Virginia Woolf and Music. Adriana L. Varga
about the influence of music on Woolf’s works – most notably, Mark Hussey in The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (1986); Jane Marcus in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (1987); and Patricia Laurence in The Reading of Silence (1991) – and over the past fifteen years a few well-regarded essays treating aspects of the topic have appeared, some authored by scholars who are also contributors to this volume.22 Prior to 1980 one finds only very few essays that touch on the subject of Woolf and music, usually more oriented toward narrative method and isolated textual readings than researched considerations of the role music played in the intellectual and cultural milieu of the Bloomsbury Group in general and in Woolf’s development in particular. Surprisingly, until now no collection of essays has focused primarily on the relationship between music, language, and the other arts in Virginia Woolf’s writings. Virginia Woolf and Music fills this gap by focusing on how Woolf’s use of music led to her breaking with traditional forms of representation in her novels at various stages of her aesthetic development and by exploring the inter-arts and interdisciplinary aspects of her modernist fictional experimentation. The essays gathered here examine various aspects of Virginia Woolf’s musical culture as well as the rich and deeply musical nature of her works from several different perspectives:
1. Contextual – the importance of music in the Bloomsbury milieu and its role within the larger framework of modernism and early twentieth-century culture (Lloyd; Szegedy-Maszák; Haller; Bahun);
2. Biographical – Woolf’s involvement with music as a listener and concertgoer, her musical knowledge and aesthetics (Szegedy-Maszák; Varga; Manhire; Clements);
3. Comparative – Woolf’s own use of music as metaphor, motif, or trope in her writing as well as connections between classical, modernist, and contemporary music and Woolf’s fictional and critical writings (Stewart; Manhire; Sutton; Clements; Thompson; Bahun; Hillman and Crisp).
The introductory section of the volume examines the importance of music for Cambridge and Bloomsbury intellectuals from G. E. Moore to Roger Fry, thus offering a setting in which Virginia Woolf’s own musical culture can be discussed. In the opening essay Rosemary Lloyd explains that even though for many of Woolf’s contemporaries music may have taken a secondary place to the fine arts, especially under Fry’s influence, for some of them, most notably Woolf herself, music was a source of sensual delight and intellectual stimulation that informed their writing and aesthetic convictions.
Woolf’s interest in music was all the more enriched by her attendance of classical music concerts from an early age, by reading about music, and, later, by listening to music practically every day in her own home. Mihály Szegedy-Maszák’s essay focuses our attention on the important role music played in Woolf’s life and writings. Contrary to what critics have previously argued, Szegedy-Maszák sees continuity between Woolf’s early concert- and operagoing experiences, the interest she took in Wagner, and her later interest in the works of Beethoven, arguing that a major artist never forgets the inspiration of early, formative years.
The middle section of the volume includes essays that discuss aspects of the music-literature relationship in Virginia Woolf’s fiction, with a focus on the novel, showing that this can be done from a variety of angles and from sometimes diverging perspectives. In my own contribution, I trace transformations in the text-music relationship from The Voyage Out (1915) to The Waves (1931) and Between the Acts (1941) and discuss Woolf’s interest in exploring the interconnections of rhythm, sound, and language in these particular works. Woolf’s musical “voyage out” led to the highly experimental forms of her later fiction, in which she reconfigured the relationship between reader, text, and context; actor, audience, and performance.
Jim Stewart draws attention to Woolf’s early interest in drama, particularly to her keen awareness of singing Greek choruses, which she discussed in her essays, and which clearly influenced her first novel, The Voyage Out. Using Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as a cross-reference to Virginia Stephen’s intellectual practice, Stewart argues that between 1899 and 1905, Woolf’s musical sensibility and her insight of writing as a form of rhythm was influenced partly by the form of the Greek music-drama and partly by Wagnerian opera.
It is to the “worst of music” that Vanessa Manhire responds in her essay, in which she shows that Woolf does not attempt to reproduce musical form but, rather, to transpose indeterminacy of meaning into linguistic play. Looking at the novelist’s treatment of music in Night and Day (1919) and in the “The String Quartet,” Manhire explores Virginia Woolf’s use of music in order to problematize the relationship between the external world and the world of the mind. She explains that Woolf used music as a model for representing interiority, and suggests that Woolf’s development of stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques owes much to her thinking about the effects of playing and listening to music – a shared social experience, but one that simultaneously allows for the individual movement of imagination.
Emma Sutton also discusses Richard Wagner’s influence on Woolf, and explores the ways in which Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is informed by Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (1843). Sutton’s approach to the topic relies on the double perspective of discussing Mrs. Dalloway’s intertextuality with Wagner’s Romantic opera and of considering the role and representation of Jewish religious practice – particularly the Jewish mourning practice of shivah – amplifying, in this way, Woolf’s critique of the Wagnerian intertext. Sutton considers Woolf as expressing in her fiction both indebtedness and resistance to the Wagnerian operatic model of tragedy.
The Years (1937), Elicia Clements argues, is Woolf’s most overtly political novel, and at the same time, it “turns up the volume” by foregrounding aurality in new and ubiquitous ways. In her essay Clements explains that the two foci – political and musical – converge in both the novel’s subject matter and methods. One of the reasons Woolf values music as an art form is that it is performative by its very nature. As with theater, it traverses a continuum between efficacy (or effective acts that produce change, as in ritual) and entertainment (symbolic gestures for an aesthetic purpose).
Opera is again a subject of discourse in Trina Thompson’s essay, this time in reference to Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts. Thompson argues that the structural poetics of Woolf’s novel and the emergence of opera share a parallel genetic evolution: in cinquecento Italy, musical entertainments were performed during the intermissions of the primary theatrical piece. Composers of these interludes believed that the social and moral power of the ancients was a function of musical drama – verbal utterance soldered to music’s dynamic force. Opera was created as a genre between the acts, and, likewise, the conflicted societal collective of Pointz Hall finds its voice between historical moments. Through this prism, Between the Acts can be interpreted as an “experiment with historically infused genres,” recapitulating Woolf’s engagement with the past and her explorations of alternatives to traditional historiography.
The last section of the volume is concerned with exploring inter-art connections between Virginia Woolf’s fiction and twentieth-century music, the visual arts, and film. Sanja Bahun begins this section with an appraisal of Woolf’s knowledge of and involvement with modernist music and explains how Woolf’s writing changed substantially in terms of expression and mood after reaching its most resonant pitches with The Waves and The Years – a shift in representation that parallels contemporary developments in modern classical music. By focusing on Woolf’s Between the Acts as a unique formal articulation of its moment of production, Bahun highlights the cross-sections between sociohistorical content, philosophic and artistic practice in compositions by Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and Woolf’s fiction. Woolf’s last novel becomes a study in the emancipation of sound similar to that carried out in “ultramodern” music.
Evelyn Haller begins her contribution to this volume by citing connections among aspects of art – specifically sound in music as well as language, sculpture and painting, and movement as further epitomized by dance. What have the rambunctious Italian Futurists or the shorter-lived English Vorticists to do with Virginia Woolf or Bloomsbury? Reviewing criticism that both affirms and denies Woolf’s associations with Vorticism,