Monatshefte

Companions like the present volume are more than just advanced introductions; they also seek to give legitimation—perhaps long overdue—to their topics. As Delia da Sousa Correa notes in her thorough and informative introduction, "[w]ithin literary criticism, relations between literature and the visual arts have continued to receive more critical attention than those between literature and music, notwithstanding the vitality of the interdisciplinary field of literature and music studies, and music and literature's shared reference points in critical theory" (4). Indeed, on the one hand, visuality and verbal discursivity maintain a certain hegemony, at least in Western culture, over acoustic events. On the other hand, sound's fleeting temporalities, nonverbal forms of signification, and directly sensuous appeal to the experiential body put up a kind of resistance to the conceptual vocabulary of many cultural practices. However, this very resistance, once hypostatized in (post-)romantic metaphysics as absolute music's ineffability, contains its own deconstructive impetus. Thus, music has always motivated other disciplines to translate it into other arts, discourses, and contexts. Consequently, composer biographies, specific compositions, and historically grounded performance practice have been explored as topics in fiction, drama, poetry, and opera, while structural components like harmony, rhythm, and even polyphony or the sonata form have left traces in literary forms. If, as Walter Pater famously suggested, all the other arts aspire to the condition of music, then literary texts may use their self-reflexive powers to reveal something in music that may not immediately be articulated by the compositions themselves, while music, in turn, lets us listen to auditory layers—literally or metaphorically—in the written or spoken word itself.

Addressing such and many other considerations, the contributions to the present volume map out a vast territory of the multiple interactions between music and literature from various historical, interdisciplinary, and multi-medial perspectives. Randomly picked examples include "Music and the Literature of Science in Seventeenth-Century England" (Penelope Gouk), "National Aspiration: Samson Agonistes [End Page 117] Transformed in Handel's Samson" (Ruth Smith), "Music and the Rise of Narrative" (Lawrence Kramer), "Wagner and French Poetry from Nerval to Mallarmé: The Power of Opera Unheard" (Peter Dayan), and "Origins and Destinations: A Future for Literature and Music" (Michael L. Klein). Due to the sheer number of contributions (sixty-five in all), it would be impossible, and indeed unfair, to single out specific entries for discussion. Instead, I'd like to highlight synoptically some of the Companion's general characteristics.

Rather than trying to analyze the affiliations between music and literature in a systematic framework, the volume wisely lines up an impressive list of specific case studies. Preceded by introductory chapters, they are arranged not by (often problematic) periodization labels but more simply and convincingly by centuries, from before 1500 to the time after 1900, including the immediate present. In a way, these concise, densely argued, and insightful essays function like explanatory monads as they focus on specific details of a writer or composer, artifact, genre, or practice, illuminating wider issues of music's presence in poetry, novels, drama, opera, and vice versa. Among the critical paradigms of more recent times informing these approaches directly or indirectly are the (no longer) New or Critical Musicology and Sound Studies. Asserting that music always and necessarily means something that can be articulated in the verbal language of cultural hermeneutics, the former situates music as a performative practice in multiple contexts of history, politics, class, ethnicity, and gender, while the latter listens to music as sonic events always already open to mediatechnological reproducibility and transmission in changing cultural horizons. Accordingly, keywords featured in this collection include, among many others: poetry, the novel, song, the opera; liturgy and courtly subjectivities; gender roles and ideology; status and hierarchy; analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and deconstruction; the body, affects, and feelings; language, signification, and meaning. Although canonical and non-canonical manifestations of Western classical music receive most of the critical attention, challenges to its dominant role articulated by popular music and postcolonial voices also receive adequate representation. The importance of genres characteristic of media-technological (post-)modernity is highlighted by discussions of the radio play, phonographic music, and soundtracked fiction.

Some of the contributions address wider, more general topics; others may strike one as overly specialized, even narrow in focus, but largely the Companion manages to balance the essays' scopes. The result is a kind of conceptual montage effect where readers are carried from topic to topic, method to method across cultural history. Since the case studies are largely self-contained, they may serve as quick reference tools but are best appreciated as instances of mutual illumination, by which readers may skip from essay to essay, drawing their own conclusions and discovering new and insightful connections of their own. What these contributions underscore is the mutually inspiring dynamic of music and literature, their inherent excess of meaning, which allows these arts continually to 'travel' beyond their own aesthetic territory, cultural-historical origins, and originally intended audiences. These conceptual journeys rarely, if ever, lead to the construction of some kind of homogenized supra-art; rather, the transgressive trajectories of music and literature also mark ineradicable differences, even unbridgeable gaps, between their topical materials, technical strategies, cultural values, and audience effects. [End Page 118]

After introductory essays on theoretical issues (intertextuality, narrative, French theory), the volume, despite its promisingly general title, focuses predominantly on English-language writers, especially after the Middle Ages: from Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, and Shelley to classical modernists like D.H. Lawrence, V. Woolf, E.M. Forster, Samuel Beckett, and contemporary writers. Representatives from other cultures, notably Proust and Mallarmé (both immensely important) or Goethe (in this context, less significant), are rather the exception. A much more balanced range can be found among the composers and musical traditions, exemplified foremost by Wagner, but also by Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and others. As the editor rather casually remarks: "As a one-volume resource, the volume has a dominant focus on Western music and British literature because it would be impossible, within the space of a single book, adequately to account for the breadth of current work in world literature and international music" (6). Certainly, there are practical reasons (the already considerable length of the volume and its hefty price tag) that necessarily limit the scope, but a major reason why the Companion's topic is so vital is exactly its global extent, and it is disappointing to see some important European and non-Western traditions not covered satisfactorily. For instance, truly important and musically inspired writers like Friedrich Hölderlin, Wilhelm Heinse, E.T.A. Hoffmann, W.H. Wackenroder, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Thomas Bernhard—to name just a few in this review for a journal of German literature and culture—are only mentioned relatively briefly or not at all. Japan, too, could have offered a rich tradition of intersections between writing and music/nature sounds, ranging from the Genji Monogatari to Yukio Mishima's novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and even to the conversations between contemporary writer Haruki Murakami and conductor Seiji Ozawa. A notable lack of geographic diversity similarly marks the extensive team of contributors, most of whom are from the United Kingdom and the United States.

But these concerns notwithstanding, the Companion marks a milestone in the scholarship on music and literature. By reviewing the historical origins and development of their affiliations, the volume suggestively points to their future promise, thus underscoring the centrality of this topic for interdisciplinary research in comparative literature and musicology, cultural studies, media critique, and general aesthetics. It is hoped that the Companion will motivate many other scholars to continue the important work begun here.