Want to Understand Literature? Start with Classical Music.

On the Deep Kinship Between Classical Music and the Written Word

If you’ve ever had to participate in one of those “icebreakers” for school or work, you’ve probably been asked to provide a “fun fact” about yourself. I used to struggle with this question, because I am not sure how much of what I find “fun” appeals to a normal person, but I’ve remedied this qualm by interpreting “fun” as “unorthodox,” to which I have an endless array of answers—such as that I frequently attend the opera.

Whenever I tell people that I routinely attend concerts at the New York Philharmonic or Carnegie Hall—or the Chicago Symphony Center back home—the first question is always “Are you a musician?” or “What do you play?” I’ve surprised composers at Juilliard when, halfway through a conversation about Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, they learn that I have no formal classical music education and never graduated from the Suzuki method back in my high school violin days. The expectation is always that a lover of classical music—at least one in my generation—is also a musician. What this tells us is that young people have collectively abandoned classical music.

I routinely carp about the lack of great-work literacy among my generation, but Gen Z classical music literacy is even more abysmal. A Statista report found that only 4% of classical music listeners worldwide are between the ages of 16 and 19, and it is unclear how many of these young classical music aficionados are also musicians. The split is even more stark for the opera, with 70% of ongoing opera audiences over the age of 55. The argument has been made that high prices for classical music concerts keep young people out, but that would not explain the tendency among young people to flock to Broadway shows, which, with an average ticket price of $128.50, are far more expensive than their classical music counterparts. And—of course—young girls are willing to dish out thousands for a Taylor Swift concert.¹

There are several factors that might explain younger generations’ lack of interest in classical music. Classical music concertgoing culture has undeniable notes of elitism, with intermissions featuring Veuve Cliquot in plastic champagne flutes and women in sparkling evening gowns who will not have time to finish a glass priced at the cost of a bottle. Concert etiquette demands that you sit still and do not eat for sometimes longer than an hour, a demand that cinema popcorn culture has rendered nearly impossible for many people my age. Outside the concert hall, Gen Z lacks the attention span to properly digest classical music, whose complex themes stand at odds with the fast-paced and passive nature of modern music consumption, where music has become a stand-in for white noise to help us focus. Cuts to classical music education at the grade school level can’t be helping either, with Republican lawmakers frequently targeting arts education programs in routine budget cuts.² As Gen Z gravitates toward Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar, we must wonder whether classical music is even worth salvaging.

As a lifelong classical music lover, I am biased, of course, but I think the answer is yes. Much like literature, classical music offers an intellectual challenge, with many works finding their foundation in the principles of mathematics. The classical music tradition is a gateway to cultural and historical understanding, connecting listeners with centuries of artistic tradition. Countless studies document classical music’s positive effects on concentration, stress relief, and cognitive function—its complexity encourages a sort of active listening that fosters an appreciation for nuance. And, of course, classical music is quite beautiful.

But here’s an argument in favor of classical music literacy that you might not have heard before: understanding classical music will enrich your understanding of literature.

As musicologist

Matt Austerklein

observes,

Classical music is ultimately a spiritual response to Western literature. Want to know about the Bible? Feel its stirring and impassioned interpretation through the soaring oratorios of Haydn and Mendelssohn. Want to explore the wisdom of the Greeks? Discover four centuries of musical odes to mythology, from Monteverdi to Debussy. Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Melville, and countless other writers not only inspired our composers, but formed the imaginative superstructure of Western sound. To listen to classical music is thus to swim amidst the sonic dreams of devoted readers of the Great Books.

Likewise, as musician Ben Katz tells us, literature has informed the development of classical music:

Many composers have created pieces based on literary works from before their own times, reimagining these works in their contemporary musical languages. Two pieces come to mind here: Mendelssohn’s music for Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Night's Dream’ and ‘El Retablo de Maese Pedro,’ De Falla’s one-act opera based on a portion of Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

I could not agree more with both Matt and Ben. I have said countless times that art cannot be understood in isolation, and I will say it again: one cannot fully understand literature without robust knowledge of other forms of art and culture, for the arts are perpetually in dialogue with each other:

The Arts Need Each Other

In his monumental essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot tells us that literature cannot be understood in isolation from the full literary tradition that came before it. “No poet,” writes Eliot, “no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” Eliot’s language is key here: he refers not just to poets but to artists as a whole, suggesting that literature is part of a broader artistic tradition that transcends medium. Indeed, in “The Music of Poetry,” Eliot observes the overlap of music and poetic form—citing the debt of meter, rhyme, and versification to musical technique. Eliot structures much of his own work after classical music, most famously in The Four Quartets, which is modeled on and inspired by Beethoven’s Opus 132, perhaps the most famous of the composer’s sixteen string quartets. Eliot’s other poetry features frequent musical allusions, with “Portrait of a Lady” opening with violins, cornets, and preludes by Chopin in a “concert room” and The Waste Land drawing heavily on the operas of Wagner. As I argue in “T.S. Eliot and the Wagnerian Parallel,” “an examination of T.S. Eliot’s Wagnerian influence enhance[s] our understanding of The Waste Land and add[s] a novel layer to its exhibition of the futility and superficiality of human relationships.” Many of the themes of The Waste Land, a work that retells the famous Perceval myth, rely on an in-depth understanding of Wagner’s interpretation of the Holy Grail myth in his opera Parsifal and the themes of love and desire in his opera Tristan und Isolde. Eliot’s classical music allusions and his specific engagement with the works of Wagner and Beethoven are not merely a testament to music’s influence on literature—they reveal a greater interconnectedness and a fundamental inseparability between these two forms of art.

In the world of the Ancient Greeks, in fact, poetry and music literally were inseparable. The great Homeric epics—The Iliad and The Odyssey—were always sung rather than recited, and there is evidence that these works were often performed with a musical accompaniment. In fact, the second word of the opening line of Homer’s Iliad is ἄειδε, or “sing,” highlighting the importance of music in the Greek epic tradition. As the Western world rediscovered the traditions of the Greeks, poetry became one with music, with many composers setting poetry to music and many poems aspiring to musical perfection—up until perhaps the 20th century, the ideal poem was one that followed a certain meter and sounded good when read aloud. And as the poetic tradition became a model of strong, literary writing, the novel followed suit, abandoning prosaic “prose” writing (our word “prosaic,” which means ordinary or dull, literally stems from the word “prose,” which used to refer to a mode of writing largely reserved for official documents and other non-artistic record-keeping) in favor of more ornamental language. The invention of the novel in the 17th century introduced the idea that beautiful writing could depart from poetry, but this sort of early prose writing retained the attention to tone, style, and craft that characterized our musical poetic tradition.

Thousands of years after the Greeks, the poetic form is still indebted to music, with more contemporary poets like W.H. Auden and Ezra Pound explicitly exploring musical themes in their work. And, while classical music’s influence is most salient in poetry, the “prosaic” prose form has its own homages to classical music. The most famous “classical music” novel is, of course, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a meditation on the nature of art that also serves as an allegory for the rise of Nazi Germany. The novel follows the great fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn—a stand-in for Nietzsche and Schoenberg—through his childhood and throughout his adult life as he engages in a metaphorical deal with the devil à la Faust. Promised twenty-four years of artistic greatness, Leverkühn forgoes the warmth of human relationships for the pursuit of art as he becomes one of Germany’s great modern composers. Doctor Faustus abounds with dense musical commentary provided by its narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, and it features several lectures on Bach and Beethoven given by Leverkühn’s music teacher, Wendell Kretzschmar. Mann based many of Leverkühn’s compositions on the musical innovations of the time and famously introduced Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique in the novel’s twenty-second chapter.³ Beethoven also plays a significant role in the novel, which, alas, I cannot reveal here without spoiling major plot points. Suffice it to say that Doctor Faustus, a must-read for any lover of music or literature, reads quite differently for those familiar with the great works of music that Mann references throughout.

Other famous works of the 20th century follow suit. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange features a haunting depiction of classical music’s power over the human psyche; like Leverkühn, the novel’s protagonist Alex is deeply moved by Beethoven’s ninth symphony, which not only is a source of ecstasy for the fifteen-year-old gang leader but becomes a vehicle for psychological torture when his “Lovely Ludwig Van” is corrupted by the Ludovico Technique. For Alex, like many of us, Beethoven represents the extremes of the human emotional experience. Beethoven acts as a similar catalyst in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a Czech novel that weaves motifs of Beethoven’s “Es muss sein!” (“It must be!”), a theme from the composer’s sixteenth and final string quartet, into its existential meditations on fate and choice through the character of Tomas, who uses the piece’s refrain as a guiding principle. Music also serves as a metaphor for love, as in the following passage:

To fully understand this metaphor, one must first have a rudimentary understanding of classical music theory—the concepts of bars and motifs, for example—and a classical music education might serve just that end. One can read The Unbearable Lightness of Being without ever having heard Beethoven and still glean much of the novel’s message, but one cannot truly understand Tomas’s approach to fate without having heard the thunderous, fatalistic final movement of Beethoven’s last quartet. Classical music is instrumental to a great number of literary experiences, and we have a duty to ourselves to keep this great art form alive.

In an age where the arts are increasingly siloed, the great literary works that draw on music offer a compelling case for the preservation of the classical music tradition. Just as one cannot fully appreciate any given work of literature without understanding the broad literary tradition that preceded it, so do many great works of literature demand a musical ear. Classical music is not merely an aesthetic pleasure or an intellectual exercise—it is an essential part of the artistic conversation that has shaped storytelling, poetry, and prose for centuries. To abandon classical music is to abandon a key to deeper literary understanding, to lose the echoes of Beethoven in Eliot, Mann, and Burgess. If we value literature as a means of engaging with the human experience, we must also value the music to which it is so greatly indebted. The two arts need each other, and we, as lovers of culture and the humanistic tradition, need them both to thrive.

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1. There was a time twelve-year-old Liza Libes attended a Taylor Swift concert in a half-empty stadium for about $50. I understand why Taylor Swift appeals to tweens, but I cannot fathom spending thousands to see a woman with the vocal range of a croaking toad.

2. I do not necessarily disagree with such decisions, given that arts education is today just a stand-in for Marxism, but I would absolutely help fund any program that approached art from a more traditional standpoint.

3. Mann included a brief author’s note in subsequent editions of the novel after Schoenberg grew annoyed that Mann had included his twelve-tone technique without his explicit permission.