While prepping for tomorrow’s class, I came across an interesting note on Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (which everyone should delve into, if only because it is available online for free).
Woolf describes the mental state of her heroine, a truly genius piano player, as follows:
Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion, her mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded and combined with the spirit of the whitish boards on deck, with the spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven Op. 112, even with the spirit of poor William Cowper there at Olney.
This is from the text of the original edition, and contains a small error. Beethoven’s Op. 112 is a work for chorus and orchestra; Woolf likely mixed it up with Op. 111, a piano sonata. She wrote a letter to Saxon Sydney-Turner in 1920, asking, “I wonder if you would once more tell me the number of the Beethoven sonata that Rachel plays in the Voyage Out — I sent the copy I marked to American, and now they’re bringing out a new edition here — I can’t remember what you told me — I say Op. 112 — It can’t be that.”
Woolf corrected the subsequent editions to Op. 111, which is a really lovely piece of music and which has been compared to jazz.
Here it is, as played by Maria Yudina, in 3 parts:
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