ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the examples of the auditory-conversion trope among nineteenth-century musicians, focusing primarily on two musical-conversion narratives, one fictional and one historical. The first appears in two novels, Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa, by the Irish writer George Moore. The second is the real-life story of the pianist Hermann Cohen, a protege of Franz Liszt. George Moore, the scion of a prominent Catholic family from County Mayo in the west of Ireland, was one of the chief British literary exponents of the fin de siecle cult of Wagner. The music of Wagner is a ubiquitous backdrop to the plot of Evelyn Innes, with the operas representing the world of unbridled sensuality into which Evelyn, in pursuit of her musical ambitions, has entered. Thus Cohen both evokes and inverts the exile of the Jewish musicians in Babylon, who fall mute when their captors demand that they play one of the songs of Zion.
