Introduction

Summary

To be second is not to be secondary or inferior; likewise, to be first is not to be originary or authoritative.

—Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, xiii

THIS QUOTATION CONCISELY FORMULATES one of the main assumptions of this book: the musical novel, a literary subgenre that engages with musical pretexts, is valuable in itself, as well as in its relationship to a musical model that contributes to its overall form. As in any intertextual work, this intermedial involvement with music does not yield a merely derivative product, but instead adds a layer to the “palimpsestuous” (Genette, Palimpsests) structure of the musical novel. The ways in which specific musical elements have been adopted and imitated by novels will be the focus of this book.

Literature's changing relationship to music over time has been intimately linked to the critical perception of music and its status in the relative hierarchy among the arts. While music in the eighteenth century was perceived to be accessible solely through the senses and was therefore less valued in an age that cherished intellectual involvement with the arts, the romantics praised music precisely for its inability to express ideas. As Enrico Fubini describes it in History of Music Aesthetics:

Music had no need to express anything that could be expressed in ordinary language…. Music could capture the very essence of the world, the Idea, the Spirit, the Infinite. And the farther it was from having any sort of meaning or philosophical content, the higher the degree to which it was endowed with the power to do these things.

(262–63)

The romantics saw music's seeming fusion of form and content as an ideal to be emulated by the sister arts of painting and poetry. Walter Pater emphasizes this unity epitomized in music above all other arts:

It is the art of music which most completely realizes this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other…. In music, then, rather than in poetry, is to be found the true type or measure of perfected art.

(158)