List of composers in literature

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)