Which Famous Novels Prominently Feature Classical Music? Part II

 by Siri Livingston  December 24th, 2025

In part one of this article, we considered the complexities of the relationship between music and literature. As sensitive, art-loving souls, many authors hold a close connection to music and wish to bring this to their works of fiction. This tendency is made rather more complex by the difficulty of describing, or the impossibility of “transcribing,” music directly into language, and by the unbridled musicality of language itself, which has its own lilt, metre, and rhythm. Nonetheless, we saw how authors have made music a central component of their celebrated novels: as a key device of affect, as symbolic of something else, or even as part of a moral argument. In Kreuzer Sonata, we see Tolstoy communicate the intensity of music and align it with lust, jealousy, and lack of self-control, whereas for E.M. Forster in A Room with a View, music represents freedom of expression and feeling, authenticity of the self, and sensual communion with nature. In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, music is treated as evocative, as a reinforcer of memories and a source of nostalgia: a way of tracing a thread of consistent meaning through years of life and disparate experiences, to make sense of a complex and evolving relationship to a person or place.

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

Doctor Faustus First edition cover in Europe © Wikipedia

This work of fiction is gargantuan not only in length but in its relation to aesthetics, the politics and history of Germany (both medieval and pre-WWII), and the intellectual life of many prominent German artists and theorists. As such, many of the complexities of this novel will go untouched in this article, but we will endeavour to look at some of the interesting ways in which the book relates to music.

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) draws on the legend of Faust, a semi-historical medieval tale originating with Johann Georg Faust (c. 1480–1540), alchemist, astrologer, and magician. The story of Faust in early books soon grew into many retellings in the form of ballads, dramas, and puppet-plays; Christopher Marlowe wrote his play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus in 1592, and Goethe also reworked the legend in the early nineteenth century. The story has enduring appeal, as it frames a central aesthetic and ethical conflict of human experience: at what cost should human excellence and knowledge be obtained? In the original Faust, the eponymous character meets the Devil at a crossroads, and, unsatisfied with his already successful and erudite life, sells his soul for infinite knowledge and experience. The adjective “Faustian” has come to mean any kind of sacrifice of spiritual goodness, wholesomeness, and health for power and greatness, often with the implication of self-defeat in the form of degradation, illness, or death. The “Faustian pact” varies in its details but is always made with Mephistopheles or a similar figure. The existence of such a corrupting influence implies, to varying degrees depending on the retelling, the presence and rejection of theological morality and God, though this was of greater focus in the medieval tales.

Delacroix: Faust and Mephistopheles, 1827 (The Wallace Collection)

In the novel by Thomas Mann, fictitious composer Adrian Leverkühn, of great genius and ambition, intentionally contracts syphilis so that the madness and hallucinations may deepen his artistic genius. He is visited by a Mephistophelean being, and renounces love for other human beings in exchange for twenty-four years of brilliance and creation. Leverkühn eventually looks upon his nephew, Echo, with love and fondness while working to finish his final masterpiece. When Echo dies, Leverkühn believes it to be caused by the pact and descends fully into madness and infirmity, unable to premiere his last work. The book situates this final downfall as happening at the same time as the full initiation of the Third Reich – the political allegory of Germany’s descent into sickness is clear.

The author’s son published an article on the musical symbolism of Doctor Faust. In it, Michael Mann quotes his father: “It is a grave error of the historical legend that it did not establish any connection between Faust and music.” Thomas Mann clearly saw something in the disposition of musicians, or composers, well-suited to corruption by temptation – or the Devil! His son notes that “critical thought and music – love of music and inner musicality of the word – are the very cornerstones of that work.” For Mann, music had a dual nature, “a Christian art with negative sign… [consisting of] both calculative order and chaos-breeding irrationality.” Arnold Schoenberg, then, was the perfect model for the character of Leverkühn, as the inheritor of the German Romantic musical lineage of Wagner and Mahler, and yet a famous inventor of the meticulous, mathematical twelve-tone system in response to the events of WWII. Schoenberg was displeased by Mann’s “homage” – in the book, the fictional Leverkühn is said to invent serialism – and Mann later added an addendum at Schoenberg’s request, in which the composer is credited for both serialism and the information Mann drew from studying Harmonielehre, Schoenberg’s treatise on harmony.

In Faustus, music becomes a kind of ethical, political, and aesthetic battleground – but Michael Mann notes that “the musical world of Adrian Leverkühn is not the musical world of Thomas Mann.” While Schoenberg’s theory ignited his literary excitement, his son notes that “his ears rejected Schoenberg’s music… his was the world of Richard Wagner…

Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns.” Even in the process of writing Faust he remarked: “If I were a composer, I should compose, perhaps, like Cesar Franck.” In his private life, Mann still sought the “beautiful illusion of art” that he “denounced in his workshop,” deeply rooted in the bürgerliche Kunst, bourgeois art, of the 19th century. In Mann’s Doctor Faustus, we find one of the most complex and paradoxical musico-literary relationships in history, as well as a harrowing and rich narrative for any lover of history or music.

The Pyramid, William Golding

The Pyramid First edition cover © Wikipedia

Of all the works thus far, Golding’s The Pyramid (1967) displays what we might call the “lightest” treatment of music out of the novels surveyed. Instead of making music representative of weighty concepts like genius or freedom, or imbuing it with a powerful ethical valence, Golding’s book centres upon the protagonist Oliver’s upbringing in the fictional sleepy English village of Stilbourne, his transition to Oxford, and his mid-adulthood, in a gentle, reflective coming-of-age narrative. Oliver and his family are very musical, and as such, music features in a way that is faithful to the ways of life of the English countryside: Oliver plays violin and piano, takes lessons with the local organist, and takes part in local community productions with his mother. Music and its practical realities, familiar to any musician – struggling with a new piece, scales, having a melody stuck in your head, and the silly mundanities of lessons and rehearsals – are all woven into the daily fabric of Oliver’s life. Mundane realities of the music world are also shown to be entangled with questions of social status and class – Oliver is ashamed of his secret desire to be a professional pianist, and is told by his father to prioritise studies – and getting into Oxford – over his music lessons.

The poignancy and beauty of music are explored alongside Oliver’s life and experiences with no strong sense of separation – music is one of the languages he speaks on a daily basis, a model of a life lived with music as a companion rather than a master, idol, or unbridled temptation. As such, we end this two-part article on the least sensational, but perhaps most realistic and healthy, portrayal of music in literature – as a daily source of comfort and beauty to those who love it.

Book Review: John Cage’s Silence

by Siri Livingston

Most famous for his iconic – and polarising – composition 4’33”, John Cage was a composer, artist, and thinker whose explorations and experiments changed the course of classical composition. His compendium of lectures and writings, Silence, will be of interest to anyone who likes to think about musical organisation and value at a meta level, and those who are fascinated by people who live and think eccentrically, which is, I suspect, most of us with any investment or interest in the arts.

John Cage

From the onset, this compendium paints a picture of a man who liked ambiguity, the frustration of expectations, and absurdity – a kind of contrariness of spirit reminiscent of Erik Satie. In the foreword he recounts an incident during his Lecture on Nothing delivered at the Artists’ Club on Eighth Street in New York, which involved the giving of the same six, randomly-selected, pre-prepared answers in response to whatever question was asked, where good friend and attendee Jeanne Reynal stood up and screamed, “John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute,” and promptly left. The anecdote is recounted not as a triumph at having irritated and frustrated another human being, but as a kind of soft acknowledgement that his way of thinking and making, his explanations of his own artistry, his music – all contain a challenging preoccupation with form, repetition, and meaning that are, in a myriad of ways, crazy-making. Later in the foreword, he acknowledges the influence that both Zen and Dadaism have had on his thinking, while also stating that he does not wish Zen to be “blamed” for his work, and that he wanted “to free Zen of any responsibility for [his] actions.” Instead of aligning himself fully with either school of thought, he gives two explicitly stated reasons or justifications for all of these lectures and writings. The first is that he sought above all else “poetry,” which he defines as “the allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words.” The other stated aim was to collapse content and message into form by communicating ideas via their embodiment rather than by abstract description or definition, such as delivering a lecture on repetition by the actual use of extensive repetition. By virtue of this latter aim, Cage’s Silence is a mixture of spatialised poetry, instructions for performance art, text scores, transcribed or written lectures, and everything evading definition in between – making for a varied and amusingly bumpy read.

First edition of John Cage’s Silence: Lectures and Writings

Of real interest from the 21st-century perspective are Cage’s predictions about the future and purpose of composition. In his lecture ‘Future of Music: Credo’ given in 1958, Cage correctly forecasted the extent to which technology, electronic instruments, and recorded sound would come to dominate music-making, and the ways in which this would blur the lines between music and the “noise” that constantly surrounds us. Some of the conclusions he reaches from the new technologies being discovered in his lifetime – high fidelity recording, and the ability to manipulate those recordings along a continuous spectra like amplitude or overtone structure – are quite extreme. He makes the analogy that writing music with simple rhythms and twelve tones alone is discrete and traditional, like walking, whereas utilising technology to make music of infinite rhythmic and pitch complexity is like flying. The other compositional alternative he seems to endorse is to turn to the sounds of nature, “to give up the desire to control sound, clear [the] mind of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments.” Having presented these two options – making complex noise-music using the outermost limits of technology, or creating sound-art out of randomness and the natural world – Cage then somewhat paradoxically says that nothing need change in music-making at all, that “the more things there are, the merrier.” He goes so far as to say we should embrace a dominant seventh chord every now and then. While none of this hangs together as the most coherent or well-defended musical philosophy, it’s certainly food for thought for anyone interested in the history of modern composition.

John Cage during his 1966 concert at the opening of the National Arts Foundation in Washington, D.C. © Rowland Scherman/Getty Images

Scattered throughout the book are strange anecdotes from Cage’s life and those of mentors and artist friends. In small italics, these surreal stories of submarines, travel, and mushroom-picking punctuate the ongoing conceptual wrestling, the never-ending tensions between noise and music, sound and silence, choice and non-choice. These serve as nice moments of levity from the dense, sometimes technical, and experimentally formatted meditations on process and musical form. On the whole, the earnestness of Cage’s desire to understand things deeply and well is always tempered with humour and a surrealist, interdisciplinary spirit. The spatialised poetry calls to mind André Breton, and Cage is as versed in theatre, philosophy, and the visual arts – with many mentions of Max Ernst and Gertrude Stein – as he is in music, perhaps more so.

Frustrating, enlightening, thought-provoking, and clever in equal measure, this is the kind of book anyone interested in music would do well to own and return to throughout their lifetime.

Composers and Their Nicknames

 by Siri Livingston 

Being a composer is not a very – how could one put it delicately – commonsense profession. Many of history’s well-known composers were larger-than-life characters who earned idiosyncratic nicknames from their erratic and memorable behaviour. In this article, we take a look at how some of these gargantuan musical figures might have been known to their contemporaries.

Franz Schubert the Mushroom

Image created by ChatGPT

This composer’s musical stature far outstrips his literal stature – Schubert was only five-foot-one, or approximately 155 centimetres. This, in combination with his unusual face and rather pudgy physique, earned him the affectionate nickname “little mushroom” or “Schwammerl.” The composer also had high standards for those he socialised with, and he often asked early in the process of being introduced to someone, “Kann er was?” or “what can he do?” This earned him the nickname “Kanevas.”   

Johannes Brahms, “Young Eagle”

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Robert Schumann gave Brahms an affectionate nickname as a token of his admiration for the composer’s abilities: “the young eagle.” This bird imagery likely came from the book of Revelations, which references “an eagle crying with a loud voice” (ESV), as Schumann had opined he “believe[d] Johannes to be the true Apostle, who will also write Revelations…” In addition to this admiring nickname, Schumann promoted Brahms’ music in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik magazine, founded by Schumann himself in 1834, and convinced Leipzig publishers to look at Brahms’ compositions.

Strangely, this avian imagery echoes elsewhere in his life, albeit less positively. Brahms once wrote about his own temperament: “I am a severely melancholic person…black wings are constantly flapping above us.”  

Joseph Haydn or “Papa Haydn”

Joseph Haydn

The nickname Haydn was given is a rare case study showcasing the power of words and the way linguistic meaning can change and be manipulated over time. Haydn was the Kapellmeister at the Esterházy court for over thirty years, presiding over a large group of much younger musicians. His benevolent attitude and willingness to stick up for the musicians of lesser status earned him the loving nickname “Papa Haydn.” As Clemens Höslinger notes, “’Papa’ arose as a term… for a father figure, someone who willingly gave advice and who was generally respected.” Eventually, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was among those who referred to Haydn as “Papa Haydn.”

The nickname grew even more popular in the 19th century as Haydn’s contributions to the symphonic and String quartet genres, and to music generally, became more broadly and formally codified. In 1797, the Tonkünstler-Societät of Vienna made Haydn an honorary life member “by virtue of his extraordinary merit as the father and reformer of the noble art of music.”

In the late 19th century, the nickname born of affection and reverence began to take on a caricatural, dismissive quality. “Papa Haydn” became a patronising and dismissive way to paint Haydn’s output as “genial, but naïve and superficial,” notes Höslinger. Recent scholarship has focused on providing a more nuanced picture of Haydn and his diversity and richness as a composer than the ideas that came to be associated with “Papa Haydn.”

Antonio Vivaldi: The Red Priest

Antonio Vivaldi

Gianbattista Vivaldi, Antonio Vivaldi’s father, was a famous Venetian violinist who regularly performed at St. Mark’s Basilica. Despite his son’s clear musical disposition, it was the local custom at the time for upper-class boys to be sent into the priesthood, and the young Antonio became a priest in 1703. This, in combination with his mop of naturally bright red hair, earned him the nickname “the red priest,” which stuck despite his relatively swift departure from the profession. Vivaldi the younger was too frail for the priestly vocation, and his true passion lay with music.   

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or “Trazom”

Croce: Mozart Family Portait (detail), 1781

Fittingly, we end the list with the composer who sported the greatest variety of nicknames – and proper names – in his lifetime. Mozart was formally baptised in Latin as “Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart” on the 28th of January 1756, the day after his birth, at St. Rupert’s Cathedral in Salzburg.

Following the custom of the Catholic Church, Mozart’s first two names are drawn from the saint’s day of his birth, in this case St. John Chrysostom, “Chrysostomus” meaning “golden mouth.” “Wolfgang” came from Mozart’s maternal grandfather, and “Theophilus” from his paternal grandfather. Interestingly, “Theophilus” comes from Greek and means “lover of God” or “loved by God,” and it is from this that Mozart came to be called by the Latin version, “Amadeus,” or the German, “Gottlieb.”

Mozart worked across cultural borders and was linguistically flexible and very playful about his own name. As such, Mozart would toy with Italian and French, signing letters with “Amadeo” and “Amadé.” He loved to be facetious and would sign letters with purposefully incorrect Latin. Indeed, the popularity of referring to Mozart as “Wolfgang Amadeus” was a largely posthumous and Romantic-era trend, as Mozart never signed a single document “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” – the closest thing to this that survives in record being a silly mock-Latin signature, “Wolfgangus Amadeus Mozartus.” He also used his names backwards for fun: “Mozart Wolfgang” and “Trazom.”