Polyphony on the page: how authors portray music in their novels
Edward Breen suggests some music-themed summer reading – settle down with his inspiring selection of novels all infused with early music, his particular passion Mrs Honeychurch disapproved of music, declaring that it always left her daughter peevish, unpractical and touchy,’ wrote EM Forster in A Room with a View (1908). It’s a sentence so intriguingly specific as to perk up anyone’s musical antennae. If Mrs Honeychurch doesn’t tempt you to reach – mid-chapter – for a brooding C minor sonata, how about the hushed reverence that descends on Covent Garden as a white-haired Peter Pears takes his seat in the Royal Opera House during a touching scene in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)? That one might well have given you the urge to listen to Britten’s opera Death in Venice . I’m obsessed with these fleeting musical touches that hide in the inner voices of a novelist’s polyphony. And to give an example from a play, in Oscar Wilde’s The ...
