Busts of Beethoven, performances of the Fifth Symphony, allusions to the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ – these are a few of the many references to Beethoven that Nathan Waddell discovers in early modernist literature. These details, Waddell argues, do more than just refer to Beethoven or his music: they make up a stable set of ideas that came to be associated with the composer in the nineteenth century. Moonlighting traces this discourse and its recurring appearances in literature of the early twentieth century. As authors employed familiar modes of describing and alluding to Beethoven, they simultaneously, and self-consciously, used the conventionality of this discourse to confront assumptions about bourgeois culture, genius, musical meaning and nationalism. Moonlighting is a revealing lesson in understanding how and why modernist authors engaged with these Beethovenian tropes.

Waddell begins by outlining this discourse as authors encountered it at the turn of the twentieth century. He treads familiar territory as he traces its essential elements, constructing a portrait of the composer from ‘stock’ objects and stories like that of the ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’, the dedication of the Third Symphony and the portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, ‘Beethoven’ had become a vast yet consistent system of cultural references, including clichéd phrases and stories, popular reproductions of Beethoven imagery and archetypal narratives. The growing visibility of these references made them easily accessible to musicians, authors and readers. They were essential to the creation and preservation of a distinct Beethoven mythology that posited Beethoven as a hero, a suffering martyr straining until death against the limits of nature and creativity. For modernist authors, these ideas offered a way to comment on the nineteenth century: in using these conventions, they found ‘thematic and stylistic ways to present the conventional for what it is: another vocabulary through which to understand the culture of the past’. Indeed, invoking Beethoven revealed the ‘distinction between the clutter of history and the tidiness of Beethovenian convention’ (10). Moreover, Waddell argues that the modernist obsession with Beethoven went beyond the use of convention as a stylistic prop to constitute a musicological investigation, through distinctly literary methods, of the composer's presence and legacy.

Each chapter in Moonlighting is devoted to a particular convention of this Beethovenian discourse. The first chapter, ‘The Idea of the Heroic’, addresses heroic depictions of Beethoven's music in literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how these descriptions conditioned characters’ listening experiences. For instance, in the famous Beethoven scene in E. M. Forster's Howards End, Helen Schlegel, a young woman proudly versed in literature and music, attends a performance of the Fifth Symphony. The narrator describes her impression of the music as a series of images – shipwrecks, heroes, goblins and dancing elephants – culminating in a triumphant victory. Helen's ability to hear the symphony in this way suggests that she is a uniquely empathetic and artistic character. The distance between the narrator and Helen's impressions, however, casts doubt on her uniqueness. Waddell shows that this account of the Fifth Symphony functions both as a study of the main character and as a reflection of musicological accounts of Beethovenian heroism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing examples from twentieth-century works such as Frederic J. Crowest, Beethoven (third edition (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1903)), J. W. N. Sullivan, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (London: Cape, 1927), Romain Rolland, Beethoven the Creator (London: Gollancz, 1929) and Alan Pryce-Jones, Beethoven (London: Duckworth, 1933), Waddell demonstrates that writers consistently used heroic terms to describe Beethoven's music, as it was believed to subvert the classical tradition by pioneering new musical forms and communicating feelings previously unvoiced in music. Waddell argues that even the most sensitive listeners were unable to think beyond these frameworks: Helen, he writes, is ‘simply and unremarkably of her time’ (70). Howards End, Waddell concludes, is an example of how the rhetoric of heroism shaped even the act of listening itself.

In chapter 2, ‘Eloquent Citations’, Waddell focuses on another, specifically musical, focal point of the conventional discourse about Beethoven: the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. Pointing to novels by Jerome K. Jerome, E. F. Benson and Edith Nesbit, Waddell describes how the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata's popularity made it an easy tool with which to satirize bourgeois characters and a weapon ‘with which to beat the comfortably cultured’. Raving, swooning, sighing and fawning were all depicted as clichéd responses to this ubiquitous piece (86). At the same time, the piece could be referred to in other ways, as in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, in which the sonata alerts readers to their own assumptions about loss and grief. Tracing various allusions to mourning music in the sonata itself, Waddell proposes that in Woolf's vision of the piece – occurring in a novel thematically centred on loss and absence – ‘sorrow deepens into yet more sorrow’; the sonata becomes ‘part of the novel's latent economy of grief’ (106). For Woolf, the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata is a valuable tool for heightening the reader's emotional response to the novel and drawing attention to its attitude of mourning.

In the third chapter, ‘The Confines of Habit’, Waddell investigates the frequent depiction of young women playing Beethoven sonatas. He begins with Forster and Woolf, whose novels A Room with a View and The Voyage Out deal with ‘young women piano players who play music that nineteenth-century musicology had told them they were not supposed to play’ – that is, Beethoven's late music, particularly the final piano sonata (114). On the surface, Forster and Woolf's characters appear to flaunt patriarchal expectations. Yet Waddell argues that by foregrounding the issue of transgression, these apparently subversive narratives only reinforce these expectations. The real subverting of this misogynistic belief, he claims, is performed by Dorothy Richardson, who rejects outright the descriptive practices of established Beethoven musicology in her series of novels Pilgrimage. Richardson's description of her protagonist's piano playing emphasizes not the listeners’ impression of Miriam's performance, but Miriam's impression of the music she plays; Richardson also avoids any reference to ‘late’ Beethoven or the alleged difficulty of these works. Waddell's analysis of the narrative reveals the extent to which the Beethoven myth was wound up with misogynistic beliefs about the (in)accessibility of music. In order to free women from these rigid expectations, Waddell suggests, the author's only recourse is to silence myth altogether.

In the fourth chapter, ‘Articulate Masks’, Waddell turns to the familiar visage of the composer himself. The famous scowling face captured in Franz Klein's life mask, seemingly caught in the throes of artistic torment, was reproduced throughout the nineteenth century in portrait busts that came to occupy offices, drawing-rooms, libraries and even bedrooms throughout Europe and the United States. Drawing on several biographies of the composer as well as Alessandra Comini's study of Beethoven imagery (The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking (New York: Rizzoli, 1987)), Waddell points out that the true cause of Beethoven's scowl – not creative torment, but his dislike of the casting process – could not compete with the alluring impression of the Klein life mask as a direct reproduction of Beethoven's austere suffering and triumph even in death. Countless owners of the Klein portrait bust thus imagined that they were holding a reproduction not of the life mask, but rather of the death mask. Widespread reproductions of the Klein mask, popular novels, inaccurate translations of texts and even musicological research reinforced this confusion. Waddell uses this fact to interpret the references to Beethoven portrait busts in two works, Wyndham Lewis's novel Tarr and Stephen Spender's poem ‘Beethoven's Death Mask’. In the novel, Lewis uses the miniature portrait bust (evidently the Klein mask) to criticize an ‘absence of taste, an inability to understand the implications of an ornament’ (156). Waddell argues that the false identification of the death mask constitutes not just a factual error on Lewis's part, but reveals how myth – attached to sculpture – implicates Lewis in the same culture he intends to criticize. Spender's poem, on the other hand, attempts to rescue the Josef Danhauser death mask through ekphrastic transformation. Beethoven portrait busts depend upon the bourgeois idea of reproducibility, yet even Spender's poem must acknowledge the necessity of such reproduction. To criticize is nevertheless to reproduce once again; to criticize Beethovenian convention is to admit its power and adopt its own methods.

In the fifth chapter, ‘The Politics of Value’, Waddell examines how authors capitalized on the utopian associations of Beethoven's music amid the growing political unrest of the early twentieth century. Through a close reading of Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, Waddell demonstrates the fragility of such associations. Huxley's novel, he argues, doubts that Beethoven's music is capable of any kind of resistance, particularly against authoritarianism. In the previous chapters, Waddell examined particular examples of Beethoven convention and the specific meanings they had for listeners and readers. Here, in the final chapter, Waddell suggests the risks of such associations – primarily the possibility of complacency – and holds the rhetoric of traditional Beethoven musicology responsible.

Moonlighting asks the same question across all its chapters: is it possible to treat critically the Beethoven myth and its rhetoric without reproducing and thus reinforcing it? In the third chapter, Waddell cites Richardson as one of the only authors who fully circumvents this myth. Yet this victory was achieved by silencing its terms altogether. The resulting implication is that any treatment of the Beethoven myth inevitably sustains it: ‘It is an inevitable double-bind. The narrator may be an ironist, but ironists must accept, to some extent, the legitimacy of whatever it is they choose to contest. To deem something bathetic one must first of all accept that the thing can be judged, that it is susceptible to being thought about, in this way’ (71). This ‘double-bind’ lays like a trap for even the most critical modernists. Moonlighting, it would seem, does the same thing. But perhaps this is not a fault. As Waddell suggests in the final pages, the vast myth was not only a means of accessing the composer and his music, it was an entire constellation of meanings that allowed (and continues to allow) musicians, audiences, writers and readers to communicate with one another. In this case, Beethoven was often the medium through which the individual could ‘peer into the mental furniture of everyone else’ (222). If the Beethoven myth persists so invincibly, then it may be because this myth is less about Beethoven than the world that created it. In this sense, Waddell's apparent reluctance to join Richardson in abandoning myth altogether is a commitment to understanding the discourse that underlined the literary investments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries more broadly.

In Moonlighting, Waddell avowedly focuses on Anglo-American authors writing between 1900 and 1930. E. M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, Lewis Wyndham and Virginia Woolf are the main characters in the book, though there are excerpts from novelists and poets like Ford Madox Ford, Romain Rolland, Stephen Spender and Katherine Mansfield as well. Certain novels reappear, among them Lewis's Tarr, Richardson's Pilgrimage and West's The Return of the Soldier. Waddell is also conversant with prominent figures in early twentieth-century Beethoven scholarship like J. W. N. Sullivan and W. J. Turner. This sampling is remarkably thorough; the voices assembled do not reduce modernism to a single movement, but depict it as an assemblage of various perspectives and styles. Excluded from this collection of authors, however, are modernist giants like Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann, who explicitly include Beethoven in their novels as a powerful influence on their fictional artists. Waddell's exclusion of these authors is curious, given that he has not ignored France altogether: he discusses Rolland's novel Jean Christophe. Though his decision to focus primarily on Anglo-American writing highlights deserving lesser-known works, the omission of these two authors creates a distinct gap in his detailed map of musico-literary modernism. In works like À la recherche du temps perdu and Doktor Faustus, Beethoven initially appears as an ideal to which Proust and Mann's young artists aspire. Yet just as each artist positions himself as an heir to the Beethovenian tradition, each significantly (and not entirely consciously) treads a distinctly bourgeois and unheroic creative path. By including these works, Waddell could have examined the discourse of the Beethoven myth as it is first sustained and then subsumed by Proust and Mann's characteristic irony.

In addition to his sampling of literature, Waddell's references to contemporary Beethoven scholarship demonstrate an impressive breadth of research. In discussing Beethoven mythology, he draws largely on Maynard Solomon and Jan Swafford, relying on their biographical research to highlight the persistent artificiality of this mythology. It is not until the following chapters that Waddell begins to work more broadly with scholarship from closer to the present day. Yet even then Waddell seems more preoccupied with early twentieth-century documents than recent musicological work. Figures like J. W. N. Sullivan are cited much more frequently than valuable secondary sources like K. M. Knittel, Scott Burnham and Mark Evan Bonds, among others. Further, scholars like Joseph Kerman, James Webster and Janet M. Levy are not mentioned at all. For example, in the first chapter on heroism, Waddell provides a concise history of how Beethoven came to be regarded as the ultimate musical hero. Yet in this section, which shares the name of Burnham's influential book Beethoven Hero, Waddell does not refer to Burnham. The primary sources Waddell provides create a rich portrait of the heroic descriptions of Beethoven's music in the early twentieth century, yet engaging with Burnham's work would have helped Waddell elaborate on how heroic language actually helped listeners to articulate impressions of Beethoven's music. This would have further historicized Waddell's claims about heroic description while clarifying how this description conditioned experience.

The thematic organization of Moonlighting emphasizes that Beethoven's presence in the early twentieth century did not develop linearly; rather, as Waddell shows, literary modernists found different ways to grapple with this mythology. Throughout Waddell's investigations, however, are found a number of recurring themes: that modernism was not a wholesale rejection of tradition, but an embrace of selected stories; that to deal with the Beethoven mythology and conventions is necessarily to admit their power; and, finally, that no matter what their aims were, literary modernists used literature as an opportunity to explore Beethoven's legacy to an extent unparalleled by other media. This last theme constitutes the heart of Moonlighting. Musico-literary studies, Waddell makes clear, often focus on the alleged equivalences among the arts: that is, the idea that literature and music (and visual art) may translate one another. Though modernist literature offers several examples of such equivalences – for instance, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Woolf's The Waves, which are briefly discussed in the conclusion – Waddell focuses on the underexamined role played by reference. He is interested less in the ‘borrowings’ or structural parallels among literary and musical works than in the ways in which authors used literature to explore Beethovenian culture. To this extent, Waddell blurs the lines between fictional and historical worlds, encouraging readers to discover how authors used literature as a fertile site for examining historical and cultural topics. Novels, he points out, are not just stories or representations of ideas; they are a space in which to study music and the concrete ways in which we engage with it. Waddell's framing of novelists as musicologists at the beginning of Moonlighting is therefore apt. By the end of the book, Waddell has demonstrated convincingly how authors like West, Lewis and Richardson explored responses to Beethoven – not through research, but through imaginative novels that combined musical sensitivity with literary insight.