George Eliot, literary soundscaping, and Beethoven

George Eliot was well aware of and profoundly fascinated by contemporary sound science. As it is typical of many other writers of the very long nineteenth century, her sonic imagination not only extensively exploited the “expressive potential of sound” and the whole spectrum of culturally interrelated sonic resources available through their literarization, but also created a particular sonic web of literary soundscapes according to holistic principles that often challenged coeval musico-literary standards, obstacles and morals. In George Eliot’s literary soundscaping, art music occupies a focal position still to be accurately investigated in the hermeneutic perspective adopted here. Ludwig van Beethoven (whose 250th birth anniversary is celebrated in 2020) is one of Eliot’s most prestigious intermedial and interdisciplinary “Others” (in the sense implied by the title of this Conference) and appears frequently in Eliot’s experience of art music. Unfortunately, Beethoven is no positive exception to the superficiality that characterizes the scholars’ intermedial research on Eliot’s literarization of art music.