14 - Music

Summary

De la musique avant toute chose [music above everything]

(Paul Verlaine, ‘Art Poétique’)

Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky: these are the composers most obviously in, behind and around T. S. Eliot's poetry. Beethoven, the apogee of Classicism; Wagner, the epitome, zenith and in embryo the decadence of Romanticism; Stravinsky, a Proteus of modernism, myth-and-motors, pastiche, jazz and neoclassicism: Beethoven, behind Four Quartets ; Wagner, in The Waste Land ; Stravinsky, a contemporary with whom Eliot was in dialogue. Together they are an index of Classical and Romantic legacies in modernist eclecticism. But music is more to Eliot than three composers, however broadly representative. The Wagnerian backgrounds of French Symbolism mean that music is fundamental to Eliot's aesthetics. And although he had no technical training, music was the art that personally affected Eliot most deeply.

Stravinsky commented on their connection from his own point of view:

Were Eliot and myself merely trying to refit old ships while the other side – Joyce, Schoenberg – sought new forms of travel? I believe that this distinction, much traded on a generation ago, has disappeared. (An era is shaped only by hindsight, of course, and hindsight reduces to convenient unities, but all artists know that they are part of the same thing.) Of course we seemed, Eliot and myself, to have exploited an apparent discontinuity, to have made art out of the disjecta membra, the quotations from other poets and composers, the references to earlier styles (‘hints of earlier and other creation’), the detritus that betokened a wreck. But we used it, and anything that came to hand, to rebuild, and we did not pretend to have invented new conveyors or new means of travel. […]