Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
“Waldweben” (“forest murmurs”) section of act 2 of Siegfried: “The loudspeaker is pouring forth Wagner from Paris. His rhythm destroys my rhythm [ . . . ]. All writing is nothing but putting words on the backs of rhythm” (L4: 303). In The Years, Siegfried is called Kitty’s “favorite opera” (Y 196). The suggestion that in this case act 1of the “Zweiter Tag” of Wagner’s tetralogy is used “to illustrate dictatorship and aggression” (HL 242) suggests that sometimes textual (and intermedial) evidence is being distorted to fit an ideological preconception. Although the reader of the Covent Garden scene of Virginia’s longest novel may not refute the argument that in presenting a performance the focus is on the audience rather than on the music, since observations “on the latter outnumber appreciations of music and performers” (Jacobs 241), in a more general sense music may have helped her realize that a “sense of rhythm,” a quality the significance of which she pointed out in her early essay “Street Music,” published in 1905 (E1: 30), was a sine qua non of prose writing. Insofar as Leslie Stephen, “one of the great pioneers of Victorian unbelief,” professed the “ideal of disengaged, instrumental reason,” music in general and Wagner’s Romantic “expressivism” (Taylor 402, 413) in particular may have helped Virginia Woolf in her protest against the scientific rationality of her father’s generation. The only possible conclusion is that it was at least partly thanks to the inspiration drawn from music that she was able to become a major artist.
WORKS CITED
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, 1972. Print.
Boulez, Pierre. Regards sur autrui (Points de repère, tome II). Textes réunis et présentés par Jean-Jacques Nattiez et Sophie Galaise. Paris: Bourgois, 2005. Print.
Caughie, Pamela L. “Virginia Woolf: Radio, Gramophone, Broadcasting.” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 332–47. Print.
Doctor, Jennifer. The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Print.
Donington, Robert. Wagner’s “Ring” and Its Symbols. 3rd ed. London: Faber, 1974. Print.
Forster, E. M. “Virginia Woolf.” Modern British Fiction. Ed. Mark Schorer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. 376–90. Print.
Genette, Gérard. Figures IV. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Print.
Grigoriev, S. L. The Diaghilev Ballet, 1909–1929. Trans. and ed. Vera Bowen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Print.
Haller, Evelyn. “Her Quill Drawn from the Firebird: Virginia Woolf and the Russian Dancers.” The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane F. Gillespie. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. 180–226. Print.
Heckert, Deborah. “Schoenberg, Roger Fry, and the Emergence of a Critical Language for the Reception of Musical Modernism in Britain, 1912–1914.” British Music and Modernism, 1885–1960. Ed. Matthew Riley. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. 49–66. Print.
Jacobs, Peter. “‘The Second Violin Tuning in the Ante-Room’: Virginia Woolf and Music.” The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane F. Gillespie. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. 227–60. Print.
Kelley, Joyce E. “Virginia Woolf and Music.” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 417–36. Print.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 1997. Print.
Levin, Gerald. “The Musical Style of The Waves.” Journal of Narrative Technique 13 (1983): 164–71. Print.
Messiaen, Olivier. “Ariane et BarbeBleue.” La Revue Musicale 132–36 (1936): 79–86. Print.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Mr. Carmichael and Lily Briscoe: The Rhythm of Creativity in To the Lighthouse.” Modernism Reconsidered. Ed. Robert Kiely. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. 167–89. Print.
Noble, Joan Russell, ed. Recollections of Virginia Woolf. London: Sphere, 1975. Print.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Ed. and intro. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print.
Reed, Christopher, ed. A Roger Fry Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print.
Richardson, Dorothy M. Pilgrimage. Intro. Walter Allen. New York: Popular Library, 1976. Print.
Stravinsky (I. F.). In Conversation with Robert Craft. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962. Print.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Print.
Thomas, Gareth. “Modernism, Diaghilev, and the Ballets Russes in London, 1911–1929.” British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960. Ed. Matthew Riley. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. 67–91. Print.
Wagner, Richard. Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen: Neunter Band. Herausgegeben von Wolfgang Golther. Berlin: Bong & Co., n.d. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works. Intro. Vyvyan Holland. London: Collins, 1984. Print.
Wood, Hugh. “English Contemporary Music.” European Music in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Howard Hartog. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. 145–70. Print.
Woolf, Leonard. An Autobiography: With an introduction by Quentin Bell. Vol. 1: 1880–1911. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Print.
———. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918. London: Hogarth, 1964. Print.
———. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939. London: Hogarth, 1967. Print.
———. The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939 to 1969. New York: Harcourt, 1975. Print.
———. “New Gramophone Records.” Nation and Athenaeum, May 18, 1929, 252. Print.
———. “New Gramophone Records.” Nation and Athenaeum, July 20, 1929, 543. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches. Ed. David Bradshaw. London: Hesperus, 2003.
———. A Chance of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3: 1923–1928. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. London: Hogarth, 1977. Print.
———. The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. 2nd ed. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989. Print.
———. The Diary. Vol. 1: 1915–1919. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Intro. Quentin Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Print.
———. The Diary. Vol. 2: 1920–24. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Print.
———. The Diary. Vol. 3: 1925–30. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Print.
———. The Diary. Vol. 4: 1931–35. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Print.
———. The Diary. Vol. 5: 1936–1941. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Print.
———. The Essays. Vol. 1: 1904–1912. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt, 1986. Print.
———. The Essays. Vol. 2: 1912–1918. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt, 1987. Print.
———. The Essays. Vol. 3: 1919–1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt, 1988. Print.
———. The