3 - Death in Effigy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
Summary
In May 1913, the Woolfs heard Wagner's Ring at Covent Garden. It was at least the fifth cycle Woolf had attended since her first in 1898 and it was to be her last. She wrote to Ka Cox:
We came up here 10 days ago to attend the Ring – and I hereby state that I will never go again, and you must help us both to keep to that. My eyes are bruised, my ears dulled, my brain a mere pudding of pulp – O the noise and the heat, and the bawling sentimentality, which used once to carry me away, and now leaves me sitting perfectly still. Everyone seems to have come to this opinion, though some pretend to believe still.
(L, II: 26)Woolf's disenchantment appears unequivocal. Characterising the Ring as bellicose, domineering and debilitating, her wearied account is unsurprising in the context of rising nationalist and patriotic rhetoric during the advent of the First World War: in this period, Wagner was central to debates about the relationship between music and what Kramer calls ‘socio-cultural agency’, as he is for many still. Yet Woolf's enduring engagement with Wagner was far more unresolved than this ‘break’ suggests – though it is suggestive that she sets the long Wagner scene in The Years in 1910, the year when ‘human character changed’ (E, III: 421).
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- Information
- Virginia Woolf and Classical MusicPolitics, Aesthetics, Form, pp. 69 - 89Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013