Читать книгу Virginia Woolf and Music - Adriana L. Varga - Страница 19

Mihály Szegedy-Maszák

ALTHOUGH VIRGINIA WOOLF WAS SKEPTICAL OF THE MERITS of any verbal approach to music, she was fascinated by the ideal of ut musica poesis. As she listened to a concert in 1915, she decided that “all descriptions of music are quite worthless” (D1: 33), yet she constantly drew inspiration from music. There is good reason to believe that as early as 1905 (PA 251) she became familiar with Walter Pater’s celebrated statement “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (86), echoed by Oscar Wilde’s declaration in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician” (17). “Its odd, for I’m not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them,” she remarked toward the end of her life. “I want to investigate the influence of music on literature,” she added a few months before her death (L6: 426, 450).

Any insight we might have into Woolf’s musical canon will help us to approach her style and the structure of her novels, although this relation must not be confused with a unidirectional causal one. Just because the two questions cannot be fully separated, I have to acknowledge that by entering into the less ambitious while staying away from the more, my discussion will be fragmentary. On the one hand, the evidence I have found in her autobiographical writings may be incomplete; on the other hand, the analysis of prose rhythm would ask for the ear of a native speaker.

Can a comparison of music and literature lead to a better understanding of Virginia Woolf’s works? The issues involved are complex; one must move carefully and tentatively in this area. A comparison of the two arts might mean a number of different things.

How can the sister arts “appear” in a work of literature? One could begin by drawing a distinction between the ideal types of “use” and “mention.” Gérard Genette gives the following examples: “In the sentence ‘Paris is a great city,’ the word Paris is used transitively [ . . . ]; in ‘Paris consists of two syllables,’ the name of the city is mentioned (cited)” (235–36). The actual presence of the sister arts in a literary work can never be a clear-cut case of use or mention. Having made this general statement, I would risk the hypothesis that the verbal description of a painting is more feasible than the literary imitation of a musical structure. Whether this is true or not, it cannot be denied that Virginia Woolf was surrounded by visual artists (such as her sister, Vanessa, and the painter Duncan Grant), and the two theoreticians whose aesthetic views exerted a profound influence on her, Roger Fry and Clive Bell, focused on the visual arts. That may be a partial explanation for the fact that an imaginary landscape plays a more important role than the tune played by an old fiddler in Woolf’s story titled “A Simple Melody” (written around 1925).

How can one characterize the impact of music on her writing? “We do not have much of a factual base to start from,” as one of the critics who has attempted to address this question has noted (Jacobs 228). The information one can collect from the diaries, the essays, the correspondence, and other publications is so fragmentary that only tentative conclusions can be drawn. Let it suffice to mention one example: On January 16, 1929, Virginia and her husband went for a week to Berlin, where they were joined by her sister, Duncan Grant, and her younger nephew, Quentin Bell. “We spent most of our time at the opera,” she wrote to a cousin (L4: 126), but her diary and correspondence contain no reference to any performance, and Quentin Bell’s biography describes the Berlin holiday as a dismal failure and makes no mention of any operatic experience. Given such gaps in our knowledge, it is difficult to assess Virginia Woolf’s musical culture.

In the late nineteenth century children in an upper-middle-class English family were expected to acquire some knowledge of the visual arts and music. The author’s mother “could play the piano and was musical” (MB 100). “Last night we went to the first of our four operas,” Virginia Stephen informed her elder brother, Thoby, in June 1898. A letter to a friend dated August 12, 1899, indicates that the children “perform Fugues on the Harmonium.” “I draw for hours every evening after dinner,” she wrote to another friend in December 1904 (L1: 17, 27, 170). “My old piano” is mentioned as early as 1901. A year later there is a reference to a pianola recently purchased. Her younger brother, Adrian, seemed to be the most musical in the family; he brought sheet music into the household by J. S. Bach, George Frideric Händel, and Robert Schumann (L1: 41, 55, 88). After she had started reviewing books, Virginia devoted some attention to works on music: in 1905 she reviewed the fifth volume of The Oxford History of Music in the Guardian, and in 1909 her article “The Opera” appeared in the London Times (E1: 373–74, 269–72). She continued to be very critical of the shortcomings of musical life in Britain: in 1918 she dismissed the “incredible, pathetic stupidity of the music hall” (D1: 144) and attacked those who regarded the oratorio as the “only permissible form of art” (E2: 262). As late as 1932 her friend Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, speaking of someone with musical talent, complained about the inferiority of the status of music in British culture in comparison with Germany, saying, “He’s a phenomenon. How I pity him! Forced to live in England with that gift – you don’t know the loneliness” (D4: 69).

Among the members of the larger family there were some who could play instruments. “[When] we asked if she could play, [ . . . ] she strummed through a Beethoven sonata, with the tramp of a regiment of dragons,” the young Virginia wrote about her cousin Helen Stephen (1862–1908) (L1: 343). Determined to make up for the lack of musical culture in London, Emma Vaughan (1874–1960), one of Virginia’s early friends, spent several months studying in Dresden.

Although there are many publications about those who knew the young Virginia Stephen, they contain surprisingly little information on music, and indeed they are sometimes unreliable. One scholar, for instance, mentions that Oliver Strachey (1874–1960), Lytton’s elder brother, “studied the piano with Lechititsky in Vienna” (Jacobs 229), and the reader may assume that the reference is to the influential Polish instrumentalist Teodor Leszetycki, known in the German-speaking countries as Theodor Leschetizky (1830–1915), one of the few who established a highly original school of interpretation, an alternative to the tradition of Ferenc Liszt.

Among the Cambridge friends of Virginia’s brothers there were amateur musicians. “It was characteristic of him that he was usually playing Chopin,” Leonard Woolf wrote about Harry Gray, who in later life became a well-known surgeon (LWA 112), and the philosopher G. E. Moore “sang Adelaide, Schubert songs, or the Dichterliebe, or [ . . . ] played the Waldstein or the Hammerklavier sonata” (BA 42), works that demand considerable virtuosity.

While all these people may have helped the young Virginia acquire good taste in music, the most important influence must have been that of Saxon Sydney-Turner (1880–1962), a regular visitor to chamber music concerts, who “kept a record, both on paper and in his head, of all the operas he had ever been to” (LWA 66). In fact, it is possible to argue that this Wagnerite played a major role in the musical education of the young writer until her future husband appeared on the scene and took a firm stand against the legacy of Richard Wagner. Back from Ceylon, in 1911 Leonard Woolf discovered that the musical life of the British capital was dominated by foreigners. “Among the frequenters of the Russian Ballet there was, strangely enough, a vogue for Wagner – strangely, because one can hardly imagine two products of the human mind and soul more essentially hostile” (BA 49). These words, written two decades after the death of Virginia Woolf, express a deep-seated resentment of the cult of Wagner that had been built up by intellectuals and musicians such as George Bernard Shaw, Sir Thomas Beecham, Albert Coates, or the Hungarian-German János (Hans) Richter (1843–1916), the conductor of the first performances in Bayreuth and one of the musical directors of the Covent Garden in the first decade of the twentieth century.

The earliest references to Wagner in Virginia Stephen’s written legacy are in “A Sketch of the Past,” which contains a passage about a performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen in June 1900 (MB 155), and in a 1904 letter written in Paris to her closest friend, Violet Dickinson. During a dinner with Clive Bell and the painter Gerald Kelly, Beatrice Thynner “expounded theories on Wagner,” creating a hot debate (L1: 140). At the beginning of the next year she reviewed a two-volume work on Wilhelmine of Prussia, markgravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, in which she remarked that the markgravine not only founded a university but even “anticipated the present opera house” – that is, the Festspielhaus (E1: 90). Two years later Virginia saw a performance of Die Meistersinger and listened to her younger brother, Adrian, spell out Wagner on the piano. Her affirmation that “nothing will induce me to sacrifice my Richter” indicates that she valued the Wagner performances of the Covent Garden (L1: 294, 308, 312). In a sketch written in 1909 she drew a portrait of Miriam Jane Timothy (1879–1950), a member of the London Symphony Orchestra, who was, according to Richter, “as excellent on the harp as on the lute” (V. Woolf, Carlyle’s House 23). In 1908 she praised a “very fairly satisfactory performance of Götterdämmerung” and declined an invitation from Lady Robert Cecil, because “our opera began at 4:30.” In that year she went “almost nightly to the opera” and “in the afternoon” studied German (L1: 329, 330, 331, 333). Her obvious goal was to understand the texts of Wagner’s works. Sydney-Turner sent her an authentic portrait of Hans Sachs, and she asked him to get tickets for her (352, 362).

In 1909 she visited Bayreuth, accompanied by Sydney-Turner and Adrian. “Now we are going to read Parsifal, and then lunch, and then we shall hear the immortal work,” she wrote to her sister, Vanessa, on August 7. The next day she summarized her impressions in the following terms: “Saxon and Adrian say that it was not a good performance, and that I shan’t know anything about it until I have heard it 4 times. [ . . . ] We have been discussing obscure points in Parsifal all the morning” (L1: 404). On August 11 she saw another performance of Wagner’s last work. On this occasion she felt “within a space of tears” and reached the conclusion that “it is the most remarkable of the operas; it slides from music to words almost imperceptibly” (406). In that year Siegfried Wagner and Karl Muck were the conductors. The few available recordings with them suggest a fundamental difference between their interpretations: the composer’s son, Siegfried (himself a composer), tended toward more transparency in orchestral playing (Siegfried Wagner Conducts Wagner, Archipel 0288), whereas Muck was instrumental in creating a long tradition of slow performances that stressed heaviness (Richard Wagner: Parsifal, Naxos Historical 8.110049–50). It would be interesting to know which of the two versions appealed more to Virginia Stephen.

While she wrote to her sister that Lohengrin was “a very dull opera” (L1: 409) before actually seeing that performance in Bayreuth on the evening of August 19, 1909, her comment may need some explanation. The impressions of a young and relatively inexperienced person should perhaps not be taken too seriously, but it is worth noting that Parsifal is not an easily accessible work, so she may have sensed some of the distinct qualities of Wagner’s art if she enjoyed it. It must be borne in mind that she could give only the “impressions as an amateur” in her article published in the Times on August 21. The remarkable thing is that she ascribed the superiority of Parsifal over Lohengrin to the fact that in the later work “the words are continued by the music so that we hardly notice the transition” (E1: 289), a feature that echoes Wagner’s own intentions. Needless to say, Lohengrin can be called an outstanding achievement from at least two perspectives: (1) as the culmination of the German Romantic opera represented by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Carl Maria von Weber, Heinrich August Marschner, and Albert Lortzing, or (2) as a model for the Expressionism of Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, composed in 1911, a one-act opera with an opposition between darkness and light (an F sharp and C polarity) comparable to the contrast underlying the structure of Lohengrin, and a blood motif inspired by the music associated with Ortrud in Wagner’s work. For different reasons, both of these contexts were unknown to Virginia Stephen.

From Bayreuth, Sydney-Turner, Adrian, and Virginia Stephen went to Dresden, where they saw a performance of Salome by Richard Strauss. “I was much excited, and believe that it is a new discovery. He gets great emotion into his music, without any beauty” (L1: 410). Once more, an insight might be detected beneath the surface of Virginia’s statement: the realization that expressivity can be attained without an appeal to conventional beauty.

Back in London Virginia may have heard a performance of Tristan und Isolde in 1910 (L1: 425) and Elektra (HL 239), a work that deploys dissonance in a more radical way than Salome, and may also have attended Der Ring in 1911. It seems almost certain that she saw few Wagner performances after her marriage to Leonard in 1912. A letter to Katherine Cox written in May 1913 testifies to the influence of Virginia’s husband: “We came up here 10 days ago to attend the Ring – and I hereby state that I will never go again[ . . . ]. My eyes are bruised, my ears dulled, my brain a mere pudding of pulp – O the noise and the heat, and the bawling sentimentality, which used once to carry me away, and now leaves me sitting perfectly still. Everyone seems to have come to this opinion, though some pretend to believe still” (L2: 26). In 1923 she wrote about her loss of enthusiasm to a younger woman in terms that suggest a focus on the action rather than on the music: “I went to Tristan the other night; but the love making bored me. When I was your age I thought it the most beautiful thing in the world – or was it only in deference to Saxon?” (L3: 56). Two years later, in a letter addressed to Sydney-Turner, Virginia seemed to express a more qualified view: “I have been to the Walküre, and to Lords: at both places I looked for you in vain. [ . . . ] Walküre completely triumphed, I thought; except for some boredom – I can’t even enjoy those long arguments in music – when it is obviously mere conversation upon business matters between Wotan and Brunhilde: however, the rest was superb. The fire is terrible: I saw at once that it was made of red silk, and that used to be done quite satisfactorily. Also I missed the ride of the horses” (L3: 186). Aside from the reservations that refer to the visual components of the production, the characterization of act 2, scene 2 suggests an inability to recognize the turning point of Der Ring: the dramatic function of Wotan’s outburst of despair caused by the realization that he is unable to create a human being who could have the freedom of will that is denied to the gods. Virginia failed to understand why the composer once described this as “the most important scene in the whole tetralogy” (Donington 155). Wotan’s monologue, moving gradually from almost unaccompanied speech to a complex musical texture in which singing is combined with orchestral development, functions as a self-examination that sheds light on the contradictions of his past. As Pierre Boulez remarked, “La totale confession de Wotan devant Brünnhilde (La Walkyrie, acte II) s’impose comme indispensable à la compréhension de son caractère, qui s’y révèle beaucoup plus profondément qu’au moyen de quelque autre procédé plus actif” (176) [Wotan’s full confession before Brünnhilde (The Walkyrie, Act II) imposes itself as indispensible to the understanding of his character, which reveals itself here much more profoundly than by means of some other more active method].

Although shortly after this performance of Die Walküre she conversed with the Jewish stockbroker Sydney J. Loeb (1876–1964), who was the son-in-law of Hans Richter and an ardent Wagnerian (D3: 26), in one of the stories composed around the same time Virginia made a guest of Clarissa Dalloway refer to the Meistersinger (CSF 194), and in 1931 she listened to Ethel Smyth’s lengthy argument about Parsifal (D4: 49). She missed the 1935 performance of Tristan und Isolde as well as Der Ring of 1937 and 1938 conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, with superb singers in the leading roles such as Frida Leider, Kirsten Flagstad, Maria Müller, Tiana Lemnitz, Margarete Klose, Franz Völker, Max Lorenz, Lauritz Melchior, Herbert Janssen, and Rudolf Bockelmann. The British press was enthusiastic, and the surviving recorded parts of the two cycles (Wilhelm Furtwängler Conducts Excerpts from Götterdämmerung, Music & Arts CD-1035 and Eklipse EKR 62) suggest that these performances may have been the most powerful in history. It would perhaps not be far-fetched to conclude that Virginia stopped learning German and lost her interest in Wagner under her husband’s influence. She may have felt some loss; “There was a time when I went out to operas, evening concerts &c, at least 3 times a week,” she noted with regret in 1915 (D1: 19). In her later years she rarely attended performances of operas composed after 1800. In 1928 she saw Christoph Gluck’s Armide, a work she found not too interesting (L3: 497); in 1931 she went to Cambridge for a performance of The Fairy Queen, Purcell’s longest semi-opera, a work she enjoyed (L4: 290, 292); in 1932 she went to Dido and Aeneas at the Sadler’s Wells Theater and thought it “absolutely and entirely satisfying”; and in December she attended Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at Sadler’s Wells (possibly sung in English), which she described as “the loveliest opera ever written” (L5: 135, 259). Her diary refers mainly to Mozart performances: in 1918 she saw Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte, in 1926 Le Nozze di Figaro, in 1930 La Finta Giardiniera, in 1931 Die Zauberflöte, and in 1933 she took her niece, Angelica Bell, to Don Giovanni at Sadler’s Wells. In 1934 she heard Le Nozze di Figaro in Glyndebourne, conducted by Fritz Busch, with Willi Domgraf-Fassbänder in the title role and Aulikki Rautawaara and Luise Helletsgruber as the Contessa and Cherubino, respectively. The next year she also went there to a concert and to Die Zauberflöte, conducted by the same music director.

It is possible that after her early experience of Salome Virginia never heard any of the major operas of the post-Wagnerian era. In 1926 she may have seen a concert performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh (D3: 72), and in 1931 she was taken to see Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers by Vita Sackville-West and the composer (D4: 48), an opera she had seen for the first time conducted by Thomas Beecham in 1909, three years after the first performance in Leipzig. Neither of these works made a deep impression on her, not even the British composer’s three-act opera, appreciated by such eminent conductors as Arthur Nikisch and Bruno Walter, and based on the legends of Cornwall, the region where the Stephen family spent several summers. Her relative lack of familiarity with the music of her age may explain why she dismissed Ariane et Barbe-bleue as “a faded arty opera” when she heard it performed at Covent Garden by a French company conducted by Philippe Gaubert (D5: 81). Paul Dukas’s only opera, first performed in 1907, was highly regarded by Schoenberg and Berg, who must have realized that although it contains quotes from Pelléas et Mélisande and La mer, it has elements that are closer to Expressionism than to Debussy’s orchestral idiom. In 1936 Olivier Messiaen characterized it as “le chef-d’oeuvre incompris” and praised especially the central act, “ce génial crescendo de l’ombre à la lumière qui fait du 2e acte le chef-d’oeuvre de Paul Dukas et un des chefs-d’oeuvre de la musique” (79, 84).

Although Virginia’s relations with Sydney-Turner had cooled considerably over the years, her dependence on his expertise continued. In a letter written in January 1920 she asked him about an episode in The Voyage Out: “I wonder if you would once more tell me the number of the Beethoven sonata that Rachel plays in the Voyage Out – I sent the copy I marked to America, and now they’re bringing out a new edition here – I can’t remember what you told me – I say op. 112 – It can’t be that” (L2: 418). The fact that she did not seem to remember that op. 112 was the cantata “Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt” clearly indicates that Sydney-Turner was her main source of information. He occasionally took her to concerts, and in 1923 they heard “a divine Bach,” the secular cantata “Geschwinde, geschwinde ihr wirbelnden Winde” (BWV 201) (L2:39).

It would be a mistake to deny the impact of Wagner on Virginia’s formative years. “I doubt whether she really enjoyed the tense atmosphere of her Bayreuth holiday,” remarked one of her critics (Jacobs 234). Such assumptions are in contradiction with the characterization of the activity of the public “between the acts” and the description of the site in the article “Impressions at Bayreuth.” One might think of passages such as the following: “when the opera is over, it is quite late; and half way down the hill one looks back upon a dark torrent of carriages descending, their lamps wavering one above another, like irregular torches.” In fact, the article also refers to the impact of the atmosphere of the city: “we wander with Parsifal in our heads through empty streets at night, where the gardens of the Hermitage glow with flowers like those other magic blossoms, and sound melts into colour, and colour calls out for words, where, in short, we are lifted out of the ordinary world and allowed merely to breathe and see” (E1: 289–92). One should avoid making the false assumption that early influences are obliterated by what comes later in an artist’s career, for this may lead us to misinterpret the early works.

Let me illustrate with one example how commentaries may do the works a disservice. Rachel Vinrace, the heroine of The Voyage Out, is an amateur musician. In Melymbrosia, the first version of the novel, she has a late Beethoven sonata “spread upon the little piano,” and she is reading an “engaging passage”:

Der zagend vor dem Streiche

sich flüchtet, wo er kann,

weil eine Braut er als Leiche

für seinen Herrn gewann!

Dünkt es dich dunkel,

mein Gedicht?

(MELYM 36)

Isolde’s ironic and self-reflexive words in act 1, scene 2 suggest that Tristan is reluctant to face her, because he is taking her as a bride for another man. In the next chapter Clarissa Dalloway opens the score of Tristan und Isolde that lies on the table of the salon and remembers Bayreuth: “I shall never forget my first Parsifal – a grilling August day, and all those fat old German women, come in their stuffy high frocks, and then the dark theatre, and the music beginning [ . . . ]. It’s like nothing else in the world!” (MELYM 54).

In the later version only the scene in which Rachel Vinrace is playing a Bach fugue is preserved. Mrs. Dalloway knocks at the door and enters. “The shape of the Bach fugue crashed to the ground” (VO 61). “Rachel’s maturity reflects Woolf’s own as she began to leave behind the popular Wagner for the older works of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart,” argues a critic in a recent essay (Kelley 422). The relevance of this explanation can be questioned on at least three grounds. First, in the early version Wagner is presented as continuing the tradition of Beethoven, very much in the spirit of the later composer’s influential essays on his predecessor. Second, before World War I Wagner’s music was hardly more popular than that of Mozart or Beethoven. Third, in Melymbrosia the focus is on the text and not the music. The passage quoted might have appealed to Virginia Woolf as poetry because of its somewhat enigmatic character.

Woolf’s interest in the legend of Sir Tristram and the Lady Iseult can be traced back to her short fiction known as “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” composed in August 1906. In what I would regard as her most interesting short narrative before “The Mark on the Wall” (1917), Master Richard tells the story, “in a high melodious voice”:

He dropped his gay manner, and looked past us all, with straight fixed eyes, as though he drew his words from some sight not far from him. And as the story grew passionate his voice rose, and his fists clenched, and he raised his foot and stretched forth his arms; and then, when the lovers part, he seemed to see the Lady sink away from him, and his eye sought farther and farther till the vision was faded away; and his arms were empty. And then he is wounded in Brittany; and he hears the Princess coming across the seas to him. (CSF 55–56)

Melymbrosia may indicate Virginia Stephen’s interest in the way Wagner added to the complexity of the love story. Be that as it may, the focus is on the text rather than on the music.

To return to the passage cited above from Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, according to which Diaghilev’s company represented a modernity different from that of Wagner, I have to admit that I have found no reference in the diaries or correspondence of Virginia Woolf to the most significant ballets of the early twentieth century. L’Oiseau de feu was “not given until Diaghilev’s third British season,” on June 18, 1912, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; Petrushka was given its British premiere on February 4, 1913; and Le Sacre du Printemps premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on July 11, 1913 (Thomas 69, 70, 72). Quentin Bell remarks that the Woolfs went to the Russian Ballet at the beginning of July 1913 but does not mention the performance they attended (QB2: 12). Although Le Rossignol was conducted by Emile Cooper in 1914 (Stravinsky 52), I have not found any reference suggesting that the Woolfs attended the performance of Stravinsky’s first opera, a work begun in 1908, before his compositional style had been considerably modified.

Most of the ballets Diaghilev presented had music that represented a far more traditional and even sentimental romanticism than that of the Bayreuth master. “The London public were much excited at the prospect of seeing Pavlova in Giselle. [ . . . ] The other ‘sensation’ of our autumn season in London was the début of Kchessinska in Le Lac des Cygnes” (Grigoriev 69). The musical idiom of Tchaikovsky is certainly very different from that of Wagner, but it can hardly be called more “advanced” in terms of harmony or structure, and it would be superfluous to compare Wagner and Adolphe Adam. Diaghilev may have believed that the British public was unprepared for his most experimental productions. In 1918 Virginia Woolf could see only the ballet-pantomime Le Carnaval and the one-act choreographic drama Shéhérézade (D1: 222, 288), two of the earliest productions of the company, first performed in 1910, with music by Robert Schumann (orchestrated by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Anagtol Liadov, Alexander Glazounov, and Alexandre Tchérépnine) and Rimsky-Korsakov, respectively. On the evidence of Virginia’s correspondence (L2: 367), it can be assumed that in 1919, when Diaghilev’s company returned to London, what she saw was an eclectic production, La Boutique Fantastique, based on “a collection of odd pieces by Rossini,” orchestrated by Respighi and danced by Lydia Lopokova and Léonide Massine (Grigoriev 154–55). Five years later she attended a performance of Les Tentations de la Bergère ou l’Amour Vainqueur, choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska (1891–1972), with décor and curtain designed by the Cubist painter Juan Gris (1887–1927). Virginia Woolf called it “a less popular but a more interesting ballet than ‘Cimarosiana’ and ‘Le Train Bleu,’” respectively a one-act ballet based on a suite of dances by Cimarosa and an “opérette dansée” with scenario by Jean Cocteau and music by Darius Milhaud. In the two paragraphs she wrote about Les Tentations for the “From Alpha to Omega” column in Nation and Athenaeum (E6: 399–400), the focus is on the visual experience and no mention is made of the music of the Baroque composer Michel Pignolet de Montéclair (1667–1737), restored and orchestrated by Henri Casadesus (1879–1947), instrumentalist, conductor, and composer, one of the founders of the Société des Instruments Anciens. According to Hermione Lee, in 1926 Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West “went to Stravinsky’s new ballets at the Haymarket” (HL 501), but Diaghilev’s régisseur mentions only the performance of Les Noces at His Majesty’s, in his chronicle of the Russian Ballet (Grigoriev 229).

Unlike G. E. Moore, Sydney-Turner, or Virginia’s younger brother, Adrian, Leonard Woolf was not an amateur musician. He never tried to compose and played no instrument. He went to concerts, but his taste was limited by strong ideological considerations. As he admitted in his late autobiography, “In 1911 I knew nothing about Wagner, but I saw that it was time for me to set about him seriously. I therefore took a box in Covent Garden for the Ring in October, and Virginia came to Das Rhein-gold, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, with Adrian and Rupert Brooke to Die Walküre” (BA 50). Although his memory was overshadowed by later historical events, it can be safely assumed that he regarded the works of Wagner as detrimental from the outset. In his writings he almost seemed to avoid addressing the music itself and paid little attention to technical considerations: “I see that in its way the Ring is a masterpiece, but I dislike it and dislike Wagner and his art. [ . . . ] The Germans in the 19th century developed a tradition, a philosophy of life and art, barbarous, grandiose, phoney. Wagner was both cause and effect of this repulsive process which ended in the apogee and apotheosis of human bestiality and degradation, Hitler and the Nazis” (BA 50).

In the later 1920s he reviewed gramophone records for the Nation and Athenaeum. Some of the records selected were of considerable interest. He paid some attention to the activity of the Dolmetsch family, probably because he knew that Stella Duckworth, Virginia’s half sister, who died in 1897, “was taught the violin by Arnold Dolmetsch” (MB 113), and in 1917 Dolmetsch made a virginal for Roger Fry (today in the Courtauld Gallery), but he failed to see the importance of period instrument interpretation. It is hardly understandable why he limited his choice to five labels (Parlophone, Beltona, His Master’s Voice, Columbia, and Decca) and ignored the products of important companies like Telefunken, Homocord, Odeon, Polydor, or Gramophone. In any case, some 50 percent of the items he discussed were insignificant. The finale of act 1 of Lohengrin and the king’s prayer sung in English and conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty certainly do not represent a memorable contribution to the history of interpretation. Although the reviewer’s short evaluations cannot be dismissed as entirely worthless, his remarks on the technical strengths and weaknesses of the recording (e.g., the emphasis on the balance between orchestra, chorus, and singers) dominate. The relatively long notice on Felix von Weingarten’s Columbia version of the Symphonie fantastique, for instance, contains no characterization of the specific features of the art of the great conductor.

In addition to extramusical considerations, Leonard Woolf’s approach to music was hampered by misinformation and the impact of fashionable views. He attributed the song titled “Die beiden Grenadiere” to Schubert (DAW 201) and constantly praised the late string quartets of Beethoven. Since he reviewed the recordings of these works made by the Léner and Capet Quartets (L. Woolf, “New Gramophone Records,” May 18; July 20), it seems likely that these were the versions known to Virginia Woolf. In his autobiography Leonard insisted that she was especially fond of one of these quartets:

I had once said to her that, if there was to be music at one’s cremation, it ought to be the cavatina from the B flat quartet, op. 130, of Beethoven. There is a moment at cremations when the doors of the crematorium open and the coffin slides slowly in, and there is a moment in the middle of the cavatina when for a few bars the music, of incredible beauty, seems to hesitate with a gentle forward pulsing motion – if played at the moment it might seem to be gently propelling the dead into eternity of oblivion. Virginia agreed with me.

Incidentally, “the music of the ‘Blessed Spirits’ from Gluck’s Orfeo was played” at the cremation (JNAM 95–96), but it is undeniable that the late Beethoven quartets seemed to be the most important musical experience for the Woolf couple in the 1920s and 1930s.

Several documents demonstrate that Leonard Woolf’s gestures of praise for these works were far from original in the interwar period. One of them is the reminiscences of Stravinsky. Here is Stravinsky’s somewhat malicious description of his meeting with a writer for whom Virginia Woolf had great admiration: “After the premières of Mavra and Renard in June 1922, I went to a party [ . . . ]. Marcel Proust was there also. Most of the people came to that party from my première at the Grand Opera, but Proust came directly from his bed [ . . . ]. I talked to him about music and he expressed much enthusiasm for the late Beethoven quartets – enthusiasm I would have shared were it not a commonplace among the intellectuals of that time and not a musical judgment but a literary pose” (102).

At any rate, if the prewar years for Virginia Woolf were marked by operatic experiences, the next decades were dominated by concerts and recordings. “There was a concert where they played Mozart,” says the narrator of “Sympathy” (written in 1919), and the name of the same composer occurs in “The String Quartet” (1920) (CSF 140). In the second of these stories a character refers to Mozart as the composer of the work performed. Since the character may be wrong, there is no contradiction with the diary entry that suggests the notes for this text were taken during a performance of a quintet by Schubert (D2: 24).

Painted Roofs, the first part of a novel cycle by Dorothy Miller Richardson was published by Duckworth some six months after The Voyage Out. The heroine of this novel, a governess sent to Germany, is an amateur pianist who is impressed by “the music that was everywhere all the week” (Richardson 1: 66) in Hanover. The description of the performance of compositions by Beethoven, Weber, and Chopin may have inspired Virginia Woolf when she was writing “The String Quartet.”

Although an afternoon concert she attended at the Queen’s Hall in 1915, conducted by Sir Henry Wood (1869–1944), included some Wagner, and on another occasion César Franck’s Symphony in D minor and three movements of Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole were performed (D1: 5, 20), Wood’s programs focused on the Viennese classics. The most remarkable feature of his Promenade Concerts was an emphasis on works by J. S. Bach, an approach that could be considered outdated from the perspective of the twenty-first century. Woolf also regularly attended the chamber concerts held at Shelley House (the Chelsea house belonging to St. John Hornby). In 1919 she heard the Allied String Quartet in Wigmore Hall (D1: 307). During a Beethoven Festival Week, April 25–30, 1921, at the Aeolian Hall she heard all the Beethoven string quartets played by the London String Quartet (D2: 113). Two of Schubert’s chamber works, the Octet and the String Quintet, also made a deep impression on her (D1: 63; D2: 24).

With some exaggeration it could be argued that the conservative eclecticism of the British music of the period might be blamed for the limitations of Virginia’s taste. Although she found the music of Ethel Smyth “too literary – too stressed – too didactic” (D4: 12), she felt an obligation to listen on the wireless to a Promenade Concert conducted by Smyth in 1930 that included the Anacreontic Ode composed in 1908 and some of her songs. Woolf described them as “very satisfying” in a letter addressed to Smyth (L4: 209). Furthermore, at the beginning of 1931 the Woolfs were present at the first performance of Smyth’s oratorio, The Prison. Two years later Virginia listened to a “Serenade Concert” that included some of Smyth’s music broadcast from the Canterbury Festival of Music and Drama, and she assured her friend that she liked her music “very much.” At the beginning of 1934 she sent her congratulations to the composer after a concert devoted entirely to her music conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. “And then I hope the Smyth festival is over,” she wrote, expressing her relief in a letter to her nephew Quentin Bell on January 10. On March 3, 1934, she attended a performance of Smyth’s late Romantic Mass in D, premiered in 1893 and later revised (L5: 193, 267, 269, 280). Virginia Woolf’s reluctance to attend a concert that included the Prelude to Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers at the Queen’s Hall in 1935 can be felt in the opening words of a letter addressed to the composer: “Yes, I’ll come if I can, on the 3rd, but I cant be dead sure; and oh Lord how I hate afternoon concerts. But as I say, if I can, from love of you, I’ll come” (L5: 370).

Since Virginia Woolf was related to Vaughan Williams by marriage, she went to concerts with his works on the program. Lord Berners was an acquaintance, so she tried to appreciate his music, and similarly personal reasons made her attend the first performances of Façade, a collaborative effort of the British literary figures Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell and William Walton (D2: 245–46), or Pomona, a twenty-minute ballet by Leonard Constant Lambert (1905–1951), with set and costumes designed by Vanessa Bell (D4: 144). In 1934 the Woolfs were taken to the premiere of an opera by Lawrence Collingwood (1887–1982), the principal conductor of Sadler’s Wells Opera, by Mary Hutchinson, a cousin of Lytton Strachey and a lover of Clive Bell (D4: 207).

All in all, the most innovative examples of twentieth-century music may have been virtually unknown to Virginia Woolf. Two performances of Ravel’s String Quartet in F major, composed in 1903 and revised in 1910 (D1: 226; D2: 39); an early performance of Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, inspired by Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin en concerts and composed in 1915–1916 (L2: 140); a theatrical production of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat held in 1928 (E4: 564); and the performance of some excerpts from Petrushka during Sir Thomas Beecham’s “Season of the Russian Opera and Ballet” (D4: 31) were among the exceptions. A letter addressed to Clive Bell suggests that Virginia planned to see Petrushka in 1919 (L2: 375), but as far as I know there is no evidence proving that she actually went to the performance at the Alhambra Theatre. In view of the fact that the “season at the Alhambra ended on 30 July” (Grigoriev 157), and that on October 27 Virginia Woolf was still hesitating to see “the Russian dancers” because they “were so expensive” (L2: 393), it seems likely that she had no chance to see Stravinsky’s second folk-influenced ballet. In 1921 Le Sacre du Printemps had two further performances in London: it was given first at a concert conducted by Leon Aynsley Goossens (1893–1962) with the composer present and later at a theater by the Diaghilev company. On June 10 the world premiere of the Symphonies d’instruments à vent à la mémoire de Debussy in the vast arena of Queen’s Hall turned out to be a disastrous failure. “Both my work and Koussevitzky,” the conductor, were “victimized,” Stravinsky wrote some fifteen years later (94, 96). In June 1927 the composer himself conducted his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex and a gala performance of his ballets was given by Diaghilev (133). Had Virginia Woolf attended these performances, there would be some trace of them in her diary. Sources unknown to me might invalidate that hypothesis.

“Do you like folk music?” she asked Ethel Smyth, and her own answer to that question suggested that she was reluctant to see the benefits of the folk culture revival both in music and in literature: “To my thinking they’re the ruin of all modern music – just as Synge and Yeats ruined themselves with keening Celtic dirges” (L4: 406). In a letter written in 1934 she called a work by Ethel Smyth “cacophonous” (L5: 360). One may even suppose that the neoclassicism of Walton and Lambert might have made some impact on the work of Virginia Woolf in the 1930s, when she turned back to what she herself called “the representational form,” “fact recording,” “objective, realistic, in the manner of Jane Austen: carrying the story on all the time” (D4: 142, 147, 168). Lambert took a firm stand against both Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and Virginia Woolf repeatedly asked Ethel Smyth to let her publish an essay in which she discussed his music (L4: 214, 215, 226). The ballet Pomona, consisting of pastiches titled Prelude, Corante, Pastorale, Menuetto, Passacaglia, Rigadoon, Siciliana, and Marcia, was the work of an artist for whom “the true guardian of the music of the future” was Jean Sibelius, the Finnish composer “whose shadow strides across Walton’s First Symphony (1935)” (Wood 156). Lambert’s ballet was composed in 1927, but the performance Virginia Woolf attended was given in January 1933, when she was trying to finish Flush and was struggling with The Pargiters, the first version of The Years, works that she herself called “cuckoos in my nest” (D4: 143). One could add that the “new” compositions Stravinsky presented to the British public in the 1920s and 1930s, the ballets Apollon Musagète and Le Baiser de la Fée or the mélodrame Perséphone, works he conducted in London in 1927, 1929, and 1934, respectively, imitate earlier styles and confirm a neoclassical outlook the contemporary British public could accept without serious reservations. None had the originality of the works he composed in the 1910s. As he himself admitted, he tried a style and orchestration “by means of which the music could be appreciated at the first hearing” (Stravinsky 149).

Although Virginia Woolf missed the most outstanding operatic performances of the interwar period, she heard some celebrated instrumentalists: in 1919 she heard Alfred Cortot (1877–1962) perform, both as pianist and as chamber musician; in 1924 she became acquainted with Brahms’s Lieder in the interpretation of the great German mezzosoprano Elena Gerhardt (1883–1961) and heard the famous Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia (1888–1950). In 1932 she went to the Wigmore Hall concert of the Busch Quartet, who played Brahms, Dvořák, and Beethoven, and the following year she heard four concerts by the same ensemble (D1: 311; D2: 298, 320; D4: 78, 147) and listened to Jelly Arányi (1893–1966) (the artist to whom Ravel dedicated Tzigane, Bartók his two sonatas for violin and piano, Holst his Double Concerto, and Vaughan-Williams his “Concerto Accademico”), playing J. S. Bach in Westminster Abbey. In 1934, the first year of the Glyndebourne Festival, she also heard an afternoon concert conducted by Fritz Busch, and in 1939 she heard another recital by the Busch Quartet at the Wigmore Hall that included Schubert’s early Quartet in B flat major (D. 112), Mozart’s G minor Quintet (K. 516), and Beethoven’s Op. 131 in C sharp minor, the quartet that Wagner regarded as one of his main sources of inspiration, in which “das innerste Traumbild wird in einer lieblichsten Erinnerung wach” (Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften 97).

Virginia Woolf was often far from enthusiastic about, and indeed at times was quite critical of, the quality of the music she heard. In 1918 she disliked Mozart’s great Symphony in G minor (K. 550) as conducted by Julian Clifford (1877–1921), finding it slow and sentimental, “with a lugubrious stickiness,” and she disapproved of the “vulgarity” of Henry Wood’s rendering of works by J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, and Dvořák (D1: 142, 206). She found the theatrics of conductors – for example, the “grimaces, attenuations, dancings, swingings” of Sir Thomas Beecham – superfluous and disturbing (D4: 284). She expressed reservations about some of the performances heard on the radio; “they play too slowly,” she remarked about the all-female Macnaghten Quartet playing Haydn (L6: 54).

With the rise of the recording industry, the Woolfs more often listened to music at home instead of going to concerts. A reference to Artur Schnabel’s Beethoven recitals in a letter written on November 8, 1932, may suggest that the risk of fainting in the heat, heart troubles, and an intermittent pulse may have prevented Virginia from attending concerts (L5: 122). Her diary and correspondence such as the following may give one some idea of their daily routine: “Home to music”; “And soon the bell will ring, and we shall dine & then we shall have some music [ . . . ]”; “delightful as this letter is, I must go and put my pie in the oven [ . . . ]. Then we turn on the loud speaker – Bach tonight”; “Black clouds while we played Brahms”; “Bach at night”; “we’ll play bowls; then I shall read Sévigné; then have grilled ham and mushrooms for dinner; then Mozart” (D3: 108, 247; L5: 88; D4: 107, 241, 336; L6: 286).

Although the world premiere of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces (op. 16) in London on September 3, 1912, met with an “extremely hostile reception” (Heckert 49), the works of this composer had numerous performances in the British capital, and from November 1923 they were often broadcast (Doctor 337–51), his name does not appear in the published diaries, letters, or biographies of Virginia Woolf. Between 1929 and 1936 Anton von Webern conducted nine concerts for the BBC. According to a booklet designed and edited by Lewis Foreman for Continuum Records (Webern Conducts Berg: Violin Concerto, Continuum Testament, SBT 1004), the programs included works by J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Johann Strauss Jr., Bruckner, Wolf, Mahler, Krenek, Milhaud, as well as by the three major composers of the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg). There is reason to believe that the London audience appreciated Berg’s works more than the music of Schoenberg and Webern. Before the memorial concert for Berg conducted by Webern on May 1, 1936, a concert performance of Wozzeck was held on March 14, 1934. Among the large number of Virginia Woolf’s diary entries about music heard on the radio, there is not a single one referring to any of these concerts.

In the acutely troubled period of the late 1930s, under the influence of preparations for war and her husband’s growing involvement in the activity of the Labour Party, Virginia came to view music as “our one resource against politics” (L6: 19). Even during the air raids they used their gramophone in the evenings, as the last words of the diary entry of October 22, 1940, suggest: “reading, music, bed” (D5: 333).

Since the catalog of the records the Woolfs owned is now archived with the papers of Leonard Woolf at the University of Sussex, and in some cases he noted the dates on which they listened to certain recordings, it seems possible to have some hypothesis concerning the core of their repertoire. In the 1930s they listened mainly to HMV recordings of works by J. S. Bach as performed by Edwin Fischer and Alfred Cortot; Beethoven string quartets played by the Busch, Capet, and Léner quartets; Artur Schnabel’s, Adolf Busch’s, and Fritz Kreisler’s interpretations of Beethoven sonatas; the Pro Arte Quartet’s Haydn series; and Mozart’s violin sonatas played by Szymon Goldberg and Lily Kraus. The catalog also includes Debussy’s Violin Sonata and some compositions by Richard Strauss, Ravel, and de Falla, but it is not possible to determine whether these recordings were acquired before 1941. The only major twentieth-century work that Leonard Woolf mentions and includes a date on which they listened to it (April 10, 1935) is Bartók’s First String Quartet (op. 7), composed in 1908–1909.

Under the influence of such recordings, Virginia’s working method changed gradually. “I do a little work on it in the evening when the gramophone is playing late Beethoven sonatas.” “It occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet that I would merge all the interjected passages into Bernard’s final speech.” Such statements may suggest that listening to music may have helped her in the writing of The Waves (D3: 139, 339). Whatever the case, it is certainly true that in the final decades of her life she regarded the string quartets of Beethoven as masterpieces comparable to the greatest works by Shakespeare. “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world,” she wrote at the end of her life (MB 84).

Though I would by no means deny the inspiration drawn from music in her works composed from the mid-1920s, I nonetheless would be somewhat reluctant to accept E. M. Forster’s claim that To the Lighthouse is “a novel in sonata form” (381), the assumption that Virginia Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry has a “sonata structure” (Jacobs 199, 253), or even the suggestion that “the conception of the long-lived Orlando” was inspired by The Rite of Spring (Haller 226). One of the numerous articles attempting to link her work to music suggests that more caution might be needed. At the outset of his essay, Gerald Levin asserted that in The Waves Virginia Woolf achieved “contrapunctal style,” but later he himself pointed out the fundamental weakness in this argument by stating that “voices in the novel cannot be heard simultaneously” (165, 166). The monologues of the six characters can be read only consecutively, so the comparison with a fugue would be a little presumptuous. Some of those who insist that her later works can be explained with the help of the thesis that Wagner’s influence had been replaced by that of Beethoven have tried to find British sources for Virginia Woolf’s interest in the late string quartets of the earlier master. They may not realize that such works as, for instance, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (1927), by the mathematician J. W. Sullivan (1886–1937), may have been inspired by Wagner’s longest essay on Beethoven (1870), a much more professional discussion of these works that contains a profound analysis of the C sharp minor Quartet (op. 131).

“I am writing The Waves to a rhythm not to a plot,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary (D3: 316). In a letter to Ethel Smyth she even revealed her awareness that such an approach to writing represented a radical departure from the generic conventions of the novel: “my difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot. Does this convey anything? And thus though the rhythmical is more natural to me than the narrative, it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction” (L4: 204). While working on Between the Acts (provisionally titled Pointz Hall), she observed “that it is the rhythm of a book that, by running in the head, winds one into a ball: and so jades one. The rhythm of PH. (the last chapter) became so obsessive that I heard it, perhaps used it, in every sentence I spoke” (D5: 339). In 1930, in a letter to Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf remarked with regret that there were no “accents to convey tone of voice” (L4: 225–26), and in an essay published in 1936, she insisted that “the prose writer, although he pretends to walk soberly in obedience to the voice of reason, nevertheless excites us by perpetual changes of rhythm” (L6: 418). Louie Everest, the “cook-general” at Monks House noted that when Virginia was having her bath, one could hear her talking to herself. “On and on she went, talk, talk, talk [ . . . ]. When Mr Woolf saw that I looked startled he told me that Mrs Woolf always said the sentences out loud that she had written during the night. She needed to know if they sounded right and the bath was a good, resonant place for trying them out” (Noble 189).

Undoubtedly, tone, voice, and the disposition of forms play a major role in To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts, but it would be an exaggeration to link them to specific musical genres or structures. Tentative explanations might be attempted in more general terms. Since the stylization of The Waves has characteristics usually associated with verse rhythm, it is possible to argue that we can “hear the difference between the characters rather than visualise them” (Caughie 345). Lily Briscoe is driven by “some rhythm which was dictated to her,” but this rhythm is at least as spatial as musical, echoing Roger Fry’s thesis that “rhythm is the fundamental and vital quality of painting, as of all the arts” (Reed 102). In her painting Virginia “attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related” (TL 184, 182).

Contrary to what some may believe, a major artist never forgets the inspirations of her early years. In the case of Virginia Woolf, it is an exaggeration to believe that there was a rift between her early experiences of Wagner’s stage works and her later interest in the works of Beethoven. In Jacob’s Room a character thinks that Brangäne is “a trifle hoarse” in a performance of Tristan und Isolde (JR 68). In 1926 the sight of the burning of the gorse on the moor reminded Virginia of the death of the hero in Götterdämmerung (L3: 309). In a letter written to Ethel Smyth five years later, she refers to rhythm as the most distinctive element of the “Waldweben” (“forest murmurs”) section of act 2 of Siegfried: “The loudspeaker is pouring forth Wagner from Paris. His rhythm destroys my rhythm [ . . . ]. All writing is nothing but putting words on the backs of rhythm” (L4: 303). In The Years, Siegfried is called Kitty’s “favorite opera” (Y 196). The suggestion that in this case act 1of the “Zweiter Tag” of Wagner’s tetralogy is used “to illustrate dictatorship and aggression” (HL 242) suggests that sometimes textual (and intermedial) evidence is being distorted to fit an ideological preconception. Although the reader of the Covent Garden scene of Virginia’s longest novel may not refute the argument that in presenting a performance the focus is on the audience rather than on the music, since observations “on the latter outnumber appreciations of music and performers” (Jacobs 241), in a more general sense music may have helped her realize that a “sense of rhythm,” a quality the significance of which she pointed out in her early essay “Street Music,” published in 1905 (E1: 30), was a sine qua non of prose writing. Insofar as Leslie Stephen, “one of the great pioneers of Victorian unbelief,” professed the “ideal of disengaged, instrumental reason,” music in general and Wagner’s Romantic “expressivism” (Taylor 402, 413) in particular may have helped Virginia Woolf in her protest against the scientific rationality of her father’s generation. The only possible conclusion is that it was at least partly thanks to the inspiration drawn from music that she was able to become a major artist.