and so on …

In 1940, Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘I think of all my books as music before I write them’.
But which music is which book? And why did she come to both love and hate Wagner with such passion?

Virginia Woolf’s musical expertise has been dismissed over the years. Both her nephew Quentin Bell, and her husband, Leonard Woolf claimed she had no technical knowledge. But, Virginia Woolf was sight reading Beethoven sonatas at the age of eleven, and playing fugues with her sister, Vanessa, at the age of seventeen. This, in addition to listening to music every day, either on the wireless, the gramophone or at a concert. Music was such a huge part of her life that she wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘The only thing in this world is music—music and books and one or two pictures’.

Using Leonard Woolf’s Diary of Music Listened To, author Emma Sutton is able to attach specific pieces of music to specific novels. She finds a strong connection between Woolf and Wagner. For instance, Virginia Woolf’s most experimental novel, The Waves, can be read as a response to Richard Wagner’s epic opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung. Added to this The Voyage Out, one of Virginia Woolf’s early works, features characters and themes from Tristan and Isolde. But what could Virginia do when Wagner became the composer of choice for the Nazi party?

For both Leonard and Virginia Woolf it was a time of great catastrophe—but it was also an era which produced this encounter between some of the twentieth century’s greatest writing and the most well known music in the Western canon.

To listen to the program, click here …

First broadcast on Into The Music, ABC RN, on 22-2-2014

Guests

Dr Emma Sutton—Senior Lecturer English – University of St Andrews

Professor Sarah Wilson—Deputy Head, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences – Melbourne University

Karen Watson—Senior Archive Assistant – The Keep: University of Sussex

© 2014—Lyn Gallacher & ABC RN