Prelude: Introduction

Summary

When I began to write this book, its working title was “Euterpe Takes the Pen,” and for inspiration I kept an image of that muse at the front of the manuscript. In the interest of clarity and accessibility I later changed the heading to the less allegorical “Music into Fiction”; but that original title, of which I remain quite fond, designated quite precisely my project: cases in which the muse of music—Euterpe's instrument is the flute—uses words rather than sounds to express her feelings.

The book deals with two specific topics: composers who write (their own libretti as well as criticism and other kinds of literary works), and the appropriation of specific musical works in literature (for instance, Bach's Goldberg Variations) to provide theme and structure in novels and the adaptation of musical forms such as the sonata and fugue as the basis for fictional works. The major exception, because it fits into neither category, is the highly unusual and perhaps unique material treated in my last chapter: the attempt by several composers to render musically the works described in meticulous detail in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus—that is, a case of fiction into music.

I make no attempt to deal with a variety of other topics from the general field of music and literature that have been treated elsewhere. I am not concerned here, for instance, with “musicality” in literature—with what Steven Paul Scher, in a book and several illuminating essays, has authoritatively defined as “verbal music”: that is, the effort to capture the effects of music through various prose and poetic devices. Nor does it treat such matters as synaesthesia: the “correspondances” central to the thinking of Charles Baudelaire in his poem of that title, in which “les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent” (fragrances, colors, and sounds respond to one another); or the “alchemy of the word” by which Rimbaud (in his poem of that title) claimed to have invented “un verbe poétique accessible è tous les sens” (a poetic word accessible to all the senses).