The idea of music: Oscar Wilde and the metaphysics of sound

Abstract

Oscar Wilde’s friends and associates generally agreed: the famed aesthete knew practically nothing about music. A schoolfellow recalled that as a boy Wilde was a fast and voracious reader but “poor at music” (Harris 2007, 22). WhereasWilde’s brother was a gifted pianist who composed his own “improved” endings to Friedrich Chopin’s preludes, even devoted friend and literary executor Robert Ross declared that Wilde “never knew anything really of music” (Ellmann 1984, 127; as quoted in Harris 2007, 158). Bernard Shaw suggested that his performance of musical knowledge was so inadequate as to earn him “a reputation for shallowness and insincerity which he never retrieved until it was too late” (Shaw 1979, 404). Indeed, on one occasion Wilde reportedly became irate when a friend repeatedly invoked the phrase “a splendid scarlet thing by Dvorák,” misquoting a line from Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist.” According to Robert Sherard, Wilde suspected “his friends knew that his attempt to write about Dvorak or any other composer was a mere pretence, and that he cleverly veiled his ignorance by the use of sonorous and effective phrases” (Sherard 1906, 121–122). Contemporary scholars too have suggested that Wilde saw music largely as a cultural signifier, albeit one that he deployed with care and purpose. Some, like Joe Law (2004) and Oliver Lovesey (2020), have refined Sherard’s depiction of Wilde as poseur by treating his musical references as evocations of cultural and sexual identity. Others propose that Wilde valued music chiefly in relation to the art form with which he was most comfortable: the written word. In this spirit, Tanya Touwen remarks: “Wilde was not in the least musical,” though Salome “is almost incantatory, with a repetitive lyricism that is indeed not unlike a ballad” (1995, 22). David Wayne Thomas takes this idea further, demonstrating that Wilde aspired to a kind of “verbal musicality,” drawing upon his “highly unprofessional relation to music” to accentuate the aural effects of language (2000, 19). In short, even where music does emerge in Wilde’s work, scholars have suggested that it is not treated with the formal rigor that typifies his discussions of the literary and visual arts. Though Wilde’s language at times seems almost musical – and