Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E. M. Forster (review)

Michelle Fillion’s study offers a very comprehensive and perceptive assessment of the role of music in E. M. Forster’s life and work, with a focus on his novels. Approaching this interdisciplinary word and music study as a musicologist, Fillion analyses the different roles and functions that music plays in Forster’s texts, and shows how music ‘is woven in numerous ways into the plot, symbolism, narration, context, and structure of all his novels’ (p. xviii). Her main hypothesis is that ‘music allowed Forster to transcend the precision of the word and, in his most visionary moments of ‘difficult rhythm’, to open the novel to the timeless and the ineffable—and ultimately to the ambiguities of modern life’ (p. xvii). Music thereby served Forster as an additional means of expression in his contribution to literary modernism.

In chapter 5, for example, Fillion reads Beethoven’s music as the emblem of both the New Woman and modernist intent (p. 92). Here she echoes and expands David Medalie’s work on Forster as a modernist, and goes beyond Dixie King, who merely states that, in A Room with a View, ‘playing vaguely indicates character’ (‘The Influence of Forster’s Maurice on Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, in John Henry Stape (ed.), E. M. Forster: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (Mountfield, 1997), p. 93; originally published in Contemporary Literature, 23 (1982)). This musicological angle is the book’s greatest strength, as it greatly enriches the mainly literary scholarship on Forster. At the same time Fillion finely balances analytical depth and readability, as her concrete musical analyses are as broad as possible and as detailed as necessary in the context of Forster’s work, which makes her book highly useful not only for musicologists, but for literary and cultural studies as well.

In her methodology Fillion combines music history, analysis, and performing practices with literary criticism on Forster and English modernism. She also engages with cultural history, narrative theory, biography, and gender studies as appropriate (pp. xviii–xix). The resulting interdisciplinary connections are very informative; at times, however, she sacrifices depth for breadth, so that the literary analysis of some of Forster’s works falls short of the musical interpretation.

In her first chapter Fillion provides a detailed musical biography of Forster, describing his skills as an amateur pianist (considerable) and his musical interests (mainly Western classical music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), and placing Forster’s musical training and taste in the context of both his literary work and the prevailing aesthetics of early twentieth-century England. Fillion writes that ‘Forster’s likes and dislikes in music are key to its role as signifier in his fiction and essays’, and adds that ‘[a]s a Cambridge student and budding novelist, Forster’s musical taste was very much that of an educated fin de siècle Londoner, with Beethoven and Wagner as the twin poles’ (p. 20). Beethoven and Wagner are thus also the twin poles of Fillion’s study of musical influences and sources for Forster’s writing. Out of the nine chapters in the book, three deal directly with Beethoven, while Wagner’s works and aesthetics are at the core of chapter 3 and provide a constant point of reference throughout the book. Chapter 1 thus serves as a solid foundation for the rest of the book, showing that ‘Forster’s musical biography establishes his credentials as a writer with music’ (p. 23).

This is apparent as early as the second chapter, tracing the genesis of the opera scene in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) to Forster’s recollections of the 12 March 1903 performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s 1835 tragic opera Lucia di Lammermoor, which he attended at the Teatro Verdi in Florence. As Fillion argues, the Lucia scene is ‘the structural and symbolic pillar of the novel’ (p. 25), informing the main character’s development and a comment on the...