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List of composers in literature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This list includes fictional representations of real (named) composers and musicians, and fictional characters under other names that are generally agreed to be based on a specific composer, or sometimes a composite of several.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Arnold Bax

  • Rebecca West: Harriet Hume (1929) (The title character based on Harriet Cohen)[3]

Ludwig van Beethoven

Bix Beiderbecke

William Sterndale Bennett

Hector Berlioz

  • Anthony Burgess: Mozart & the Wolf Gang (1991)[5]
  • Jude Morgan: Symphony (2006)[9]
  • Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Florimond Anastasa)[10]

Lord Berners

Hildegard of Bingen

  • Mary Sharratt: Illuminations (2012)[5]

Mario Braggiotti

Benjamin Britten

  • Ian McEwan: Amsterdam (1998) (Clive Linley, correspondencies with Britten)[13]

Thomas Busby

  • George Borrow: Lavengro (1851) (as editor of the "Universal Review")[10]

Frédéric Chopin

Harriet Cohen

Michael Costa

  • Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as St Michel)[10]

Noël Coward

Christian Darnton

Claude Debussy

Frederick Delius

Edward J Dent

Delia Derbyshire

Arnold Dolmetsch

Edward Elgar

César Franck

  • Marcel Proust: À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) (aspects of Vinteuil, see also Debussy and Saint-Saëns)

George Gershwin

Carlo Gesualdo

  • David Pownall: Music to Murder By (1976)[22]

Jimmy Glover

Eugene Aynsley Goossens

  • Inez Baranay: Pagan (1990)
  • Louis Nowra: The Devil is a Woman (2004)

Glenn Gould

  • Christopher Miller: Sudden Noises from Inanimate Objects: A Novel in Liner Notes (2004)[24]

Cecil Gray

Jan Hambourg

George Frideric Handel

  • Nick Drake: All the Angels: Handel and the First Messiah (2015)

Josef Matthias Hauer

Charles Edward Horsley

  • Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Charles Auchester)[8]

John Pyke Hullah

  • Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Lenhart Davy)[10]

Halfdan Jebe

  • C F Keary: The Journalist (1898) (as Hauch)[28]

Maurice Jacobson

Joseph Joachim

  • Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Charles Auchester)[10]

Aram Khachaturian

Constant Lambert

Henry Lawes

Madame Levinskaya

Franz Liszt

Elisabeth Lutyens

Alma Mahler

  • Max Phillips: The Artist’s Wife (2001)[35]
  • Mary Sharratt: Ecstasy (2018)[36]

Gustav Mahler

Florence Ashton Marshall (and her sister, the clarinettist Frances Marshall)

Fanny Mendelssohn

  • Peter Härtling: Liebste Fenchel (2011)
  • Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Maria Cerinthea)[10]

Felix Mendelssohn

  • Anthony Burgess: Mozart & the Wolf Gang (1991)[5]
  • Pierre La Mure: Beyond Desire (1955)[41]
  • Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Seraphael)[8]

Noel Mewton-Wood

  • Sonia Orchard: The Virtuosso (2009)[42]

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Hubert Parry

Helen Perkin

  • Carl Ginsburg: Medicine Journeys: Ten Stories (Center Press, 1983) (as Mrs Todd Ashby)[43]

Sergei Prokofiev

  • Anthony Burgess: Mozart & the Wolf Gang (1991)[5]
  • David Pownall: Master Class (1982)[22]

Maurice Ravel

Gioachino Rossini

  • Anthony Burgess: Mozart & the Wolf Gang (1991)[5]

Harold Rubens

Anton Rubinstein

  • George Eliot: Daniel Deronda (1876) (aspects of Julius Klesmer, see also Liszt)[19]

Camille Saint-Saëns

  • Marcel Proust: À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) (aspects of Vinteuil, see also Debussy and Franck)

Antonio Salieri

  • Alexander Pushkin: Mozart and Salieri (1830)
  • Peter Shaffer: Amadeus (1979)

Godfrey Sampson

Erik Satie

  • Caitlin Horrocks: Vexations (2019)[46]

Arnold Schoenberg

Franz Schubert

Clara Schumann

Robert Schumann

  • Jessica Duchen: Ghost Variations (2016)[50]
  • Elisabeth Kyle: Duet: The Story of Robert and Clara Schumann (1968)
  • Peter Härtling: Schumanns Schatten (1996)

Dmitri Shostakovich

Jean Sibelius

  • Simon Boswell: The Seven Symphonies: A Finnish Murder Mystery (2005)[53]
  • Caroline J Sinclair: My Music, My Drinking & Me (2015) (fictionalised memoir)[54]

Ethel Smyth

Kaikhosru Sorabji

  • Christopher Miller: Sudden Noises from Inanimate Objects: A Novel in Liner Notes (2004)[55]

Barbara Strozzi

  • Russell Hoban. My Tango with Barbara Strozzi (2007) ((as modern day Bertha Strunk)[5]

Arthur Sullivan

Kay Swift

  • Mitchell James Kaplan. Rhapsody (2021)[23]

Antonio Vivaldi

  • Barbara Quick: Vivaldi's Virgins (2007)[5]

William Walton

  • Lord Berners: Count Omega (1941) (as Emmanuel Smith)[57]
  • David Pownall: Facade (radio play, 2002)

Richard Wagner

  • Anthony Burgess: Mozart & the Wolf Gang (1991)[5]

Peter Warlock

  • Frank Baker: The Birds (1936) (as Paul Weaver)
  • Ralph Bates: Dead End of the Sky (1937) (as Robert Durand)[58]
  • Robertson Davies: A Mixture of Frailties (1958) (as Giles Revelstoke)[59]
  • Aldous Huxley: Antic Hay (1923) (as Coleman)[60]
  • D. H. Lawrence: Women in Love (1921) (as Julius Halliday)[60]
  • Anthony Powell: Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960) (aspects of Maclintick)
  • David Pownall: Music to Murder By (1976)[22]
  • Jean Rhys: Till September Petronella (short story, 1930s) (as Julian Oakes)[61]
  • Osbert Sitwell: Those Were the Days (1938) (as Roy Hartle)

Hugo Wolf

  • Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus (1947) (aspects of Adrian Leverkühn, see also Schoenberg)[62]

Carl Friedrich Zelter

  • Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Aronach)[10]

Further reading

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References

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  1. ^ A. H. Weiler. "Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968)" in The New York Times, April 7, 1969
  2. ^ Erin Douglass. 'A novel envisions what it would be like to study with Bach', Christian Science Monitor, 29 April 2022
  3. ^ a b Corymbus: The Music That Time Forgot
  4. ^ Duchan, Jessica. Immortal at Unbound
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Freya Parr. 'Ten of the best (and worst) novels about composers', BBC Music Magazine, 26 February 2019
  6. ^ New York Review of Books, 26 October, 2021
  7. ^ British Musician and Musical News, Vol. 7 no 67, July 1931, p. 153
  8. ^ a b c d e f Weliver, Phyllis. The Musical Crowd in English Fiction (2006)
  9. ^ review, Publishers Weekly
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m M.C. Rintoul: Dictionary of Real People and Places in Fiction (2014)
  11. ^ Amory, Mark. Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric (1999)
  12. ^ The Letters of Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (1964), p. 570
  13. ^ Robert E Kohn. 'The Fivesquare "Amsterdam" of Ian McEwan', in Critical Survey, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2004), pp. 89-106
  14. ^ Diedre Bair. 'Getting even with Chopin', in The New York Times, 11 August 1985, Section 7, p.9
  15. ^ Pan Macmillian
  16. ^ a b Fry, Helen. Music & men : the life and loves of Harriet Cohen (2008)
  17. ^ Collett, Derek (2015). His Own Executioner: The Life of Nigel Balchin. SilverWood. ISBN 978-1-78132-391-5.
  18. ^ Claire de Lune review, Montreal Gazette, 24 November, 1962
  19. ^ a b c d e f Amos, William. The Originals: Who's Really Who in Fiction (1990)
  20. ^ Audrey Wollen. 'The Writer Who Burned Her Own Books', in The New Yorker, 3 January, 2023
  21. ^ Richard Lines. 'George Moore's Evelyn Innes', in The Norwood Review No 174 (2008)
  22. ^ a b c d e f g The Composer Plays, Oberon (1996)
  23. ^ a b Rhapsody, by Mitchell James Kaplan
  24. ^ Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise blog (2004)
  25. ^ Leo Hamalian (1996). D.H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. p. 51. ISBN 978-0-8386-3603-9.
  26. ^ Spurling, Hilary: Dancing to the Music of Time, Hamish Hamilton, 2017
  27. ^ 'Willa Cather and the Professor's House', in Western American Literature, Vol. 7, No. 1, A Willa Cather Issue (Spring 1972), pp. 13-24
  28. ^ Boyle, Andrew J. Delius and Norway (2017), p. 175
  29. ^ Bluemel, Kristin. George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (2004), Chapter 1, p.27-66
  30. ^ Lloyd, Stephen. Constant Lambert: Beyond The Rio Grande. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1-84383-898-2
  31. ^ Allis, Michael. Temporaries and Eternals: The Music Criticism of Aldous Huxley (2013), p. 56
  32. ^ Nélida, Suny Press
  33. ^ Walker, Alan. Franz Liszt: The Weimar Years, 1848–1861 (1989), p. 250
  34. ^ Henry Reed: Hilda Tablet and Others, BBC Books, London, 1971
  35. ^ Art in Fiction: The Artist's Wife
  36. ^ Art in Fiction. Ecstacy
  37. ^ Faber, Mahler's Conversion
  38. ^ 'Thomas Mann', Mahler Foundation
  39. ^ Werley, Matthew. Mahler in Context (2020), Chapter 32, 'Influences in Literature'
  40. ^ Shannon Draucker. Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature (2024)
  41. ^ Beyond Desire review, The Age. 12 December, 1956
  42. ^ Harper Collins, The Virtuosso
  43. ^ 'Helen Adie', at Gurdjieff Club
  44. ^ Flynn, Jessica (4 May 2010). "Tributes paid to piano great Harold Rubens". South Wales Echo. Cardiff. Retrieved 13 October 2017.
  45. ^ Whittle, David. Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books (2008)
  46. ^ Art in Fiction: Vexations
  47. ^ Jack M Stein. Adrian Leverkühn as a Composer, Germanic Review, Vol. 25 (1950)
  48. ^ Penguin Books
  49. ^ Art in Fiction. Longing
  50. ^ Art in Fiction. Ghost Variations
  51. ^ Art in Fiction: The Conductor
  52. ^ Helga Schwalm. 'Imagining Compromised Creativity: Art and Fear in Shostakovich Bio-Fiction', in Slavonica, Volume 25, 2020 - Issue 1
  53. ^ sevensymphonies.com
  54. ^ GoodReads
  55. ^ Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise blog (2004)
  56. ^ Eyles, Allen (1986). Sherlock Holmes: A Centenary Celebration. Harper & Row. pp. 118-119. ISBN 0-06-015620-1.
  57. ^ Lloyd, Stephen. William Walton: Muse of Fire (2002)
  58. ^ Bates, Ralph. Rainbow Fish: Four Short Novels (1937)
  59. ^ Allis, Michael. 'From Musicology to Novel: Reassessing Robertson Davies's Literary Representation of Peter Warlock', in University of Toronto Quarterly (Winter 2019)
  60. ^ a b Smith, Barry. Peter Warlock: The Life of Philip Heseltine (1994)
  61. ^ Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys: Life and Work (1998)
  62. ^ Stokes, Richard. The Complete Songs of Hugo Wolf: Life, Letters, Lieder (2020)