Social Reforms and Classical Music in British Literature and Culture from 1870 to 1945
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Music Made Meaningful: Social Reforms and Classical Music in British Literature and Culture from 1870 to 1945 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By David Henry Deutsch, M. A. Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2011 Dissertation Committee: Sebastian Knowles, Advisor David Adams Mark Conroy Copyright by David H. Deutsch 2011 Abstract This dissertation examines the importance of classical music portrayed in British literature as a means to indicate social worth, intellectual ability, and political identity. Most scholars of music and literature emphasize the abstract, avant-garde influence of quartets and fugues on novels and poetry, overlooking the broader cultural implications of music in Britain. This project demonstrates how, from the 1870s, authors such as Benjamin Jowett, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde used diverse appreciations of opera and instrumental music to make socio-economic and moral distinctions, as well as to portray political cohesion through communal pleasures. Turning to literature written after 1900, I show how modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf revised these late-Victorian themes and used an ability to understand classical music as a litmus test for determining a character‟s placement within intellectual hierarchies. To locate these literary concerns within their cultural context, I uncover how journalists depicted concerts in domestic and institutional settings to indicate the value of communities that could create and sustain an art increasingly recognized as nationally important. Having established the social significance of classical music, I detail how writers relied on musical proclivities to justify the value of alienated subcultures to the larger British populace. Arnold Bennett and Thomas Burke depict the allegedly uncultured lower-middle and working classes as engaged with operas and oratorios as a means to assert their respectability. Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and twentieth-century authors such ii as Beverley Nichols and A. T. Fitzroy did the same for homosexual characters. I argue that these depictions are historically accurate by investigating working-class memoirs, contemporary cultural critiques, as well as unpublished documents pertaining to music in lower-income schools and concert halls. Moving beyond class and sexuality, E. M. Forster and G. B. Shaw depicted British citizens as enjoying continental European classical music as a means to explore the relationships between Britain and Germany. They represent a series of authors who used German classical music as a means to create connections between the liberal and peaceful factions of British and German societies during two world wars. By examining concert programs and letters printed in popular newspapers, I argue that these literary themes were prevalent throughout British culture. This study proves that, rather than acting as an abstruse art, classical music was fundamental to definitions of social and national identities in literature. iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my mother and to Kirk. iv Acknowledgments Without my family, my mother, Kirk, my sister and brother, and Bella, writing this dissertation would have been a lonely and a dismal process. My grandparents taught me to love music and for that words cannot thank them. Regarding words, I would like to thank my dissertation director, Sebastian Knowles, and my committee, Mark Conroy and David Adams, for reading very long drafts that were full of them and for providing helpful comments and suggestions for further reading. I would also like to thank David Riede and Marlene Longenecker for reading and commenting on chapter drafts. Without the help of Andrew Cole, I would never have known how to write a graduate paper, much less a dissertation. In the graduate office, Kathleen Griffin knew the answers to all my questions and made the graduate experience much easier than it might have been. The Institute of Historical Research in London and the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State both provided research fellowships and travel grants and for this I am grateful. v Vita June 1999 .......................................................Chattahoochee High School 2003................................................................B.A. English, University of Georgia 2006................................................................M.A. English, University of Georgia 2006 to present ..............................................Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University Publications “Reconnecting Music to Howards End: Forster‟s Aesthetics of Inclusion.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 21.3 (2010): 1-24. Fields of Study Major Field: English vi Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v Vita ..................................................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1: Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Re-Imagining Music: Walter Pater and the Reformation of a Modern Musical Aesthetic ........................................................................................................................... 13 Chapter 3: Economies of Appreciation: Class, Culture, and Classical Music in Modernist Literature (Part One: A Modernist Fantasia) .................................................................... 92 Chapter 4: Economies of Appreciation: Class, Culture, and Classical Music in Modernist Literature (Part Two: The Music of the Working and Lower-Middle Classes) ............. 160 Chapter 5: A “curious music”: Music and the Positive Imagining of Homosexual Selves ......................................................................................................................................... 236 Chapter 6: “The International Spirit”: Classical Music and Wartime Reconciliations .. 327 Chapter 7: Epilogue: “Our privileged community”: The Commonwealth of Classical Music............................................................................................................................... 420 References ....................................................................................................................... 430 vii Chapter 1: Introduction When it comes to discussing classical music and its relation to life, early- twentieth-century British writers often appear to run into difficulties. One of these difficulties is not having nothing to say. If we scan the pantheon of canonical writers from this period (say 1900 to 1945) we will find in fact that they are downright voluble on the subject. T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf, to cite just three prominent examples, have quite a lot to say about music, and they say it often. Nor is their problem an interpretation of notes. They are not interested in the significance of a “D” or what happens aurally when it sounds with an “A,” at least not in their writing. Their chief problem appears, rather, to be a descent (or an ascent, depending upon your perspective) into an abstract metaphysics. When exploring the tripartite interchanges of music, literature, and life, writers often get bogged down in abstractions. In his “The Music of Poetry,” T. S. Eliot argued for a connection between music and the poetry of everyday language: “[t]he music of poetry … must be a music latent in the common speech of its time” (On Poetry 31). In discussing this temporally-grounded combination, however, he emphasizes the loss of a clearly defined semantic meaning. A musical poetry has something to do, he suggests, with “an allusiveness which is in the nature of words” and their diverse “secondary 1 meanings” (33). The diverse associations that words in common usage accumulate over time create a musically poetic diffusion of sense. In Four Quartets Eliot takes this principle of a musical-literary “allusiveness” to an extreme. In “Dry Salvages” he writes of a “music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all” (V 27-28). Here music has a profound significance. It is a significance linked to the accumulated meanings of human existence, for he goes on to suggest that “you are the music/ While the music lasts” (V 28-29). Music has an intimate relation to life, but Eliot is reluctant to say what precisely this relation is or to agree that it could ultimately be discerned at all. The more intensely one hears the diverse resonances of important music, the less one hears the comprehensive meaning of the music itself: this is a metaphysical musical paradox. Forster shows a similar eagerness to affirm, but a reluctance to specify the link between music and history. In Howards End (1910), Helen Schlegel tries to make sense of the relationship between music and her world by turning Beethoven‟s Fifth Symphony into a story of “heroes and goblins,” the former of which she connects to people like “President Roosevelt” (30, 31). Whatever Beethoven intended, Helen imagines a relatively