Perhaps even more important than Moore in forming the early musical taste of this element of Bloomsbury was the enigmatic Saxon Sydney-Turner, whose genius they long took on trust and whose literary style Virginia Woolf once described as “the envy of my heart” (L3: 411), but who was never able to produce the great works of which he and they dreamed. Sydney-Turner was an ardent Wagnerite, who no doubt played an essential role in introducing to his Bloomsbury friends the German composer and his image of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the all-embracing art work that combined music, libretto, scenery and costumes into a coherent whole. We catch glimpses of Sydney-Turner in Adrian Stephen’s journal, where he is wittily described as “talking about good and evil and playing the pianola” (HL 237) or traveling to Bayreuth with Adrian (see, for instance, V. Bell, Letters 68). Adrian and Sydney-Turner were joined in 1909 by Virginia, who initially confided in her sister, Vanessa, that Parsifal “seems to me weak vague stuff, with the usual enormities” (L1: 404), but later said that it moved her almost to tears and that she judged it “the most remarkable of the operas; it slides from music to words almost imperceptibly” (406). If Sydney-Turner’s influence is perceptible here, his irritation when they praised composers other than Wagner is also evident: “We went to Salome (Strauss, as you may know) last night.” Virginia reported to her sister: “I was much excited, and believe that it is a new discovery. He gets great emotion into his music, without any beauty. However, Saxon thought we were encroaching upon Wagner, and we had a long and rather acid discussion” (L1: 410). Writing to Clive Bell in 1907, Lytton Strachey reported with his characteristic malice as well as typical stylistic bravura: “Poor Turner’s volcanic energy has deserted him. His lava flows no more. It is all dust and ashes now, and decrepitude and sciatica. [ . . . ] He showed me the MS of his opera this evening. Will its final resting-place be the British Museum, beside the notebooks of Beethoven? Well! At any rate we shall never know” (Levy, Letters 122). In 1908 Vanessa Bell chose to portray Saxon Sydney-Turner, according to Michael Holroyd, “seated slightly bent before a pianola, and peering through his spectacles at some sheet of music with an expression of rapt, self-obvious concentration” (144–45).6 The link between music and mathematics that Leonard Woolf charts with such energetic enthusiasm becomes almost caricatural in Sydney-Turner, who combined it with a love of puzzles, especially crossword puzzles, and whose extraordinary memory together with his passion for Wagner made him capable of comparing countless performances and recalling the exact dates on which he had seen them, but did not lead to any creative production.
Other members of the Bloomsbury Group had a less passionate but nevertheless decisive response to music. For Lytton Strachey, for instance, music had been a familiar part of family life since his childhood. Virginia Woolf’s unflattering likeness of him in her character St. John Hirst in The Voyage Out rather unkindly says that he had “no taste for music, and a few dancing lessons at Cambridge had only put him in possession of the anatomy of a waltz, without imparting any of its spirit” (VO 157). But Strachey’s ungainly walk and elongated body probably had more to do with this little caricature than with any truth about his musical sensibilities. According to Holroyd, Strachey’s mother, Jane Maria Strachey, “enjoyed classical music, sitting Lytton on her knee while she played songs on the piano” (6), while his brother Oliver, hoping to become a professional concert player, had studied piano with the famous teacher Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna, thus becoming one of only two Englishmen to attend Brahms’s funeral in that city’s central cemetery (Levy, Letters 47). Their younger brother James, who has become best known as the general editor of Freud’s works in English, was also an authority on Haydn, Mozart, and Wagner, and in the 1950s contributed notes and commentaries for the Glyndebourne opera programs (Holroyd xv).
In a letter to the Times in 1924, protesting at attempts to prevent the proposed visit of the Vienna State Opera Company to Covent Garden, Lytton Strachey clearly included himself among the “lovers of music in England” (Levy, Letters 533), although his main purpose in writing may well have been political rather than aesthetic. Certainly some of his accounts of the operas that he attended focus more on the audience than the opera itself. Take, for instance, a letter of 1918 about a performance of The Magic Flute, in what he refers to as a performance that was “even more preposterous than usual,” and during which Strachey’s attention seems to have been directed far more toward “an attractive young man, in evening dress” who turned out to be Duncan Grant (Letters 198–99).7
In letters to Leonard Woolf during Woolf’s long absence in Ceylon, Strachey frequently refers rather more seriously to music. “Alas!” he writes soon after Woolf’s departure, “Beethoven thunders in vain for you, and the ocean has swallowed up Mozart!” (Levy, Letters 36), while later he expatiates on the beauties of Christoph Gluck, only to fall silent when he faces the challenge that Virginia Woolf’s Times essay addresses, that of the inadequacy of words to evoke music. “They’re now with me more almost than Racine. Pure beauty and grandeur – elysian airs, exquisite crescendos, inimitable heights. There is a ballet in the third act of Orfeo – but what’s the good of talking?” (Letters 85).8 Unpredictably, perhaps, he also delighted in Gilbert and Sullivan, reporting on Iolanthe that the “astounding thing about Iolanthe is the acting of Mr. Workman, who really does reach the most magnificent tragic heights. It’s impossible to believe that a Lord Chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous, but one goes, and when the moment comes, it’s simply great. The audience was completely mastered, and I believe many of them were in tears” (Letters 131). A letter to Ottoline Morrell on April 23, 1916, indicates a more predictable familiarity with Mozart: “The Magic Flute was considerably slewed [note: others read “slimed”] over by Beecham’s vulgarity but the loveliness came through” (Letters 290). His biographer, Michael Holroyd, also argues that music played a central, if metaphorical, role in the sexual relationship between Strachey and Roger Senhouse: “When they listened to Mozart together, chamber music mostly, it almost seemed as if Roger and he were the instruments themselves” (582). Yet however important music may have been for Strachey, it is notable that his tastes in that art were far more conservative and classical than in other areas, rarely moving far beyond the middle of the nineteenth century.
As for the painter Duncan Grant, his love of music, together with his general aesthetic sensibility, had come to him from his father (Holroyd 130–31). David Garnett notes in his chatty and rather superficial autobiography that Grant “was always buying and playing gramophone records – especially Mozart” (Flowers of the Forest 29). Although he had no formal training in music, Grant enjoyed playing the piano and had a particular gift for dancing. Far more significantly and adventurously, Grant was familiar with the experiments of the French Postimpressionists and the Italian Futurists, as well as more specifically the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, known for his Calligrammes, poems written such that the words – evoking a dove or rain, for example – form the shapes they evoke, and the Russian composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin, whose compositions draw inspiration from a color system ascribing different colors to the keys of a keyboard. Under their influence, Grant created his 1914 “Kinetic Scroll,” which Frances Spalding describes as “a fourteen foot long scroll decorated with rectangular abstract coloured shapes, which he intended should be viewed through an aperture, as it was slowly wound past to the accompaniment of music by J. S. Bach” (Roger Fry 168).9 The music selected was the Brandenburg Concerto no. 1. With this kind of experimentation, drawing on both art and music, Grant was creatively responding to such synesthetic creations as that produced in 1912 by the joint efforts of designer Leon Bakst, impresario Sergei Diaghilev, and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky when they staged their famous ballet based on Claude Debussy’s sensuous response to Stéphane Mallarmé’s beautiful poem “L’Après-midi d’un faune.” Whereas Mallarmé had wanted the scenery to consist of trees made of zinc, Bakst chose to recreate the barbaric splendor of the Tartar, Russian, and Persian despots of the Middle Ages, while Nijinsky’s choreography blended the archaic style of dancing found in Greek bas-reliefs with frank eroticism, ending with a final masturbatory gesture that shocked the critics. While Grant’s choice of Bach might seem outdated in such an experiment, it should be remembered that this was the beginning of a period