Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
(D1: 307). During a Beethoven Festival Week, April 25–30, 1921, at the Aeolian Hall she heard all the Beethoven string quartets played by the London String Quartet (D2: 113). Two of Schubert’s chamber works, the Octet and the String Quintet, also made a deep impression on her (D1: 63; D2: 24).
With some exaggeration it could be argued that the conservative eclecticism of the British music of the period might be blamed for the limitations of Virginia’s taste. Although she found the music of Ethel Smyth “too literary – too stressed – too didactic” (D4: 12), she felt an obligation to listen on the wireless to a Promenade Concert conducted by Smyth in 1930 that included the Anacreontic Ode composed in 1908 and some of her songs. Woolf described them as “very satisfying” in a letter addressed to Smyth (L4: 209). Furthermore, at the beginning of 1931 the Woolfs were present at the first performance of Smyth’s oratorio, The Prison. Two years later Virginia listened to a “Serenade Concert” that included some of Smyth’s music broadcast from the Canterbury Festival of Music and Drama, and she assured her friend that she liked her music “very much.” At the beginning of 1934 she sent her congratulations to the composer after a concert devoted entirely to her music conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. “And then I hope the Smyth festival is over,” she wrote, expressing her relief in a letter to her nephew Quentin Bell on January 10. On March 3, 1934, she attended a performance of Smyth’s late Romantic Mass in D, premiered in 1893 and later revised (L5: 193, 267, 269, 280). Virginia Woolf’s reluctance to attend a concert that included the Prelude to Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers at the Queen’s Hall in 1935 can be felt in the opening words of a letter addressed to the composer: “Yes, I’ll come if I can, on the 3rd, but I cant be dead sure; and oh Lord how I hate afternoon concerts. But as I say, if I can, from love of you, I’ll come” (L5: 370).
Since Virginia Woolf was related to Vaughan Williams by marriage, she went to concerts with his works on the program. Lord Berners was an acquaintance, so she tried to appreciate his music, and similarly personal reasons made her attend the first performances of Façade, a collaborative effort of the British literary figures Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell and William Walton (D2: 245–46), or Pomona, a twenty-minute ballet by Leonard Constant Lambert (1905–1951), with set and costumes designed by Vanessa Bell (D4: 144). In 1934 the Woolfs were taken to the premiere of an opera by Lawrence Collingwood (1887–1982), the principal conductor of Sadler’s Wells Opera, by Mary Hutchinson, a cousin of Lytton Strachey and a lover of Clive Bell (D4: 207).
All in all, the most innovative examples of twentieth-century music may have been virtually unknown to Virginia Woolf. Two performances of Ravel’s String Quartet in F major, composed in 1903 and revised in 1910 (D1: 226; D2: 39); an early performance of Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, inspired by Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin en concerts and composed in 1915–1916 (L2: 140); a theatrical production of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat held in 1928 (E4: 564); and the performance of some excerpts from Petrushka during Sir Thomas Beecham’s “Season of the Russian Opera and Ballet” (D4: 31) were among the exceptions. A letter addressed to Clive Bell suggests that Virginia planned to see Petrushka in 1919 (L2: 375), but as far as I know there is no evidence proving that she actually went to the performance at the Alhambra Theatre. In view of the fact that the “season at the Alhambra ended on 30 July” (Grigoriev 157), and that on October 27 Virginia Woolf was still hesitating to see “the Russian dancers” because they “were so expensive” (L2: 393), it seems likely that she had no chance to see Stravinsky’s second folk-influenced ballet. In 1921 Le Sacre du Printemps had two further performances in London: it was given first at a concert conducted by Leon Aynsley Goossens (1893–1962) with the composer present and later at a theater by the Diaghilev company. On June 10 the world premiere of the Symphonies d’instruments à vent à la mémoire de Debussy in the vast arena of Queen’s Hall turned out to be a disastrous failure. “Both my work and Koussevitzky,” the conductor, were “victimized,” Stravinsky wrote some fifteen years later (94, 96). In June 1927 the composer himself conducted his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex and a gala performance of his ballets was given by Diaghilev (133). Had Virginia Woolf attended these performances, there would be some trace of them in her diary. Sources unknown to me might invalidate that hypothesis.
“Do you like folk music?” she asked Ethel Smyth, and her own answer to that question suggested that she was reluctant to see the benefits of the folk culture revival both in music and in literature: “To my thinking they’re the ruin of all modern music – just as Synge and Yeats ruined themselves with keening Celtic dirges” (L4: 406). In a letter written in 1934 she called a work by Ethel Smyth “cacophonous” (L5: 360). One may even suppose that the neoclassicism of Walton and Lambert might have made some impact on the work of Virginia Woolf in the 1930s, when she turned back to what she herself called “the representational form,” “fact recording,” “objective, realistic, in the manner of Jane Austen: carrying the story on all the time” (D4: 142, 147, 168). Lambert took a firm stand against both Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and Virginia Woolf repeatedly asked Ethel Smyth to let her publish an essay in which she discussed his music (L4: 214, 215, 226). The ballet Pomona, consisting of pastiches titled Prelude, Corante, Pastorale, Menuetto, Passacaglia, Rigadoon, Siciliana, and Marcia, was the work of an artist for whom “the true guardian of the music of the future” was Jean Sibelius, the Finnish composer “whose shadow strides across Walton’s First Symphony (1935)” (Wood 156). Lambert’s ballet was composed in 1927, but the performance Virginia Woolf attended was given in January 1933, when she was trying to finish Flush and was struggling with The Pargiters, the first version of The Years, works that she herself called “cuckoos in my nest” (D4: 143). One could add that the “new” compositions Stravinsky presented to the British public in the 1920s and 1930s, the ballets Apollon Musagète and Le Baiser de la Fée or the mélodrame Perséphone, works he conducted in London in 1927, 1929, and 1934, respectively, imitate earlier styles and confirm a neoclassical outlook the contemporary British public could accept without serious reservations. None had the originality of the works he composed in the 1910s. As he himself admitted, he tried a style and orchestration “by means of which the music could be appreciated at the first hearing” (Stravinsky 149).
Although Virginia Woolf missed the most outstanding operatic performances of the interwar period, she heard some celebrated instrumentalists: in 1919 she heard Alfred Cortot (1877–1962) perform, both as pianist and as chamber musician; in 1924 she became acquainted with Brahms’s Lieder in the interpretation of the great German mezzosoprano Elena Gerhardt (1883–1961) and heard the famous Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia (1888–1950). In 1932 she went to the Wigmore Hall concert of the Busch Quartet, who played Brahms, Dvořák, and Beethoven, and the following year she heard four concerts by the same ensemble (D1: 311; D2: 298, 320; D4: 78, 147) and listened to Jelly Arányi (1893–1966) (the artist to whom Ravel dedicated Tzigane, Bartók his two sonatas for violin and piano, Holst his Double Concerto, and Vaughan-Williams his “Concerto Accademico”), playing J. S. Bach in Westminster Abbey. In 1934, the first year of the Glyndebourne Festival, she also heard an afternoon concert conducted by Fritz Busch, and in 1939 she heard another recital by the Busch Quartet at the Wigmore Hall that included Schubert’s early Quartet in B flat major (D. 112), Mozart’s G minor Quintet (K. 516), and Beethoven’s Op. 131 in C sharp minor, the quartet that Wagner regarded as one of his main sources of inspiration, in which “das innerste Traumbild wird in einer lieblichsten Erinnerung wach” (Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften 97).
Virginia Woolf was often far from enthusiastic about, and indeed at times was quite critical of, the quality of the music she heard. In 1918 she disliked Mozart’s great Symphony in G minor (K. 550) as conducted by Julian Clifford (1877–1921), finding it slow and sentimental, “with a lugubrious stickiness,” and she disapproved of the “vulgarity” of Henry Wood’s rendering of works by J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, and Dvořák (D1: 142, 206). She found the theatrics of conductors – for example, the “grimaces, attenuations, dancings, swingings” of Sir Thomas Beecham – superfluous and disturbing (D4: 284). She