Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
54).
With the rise of the recording industry, the Woolfs more often listened to music at home instead of going to concerts. A reference to Artur Schnabel’s Beethoven recitals in a letter written on November 8, 1932, may suggest that the risk of fainting in the heat, heart troubles, and an intermittent pulse may have prevented Virginia from attending concerts (L5: 122). Her diary and correspondence such as the following may give one some idea of their daily routine: “Home to music”; “And soon the bell will ring, and we shall dine & then we shall have some music [ . . . ]”; “delightful as this letter is, I must go and put my pie in the oven [ . . . ]. Then we turn on the loud speaker – Bach tonight”; “Black clouds while we played Brahms”; “Bach at night”; “we’ll play bowls; then I shall read Sévigné; then have grilled ham and mushrooms for dinner; then Mozart” (D3: 108, 247; L5: 88; D4: 107, 241, 336; L6: 286).
Although the world premiere of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces (op. 16) in London on September 3, 1912, met with an “extremely hostile reception” (Heckert 49), the works of this composer had numerous performances in the British capital, and from November 1923 they were often broadcast (Doctor 337–51), his name does not appear in the published diaries, letters, or biographies of Virginia Woolf. Between 1929 and 1936 Anton von Webern conducted nine concerts for the BBC. According to a booklet designed and edited by Lewis Foreman for Continuum Records (Webern Conducts Berg: Violin Concerto, Continuum Testament, SBT 1004), the programs included works by J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Johann Strauss Jr., Bruckner, Wolf, Mahler, Krenek, Milhaud, as well as by the three major composers of the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg). There is reason to believe that the London audience appreciated Berg’s works more than the music of Schoenberg and Webern. Before the memorial concert for Berg conducted by Webern on May 1, 1936, a concert performance of Wozzeck was held on March 14, 1934. Among the large number of Virginia Woolf’s diary entries about music heard on the radio, there is not a single one referring to any of these concerts.
In the acutely troubled period of the late 1930s, under the influence of preparations for war and her husband’s growing involvement in the activity of the Labour Party, Virginia came to view music as “our one resource against politics” (L6: 19). Even during the air raids they used their gramophone in the evenings, as the last words of the diary entry of October 22, 1940, suggest: “reading, music, bed” (D5: 333).
Since the catalog of the records the Woolfs owned is now archived with the papers of Leonard Woolf at the University of Sussex, and in some cases he noted the dates on which they listened to certain recordings, it seems possible to have some hypothesis concerning the core of their repertoire. In the 1930s they listened mainly to HMV recordings of works by J. S. Bach as performed by Edwin Fischer and Alfred Cortot; Beethoven string quartets played by the Busch, Capet, and Léner quartets; Artur Schnabel’s, Adolf Busch’s, and Fritz Kreisler’s interpretations of Beethoven sonatas; the Pro Arte Quartet’s Haydn series; and Mozart’s violin sonatas played by Szymon Goldberg and Lily Kraus. The catalog also includes Debussy’s Violin Sonata and some compositions by Richard Strauss, Ravel, and de Falla, but it is not possible to determine whether these recordings were acquired before 1941. The only major twentieth-century work that Leonard Woolf mentions and includes a date on which they listened to it (April 10, 1935) is Bartók’s First String Quartet (op. 7), composed in 1908–1909.
Under the influence of such recordings, Virginia’s working method changed gradually. “I do a little work on it in the evening when the gramophone is playing late Beethoven sonatas.” “It occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet that I would merge all the interjected passages into Bernard’s final speech.” Such statements may suggest that listening to music may have helped her in the writing of The Waves (D3: 139, 339). Whatever the case, it is certainly true that in the final decades of her life she regarded the string quartets of Beethoven as masterpieces comparable to the greatest works by Shakespeare. “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world,” she wrote at the end of her life (MB 84).
Though I would by no means deny the inspiration drawn from music in her works composed from the mid-1920s, I nonetheless would be somewhat reluctant to accept E. M. Forster’s claim that To the Lighthouse is “a novel in sonata form” (381), the assumption that Virginia Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry has a “sonata structure” (Jacobs 199, 253), or even the suggestion that “the conception of the long-lived Orlando” was inspired by The Rite of Spring (Haller 226). One of the numerous articles attempting to link her work to music suggests that more caution might be needed. At the outset of his essay, Gerald Levin asserted that in The Waves Virginia Woolf achieved “contrapunctal style,” but later he himself pointed out the fundamental weakness in this argument by stating that “voices in the novel cannot be heard simultaneously” (165, 166). The monologues of the six characters can be read only consecutively, so the comparison with a fugue would be a little presumptuous. Some of those who insist that her later works can be explained with the help of the thesis that Wagner’s influence had been replaced by that of Beethoven have tried to find British sources for Virginia Woolf’s interest in the late string quartets of the earlier master. They may not realize that such works as, for instance, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (1927), by the mathematician J. W. Sullivan (1886–1937), may have been inspired by Wagner’s longest essay on Beethoven (1870), a much more professional discussion of these works that contains a profound analysis of the C sharp minor Quartet (op. 131).
“I am writing The Waves to a rhythm not to a plot,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary (D3: 316). In a letter to Ethel Smyth she even revealed her awareness that such an approach to writing represented a radical departure from the generic conventions of the novel: “my difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot. Does this convey anything? And thus though the rhythmical is more natural to me than the narrative, it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction” (L4: 204). While working on Between the Acts (provisionally titled Pointz Hall), she observed “that it is the rhythm of a book that, by running in the head, winds one into a ball: and so jades one. The rhythm of PH. (the last chapter) became so obsessive that I heard it, perhaps used it, in every sentence I spoke” (D5: 339). In 1930, in a letter to Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf remarked with regret that there were no “accents to convey tone of voice” (L4: 225–26), and in an essay published in 1936, she insisted that “the prose writer, although he pretends to walk soberly in obedience to the voice of reason, nevertheless excites us by perpetual changes of rhythm” (L6: 418). Louie Everest, the “cook-general” at Monks House noted that when Virginia was having her bath, one could hear her talking to herself. “On and on she went, talk, talk, talk [ . . . ]. When Mr Woolf saw that I looked startled he told me that Mrs Woolf always said the sentences out loud that she had written during the night. She needed to know if they sounded right and the bath was a good, resonant place for trying them out” (Noble 189).
Undoubtedly, tone, voice, and the disposition of forms play a major role in To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts, but it would be an exaggeration to link them to specific musical genres or structures. Tentative explanations might be attempted in more general terms. Since the stylization of The Waves has characteristics usually associated with verse rhythm, it is possible to argue that we can “hear the difference between the characters rather than visualise them” (Caughie 345). Lily Briscoe is driven by “some rhythm which was dictated to her,” but this rhythm is at least as spatial as musical, echoing Roger Fry’s thesis that “rhythm is the fundamental and vital quality of painting, as of all the arts” (Reed 102). In her painting Virginia “attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related” (TL 184, 182).
Contrary to what some may believe, a major artist never forgets the inspirations of her early years. In the case of Virginia Woolf, it is an exaggeration to believe that there was a rift between her early experiences of Wagner’s stage works and her later interest in the works of Beethoven. In Jacob’s Room a character thinks that Brangäne is “a trifle hoarse” in a performance of Tristan und