Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
to rhythm that makes it possible to quote the words she used when she assessed the style of Congreve: “The more slowly we read [her] and the more carefully, the more meaning we find, the more beauty we discover” (E6: 120).
NOTES
1. Spalding, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life (Norwich: Black Dog Books, 1999).
Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK OUR EDITORS AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY Press, especially Raina Polivka, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, and Jill R. Hughes, for the wonderful, energetic support they have given this project, and for seeing it come to fruition. In addition, I would like to thank Paula Durbin-Westby for her superior skill and expertise in compiling the volume’s index. I am also most grateful to Cornelia and Aurel Varga for their unfailing and generous support throughout the entire editing process of this work. My thankful remembrance also goes to Matei Calinescu, without whom I would not have turned my eye to Virginia Woolf in the first place.
Furthermore, I am indebted to two of the volume’s contributors in particular: I am grateful to Mihály Szegedy-Maszák for reading this volume, advising on its compilation, and, most of all, for his inspiring scholarship and lectures at Indiana University–Bloomington, in which he often spoke of modernism and the arts, of Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury, and music. One result of these lectures, in the late 1990s, was the realization that a collection of essays on this topic was both possible and necessary. His own dissertation, “Virginia Woolf, The Novelist: An Attempt at Appreciation,” can be found today in the Special Collections of the University of Sussex Library, the Monks House Papers, where Leonard Woolf, who must have thought highly of it, placed it alongside his own and Mrs. Woolf’s personal letters, photographs, and manuscripts. I would also like to offer my special thanks to Trina Thompson, who offered her steadfast encouragement by reading and advising on parts of the manuscript at various stages of the editing process, and by discussing with me music theory and word-music issues as the volume took shape. Many thanks as well to Melody Eotvos, Trina Thompson, and Deborah Crisp for assembling the music examples used in the volume.
I must also acknowledge the support I received from several scholars with whom I discussed aspects of the volume at different times. I am thankful to Susan Gubar for her strong encouragement of the project from the very beginning and throughout the editing process; to Mark Hussey for his most helpful editorial suggestions; to Robert Hatten for his enlightening lectures on Beethoven and music theory at the Jacobs School of Music; to Katherine Linehan and Michael Davis for their extremely helpful comments on the volume’s introduction; and to Susan Sellers and Laura Marcus for their illuminating questions and comments on Woolf and music at the Woolf contemporaine / A Contemporary Woolf Colloque de la Société d’Etudes Woolfiennes, Université d’Aix-Marseille I, Aix-en-Provence, September 2010. Finally, I am most thankful to Nazareth Pantaloni, Assistant Director for Copyright and Administration at the William and Gayle Cook Music Library at the Jacobs School of Music; to the Lilly Library librarians at Indiana University, particularly to Rebecca C. Cape, who made available the publications of the Hogarth Press and other Bloomsbury manuscripts; as well as to the Special Collections librarians at the University of Sussex, who kindly helped me research the Monks House Papers, especially Leonard Woolf’s “Card Index of Gramophone Recordings” (June 2005).
Abbreviations
Chapters follow the Harcourt Annotated Editions of Virginia Woolf’s works unless otherwise noted in each chapter’s Works Cited.
| AROO | Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own |
| BA | Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918 |
| BP | Virginia Woolf, Books and Portraits |
| BTA | Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts |
| CR1 | Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader |
| CR2 | Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, Second Series |
| CSF | Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf |
| D1–5 | Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf |
| DAW | Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939 |
| E1–6 | Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf |
| HL | Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf |
| JNAM | Leonard Woolf, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939–1969 |
| JR | Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room |
| L1–6 | Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf |
| LLW | Leonard Woolf, The Letters of Leonard Woolf |
| LWA1,2 | Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography |
| MB | Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being |
| MD | Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway |
| MELYM | Virginia Woolf, Melymbrosia: An Early Version of the Voyage Out |
| ND | Virginia Woolf, Night and Day |
| O | Virginia Woolf, Orlando |
| PA | Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909 |
| PH | Virginia Woolf, Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts |
| QB1, 2 | Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography |
| RF | Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography |
| S | Leonard Woolf, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years, 1880–1904 |
| TG | Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas |
| TL | Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse |
| VO | Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out |
| W | Virginia Woolf, The Waves |
| Y | Virginia Woolf, The Years |
Virginia Woolf & Music
Introduction
Adriana Varga
AS EARLY AS 1901, VIRGINIA WOOLF WAS WRITING TO HER COUSIN Emma Vaughan, “The only thing in this world is music – music and books and one or two pictures” (L1: 35). And as late as 1940, she was writing to her friend, the gifted violinist Elizabeth Trevelyan, about the structure of Roger Fry: A Biography:
Its odd, for I’m not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them. And especially with the life of Roger, – there was such a mass of detail that the only way I could hold it together was by abstracting it into themes. I did try to state them in the first chapter, and then to bring in developments and variations, and then to make them all heard together and end by bringing back the first theme in the last chapter. Just as you say, I am extraordinarily pleased that you felt this. No one else has I think. (L6: 425–26)
Such confessions may be surprising, coming from an author whose works are more often associated with the visual arts than with music. They point to the significant role music played in Woolf’s writing and aesthetics throughout her life. In her 1939 memoir “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf also described one of her first childhood memories at Talland House, St. Ives, as a “colour-and-sound” moment in which sound, rhythm, image, and scent were fully interconnected. Life itself seemed to have unfolded out of these synesthetic moments the child experienced, which the writer, later, at the height of her creative power, refrained from calling “pictures” because “sight was then so much mixed with sound that picture is not the right word” (“Sketch” 67). These autobiographical details reveal early, consciousness-shaping synesthetic experiences that formed some of the author’s most treasured memories.1 Despite numerous musical references and connections that enrich her fiction, essays, letters, and diaries, readers have most often focused on comparisons with the visual arts, often failing to “hear” Woolf’s novels – to use Jane Marcus’s insightful words – and ignoring Woolf’s “longing to imitate music with words, to build a structure to house the human longing for sublimity as Wagner had done,”