formally in any way as an adult, he accomplished all this in about six years.

This is not a description of someone who had "failed to master the rudiments" and whose "knowledge of music was not very profound."

It should also be noted that during those six years he took enough time off from musical composition to write 17 major works of English literature, including Kidnapped, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and A Child’s Garden of Verses.

In defense of Louis's playing, it must be said that the flageolet is not the best instrument for someone afflicted with tuberculosis, as he was said to be. More than any other orchestral instrument, it requires skillful breath control to play in tune and to produce a pleasing tone. This is even more true of the Boehm flageolet

which he acquired around 1889. Unlike the penny whistle, it has many keys and is much more difficult to master. Because of the high humidity and salt air at Stevenson's last home in Vailima, Samoa, his flageolet's springs rusted and the wood cracked, so it is no wonder he had trouble playing it. At Vailima he did have a flageolet teacher, but three years is hardly enough to master such an instrument.

Stevenson’s wife Fanny died in 1914 and from then through 1919 the Anderson Auction Company held four major sales of Stevenson’s archives.

This website includes partial facsimiles and transcriptions of all the works listed in the Anderson Auction Catalogs of 1914,1915, 1917 and 1919, with the exception of the Barcarolle, Chant d'Amour, Dumbarton Drums, Garb of Old Gaul, and Liebes Botschaft. Threnody, Stevenson's first composition, is not in Anderson and is also not represented here by a facsimile. These six manuscripts were not located. However, this website also includes many more pieces not listed in any catalog anywhere.

Most of Stevenson's works are short and simple, like this early duet arrangement of Schubert’s Sehnsuchts-Walzer he played with his stepson Lloyd. The subtitle reads, “arranged for two D penny whistles by the Abbé Stevenson, non troppo lento.”

His music had to be short and simple because he wrote for himself or for members of the family band, who were all amateurs. Playing music requires concentration, and amateurs have limited technique and little patience for long or difficult pieces. It takes a talented composer to work within these restrictions.

He did, however, attempt longer works, including the Gigue, Nights of Vailima, and Farewell toTautira.

The family band consisted basically of three groups. In England it included stepson Lloyd on penny whistle, neighbor Adelaide Boodle on violin, wife Fanny on guitar and Louis on piano.

Stevenson lived for a year in Hawaii and there the band included Lloyd, shown here on violin in the back, Fanny on guitar in front of him, stepdaughter Belle next at the piano and RLS in white. In this picture, the band has picked up several ringers, including Captain Otis of Stevenson’s cruise ship Casco, and Stevenson’s mother Margaret, who has her back to us.

General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

This photo of the music corner at Vailima, shows Lloyd sitting on the left, Belle holding a mandolin, her husband Joe hiding behind the piano and Louis just in front of a banjo.

In Vailima, Samoa, where Stevenson spent the last four years of his life, the band depended on which ship was in port, but the members of the core group were the multi-talented Lloyd on violin, clarinet, banjo, penny whistle, mandolin or voice, Fanny on guitar, step-daughter Belle on piano, her husband Joe Strong on flute or guitar, and Louis on flageolet. They played to amuse themselves and to entertain at various social functions.

The band of the HMS Katoomba in Vailima, 1893. National Library of Scotland.

Most of Stevenson’s pieces have been unknown and unseen for nearly 120 years, but they have practical value for today. They are a Treasure Island for recorder players or any amateur musician. The flageolet and penny whistle are the same instrument as the recorder except for a missing thumb hole in the back. Stevenson’s pieces fit the basic range of the soprano or tenor recorder perfectly. They are short, beautiful, and not technically demanding, but musically very challenging. Arranged in suites of contrasting pieces they can be used effectively in any performance situation. Perhaps most important of all to recorder players, whose repertoire usually consists of Baroque or modern works, these are genuine 19th century compositions for their instrument.

Writers, artists, and composers who die young, like the 44 year old Stevenson, always tempt the imagination to ask, "What if they had lived ten years longer?" In Stevenson's case we must also ask, "What if he had started twenty years earlier?"

It was too late for regrets when Lloyd summarized the tragedy of his stepfather’s musical life in his introduction to An Inland Voyage:

Yet that pitiful flageolet was the key to those stacks of music. Through it Stevenson rediscovered the melody of his childhood. Poorly as he may have whistled, it was enough for him that it suggested the beauty that was there. His imagination supplied the missing perfection.

By 1892 for health reasons he was forbidden his three primary vices: drinking, smoking and playing the flageolet. From that date on in his final two years of life, there is no mention of the instrument or even of music in his letters. However, he did manage to play by proxy through the compulsive penny whistler Rowley in the unfinished novel St. Ives, which he worked on until his death in 1894.

Graham Balfour said of Stevenson's writings that

This website is a list of the things nearest his heart. These pieces are his "crystallized emotions."

No more apt conclusion could be provided to this discussion than the blunt response Lou himself gave to harsh musical criticism by his favorite cousin Bob about Stevenson's first composition, Threnody. His response was written in deepest friendship, and Bob surely didn't take it personally, so neither should we.

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