T. S. Eliot and Beethoven: Aesthetics, Music and Politics 1870-1945

This project was funded by a British Academy fellowship based on Dr Aakanksha Virkar's extensive publications around Eliot and music, including 'Absolute music and the death of desire: Beethoven, Schopenhauer, Wagner and Eliot's Four Quartets' (Journal of Modern Literature, Jan 2017) and 'An Objective Chemistry: what T. S. Eliot borrowed from Schopenhauer' (Philosophy and Literature, Oct 2015) as well as, more recently, 'Max Klinger’s Beethoven (1902), Nietzsche’s Übermensch and the anti-fascist poetics of T. S. Eliot’s Coriolan I “Triumphal March” (1931)' (Journal of Modern Literature, Jan 2024). 

The research facilitated by the project continues Dr Virkar's work interrogating the aesthetics and politics of T. S. Eliot’s engagement with Beethoven during the interwar and World War II years, focusing on his monumental 'Four Quartets' (1936-1942) and lesser-known 'Coriolan' (1931-1932). Bringing together literary and musicological analysis, the project radically proposes that Eliot's turn to Beethoven in 1931 was not only a response to the 1927 Beethoven centenary, but a powerful critique of Nazi cultural ideology and rhetoric during these years.

As a literary scholar, Dr Virkar has explored the intersections between literature and the arts extensively. This timely project, initiated during the approach to the 2027 centenary, marking 200 years from Beethoven’s death, investigates how Eliot’s poetry explores the myth and meaning of Beethoven. A particular focus is the ‘heroic’ idea of the composer, as seen not only in Beethoven’s music and in musical discourse, but also in art and visual culture.

In the Journal of Modern Literature, Dr Virkar argued that the first of Eliot's 'Coriolan' poems is a response to the famous 1902 Beethoven sculpture by the Jewish artist Max Klinger. Klinger’s sculpture was first exhibited in Vienna as part of the ‘Beethoven’ exhibition by the Vienna Secession artists. In the poem, Klinger’s artist-hero embodies for Eliot an idea of heroism that can counter the fascist conception of Beethoven as military hero.

During this fellowship she examines, for the first time, Eliot’s Beethoven series as deliberately satirising and resisting the arguments of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf', through a celebration of fin-de-siècle Vienna and the Jewish artist as creator of culture. Far from the politically disinterested or reactionary poet imagined by the public and scholarly community, this project repositions Eliot as a poet whose engagement with Beethoven’s legacy was an artistic and philosophical defence of art against Nazi 'Kulturpolitik'.

Dr Virkar is also a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies (IES), School of Advanced Study, University of London and this research draws on resources at IES, the British Library and the German Historical Institute London.

The research was undertaken with plans to share findings widely with the public and the project will result in both a major journal article and a joint publication with the globally leading Beethoven scholar Daniel Chua, Professor and Chair of Music at Hong Kong University and author of Beethoven and Freedom (2017).