Conclusion

This chapter provides an overview of the main thrust of this book: how Beethovenian legend—there being no better example than the influential account of Beethoven as the archetypally suffering, Romantic composer, one whose ‘true’ origins in Beethoven’s day-to-day life seem always already hidden by the tales which have accumulated around him and his work—is a kind of encryption. This chapter accounts for the significance of that legendariness as it made its way through modernist literature in the early twentieth century, while also opening up the discussion, in conclusion, to look at the link between Beethovenian cultures and politics, and musico-literary analysis. It suggests that the importance of the book is that its argument gives us a means with which to demonstrate the existence of a hitherto-unacknowledged Beethovenian trajectory within modernist writing, and in so doing to describe its musico-literary operations in a markedly new way.

Articulate Masks

This chapter addresses the question of how modernist writers represented in literature the idea and phenomenologies of Beethoven masks and portrait busts. Many writers in the period referred to Beethovenian portrait busts and masks because they brought with them a ready-made set of allusive undertones. They knew that such objects are freighted with symbolic meanings and that mentioning them at key moments in a novel or poem allowed them to draw on an established history of social and cultural associations. Many of the writers who used the Beethovenian iconography in this way did so to help them comment satirically on the nature of bourgeois culture. Others did so to evaluate the nature of the Beethovenian iconography itself. Two works in particular appear to do both: the revised edition of Wyndham Lewis’s novel Tarr (1928) and Stephen Spender’s poem ‘Beethoven’s Death Mask’ (1930).

The Confines of Habit

The focus of this chapter is on how certain modernist writers, principally E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson, dramatized the Beethoven-focused experiences of piano-playing young women. Concentrating above all on Richardson’s Pilgrimage, the chapter suggests that the depictions of Beethoven’s music in Richardson’s ‘mega-novel’ represent an attempt to fly by the nets of a musicological tradition—the three-period model of dividing up Beethoven’s career—which had long since defined the terms of how that music is supposedly meant to be categorized and, in being categorized, valued. Whereas the emphasis in Forster’s and Woolf’s work is on what those not playing Beethoven’s music make of the player, the emphasis in Richardson’s is on what the player (and listener) makes of Beethoven. This shift indicates an attempt to get inside and therefore authorize the mind of the young woman pianist, to account for her experiences in a prose that substantiates her moments of being through extended sequences of musical impressions.

The Idea of the Heroic

This chapter re-investigates the influence of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century musicology on the representation of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). Concentrating on the idea of the musical heroic, the chapter suggests that Howards End affirms and investigates what was in 1910 a century-old interpretation of a piece whose ‘narrative’, according to E. T. A. Hoffmann, is concerned with ‘the pain of infinite yearning’. Howards End does not simply echo such rhetoric, which by 1910 had been thoroughly institutionalized. Rather, the novel highlights the fact of that very same process of institutionalization. It reveals the normalization of a subjective reading (the claim that this or that piece by Beethoven is heroic) as an inevitable truth (the view that this music is in some sense already constituted by the heroic prior to being interpreted as such).

Introduction

This introductory chapter suggests that the customary critical focus on formal correspondences between literary and musical art works doesn’t help us grasp how the modernists knew that so many references to Beethoven’s life and music in and around 1900 were references to conventional ways of talking and writing about his life and music, references which had by that point long since become part of the cultural vernacular. It argues that once we allow for a modernist musicality in this sense, we open up the possibility of a new way of talking about the place of the Beethovenian in early twentieth-century literature—we make it feasible to see modernist writers not only as the inheritors of Beethovenian rebelliousness, but also as critics of the very rhetorical means with which the rebelliousness of Beethoven acquired legendary status.

The Politics of Value

This chapter discusses the music of Beethoven’s so-called ‘late’ period and its representation in the work of Aldous Huxley, among others. Beethoven’s music may or may not embody values over which the politics of authoritarianism arguably can never fully or finally triumph, but it is hard to see what that music can do, practically speaking, when faced with the violent realities of authoritarianism ‘on the ground’: vitriol, fists, weapons, bombs, and tanks. Huxley managed to bring these emphases into a distinctive dialogue with the idea of Beethovenian conventionality. This chapter considers how his most modernist novel, Point Counter Point (1928), affirms the value of Beethoven’s late music; questions the terms of the inter-war musicological consensus which did so much to put that music on a high-cultural pedestal; and uses the implied background of the Beethoven centenary celebrations to dispute the redemptive power of Beethovenolatry in an age of authoritarian entrenchment.

Eloquent Citations

This chapter examines the legends and stories associated with Beethoven’s so-called ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. Musico-modernist scholarship has not found much to do with the references to Beethoven’s music in E. M. Forster’s ‘A View without a Room’ (1958), a pseudo-epilogue to A Room with a View (1908); Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (1918); and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922). Each work, respectively, tells us something about how the terms of Beethovenian convention could enrich depictions of Anglo-German anxiety; bourgeois dullness; and the lure of associativity. In using convention as they do, these texts show how, even if only in passing, convention can prompt a certain kind of cleverness; how convention can channel abstract ideas of despair into articulate, eloquent form—and in channelling them, complicate them.