19c Journal2

Edwardian Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Music in E. M. Forster's A Room with a View Author(s): Michelle Fillion Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol.
25, No. 2-3 (Fall/Spring 2001-02), pp. 266-295 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2001.25.2-3.266 . Accessed: 20/10/2011 10:06
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19 TH CENTURY MUSIC
Edwardian Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Music in E. M. Forsters A Room with a View

MICHELLE FILLION
E. M. Forsters A Room with a View, published in 1908, is in many ways his most musical novel. Not only is it indebted to structural principles inspired by Richard Wagners music dramas, but its symbolic world also depends heavily on musical allusion. Its heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, is a pianist whose musical choicesBeethovens Sonata op. 111, pieces by Schumann and Mozart, transcriptions from Glucks Armide and Wagners Parsifal, and Lucy Ashtons song from Walter Scotts Bride of Lammermoor chart her decline into a fullblown Forsterian muddle. Forster was both a serious music-lover and an active amateur pia-
nist;1 he evidently selected this repertory with scrupulous attention to its signifying power and in response to his own tastes. On a broader level, however, the novel is a revealing document of musical reception in turn-of-the-century England, and this perspective, I shall argue, provides an essential key to understanding its structure and musical symbolism. Viewed in this light, A Room with a View emerges as a rare literary document of late Romantic and Edwardian musical tastes from a writer for whom music remained a lifelong creative tool. A number of literary scholars have commented ably on the internal workings of the
Unpublished materials from the Archive of Kings College, Cambridge, and the Henry Ransom Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin), as well as copyrighted excerpts from the Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster are cited with the kind permission of The Society of Authors as agent for the Provost and Scholars of Kings College, Cambridge.
Although Forster repeatedly denigrated his pianistic ability (it [grows] worse yearly, but never will I give [it] up, he wrote in 1939 in Not Listening to Music, Two Cheers for Democracy [A Harvest Book; San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1951], p. 130), he was a devoted if less than fully pro cient amateur who was able to make his way around the rst movements of Beethovens ops. 101, 109, and 111.
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19th-Century Music, XXV/23, pp. 26695. ISSN: 0148-2076. 2002 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.
novels musical content2 with the aim of demonstrating how it reveals Lucys unconscious thoughts and hidden motiveseven when she is lying to herself. The reciprocal relationship between Lucys musical choices and the wider aesthetic forces that inspired them has, however, received little attention.3 Numerous fresh insights on the novels structure, psychology, and meaning emerge when it is examined in this broader context. Essential to this pursuit is the large body of recent musicological literature on nineteenth-century musical aesthetics, reception history, and interpretation, especially surrounding Beethovens instrumental music and Wagnerian music drama. Lucys music insinuates into the novel a secret song not unlike Friedrich Schlegels leiser Ton, a covert poetic message perceptible only to the reader attuned to its presence.4
J. B. Beer, The Achievement of E. M. Forster (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), pp. 5566; William Blissett, Wagnerian Fiction in English, Criticism 5 (1963), 23960, esp. 25860; John Lucas, Wagner and Forster: Parsifal and A Room with a View, English Literary History 33 (1966), rpt. in E. M. Forster: Critical Assessments, ed. J. H. Stape, vol. III, The Modern Critical Response (Mount eld, East Sussex: Helm Information, 1997), p. 162; Zohreh T. Sullivan, Forsters Symbolism: A Room with a View, Fourth Chapter, Journal of Narrative Technique 6 (1976), rpt. in Stape, Critical Assessments, III, 183; John Louis DiGaetani, Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978), pp. 90108; Frederick P. W. McDowell, E. M. Forster (rev. edn. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), pp. 2223; Nicola Beauman, E. M. Forster: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), pp. 20607. Others seem to regard music as little more than an incidental adornment to plot and character, such as: James McConkey, The Novels of E. M. Forster (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957); Frederick C. Crews, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 89; Stephen K. Land, Challenge and Conventionality in the Fiction of E. M. Forster, AMS Studies in Modern Literature, 19 (New York: AMS Press, 1990), pp. 11617. 3 An exception is Lucas, Wagner and Forster: Parsifal and A Room with a View. Although I shall disagree with his overall premise, Lucas ably discusses the Parsifal scene in the context of English Wagnerism. 4 Forster received a strong training in Romantic literary theory and German idealism as an undergraduate at Kings College, Cambridge (18971901), where he was a member of the Apostles, an elite literary society with pronounced idealist leanings; see Wilfred Stone, The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), p. 48; and Peter E. Firchow, Germany and Germanic Mythology in Howards End, Comparative Literature 33 (1981), 5068 (here 5658). Moreover, as an active pianist and concertgoer, and a competent reader of German, Forster surely knew the Schlegel
2
The plot is familiar to a wide readership, especially following the 1986 feature lm produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory, with a sensitive and generally faithful screen adaptation by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.5 Nevertheless, a summary is in order. The novel recounts the emotional and sexual coming-ofage of a young upper-middle-class English woman, our pianist Lucy. If its tone vacillates between the ironic and the poetic, this split is an acknowledged feature of Forsters ctional style6 and an appropriate procedure in a novel that is about resolving the contradictions of life, whether they be rooms and views or something quite different, whose existence [Lucy] had not realized before.7 Part I is set in Florence, where she is traveling with her older maiden cousin, the prickly Charlotte Bartlett. At the Pension Bertolini they cross paths with Mr. Beebe, an English clergyman who has just been appointed to Lucys parish in Summer Street, but who had already heard her playing at a concert in her cousins church hall. Among the more unfortunate guests is a pair of freethinking Liberals, the outspoken Mr. Emerson and his brooding son George, who are ostracized as dif cult and ill-bred by the others, especially after they offer their rooms with a view to the viewless Lucy and Charlotte. Circumstances bring Lucy and the Emersons into repeated contact, with Lucy witnessing a murder in the Piazza Signoria and fainting into Georges arms. Her stay in Florence is interrupted by Georges impulsive kiss in a eld of
MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster
epigraph to Robert Schumanns Fantasie, op. 17: Durch alle Tne tnet / Im bunten Erdentraum / Ein leiser Ton gezogen / Fr den der heimlich lauschet. 5 For a discussion of some of the differences between novel and lm, see June Perry Levine, Two Rooms with a View: An Inquiry into Film Adaptation, Mosaic 22 (1989), 67 84, rpt. in E. M. Forster: Critical Assessments, ed. J. H. Stape, vol. IV, The Modern Critical Response, 194590, pp. 20221. 6 See esp. Rose Macaulay, The Writings of E. M. Forster (London: Hogarth Press, 1938), p. 8; and Jo M. Turk, The Evolution of E. M. Forsters Narrator, Studies in the Novel 5 (1973), rpt. in Stape, Critical Assessments, IV, 32223. 7 E. M. Forster, A Room with a View, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 24. All subsequent quotations from the novel will refer to this edition, which is based on the de nitive Abinger edition (1977), and will be cited in the text.
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violets over Fiesole. Charlotte separates them with dispatch and packs Lucy off to Rome; there they will meet up with Mrs. Vyse and her bookish son Cecil. Part II returns to England, where the characters reassemble at the Honeychurch home of Windy Corner and are joined by Lucys sensible mother and Freddy, her high-spirited brother. Lucy has just accepted Cecils (third) proposal, to a muted response from her family and disappointment from Mr. Beebe, who had pegged him as a celibate like himself. Her repressed love for George Emerson is rekindled, however, by his unexpected move to the community and a second kiss in the garden. But by this point Lucy, in the grip of the medieval Cecil Vyse, is already marching in the armies of darkness (p. 200) and vehemently rejects Georges offer of love. The latters description of Cecil as a controlling aesthete who should know no one intimately, least of all a woman (p. 185) rings true enough, however, to persuade Lucy to end their engagement. At this point, hopelessly muddled, she lies to herself and everyone else, denying her true feelings for George while setting up a seemingly impenetrable barrier of travel plans and hurt feelings between them. With Charlottes unwitting help, however, Lucy is trapped into a surprise meeting with old Mr. Emerson, who forces her to acknowledge her love for his son and helps her see the whole of everything at once (p. 225). The End of the Middle Ages returns full circle to Florence and the Pension Bertolini, where Lucy and George are on their honeymoon. They have left almost everyone at home alienated from them, none more so than the curiously embittered Mr. Beebe. Forsters sole conventional happy ending in marriage and heterosexual ful llment caused him and his friends to doubt the artistry of this novel,8 and may
In May 1905, Forster had written in his manuscript Notebook Journal that artists now realize that marriage, the old full stop, is not an end at all, and that art is concerned with complete things; Life puts up with incompleted, & does notor should notapply the test of durability (MS Kings College, Cambridge, EMF XIV/5, fol. 21r). In his preface to A Room with a View, pp. 1417, Stallybrass summarizes the rst responses from Forsters circle. See also Barbara Rosecrance, Forsters Narrative Vision (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 83, 8890.
8
have motivated his ftieth-anniversary postscript to it, A View without a Room, an ironic update of the post-novel fate of its main characters.9 Without her music Lucy is a at character,10 a conventional and rather commonplace ingenue. It is no wonder that critics who discount the novels musical content also tend to dismiss her as a two-dimensional heroine,11 none more devastatingly than the early Observer reviewer: Lucy Honeychurch is an average specimen of her kindunoriginal, pretty and nice, with second-hand opinions and borrowed enthusiasms.12 Music rounds out her character, suggesting the depths that she spends a good deal of the novel concealing. Moreover, Forster placed the musical episodes at key points in the novel, where they serve as preludes to life-changing experiences for Lucy.13 Her brush with passion and death in the Piazza Signoria is framed by her Beethoven playing; the scene of Georges rst kiss is suffused with musical imagery; Schumann is associated with her inauspicious engagement to Cecil; Wagner and Gluck precede Georges second kiss and her decision to end the engagement; and Mozart marks her descent into sterile convention. Her courageous last-minute reversal of course realizes her heroic potential, and distant echoes of Beethovens last sonata accompany the newlyweds in Florence. For all its centrality, the musical component was a relatively late addition in the gestation of
The Observer (27 July 1958), 15, rpt. in Stallybrass, A Room with a View, pp. 23133. 10Forster elucidated his concept of at and round characters in chap. 4 of Aspects of the Novel (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1927), pp. 6778. 11 Crews, The Perils of Humanism, p. 83; see also Land, Challenge and Conventionality, p. 117, where music is reduced to Lucys escape valve. Conversely, the most insightful of the early reviews of the novel by C. F. G. Masterman (Nation, 28 November 1908) singles out her radiant youth and her music as Lucys most notable characteristics, and her bulwarks against the conventions of her upbringing (quoted in E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Gardner [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973], p. 113). 12 Unsigned review, Observer (8 November 1908), p. 4, quoted in Gardner, E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, p. 109. 13 Land (Challenge and Conventionality, p. 116) identi es three life changes signaled by music, but in actuality the placement is somewhat more complex.
9
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the novel. Begun in 190102, the earliest draft, now identi ed as Old Lucy, has her simply as an accompanist.14 It is set exclusively in Italy and revolves around a fund-raising concert for the English church in Florence, at which Lucy Beringer is to accompany the singing of a Mrs. Flint-Carew. It is the novels hero, variously identi ed as George Hemsley, Tancred, or Arthur, who is to play the solo at The Concert. He downgrades Lucys accompanying as a waste of time: I shouldnt say you liked sitting in the drawing room all most of the day and playing accompaniments to tenth rate songs.15 The New Lucy draft, begun in December 1903 and abandoned a year later to allow Forster to complete Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907), is set in England. Although the Emersons and a covertly homosexual16 Mr. Beebe make their appearance in this version, Lucy is nowhere identi ed as a musician. The musical symbolism entered the project when Forster again took up the novel as A Room with a View in June 1907,17 arguably a response to his exploration of leitmotivic structure and musical allusion in the two previous novels. It may have also supplied a needed impetus to complete this balky project. The reader of A Room with a View experiences Lucys music by way of her three male listeners, Mr. Beebe, Cecil Vyse, and the intrusive narrator, all of whom re ect Forsters sympathetic interest in his heroine and are to a great extent his spokesmen. Without their testimony, the reader would have no inkling of Lucys musical ability or the untapped heroic potential that it indicates; she seems hardly aware of it herself. Her family nds nothing extraordinary in her playing (p. 144). Freddy
leaves his biology specimens lying on her piano (p. 101) and kicks it vicariously at the news of her engagement to Cecil (p. 104). Mrs. Honeychurch disapproved of music, declaring that it always left her daughter peevish, unpractical and touchy (p. 61). For Charlotte it is a mark of Lucys capriciousness, prompting the acid remark in the wake of the failed engagement: Lucy can always play (p. 203). Mr. Emerson probably never hears her playing, and he has only her comment that it is a hobby, like Freddys stamp collecting, by which to judge her commitment (p. 48). Nor does music enter into her relationship with George, who hears only a few faltering measures of the Flower Maidens Song from Wagners Parsifal before she shuts the piano (p. 174). And when Lucy tries to explain the meaning of music to Mr. Beebe, she gets no further than Music before admitting defeat (p. 52). In times of confusion she tends to degrade it to the employment of a child (pp. 94, 175), or to deny its sensual hold (She liked music, but how much better tennis seemed. How much better to run about in comfortable clothes than to sit at the piano and feel girt under the arms [p. 175]). Forster, however, has made his Lucy an authentic musician and has shared this perception with his narrator. She and her music interested Forster a good deal and won for Lucy a unique place as the only woman among his favorite characters in his own ction.18 Her conservative tastes duplicated his own, with Wagner and Beethoven at the center of their musical constellation.19 Like Lucy, Forster played op. 111 with understanding if not aw-
E. M. Forster, The Lucy Novels: Early Sketches for A Room with a View, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, The Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster, vol. 3a (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 8. 15 Ibid., p. 45. 16 Forster decided to suppress the homoerotically suggestive midnight meeting of Mr. Beebe and George Emerson from New Lucy; see Stallybrass, The Lucy Novels, pp. 10612. 17 Stallybrass (preface to A Room with a View, pp. 78) summarizes the novels gestation.
14
Forster, in a letter of 19 October 1908 to E. J. Dent, describes Lucy, on which everything depends, as all right: she and Mr. Beebe have interested me a good deal (Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank, vol. I: 18791920 [London: Collins, 1983], p. 95). Fifty years later (May 1958) Forster would still speak of Lucy as the only one of his female characters for whom he cared; see E. M. Forster, Commonplace Book, ed. Philip Gardner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 204. 19 For a study of Forsters Beethoven reception, see my E. M. Forsters Beethoven, Beethoven Forum 9/2 (forthcoming).
18
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less accuracy,20 had attended Glucks Armide in London in 1906 and found it magni cent,21 knew Parsifal from concert excerpts or the piano-vocal arrangement published by Novello in 1902, 22 and had no great enthusiasm for Schumanns or Mozarts piano music. Through the descriptions of his narrator, Forster imbued Lucy with a musical idealism that resonated with his own. And like Forster she is a Wagnerist in her valorizing of creativity over the world of convention and commercialism.23 For her, music occupies a transcendent, wordless realm that has little to do with the world of manners and courtship:
It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never (p. 50).
and like Forster himself she struck no more right notes than was suitable for one of her age and situation, Lucy has the instincts of a serious pianist. Forsters understanding of the physicality of piano playing is palpable in her sensual contact with the keyboard: Like every true performer, she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were ngers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire (p. 51). Lucys admission that she liked her own playing best (Of course, I didnt mean that I played well) is the insight of an active musician (p. 52); it baf es her mother, but seems perfectly natural to the narrator and Mr. Beebe (who wonders why she bothered to explain). Too much Beethoven For Mr. Beebe and Cecil, Lucys piano playingespecially her Beethovenis an object of wistful admiration. Beethoven dominates the novels rst movement and provides the subject of the rst signi cant comment about Lucy by another character. Mr. Beebe, entering the Pension dining room, preferred to talk to Lucy, whose playing he remembered, rather than to Miss Bartlett, who probably remembered his sermons (p. 27). By elevating her playing over his own pastoral work, he reveals the rst seeds of a self-doubt that will help motivate his ominous fall from grace at the novels close.24 At the beginning of chapter 3 he reveals the details of a rst encounter while, from an unseen vantage point in the window-seat of the Pensions parlor, he listens to Lucy playing Beethoven. It seems that Lucy had had the audacity to play the rst movement of Beethovens Sonata in C Minor, op. 111, at a society musicale at which a piano arrangement of Adelaide or The Ruins of Athens would have been ex-
Although she was no dazzling excutante (her runs were not at all like strings of pearls),
According to his friend Charles Mauron, who describes his playing of op. 111 in Quelques traits de E. M. Forster, Le Figaro littraire (10 January 1959), rpt. E. M. Forster: Interviews and Recollections, ed. J. H. Stape (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 19395. Mauron tells us that he played op. 111 well, skipping freely from page to page, excusing himself when Beethoven goes a bit too much like the wind, but striking aright the gaiety, tenderness or heroism. He is completely at home in a musical world (pp.19394). 21 Letter to E. J. Dent, undated, cited by Stallybrass in the notes to A Room with a View, p. 252. 22 Tony Brown, E. M. Forsters Parsifal: A Reading of The Longest Journey, Journal of European Studies 12 (1982), rpt. in Stape, Critical Assessments, III, 93. 23 According to William Webers de nition of this term as a spontaneous, creative drive in opposition to the external world, which contradicts its process of becoming with the power of convention, authority, and mode (see his Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism, in David C. Large and William Weber, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984], p. 56).
20
Mr. Beebes nal betrayal of Lucys aspirations has perplexed many critics; Jeffrey Meyerss persuasive argument that Mr. Beebe is in love with George may help to explain his abandonment of the lovers (see Vacant Heart and Hand and Eye: The Homosexual Theme in A Room with a View, English Literature in Transition 13 [1970], 181 92). Stallybrasss 1977 edition of The New Lucy con rms the validity of his argument; see n. 14 above. Rosecrance (Forsters Narrative Vision, p. 87) re ects this revisionist interpretation.
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pected. It had disturbed . . . his composure. His careful delineation of the musics course reveals hisand Forstersacquaintance with the work, as is evident in the accompanying examples:
He was in suspense all through the introduction [Maestoso, mm. 116; see ex. 1], for not until the pace quickens [at Allegro con brio ed appassionato, ex. 1] does one know what the performer intends. With the roar of the opening theme [beginning m. 19 in ex. 1] he knew that things were going extraordinarily; in the chords that herald the conclusion [mm. 14649, ex. 2] he heard the hammer-strokes of victory. He was glad that she only played the rst movement, for he could have paid no attention to the winding intricacies of the measure of nine-sixteen [Arietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile] (p. 51).
The parish vicar echoes the conventional Victorian response to Beethovens late music in considering the choice of op. 111 unfortunate: Beethoven is usually so simple and direct in his appeal that it is sheer perversity to choose a thing like that, which, if anything, disturbs (p. 51). By contrast, Mr. Beebes enthusiastic stamping is a physical manifestation of the narrators admiration:25 [Lucy] was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play on the side of Victory. Victory of what and over whatthat is more than the words of daily life can tell us. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph (p. 50). Would Lucy have repeated the rst movement of op. 111 in Florence? Her repertoire was probably large enough to preclude repetition, to judge from Mr. Beebes later comment that he could no more predict Lucys next move than he could tell you what tune shell play next (p. 112). There is every indication, though, that her choice was heroic in character, for it
provokes Mr. Beebes heady challenge (If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very excitingboth for us and for her [p. 52]) and emboldens her to step out into Florence without a chaperone. Forster may have had in mind one of the handful of Beethoven sonatas that had been heroic icons since the nineteenth century, especially the Appassionata Sonata, op. 57, the Tempest, op. 31, no. 2, the Sonata Pathtique, op. 13, or the Waldstein, op. 53. For the Pension scene, the Merchant-Ivory lm made an astute choice in excerpts of the Introduzione and Rondo Allegretto moderato of the Waldstein, a work of no less technical dif culty than op. 111, but one more appropriate to an intimate setting on a rainy afternoon. Musical director Richard Robbinss selections virtually replicate the unfolding of Forsters description of op. 111. The scene opens with the stirring rising octaves that begin the nal transition to the rondo theme (m. 23), through which the listener is no less in suspense (especially during the soft cadential chords with their passing submediant coloration in mm. 2628) until the pace quickens with the attacca entry of the rondo theme. After a cut to another scene, Lucys performance resumes at the loud, triumphal chords of the closing measures (mm. 52943). One can imagine Forsters sly glee in having the Sonata op. 111, which he counted among Beethovens most profound works, share the stage of a country church variety show with the ladies and gentlemen of the parish, who sang, or recited, or imitated the drawing of a champagne-cork (p. 51).26 Mr. Beebe had expected the unidenti ed Beethoven listed in the program to be a popular salon piece favored by marriageable young women, such as a simpli ed piano arrangement of the Marcia alla turca from The Ruins of Athens, op. 113. Dance music, variations, songs, and arrangements these were the things for ladies. Adelaide, op. 46, a song to a sentimental text by Friedrich Matthisson, would presumably have also been
Scott Burnhams description of the power of Beethovens heroic style to enlist our identi cation, to make us experience its surging course as if it were our own . . . to express victory not just as Victory but as the listeners own victory . . . and yet also as Victory echoes Lucys response (see Beethoven Hero [Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1995], p. 24).
25
Forsters penchant for improbable programs would continue in Howards End, in which the famous concert scene at the Queens Hall in chap. 5 juxtaposes Beethovens Fifth Symphony with Brahmss Four Serious Songs and Elgars Pomp and Circumstance.
26
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Maestoso
cresc.
cresc.
dimin.
sempre
cresc.
12
16
Allegro con brio ed appassionato
cresc.
18
Example 1: Beethoven, Sonata in C Minor, op. 111, movt. I, mm. 122.

272
146
dimin.
151
155
dimin.
Example 2: Beethoven, Sonata in C Minor, op. 111, movt. I, mm. 14658.
a piano arrangement. Its gentle, owing rhythms, diatonic harmony, and lyrical Italianate melody make it a suitable feminine emblem, but its choice is curious (Fr Elise, the Minuet in G, or the opening movement of the Moonlight Sonata would have been more predictable). Forsters oddities often conceal hidden levels of meaning, and Adelaide, as we will see, anticipates several of the most important poetic images of the novels Italian segment. Too much Beethoven, Mr. Beebe chides (p. 59), already unable to rise to his heady prophecy when Lucy sets out alone. The bigness of the music had opened a larger world of truth to her, which was frustrated by the pettiness of the ensuing conversation. Immediately thereafter she is transformed by the tragedy in the Piazza Signoria. This episode has been interpreted as her sexual awakening, a symbolic de oration, and a rebirth.27 During Lucys ensuing conversation with George, at which he throws her blood-stained print of the Birth of
Venus into the Arno, the rivers roar suggested some unexpected melody to her ears (p. 66) and thus recalls to the reader the roaring victory of her op. 111.28 The episode concludes with Mr. Beebes refrain Too much Beethoven repeated on her return (p. 67), and Lucys awakening the next morning to an Arno like a lion (p. 68), a distant echo of its roaring melody of the previous night. Thus Beethoven frames this episode and emerges with increasing subtlety and in combination with water imagery as an important developing motif in the novel.29 Surprisingly, the far-reaching implications of Lucys choice of Beethovens last piano sonata have elicited virtually no comment in the Forster literature.30 This musical work situates her in an aesthetic, social, and philosophical
Stallybrass also draws this connection in his notes to A Room with a View, p. 243. 29 On the rhythmic association of water and music in the novel, see Crews, The Perils of Humanism, p. 89. 30 Nicola Beaumans recent biography was the rst to mention the signi cance of Forsters choice of this notoriously dif cult piece as an image for Lucys potential greatness (E. M. Forster: A Biography, p. 206).
28
27
Rosecrance, Forsters Narrative Vision, pp. 9092.
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nexus that had been gathering momentum throughout the nineteenth century. Forsters was the Romantic Beethoven, who was venerated as the very epitome of a musician.31 His Beethovenbild was the product of the critical tradition founded by Novalis, Wackenroder, and Friedrich and A. W. Schlegel at the turn of the nineteenth century, and solidi ed in the musical writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann and A. B. Marx.32 His was also the Wagnerian Beethoven, ltered through the lens of Wagners writings on Beethoven that had culminated in the 1870 centenary essay.33 Forster had probably encountered Wagners perspective by way of Edward Dannreuther, who translated Wagners Beethoven essay into English and interpreted Wagners music and ideas for an English audi-
In the words of Richard Wagner (Gesammelte Schriften, IX, 79), quoted in Klaus Krop nger, Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagners Reception of Beethoven, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 134. 32 Some of the most signi cant recent musicological literature on the primary and secondary sources for this critical tradition from the early Romantics through Wagner are: Ludwig van Beethoven: Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit: Gesammelte Konzertberichte und Rezensionen bis 1830, ed. Stefan Kunze (Laaber: Laaber, 1987); Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Review of Beethovens Fifth Symphony, in E. A. Hoffmanns Musical WritT. ings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 23451; Ulrich Schmitt, Revolution im Konzertsaal: Zur BeethovenRezeption im 19. Jahrhundert (Mainz: B. Schotts Shne, 1990); Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Krop nger, Wagner and Beethoven (1991); Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Zur Geschichte der Beethoven-Rezeption (rev. edn. Laaber: Laaber, 1994); William Kinderman, Wagners Beethoven, Beethoven Forum 3 (1994), 16779; Burnham, Beethoven Hero (1995); The Critical Reception of Beethovens Compositions by His German Contemporaries, ed. and trans. Wayne M. Senner, with Robin Wallace and William Meredith, vol. I (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Leon Botstein, The Search for Meaning in Beethoven: Popularity, Intimacy, and Politics in Historical Perspective, in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 33266; Scott Burnham, The Four Ages of Beethoven: Critical Reception and the Canonic Composer, in The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, ed. Glenn Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 27291. 33 On the in uence of Wagner and his essay Beethoven on composers and critics born after 1860, see Botstein, The Search for Meaning in Beethoven, pp. 33233.
31
ence.34 But Forster was no uncritical Wagnerite; he appears to have sifted through the latters philosophy of music for what was resonant with his own needs and inclinations. Forsters belief in the narrative power of music as the primal language of the soul35 rests rmly on this twin foundation of Beethoven and Wagner. If Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that instrumental music speaks a language, inarticulate but vivid, ardent, passionate, [that] has a hundred times more energy than speech itself,36 Romantic aesthetics would have Beethovens music speak a secret language of wild, primal emotions that stretch out into the in nite.37 In E. T. A. Hoffmanns famous formulation of 1810, Beethovens instrumental music reveals an unknown realm . . . a world in which [man] leaves behind all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible. (Lucy was in good company in her inability to de ne music in words.) Yet Hoffmann proceeds nonetheless to identify some of these ineffable states as awe, fear, terror, and pain, which awaken the in nite yearning which is the essence of romanticism.38 Wagner seems to have picked up on Hoffmanns lead in his 1870 Beethoven centenary essay, where he identi es Beethovens emotional range as a ghastly animation, alternately tender and terrifying, a pulsating vibration, jubilation, longing, alarm, lam-
Forster almost certainly knew George Groves article Ludwig van Beethoven, rev. J. S. Shedlock, in Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. J. A. Fuller Maitland (London: Macmillan, 1904), I, 21677. There he would have encountered extensive excerpts from Edward Dannreuthers Beethoven and His Works: A Study, Macmillans Magazine 34 (July 1876), 193209. Dannreuther had met Wagner at least once, when he attended the latters reading of the Parsifal poem in London on 17 May 1877, as reported in Richard Wagner, Smtliche Werke, vol. 30: Dokumente zur Entstehung und ersten Auffhrung des Bhnenweihfestspiels Parsifal, ed. Martin Geck and Egon Voss (Mainz: B. Schotts Shne, 1970), p. 23. Regarding Dannreuthers Wagnerian-inspired reception of Beethoven, see K. M. Knittel, Wagner, Deafness, and the Reception of Beethovens Late Style, Journal of the American Musicological Society 51 (1998), 7173. 35 Krop nger, Wagner and Beethoven, p. 50. 36 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur lorigine des langues, cited in Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, p. 67. 37 In the words of Richard Wagner, The Composer as Listener, cited in Krop nger, Wagner and Beethoven, p. 55. 38 Charlton, E. T. A. Hoffmann, review of Beethovens Fifth Symphony, pp. 23638.
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entation and rapture, which seem to set our innermost being in motion.39 Here was a daring emotional world that challenged the performer and listener to accompany Beethovens impetuous genius into regions which only he could attain.40 These were dangerous waters for any young woman. Unconsciously, perhaps, Lucy subscribed to this private, subversive world in playing Beethoven. It would have given her an idealized outlet for her frustrated yearning for freedom and other strange desires that Forsters narrator observes in the modern woman: She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and wara radiant crust, built around the central res, spinning towards the receding heavens (p. 60). Forster speaks eloquently about who Lucy is simply by associating her with Beethovens op. 111a work of instrumental music, a Sonata at that, and one without a programmatic subtitle. Although a staple of the concert recital in the twentieth century, the piano sonata was an essentially private genre during Beethovens lifetime, and remained an outlet for intimate rather than public expression well into the nineteenth century (the private counterpart of the public symphony).41 In spite of a renewed search, Glenn Stanley has located only one documented public performance of a Beethoven sonata during the composers lifetime.42 Moreover, throughout the century the Beethoven piano sonatas received only conditional acceptance on recital programs (even in London, where Sir Charles Hall [181995] was known for his Beethoven
and Schubert performances, Hans von Blow was criticized as late as 1878 for an all-Beethoven program).43 Only a handful of Beethoven sonatas were regularly performed in the nineteenth century, and all of them had poetic subtitles (the Pathtique, Moonlight, Waldstein, Appassionata, and Hammerklavier among them); the 1909 edition of Wilhelm von Lenzs Beethoven monograph identi es op. 111 as very rarely performed.44 Lucys choice of op. 111, therefore, a rarely played sonata lacking an audience-friendly poetic handle,45 would have been even more unexpected in a rural English setting in 1907 than it would seem today. As instrumental music, op. 111 gave Lucy access to a mans intellectual world. Friedrich Schlegels projection of instrumental music as sounding philosophy 46 nds its de nitive statement in Schopenhauers normative: music expresses in a very universal language the inner essence, the intrinsic nature [das An-sich] of the world.47 Beethoven was viewed by latenineteenth-century writers such as Edward Dannreuther as a philosopher in tones. Forster and many of his reading public would probably have read Dannreuthers description in the 1904 edition of Groves Dictionary: The warmth and depth of [Beethovens] ethical sentiment is now felt all the world over, and it will ere long be universally recognised that he has leavened and widened the sphere of mens emotions in a manner akin to that in which the conceptions of great philosophers and poets have widened
Jetzt eine geisterhafte Lebendigkeit, eine bald zartfhlige, bald erschreckende Regsamkeit, ein pulsierendes Schwingen, Freuen, Sehnen, Bangen, Klagen und Entzcktsein . . . , welches alles wiederum nur aus dem tiefsten Grunde unseres eigenen Inneren sich in Bewegung zu setzen scheint (quoted from Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften, IX, 87 by Eggebrecht, Beethoven-Rezeption, p. 77). 40 Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften I, 144, cited in Krop nger, Wagner and Beethoven, p. 52. 41 A. B. Marx had made this distinction in The Music of the Nineteenth Century, and Its Culture: System of Musical Instruction, trans. August Heinrich Wehrhan (London: Robert Cocks, 1855), p. 92. On the aesthetics of genre in Beethovens piano sonatas, see Glenn Stanley, Genre Aesthetics and Function: Beethovens Piano Sonatas in Their Cultural Context, Beethoven Forum 6 (1998), 129. 42 Stanley, Genre Aesthetics and Function, p. 2.
39
William S. Newman, The Sonata since Beethoven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 55, cited in Stanley, Genre Aesthetics and Function, p. 27. On Halls career, see Michael Kennedy, Sir Charles Hall, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (2nd edn. New York: Macmillan, 2001), X, 70405. 44 Wilhelm von Lenz, Beethoven et ses trois styles (2nd edn. Paris: G. Legouix, 1909), rpt. with a new foreword by Joseph Kerman (New York: Da Capo, 1980), p. 257: Cette sonate en ut mineur, quon nentend presque jamais, nest pas la moins belle. 45 On the social implications of the poetic subtitle in Beethoven reception, see Botstein, The Search for Meaning in Beethoven, p. 334. 46 Athenums-Fragment 444 (there is a certain tendency of all purely instrumental music toward philosophy), cited in Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, p. 166. 47 Cited in Krop nger, Wagner and Beethoven, pp. 13132.
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the sphere of mens intellectual activity. For Dannreuther, Beethovens late music adds the voice of the seer to that of the philosopher, who in unison with all genuine mystics and ethical teachers, . . . delivers a message of religious love and resignation, identi cation with the sufferings of all living creatures, deprecation of self, negation of personality, release from the world.48 The musical content and philosophical implications of Beethovens op. 111 thus mark Lucy as a woman of substance; no wonder Mr. Beebe was disappointed after the performance to nd that she was just an ordinary girl with a very pretty, pale, undeveloped face (p. 52). For this is not any Beethoven sonata; it is, in the words of Lenz, his testament,49 his last piano sonata, a work of great technical and musical dif culty by an aging musical philosopher notorious for the demands his music places on listener and performer alike. As a late Beethoven work it shares in the mystique of his other late instrumental music, especially the Ninth Symphony, the Groe Fuge, op. 133, and the String Quartet in C Minor, op. 131.50 It was written for a male dedicatee, the Archduke Rudolph of Austria, Beethovens patron, student, and insightful interpreter. It was the last of a line of C-minor works that had forged the myth of de ant opposition to fate that was central to the Beethoven hero.51 Considered by Lenz to be the sonata equivalent of that paradigm of heroic resistance, the Fifth Sym-
phony,52 op. 111 positions itself in relation to the rich tradition of Beethoven literature inspired by the heroic metaphor from E. A. T. Hoffmann to Wilfrid Mellers.53 For many musically literate readers in 1908, a Beethoven work in C minor would be redolent of storm and battle eld and all the trappings of epic resistance. Forster himself would echo this tradition in his 1941 essay The C Minor of that Life: This musician [Beethoven] excited by immensities is unique in the annals of any art. No one has ever been so thrilled by things so huge, for the vast masses of doom crush the rest of us before we can hope to measure them. Fate knocks at our door; but before the nal tap can sound, the imsy door ies into pieces, and we never learn the sublime rhythm of destruction.54 Lucys disturbing performance of this musical icon of triumphant heroism by this paragon of masculinity55 thus serves as both a projection of her unconscious desires and a political statement in the broadest sense. By the time of Forsters youth, Beethoven had been recast as the archetypal male composer, whose hypervirile persona had made him, in Lawrence Kramers words, one who feminizes others but who can never himself be feminized, . . . stern, unyielding, commanding, his name the name of the musical Father.56 Viewed in this light, it is no wonder that Mr. Beebe responds to Lucys performance with a vigorous round of stamping, but loses interest in her when she displays the conventional gendered behavior of a young woman of her class.57 Yet
Lenz, Beethoven et ses trois styles, p. 266. Mellers, Beethoven and the Voice of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), though dealing more overtly with inner, spiritual resistance, is a late addition to this critical vein. The history of the heroic metaphor is explored with brilliant thoroughness in Burnhams Beethoven Hero. 54 Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 125. 55 Sanna Pederson, Beethoven and Masculinity, in Beethoven and His World, pp. 31331. 56 Kramer is extrapolating from Robert Schumanns comparison of Beethoven and Schubert; see After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 45 (quote, p. 5). 57 He was, as the narrator hints guardedly, from rather profound reasons, somewhat chilly in his attitude towards the other sex, and preferred to be interested rather than enthralled (pp. 5354).
52 53
Grove, Ludwig van Beethoven, I, 267, 262. This second quotation would make Beethovens late voice an anticipation of Isolde by way of Schopenhauer (cf. in des Welt-Atems wehendem Al l, ertri nken, versin ken, unbewut . . . ). 49 Lenz, Beethoven et ses trois styles, p. 257. 50 Earlier in the century the Ninth Symphony had been portrayed as a dangerous incitement to madness, murder, and suicide in Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerls novella Das Musikfest oder die Beethovener (Braunschweig, 1841), summarized in Schmitt, Revolution im Konzertsaal, pp. 244 45. Forster had dif culty with the fugue of op. 131, which he found impossible to enjoy or understand . . so dispir. : ited and so dispiriting (unpublished letter to E. H. W. Meyerstein, 24 November 1944, University of Texas at Austin, Henry Ransom Humanities Research Center). 51 On the poetic and formal implications of the key of C minor to Beethoven, see Michael C. Tusa, Beethovens C-Minor Mood: Some Thoughts on the Structural Implications of Key Choice, Beethoven Forum 2 (1993), 127, esp. p. 24.
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Lucy yearns for more than the thrilling world of men and action. She has aspirations to the cosmic itself, to those transcendent realms over which Beethoven held sway in late-nineteenthcentury criticism and iconography. His music had come to represent an earnest and fundamental presence burdened with some great weight yet coursing forth ineluctably, moving the listener along as does the earth itself.58 Forsters contemporaries placed Beethovens last piano sonatas in a special relationship to this tradition: the 1904 Groves Dictionary article on Beethoven nds them perfectly distinct from any of the earlier ones . . . in a certain wistful yearning, a sort of sense of the invisible and vision of the in nite, mingled with their power.59 The music of the rst movement captures this Promethean tone in its technical and musical challenges. All early reviews of this sonata mention its dif culty; indeed, A. B. Marxs ctive reviewer in the Berliner Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1824) was unable to play it.60 Its range is large, with quick shifts across the span of the keyboard, often with hand-crossing (the ve-and-a-half-octave displacement at m. 115 is famous), and its spacious textures require of the pianist an erect posture with the chest open and exposed (see m. 116 and especially the closing mm. 15558). The chordal writing calls for a exible hand, one capable of spanning a minor tenth (mm. 9495), of accurately placing loud, disjunct, staccato block
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 65. Alessandra Comini (The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking [New York: Rizzoli, 1987]) has provided powerful images of Beethovens apotheosis by centurys end, none more so than Kaspar Clemens Zumbuschs Beethoven monument of 1880, with its more than passing debt to Michelangelos Moses; and Max Klingers Beethoven centerpiece for the 1902 Secession Exhibition in Vienna, which is an endstation in the Romantic transformation of Beethoven into a demi god of Zeus-like proportions and powers (Comini, p. 389). On the Zumbusch monument, see Comini, pp. 38586 and g. 141; for a thorough examination of Klingers contribution to the Beethoven exhibition, see Comini, pp. 388415. The entire exhibition, including Klimts Beethoven-frieze, is surveyed in Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna 18981918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, and Their Contemporaries (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 6777. 59 Grove, Ludwig van Beethoven, I, 261. 60 Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1 (1824), 95, in Kunze, Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit, p. 378.
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chords (mm. 8690), and of maintaining relaxation during fast, loud rotary patterns (such as mm. 13538). The transcendental demands of Beethovens late styleoctave chains, orchestral tremolos, large chords, and extended trills for the left handare intensi ed by the sonatas almost constant fugato texture, which combines these dif culties with convoluted sixteenthnote countermaterial that demands strength and athleticism in both hands. Then there are the surprises, such as the ve-against-two rising sequences in mm. 12732, in which the pianist must build momentum in spite of the irregular rhythm and shifting tempo. What is dif cult makes one sweat, as Beethoven wrote,61 and Lucy would have been hard-pressed to maintain her demeanor during her performance. The formidable musical demands of op. 111, however, pose the ultimate challenge to the performer. The 1823 review in the Berlin Zeitung fr Theater und Musik accurately identi es its ideal interpreters as denkende Spieler.62 Its rigorous contrapuntal density, rhythmic complexity, extended chromaticism, and outbursts of massive sound followed by silence, would seem predestined for the male performer to one of Forsters generation. This is evident in the Maestoso opening, the most elaborate slow introduction to any of Beethovens piano sonatas (see ex. 1, and its reduction in ex. 3). The opening gesture (ex. 1, mm. 12) is both a musical and a physical representation of daring in its dangerous doubledotted octaves played unassisted by the left hand alone.63 This off-tonic opening on a secondary diminished-seventh chord ( IVo7 or viio7/ V) gives rise to the harmonic problem of the rst movement. Resolving through a weak tonic to a dominant inversion in C minor (see ex. 3), it is succeeded by the two other possible diminished-seventh chords in the chromatic row
The Letters of Beethoven, ed. Emily Anderson (London: Macmillan, 1961; rpt. New York: Norton, 1985), letter no. 749, II, 661, cited in Stanley, Genre Aesthetics and Function, p. 14. 62 Review by J. P. S., Zeitung fr Theater und Musik 3 (1823), 9394, in Kunze, Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit, p. 377. 63 Pianists sometimes divide the opening gesture between the hands, opting for safety while diminishing its hairraising effect.
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I m. 1
II 3 4
III 5
c: vii 7
V6
f: vii 7
b : vii 7
Ie
II e
III
m.
10
11
vii 7 e :
6 5
It.6
Example 3: Beethoven, Sonata in C Minor, op. 111, movt. I, mm. 111 (reduction).
(on the downbeats [ ] of mm. 3 and 5; see ex. 3), both of which ful ll a similar harmonic function in tonicizing the keys of F minor and B minor. Together, these three chords (numbered I, II, and III respectively in ex. 3) comprise all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale and set up a eld of expanded tonalitywith a tendency to drift atwisethat will hold sway for much of the movement. Original as these materials may be, the process of their unfolding in the movement is unprecedented. Charles Rosens brilliant discussion of this movement succinctly situates its uniqueness in that it xes an order for these [three possible diminished-seventh] chords so rmly throughout a movement . . . , derives the principal melodic material so directly from their sonority, and makes such a consistent attempt to integrate the whole movement by their means.64 Beethoven uses these three chords repeatedly and in this order throughout the movement, either at their original pitch (o) or
Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 444. My discussion of this movement was nourished by Rosens account (pp. 44144).
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in enharmonic respellings (e), thereby maintaining their atwise tendency. We see the latter process at work in the third phrase beginning on B minor in m. 5. It is initiated by diminished chord IIIo, which had already been anticipated in m. 4. Here the performer is faced with the challenges of chromatic linear counterpoint in contrary motion leading atwise through E minor, and enhanced by signi cant rhythmic and metric complications (the structural chords in mm. 510 are placed on beat 2 [^ with further rhythmic obfuscation by per2], sistent double-dotting). The harmonic motion is driven by diminished chords Ie, IIe, and IIIo (see ex. 3). Once the home dominant is reached in m. 11, tension is further enhanced by the sforzando accents on off-beats, supporting penetrating dissonances (ex. 1, mm. 1114) and leading to contrapuntally derived pre-dominant clusters on beat 4 of mm. 12 and 14, which dismayed an early English reviewer as a crudity attributable to the composers deafness.65 As the low trill enters in a pianissimo that is
Harmonicon 1 (1823), 11213, in Kunze, Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit, p. 374.
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a. mm. 4950.
49
b. mm. 5556.
55
etc.
Example 4: Beethoven, Sonata in C Minor, op. 111, movt. I, reduction.
hard to control in this range (m. 16), it builds up volume and intensity through a tricky tempo shift at m. 17 that must have the effect of only a slight enhancement of pace. Here, as the opening theme emerges from the roaring trill, the narrator informs us that Lucys magni cent performance begins its excursion from tragedy to triumph. In Howards End Forster would de ne the essence of heroism as connecting the irreconcilablethe seen and unseen, the prose and the passion of lifeby means of the rainbow bridge of proportion.66 Beethoven and Margaret Schlegel are heroic there because they connect: Beethoven, in writing the Fifth Symphony, which has become a model of organic coherence and triumph over adversity; Margaret, for uniting her divided family at Howards End.67 To be triumphant, Lucys performance must therefore also connect across time the con icting tonal elements in the sonatas foundational idea. She would need to project the derivation
The reference to the Rainbow Bridge from Das Rheingold (Howards End [New York: Vintage, 1989], pp. 194, 20203) is both intentional and signi cant; this imaginative mediator is Forsters image for Coleridges synthetic and magical power that reconciles opposites. On the centrality of proportion in Forsters literary theory, see Crews, The Perils of Humanism, p. 93. 67 Howards End, p. 354.
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of the unisono main theme (ex. 1, mm. 2022) as a spinning-out of diminished-seventh chord II o . She would observe Beethovens poco ritenente at m. 34, lingering on the diminished chord Io that provides a harmonic ex before the long fugato expansion (mm. 3548), with its passage through diminished chords IIo (m. 36) and IIIo (m. 40). She would savor the extravagant range crossing in m. 49 (ex. 4a) on diminished chord IIe that tonicizes A and introduces the otherworldly secondary theme (m. 50); and she would emphatically rejoin this same diminished chord when it violently disrupts the ethereal parenthetical enclosure68 in m. 55 (ex. 4b). Her chromatic fugato in the development (mm. 7286) would retain a heroic grip on the motion through diminished harmonies Io (m. 77), IIo (m. 79), IIIo (m. 81), circling back to Io (m. 85), and this in spite of numerous physical and intellectual challenges. At the climactic dominant prolongation (mm. 8691), she would again highlight the renewed circling around the three chords at their original pitch, but would now emphasize their dominant function. She would nally demonstrate
I use this term in the sense introduced by William Kinderman, Beethoven (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 233, in relation to this passage.
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the triumphant resolution of the hammerstroke chords in mm. 14649 (see ex. 2), which Forster singled out for special comment. This arresting passage distills the diminished-seventh problem by juxtaposing the three diminished chords in their original order and pitch,69 loud, on weak beats, separated by silences, but placed now over a tonic pedal, and resolving through IV and iv to the movements ultimate goal of C major, which is reinforced by an extended plagal cadence with minor coloration. At last the tonic major prevails, unlike the fragile C major of the transcendent secondary theme in mm. 11618 of the recapitulation, which had succumbed to the diminished-seventh incursion in mm. 12223. If Lucys performance triumphed, if it followed through from the cradle to the grave and resolved in art what life can so rarely achieve, she would have had to retain intellectual control of the movements unfolding while allowing its ultimately transcendent goal to emerge and grow radiant in the spacious closing measures (ex. 2, mm. 15058). Of course, Lucy would have been no more aware of the technicalities of this analysis than Forster would have been when he played op. 111. But all Forsters writing on Beethoven, through his un nished Beethovens Piano Sonatas manuscript begun in 1939, shows that the coherent developm ental unfolding of themes and motives keenly interested himin music as in literaturewhere abstract forms (such as sonata form) emphatically did not.70 And Lucys musical instincts would have led her to emphasize these very details in crafting an interpretation that was a convincing depiction of triumph. But the closing measures of Lucys performance are not the end of op. 111. Nor are they a conventional ending at all, for the dominant defers to the subdominant (a nal nod to the movements subdominant drift); moreover, the nal cadence superimposes diminished chord IIo (viio7) over a tonic pedal and subdominantminor harmony, resolving directly to C major, again without use of the dominant. I have al-
ways been puzzled by Mr. Beebes relief at having been spared the Arietta movement, which for most listeners is the prize. This is surely more than a sly variation joke (parallel to Helens amusing daydreaming during the variation slow movement of Beethovens Fifth in Howards End) or a comment on the audiences attention span. There is a long hermeneutic tradition of Hegelian interpretation of op. 111s two-movement form as a synthesis of opposing forces, variously described as resistance and submission (Lenz), Samsara and Nirvana (Hans von Blow), worldly and otherworldly (Edwin Fischer), masculine and feminine principles (Alfred Brendel, with reference to Beethoven), becoming and being (Mellers), animation against repose (Brendel), Schreckensfanfare and contemplative vis ion (Kinderman).71 By playing the rst movement in isolation from the second, Lucy would have associated herself with a heady sampling of exclusively masculine metaphors, while avoiding the passive, contemplative, and essentially feminized world of the Arietta. As Sanna Pederson has concluded, the German tradition that valorizes Beethovens narrative of overcoming has a tradition of viewing woman as an unchanging, eternal essence, as the polar opposite of the dynamically striving and achieving man.72 Thus the rst movement of op. 111 is an emblem for Lucys yearning to escape the stranglehold of the ewig Weibliche and join the ranks of the modern woman. Yet there may be another implication, wider still, to which I shall return in my conclusion: Lucy was not yet ready for the Arietta. Vom lieblichen Zauberlicht um ossen Although water imagery prevails in the scene of Georges rst kiss in a sexually charged eld
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Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 444. As concluded in my E. M. Forsters Beethoven.
Paul Bekker, Beethoven (Berlin: Schuster & Loef er, 1911), p. 190; Alfred Brendel, Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts (London: Robson Books, 1990), p. 71; Mellers, The Voice of God, p. 264; William Kinderman, Klaviersonate c-Moll op. 111, in Beethoven: Interpretationen seiner Werke, ed. Albrecht Riethmller, Carl Dahlhaus, and Alexander L. Ringer, vol. 2 (Laaber: Laaber, 1994), p. 181; and Kinderman, Beethoven, p. 236. 72 Pederson, Beethoven and Masculinity, p. 326.
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of waving violets, distant echoes of music are not far behind. The violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue . . . this terrace was the wellhead, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth (p. 89). Lucy appears to the waiting George as one who had fallen out of heaven, descending from that empyrean to which Beethoven alone had previously granted her access with radiant joy in her face. The owers beat against her dress in blue waves (p. 89), as if she were some latter-day Venus rising from them. This scene also suggests an association with Beethoven by way of his song Adelaide, op. 46. The Matthisson text evokes many of the same pastoral images: the young man, wandering alone in the garden in springtime, gently bathed in the magical light (vom lieblichen Zaub erlicht um ossen) that trembles through the waving owery boughs (durch wankende Bltenzweige zittert); the sound of wind murmuring in the grasses, carrying with it the distant roar of the waves (Wellen rauschen); and his musings on the ower (a violet, perhaps) that will spring from his grave (Eine Blume der Asche meines Herzens), each of its purple petals bearing the name of his beloved (auf jedem Purpurblttchen). Adelaide is the unheard accompaniment to Forsters scene, poetically truer than Puccinis Chi il bel sogno di Doretta from La rondine that underscores the Merchant-Ivory lm adaptation. Lucys second taste of living as she plays leaves her again stricken with remorse, renouncing the beauty of the vision and with it the heroic model for which Beethoven was Forsters chief metaphor (Heroesgodsthe nonsense of schoolgirls [p. 93]).73 But if Beethoven is the source of Forsters images, Wagner is the chief inspiration for their motivic development. Of the many English writers who responded to the call of Wagnerism in the rst decades of the twentieth century, Forster was the earliest to exploit the notion of the Leitmotiv as a structural device in the novel.74 The process whereby
Forsters web of Beethoven-related images grow and transform throughout part I of the novel corresponds to late-nineteenth-century descriptions of leitmotivic development in Wagners music dramas. Forster was well acquainted with Wagners music by 1907, 75 and may have also been aware of the critical literature on it. His literary methods seem to parallel Wagners process of developing themes as described, for example, by Friedrich Stade in 1870. There Wagners process is said to embody the motivation of characters and reveal the entire workings of the inner life, the most private urges and impulses, allowing the characterization to take on an extraordinary wealth of shadings and nuances, while resulting in a unity which the old type of opera [or novel] could never achieve.76 Signi cantly, Lucy vehemently refuses to play the piano for Miss Alan on her return, for suddenly music seemed to her the employment of a child (p. 94). She cannot begin to aspire to the empyrean because she is in hell, a cheerless, loveless world in which the young rush to destruction until they learn bettera shamefaced world of precautions and barriers which may avert evil, but which do not seem to bring good, if we may judge from those who have used them most (pp. 99100). The movement cadences abruptly: In the morning they left for Rome (p. 100). Schumann was the thing Part II opens with the announcement of Lucys engagement to Cecil, who has progressed beyond his original assessment of Lucy as a commonplace girl who happened to be musical (p. 107). By now he is well on his way to turning her into a work of art, comparing her repeatedly to a Leonardo when he deems her behavior appropriate, and censuring her lapses as fail-
Note the anticipation of Helen Schlegels heroes and shipwrecks in relation to the rst movement of the Fifth Symphony in Howards End, p. 33. 74 DiGaetani, Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel, p. 159.
73
He had, for example, attended the Ring cycle in Dresden in April 1905; for a succinct summary of Forsters Wagner experiences around this time, see Brown, E. M. Forsters Parsifal, pp. 9397. 76 Zur Wagner-Frage, Musikalisches Wochenblatt 1 (1870), 563, quoted by Krop nger, Wagner and Beethoven, p. 218. Forster admitted his structural debt to Wagners Leitmotiv system in his famous Paris Review interview; see DiGaetani, Wagner and the Modern British Novel, p. 91.
75
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ures to be Leonardesque (pp. 10708). The engagement announcement is marked by a recollection of Lucys playing of Beethoven, and again the agent is Mr. Beebe. He enters, at rst unaware of the engagement, and expounds on his pet theory about Lucy:
Does it seem reasonable that she should play so wonderfully, and live so quietly? I suspect that one day she will be wonderful in both. The watertight compartments in her will break down, and music and life will mingle. Then we shall have her heroically good, heroically badtoo heroic, perhaps, to be good or bad (p. 111).
But Lucy will play Beethoven no more. Chapter 11 is set in London, in the wellappointed at of Cecils mother. Lucys descent is well under way; no wonder Cecil calls her little thing (p. 138). At a party for the jaded grandchildren of famous people, she plays Schumann:
Now some Beethoven, called Cecil, when the querulous beauty of the music had died. She shook her head and played Schumann again. The melody rose, unpro tably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incompletethe sadness that is often Life, but should never be Artthrobbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb. Not thus had she played on the little draped piano at the Bertolini, and Too much Schumann was not the remark that Mr. Beebe had passed to himself when she returned (p. 141).
Later, Cecil comments to Mrs. Vyse how wonderful Lucys music always was. It has become her distinctive mark for him as well: The style of her! he exclaimed, How she kept to Schumann when, like an idiot, I wanted Beethoven. Schumann was right for this evening. Schumann was the thing (p. 142). Although he would later have Carnaval in his repertoire,77 Forster did not have great af nity for Schumann around the time of this novel: in March 1905 he wrote to his friend R. C. Trevelyan that Schumann was a young person whom I dont yet take to. He isnt a tune and
he isnt a noise, and I do like music to be one or the other, I think.78 By this Forster seems to imply that Schumanns mixture of the lyrical and the heroic (the tune and the noise), the Eusebius-Florestan split between subjective and objective musical personae, gave him dif culty. Forsters narrator seems to echo the authors sentiments in suggesting that Schumanns music was lacking in ethical content and the ability to inspire courageous acts. Schumann, however, was right for this audience, tired of everything, it seemed . . [who] . launched into enthusiasms only to collapse gracefully, and pick oneself up amid sympathetic laughter (p. 141). Lucy would probably have avoided large wo rks such as the Kreisleriana, op. 16, or the Fantasie, op. 17, especially as the latter was originally planned as a monument for Beethoven and a deep lament for Roberts unattainable love.79 Moreover, Liszt had considered them too dif cult for the public to digest. 80 Impulsive, Florestanian pieces such as In der Nacht or Aufschwung from the Fantasiestcke, op. 12, would have challenged Cecils Leonardo xation.81 Lucys technique was not reliable enough to tackle in public the Toccata, op. 7, or the more Paganinian of the tudes Symphoniques, op. 13. An outdoor cycle such as the Waldszenen, op. 82, would not be appropriate for the London at of a man who reminded her of a drawing-room rather than the open air (p. 125). Better a salon piece, episodic in construction, classicizing in tone, with moments of graceful collapse followed by rallies, a work such as the Arabeske, op. 18. One of several works composed in 1839 at Claras request for something brilliant, easily
Letter to Florence Barger, 18 February 1918, in Lago and Furbank, Selected Letters, I, 287.
77
Cited in Stallybrass, notes to A Room with a View, p. 250; according to Stallybrass, the letter is dated 5.5.05 but was almost certainly written on 5 March 1905. 79 John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 153 54. 80 Letter to Robert Schumann of 5 June 1839 (Liszt, Briefe, I, 27), cited in Daverio, Robert Schumann, p. 137. According to Daverio, even Clara stopped programming the Fantasie following her single 1867 public performance of it. 81 On the origin and implications of Florestan and Eusebius in Schumanns imaginative world, see Daverio, Robert Schumann, pp. 7475.
78
282
understandable, . . . a completely coherent piece, not too long and not too short, . . . [and] speci cally intended for the public,82 the Arabeske would doubtless have appealed to the witty weariness of Lucys audience (p. 141). It is a rondo based on an attractive gurational theme that the naive listener perceives as a straightforward perpetual motion, but that the connoisseur would appreciate for its intricate layering of independent lines and rhythmic counterpoint (see Leicht und zart, mm. 140).83 Its two minore episodes, especially the rst (Etwas langsamer, mm. 4188), have a querulous beauty about them, which is intensi ed in the rhapsodic transition to the rst reprise (mm. 89104). This dreamy, Eusebian fragment with its concealed melody in sustained tones embedded in its inner voices, its veiled pedal effects, and its subtle harmonic shifts (none more so than the tritone juxtaposition of the keys of G and D in mm. 10001) would have also given Lucy a safe zone for her secret self. And the enigmatic coda, Zum Schlu (mm. 209 24), would have allowed her to assume the persona of a poet striving to nd words for the inexpressible. Although Forster left the identity of her second Schumann piece just as tantalizingly vague, he has provided some rather speci c indications of its character. Its melody rose, but broke before reaching its expected closure. Bewitching but unresolved (unpro tably magical), its throbbing, disjected phrases retained their fragmentary character to the very close (not marching once from the cradle to the grave). Its effect was the sadness of the incompletethe sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.84 It is therefore a Roman-
See her letter to Robert of 4 April 1839 (Litzmann, Clara Schumann I, 311), quoted in Daverio, Robert Schumann, p. 137. According to him, the Blumenstck, op. 19, and Faschingsschwank aus Wien, op. 26, also resulted from her request (p. 137). 83 Charles Rosen nds a comparably subtle rhythmic-textural surface in Schumanns Des Abends, in The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 3335. 84 Forster probably culled this ringing phrase from a diary entry of 15 May 1905: Art is concerned with complete things; Life put up with incompleted, & does notor should notapply the test of durability (Notebook Journal, fol. 21r ). Forster had little tolerance for music that
82
tic fragment in the sense de ned by Charles Rosen, a circular piece without clear beginning or end, an emblem of unsatis ed desire, of longing eternally renewed.85 Warum? from the Fantasiestcke, op. 12, virtually replicates the details of the narrators description (see ex. 5). Its off-tonic opening gesture is no more tting as a beginning than as an ending (mm. 13 16, 3542). Instead, the melody weaves ceaselessly through the texture without issue, so as to make the nerves of the audience throb along with its unsettling, syncopated pulse. The second half sets up the expectation of an arrival by way of its increasing harmonic, dynamic, and rhetorical insistence (mm. 1730), only to dissolve into a ritardando and a soft return to the opening theme, its resolving E 7 again undercut by the mysterious A pedal (m. 31; cf. m. 13). The questioning theme returns repeatedly at its original pitch in the short reprise (mm. 3142). The piece closes but does not cadence; its nal measure circles back to the reprise of the second half. In the absence of a more conclusive second ending, Warum? remains openended, the performer seemingly enticed into in nite repetitions of its unanswered question. Warum? would also help furnish a key to an otherwise odd detail in the two opening chapters. When George Emerson vacates his room for Miss Bartlett at the end of chapter 1, he leaves an enormous question mark sketched on a piece of paper pinned over the wash-stand (p. 34). Lucy may well have seen it when saying goodnight in her cousins room later that night. We are given a clue to its meaning the next day at the climax of Mr. Emersons talk with Lucy at Santa Croce, at which he urges her to help his son: Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yesa transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes (p. 48). This undeniable reference to Carlyles Sartor Resartus86 may well also con-
he perceived as assemblages of scraps; he would nd Haydns piano sonatas and even the rst movement of Beethovens Sonata op. 110 unenjoyable, because in scraps as late as his un nished Beethovens Piano Sonatas manuscript begun in 1939 (fol. 13[15]). 85 Rosen, The Romantic Generation, p. 41. 86 The Carlyle reference has been identi ed by Stallybrass in his notes to A Room with a View, p. 241.
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Langsam und zart
rit.
17
m.d.
m.d.
26
rit.
34
Example 5: Robert Schumann, Warum? from Fantasiestcke, op. 12.

284
ceal a secondary allusion to this Schumann piece, with its sadness of the incomplete and its withholding of the transitory Yes of a conclusive cadence. Echoes from the Garden In chapter 15, Lucys disaster within is again marked by a performance, here the enchanted garden music from Armide and Parsifal. By now the pastoral garden, with its association with unattainable bliss, is well on the way to becoming an important secondary motif in the novel. The love scene over Fiesole had been set in such an idealized landscape, one that shared many features with Matthissons setting for Adelaide. Cecil would later add Alfred Lord Tennyson to the mix by addressing Lucy with the opening lines of Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height (p. 119) from The Princess, considered by Paul Alpers to be a model of modern pastoral lyricism. 87 Unwittingly, Cecils literary display also conceals an uncanny intuition of Lucys scene among the violets:
For Love is of the valley, come thou down And nd him; by the happy threshhold, he, Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize, Or red with spirted purple of the vats, or Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.88
As we learn in chapter 12, just before the Dionysian romp in the Sacred Lake that comes as close to religious experience as the novel gets,89 the garden is also a tenet in Mr. Emersons natural religion: The Garden of Eden, . . . which you [Mr. Beebe] place in the past, is really yet to come . . . [and] not until we [men and women] are comrades shall we enter the
Garden (p. 145). Although Lucy does not hear these words on this occasion, the reader connects them with the narrators recent observation that she was a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved (p. 130). George will later echo his father when pressing his suit with Lucy: This desire to govern a womanit lies very deep, and men and women must ght it together before they shall enter the Garden (pp. 18687). John Lucas rightfully reads the Gluck-Wagner scene as a key to Lucys inner truth, but situates the message of these two musical excerpts largely in their intellectual opposition of the pagan and the Christian.90 Certainly this is one of many dualities in the novel, but the formulation overlooks Lucys personal reasons for identifying with these complementary operatic scenes. Both scenes involve a courageous but foolish young man (a tenor) who enters a magic garden that is alternately beautiful and dangerous, where a seductive enchantress will offer him sensual pleasure that may destroy him. Before our eyes the garden is transforming itself from a locus of pastoral bliss to a dark Eden about to be lost. The Gluck selection proceeds from an affecting Forsterian epiphany at the dinner table. Lucy has just learned that George has kept their kiss a secret, and she is lled with unexpected peace as her idyllic childhood at Windy Corner appears momentarily untouchable by the passage of time: Her mother would always sit there, her brother here. The sun, though it had moved a little since the morning, would never be hidden behind the western hills. After luncheon they asked her to play (p. 173).91 Her choice: a scene from Armide, which she had seen that year, probably with Cecil. Forster knew the opera well, for he had seen at least two London performances in 1906 and 1908,
Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 295300. 88 The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), II, 28688, cited in Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, pp. 29596. 89 It was a passing benediction, . . . a holiness, a spell, a momentary chalice for youth (p. 152).
87
Lucas, Wagner and Forster, pp. 17576 and p. 180, n. 24. 91 Stone, The Cave and the Mountain, p. 234, and Rosecrance, Forsters Narrative Vision, p. 106, also signal the importance of this episode.
90
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and deemed it most beautiful.92 From the narrators description, it is easy to identify her selection as Plus jobserve ces lieux (act II, sc. 3),93 the music to which Renaud approaches, beneath the light of an eternal dawn, the music that never gains, never wanes, but ripples for ever like the tideless seas of fairyland (p. 173). Lucys unerring instinct for tting her music to her mood appears intact. Plus jobserve, with its classic indicators of the pastoral mode (chaste melody, pristinely diatonic harmony, gently murmuring accompaniment, and aura of timeless repose),94 is an ideal background for her illusory insight at the table. But the selection also seems to have a wider signi cance for Lucy, for she plays it from memory. Either she has a awless recall of music orfar more likely she has already played it repeatedly to herself. Although the arias gentle eroticism is tempered by rococo delicacy, inappropriate passion threatens this pastoral retreat. Lucys bravado in the face of Georges imminent arrival echoes Renauds imagined imperviousness to Armides charms. Both, however, are vulnerable to their repressed sexual feelings, in spite of their armor (for Renaud, his thirst for la gloire, for Lucy, her engagement to a fastidious medieval saint [p. 106] from whom she will expect few unrestrained advances95). She may also identify unconsciously with Armides fruitless battle with forbidden love (Faut-il que malgr moi tu rgnes dans mon coeur? the latter exclaims in act III, sc. 1). Lucys tangled memories of George seem to converge in Plus jobserve,
but in a manner that would allow her to savor them in private, without having to examine their adult implications. Her listeners, who cannot share in her concealed program, nd the piece as sopori c as Renaud did (he falls asleep during the extended postlude [ex. 6, mm. 111 26] with its pronounced subdominant drift). Forster may well have played this simple Andante movement in a piano-vocal transcription (ex. 6), and he would have known that it is not for the piano (p. 173). Much of the beauty of the original comes of its ravishing orchestration for a quintet of solo woodwinds over muted strings96 and is considerably dulled in the piano arrangement. Thus its attraction for Lucy may be sought in its evocation of her suppressed memories of the eld of waving violets, especially the following excerpt:
Les plus aimables eurs, Et le plus doux zphire Parfument lair Quon y respire. Non, je ne puis quitter Des rivages si beaux: Un son harmonieux Se mle au bruit des eaux. (The fairest owers And the softest breeze Perfume the air That one breathes there. No, I cannot leave Such beautiful shores: A harmonious sound mingles With the murmuring waters.)
Stallybrass (notes to A Room with a View, p. 252) identies the performance as the 1906 Covent Garden opening, which Forster had attended. In his Notebook Journal entry of 7 June 1908 (fol. 52), Forster also notes that he went last night to Armide with [Arthur] Cole . . . it was most beautiful. 93 Glucks drame hroque in ve acts on the classic libretto by Philippe Quinault (Paris, 1777) is available in full score, edited by Klaus Hortschansky, in Christoph Willibald Gluck: Smtliche Werke, I, vol. 8a (Kassel: Brenreiter, 1987), pp. 14959; piano-vocal score (Leipzig: C. F. Peters, n.d.), pp. 6467. 94 Geoffrey Chew, Pastoral, in New Grove, 2nd edn., XIX, 217. 95 This, to judge from his awkward and painfully self-conscious rst kiss (p. 127), is in marked contrast to the unpremeditated grace with which George had claimed his. No wonder Mrs. Honeychurch has taken to calling Lucy old lady (p. 157).
92
Cecil, sharing the discontent, called out: Now play us the other gardenthe one in Parsifal (p. 173), referring to the Flower Maidens song from act II (Komm! Komm! Holder Knabe!). He has indeed upped the stakes thereby: unlike Glucks magic garden, Wagners is a topiary Venusberg heavy with guilty late-Romantic sexuality. And unlike Armides enchantment, which will evaporate
This is particularly evident in the recent (1999) recording by Les Musiciens du Louvre on period instruments, conducted by Marc Minkowski (DGG 459 6162).
96
286
a. Mm. 124.
Andante
13
19
b. Mm. 10826.
108
114
Renaud falls asleep.
calando sin al
120
Example 6: Gluck, piano arrangement of the instrumental introduction and postlude to act II, sc. 3, of Armide, in an arrangement by F. Brissler (Leipzig: Edition Peters).
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in a matter of seconds when two of Renauds military cronies return to knock a little soldierly sense into him (act IV, sc. 3), Kundrys is powerful and ghastly, its punishment for sexual transgression an unspeakable wound. Again Lucy ignores Cecils command, as she had in Mrs. Vyses at, and closed the instrument. By now she has developed a penchant for refusing to play on command (her music is one of the few places in life where she can exert her will). Then George enters, and she attempts to mask her confusion at the piano. Impulsively, she xes on the Wagner, but botches the opening measures and again shuts the piano. At that, Freddy proposes tennis, disgusted at the scrappy entertainment. Cecils self-assured call for the Parsifal suggests that they had seen one of its many concert performances together (in 1907 the fully staged work was still the exclusive property of Bayreuth, but the concert version was regularly performed in London). The Schott piano-vocal score, with English text by Margaret H. Glynn and simpli ed piano part by Liszts student Karl Klindworth, was also available in London after 1902, issued there by Novello.97 If Lucy had attended a performance with Cecil, the latters zeal to improve her might well have led to some discussion of the Flower Maidens, especially given Cecils affectation since his engagement of a cosmopolitan naughtiness which he was far from possessing (p. 116). For, from the planning stage of the rst production of Parsifal, Wagner made it clear that his Flower Maidens, both the six soloists and the female chorus, were to be images of female sexuality. In January 1881 he commissioned Lilli Lehmann to help him nd six female singers of the highest quality, with similar voice and range, but also comely and slender, well-formed women (hbsche schlank gewachsene Frauenzimmer), as well as 12 or 16 young, pretty (hbsche) female choristers of the best quality. He repeated his speci cations to Ludwig II in September: I require six soloists with beautiful, matching high voices and the appropriate physical appeal (das erforderliche
angenehme uere).98 The cast list of the 1882 premiere reveals that Frau Lehmann had brought her soloists from as far away as Milan and Schwerin. Issues of her success aside, the photograph of this rst cast (plate 1)99 re ects Wagners aim. Though demure by todays standard, their costumes would have been shocking in 1882, with swelling hips accentuated by the uttering petals, and cut to the knee to reveal bare legs and feet. Encircling Parsifal in a tangle of limbs, they create an effective tableau vivant of nymphomania. With that rst performance, Wagners Maidens entered the expanding iconography of woman as ower of evil at the n de sicle. Although written in response to other predatory ower-women, Bram Dijkstras perfervid nightmare vision of woman as a palpitating mass of petals reaching for the male in order to encompass him, calling to him to be drained by her pistils yearning for fertilization, seems tailor made for Parsifal.100 In requesting the Wagner, Cecil may have been sharing with Lucy a naughty private reference that would have been lost on the other Honeychurches. She is evidently annoyed. Perhaps the Gluck has put her in a dreamy state of recollection of Georges kiss, making the heavily charged sexuality of Wagners garden more than she could face. Perhaps it also reminds her of the disparity between the musics sensuality and Cecils aestheticism, which Lucas identies as the essential problem in their relationship. But Georges entry makes the piano seem a safer outlet. Unwisely she offers Cecil the Parsifal, and anything else that he liked (p. 174), presumably jolted because what Cecil most wanted of hera woman untouched (p. 165)was no longer in her power to offer. Her stumbling performance is perhaps the most re-
97
See Brown, E. M. Forsters Parsifal, p. 93.
Geck and Voss, Parsifal Dokumente, p. 47, letter of Richard Wagner to Lilli Lehmann, Bayreuth, 22 January 1881; and Parsifal Dokumente, p. 51, letter of Richard Wagner to Ludwig II, Bayreuth, 19 September 1881. 99 Hans Brand, Costm-Portraits des Bayreuther Bhnenweihfestspiels Parsifal (Bayreuth, 1882), rpt. in Parsifal Dokumente, p. 252, ill. 25. The singers are identi ed as the Frulein Andr, Belce, Pringle, Meta, Galfy, and Horson. 100 See esp. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-sicle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 25054 and esp. pp. 24041.
98
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Plate 1: Wagners Flower Maidens with Parsifal (Hermann Winkelmann) in the 1882 Bayreuth premiere.
Reproduced with permission of the Richard-Wagner-Stiftung Bayreuth.
vealing detail, especially if she was playing from the Klindworth arrangement. She must have been confused indeed to have been unable to play the elementary opening measures (see ex. 7), when we know that she could keep her head during a performance of op. 111. Forster certainly knew Parsifal well, for he had made it an important symbolic motif in his recently completed The Longest Journey (1907).101 He presumably would have known that the Flower
Maidens words could have struck Lucy with considerable force as soon as she had begun playing in Georges presence:
Come! Come! Dear boy! Come! Come! Let me blossom for you! Dear boy! For your delight and refreshment I offer my loving care!
101
Brown, E. M. Forsters Parsifal, esp. pp. 9697.
After the tennis game comes Georges second kiss, inspired by another burst of prescience from Cecil: his selection of the kiss scene from a pulp novel to read aloud to the pair (p. 179). It turns out to have been written by one of their
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Leicht bewegt
10
espressivo
19
Example 7: Flower Maidens Song from Parsifal, in an arrangement by Karl Klindworth (Mainz: Schott; London: Novello), mm. 121.
Pension Bertolini companions, Miss Lavish, who had bowdlerized their Fiesole embrace for the climax of her love scene, thereby degrading their garden of beauty to the level of postcard kitsch. That night Lucy ends her engagement on the pretext that Cecil wraps himself up in art and books and music. Too late she drops her Leonardesque veneer to become for him a living woman, with mysteries and forces of her own, with qualities that even eluded art (p. 191). Now it is Lucy who hides behind words, protesting that she wont be sti ed, not by the most glorious music, for people are more glorious (p. 192). Although sometimes interpreted as an emancipation from art,102 this manifesto conceals more than a hint of disingenuousness. The problem for Lucy is not aesthetic but ethical, and her betrayal of music leaves her ravaged: She gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted,
who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catchwords . . . they have yielded to the only enemy that matters the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth. . . . The night received her (p. 194). The Wagnerite will hear a faint echo of the closing lines of the Flower Maidens Song: If you cannot love and cherish us, we will fade and die thereby. Easy live and quiet die The next morning nds Lucy tinkling at a Mozart sonata when Mr. Beebe enters. How delicate those sonatas are! said Mr. Beebe, though, at the bottom of his heart, he thought them silly little things. Lucy passed into Schumann (p. 200). She soon hatches her escape to Greece, after which she goes back to her tinkling of a Mozart sonata (p. 203). The weather turns stormy as Mr. Beebe leaves for tea, relegating Lucy to her Mozart after having abandoned Mrs. Honeychurch to her ravaged garden with a suggestive aside (It is terrible, this havoc among the owers [p. 199]).
102
Stone, The Cave and the Mountain, p. 230.
290
Although paired with the ambiguous Schumann, Mozarts piano sonatas emerge more negatively still. In spite of his active friendship with Edward J. Dent during the time the latter was writing his pivotal study of the operas, Forster was no great admirer of Mozart. He occasionally ribbed Dent in their correspondence (such as his admission that he had understood little of a German performance of Die Zauber te except the tragic death of the boa constrictor in the rst few bars103). A performance of Figaro in York in May 1904 would leave him equally nonplussed: Mozart is topsyturvy, he wrote in his Notebook Journal (fol. 12). Moreover, Mr. Beebes coolness toward the Mozart piano sonatas is echoed in English criticism of the time. The Austrian C. F. Pohls Mozart article (with additions by W. H. Hadow) in the 1907 volume of Groves Dictionary dispatches the solo piano music with a few dismissive phrases as thoroughly suited to the instrumentgrateful, and for the present state of technique, easy, . . . the passages being for the most part founded on the scale, or on broken chords. In playing them, clearness, taste, and the power of singing on the instrument are required. Hubert Parrys dismissal of Mozart in the same source as not naturally a man of deep feeling or intellectuality would not have endeared the composer to Forster.104 Still many years away from their rehabilitation by Artur Schnabel, Myra Hess, and Clara Haskil, Mozarts piano sonatas emerge in 1907 as an image of repressive convention. On Mr. Beebes return, he is surprised to nd Lucy singing an unidenti ed song that Cecil had given her. Its text is Lucy Ashtons song of renunciation from Sir Walter Scotts Bride of Lammermoor, 105 which Forster interpolates throughout this scene (pp. 20809):
Look not thou on beautys charming, Sit thou still when kings are arming,
Taste not when the wine-cup glistens, Speak not when the people listens, Stop thine ear against the singer, From the red gold keep thy nger, Vacant heart, and hand, and eye, Easy live and quiet die.
The words are rotten according to Freddy, but the celibate Mr. Beebe deems it a beautiful song and a wise one (p. 209). Stallybrass has located one musical setting of this text by Sir Henry Bishop (17861855), the composer of Home, Sweet Home.106 Although Stallybrass questions whether Forster would have known it, Bishops poetic rightness is striking. Beloved as the English Mozart by his contemporaries, he was a hugely proli c commercial composer of popular operas and operatic arrangements, including many to texts by Sir Walter Scott. His star had set by the centurys end, and Forster may well have read J. R. Fuller Maitlands dismissal of his so-called operas in which the low taste of the public was pandered to in each and all of them in his 1902 English Music.107 Not Beethoven, not Mozart, but the likes of Henry Bishop accompanies Lucys planned ight from George and her family. Donizettis Lucia had already found dramatic use in Forsters rst completed novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, in which the performance of the opera in Monteriano [San Gimigniano] unexpectedly reconciles Gino with Philip, his English brother-in-law, and opens Caroline to the beauty of Italy and the lure of love and family.108 Scotts Lucy sings Look Not Thou to a secret listener, her father Sir William, to whom the words she had chosen seemed particularly adapted to her character; for Lucy Ashtons exquisitely beautiful, yet somewhat girlish features, were formed to express peace of mind, serenity, and indifference to the tinsel of worldly pleasure. Yet appearances are de-
Letter to Dent, Nuremberg, 17 September 1902, in Lago and Furbank, Selected Letters, I, 58. 104 Pohl, Mozart, Groves Dictionary, p. 304. Parry, Variation, cited in Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (London: Hutchinson, 1995), p. 14. 105 Sir Walter Scott, Waverley Novels, Melrose Edition, vol. I: Bride of Lammermoor (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1873), p. 61.
103
Notes to A Room with a View, pp. 25354. Quoted in Nicholas Temperley, with Bruce Carr (worklist), Sir Henry R. Bishop, New Grove, 2nd edn., III, 63034 (p. 631). 108 It was in the company of Dent that Forster saw Lucia di Lammermoor with a young Tetrazzini in the title role, in Florence in May 1903; see E. J. Dent, Travels in Italy and Austria, rpt. in Stape, Interviews and Recollections, p. 5.
106 107
291
19 TH CENTURY MUSIC
ceptive for this Lucy as well, for left to the impulses of her own taste and feeling, [she] was particularly accessible to those of a romantic cast. How strong her hidden romantic inclinations were emerges in her struggle to marry the man she loves, Edgar of Ravenswood, her fathers sworn enemy. Her nal capitulation to her parents machinations to see her married to a country laird . . . rich enough to supply her with every comfort109 has tragic consequences: on the day of her marriage to Bucklaw Hayston, Lucy stabs her bridegroom and dies in a t of insanity. The hapless Edgar pines away to death a year lateran altogether melodramatic warning to our Lucy Honeychurch of the dangers of betraying ones true feelings. To see the whole of everything at once The novels musical world affords new conclusions in three areas of its critical reception: narrative strategy, issues of gender and characterization, and the viability of the ending. It also provides an important key to the novels developmental process. Unless one makes a clear distinction between Forster and his intrusive narrator, one risks falling into the critical trap that snared an early Chicago reviewer, who thoroughly disliked the authors irritating selfconsciousness and his equally irritating desire to be clever.110 The literature on Forsters narrative voice from the 1970s and 1980s, most notably by Turk, Armand, and Rosecrance,111 carefully delineates points of similarity and divergence between author and narrator in this work. The conventional narrator is Forsters primary agent,112 like him a liberal Englishman, reasonably well-traveled, and an avid observer of his countrymen and -women. But he is also far from omniscient, for he is so busy looking over the shoulders of his characters, especially Lucy, that he fails to look reliably
Scott, Bride of Lammermoor, pp. 62, 64. Unsigned review, Inter-Ocean (Chicago) (20 May 1911), 5, cited in Gardner, The Critical Heritage, p. 121. 111 Turk, The Evolution of E. M. Forsters Narrator (1973); Laura Maslow Armand, Forsters Fallible Narrator, tudes anglaises 28 (1975), 26980; Rosecrance, Forsters Narrative Vision, pp. 83110. 112 Rosecrance, Forsters Narrative Vision, p. 15.
109 110
into their minds and hearts.113 The novels ample dialogue furthers the action without mediation, as in a comedy of manners; the narrator interrupts these episodes with his commentary on the action as if [it] were a play . . . taking rst the short view and then the long by relating happenings and then giving his own summary narrative.114 Accordingly, Howards End and especially A Passage to India are generally considered to be superior to A Room with a Viewand less retrogressivein their increased narrative insight and subtlety.115 I would argue, however, that the narrative structure of this novel is rather more complex and original than previously noted, for Lucys performances and the thoughtful responses of her ctive listeners elevate music to the role of wordless narrator with the capacity, exalted in Romantic aesthetics, of expressing the otherwise inexpressible. As I have argued, Lucys music affords a direct, nonverbal channel to her thoughts and emotions. As seen in Table 1, her music has two additional observers, Mr. Beebe and Cecil, who also act as supplementaryand increasingly unreliablenarrators in the novel (see Table 1). The author alone understands the subtle signi cance of all Lucys music. Whether consciously or by that ineffable process that weaves an imaginative product from the tangled skein of life experience and artistic materialsincluding music and literature, Forster created in A Room with a View a literary tapestry that invites the reader to search out these motivic threads as they develop and intertwine throughout. The narrator also has considerable insight into music and what it tells us about Lucy, especially her playing of Beethoven and Schumann. The signi cance of the Gluck and Wagner selections, as well as the Adelaide reference, however, seem to be largely lost on him. Mr. Beebe, who sometimes functions as
Turk, Evolution of Forsters Narrator, p. 324. Ibid., p. 323; Rosecrance (Forsters Narrative Vision, pp. 10607) also discusses the predominance of dialogue over narration in this novel. 115 Turk, Evolution of Forsters Narrator, pp. 32426; Rosecrance, Forsters Narrative Vision, p. 13.
113 114
292
Table 1 continuum of decreasing reliability Forster Narrator Mr. Beebe Cecil Vyse
Lucys Music George Lucy art
the narrators voice in the novel116 (most notably in the Beethoven scene in the Pension), understands Lucys Beethoven, even if he is incapable of living out its consequences. Cecil, however, can only partially comprehend this part of her (he asks for Beethoven inappropriately). Cecil also mediates his view of Lucy through the visual arts via his characterization of the conventional and rebellious Lucy as Leonardesque or Michelangelesque (only in their parting scene does he see her directly). Moreover, the symbolism of Schumann is completely lost on Cecil, as is Lucys reaction to the Gluck and Wagner. The reader will remember that Forster had a special affection for Lucy as a ctional character, and admitted in a letter to Dent in 1908 that both Lucy and Mr. Beebe have interested me a good deal.117 But it is Cecil whom Forster spends the bulk of the ensuing paragraph justifying to Dent; clearly, he identi ed to some degree with Lucys improbable suitor and would even make of him a personal acquaintance in the ftieth-anniversary postscript to the novel, A View without a Room.118 George, by con-
Rosecrance, Forsters Narrative Vision, p. 100. Letter of 19 October 1908, cited in Stallybrass, preface, p. 14; see also Lago and Furbank, Selected Letters, I, 95. 118 A View without a Room: An Anniversary Postscript, Observer (27 July 1958), p. 15. There Forster professes to have crossed paths with Cecil in Alexandria during World War I, where the latter displayed the remnants of his affection for Lucy by defending Beethoven against the charge of Hun music.
116 117
trast, always sees Lucy directly, but because he is largely nonverbal, except when he is spouting his fathers words (as in his dictum about the Garden), the exact nature of his relationship to Lucy remains unde ned to the very end. In the Postscript, Lucys Beethoven playing continues as an individual rather than a shared pursuit in their marriage: during the First World War, she plays Beethoven sonatas to express her conscientious objections (and is reported to the police for playing Hun music); during the Second War, she broadcasts Beethoven (who was quite all right this time) while George is away ghting and being unchaste. And yet Georges instinctive identi cation with the spiritual zone represented by Beethovens op. 111, both in the earlier scene by the Arno and again in the novels conclusion, establishes him as Lucys appropriate companion. Mr. Beebe and Cecil, by contrast, are considerably more fully realized characters than the shadowy George, yet they have often been marginalized in the literature.119 Their central role in the novels pivotal musical narrative justi es Forsters empathy, however, and helps the reader understand why their characterization emerges more vividly than that of the Emersons.
Land (Challenge and Conventionality, p. 129) goes so far as to deem Mr. Beebe a totally dispensable character, who merely applies oil to the social machine.
119
293
19 TH CENTURY MUSIC
The implications of the musical evidence for issues of gender and sexuality in the novel are equally noteworthy. Wilfred Stone has observed that in Howards End Forster for the rst time . . . relinquishes the hero-role entirely to women, and in effect hides out in female bodies that men do not normally strike.120 Lucys heroic Beethoven playing undercuts Stones assertion, however, and establishes an important link between these two novels in their shared use of Beethoven as the prime heroic metaphor. In addition, we have seen that Lucys musical choices have signi cant gender associations. Yes, she is a woman, but except for the dark days before the novels close she eschews womens music such as the Mozart sonatas in favor of Beethovens masculine voice. Her musical life is, in Mr. Beebes words, an illogical element in her. She seems to associate herself with equal ease with male and female roles (Renaud and Armide), and her choice on two occasions of Schumann, with the implie d bifurcation of his FlorestanEusebius personae, suggests a transgendered musical orientation that may well have appealed to her exclusively male (and, by implication, homosexual) narrative observers. Far from hiding behind Lucys skirts, Forster and his narrators identify with her strength and daring, even if their admiration is tinged with wistfulness or, in the case of Mr. Beebe and Cecil, transformed into bitterness or misogyny when they cannot follow her. We have seen how Wagnerian processes of thematic association and development seem to underscore Forsters treatment of the central Beethoven sonata image as it ows together with the roaring Arno. In the unfolding of the symbol of the pastoral Garden, however, Forsters method seems more closely connected with another related mode of Romantic musical expansion, developing variation. From the initial, seemingly insigni cant passing reference to Adelaide, a series of gardens emerges in the wake of the Fiesole love scene, including Tennysons idyllic spot, Mr. Emersons naturalistic Garden of Eden, Lucys childhood home of Windy Corner, the increasingly mor-
bid enchanted gardens of the Gluck and Wagner excerpts, and nally the debased commercialized garden frequented by the tourist trade in Miss Lavishs novel. Each successive pastoral image therefore modulates into the next in a downwardly spiraling trajectory that parallels Lucys own spiritual course. In this regard, reading this novel is not unlike listening to a Romantic symphony, each thematic transformation causing the listening reader to project forward and backward across time, connecting, anticipating, recollecting, and re ecting. Literary scholars have voiced concern about the credibility of the novels conclusion, especially the curious transforming power of the kiss from Mr. Emerson senior: He gave her a sense of deities reconciled, a feeling that, in gaining the man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world. . . . he had shown her the holiness of direct desire. As she would say in later years, It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once (p. 225). A harbinger of the hard-won insights in Howards End, the only connect of its epigraph and its struggle to see life steadily and to see it whole (pp. 57, 168), Lucy seems to have come upon this wisdom by osmosis rather than by spiritual toil, and from the lips of a character whose proselytizing has often come across as pompous posturing. As has been clear throughout this paper, the novel is rich in dialectical oppositions, beginning with the Room and View of its title.121 Thus the orderly comfort of the one clashes with the wild or exultant element of the other,122 just as Lucys Beethoven playing is posited against her Mozart, her Leonardesque tranquility against her Michelangelesque brashness. Cecils drawing room, the locus of male domination, is contrasted with Georges woods and Garden, where men and women meet as equals. Constraint and desire, celibacy and eroticism, the Gothic and the Greek, the aesthetic and the artisticone could continue much further; clearly, resolving this tumbling mass of oppositions will not be an easy task. To justify
Stone (The Cave and the Mountain, p. 226) discusses the novels rhythm of opposites. 122 In C. F. G. Mastermans review, in Stape, Critical Assessments, I, 126.
121
120
Stone, The Cave and the Mountain, p. 237.
294
174
cresc.
dim.
Example 8: Beethoven, Sonata in C Minor, op. 111, movt. II, mm. 17477. its connecting preposition, Forster will need to nd a way to link his Room with its View. And yet, by the novels closing sentences, the reader is emotionallyif not intellectually convinced that something intangible but fullling has indeed happened, something more momentous than a simple marriage and a happy return to Florence would imply.123 From the window overlooking the Arno, the rivers southward roar blends with the song of an Italian driver as George and Lucy yield to their passion under the veil of authorial delicacy: Youth enwrapped them; the song of Phaethon announced passion requited, love attained. But they were conscious of a love more mysterious than this. The song died away; they heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean (p. 230). In E. M. Forsters Beethoven, I conclude that Forsters understanding of Beethovens compositional method as an essentially dialectical process, epitomized in the Fifth Symphony, underscored his fundamental concepts of literary structure. Likewise, in A Room with a View Beethovens Sonata op. 111 is the novels coiled spring, its earlier association with the roar of the Arno a possible key to the effect of Forsters closure. Its last paragraph is rich with what he would later call prophecy. As de ned in Aspects of the Novel,124 prophecy is an expansive form of closure that involves not completion, not rounding off but opening out. At its most ineffable, the expansive close reveals the underlying spirit of the visible world and, in effect, becomes music125 (as after the close of Tolstoys War and Peace, when great chords begin to sound behind us and its myriad details expand to lead a larger existence than was [previously] possible). But if the Arno is again singing Beethovens op. 111, what part would convey this love more mysterious than human love, falling from the glacial heights? Although the closing measures of Lucys rst movement resolve the movements musical problem, the dialectical oppositions of the work nd their ful llment only in the Arietta movement, and especially in its closing measures (ex. 8). Here the music descends precipitously from its high trills to reach its nal goal, the rising fourths that invert the falling fourths and fths of its opening theme and solidify the de nitive dominanttonic closure that had been withheld by the rst movement and the entire Arietta. The watertight compartments in Lucy have indeed burst; life and art have mingled. She has followed Tennysons shepherds call, letting the torrent dance [her] down / To nd him in the valley.126 If distant echoes of op. 111 murmur in the rivers nal course, it would appear that Forster may have sought a sense of closure for this, his most intractable novel, by associating it with Beethovens haunting conclusion to his nal sonata.
Masterman was among those convinced; as he concluded his 1908 review of the novel: There is the spirit of high comedy in it. . . Had this element been there alone, the . book would have been merely an excellent satirical judgment of manners and conventions. Had the other element stood alonethe revelation of the hidden lifeit would have been mystical, intangible, illusory. By the fusion of the one with the other, he is able to present work humorous and arresting, with a curious element in it of compelling strength and emotion (p. 129). 124 Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1936). My page references refer to the simultaneous U.S. edition
123
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), esp. pp. 23542. 125 Stone, The Cave and the Mountain, pp. 11517. 126 Tennyson, Come down, O maid, lines 1819.
295

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Edwardian Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Music in E. M. Forster's A Room with a View Author(s): Michelle Fillion Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol.

Edwardian Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Music in E. M. Forsters A Room with a View

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

Allegro con brio ed appassionato

Example 1: Beethoven, Sonata in C Minor, op. 111, movt. I, mm. 122.

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

Example 2: Beethoven, Sonata in C Minor, op. 111, movt. I, mm. 14658.

Rosecrance, Forsters Narrative Vision, pp. 9092.

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

Example 4: Beethoven, Sonata in C Minor, op. 111, movt. I, reduction.

Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 444. As concluded in my E. M. Forsters Beethoven.

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

Langsam und zart

Example 5: Robert Schumann, Warum? from Fantasiestcke, op. 12.

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

Renaud falls asleep.

See Brown, E. M. Forsters Parsifal, p. 93.

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

Brown, E. M. Forsters Parsifal, esp. pp. 9697.

Stone, The Cave and the Mountain, p. 230.

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

Lucys Music George Lucy art

Stone, The Cave and the Mountain, p. 237.

MICHELLE FILLION Edwardian Perspectives in Forster

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