![\"Virginia_Woolf\"](\"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/04\/Virginia_Woolf-classical_music.jpg\")
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Many of Virginia Woolf\u2019s early reviewers noted parallels between her literary innovations and those of contemporary composers, such as Claude Debussy. Woolf\u2019s interest in music was overlooked after her death. However, 80 years on, we are now beginning to explore how her extraordinary experimental uses of narrative perspective, repetition and variation derive from her close study of particular musical works and specific musical forms.<\/p>\n
Music provided Woolf (and other modernists including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Katherine Mansfield) with a vocabulary to imagine and describe their creative practice and formal innovations. Woolf, for instance, compares her diary writing to a pianist practising their scales. She describes her reading as a process of \u201ctuning up\u201d for her writing. And in 1940 she famously observed:<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s odd, for I\u2019m not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Woolf grew up immersed in classical music. As a young woman, she attended operas and concerts at the Royal Opera House three or four times a week \u2014 sometimes, every night. Like most women of her age and social class, she had received basic music education in singing and piano. But her passion as a listener far outstripped her abilities as a performer.<\/p>\n
Her letters and diaries repeatedly convey her love of classical repertoire \u2014 particularly the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. But she heard a wide variety of music in varied settings. She heard folk music as she travelled in England, Scotland and continental Europe. Took in comic and patriotic songs in music halls. Delighted in the work of Arnold Schoenberg and another avant-garde repertoire through her subscription membership of the National Gramophonic Society, and Russian ballet music when the Ballets Russes visited London in 1912.<\/p>\n
Woolf\u2019s Hogarth Press also published studies of contemporary music, composers and popular books of music appreciation. Her understanding of \u2014 and in some cases intimate friendships with \u2014 leading composers, music critics, conductors and other musicians of her time gave her an insight into professional musical life, too. Friends included the composers and critics Eddy Sackville-West and Gerald Berners, the conductor and educator Nadia Boulanger, and the composer and feminist Ethel Smyth.<\/p>\n
Woolf\u2019s feminism, pacificism and cosmopolitanism were significantly shaped by her enduring, passionate love of music. The social conventions surrounding music education, performance and composition catalyse some of her wittiest and most acerbic social comedy but also inform her critiques of, for example, women\u2019s unequal access to music education.<\/p>\n
In her first novel, The Voyage Out<\/em> (1915), Woolf references specific musical works to challenge the established expectation that men and women should play different repertoire. The novel\u2019s female protagonist, who is an accomplished amateur pianist, plays Beethoven\u2019s late piano sonatas. These works were frequently characterised as too technically and intellectually demanding for women performers. Essays addressed to amateur female pianists characterised the works as \u201csimply unattainable\u201d.<\/p>\n