Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
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