Phyllis Weliver & Katharine Ellis 
Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century 

A new wave of scholarship inspired by the ways the writers and musicians of the long nineteenth century themselves approached the relationship between music and words.


Words and Notes encourages a new wave of scholarship inspired by the ways writers and musicians of the long nineteenth century themselves approached the relationship between music and words. Contributors to the volume engage in two dialogues: with nineteenth-century conceptions of word-music relations, and with each other. Criss-crossing disciplinary boundaries, the authors of the book’s eleven essays address new questions relating to listening, imagining and performing music, the act of critique, and music’s links with philosophy and aesthetics. The many points of intersection are elucidated in an editorial introduction and via a reflective afterword. Fiction and poetry, musicography, philosophy, music theory, science and music analysis all feature, as do traditions within English, French and German studies.

Wide-ranging material foregrounds musical memory, soundscape and evocation; performer dilemmas over the words in Satie’s piano music; the musicality of fictional and non-fictional prose; text-setting and the rights of poet vs. composer; the rich novelistic and critical testimony of audience inattention at the opera;German philosophy’s potential contribution to musical listening; and Hoffmann’s send-ups of the serious music-lover. Throughout, music – its composition, performance and consumption – emerges as a profoundly physical and social force, even when it is presented as the opposite.


PHYLLIS WELIVER is Associate Professor of English, Saint Louis University.


KATHARINE ELLIS is Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at the University of Bristol.


Contributors: Helen Abbott, Noelle Chao, Delia da Sousa Correa, Peter Dayan, Katharine Ellis, David Evans, Annegret Fauser, Jon-Tomas Godin, Cormac Newark, Matthew Riley, Emma Sutton, Shafquat Towheed, Susan Youens, Phyllis Weliver

Table of Content

Introduction: Approaches to Word-Music Studies of the Long Nineteenth Century – Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis

Losing Sense, Making Music: What Erik Satie’s Music and Poetry do for Each Other – Peter Dayan

Not Listening in Paris: Critical and Fictional Lapses of Attention at the Opera – Cormac Newark

New Expectations: How to Listen to Sonata Form, 1800-1860 – Jon-Tomas Godin

The Science of Musical Memory: Vernon Lee and the Remembrance of Sounds Past – Shafquat Towheed

Musical Listening in
The Mysteries of Udolpho – Noelle Chao

Katherine Mansfield and Nineteenth-Century Musicality – Delia da Sousa Correa

E.T.A. Hoffmann Beyond the ‘Paradigm Shift’: Music and Irony in the Novellas 1815-1819 –

Fiction as Musical Critique: Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out and the Case of Wagner – Emma Sutton

Théodore de Banville and the Mysteries of Song – David Evans

Performing Poetry as Music: How Composers Accept Baudelaire’s Invitation to Song – Helen Abbott

The Grit in the Oyster, or How to Quarrel with a Poet – Susan Youens

Afterword: Wording Notes: Musical Marginalia in the Guise of an Afterword – Annegret Fauser

About the author

ANNEGRET FAUSER, Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill