It is possible that after her early experience of Salome Virginia never heard any of the major operas of the post-Wagnerian era. In 1926 she may have seen a concert performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh (D3: 72), and in 1931 she was taken to see Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers by Vita Sackville-West and the composer (D4: 48), an opera she had seen for the first time conducted by Thomas Beecham in 1909, three years after the first performance in Leipzig. Neither of these works made a deep impression on her, not even the British composer’s three-act opera, appreciated by such eminent conductors as Arthur Nikisch and Bruno Walter, and based on the legends of Cornwall, the region where the Stephen family spent several summers. Her relative lack of familiarity with the music of her age may explain why she dismissed Ariane et Barbe-bleue as “a faded arty opera” when she heard it performed at Covent Garden by a French company conducted by Philippe Gaubert (D5: 81). Paul Dukas’s only opera, first performed in 1907, was highly regarded by Schoenberg and Berg, who must have realized that although it contains quotes from Pelléas et Mélisande and La mer, it has elements that are closer to Expressionism than to Debussy’s orchestral idiom. In 1936 Olivier Messiaen characterized it as “le chef-d’oeuvre incompris” and praised especially the central act, “ce génial crescendo de l’ombre à la lumière qui fait du 2e acte le chef-d’oeuvre de Paul Dukas et un des chefs-d’oeuvre de la musique” (79, 84).
Although Virginia’s relations with Sydney-Turner had cooled considerably over the years, her dependence on his expertise continued. In a letter written in January 1920 she asked him about an episode in The Voyage Out: “I wonder if you would once more tell me the number of the Beethoven sonata that Rachel plays in the Voyage Out – I sent the copy I marked to America, and now they’re bringing out a new edition here – I can’t remember what you told me – I say op. 112 – It can’t be that” (L2: 418). The fact that she did not seem to remember that op. 112 was the cantata “Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt” clearly indicates that Sydney-Turner was her main source of information. He occasionally took her to concerts, and in 1923 they heard “a divine Bach,” the secular cantata “Geschwinde, geschwinde ihr wirbelnden Winde” (BWV 201) (L2:39).
It would be a mistake to deny the impact of Wagner on Virginia’s formative years. “I doubt whether she really enjoyed the tense atmosphere of her Bayreuth holiday,” remarked one of her critics (Jacobs 234). Such assumptions are in contradiction with the characterization of the activity of the public “between the acts” and the description of the site in the article “Impressions at Bayreuth.” One might think of passages such as the following: “when the opera is over, it is quite late; and half way down the hill one looks back upon a dark torrent of carriages descending, their lamps wavering one above another, like irregular torches.” In fact, the article also refers to the impact of the atmosphere of the city: “we wander with Parsifal in our heads through empty streets at night, where the gardens of the Hermitage glow with flowers like those other magic blossoms, and sound melts into colour, and colour calls out for words, where, in short, we are lifted out of the ordinary world and allowed merely to breathe and see” (E1: 289–92). One should avoid making the false assumption that early influences are obliterated by what comes later in an artist’s career, for this may lead us to misinterpret the early works.
Let me illustrate with one example how commentaries may do the works a disservice. Rachel Vinrace, the heroine of The Voyage Out, is an amateur musician. In Melymbrosia, the first version of the novel, she has a late Beethoven sonata “spread upon the little piano,” and she is reading an “engaging passage”:
Der zagend vor dem Streiche
sich flüchtet, wo er kann,
weil eine Braut er als Leiche
für seinen Herrn gewann!
Dünkt es dich dunkel,
mein Gedicht?
(MELYM 36)
Isolde’s ironic and self-reflexive words in act 1, scene 2 suggest that Tristan is reluctant to face her, because he is taking her as a bride for another man. In the next chapter Clarissa Dalloway opens the score of Tristan und Isolde that lies on the table of the salon and remembers Bayreuth: “I shall never forget my first Parsifal – a grilling August day, and all those fat old German women, come in their stuffy high frocks, and then the dark theatre, and the music beginning [ . . . ]. It’s like nothing else in the world!” (MELYM 54).
In the later version only the scene in which Rachel Vinrace is playing a Bach fugue is preserved. Mrs. Dalloway knocks at the door and enters. “The shape of the Bach fugue crashed to the ground” (VO 61). “Rachel’s maturity reflects Woolf’s own as she began to leave behind the popular Wagner for the older works of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart,” argues a critic in a recent essay (Kelley 422). The relevance of this explanation can be questioned on at least three grounds. First, in the early version Wagner is presented as continuing the tradition of Beethoven, very much in the spirit of the later composer’s influential essays on his predecessor. Second, before World War I Wagner’s music was hardly more popular than that of Mozart or Beethoven. Third, in Melymbrosia the focus is on the text and not the music. The passage quoted might have appealed to Virginia Woolf as poetry because of its somewhat enigmatic character.
Woolf’s interest in the legend of Sir Tristram and the Lady Iseult can be traced back to her short fiction known as “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” composed in August 1906. In what I would regard as her most interesting short narrative before “The Mark on the Wall” (1917), Master Richard tells the story, “in a high melodious voice”:
He dropped his gay manner, and looked past us all, with straight fixed eyes, as though he drew his words from some sight not far from him. And as the story grew passionate his voice rose, and his fists clenched, and he raised his foot and stretched forth his arms; and then, when the lovers part, he seemed to see the Lady sink away from him, and his eye sought farther and farther till the vision was faded away; and his arms were empty. And then he is wounded in Brittany; and he hears the Princess coming across the seas to him. (CSF 55–56)
Melymbrosia may indicate Virginia Stephen’s interest in the way Wagner added to the complexity of the love story. Be that as it may, the focus is on the text rather than on the music.
To return to the passage cited above from Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, according to which Diaghilev’s company represented a modernity different from that of Wagner, I have to admit that I have found no reference in the diaries or correspondence of Virginia Woolf to the most significant ballets of the early twentieth century. L’Oiseau de feu was “not given until Diaghilev’s third British season,” on June 18, 1912, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; Petrushka was given its British premiere on February 4, 1913; and Le Sacre du Printemps premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on July 11, 1913 (Thomas 69, 70, 72). Quentin Bell remarks that the Woolfs went to the Russian Ballet at the beginning of July 1913 but does not mention the performance they attended (QB2: 12). Although Le Rossignol was conducted by Emile Cooper in 1914 (Stravinsky 52), I have not found any reference suggesting that the Woolfs attended the performance of Stravinsky’s first opera, a work begun in 1908, before his compositional style had been considerably