Читать книгу Virginia Woolf and Music - Adriana L. Varga - Страница 16

Rosemary Lloyd

LOOKING BACK ON THE HEADY DAYS IN CAMBRIDGE WHEN MANY of those who would come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group first met, Leonard Woolf recognized how important music had been for himself and his friends. He affirms in his biography that they were “intellectuals, intellectuals with three genuine and, I think, profound passions: a passion for friendship, a passion for literature and music (it is significant that the plastic arts came a good deal later), a passion for what we called the truth” (S 173). If the heyday of Bloomsbury can be seen as starting in March 1905, when the four young Stephens – Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian – opened their home in Gordon Square for Thursday evening gatherings, and continuing until the end of World War I, a calamity that, according to Vanessa Bell at least, also killed Bloomsbury (Selected Letters 364), its origins date back to 1899, when Lytton Strachey, Thoby Stephen, and Leonard Woolf first met at Cambridge University, and it continued in an altered form until 1939, when the dark days of World War II loomed.¹ Clever, witty, and sexually unconventional, the Bloomsberries, as they called themselves, were associated above all with new movements in art and literature. As a group, they reveled in free and open discussions, attempting to reach a less stuffy, less hypocritical form of ethics than the previous generation and to shape their lives and their thinking around love and beauty, giving value to what Leonard Woolf termed the “passion for friendship” (S 173). Rebelling against the stuffiness of their parents’ generation, they turned to forms of art that exalted the sensual. For many of them, the family home had had little of aesthetic interest and the family ethos had been driven by a scornful rejection of aesthetic values. Although Virginia Woolf would later assert that her father had “no feeling for pictures; no ear for music; no sense of the sound of words” (MB 68), the other members of the Stephen family were to some extent an exception to this position, with Virginia’s mother and her half sister, Stella, revealing a lively interest in music. The passion for photography revealed by her great-aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, no doubt influenced her own practice of that art,² and both Virginia and Vanessa, like most young women of their class, were given music and ballet lessons from an early age. For most of the Bloomsbury Group, however, the discovery of visual and aural beauty during their Cambridge years, passed on to the women through brothers at the university, became a formative experience that would shape their later aesthetics. The early passion for music that Leonard Woolf reveals may have faded for many of them in comparison with the discovery of the plastic arts, especially under the guidance of Roger Fry, but music nevertheless remained an important part of their lives, both intellectually and emotionally.

Turning to the period 1911–1918 in the volume of his autobiography titled Beginning Again, Leonard Woolf captures the excitement the Bloomsbury Group felt in the vital artistic year 1913, the year that saw New York’s Armory Show inaugurate a new era in modern art; when Roger Fry established the Omega Workshop in Fitzroy Square, London, to produce textiles and furniture designed by artists; and when the London Group of artists held its first exhibition. It was the year when Sigmund Freud, a central figure for so many of the group, would publish his interpretation of dreams as well as Totem and Taboo and when Marcel Proust would transform the image of the novel form by publishing the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Leonard Woolf evokes the excitement of the year in the following revealing terms:

On the stage the shattering impact of Ibsen was still belatedly powerful and we felt that Ibsen had a worthy successor in Shaw as a revolutionary. [ . . . ] In painting we were in the middle of the revolution of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. [ . . . ] And to crown all, night after night we flocked to Covent Garden, entranced by a new art, a revelation to us benighted English, the Russian ballet in the greatest days of Diaghilev and Nijinsky.³

What appears to be missing from this enthusiastic list is music, yet these were also heady days for music lovers, and several of those who frequented Bloomsbury were indeed passionate about certain aspects at least of that art. Nineteen thirteen, after all, saw the tumultuous first presentation in Paris on May 29 and in London on July 11 of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, while the years between 1905 and 1912 were dominated by the first performances of several Gustav Mahler symphonies (no. 6 in 1906, no. 7 in 1908, no. 8 in 1910, and no. 9 in 1912). The year 1905 witnessed the first Bloomsbury gatherings and also saw the premieres of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and Debussy’s La Mer. In 1905, too, Thomas Beecham came to London.⁴ He had already conducted the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, and now, in addition to conducting the New Symphony Orchestra, he played an essential role in introducing Richard Strauss to an English audience and in inviting to the capital many leading performers, composers, and companies, most significantly, perhaps, the Ballets Russes. In 1907 Frederick Delius’s opera A Village Romeo and Juliet had its premiere, although significantly, perhaps, in Berlin rather than London, and in 1908 Edward Elgar’s first symphony and his violin concerto were both given their opening performance, the second with Fritz Kreisler playing the solo part. In 1911 Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde was performed for the first time, as was Elgar’s second symphony, and the following year saw the first performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s expressionist Pierrot Lunaire with its groundbreaking use of the twelve-tone chromatic scale.

Despite these momentous musical events, it was ballet that struck most of the Bloomsberries as the most radical artistic form, largely through Thomas Beecham’s powerful promotion of that art. This is not entirely surprising, given the highly innovative works that Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes were bringing to London. We need to bear in mind, moreover, not only that the Ballets Russes themselves brought pioneering music with them, but also that it was much more difficult to hear groundbreaking music in those days before radio and recording studios made it so much more widely available. Music was known primarily through concerts, sheet music, the pianola (or player piano), and only later the gramophone, a device that Virginia Woolf so wonderfully described as opening “one little window” in their lives (D3: 151). Besides, as she revealingly wrote in an essay for the London Times of August 21, 1909: “The commonplace remark that music is in its infancy is best borne out by the ambiguous state of musical criticism. It has few traditions behind it, and the art itself is so much alive that it fairly suffocates those who try to deal with it” (“Impressions at Bayreuth,” BP 18). The conflation of music with its criticism is both characteristic of her primary focus on language and intrinsically interesting in that it draws attention to the degree to which the general public, even those as intelligent as the Bloomsbury Group, relied on the critics to guide them and shape their appreciation of music, whereas in other artistic domains they would feel more confident of relying on their own judgment.

What Woolf points to as particularly problematic for those writing or even talking about contemporary music was the lack of precedents: “A critic of writing is hardly to be taken by surprise, for he can compare almost every literary form with some earlier form and can measure the achievement by some familiar standard. But who in music has tried to do what Strauss is doing, or Debussy?” (BP 18). As a result, she argues, “We are miserably aware how little words can do to render music. When the moment of suspense is over, and the bows actually move across the strings, our definitions are relinquished, and words disappear in our minds” (21). Even for the highly articulate members of the Bloomsbury Group, finding a way of talking about music, especially of modern music, posed problems they did not seem to encounter, or at least not so severely, when they discussed art, literature, or the ballet.

Yet long before that seminal period and the gramophone’s opening of the little window, music had begun to play a shaping role in Bloomsbury’s aesthetic world and left its trace in the letters, diaries, and memoirs of many of its members. Of course, music formed an essential part of the education and social lives of the middle classes at this period, a time when, as Virginia Woolf crisply puts it in Three Guineas, women were taught to tinkle on the piano but not allowed to join an orchestra (TG 45), and yet the intensity of Leonard Woolf’s passion for music, a passion shared by several leading figures in the English modernist movement, goes well beyond those standard paradigms. The pleasure Leonard Woolf derived from music was, as is often the case, closely related to the enjoyment he gained from mathematics: “This satisfaction which I got from mathematics is, I think, closely related to the aesthetic pleasure which came from poetry, pictures, and, most of all, in later years from music” (S 95). For Leonard Woolf, moreover, music is clearly part of a nexus of memories and responses associated with friendship, intelligence, intensity, and intellectual passion. There can be little doubt, as well, that its close association with those formative and magical years in Cambridge conferred on it an added prestige for him in later life.

Moreover, a major force in creating such enthusiasm for music among these undergraduates was, less cerebrally, the pivotal figure of the philosopher George Moore. Moore’s influence over their thinking, especially through his book Principia Ethica, has often been noted,⁵ and the charm he exerted clearly played a vital role in conveying his own love of music to his friends and disciples. According to Leonard Woolf, for instance,

[Moore] played the piano and sang, often to Lytton Strachey and me in his rooms and on reading parties in Cornwall. He was not a highly skilful pianist or singer, but I have never been given greater pleasure from playing or singing. This was due partly to the quality of his voice, but principally to the intelligence of his understanding and to the subtlety and intensity of his feeling. He played [Beethoven’s] Waldstein sonata or sang [Schumann’s] “Ich grolle nicht” with the same passion with which he pursued truth; when the last note died away, he would sit absolutely still, his hands resting on the keys, and the sweat streaming down his face. (S 150)

Lytton Strachey, too, in a letter to Virginia Stephen, stressed the interrelationship of Moore’s magnetic personality and his musicality: “Moore is a colossal being and he also sings and plays in a wonderful way” (Levy, Letters Apr. 23, 1908, 141). It is not just that Moore seemed to have acquired for many of the Apostles, the Cambridge University secret society dedicated to intelligent conversation, an aura that attached itself to anything he did, including music, but that he embarked on all of his activities with such passion that his enthusiasm became highly contagious.

While Moore may have exerted the greatest musical influence over those in the Apostles society, Leonard Woolf had another group of Cambridge friends who were also music lovers, friends so different in outlook and even behavior that he kept a sharp divide between them and his Apostles companions. The brief pen-portrait of his friend Harry Gray, for example, brings out both the characteristic enthusiasm and the different way in which it found expression in him as compared to Moore: “He was absorbed in two things, but with an almost impersonal absorption, medicine and music. [ . . . ] He was already, as an executant[e], a first-class pianist. His playing was brilliant, but singularly impersonal and emotionless, and, when he was not working, he would usually be found playing the piano. It was characteristic of him that he was usually playing Chopin” (S 190).

Perhaps even more important than Moore in forming the early musical taste of this element of Bloomsbury was the enigmatic Saxon Sydney-Turner, whose genius they long took on trust and whose literary style Virginia Woolf once described as “the envy of my heart” (L3: 411), but who was never able to produce the great works of which he and they dreamed. Sydney-Turner was an ardent Wagnerite, who no doubt played an essential role in introducing to his Bloomsbury friends the German composer and his image of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the all-embracing art work that combined music, libretto, scenery and costumes into a coherent whole. We catch glimpses of Sydney-Turner in Adrian Stephen’s journal, where he is wittily described as “talking about good and evil and playing the pianola” (HL 237) or traveling to Bayreuth with Adrian (see, for instance, V. Bell, Letters 68). Adrian and Sydney-Turner were joined in 1909 by Virginia, who initially confided in her sister, Vanessa, that Parsifal “seems to me weak vague stuff, with the usual enormities” (L1: 404), but later said that it moved her almost to tears and that she judged it “the most remarkable of the operas; it slides from music to words almost imperceptibly” (406). If Sydney-Turner’s influence is perceptible here, his irritation when they praised composers other than Wagner is also evident: “We went to Salome (Strauss, as you may know) last night.” Virginia reported to her sister: “I was much excited, and believe that it is a new discovery. He gets great emotion into his music, without any beauty. However, Saxon thought we were encroaching upon Wagner, and we had a long and rather acid discussion” (L1: 410). Writing to Clive Bell in 1907, Lytton Strachey reported with his characteristic malice as well as typical stylistic bravura: “Poor Turner’s volcanic energy has deserted him. His lava flows no more. It is all dust and ashes now, and decrepitude and sciatica. [ . . . ] He showed me the MS of his opera this evening. Will its final resting-place be the British Museum, beside the notebooks of Beethoven? Well! At any rate we shall never know” (Levy, Letters 122). In 1908 Vanessa Bell chose to portray Saxon Sydney-Turner, according to Michael Holroyd, “seated slightly bent before a pianola, and peering through his spectacles at some sheet of music with an expression of rapt, self-obvious concentration” (144–45).⁶ The link between music and mathematics that Leonard Woolf charts with such energetic enthusiasm becomes almost caricatural in Sydney-Turner, who combined it with a love of puzzles, especially crossword puzzles, and whose extraordinary memory together with his passion for Wagner made him capable of comparing countless performances and recalling the exact dates on which he had seen them, but did not lead to any creative production.

Other members of the Bloomsbury Group had a less passionate but nevertheless decisive response to music. For Lytton Strachey, for instance, music had been a familiar part of family life since his childhood. Virginia Woolf’s unflattering likeness of him in her character St. John Hirst in The Voyage Out rather unkindly says that he had “no taste for music, and a few dancing lessons at Cambridge had only put him in possession of the anatomy of a waltz, without imparting any of its spirit” (VO 157). But Strachey’s ungainly walk and elongated body probably had more to do with this little caricature than with any truth about his musical sensibilities. According to Holroyd, Strachey’s mother, Jane Maria Strachey, “enjoyed classical music, sitting Lytton on her knee while she played songs on the piano” (6), while his brother Oliver, hoping to become a professional concert player, had studied piano with the famous teacher Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna, thus becoming one of only two Englishmen to attend Brahms’s funeral in that city’s central cemetery (Levy, Letters 47). Their younger brother James, who has become best known as the general editor of Freud’s works in English, was also an authority on Haydn, Mozart, and Wagner, and in the 1950s contributed notes and commentaries for the Glyndebourne opera programs (Holroyd xv).

In a letter to the Times in 1924, protesting at attempts to prevent the proposed visit of the Vienna State Opera Company to Covent Garden, Lytton Strachey clearly included himself among the “lovers of music in England” (Levy, Letters 533), although his main purpose in writing may well have been political rather than aesthetic. Certainly some of his accounts of the operas that he attended focus more on the audience than the opera itself. Take, for instance, a letter of 1918 about a performance of The Magic Flute, in what he refers to as a performance that was “even more preposterous than usual,” and during which Strachey’s attention seems to have been directed far more toward “an attractive young man, in evening dress” who turned out to be Duncan Grant (Letters 198–99).⁷

In letters to Leonard Woolf during Woolf’s long absence in Ceylon, Strachey frequently refers rather more seriously to music. “Alas!” he writes soon after Woolf’s departure, “Beethoven thunders in vain for you, and the ocean has swallowed up Mozart!” (Levy, Letters 36), while later he expatiates on the beauties of Christoph Gluck, only to fall silent when he faces the challenge that Virginia Woolf’s Times essay addresses, that of the inadequacy of words to evoke music. “They’re now with me more almost than Racine. Pure beauty and grandeur – elysian airs, exquisite crescendos, inimitable heights. There is a ballet in the third act of Orfeo – but what’s the good of talking?” (Letters 85).⁸ Unpredictably, perhaps, he also delighted in Gilbert and Sullivan, reporting on Iolanthe that the “astounding thing about Iolanthe is the acting of Mr. Workman, who really does reach the most magnificent tragic heights. It’s impossible to believe that a Lord Chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous, but one goes, and when the moment comes, it’s simply great. The audience was completely mastered, and I believe many of them were in tears” (Letters 131). A letter to Ottoline Morrell on April 23, 1916, indicates a more predictable familiarity with Mozart: “The Magic Flute was considerably slewed [note: others read “slimed”] over by Beecham’s vulgarity but the loveliness came through” (Letters 290). His biographer, Michael Holroyd, also argues that music played a central, if metaphorical, role in the sexual relationship between Strachey and Roger Senhouse: “When they listened to Mozart together, chamber music mostly, it almost seemed as if Roger and he were the instruments themselves” (582). Yet however important music may have been for Strachey, it is notable that his tastes in that art were far more conservative and classical than in other areas, rarely moving far beyond the middle of the nineteenth century.

As for the painter Duncan Grant, his love of music, together with his general aesthetic sensibility, had come to him from his father (Holroyd 130–31). David Garnett notes in his chatty and rather superficial autobiography that Grant “was always buying and playing gramophone records – especially Mozart” (Flowers of the Forest 29). Although he had no formal training in music, Grant enjoyed playing the piano and had a particular gift for dancing. Far more significantly and adventurously, Grant was familiar with the experiments of the French Postimpressionists and the Italian Futurists, as well as more specifically the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, known for his Calligrammes, poems written such that the words – evoking a dove or rain, for example – form the shapes they evoke, and the Russian composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin, whose compositions draw inspiration from a color system ascribing different colors to the keys of a keyboard. Under their influence, Grant created his 1914 “Kinetic Scroll,” which Frances Spalding describes as “a fourteen foot long scroll decorated with rectangular abstract coloured shapes, which he intended should be viewed through an aperture, as it was slowly wound past to the accompaniment of music by J. S. Bach” (Roger Fry 168).⁹ The music selected was the Brandenburg Concerto no. 1. With this kind of experimentation, drawing on both art and music, Grant was creatively responding to such synesthetic creations as that produced in 1912 by the joint efforts of designer Leon Bakst, impresario Sergei Diaghilev, and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky when they staged their famous ballet based on Claude Debussy’s sensuous response to Stéphane Mallarmé’s beautiful poem “L’Après-midi d’un faune.” Whereas Mallarmé had wanted the scenery to consist of trees made of zinc, Bakst chose to recreate the barbaric splendor of the Tartar, Russian, and Persian despots of the Middle Ages, while Nijinsky’s choreography blended the archaic style of dancing found in Greek bas-reliefs with frank eroticism, ending with a final masturbatory gesture that shocked the critics. While Grant’s choice of Bach might seem outdated in such an experiment, it should be remembered that this was the beginning of a period of renewed interest in Bach’s music, reflected in the neoclassical compositions of, among others, Erik Satie, Sergei Prokofiev, and Igor Stravinsky.

No doubt the most progressive of all the Bloomsbury intellectuals, where an awareness of modern art and modernist movements in Europe and the United States was concerned, was the artist and art critic Roger Fry, of whom Kenneth Clark so memorably remarked: “Insofar as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry” (Fry, Last Lectures ix). Indeed, Virginia Woolf saw his importance as a guide and influence over Bloomsbury’s awareness of art, particularly of color, as so great that she later lamented that she had not dedicated to him To the Lighthouse with its affirmation of beauty and its rejection of Mr. Ramsay’s blindness to the external sensory world (L3: 385). Through him, she insists, “The old skeletal arguments of Bloomsbury about art and beauty took on flesh and blood” (MB 175). Although his Quaker upbringing rejected music as an acceptable pastime, Fry was certainly familiar with the works of the classical composers. In 1891, for example, he wrote to his friend, the historian Goldie [Goldsworthy Lowes] Dickinson, from Florence that the Lorenzo Library and the Chapel of the Medici “make me quite certain that Michelangelo was much the greatest architect that has lived since Greek times; it is a perfectly new effect produced by the most subtle arrangement in proportion, and expresses an idea at least as complete and intelligible as a sonata of Beethoven’s, which indeed it much resembles” (Fry, Letters 141). Thirty years later, again in a letter to Dickinson, Fry waxes lyrical about the operas and concerts he can attend in Vichy, although his response to them is, not surprisingly, sharply influenced by his own personality. Of Wagner’s Valkyrie he comments:

At first I thought I should never stick it out because they began at once to get to the last pitch of emotion over nothing in particular and of course his want of proportion is simply scandalous – also the puerile psychology, the sentimental education of a board school or Daily Mail journalist, but I did manage by disregarding all he was trying to express to get great pleasure out of the music. I think the Valkyrie is a lucky one because the amorous interest is slight and he’s to me unendurable over that. (615)

In the same letter he makes the following curious comment on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, an observation clearly influenced by national prejudices associated with the First World War: “[The symphony] shocked me profoundly and shows the essential barbarity and want of civilization of the German spirit and the worst of it is he’s such a musician” (615).

Most importantly, Fry drew on musical analogies in his art criticism, asserting, for example, of the artist Wassily Kandinsky’s innovative abstract paintings at the Allied Artists’ Salon of 1913 that “the improvisations become more definite, more logical and more closely knit in structure, more surprisingly beautiful in their colour oppositions, more exact in their equilibrium. They are pure visual music.” And he added, revealingly, “I cannot any longer doubt the possibility of emotional expression by such abstract visual signs” (Reed 152). Fry’s coinage of the term “visual music” was to have a lengthy and distinguished history, inspiring artists and critics alike in attempts both to forge synesthetic connections among the arts and to create a form of painting that aspired to the condition of music.¹⁰ No doubt Fry’s thinking about music was also strongly influenced by his interest in the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whose demanding and difficult poems he translated into English and whose highly intelligent, articulate, and imaginative responses to music in general and Wagner in particular he would have found both challenging and stimulating.

An anecdote recounted by George Bernard Shaw suggests a further dimension to Fry’s appreciation of music. According to Shaw, Fry and the English composer Edward Elgar were both present at a luncheon in 1917:

Elgar talked music so voluminously that Roger had nothing to do but eat his lunch in silence. At last [Roger] began in his beautiful voice: “After all, there is only one art; all the arts are the same.” I heard no more, for my attention was taken by a growl from the other side of the table. It was Elgar, with his fangs bared and all his hackles bristling, in an appalling rage. “Music,” he spluttered, “is written on the skies for you to note down. And you compare that to a DAMNED imitation.” There was nothing for Roger to do but either seize the decanter and split Elgar’s head with it, or else take it like an angel with perfect dignity. Which latter he did. (qtd. in RF 208)

As Christopher Reed asserts, this anecdote reveals Fry’s belief in the unity of the arts, his conviction that “we cannot hold our theory for music and architecture and drop it for poetry and drama” (278). Reading Fry’s theoretical writings, it becomes clear that what most appeals to him in music, as for such other members of the Bloomsbury Group as Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney-Turner, is its formal quality and above all its representation of order. “Why,” he asks in “The Artist and Psycho-Analysis,” “are we moved deeply by certain sequences of notes which arouse no suggestion of any experience in actual life?” His response is that “there is a pleasure in the recognition of order, of inevitability in relations, and that the more complex the relations of which we are able to recognize the inevitable interdependence and correspondence, the greater is the pleasure” (Reed 364–65). This attitude clarifies the absence from much of his writing, and indeed from that of much of the Bloomsbury Group, of contemporary composers, many of whom were driven by an imperative to seize and reproduce the disordered and chaotic nature of a postwar world, one in which the inevitability of rational order was no longer a central conviction. Wagner, whom so many of those associated with Bloomsbury admired, is far closer than these contemporaries to Fry’s image of order and relation as central to the pleasure of music.

One final aspect of Fry’s response to music appears most clearly in a 1911 lecture he gave on the topic of Postimpressionism. His aim in the lecture, he explains, is to discover

what arrangements of form and colour are calculated to stir the imagination most deeply through the stimulus given to the sense of sight. This is exactly analogous to the problem of music, which is to find what arrangements of sound will have the greatest evocative power. But whereas in music the world of natural sound is so vague, so limited, and takes, on the whole, so small a part of our imaginative life, that it needs no special attention or study on the part of the musician; in painting and sculpture, on the contrary, the actual world of nature is so full of sights which appeal vividly to our imagination – so large a part of our inner and contemplative life is carried on by means of visual images, that this natural world of sight calls for a constant and vivid apprehension on the part of the artist. (Reed 100–101)

For Roger Fry, at least, the world of sight was simply much more vivid than the world of hearing, and music, as a result, appeared to him as vague and limited in comparison with the intense stimulus he obviously received from vision and therefore from painting and sculpture. Given Fry’s extensive influence over the Bloomsbury Group, judgments like these must have carried considerable weight in forming members’ tastes and developing their impressions of the arts.

Other figures associated with the Bloomsbury Group have less clearly articulated responses to music. For example, although in later life E. M. Forster was delighted and honored to be invited by Benjamin Brittan to write the libretto for Billy Bud, he leaves few echoes of his enjoyment of music in either his public or his private writing. In 1908, for instance, he attended at least the Götterdämmerung part of the Ring Cycle being performed at Covent Garden but mentions it only in passing. In addition, Quentin Bell, in his Bloomsbury Recalled, offers the following amusing but not particularly informative shred of evidence:

Q: It seems to me, Morgan, that you were near but not exactly in Bloomsbury.

M: What makes you think that?

Q: Well, you preferred Beethoven to Mozart.

M: (smiling) Ah, but I was young then. (144–45)

Vanessa Bell and Dora Carrington seem to have had little time for music, focusing far more on the visual. When she does mention concerts, Vanessa is far more likely to comment on the audience than the performance. In a letter to her son Quentin, for example, she describes a performance of Ethel Smyth’s Mass at the Albert Hall: “The Queen was there attended by Timmy [Gerald Chichester], and the Dame went and had a long conversation with her in the Royal Box and made her laugh a good deal. I don’t wonder. The Dame was in her best wig and tricorn hat and an ‘Ascot frock’ bought at Stagg and Mantles for 16/6. The Queen was dressed in much the same sort of way and they really made an imposing couple. As for the music, I have no views, but it seemed brilliantly amorphous” (Selected Letters 377). “Brilliantly amorphous” suggests a musical appreciation that was significantly different from Roger Fry’s search for pattern and order, something rather closer to her sense of artistic values. Maynard Keynes, for his part, had little affection for music. According to his biographer, Robert Skidelsky, “There was nothing in the Keynes family home to stimulate the aesthetic sensibilities. [ . . . ] Nor was music then part of their lives, except for an occasional visit to a Gilbert and Sullivan, though [Keynes’s father] later collected records of operatic arias” (31). His closest friend during his years at King’s College, Cambridge, Robert Furness, who went on to become a distinguished translator, was an ardent Wagnerite but did not succeed in passing that enthusiasm on to the economist, although like many of the Bloomsberries, Keynes did attend the 1906 performance of Tristan und Isolde in London. Even his love affair with the mélomane Duncan Grant failed to instill in him any great pleasure in music (see, for instance, Skidelsky 119), and if he came to appreciate the ballet it was above all because it gave him an opportunity to “view Mr. Nijinsky’s legs” (154), as he put it in a letter to Lytton Strachey in July 1911, and later as a medium associated with his wife, Lydia Lopokova, rather than for ballet’s interpretation of music. After the First World War he entered the same social circle as Sir Thomas Beecham, but the relationship seems to have been purely social rather than being based on aesthetic concerns.

The fervent views of music we find in certain members of the Bloomsbury circle must therefore be counterbalanced by the responses of other elements within the group who not only regarded music with considerably less enthusiasm but also considered concerts more as an opportunity for observing human behavior than as an aesthetic experience. In discussing Bloomsbury, after all, it is always advisable to bear in mind the journalist and critic Desmond MacCarthy’s caveat that “in taste and judgment ‘Bloomsbury’ from the start has been at variance with itself. Indeed, here lay its charm as a social circle” (Rosenbaum 67). It is worth underlining MacCarthy’s description of it as a social rather than an intellectual or a cultural circle, although there are many critics who would argue that it also deserved those epithets. And MacCarthy’s argument notwithstanding, where music is concerned there are certain shared assumptions, interests, and experiences that run through the letters, diaries, and memoirs of those who made up the Bloomsberries, even if those assumptions are somewhat less progressive than some of their other views about the arts. Indeed, for many of them, the music that played an important part in their social life was mainly, although far from exclusively, well-established classical music. Raymond Mortimer, who joined the group after the First World War, may be taking matters too far when he provocatively claims in his “London Letter” written for the American journal Dial in 1928, that Bloomsbury tended to exalt the classical in all the arts: “Racine, Milton, Poussin, Cézanne, Mozart and Jane Austin have been their more cherished artists” (Rosenbaum 311). Nevertheless, he has a point. The operas of Richard Wagner were for many of them the most innovative addition to the standard repertoire. The sensitivity to the radical changes in the plastic arts that the group embraced, promoted, and delighted in, together with that sharp awareness of the changes in social mores that Virginia Woolf playfully dates to around December 1910, seems to have found an equivalent in music only in the case of a few of the Bloomsberries, most notably Virginia Woolf herself.

Indeed, contemporary music tends to be treated with distaste or scorn, as when Strachey, encountering the English composer Roger Quilter at a party, focuses on the outward appearances without seeming to listen to the music at all: “I went to the ‘Friday Club’[ . . . ]. The proceedings were curious and unpleasant. Nearly everyone – male and female – sat on the floor back to back, while Walter Creighton sang Brahms or posed with a cigarette, and his friend Mr. Roger Quilter – a pale young man with a bottle nose – played his own compositions on the piano” (Levy, Letters, Dec. 7, 1905, 86). And although there are allusions to Diaghilev’s ballets, Stravinsky’s epoch-making Rite of Spring, first performed in Paris in 1913, apparently passed many of them by largely unnoticed. Lytton Strachey did attend a performance in July 1913 but described it as “one of the most painful experiences of my life,” explaining that he “couldn’t have imagined that boredom and sheer anguish could have been combined together at such a pitch” (Holroyd 291). By 1919, however, Diaghilev’s company was being lionized by Bloomsbury (and others), and in 1926 Vita Sackville-West writes of attending a Stravinsky ballet with Virginia Woolf, although her main attention seems to have been focused on Virginia’s extraordinary outfit (HL 495).

Music as social exercise and fairly lighthearted entertainment is what most strikes a reader of the correspondence of many of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf’s letters, even those she exchanged with the feminist and composer Ethel Smyth. But then, as she puts it to Gerald Brennan in 1923, letter writing for her was often a “tossing of omelettes” (L3: 80). At one point, perhaps to avoid the embarrassment of having to offer evaluations of her correspondent’s music, Virginia insisted that she could not judge music (L5: 135). Of course there is in any writer’s correspondence a sense of delight in seizing opportunities to test techniques or to indulge in displays of virtuoso description that often distorts the real seriousness with which the subject matter might normally be taken. Thus, in a letter of 1903, she paints an amusing picture of Adrian playing the pianola for their own pleasure but as a result affecting the moods and behavior of the servants:

A fresh lot of tunes came today chosen by Adrian and a very mixed set – Bach and Schumann and the Washington Post, and the Dead March in Saul, and Pinafore and the Messiah. We find the difference in quality a very good thing because all our servants sit beneath the open drawing room window all evening while we play – and by experiment we have discovered that if we play dance music all their crossnesses vanish and the whole room rings with shrieks and then we tame them down so sentimentally with Saul or bore them with Schumann. (L1: 88)

The pianola also features in Duncan Grant’s memoir of Virginia Woolf, in which it is described in the following comic manner:

In the back part of the [drawing] room there was an instrument called a Pianola, into which one put rolls of paper punctured by small holes. You bellowed with your feet and Beethoven or Wagner would appear. Anyone coming into the room might have thought Adrian was a Paderewski – the effort on the bellows gave him a swaying movement very like that of the great performer, and his hands were hidden. (Rosenbaum 99)

Although Grant notes that he could not remember having seen Virginia play on this instrument, he adds that “it must have played a part in her life, for Adrian on coming home from work would play in the empty room by the hour” (99).

Playing a pianola in an empty room might indeed seem a curiously apt metaphor for the musical tastes of many of those associated with Bloomsbury, a group whose verbal skills and visual imaginations seem to have relegated music to an activity at best appreciated at second hand and in private. But that very verbal skillfulness can be misleading: when we read their letters or essays, it can frequently seem that the desire to amuse can outweigh any intention of seriousness in conveying a response to a musical experience, yet the ways in which the Bloomsberries depicted music in their works of art can suggest a different and more serious appreciation. Diverse in their tastes, forthright in the expression of their aesthetic judgments, witty and iconoclastic, the Bloomsbury Group reveals a response to music that was as varied and idiosyncratic as were its individual members. While many of them were not as innovative in their musical taste as in their appreciation of literature and the visual arts, some of them, notably Virginia Woolf, found in music a source of sensual delight and intellectual stimulation that informed their aesthetic convictions and in turn fed into their writings. It is this more profound appreciation of music that this collection of essays on Virginia Woolf sets out to explore. Setting her responses against, or at least in the context of, those of the wider Bloomsbury circle illuminates her own independence of spirit and her originality.