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Adriana Varga

AS EARLY AS 1901, VIRGINIA WOOLF WAS WRITING TO HER COUSIN Emma Vaughan, “The only thing in this world is music – music and books and one or two pictures” (L1: 35). And as late as 1940, she was writing to her friend, the gifted violinist Elizabeth Trevelyan, about the structure of Roger Fry: A Biography:

Its odd, for I’m not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them. And especially with the life of Roger, – there was such a mass of detail that the only way I could hold it together was by abstracting it into themes. I did try to state them in the first chapter, and then to bring in developments and variations, and then to make them all heard together and end by bringing back the first theme in the last chapter. Just as you say, I am extraordinarily pleased that you felt this. No one else has I think. (L6: 425–26)

Such confessions may be surprising, coming from an author whose works are more often associated with the visual arts than with music. They point to the significant role music played in Woolf’s writing and aesthetics throughout her life. In her 1939 memoir “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf also described one of her first childhood memories at Talland House, St. Ives, as a “colour-and-sound” moment in which sound, rhythm, image, and scent were fully interconnected. Life itself seemed to have unfolded out of these synesthetic moments the child experienced, which the writer, later, at the height of her creative power, refrained from calling “pictures” because “sight was then so much mixed with sound that picture is not the right word” (“Sketch” 67). These autobiographical details reveal early, consciousness-shaping synesthetic experiences that formed some of the author’s most treasured memories.¹ Despite numerous musical references and connections that enrich her fiction, essays, letters, and diaries, readers have most often focused on comparisons with the visual arts, often failing to “hear” Woolf’s novels – to use Jane Marcus’s insightful words – and ignoring Woolf’s “longing to imitate music with words, to build a structure to house the human longing for sublimity as Wagner had done,” to “compose her novel,” and “above all to bring forward the chorus” (Languages of Patriarchy 51).

In the Stephen-Jackson family, music was a practiced art. Woolf remembered, in “A Sketch of the Past,” that her mother “could play the piano and was musical” (86), and that her older half sister, Stella Duckworth, “was taught the violin by Arnold Dolmetsch and played in Mrs Marshall’s orchestra” (97). Stella would record in her diary (August 18, 1893), as Hermione Lee points out, that “Ginia did her music” while she herself practiced Beethoven sonatas (33). Mihály Szegedy-Maszák reminds us that the seventeen-year-old Virginia and Vanessa used to play fugues on the harmonium (L1: 27). The two sisters did receive a fairly standard female childhood instruction in piano, singing, and dancing, but, while Vanessa whimsically complained about it,² in Woolf’s case this early training seems to have nourished and enhanced her unusual sensitivity to rhythm and the pleasure of sound she recalled from her childhood, which were so closely interrelated to her linguistic ingenuity. Despite Quentin Bell’s assertion that Virginia could not read music “with any deep comprehension” (149), and despite Leonard Woolf’s conviction that his wife “had no deep knowledge of [music’s] construction” (for a discussion of this point, see Jacobs 232), it is safe to assume that Virginia Woolf could read music and not only understood musical form and structure but also, most importantly, used them creatively in her own writing – as her own description of the structure of Roger Fry: A Biography suggests.

Within the last decade, we have been witnessing concerted efforts among Woolf scholars to reconsider the writer’s musical background, the direct influence music had on Woolf’s aesthetics and politics, and connections between music and her fictional and critical writings. Joyce E. Kelly discusses Woolf’s “continual enjoyment of and interest in musical performance” (417); Emilie Crapoulet argues that Woolf “undoubtedly had a fair share of technical musical knowledge” (201); and, more importantly, Emma Sutton points to a “paradigm shift” in Woolf criticism, which “has returned us in one respect to the position of many of Woolf’s original readers, to whom the parallels between her work and some contemporary music were self-evident” (278). Woolf’s interest in music was all the more enriched by her almost systematic attendance of classical music concerts from an early age (Szegedy-Maszák, chapter 2, this volume), and later by listening to music practically every day in her own home as well as reading, discussing, writing, and publishing music criticism. She planned to host her own private concerts during the autumn of 1925, and borrowed a piano from Edward Sackville West for this purpose (L3: 195). Although critical of the BBC as breeding “a new monster, the middlebrow” (Caughie 339), Woolf, as Pamela Caughie explains, listened in “with great pleasure” for being able to “sit at home & conduct The Meistersinger myself” (D4: 107), thus partaking of what became an active form of listening: “highly attentive to technique; sensitive to nuances of voice; selective in tuning in certain kinds of programmes and tuning out distractions, including the sound of the technology itself. Listening became a skill, producing a heightened critical awareness and independence of thought” (Caughie 338). Most of all, Woolf found the cultural milieu of Bloomsbury receptive to music as part of a modernist aesthetic that fed into her ongoing fascination with color-sound art (see Bahun; Haller in the present volume).

In her September 14, 1925, diary entry, Woolf also described an important purchase: “I shall aim at haphazard, bohemian meetings, music (we have the algraphone, & thats a heavenly prospect – music after dinner while I stitch at my woolwork)” (D3: 42).³ The Algraphone was a cherished possession because it allowed her to listen to her music in private, without the usual distractions that disturbed her listening experience at public performances.⁴ This was also an important purchase for Leonard Woolf, who reviewed classical gramophone recordings for the Nation and Athenaeum between 1926 and 1929. In his “New Gramophone Records” column, he reviewed a variety of works by composers ranging from Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Johann Sebastian Bach to Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Frederick Delius, and many others. As a result, the Woolfs built up an impressive record collection, a small portion of which is today part of the Charleston Trust.⁵

At about the same time, between 1927 and 1930, the Hogarth Press published several books about music history and musicology – Robert Hull’s Contemporary Music (1927) and Delius (1928); Basil de Selincourt’s The Enjoyment of Music (1928); Ralph Hill and Thomas J. Hewitt’s two-volume An Outline of Musical History (1929); Erik Walter White’s Stravinsky’s Sacrifice to Apollo (1930); and a sixth, inter-art study, White’s Parnassus to Let: An Essay about Rhythm in the Films I (1928). These works address the “common reader,” but they also offer comprehensive musical analyses. They were part of the Hogarth Essays, a series the Woolfs began to publish in 1924 that included works such as Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (Virginia Woolf), The Artist and Psycho-Analysis (Roger Fry), Henry James at Work (Theodora Bosanquet), and Homage to John Dryden (T. S. Eliot) (Willis 108). By 1941 the Hogarth Press had published thirteen such series. That music was a subject that featured prominently alongside literature, art, politics, law, and history shows the serious interest the Woolfs took, as publishers, in music history and musicology.⁶

Equally important is Virginia Woolf’s interest in music criticism and performance history, as her essays, diaries, and letters attest. She expressed this interest in one of the earliest essays she wrote about musical performance, “Impressions at Bayreuth” (August 1909), in which she stated her concern for music criticism, decrying “the lack of tradition and of current standards” in writing about what she called “new music” (E1: 288). Having made the Covent Garden Opera House “her college” (Marcus, Languages of Patriarchy 51), Woolf was able to compare what she saw in London with what she saw in 1909 Bayreuth and Dresden,⁷ discerning what few music critics would have been able to realize at the time about performance practice: “In the final impression of Bayreuth this year, beauty is still triumphant, although the actual performances (if we except Götterdämmerung, which remains to be heard) have been below the level of many that have been given in London” (E1: 292).

Her slightly earlier article “The Opera” (April 1909) reflects a complex understanding of musical performance, reception, and criticism. She divides the operagoing public into three groups: those who prefer Traviata to Walküre, that is to say, the bel canto tradition to Wagnerian opera; those “who disapprove of opera altogether, but, go, cynically enough, for the sake of what they term its bastard merits” (E1: 270) – a reference to the dispute between the supporters of absolute music (instrumental, non-programmatic music without words) and the supporters of opera; and a third party, “which opposes Gluck to Wagner” (270). In her opinion, this latter difference is the one “most worthy of discussion” (270), because it has to do exactly with the relationship between text and music: in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s case, Woolf argues, emotions arise directly from the music itself, while in Wagnerian opera, emotions “flash out in men and women, as the story winds and knots itself, under the stress of sharp conflict” (270). Woolf then continues to examine different ways of relating to and understanding Wagner’s works, but what interests her most is the relationship between word and music as played out to the fullest in Wagnerian opera. She returns to this topic again in “Impressions at Bayreuth,” where she describes the opera Parsifal’s music as “intimate in a sense that none other is; one is fired with emotion and yet possessed with tranquility at the same time, for the words are continued by the music so that we hardly notice the transition” (289).