Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
at Stagg and Mantles for 16/6. The Queen was dressed in much the same sort of way and they really made an imposing couple. As for the music, I have no views, but it seemed brilliantly amorphous” (Selected Letters 377). “Brilliantly amorphous” suggests a musical appreciation that was significantly different from Roger Fry’s search for pattern and order, something rather closer to her sense of artistic values. Maynard Keynes, for his part, had little affection for music. According to his biographer, Robert Skidelsky, “There was nothing in the Keynes family home to stimulate the aesthetic sensibilities. [ . . . ] Nor was music then part of their lives, except for an occasional visit to a Gilbert and Sullivan, though [Keynes’s father] later collected records of operatic arias” (31). His closest friend during his years at King’s College, Cambridge, Robert Furness, who went on to become a distinguished translator, was an ardent Wagnerite but did not succeed in passing that enthusiasm on to the economist, although like many of the Bloomsberries, Keynes did attend the 1906 performance of Tristan und Isolde in London. Even his love affair with the mélomane Duncan Grant failed to instill in him any great pleasure in music (see, for instance, Skidelsky 119), and if he came to appreciate the ballet it was above all because it gave him an opportunity to “view Mr. Nijinsky’s legs” (154), as he put it in a letter to Lytton Strachey in July 1911, and later as a medium associated with his wife, Lydia Lopokova, rather than for ballet’s interpretation of music. After the First World War he entered the same social circle as Sir Thomas Beecham, but the relationship seems to have been purely social rather than being based on aesthetic concerns.
The fervent views of music we find in certain members of the Bloomsbury circle must therefore be counterbalanced by the responses of other elements within the group who not only regarded music with considerably less enthusiasm but also considered concerts more as an opportunity for observing human behavior than as an aesthetic experience. In discussing Bloomsbury, after all, it is always advisable to bear in mind the journalist and critic Desmond MacCarthy’s caveat that “in taste and judgment ‘Bloomsbury’ from the start has been at variance with itself. Indeed, here lay its charm as a social circle” (Rosenbaum 67). It is worth underlining MacCarthy’s description of it as a social rather than an intellectual or a cultural circle, although there are many critics who would argue that it also deserved those epithets. And MacCarthy’s argument notwithstanding, where music is concerned there are certain shared assumptions, interests, and experiences that run through the letters, diaries, and memoirs of those who made up the Bloomsberries, even if those assumptions are somewhat less progressive than some of their other views about the arts. Indeed, for many of them, the music that played an important part in their social life was mainly, although far from exclusively, well-established classical music. Raymond Mortimer, who joined the group after the First World War, may be taking matters too far when he provocatively claims in his “London Letter” written for the American journal Dial in 1928, that Bloomsbury tended to exalt the classical in all the arts: “Racine, Milton, Poussin, Cézanne, Mozart and Jane Austin have been their more cherished artists” (Rosenbaum 311). Nevertheless, he has a point. The operas of Richard Wagner were for many of them the most innovative addition to the standard repertoire. The sensitivity to the radical changes in the plastic arts that the group embraced, promoted, and delighted in, together with that sharp awareness of the changes in social mores that Virginia Woolf playfully dates to around December 1910, seems to have found an equivalent in music only in the case of a few of the Bloomsberries, most notably Virginia Woolf herself.
Indeed, contemporary music tends to be treated with distaste or scorn, as when Strachey, encountering the English composer Roger Quilter at a party, focuses on the outward appearances without seeming to listen to the music at all: “I went to the ‘Friday Club’[ . . . ]. The proceedings were curious and unpleasant. Nearly everyone – male and female – sat on the floor back to back, while Walter Creighton sang Brahms or posed with a cigarette, and his friend Mr. Roger Quilter – a pale young man with a bottle nose – played his own compositions on the piano” (Levy, Letters, Dec. 7, 1905, 86). And although there are allusions to Diaghilev’s ballets, Stravinsky’s epoch-making Rite of Spring, first performed in Paris in 1913, apparently passed many of them by largely unnoticed. Lytton Strachey did attend a performance in July 1913 but described it as “one of the most painful experiences of my life,” explaining that he “couldn’t have imagined that boredom and sheer anguish could have been combined together at such a pitch” (Holroyd 291). By 1919, however, Diaghilev’s company was being lionized by Bloomsbury (and others), and in 1926 Vita Sackville-West writes of attending a Stravinsky ballet with Virginia Woolf, although her main attention seems to have been focused on Virginia’s extraordinary outfit (HL 495).
Music as social exercise and fairly lighthearted entertainment is what most strikes a reader of the correspondence of many of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf’s letters, even those she exchanged with the feminist and composer Ethel Smyth. But then, as she puts it to Gerald Brennan in 1923, letter writing for her was often a “tossing of omelettes” (L3: 80). At one point, perhaps to avoid the embarrassment of having to offer evaluations of her correspondent’s music, Virginia insisted that she could not judge music (L5: 135). Of course there is in any writer’s correspondence a sense of delight in seizing opportunities to test techniques or to indulge in displays of virtuoso description that often distorts the real seriousness with which the subject matter might normally be taken. Thus, in a letter of 1903, she paints an amusing picture of Adrian playing the pianola for their own pleasure but as a result affecting the moods and behavior of the servants:
A fresh lot of tunes came today chosen by Adrian and a very mixed set – Bach and Schumann and the Washington Post, and the Dead March in Saul, and Pinafore and the Messiah. We find the difference in quality a very good thing because all our servants sit beneath the open drawing room window all evening while we play – and by experiment we have discovered that if we play dance music all their crossnesses vanish and the whole room rings with shrieks and then we tame them down so sentimentally with Saul or bore them with Schumann. (L1: 88)
The pianola also features in Duncan Grant’s memoir of Virginia Woolf, in which it is described in the following comic manner:
In the back part of the [drawing] room there was an instrument called a Pianola, into which one put rolls of paper punctured by small holes. You bellowed with your feet and Beethoven or Wagner would appear. Anyone coming into the room might have thought Adrian was a Paderewski – the effort on the bellows gave him a swaying movement very like that of the great performer, and his hands were hidden. (Rosenbaum 99)
Although Grant notes that he could not remember having seen Virginia play on this instrument, he adds that “it must have played a part in her life, for Adrian on coming home from work would play in the empty room by the hour” (99).
Playing a pianola in an empty room might indeed seem a curiously apt metaphor for the musical tastes of many of those associated with Bloomsbury, a group whose verbal skills and visual imaginations seem to have relegated music to an activity at best appreciated at second hand and in private. But that very verbal skillfulness can be misleading: when we read their letters or essays, it can frequently seem that the desire to amuse can outweigh any intention of seriousness in conveying a response to a musical experience, yet the ways in which the Bloomsberries depicted music in their works of art can suggest a different and more serious appreciation. Diverse in their tastes, forthright in the expression of their aesthetic judgments, witty and iconoclastic, the Bloomsbury Group reveals a response to music that was as varied and idiosyncratic as were its individual members. While many of them were not as innovative in their musical taste as in their appreciation of literature and the visual arts, some of them, notably Virginia Woolf, found in music a source of sensual delight and intellectual stimulation that informed their aesthetic convictions and in turn fed into their writings. It is this more profound appreciation of music that this collection of essays on Virginia Woolf sets out to explore. Setting her responses against, or at least in the context of, those of the wider Bloomsbury circle illuminates her own independence of spirit and her originality.
NOTES
1. On the nature and chronology of the Bloomsbury