Author: David Henry Deutsch

Publisher:

Published: 2011

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ISBN-13:

Abstract: This dissertation examines the importance of classical music portrayed in British literature as a means to indicate social worth, intellectual ability, and political identity. Most scholars of music and literature emphasize the abstract, avant-garde influence of quartets and fugues on novels and poetry, overlooking the broader cultural implications of music in Britain. This project demonstrates how, from the 1870s, authors such as Benjamin Jowett, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde used diverse appreciations of opera and instrumental music to make socio-economic and moral distinctions, as well as to portray political cohesion through communal pleasures. Turning to literature written after 1900, I show how modernist authors such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf revised these late-Victorian themes and used an ability to understand classical music as a litmus test for determining a character's placement within intellectual hierarchies. To locate these literary concerns within their cultural context, I uncover how journalists depicted concerts in domestic and institutional settings to indicate the value of communities that could create and sustain an art increasingly recognized as nationally important. Having established the social significance of classical music, I detail how writers relied on musical proclivities to justify the value of alienated subcultures to the larger British populace. Arnold Bennett and Thomas Burke depict the allegedly uncultured lower-middle and working classes as engaged with operas and oratorios as a means to assert their respectability. Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and twentieth-century authors such as Beverley Nichols and A.T. Fitzroy did the same for homosexual characters. I argue that these depictions are historically accurate by investigating working-class memoirs, contemporary cultural critiques, as well as unpublished documents pertaining to music in lower-income schools and concert halls. Moving beyond class and sexuality, E.M. Forster and G.B. Shaw depicted British citizens as enjoying continental European classical music as a means to explore the relationships between Britain and Germany. They represent a series of authors who used German classical music as a means to create connections between the liberal and peaceful factions of British and German societies during two world wars. By examining concert programs and letters printed in popular newspapers, I argue that these literary themes were prevalent throughout British culture. This study proves that, rather than acting as an abstruse art, classical music was fundamental to definitions of social and national identities in literature.