Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
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