'If music be the food of love, play on...'
It might seem impossible to describe music in words, but lots of writers have tried to convey its power. Here are some examples of 'melophrasis'
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
The Story So Far: Maggie Tulliver and her cousin Lucy Deane are being entertained by the debonair Stephen Guest, apparently wooing Lucy but increasingly fixated on Maggie…and he’s found her weak spot: his singing. Lucy is so busy accompanying Stephen on piano as he sings that she barely notices how rapt Maggie is by Stephen’s voice. But Philip, in love with Maggie, very much notices…
Maggie always tried in vain to go on with her work when music began. She tried harder than ever to-day; for the thought that Stephen knew how much she cared for his singing was one that no longer roused a merely playful resistance; and she knew, too, that it was his habit always to stand so that he could look at her. But it was of no use; she soon threw her work down, and all her intentions were lost in the vague state of emotion produced by the inspiring duet,—emotion that seemed to make her at once strong and weak; strong for all enjoyment, weak for all resistance. When the strain passed into the minor, she half started from her seat with the sudden thrill of that change. Poor Maggie! She looked very beautiful when her soul was being played on in this way by the inexorable power of sound. You might have seen the slightest perceptible quivering through her whole frame as she leaned a little forward, clasping her hands as if to steady herself; while her eyes dilated and brightened into that wide-open, childish expression of wondering delight which always came back in her happiest moments. Lucy, who at other times had always been at the piano when Maggie was looking in this way, could not resist the impulse to steal up to her and kiss her. Philip, too, caught a glimpse of her now and then round the open book on the desk, and felt that he had never before seen her under so strong an influence.
What we love about this passage…
Eliot here gives us a brilliant instance of melophrasis—describing music through words, or the musical equivalent of ekphrasis, which is the description of visual art through words (as in Homer’s lovingly detailed passage about the shield of Achilles in The Iliad, or most of Ali Smith’s brilliant How to be Both, a novel about an extraordinary work of art.)
But it’s arguably even harder to describe music than art. Eliot adroitly gets around this difficulty by focusing not on the music itself but on Maggie’s response to it, which is both emotional and physical: she shivers, quivers, clasps her hands, starts from her seat, her eyes dilating with the ‘inexorable power of sound.’ We love the way Eliot captures how powerfully music acts upon the listener, how helpless we are to resist it, and how it can make two people fall in love.
We have a past newsletter on Proust that beautifully shows melophrasis in action.
And if you want to know what happens to Maggie and Stephen (and Lucy and Philip, for that matter), you can read the whole novel here. It gets pretty dramatic!
About the Author
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-80), an influential essay writer, poet, and novelist; some of her best-known works are The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876). She was one of the leading writers and theorists of realism in the nineteenth century.
You can read our Middlemarch newsletter here.
To Read Alongside…
No matter what form it takes, music is indeed ‘the food of love’ that Shakespeare describes in Twelfth Night. The novel Blessings (2024) by Chukwuebuka Ibeh contains beautifully evocative descriptions of the healing power of music, especially for the struggling and oppressed individual. This happens as well in Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (2005); dancing to a favorite song on a cassette tape is a forbidden expression of identity and thus a threat to the authorities.
Music also runs through Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983) and has both erotic and redemptive overtones centred on Celie’s blossoming relationship with the blues singer Shug.
Thomas Hardy’s story ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’ (1893) conveys the deep yearning of a young woman named Car’line for a strolling violinist who completely mesmerizes her with music so beautiful that it could ‘well-nigh have drawn an ache from the heart of a gate-post.’ The effect on the young woman is electric: ‘the aching of the heart seized her simultaneously with a wild desire to glide airily in the mazes of an infinite dance.’
What’s striking about these examples of musical moments in literature is that they all have such dramatic consequences for the characters. Swept away by the emotion caused by music, the characters’ fates take a life-changing turn—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
E.M. Forster’s Howards End has a pivotal scene in which the main characters attend a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, ‘the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man….The passion of your life becomes more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings.’ One of the characters, a young woman named Helen, ‘can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music’s flood…[and] goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing’ in the final movement. So carried away is Helen by the music that she inadvertently carries away an umbrella belonging to a young man she doesn’t know. This event sets the rest of the novel’s action in motion; the goblins have done their mischief.
For other examples of literature inspired by music (and attempting to convey its qualities), you might also enjoy George Bernard Shaw’s 1903 play Man and Superman (Shaw was a professional music critic for many years) and also the Faroese writer William Heinesen’s lyrical breakthrough novel The Lost Musicians (1950).
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