The diary of Virginia Woolf

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

9-10

text excerpt

Today Ethel comes.  On Monday I went to hear her rehearse at Lady Lewis's.  A vast Portland Place house with the cold wedding cake Adams' plaster: shabby red carpets; flat surfaces washed with dull greens.  The rehearsal was in a long room with a bow window looking on, in fact in, to other houses - iron staircases, chimneys, roofs - a barren brick outlook.  There was a roaring fire in the Adams grate.  Lady L. now a shapeless sausage, & Mrs Hunter, a swathed satin sausage, sat side by side on a sofa.  Ethel stood at the piano in the window, in her battered felt, in her jersey & short skirt conducting with a pencil. There was a drop at the end of her nose.  Miss Suddaby was singing the Soul, & I observed that she went through precisely the same attitudes of ecstasy and inspiration in the room, as in a hall. There were two young or youngish men.  Ethel's pince nez rode nearer & nearer the tip of her nose.  She sang now & then; & once taking the bass, made a cat squalling sound - but everything she does with such forthrightness directness that there is nothing ridiculous.  She loses self-consciousness completely.  She seems all vitalised; all energised: she knocks her fat from side to side. Strides rhythmincally down the room to signify to Elizabeth that this is the Greek melody; strides back; Now the furniture moving begins, she said, referring to some supernatural gambols connected with the prisoner's escape, or defiance or death. I suspect the music is too literary - too stressed - too didactic for my taste.  But I am always impressed by the fact that it is music - I mean that she has spun these coherent chords harmonies melodies out of her so practical vigorous, strident mind.  What if she should be a great composer? This fantastic idea is to her the merest commonplace: it is the fabric of her being.  As she conducts, she hears music like Beethoven's.  As she strides & turns & wheels about to us perched mute on chairs she thinks this is about the most important event now takign place in London. And perhaps it is.

excerpt from 'The diary of Virginia Woolf' pp. 9-10 (361 words)

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1444835786234