I

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine DeBourgh lays down the rules of playing as tokens of the young gentlewoman’s breeding, and intimates that the possession of an instrument is a privilege of domestic respectability limited to the upper ranks of the landed gentry. She is surprised to find that there is a piano in the Bennet household, but we learn elsewhere that there are others scattered about the minor households of Longbourn — in the Lucas house and in the Bingley’s leased mansion, though not in the house of the less prosperous or reputable Uncle Phillips — where card-playing must take the place of music to while away a dull evening. Lady Catherine notes with self-satisfaction that Charlotte does not have “an instrument” in Mr. Collins’s parsonage, and that Lady Catherine has two — the obscurest of which is offered to Elizabeth for that practice which would perfect her pretensions as the daughter of a gentleman and perhaps hone her skills for the inevitability of having to teach young children as a governess when the Bennet patrimony passes on to Mr. Collins.² That the piano was so ubiquitous at the period depicted in Pride and Prejudice indicates the phenomenal spread in England of a relatively new invention; pianos had been available for domestic use and display for only twenty-five years or so before Jane Austen completed the first version of her novel (1798). Historians have ascribed this growth not only to the affluence of an English middle class “eager to spend for prestige, enjoyment and self-improvement,” but to the shrewdness of the major English piano makers in taking advantage of the market (Ehrlich, pp. 16-17). One measure of the rapid increase in popularity for the instrument is the publication of piano music in London between 1750 and 1800: whereas in 1750 there were over three hundred musical editions for the harpsichord, by 1785 editions designated for harpsichord rarely appeared, and by 1800 there were none at all (Sumner, pp. 50-51).

The piano got its name, “pianoforte,” from its capacity to make sounds that could be “soft” or “loud.”³ Its dynamic qualities contrasted markedly with the limited dynamics of the harpsichord. The plucked strings of the harpsichord, which had been the domestic musical instrument of choice in the eighteenth century (in Fielding’s Tom Jones [1749] Sophia Western quiets the fevered impulses of the Squire by playing old ballads on her spinet), could make a brilliant sound, but “could not produce subtle gradations of volume” (Ehrlich, p. 11). The clavichord seems not to have been a functional substitute; although it could provide subtleties of effect, its tone was not powerful, and so it was primarily a private instrument. Thus in Italy and in Germany in the first half of the century, harpsichord makers experimented with an instrument that could allow for a stronger tone — striking rather than plucking the strings through intricately engineered “actions” that conveyed the pianist’s touch from the key to a hammer to the string. Experiments in piano making moved forward on a number of fronts — allowing for freedom of vibration, damping, use of heavier strings at higher tensions, and later in the century the adaption of iron frames to allow for increased stress, more strings, and heavier hammers.

The pianoforte was thus the product of several technical advances; these led to the creation of an extremely versatile instrument — one which opened a number of possibilities for amateur players as well as for professional musicians and composers. The pianoforte promised to give every home its own orchestra, as the well-known Victorian musical educator John Hullah noted (Mackerness, p. 173); it provided not only for individual pleasure but for collective family pleasure. Without the availability of the piano for dance music, the confrontations of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth and Darcy could hardly have been staged. Jane Austen noted such a recreational use in a letter to her sister in 1808: “Yes, yes, we will have a pianoforte, as good a one as can be got for thirty guineas, and I will practise country dances, that we may have some amusement for our nephews and nieces, when we have the pleasure of their company. “⁴

(1) “Maternal Recreation” from Emma by Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923). The piano in the illustration is a Broadwood & Sons.

The piano’s usurpation of the harpsichord’s role was a commercial as well as a technical phenomenon. Utilizing some of the strategies of manufacture and merchandising that were to become standard later under industrialization, manufacturers like John Broadwood — who married into the family of one of the continental piano makers, immigrants to England in the eighteenth century — made London a center for the creation and perfection of pianos for concert and domestic use alike (Ehrlich, p. 19): “There were forty-five firms which manufactured pianos in London alone before 1800. Broadwood made 6,000 square and 1,000 grand pianos between 1780 and 1800, a large number when the size of the cultured population is taken into consideration” (Sumner, 51). Indeed, his is one of the few trade names mentioned in Jane Austen — Jane Fairfax’s piano is from Broadwood’s (see figure l)⁵ — and so is Amelia Sedley’s in Vanity Fair; Becky Sharp remarks of the price it brings in auction, “Five-and-twenty guineas was monstrously dear for that little piano. We chose it at Broadwood’s for Amelia, when she came from school. It only cost five-and-thirty then.”⁶ Later in the novel, Thackeray seems to have forgotten this piano’s provenance and has Dobbin remember it as having been made by “Stothard,” an allusion to Stodart, another London manufacturer.⁷

The number of pianos produced in London through the nineteenth century suggests a sizeable market, and that market was served by many manufacturers specializing in a variety of models and prices. From the beginning of the century a small piano was within reach of the middle classes, and towards the end of the century even workers could have pianos in their homes. Broadwood listed a single-action piano for as little as £17 6s. in 1815; the cheapest six-octave cottage model was listed at forty-four guineas in 1840.⁸ In 1850, a cottage piano could be hired for a pound a month, though George Eliot — returning from Geneva to London in 1850 — asked a friend to see if she could rent her old piano for “16 s. per month which is quite enough.”⁹ Such prices were high but not prohibitive, and there seems to have been some trade in used and rehabilitated pianos. Thus a middle-class family could aspire to a good square piano, while a rich family could display a “grand.” The modest “cottage” piano could be obtained through hire-purchase by the latter half of the century (Ehrlich, pp. 98-104). When Eliot’s writing began to promise a life of some affluence, one of her first aspirations was to purchase a grand piano; she wrote to George Henry Lewes’s son after the success of Adam Bede in 1859, “If I am able to go on working, I hope we shall afford to have a fine grand piano” (Letters, III, 125-126).

In the history of serious music, the invention of the piano had a major impact on musical composition. Mozart’s playing of a German piano in 1777 seems almost to have been a conversion experience, leading to the composition of his great piano concertos. Haydn accepted the new instrument as well. Despite the heavier action of English pianos, Beethoven composed on a Broadwood given to him by the manufacturer.¹⁰ And all piano manufacturers made efforts to supply the most famous virtuosi with their particular makes. Thus the conjunction of commerce and inspiration assured the creation of sublime concert music from the time the piano was first made available to composers. But on the domestic scene, the inspiration was not always sublime. Although Schubert’s compositions for home musicales — Schubertiads, as they were called in the 1820s — combined a rare musical creativity with the pleasures and intimacies of domestic settings, the popularity of the piano as an instrument for the English home had less to do with such genius than with such matters as women’s education, the upward mobility of the middle class, and the status of the bourgeois household as the locus for all legitimate general sociability.

Most of the young women who labored to learn the piano in the nineteenth century were not intent upon mastering the intricacies of Mozart, Haydn, or Beethoven. Though each of these composers wrote some music for the amateur, their compositions were rarely grist for amateur feminine art. The expressive capacities of the new instrument promised effects that could make the amateur shine in the playing of showy “salon” music, simple ballads and sacred songs, or simplified transcriptions of more difficult pieces; such compositions did not demand a great deal of technical finish or musical intelligence. Simple chords and arpeggios could be made to sound as important as contrapuntal patterns (Ehrlich, p. 12); the slightest of accompaniments could embellish singing that would not have been pleasing without some amplification, or perhaps some masking; and touch could seem a proper substitute for dexterity. Dramatic effects could be easily obtained with the percussive aspects of the piano; indeed in performing one battle piece composition, a kind of programme music that became very popular in the early part of the century, one young lady used a special “swell” pedal to slam the lid of the piano so as to simulate the sound of a cannon explosion.¹¹

Such drawing-room music attracted the scorn of early music critics like George Hogarth, Dickens’s father-in-law, but its simple pleasures were not to be denied. Young Victorian women who played for show were more likely to bang through a piece like “The Battle of Prague” than to assay the subtleties of Schubert as Madame Merle does in James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881) (see figure 2). For the discriminating, though, there were variations on ballad themes and airs — simple but expressive compositions like Mendelssohn’s “Fantasia on an Ancient Irish Air” (“The Last Rose of Summer”). But even so musically sensitive a poet as Thomas Hardy could be nostalgic about old parlor standards such as the “Fall of Paris,” “Battle of Prague,” “Roving Minstrels,” and “Elfin Call.”¹² One historian of music has concluded that “no musical instrument (except the Spanish guitar) is more susceptible to insensitive usage than the pianoforte. This is reflected in the great mass of meretricious piano music produced throughout the nineteenth century” (Mackerness, p. 175). Mark Twain shared the general revulsion against this kind of programme music, working it into the genteel setting of the Grangerford parlor in Huckleberry Finn (1884): “There was a little old piano, too, that had tin pans in it, I reckon, and nothing was ever so lovely as to hear the young ladies sing, The Last Link is Broken’ and play The Battle of Prague’ on it.”¹³ In a letter written in 1878, Twain described hearing a young lady hammer out the battle piece in a Swiss hotel: “She turned on all the horrors of The Battle of Prague, that venerable shivaree, and waded chin deep in the blood of the slain.”¹⁴

(2) “The Pleasures of Folding Doors,” from Punch 3 (1842). The caption reads: “Hearing ‘The Battle of Prague’ played, with a running accompaniment of-One, and Two, and Three; -and One, and Two, and Three; -and ... ”

II

If the piano became a fixture in parlors from London to backwoods America, its impact on the education of young women was equally pervasive. Though learning to play the piano was a requirement for middle-class girls, tutelage in piano-playing seems to have had little place in the curriculum for boys. Although there were fine professional male composers and performers of music in nineteenth-century England, there seems to have been a bias against educating middle-class males for amateur instrumental performance. Perhaps this prejudice can be assigned to the spirit of John Locke, which brooded over English education even in the Victorian period. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education Locke had discounted musical training for young men:

Musick is thought to have some affinity with Dancing, and a good Hand, upon some Instruments, is by many People mightily valued. But it wastes so much of a young Man’s time, to gain but a moderate Skill in it; and engages often in such odd Company, that many think it much better spared: And I have, amongst Men of Parts and Business, so seldom heard any one commended, or esteemed for having an Excellency in Musick, that amongst all those things, that ever came into the List of Accomplishment, I think I may give it the last place.¹⁵

Such a bias against music as a waste of the ordinary English gentleman’s time can be seen in nineteenth-century English fiction. The native Englishmen who play instruments in British novels tend to be schoolmasters or clergymen, and in either case they tend to be seen as eccentric, though often admirable, examples of manhood. A number of Victorian memoirists have commented on this British prejudice against amateur male musicians. Mrs. C. S. Peel observed that “gentlemen also sang and duets were in high favour, but play the piano gentlemen did not, that being considered a task only fit for ladies and professional musicians.”¹⁶ And in his survey of music in Dickens’s work, James T. Lightwood recalls that in his own late Victorian experience, it was not considered “the correct thing for a gentleman to play the piano, though it might be all very well for the lower classes and the music teacher. Consequently we read of few male performers on the instrument.”¹⁷

It is important to emphasize that Lightwood’s generalization can apply only to amateur musicianship among the upper classes. Most professional pianists in Victorian England were male. But for amateur male musicians, instruments tended to have gender significance; thus gentlemen in Victorian novels tend to play instruments that, according to Nicholas Temperley, were generally considered masculine (“Ballroom and Drawing-Room Music,” p. 120). Mr. Mell in David Copperfield (1849-50) plays the flute; Prince Turveydrop in Bleak House (1852-53) plays the “kit” or small violin for his dancing classes; and Mr. Harding in The Warden (1855) plays the cello. Despite such positive examples, Victorian society rejected piano playing for the gentleman, and as we shall see, this prejudice gave rise to some strange conventions in the presentation of male virtuosi in some of the late Victorian novels that broach the topic of masculine versus feminine musicianship.

It would be difficult to determine exactly how many girls labored and wept over the pianoforte during the nineteenth century, but a variety of sources suggest that at least one struggling female pianist was typical of every respectably prosperous family. The example of the untalented but ever ready Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice indicates the extent to which musical accomplishment could be part of the young woman’s dowry and public identity. Maria Edgeworth sketches a picture of the forced labor behind such examples in her essay on “Female Accomplishments, Masters, and Governesses” in Practical Education (1798), when she urges the sensible mother to resist the temptation of turning her daughter into a musical “automaton for eight hours in every day for fifteen years, for the promise of hearing her, at the end of that time, pronounced the first private performer at the most fashionable and most crowded concert in London.”¹⁸ Edgeworth outlines the benefits of musical gifts — the “admission to fashionable company,” the increase of “a young lady’s chance of a prize in the matrimonial lottery,” and their “value as resources against ennui” (p. 111), but, like Locke, she sees little intrinsic value in their pursuit. The best accomplishments are those that suit the young woman for her long and dismal servitude in the home:

Women are peculiarly restrained in their situation, and in their employments, by the customs of society: to diminish the number of these employments, therefore, would be cruel; they should rather be encouraged, by all means, to cultivate those tastes which can attach them to their home, and which can preserve them from the miseries of dissipation. Every sedentary occupation must be valuable to those who are to lead sedentary lives; and every art, however trifling in itself, which tends to enliven and embellish domestic life, must be advantageous, not only to the female sex, but to society in general.

(Edgeworth, p. 112).

Thus the ultimate rationale for musical training for young women was the exercise of moral rather than aesthetic aptitudes: “Therefore the study of the fine arts, considered as a part of female education, should be attended to much less with a view to the acquisition of superior talents, than with a desire to give women a taste for industry, the habit of application, and a greater variety of employments” (Edgeworth, pp. 117-118). Through the remainder of the nineteenth century, advocacy of musical education for girls tended to sanction one or the other of the uses advocated by Edgeworth: piano expertise was a commodity in the marriage market, a form of necessary self-discipline, or an innocent entertainment in an otherwise vacuous existence.

Some of the most vocal critics of such limited views and their attendant coercion of female musicianship were the mid and late Victorian music critics and pedagogues (Mackerness, pp. 173-175). But criticism also came from another, unexpected quarter. In the middle of the century, the science of domestic economy began to evolve, and those experts who took to advising young women on their more mundane domestic duties found the contrast between the useful work of cooking and the useless work of playing the piano to be instructive.¹⁹ William Kitchiner began his Housekeeper’s Oracle (1829) with an exhortation to the young woman to season her training in the graces with training in household economy so that she “may learn the delectable Arcana of Domestic Affairs in as little time as is usually devoted to directing the position of her hands on a Piano-Forte . . . which will enable her to make the Cage of Matrimony as comfortable as the Net of Courtship was charming.”²⁰ And at the beginning of his treatise on The Modern Housewife or Ménagère (1850), Alexis Soyer has a satisfied husband comment on the ways in which his wife’s genteel accomplishments have been augmented by training in home economics: “She speaks two or three different languages tolerably well, and, as an amateur, is rather proficient in music, but her parents, very wisely considering household knowledge to be of greater importance, made her first acquainted with the keys of the storeroom before those of the piano.”²¹ According to a number of the Victorian treatises that advocated the necessity of thorough training in domesticity, then, conventional feminine musicianship was a trivial pursuit, an unworthy distraction from the vocation of managing a home.

Commercial and social developments could thus send the aspiring Victorian girl to music masters, but the philosophical, pedagogical, and practical oracles of the nineteenth century posed a dilemma for her. On the one hand, she was to exert herself to attain accomplishments that would enrich the home: on the other, she must remain a mere amateur — all her arts that were not utilitarian were suspect.

Early Victorian fiction tended to portray the young woman’s efforts at the piano unsympathetically. In significant instances, early Victorian novelists could entertain the possibility that musical talent might have serious implications in women’s lives, but in their predominant focus on the limitations of social climbing, they were more likely to treat a female character’s pretension to musical achievement satirically. Although Thackeray was a lover of music in his personal life, he presents piano playing as one of the more questionable successes of feminine education.²² Amelia Sedley embodies the slightness of talent and exertion required in the proper young lady’s musical education, and though her piano playing is a solace, it involves little more than passive doodling on the keys: she sits “for long evening hours, touching, to the best of her simple art, melancholy harmonies on the keys, and weeping over them in silence”) Vanity Fair, chap. 59). No matter how inept, Amelia’s feeble artifice expresses the truth of her feeling. Becky Sharp’s proficiency, on the other hand, is heartless: singing the religious songs of Mozart to Lady Steyne “with such sweetness and tenderness that the lady, lingering round the piano, sate down by its side, and listened until the tears rolled down her eyes”) Vanity Fair, chap. 50), Becky ruthlessly deploys the calculation in her art.

In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre a similar distinction between art as feeling and as artifice is set up by the contrast between Jane’s piano playing and that of Blanche Ingram. Jane plays the piano only as well as a governess must, while Blanche exhibits her social superiority through a feverish virtuosity as she “seated herself with proud grace at the piano, spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude, [and] commenced a brilliant prelude; talking meantime.”²³ Such brilliance is not only false but unseemly, and if it evokes a certain censoriousness in Brontë, it causes even greater ambivalence about feminine aggressiveness in other Victorian novelists.

Thackeray’s attraction to the passivity of the feminine stereotype makes his contrast between Amelia and Becky more anxious than Brontë’s pairing of Jane and Blanche. His treatment of women at the piano exhibits his characteristic problem in balancing the good woman against the wicked woman in Vanity Fair. Brontë can strike some balance by giving the unmusical Jane a living to earn and extraordinary expressive skill in another fine art, drawing. But in Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre alike the young woman who uses her artistic skill for social advancement is seen as nothing better than a schemer. Indeed those women who are depicted as conscious artists tend to be “performers” through and through, seeking an unseemly domination over their masculine audiences.

III

Dickens’s treatment of women and music presents a complex range of variations on the dilemma of whether feminine musical facility is a trifling emblem of marital eligibility or an achievement of talent and insight. In David Copperfield, Dora is so inept that she must play at the guitar rather than the more demanding piano (see figure 3). The impracticality of her cultivation of musical attainments at the expense of common sense calls forth a critique of the inadequacies of feminine education that Dickens reiterated often in his fiction and journalism.²⁴ David remarks on Dora’s failure to think seriously about cooking, “We fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and the songs about never leaving off dancing, ta ra la! and were as happy as the week was long. I occasionally wished I could venture to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart a little too much like a plaything.”²⁵

Dickens often rattles the keys of the storeroom in his characterization of women, and nowhere is this more apparent than in his portrait of Esther Summerson as the epitome of the efficient housewife in Bleak House. Esther can appreciate the talents of others — she listens quietly when the gentle and impractical Ada plays and sings with Richard in their first days at Bleak House — but she is also aware that Harold Skimpole’s musical facility is one more sign of the childishness of genteel people who use music to while away empty hours.²⁶

(3) “My Child-Wife’s Old Compani on” from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, illustrations by H. K. Browne (1849-50).

Thus Dickens is apt to portray domestic piano playing as childish. Nevertheless, he had a genuine appreciation for music, and sought to master the accordion — an appropriately popular and cheerful instrument.²⁷ The nature of music’s appeal to him can be seen in his depiction of hearty men who sing at pubs or clubs or who perform in music halls or circuses. And women’s musicianship can be redeemed when associated with the active, practical running of affairs or the provision of communal entertainment. It seems likely that Dickens’s toleration of some feminine efforts at the piano may have been influenced by his affection for his sister Fanny, who was remarkably well-trained as a pianist and vocalist. It was Fanny who received tuition at the Royal Academy of Music when Dickens went to the blacking warehouse. She studied under Ignaz Moscheles, one of the most famous of Victorian pianists, and she seems to have been able to earn her way through music — working as a “sub professor” and giving occasional concerts. She eventually married a fellow student and singer, and they made a joint career from music, moving to Manchester both to teach and to sing in a church.²⁸ Dickens’s admiration for the bond of music in her marriage may be reflected in Caddy Jellyby’s learning to play the piano in order to accompany children at her young husband’s dancing school.

Thus in Dickens’s fiction music as a practical endeavor, used in conjugal mutual support, differs from music as an ornament for lightheaded husband-hunters. Esther Summerson openly approves of Caddy’s labors to master the pianoforte; music for her is, after all, a species of home economics: “I conscientiously believed, dancing-master’s wife though she was, and dancing-mistress though in her limited ambition she aspired to be, she had struck out a natural, wholesome, loving course of industry and perseverance that was quite as good as a Mission.”²⁹ But although Esther embodies the more acceptable mid-Victorian image of true female accomplishment in her efficient bustling about the house, her lack of any means of overt self-expression — of any music beyond the tinkling of Dame Durden’s keys — may account for a lack of resonance in her characterization.

Dickens’s depictions of women and music generally followed mid-Victorian prejudices about woman’s place in society. But on occasion his fiction recognizes the deeper power of music under a woman’s hand. His portrayal of Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield strikes a note that echoes in a number of later nineteenth-century novels. Rosa’s performance on the harp dramatizes a capacity to feel that has been perverted by intense repression and suffering:

I don’t know what it was, in her touch or voice, that made that song the most unearthly I have ever heard in my life, or can imagine. There was something fearful in the reality of it. It was as if it had never been written, or set to music, but sprung out of the passion within her; which found imperfect utterance in the low sounds of her voice, and crouched again when all was still. I was dumb when she leaned beside the harp again, playing it, but not sounding it, with her right hand.

(chap. 29).

The great male virtuoso figures of the Victorian period were often depicted in demonic terms, suggesting a sexual source for sublime musical rapture. For one thing, the popular Victorian heroes of music were thought to have obtained almost diabolical skill. Paganini, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Rubinstein, and — later — Paderewski seemed inhumanly masterful during their concerts. Moreover, their allure seemed most potent for the females in their audiences. Even though the feminine adulation of Liszt and others gave rise to a number of cartoons in comic periodicals both in England and on the Continent, the sexual implications of their appeal could also be a serious concern (see figures 4 and 5). Thus the fictional treatment of women and the demonic in music suggests the fear that too powerful an inspiration can overwhelm impressionable female hearers, often in pathological ways.

In English literature, sublime rapture could sometimes originate in female figures such as Coleridge’s damsel with a dulcimer and Dickens’s Rosa Dartle. In such cases, the demonic threat passes from female to male rather than from male to female: the damsel of “Kubla Khan” inspires an ecstatic vision that gives rise to the warning to the rapt poet, “Beware! Beware!” And Rosa seems ready to tear Steerforth apart, even though she is the one who bears the scar of his childhood violence. Despite the threat of suppressed animal energy in Rosa Dartle (her passion “crouched again when all was still”), Dickens honors its eloquence and pathos.

When he returns to the image of feminine musical passion again, however, he makes it less conscious and he places it under the control of a male master. In this permutation of the theme, the woman cannot manage her own talent and is therefore especially vulnerable to the unscrupulous male musician. She is an angel, too innocent to recognize the evil around her. Such depictions of extraordinary musical gifts provide additional evidence of the doubleness of the Victorian myth of woman as angel and devil.³⁰ In The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), John Jasper accompanies Rosa Bud with a hypnotic insistence on a single note which places her under his spell: “As Jasper watched the pretty lips, and ever and again hinted the one note, as though it were a low whisper from himself, the voice became less steady, until all at once the singer broke into a burst of tears, and shrieked out, with her hands over her eyes: ‘I can’t bear this! I am frightened! Take me away!’ “³¹ In Drood the countervailing musical impulse is found in Mr. Crisparkle, a valiant singer whose music is healthily communal, liberating, and English; nevertheless, the image of the wily male music master, seducing the woman through music mastered in some exotic birthplace, is the more insistent and compelling one.

(4) “Liszt and his Sabre” from La Vie Parisienne, 3 April 1886.

(5) A Nineteenth-Century Cartoon of Paderewski

It is this stereotype of the foreign musician that mirrors in Victorian fiction that bias against music on the part of middle-and upper-class males mentioned earlier. Images of powerful musicians from foreign lands can be found in a number of Victorian novels that treat woman’s potentially demonic affinity with music as a susceptibility to corruption by an alien whose talent is likely to be unscrupulous. George DuMaurier’s Trilby (1894) is, of course, the locus classicus for this motif (see figure 6). Musically gifted villains from such sinister places as “the East” and the Mediterranean also turn up in Bulwer-Lytton’s Strange Story (1862) and Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White (1860). Such sensational manipulators of music as an instrument for sexual domination illustrate an awakened recognition of its significance outside the drawing room. The increasing attribution of demonic musical power to Svengali-like figures perhaps involved a growing awareness that women’s music might embody genuine power. The question of who was to wield that power became paramount in assessing the ability of women to take charge of their own lives.

Certain it is that images of men and women joined in making music together suggest a struggle for domination in many late-Victorian novels. Even when women’s musicality is presented as an avenue for her autonomy in society, its depiction is strained and unconvincing. George Meredith, one of the most musically sophisticated of late Victorian novelists, tried to present an affirmative image of women’s music in Sandra Belloni (1864), but although he wished to use the extraordinary musical gifts of his heroine as a foil for social criticism, he was incapable of keeping her in proportion. In reaction against her shallow English lover, the musically gifted heroine loses her voice. Her singing — a gift of her Italian heritage — is eventually allied with her heroic efforts in the liberation of her native land. But in the revolutionary conclusion of Meredith’s complicated novel, the heroine becomes a figure more suitable for the opera stage than the boundaries of realist fiction. Though Meredith viewed women’s music as a necessary antidote to the masculine British stolidity that was always the target of his comedy, he could portray its power only through posturings in a wildly improbable plot.

IV

The Victorian novelist who explored women’s music most successfully within the confines of firm social observation and psychological realism was George Eliot. She considered herself to be only an amateur musician, but her characterization of musical women negotiates a variety of possibilities beyond amateurism, mesmerism, or idealization.

(6) “Au Clair de la Lune” from Trilby by George Du Maurier, illustrations by George Du Maurier (1894).

George Eliot’s biography and letters reveal a life-long attachment to playing the piano — as a source of inner recreation, as a goad to self-discipline, and as an expression of the deepest spiritual harmony. In many ways her notions about the uses of piano playing show her to be a daughter of Maria Edgeworth. The Edgeworthian motifs of recreation and self-discipline are always near when she talks of her own playing. Thus during her first stay in Geneva, she describes her regimen to Sarah Bray: “My want of health has obliged me to renounce all application. I take walks, play on the piano, read Voltaire, talk to my friends, and just take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft” (Letters, I, 321).

But although Eliot shared Edgeworth’s emphasis on recreation and discipline, she also appreciated the communal powers of musical performance. In 1850, she wrote to Charles Lewes in delighted anticipation of their playing duets together (Letters, III, 125-126), though she could not be content with her facility:

I was a very idle practiser, and I often regret now that when I had abundant time and opportunity for hours of piano-playing, I used them so little. I have about eighteen sonatas and symphonies of Beethoven, I think, but I shall be delighted to find that you can play them better than I can. I wish Bertie could be exhorted to work at his music, since he appears to have a decided ear for it. I am very sensitive to blunders and wrong notes, and instruments out of tune, but I have never played much from ear, though I used to play from memory a great deal.

(Letters, III, 177-178).

Thus the emphasis on discipline is always in counterpoint to George Eliot’s emphasis on the delight of music. She could not resist linking the ideal of habitual exactitude — the only reliable stay against moral confusion — with an aspiration for emotional spontaneity. In her experience, music was the perfect arena for testing the relationships between these frequently conflicting values, for she was not only a rapt enthusiast, she was aware that piano-playing was one form of art in which her skill was incommensurate with the intensity of her feeling.

The result of the discrepancy between George Eliot’s musical aspiration and achievement lends a note of poignant vanity to her biography. Frederick Lehmann, a friend with whom she often played violin duets, described her for the official record as a “very fair pianist, not gifted, but enthusiastic, and extremely painstaking” (Letters, VIII, 385). Off the record, Lehmann was much less kind. In her memoirs of literary life in mid-century London, L. B. Walford quotes him to a quite different effect (she is recounting her observation of George Eliot at a private concert given by Rubinstein):

His playing was glorious, and among the rest George Eliot gave herself up to it entirely.

That it cast a spell over her was obvious. Her massive brow unbent, and a softened expression stole over her heavy features. She did not look the same woman as when last I saw her.

Music, it was said, always had on her a great effect. “Indeed, she is a real lover of it,” said Mr. Lehmann, sitting down beside us in an interval. “The pity is, that she rather prides herself on being a performer too, as I know to my cost. I play duets with her sometimes. Well, they are odd performances, those duets. She has feeling, certainly she has feeling — but her execution is — erratic;” — and he laughed a little. “However,” he continued, “it gives pleasure to one auditor at any rate, for whenever we get through a whole page without a breakdown, Lewis [sic] claps his hands and cries ‘Exquisite!’ “³²

No matter how deluded it may have seemed to outsiders, George Eliot’s pursuit of pianistic skill never slackened. Indeed, returning to the piano keyboard helped her overcome sorrow at the death of George Henry Lewes, even while it strengthened her bond with John W. Cross. In his Life of Eliot, Cross recalls the turning point in her grieving: “At the end of May [1879] I induced her to play on the piano at Widey for the first time; and she played regularly after that whenever I was there, which was generally once or twice a-week.”³³ We can reasonably surmise that she kept at it until she died.

Given this biographical context, it is not surprising that George Eliot’s novels are rich in musical allusion. In Mill on the Floss (1860), for example, music is a pervasive source of imagery, characterization, and plot.³⁴ Eliot’s other novels feature a number of case studies of women whose musical responses indicate either great resources of character or total vacuity. Thus in Middlemarch, Dorothea is gifted with a rich, low musical voice, while Rosamond Vincy, who cannot sing very well, has a surface dexterity at the piano, learned by rote from a good teacher at her country school: “Rosamond, with the executant’s instinct, had seized his manner of playing, and gave forth his large rendering of noble music with the precision of an echo. It was almost startling, heard for the first time.”³⁵ And in Felix Holt (1866), Mrs. Transome’s girlhood accomplishments, which included singing and playing “a little,” have “become as valueless as old-fashioned stucco ornaments, of which the substance was never worth anything, while the form is no longer to the taste of any living mortal.”³⁶

Thus in the tradition of Thackeray, Brontë, and Dickens, Eliot satirized conventional feminine musicianship. But even in satire her fiction measured more than the limits of musical education for girls in a culture that could not take women seriously; it also measured the frailty of consciences that have never been touched by the largeness of emotion that music could express.

While music is a recurrent motif in all of George Eliot’s fiction, in Daniel Deronda (1874-76) her preoccupation with its implications for the development of woman’s character becomes central to the structure and meaning of the novel. Here Eliot’s main moral and sociological preoccupations come together in a definitive exploration of the varieties of musical experience available in late Victorian society. Albert R. Cirillo notes that George Eliot found in Feuerbach’s notion of music as the disciplined “language of feeling” a philosophical foundation that informs her treatment of the positive values of music in the novel.³⁷ And Shirley F. Levenson further elaborates on George Eliot’s perception that such a concept of music countered deeply ingrained English moral tone-deafness: “There is a formal, superficial quality about the English society which Eliot is describing that works against the development of music because music . . . is associated in [Daniel Deronda] with the expression of deep feeling.”³⁸

This conflict between the convention of music as a feminine social grace and Eliot’s ideal of music as socially significant feeling animates the contrast between Gwendolen Harleth’s ability to amuse through playing and singing in the drawing room and the transcendent musical gifts of Mirah Cohen — gifts that require a more natural amphitheater (indeed Daniel first hears her voice while he is rowing on the river). Although F. R. Leavis has divided Deronda between Gwendolen and Daniel, I am inclined to emphasize the narrative alternation between Gwendolen and Mirah.³⁹ In any case, as George Eliot shifts attention from Gwendolen’s struggle to salvage her fortunes through music to Mirah’s role in helping Daniel to find his musical heritage, there unfolds a complex analysis of the cultural and psychic situations of Victorian women who seek to control their destinies by exploiting their own talents.

Gwendolen is shown as almost irremediably shallow in her approach to music. Herr Klesmer, the benign Liszt/Rubinstein prototype in the novel, nearly destroys her self-esteem with his critique of her deficiencies in feeling and skill.⁴⁰ And Klesmer emphasizes the fact that Gwendolen’s limitations are not simply the results of her nationality and class: Klesmer’s student, Catherine Arrowpoint, has taken her musical education beyond the limitations of the conventional school-girl attainments. She has made herself a suitable partner for Klesmer in four-handed duets, and eventually in life. Her choice of such a mate, one with whom she will share a musical vocation, upsets the prejudices of her class against male musicians and, incidentally, provides one of George Eliot’s rare depictions of an independent woman making a vocational decision that does not immure her in the home.

Although Gwendolen Harleth must be held accountable for her musical limitations, she escapes the moral failure of prototypes like Rosamond Vincy and Mrs. Transome by learning to value the kind of inspiration and skill that she will never have. She struggles for self-recognition after she has been told by Herr Klesmer that her musical ambitions are based upon too fragile a talent — and also too frail a concept of “what excellence is” — to achieve “more than mediocrity.”⁴¹ The images of the music room in which he leaves her after their interview impress into her consciousness a sense that up to now she has only been playing: “All the memories, all objects, the pieces of music displayed, the open piano — the very reflection of herself in the glass — seemed no better than the packed-up shows of a departing fair” (chap. 23). Despite the disintegration of her scheme to become a musician in order to escape marriage with Grandcourt, however, Gwendolen is still not without musical recourse. When she goes to Daniel for advice he urges her to take up her lessons again.⁴² That duty, like the other duties which can give her life meaning, will put her in touch with the feelings of others, and with her own feelings as well.

But George Eliot is interested in the mystical as well as the moral aspects of women’s music, embodying this interest in Mirah Cohen. In the contrast between Mirah and Gwendolen, she points to the relationships among the main factors in musical achievement — the habitual discipline required for artistic expression, the self-sacrifice necessary for the choice of music as a vocation, and the native genius that is somehow validated through suffering. The combination of these factors is, however, alien to native English soil, and the musicians of Daniel Deronda, like the musical villains in the Victorian sensation novels mentioned above, come from foreign places. Music in Daniel Deronda is specifically Jewish; “klesmer” is the Yiddish word for musician (Levenson, p. 137) and of course Mirah is Jewish.

In thus evoking the mysteries of music, George Eliot shares the late Victorian impulse to appeal to the exotic and demonic, but she sees this appeal as positive rather than pathological. As a matter of fact, she locates the power of song in a sort of racial consciousness that transcends the limitations of an English culture mired in commercialism and caste. To be sure, there is some narrative strain in the conception of Mirah as an innocent girl who happens to be possessed by a native talent that transports all hearers (her training with Klesmer involves strengthening her natural voice rather than the drudgery of practicing scales). And Mirah’s last-chapter marriage to Daniel so that they can work together in the East holds less promise for her own independence than does Catherine Arrowpoint’s marriage to Klesmer. With Mirah’s story we are caught up in the book of romance; nevertheless, Eliot turns a new page by suggesting that Deronda’s liberation must lie in his submission to the music of the women of a dispossessed race. His determination to treat music and its values as profound gifts, worthy of all his manly striving, marks an important innovation in Victorian fiction.

George Eliot’s last novel reverses some of the stereotypes in the Victorian evocation of women and music even as it falters before the challenge of finding a fully satisfying resolution. Perhaps there was no resolution; perhaps the competing claims of domesticity, sexuality, isolated training, and communal cooperation must remain a cacophony in women’s lives. But if Mirah’s last act is impossibly hopeful, it follows close upon George Eliot’s narrative of another woman’s musical achievement that is more believable, if more tragic. The Princess Alcharisi, Daniel’s mother, embodies the sad possibility that women might never be able to rise above their mundane circumstances on the wings of song without suffering drastic consequences. Alcharisi is a singer who has abandoned family ties to pursue her art, and the result is both exultant and forbidding. The epigraph to the chapter in which Daniel finally confronts his long-lost mother allegorizes the situation of most women who cannot indulge their impulse to sing:

Daniel’s mother has chosen to escape the “insect-labour” of the domestic round through singing her own song.⁴³ But the price she has paid is the loss of her son; their reunion is not a triumph of love surviving separation but a dry recognition of separate and unalterable fates. If Alcharisi is not fulfilled as a woman, however, she possesses the dignity conferred by choosing her own destiny, and George Eliot is unwilling to soften the result. A woman artist, she seems to admit, must lead an uneasy life, but she will at least know who she is.

As the fictional preoccupation with women’s potentialities became more imperative through the Victorian period, so did novelists’ probing of music as one of the main areas in which the female sex might exercise initiative, expertise, and talent. In earlier explorations of women’s experience, the piano had been used as a prop to illustrate the foibles of social climbing and feminine artifice. In later fictions, feminine aspirations for success in performance were likely to illustrate the meagerness of women’s opportunities. And eventually the possibility that music might become an instrument for feminine rebellion presented itself to the Victorian imagination in terms that recall Coleridge’s damsel “wailing for her demon-lover.” In some ways the rapt female musicians of late-Victorian romance and melodrama — most of them untrained singers rather than players of sophisticated instruments like the piano — could be reassuring. Although their native woodnotes could be made to follow a sinister tune, their music could be found so eccentric as to pose no threat to the general social order. Or, like Jenny Lind, they could be assimilated into the myth of the ministering angel whose holy song signified undying spiritual passion. The image of women as conscious, trained musicians involved sacrificing home and safety for the risks of a difficult apprenticeship, unpredictable inspiration, and bohemian circumstances. Even George Eliot feared the disruptions of this kind of rebellion and placed it under the protection of a strong hero. Ultimately, then, the art of music could never be a reliable escape for women in Victorian fiction. Indeed, it may be best to conclude this survey with George Gissing’s clear-eyed assessment of the limits of women’s musical education in The Odd Women. There Rhoda Nunn inquires of a postulant in her typing school, “Did you ever have piano lessons?” When the answer is “No,” Miss Nunn responds with sisterly sympathy. But her sympathy is not for the deprivation of a social grace or of the chance to indulge in passionate inspiration. It is for the economic handicap: “No more did I, and I was sorry for it when I went to typewriting. The fingers have to be light and supple and quick.”⁴⁴