ABSTRACT
The 'musical Magus' who so suddenly widens the horizons around Gwendolen's 'small musical performance' in Daniel Deronda is, of course, Julius Klesmer. Associations between Eliot's account of Klesmer and German Romantic literature suggest ways of connecting some of the very disparate critical responses which his portrayal has provoked. Comments on Klesmer range from seeing him as an unimpeachable manifestation of serious European culture, guardian of the privileged discourse of music, to noting how strange a figure he is and how he forms part of the rather sinister coercive patterning through which Deronda and Grandcourt double one another in their relation to the novel's heroine. I believe that Klesmer fits not either, but both these extremes.
