Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
Virginia Woolf & Music
Virginia Woolf & Music
Edited by Adriana Varga
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Virginia Woolf and Music / edited by Adriana Varga.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-253-01246-3 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-253-01255-5 (pb) – ISBN 978-0-253-01264-7 (eb) 1. Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Music and literature. I. Varga, Adriana.
PR6045.O72Z89226 2014
823’.912 – dc23
2013046357
1 2 3 4 519 18 17 16 15 14
. . . for the words are continued by the music
so that we hardly notice the transition.
VIRGINIA WOOLF,
“Impressions at Bayreuth,” E1, August 21, 1909
I always think of my books as music before I write them.
VIRGINIA WOOLF,
The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 6, September 4, 1940
Preface
Mihály Szegedy-Maszák
MUSIC PLAYED A VERY IMPORTANT ROLE IN THE LIFE OF VIRGINIA Woolf. In 1966, when I visited her husband, Leonard Woolf, he kindly showed me some of their favorite gramophone records and spoke of their attachment to specific works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Their melomania distinguished them from most of the other members of the Bloomsbury Group, who turned for inspiration to the visual arts. One of the distinguished contributors to this volume quotes a letter by Roger Fry in which he argues that Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony reveals “the essential barbarity and want of civilization of the German spirit.” Lytton Strachey had little affection for Le Sacre du Printemps. Fry, who praised or dismissed paintings for strictly aesthetic reasons, was influenced by politics when speaking about music, and Strachey’s contempt for one of the musical chefs d’oeuvre of the early twentieth century suggests a lack of understanding of rhythmic and harmonic innovation. Leonard Woolf’s reluctance to acknowledge the avant-garde may have affected his wife’s attitude about contemporary music. Their taste was more conservative in music than in literature. In the course of our conversation I became convinced that Leonard Woolf’s interest focused on works in diatonic (major-minor) scales, and Virginia shared his admiration for the works composed between the very late sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The absence from much of her writing of allusions to the innovative composers of her age seems undeniable. There are relatively few traces of her interest in the activity of those who took the initiative in moving beyond tonality. Since the contemporary British composers whose work she was familiar with represented either late Romanticism (Ethel Smyth) or a kind of conservative nationalism (Vaughan Williams), her involvement in contemporary experimentation may have been limited by their influence. Undoubtedly, modernism is a question-begging concept. As is well known, Arnold Schoenberg (and his disciple Theodor Adorno) had a low opinion of Igor Stravinsky. Outside a narrow circle of experts, few of Virginia’s contemporaries could separate the most important achievements from the vast number of second-rate products. In the first decades of the twentieth century, it was not easy to recognize the compositions that would prove most original, especially in a country dominated by eclecticism. One of the merits of the present collection of essays is that it offers a comparison between Virginia Woolf’s art and the music of some of her contemporaries.
Inter-art studies represent a wide range of fields. As an amateur musician and reader of scholarly studies by musicologists, I may be too cautious to accept parallels between literary texts and musical compositions. Opera is a hybrid genre. It can be based on a legend that also inspired literary works usually regarded as belonging to “high culture.” In such cases the common denominator may be literary. Reflections on the effects of listening to music abound in the works of Virginia Woolf, from The String Quartet to The Years. References to composers are frequent not only in her autobiographical texts but also in her narrative fiction. In Night and Day William Rodney hums a tune out of an opera by Mozart and picks out melodies in Die Zauberflöte upon the piano. Clarissa Dalloway remembers Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf discussing Wagner. At the beginning of Moments of Being: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points” (published in 1928), Miss Craye strikes the last chord of a Bach fugue.
Some people speak of “musical emotion” produced by the novels of Virginia Woolf. They also admit that the media of literature and music are so different that it might be difficult to look for the imitation of musical form. Understandably, the contributors to this volume avoid the temptation of using musical terms without qualifications. The word “counterpoint,” for instance, is rarely mentioned, since the simultaneity of voices is hardly feasible in a text that is expected to be read linearly. Music frequently serves as a metaphor in her novels, so the analysis of musical imagery and the aural nature of her prose deserve much attention. Although pause, semantically emancipated or “qualitative” silence, ellipses, spaces of indeterminacy, displaced accents, syncopation, or fragmentation are hardly specific to music, some believe that if repetitions of the signifier (e.g., onomatopoeia, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, parallelism, etc.) are conspicuous, we can speak of the musicality of prose.
Rhythm has not received its deserved attention in the studies devoted to the works of Virginia Woolf, although punctuation choice (e.g., the use of semicolons or dashes) and syntactic structure may be important characteristics of her art. Roger Fry identified rhythm as the distinguishing feature of her art as early as 1918, when despite his dissatisfaction with the ending of her short story “The Mark on the Wall” he praised her first step toward the creation of a language with conspicuous aural characteristics: “Of course there are lots of good writers in one way or another but you’re the only one now Henry James is gone who uses language as a medium of art, who makes the very texture of words have a meaning and quality really almost apart from what you are talking about” (198).1
Thanks to the contributors to this volume, the reader may learn much about this neglected topic. The following essays reveal the motivation on which Virginia Woolf acts and show that her experience of compositions by J. S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or Wagner helped shape her aesthetic demands and allowed her to realize a spontaneity in writing