Virginia Woolf and Classical Music
Politics, Aesthetics, Form
Explores the formative influence of classical music on Woolf's writing
- Analysis of music, national identity and war in The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway
- Close reading of Wagner’s influence on the plot and narrative techniques of The Voyage Out
- Analysis of music and philo- and anti-Semitism in The Years
- Innovative reading of the ‘fugal’ structure of Mrs Dalloway
- Listen to an interview with Emma Sutton on ABC's RN
In this unique study Emma Sutton discusses all of Woolf’s novels as well as selected essays and short fiction, offering detailed commentaries on Woolf’s numerous allusions to classical repertoire and to composers including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Sutton explores Woolf’s interest in the contested relationship between politics and music, placing her work in a matrix of ideas about music and national identity, class, anti-Semitism, pacifism, sexuality and gender. The study also considers the formal influence of music – from fugue to Romantic opera – on Woolf’s prose and narrative techniques. The analysis of music’s role in Woolf’s aesthetics and fiction is contextualized in accounts of her musical education, activities as a listener, and friendships with musicians; and the study outlines the relationship between her ‘musicalized’ work and that of contemporaries including Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Mansfield and Eliot.
List of Abbreviations and Editions Used in the Text
Introduction
1. On Not Writing Opera
2. Killing the Pianist in the House
3. Death in Effigy
4. Fugues, Flights & Free Association
5. What it Really Means to be English
6. Only Suggest
Bibliography
Index.
Persuasive and engrossing from the outset, this much needed, wide-ranging and authoritative work is a substantial contribution to Woolf studies. Invited to attend afresh to her writings, we close Sutton’s book retuned to Woolf’s complexities and reawakened to her meanings.
Sutton’s readings of Woolf’s writing are fresh and mature, full of new insights and precise contextualization, and capture the pitch of Woolf’s writing just right.
This fascinating and learned study opens up quite new paths for exploring Virginia Woolf’s writing. It also gives a vivid portrait of musical life in the earlier twentieth century and the arguments around nationalism and gender. Dr. Sutton demonstrates the presence of Wagner and of Beethoven in Woolf’s formal experiments.
...should be acquired as a matter of priority by any academic library wanting to keep its collection of Woolf scholarship up to date.
Sutton’s listening is both attentive and inventive, and brings a new sophistication and subtlety to our understanding of musical–literary relations in modernism.
