# Music in literature: my recent experience. Share yours!



## Sonata (Aug 7, 2010)

I recently wrote this in the "what book are you reading thread" But I thought I'd post as its own topic, as I thought it might be an interesting conversation starter.
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The book I am referring to is Sophie's Choice, by William Styron.


One thing that was really neat about the book was the way music was written in to the fabric of the characters and events. Sophie's passion for music was almost spiritual. For someone like myself who's just gotten really serious into listening to classical like me so recently, it was very powerful. And the VALUE of the music to the characters....I race along trying to listen to as much music as I can, sometimes I've forgotten to just immerse myself in the moment of the music.

This was interesting: Sophie's friend Stingo, the narrator of the book, the cost of a single Beethoven symphony record was half a week's pay. I purchased a complete digital download CYCLE of his symphonies for five bucks. That's less than half an HOUR of work for me. The cost of that cycle, were I Stingo, would be over four thousand dollars for me. Seriously, over FOUR THOUSAND dollars. Think about how much he would savor that single symphony he had let alone eventually having the whole collection.

So, what I'm saying in so many words, reading that book really made me appreciate how fortunate I am to have this ridiculously large collection of music (classical and otherwise) and reminds me that I need to savor that music!


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## crmoorhead (Apr 6, 2011)

I started researching classical music for the first time when I read the book Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. In the story, one of the protagonists is a composer's aid (heavily based on the true life story of Fred Delius). Being unfamiliar with many of the terms and wishing to explore more, I googled things like 'dodecaphonists' and watched some YouTube videos. This book has been made into a movie that will be released very shortly:


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## dionisio (Jul 30, 2012)

I'd advise everyone to read Mann's Doktor Faust. It might be a bit difficult to read sometimes though.

Is about the life of the (fictional) composer Adrian Leverkühn who wants to achieve true greatness and not just to be famous.

Its a good essay about art or beauty in music and one can understand Thomas Mann's passion for music.


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

Currently finishing "The Human Stain" by Philip Roth. Here is a passage on Yefim Bronfman at an open rehearsal of Prokofiev's second piano concerto at Tanglewood.

Then Bronfman appears. Bronfman the brontosaur! Mr. Fortissimo!
Enter Bronfman to play Prokofiev at such a pace and with
such bravado as to knock my morbidity clear out of the ring. He is
conspicuously massive through the upper torso, a force of nature
camouflaged in a sweatshirt, somebody who has strolled into the
Music Shed out of a circus where he is the strongman and who
takes on the piano as a ridiculous challenge to the gargantuan
strength he revels in. Yefim Bronfman looks less like the person
who is going to play the piano than like the guy who should be
moving it. I had never before seen anybody go at a piano like this
sturdy little barrel of an unshaven Russian Jew. When he's finished,
I thought, they'll have to throw the thing out. He crushes it. He
doesn't let that piano conceal a thing. Whatever's in there is going
to come out, and come out with its hands in the air. And when it
does, everything there out in the open, the last of the last pulsation,
he himself gets up and goes, leaving behind him our redemption.
With a jaunty wave, he is suddenly gone, and though he takes all
his fire off with him like no less a force than Prometheus, our own
lives now seem inextinguishable. Nobody is dying, nobody—not if
Bronfman has anything to say about it!

Later in the novel, the closing movement of Mahler's third symphony is played at a funeral.

One moment we were immobilized
by the infinite vulnerability of Mahler's adagio movement, by
that simplicity that is not artifice, that is not a strategy, that unfolds,
it almost seems, with the accumulated pace of life and with all of
life's unwillingness to end... one moment we were immobilized by
that exquisite juxtaposition of grandeur and intimacy that begins
in the quiet, singing, restrained intensity of the strings and then
rises in surges through the massive false ending that leads to the
true, the extended, the monumental ending . . . one moment we
were immobilized by the swelling, soaring, climaxing, and subsiding
of an elegiac orgy that rolls on and on and on with a determined
pace that never changes, giving way, then coming back like
pain or longing that won't disappear . . .


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

Another favorite from Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day"

MEANTIME 'PERT, who had been busy trying, with little success, to plant doubts about the girl in Hunter's mind, had also learned through elements of the T.W.I.T. something of his earlier adventures and the frailties resulting, and appointed herself a sort of anti-muse, hoping out of meanness to provoke Hunter at least into work unlikely to endear him to the British public. Her history was soon to undergo a certain adjustment, however. In September, Hunter would invite her to accompany him to Gloucester Cathedral, where as part of that year's Three Choirs Festival, a new work by Ralph Vaughan Williams would be having its first performance. Ruperta, who despised church music, must have seen some irresistible opening for idle mischief, because she went along wearing a sportive toilette more appropriate to Brighton, with a hat she had always found particularly loathsome but kept handy for occasions just such as this. The composer was conducting two string orchestras set like cantores and decani facing each other across the chancel, with a string quartet between them. The moment Vaughan Williams raised his baton, even before the first notes, something happened to Ruperta. As Phrygian resonances swept the great nave, doubled strings sang back and forth, and nine-part harmonies occupied the bones and blood vessels of those in attendance, very slowly Ruperta began to levitate, nothing vulgar, simply a tactful and stately ascent about halfway to the vaulting, where, tears running without interruption down her face, she floated in the autumnal light above the heads of the audience for the duration of the piece. At the last long diminuendo, she returned calmly to earth and reoccupied herself, never again to pursue her old career of determined pest. She and Hunter, who was vaguely aware that something momentous had befallen her, walked in silence out along the Severn, and it was hours before she could trust herself to speak. "You must never, never forgive me, Hunter," she whispered. "I can never claim forgiveness from anyone. Somehow, I alone, for every single wrong act in my life, must find a right one to balance it. I may not have that much time left."


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

The music/art thread led me back to this one.

I suspect many of you know that Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata inspired Tolstoy's short story of the same name. That, in turn, inspired Janacek's first quartet. Less known is the fact that Janacek's second quartet inspired Brian Friel's play, "Performances." Janacek is a character and the quartet is performed.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

This might be a good place to post something that's been bugging me for years. Decades ago I read a science-fiction novel (probably by Asimov or Heinlein) in which one of the protagonists listens to a late (8th or so) symphony by Bernstein, titled "Ruth". At the time that the novel was written, Lenny was very much alive and kicking of course. Does anybody recognize this, and can give me the title of the novel?


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I suspect it wasn't Heinlein who tended to seem as if he didn't have a cultured bone in his body. Asimov more plausible, but doesn't ring any bells. Maybe something by Pohl?


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I once took a college seminar in "Music and the Novel" given by a fairly literate music professor. As I remember the reading list included: Jean Christoff, Swann's Way, Point Counterpoint, Ulysses, and Doktor Faustus. Needless to say, it was a slog.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

The one that's always stuck with me most vividly is EM Forster's description of Beethoven's 5th in Howard's End. Forgive me for quoting the whole thing, but it's worth reading:


> It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it. Whether you are like Mrs. Munt, and tap surreptitiously when the tunes come-- of course, not so as to disturb the others--or like Helen, who can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music's flood; or like Margaret, who can only see the music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and holds the full score open on his knee; or like their cousin, Fraulein Mosebach, who remembers all the time that Beethoven is echt Deutsch; or like Fraulein Mosebach's young man, who can remember nothing but Fraulein Mosebach: in any case, the passion of your life becomes more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings. It is cheap, even if you hear it in the Queen's Hall, dreariest music-room in London, though not as dreary as the Free Trade Hall, Manchester; and even if you sit on the extreme left of that hall, so that the brass bumps at you before the rest of the orchestra arrives, it is still cheap.
> 
> "Whom is Margaret talking to?" said Mrs. Munt, at the conclusion of the first movement. She was again in London on a visit to Wickham Place.
> 
> ...


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Isaac Asimov was a music fan but I can't remember anything related to Bernstein. I vaguely recall a poem of his called _The Author's Ordeal_, of which the second part mimics the lyrical style of W.S. Gilbert (to whom he offered apologies). I can't quite remember which collection it was from as I no longer have any of his books - _Earth is Room Enough_, perhaps?

_Tintin_ author Hergé was a music fan also - one of his main characters was an overbearing opera diva called Bianca Castafiore whose signature tune was _The Jewel Song_ from Gounod's _Faust_. And she had an accompanist called Igor Wagner!


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## jenspen (Apr 25, 2015)

MarkW said:


> I once took a college seminar in "Music and the Novel" given by a fairly literate music professor. As I remember the reading list included: Jean Christoff, Swann's Way, Point Counterpoint, Ulysses, and Doktor Faustus. Needless to say, it was a slog.


Well, I seem to have slogged my way through a number of Famous Novels that might qualify for such a seminar. Of those you mention:

The doomed composer Adrian Leverkühn, in Doktor Faustus, is thought to have been modelled on Hugo Wolf. There are some songs in it - Schumann, I think.

Proust knew Fauré and Fauré's "Ballade" is thought to have been the inspiration for the sonata by Proust's character, Vinteuil, that haunts the hero of "Swann's Way".

I never finished Point Counterpoint but the title's impressively musical...

"Ulysses" is another one I never quite got to the end of but I remember a lot of singing in it. The writer Oliver St John Gogarty wrote: _Strange, almost incredible as it may seem now to his admirers, Joyce was more intent on becoming a singer than a writer. Although he competed at the Feis long before he conceived Ulysses, he was devoted all his life to music. 
_

Another Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, was a fine pianist who would accompany himself in Schubert Lieder. I can't bring his musical references to mind, though I had to study some of his plays once, but here's an article that discusses the importance of music in Beckett's works - https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jul/31/why-music-struck-chord-beckett

Patrick O'Brian's novels are dense with references to music - it created the bond between his two heroes.

And, to top off, one of Shakespeare's famous references to music:

Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wrack,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Willa Cather's_ Song of the Lark_... (hence "Larkenfield").

"_Thea Kronborg is a Scandinavian-American singer who works her way up from the dusty desert town of Moonstone, Colorado, to the boards of the Metropolitan Opera house_. Although Willa Cather herself was not a musician, the portions of the novel covering childhood, apprenticeship, and artistic awakening in the western landscape are autobiographical. Its final section, dealing with Thea's professional life, is drawn largely from the career of the Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, who was the kind of artist Willa Cather still aspired to be." There are of course a number of musical references in Cather's classic novel as Thea struggles through great self-doubt to find her creative gift as a pianist or opera singer.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

The last time I came across a musical idea in literature, it wasn't a description, it was a structurural thing. Jonathan Littell has labelled the sections of his novel _Les Bienveillants_ with the names of the movements of Bach's 6th keyboard partita. I don't know what his thinking behind that was.


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## skim1124 (Mar 6, 2019)

I read Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. Not remembering many of the details, I turned to Wikipedia for this synopsis: 

"The plot concerns Michael, a professional violinist, who never forgot his love for Julia, a pianist he met as a student in Vienna. They meet again after a decade, and conduct a secret affair, though she is married and has one child. Their musical careers are affected by this affair and the knowledge that Julia is going deaf. A recurring element throughout the plot is the pair's performance of Beethoven's Piano Trio Opus 1 No.3, which they first perform in their college days."

That I don't remember much of it--and have no desire to re-read it--must mean that I didn't care for it very much. I think there were (too many?) passages that over-analyzed the music or talked about music in a way that went over my head, and that was probably why I didn't enjoy it too much. But there are probably many of you who'd love it for just such passages.

I had loved, loved, loved Seth's A Suitable Boy, but An Equal Music was nothing like it and was further disappointing for that reason. In fact, I'm rather sore at violinist Philippe Honore, Seth's lover at the time and on whom the protagonist was based. Because he broke up with Seth, Seth suffered terrible writer's block which has caused the delay of his writing the sequel A Suitable Girl for which I've been waiting for the last 4+ years.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

The Magic Mountain contained a lot of discussions of music as well. Hans Castorp (the protagonist) meets a gramophone for the first time (it was a novelty at that time) and Mann has a lot of discussion about opera, Schuberts Lieder etc.

To a lesser extent, The Alienist, contained some operas in the Metropolitan Opera


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

jenspen said:


> . . .
> 
> Another Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, was a fine pianist who would accompany himself in Schubert Lieder. I can't bring his musical references to mind, though I had to study some of his plays once, but here's an article that discusses the importance of music in Beckett's works - https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jul/31/why-music-struck-chord-beckett
> 
> . . .


I'm surprised the article didn't mention Morton Feldman. Not only did Feldman name one of his pieces "For Samuel Beckett," they collaborated on an opera.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

_The Prague Sonata _- Bradford Morrow

"In the early days of the new millennium, pages of a weathered original sonata manuscript-the gift of a Czech immigrant living out her final days in Queens-come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. To Meta's eye, it appears to be an authentic eighteenth-century work; to her discerning ear, the music rendered there is hauntingly beautiful, clearly the composition of a master. But there is no indication of who the composer might be. The gift comes with the request that Meta attempt to find the manuscript's true owner-a Prague friend the old woman has not heard from since the Second World War forced them apart-and to make the three-part sonata whole again."


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## drmdjones (Dec 25, 2018)

Renaissance and baroque music is a recurring theme in Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Hesse appears knowledgeable. I wonder if he had had musical training.


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