ABSTRACT
While Chapter 3 focuses strictly on narratives employing Beethoven’s music, it will also show that the history of listening to Beethoven is as important as his music itself in these novels. I examine the use of Beethoven in Forster’s Room with a View and Howard’s End in relation to the idea of absolute music, a notion that is symptomatic of how Beethoven has been used in narrative fiction. Absolute music—aside from being independent of extramusical references or other arts—carries the idealistic notion of the philosophical absolute, making it a sublime experience (Dahlhaus 1991). However, this sublime experience turns into a katabasis for the main characters of the novels investigated in this chapter: while music was often associated with immediacy or self-sameness in German Romanticism, the sublime musical experience becomes connected with death in the novels discussed.
