Читать книгу Virginia Woolf and Music - Adriana L. Varga - Страница 11

The paradigm shift in “Woolf and music” scholarship, signaled by the most recent studies on the topic,¹² is paralleled by another shift: a reconsideration of the reception of modernist music in Great Britain in the early twentieth century. Even though the repertoire of British music before the 1960s is usually seen as having considerably lagged behind continental modernist developments in classical music, and even though British composers themselves were decrying the backward state of music in England during the first half of the twentieth century, critics have recently begun to point out that modernist continental music was known in London in the first decades of the twentieth century. Works by Arnold Schoenberg, Manuel de Falla, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and Maurice Ravel premiered in London, sometimes conducted by the composers themselves; works by the composers of the Second Viennese School were frequently broadcast by the BBC during the interwar period;¹³ and “modern music” was reviewed, debated, and seriously considered in the British press and music journals (Riley 2).

This latter point deserves attention in the context of this study because, as Deborah Heckert has shown, at the beginning of the twentieth century, debates about the performance and reception of modernist music in England were expressed through and connected to the theoretical language of visual modernism as developed and coined by Roger Fry and Clive Bell: “We can see resonances of Fry’s art criticism of 1910–13 in the positive critical reactions to Schoenberg and other performances of Continental avant-garde music in 1913–14, around the time of the second performance of the Five Orchestral Pieces [January 1914]” (Heckert 62). Although the first performance of this work was harshly criticized in London, after its second performance, conducted by the composer himself, British critics began to consider the possibility that the work was “a ‘next step’ in an evolving musical language” (62) and, in doing so, they made recourse to Fry’s aesthetic language. They were considering, among other things, “the importance of form and the structural characteristics of the artwork in creating an emotional and expressive impact,” and “they echoed Fry’s themes and adapted them to explain the new music, attempting to justify these works to the London public in terms that were increasingly familiar across the spectrum of emerging modernist styles in the visual arts, literature and music” (62). If the question Woolf began “Impressions at Bayreuth” with in 1909, concerning what she called the ambiguous state of musical criticism for both “new” and “old” music (E1: 288), could have received an answer at all, it would have received it by way of the aesthetics of Fry and Bell. While genetic criticism points to the conclusion that Woolf was much more familiar with and, therefore, influenced by the classical style (by the First rather than the Second Viennese School), her very early appreciation of Wagner’s music and exposure to Richard Strauss¹⁴ as well as her familiarity with the latest developments in visual-art criticism of the Bloomsbury Group bring her aesthetics in line with those of her contemporary modernist musicians and artists. This opens up new critical perspectives and comparative approaches, allowing scholars such as Sanja Bahun, Evelyn Haller, Roger Hillman, and Deborah Crisp to consider Woolf’s works in their interrelations with modernist and later twentieth-century music and art.

Such reconsiderations also raise the question of how we may interpret Woolf’s interest in the classical style in light of neoclassical developments in early twentieth-century classical music. Reflecting back in 1941 on Stravinsky’s Octet (1923), Aaron Copland observed that this work “was destined to influence composers all over the world in bringing the latent objectivity of modern music to full consciousness by frankly adopting the ideals, forms, and textures of the preromantic era” (Taruskin 447). Woolf’s interest in the classical style may be seen not as anachronistic but, rather, as resonating with modernist musical developments (see Lloyd 35, and Szegedy-Maszak 63, this volume). Richard Taruskin goes as far as to affirm that it is neoclassicism that marks the beginning of “the history of twentieth-century music as something esthetically distinct from that of the nineteenth century” (448). If twentieth-century musical and literary aesthetics may be interpreted as a recycling of both classicism and romanticism, the point remains that Octet ushered in neoclassicism as “a new creative period, not only for Stravinsky but for European and Euro-American ‘art music’ generally,” these “musical manifestations” being “symptoms in turn of a pronounced general swerve in the arts that reflected a yet greater one in the wider world of expressive culture” (448).