Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism by Nathan Waddell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism by Nathan Waddell Alexander Carpenter Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism. By Nathan Waddell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. [xiii, 248 p. ISBN 9780198816706 (hardcover), $85; also available as an e-book, price varies.] Bibliography, index. Approaching Nathan Waddell's Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism, a reader might reasonably wonder, Is this a work of literary criticism or a musicological study? Happily, it is both. The book offers an account of Beethoven's influence on early modernist writers that integrates close readings of literature with the Anglo-German musicology and music criticism of the nineteenth century, in working toward an understanding of how the "Beethovenian" shaped the development of literary modernism. Moonlighting develops its argument through five substantial case studies, each focusing on different musical pieces and aspects of Beethoven's legacy as they appear in the writings of a cadre of important early modernist writers, including E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Wynham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, and Rebecca West. Waddell argues that, while most "musico-literary" studies that focus on Beethoven and modern literature seek to explore the resemblances—the "structural analogies" (p. 1)—between musical works by Beethoven and literary texts, Moonlighting instead focuses on how the Beethoven legend, and the conventions of representation it engendered, fed the imaginations of early modernist writers. These writers, Waddell insists, "knew Beethovenian legend when they saw it . . . and were eager to use it" (p. 1). Waddell prefaces his case studies with a massive introductory chapter: at 46 pages and 148 footnotes, it is by far the longest and densest section of the book. In this introduction, Waddell not [End Page 604] only lays out the argument of Moonlighting but also takes on modernism as a whole, challenging notions of "anti-traditionalism" as central to modernism. He also deconstructs the long-standing musicological convention of dividing Beethoven's oeuvre into three periods—"tradition, to individualism, to transcendence" (p. 5)—and suggests that this taxonomy gives rise to the decisive interpretation of Beethoven's music as embodying a heroic struggle (the topic of the subsequent chapter). Waddell compares and contrasts the influence of Wagner and Beethoven on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century culture and then concludes his introduction with a turn to Beethoven reception in fin de siècle Vienna, discussing Max Klinger's 1902 Beethoven statue and Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze as exemplars of "versions" of Beethoven inherited from the nineteenth century and focusing on the establishment of what he calls a Beethovenian "routine" or "habit." Modernist writers, Waddell asserts, were able to "avail themselves of Beethovenian routine to establish intimacy between writer and reader," since readers also knew and understood the "norms and customs" of the "Beethovenian habit" (p. 36). Waddell centers his first chapter, "The Idea of the Heroic," on Howard's End by E. M. Forster and on the book's double-fictionalization of the Beethoven myth—that is, on how Forster's characters themselves filter Beethoven's music through the conventions of the heroic narrative. Waddell's study of Howard's End identifies a fundamental tension within the novel "between two kinds of convention: on the one hand, the claim that certain Beethoven compositions depict or encode heroic experiences . . . and on the other, the assumption that a heroic explanation of this music represents an unmediated way to explain its value" (p. 52). This tension, as Waddell demonstrates, is complicated and intensified by the fact that Forster imposes another layer of mediation—a not wholly reliable narrator—on this whole process. The chapter concludes with Waddell's claim that Howard's End is a "musicological document" by dint of its tacit criticism of and "intervention into the very terms of the nineteenth-century musicology which authorized" the idea that Beethoven's music is heroic, that it is "'about' struggle, defeat, endurance, overcoming" (p. 72). In chapter 2, "Eloquent Citations," Waddell stays with E. M. Forster, shifting to address "A View without a Room" (the 1958 postscript to his 1908 novel A Room with a View) alongside Wyndham Lewis's novel Tarr and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. In this chapter, he turns to Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. As one...