Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
romanticism than that of the Bayreuth master. “The London public were much excited at the prospect of seeing Pavlova in Giselle. [ . . . ] The other ‘sensation’ of our autumn season in London was the début of Kchessinska in Le Lac des Cygnes” (Grigoriev 69). The musical idiom of Tchaikovsky is certainly very different from that of Wagner, but it can hardly be called more “advanced” in terms of harmony or structure, and it would be superfluous to compare Wagner and Adolphe Adam. Diaghilev may have believed that the British public was unprepared for his most experimental productions. In 1918 Virginia Woolf could see only the ballet-pantomime Le Carnaval and the one-act choreographic drama Shéhérézade (D1: 222, 288), two of the earliest productions of the company, first performed in 1910, with music by Robert Schumann (orchestrated by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Anagtol Liadov, Alexander Glazounov, and Alexandre Tchérépnine) and Rimsky-Korsakov, respectively. On the evidence of Virginia’s correspondence (L2: 367), it can be assumed that in 1919, when Diaghilev’s company returned to London, what she saw was an eclectic production, La Boutique Fantastique, based on “a collection of odd pieces by Rossini,” orchestrated by Respighi and danced by Lydia Lopokova and Léonide Massine (Grigoriev 154–55). Five years later she attended a performance of Les Tentations de la Bergère ou l’Amour Vainqueur, choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska (1891–1972), with décor and curtain designed by the Cubist painter Juan Gris (1887–1927). Virginia Woolf called it “a less popular but a more interesting ballet than ‘Cimarosiana’ and ‘Le Train Bleu,’” respectively a one-act ballet based on a suite of dances by Cimarosa and an “opérette dansée” with scenario by Jean Cocteau and music by Darius Milhaud. In the two paragraphs she wrote about Les Tentations for the “From Alpha to Omega” column in Nation and Athenaeum (E6: 399–400), the focus is on the visual experience and no mention is made of the music of the Baroque composer Michel Pignolet de Montéclair (1667–1737), restored and orchestrated by Henri Casadesus (1879–1947), instrumentalist, conductor, and composer, one of the founders of the Société des Instruments Anciens. According to Hermione Lee, in 1926 Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West “went to Stravinsky’s new ballets at the Haymarket” (HL 501), but Diaghilev’s régisseur mentions only the performance of Les Noces at His Majesty’s, in his chronicle of the Russian Ballet (Grigoriev 229).
Unlike G. E. Moore, Sydney-Turner, or Virginia’s younger brother, Adrian, Leonard Woolf was not an amateur musician. He never tried to compose and played no instrument. He went to concerts, but his taste was limited by strong ideological considerations. As he admitted in his late autobiography, “In 1911 I knew nothing about Wagner, but I saw that it was time for me to set about him seriously. I therefore took a box in Covent Garden for the Ring in October, and Virginia came to Das Rhein-gold, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, with Adrian and Rupert Brooke to Die Walküre” (BA 50). Although his memory was overshadowed by later historical events, it can be safely assumed that he regarded the works of Wagner as detrimental from the outset. In his writings he almost seemed to avoid addressing the music itself and paid little attention to technical considerations: “I see that in its way the Ring is a masterpiece, but I dislike it and dislike Wagner and his art. [ . . . ] The Germans in the 19th century developed a tradition, a philosophy of life and art, barbarous, grandiose, phoney. Wagner was both cause and effect of this repulsive process which ended in the apogee and apotheosis of human bestiality and degradation, Hitler and the Nazis” (BA 50).
In the later 1920s he reviewed gramophone records for the Nation and Athenaeum. Some of the records selected were of considerable interest. He paid some attention to the activity of the Dolmetsch family, probably because he knew that Stella Duckworth, Virginia’s half sister, who died in 1897, “was taught the violin by Arnold Dolmetsch” (MB 113), and in 1917 Dolmetsch made a virginal for Roger Fry (today in the Courtauld Gallery), but he failed to see the importance of period instrument interpretation. It is hardly understandable why he limited his choice to five labels (Parlophone, Beltona, His Master’s Voice, Columbia, and Decca) and ignored the products of important companies like Telefunken, Homocord, Odeon, Polydor, or Gramophone. In any case, some 50 percent of the items he discussed were insignificant. The finale of act 1 of Lohengrin and the king’s prayer sung in English and conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty certainly do not represent a memorable contribution to the history of interpretation. Although the reviewer’s short evaluations cannot be dismissed as entirely worthless, his remarks on the technical strengths and weaknesses of the recording (e.g., the emphasis on the balance between orchestra, chorus, and singers) dominate. The relatively long notice on Felix von Weingarten’s Columbia version of the Symphonie fantastique, for instance, contains no characterization of the specific features of the art of the great conductor.
In addition to extramusical considerations, Leonard Woolf’s approach to music was hampered by misinformation and the impact of fashionable views. He attributed the song titled “Die beiden Grenadiere” to Schubert (DAW 201) and constantly praised the late string quartets of Beethoven. Since he reviewed the recordings of these works made by the Léner and Capet Quartets (L. Woolf, “New Gramophone Records,” May 18; July 20), it seems likely that these were the versions known to Virginia Woolf. In his autobiography Leonard insisted that she was especially fond of one of these quartets:
I had once said to her that, if there was to be music at one’s cremation, it ought to be the cavatina from the B flat quartet, op. 130, of Beethoven. There is a moment at cremations when the doors of the crematorium open and the coffin slides slowly in, and there is a moment in the middle of the cavatina when for a few bars the music, of incredible beauty, seems to hesitate with a gentle forward pulsing motion – if played at the moment it might seem to be gently propelling the dead into eternity of oblivion. Virginia agreed with me.
Incidentally, “the music of the ‘Blessed Spirits’ from Gluck’s Orfeo was played” at the cremation (JNAM 95–96), but it is undeniable that the late Beethoven quartets seemed to be the most important musical experience for the Woolf couple in the 1920s and 1930s.
Several documents demonstrate that Leonard Woolf’s gestures of praise for these works were far from original in the interwar period. One of them is the reminiscences of Stravinsky. Here is Stravinsky’s somewhat malicious description of his meeting with a writer for whom Virginia Woolf had great admiration: “After the premières of Mavra and Renard in June 1922, I went to a party [ . . . ]. Marcel Proust was there also. Most of the people came to that party from my première at the Grand Opera, but Proust came directly from his bed [ . . . ]. I talked to him about music and he expressed much enthusiasm for the late Beethoven quartets – enthusiasm I would have shared were it not a commonplace among the intellectuals of that time and not a musical judgment but a literary pose” (102).
At any rate, if the prewar years for Virginia Woolf were marked by operatic experiences, the next decades were dominated by concerts and recordings. “There was a concert where they played Mozart,” says the narrator of “Sympathy” (written in 1919), and the name of the same composer occurs in “The String Quartet” (1920) (CSF 140). In the second of these stories a character refers to Mozart as the composer of the work performed. Since the character may be wrong, there is no contradiction with the diary entry that suggests the notes for this text were taken during a performance of a quintet by Schubert (D2: 24).
Painted Roofs, the first part of a novel cycle by Dorothy Miller Richardson was published by Duckworth some six months after The Voyage Out. The heroine of this novel, a governess sent to Germany, is an amateur pianist who is impressed by “the music that was everywhere all the week” (Richardson 1: 66) in Hanover. The description of the performance of compositions by Beethoven, Weber, and Chopin may have inspired Virginia Woolf when she was writing “The String Quartet.”
Although an afternoon concert she attended at the Queen’s Hall in 1915, conducted by Sir Henry Wood (1869–1944), included some Wagner, and on another occasion César Franck’s Symphony in D minor and three movements of Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole were performed (D1: 5, 20), Wood’s programs focused on the Viennese classics. The most remarkable feature of his Promenade Concerts was an emphasis on works by J. S. Bach, an approach that could be considered outdated from the perspective