Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
Woolf and Musical Culture
Mihály Szegedy-Maszák
ALTHOUGH VIRGINIA WOOLF WAS SKEPTICAL OF THE MERITS of any verbal approach to music, she was fascinated by the ideal of ut musica poesis. As she listened to a concert in 1915, she decided that “all descriptions of music are quite worthless” (D1: 33), yet she constantly drew inspiration from music. There is good reason to believe that as early as 1905 (PA 251) she became familiar with Walter Pater’s celebrated statement “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (86), echoed by Oscar Wilde’s declaration in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician” (17). “Its odd, for I’m not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them,” she remarked toward the end of her life. “I want to investigate the influence of music on literature,” she added a few months before her death (L6: 426, 450).
Any insight we might have into Woolf’s musical canon will help us to approach her style and the structure of her novels, although this relation must not be confused with a unidirectional causal one. Just because the two questions cannot be fully separated, I have to acknowledge that by entering into the less ambitious while staying away from the more, my discussion will be fragmentary. On the one hand, the evidence I have found in her autobiographical writings may be incomplete; on the other hand, the analysis of prose rhythm would ask for the ear of a native speaker.
Can a comparison of music and literature lead to a better understanding of Virginia Woolf’s works? The issues involved are complex; one must move carefully and tentatively in this area. A comparison of the two arts might mean a number of different things.
How can the sister arts “appear” in a work of literature? One could begin by drawing a distinction between the ideal types of “use” and “mention.” Gérard Genette gives the following examples: “In the sentence ‘Paris is a great city,’ the word Paris is used transitively [ . . . ]; in ‘Paris consists of two syllables,’ the name of the city is mentioned (cited)” (235–36). The actual presence of the sister arts in a literary work can never be a clear-cut case of use or mention. Having made this general statement, I would risk the hypothesis that the verbal description of a painting is more feasible than the literary imitation of a musical structure. Whether this is true or not, it cannot be denied that Virginia Woolf was surrounded by visual artists (such as her sister, Vanessa, and the painter Duncan Grant), and the two theoreticians whose aesthetic views exerted a profound influence on her, Roger Fry and Clive Bell, focused on the visual arts. That may be a partial explanation for the fact that an imaginary landscape plays a more important role than the tune played by an old fiddler in Woolf’s story titled “A Simple Melody” (written around 1925).
How can one characterize the impact of music on her writing? “We do not have much of a factual base to start from,” as one of the critics who has attempted to address this question has noted (Jacobs 228). The information one can collect from the diaries, the essays, the correspondence, and other publications is so fragmentary that only tentative conclusions can be drawn. Let it suffice to mention one example: On January 16, 1929, Virginia and her husband went for a week to Berlin, where they were joined by her sister, Duncan Grant, and her younger nephew, Quentin Bell. “We spent most of our time at the opera,” she wrote to a cousin (L4: 126), but her diary and correspondence contain no reference to any performance, and Quentin Bell’s biography describes the Berlin holiday as a dismal failure and makes no mention of any operatic experience. Given such gaps in our knowledge, it is difficult to assess Virginia Woolf’s musical culture.
In the late nineteenth century children in an upper-middle-class English family were expected to acquire some knowledge of the visual arts and music. The author’s mother “could play the piano and was musical” (MB 100). “Last night we went to the first of our four operas,” Virginia Stephen informed her elder brother, Thoby, in June 1898. A letter to a friend dated August 12, 1899, indicates that the children “perform Fugues on the Harmonium.” “I draw for hours every evening after dinner,” she wrote to another friend in December 1904 (L1: 17, 27, 170). “My old piano” is mentioned as early as 1901. A year later there is a reference to a pianola recently purchased. Her younger brother, Adrian, seemed to be the most musical in the family; he brought sheet music into the household by J. S. Bach, George Frideric Händel, and Robert Schumann (L1: 41, 55, 88). After she had started reviewing books, Virginia devoted some attention to works on music: in 1905 she reviewed the fifth volume of The Oxford History of Music in the Guardian, and in 1909 her article “The Opera” appeared in the London Times (E1: 373–74, 269–72). She continued to be very critical of the shortcomings of musical life in Britain: in 1918 she dismissed the “incredible, pathetic stupidity of the music hall” (D1: 144) and attacked those who regarded the oratorio as the “only permissible form of art” (E2: 262). As late as 1932 her friend Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, speaking of someone with musical talent, complained about the inferiority of the status of music in British culture in comparison with Germany, saying, “He’s a phenomenon. How I pity him! Forced to live in England with that gift – you don’t know the loneliness” (D4: 69).
Among the members of the larger family there were some who could play instruments. “[When] we asked if she could play, [ . . . ] she strummed through a Beethoven sonata, with the tramp of a regiment of dragons,” the young Virginia wrote about her cousin Helen Stephen (1862–1908) (L1: 343). Determined to make up for the lack of musical culture in London, Emma Vaughan (1874–1960), one of Virginia’s early friends, spent several months studying in Dresden.
Although there are many publications about those who knew the young Virginia Stephen, they contain surprisingly little information on music, and indeed they are sometimes unreliable. One scholar, for instance, mentions that Oliver Strachey (1874–1960), Lytton’s elder brother, “studied the piano with Lechititsky in Vienna” (Jacobs 229), and the reader may assume that the reference is to the influential Polish instrumentalist Teodor Leszetycki, known in the German-speaking countries as Theodor Leschetizky (1830–1915), one of the few who established a highly original school of interpretation, an alternative to the tradition of Ferenc Liszt.
Among the Cambridge friends of Virginia’s brothers there were amateur musicians. “It was characteristic of him that he was usually playing Chopin,” Leonard Woolf wrote about Harry Gray, who in later life became a well-known surgeon (LWA 112), and the philosopher G. E. Moore “sang Adelaide, Schubert songs, or the Dichterliebe, or [ . . . ] played the Waldstein or the Hammerklavier sonata” (BA 42), works that demand considerable virtuosity.
While all these people may have helped the young Virginia acquire good taste in music, the most important influence must have been that of Saxon Sydney-Turner (1880–1962), a regular visitor to chamber music concerts, who “kept a record, both on paper and in his head, of all the operas he had ever been to” (LWA 66). In fact, it is possible to argue that this Wagnerite played a major role in the musical education of the young writer until her future husband appeared on the scene and took a firm stand against the legacy of Richard Wagner. Back from Ceylon, in 1911 Leonard Woolf discovered that the musical life of the British capital was dominated by foreigners. “Among the frequenters of the Russian Ballet there was, strangely enough, a vogue for Wagner – strangely, because one can hardly imagine two products of the human mind and soul more essentially hostile” (BA 49). These words, written two decades after the death of Virginia Woolf, express a deep-seated resentment of the cult of Wagner that had been built up by intellectuals and musicians such as George Bernard Shaw, Sir Thomas Beecham, Albert Coates, or the Hungarian-German János (Hans) Richter (1843–1916), the conductor of the first performances in Bayreuth and one of the musical directors of the Covent Garden in the first decade of the twentieth century.
The earliest references to Wagner in Virginia Stephen’s written legacy are in “A Sketch of the Past,” which contains a passage about a performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen in June 1900 (MB 155), and in a 1904 letter written in Paris to her closest friend, Violet Dickinson. During a dinner