“‘Ah bitter love!’ she sung”: music and unobtainable erotic desires in Theophilus Marzials’s Love’s Masquerades

This article explores the connection between music and sexuality in the poetry of the little-known British composer, singer, and poet, Theophilus “Theo” Marzials (1850-1920). In doing so I investigate his first and only collection of poetry, called The Gallery of Pigeons, published in 1873. I argue that music is deployed throughout this volume, but most especially, within Love’s Masquerades – a sonnet sequence contained amongst the collection and one within which the personified Love appears in different guises and performs various sexual and romantic roles – to articulate the most private (and often dangerous) aspects of sexuality and sexual identity in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. I discuss how music and musical discourses are ultimately employed as tools with which Marzials imagines and articulates a range of specifically unobtainable erotic desires and fantasies; their unobtainability arising from the social disruption that they threaten.