A material trace of Eliot\u2019s passion for music remains in the form of a fine Broadwood piano, now housed at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry<\/a> which was purchased by Lewes for Eliot\u2019s 50th<\/sup> birthday. It thus became a presence in her life precisely 150 years ago on this 22nd<\/sup> November. Her anniversary provides a fitting opportunity for us to reflect on what this piano meant to her and what it adds to our understanding of her life and work. For us it\u2019s also a question of what significance we invest in material relics of the past; what does Eliot\u2019s piano, standing there in the museum, mean to us 150 years on?<\/p>\n On 22 November 1869, this piano was delivered to a grieving household. Lewes\u2019s middle son, Thornfield, had returned from farming in Africa with a painful illness and had died, aged 25, just a month previously. Neither Eliot, who was writing Middlemarch<\/em><\/a>, nor Lewes, were able to work. That the piano was purchased now, marks its significance. Not surprisingly, no flurry of references to the new piano fills Eliot\u2019s correspondence at this date. Fittingly however, the piano is an implied source of solace a decade later when, on the first anniversary of Lewes\u2019s own death, Eliot\u2019s diary for 8 Sept 1879 reads simply: \u2018Darwin. Schubert\u2019 (Journals<\/em>, 180). \u2018Darwin\u2019 may denote a visitor, or his books; Schubert she must have been playing at the piano. Eliot\u2019s journal further records that she had \u2018Touched the piano for the first time\u2019 after Lewes\u2019 death on 27th<\/sup> May (Journals<\/em>, 175). However the piano, which survives in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, represents not just the personal importance of music for George Eliot but its significance for numerous areas of Victorian culture.<\/p>\n The purchase of this fine piano was possible because of Eliot\u2019s success as a novelist, although the fact that it was acquired before the publication of Middlemarch<\/em>, which made her wealthy, is a further indication of its priority. Nor was it the first Broadwood that Eliot had owned. The first, purchased in 1861, marked an early milestone in her successful career. The enthusiasm conveyed in Eliot\u2019s letters communicates the central place a piano occupied in the Lewes\u2019s domestic and social lives. \u2018Today our new grand piano came \u2013 a great addition to our pleasures\u2019 Eliot records in her journal for 1st<\/sup> October 1861 (Journals<\/em>, 102). Later that month, she writes that a state of good health and spirits might be attributable to her \u2018new grand piano, which tempts me to play more than I have done for years before\u2019 (Letters<\/em>, III:460). The next year she mentions being unhappy with the piano\u2019s touch \u2013 no doubt among the reasons for subsequently replacing it (Letters<\/em>, IV:30). Despite this reservation, Eliot makes repeated references over the following years to the benefits she derives from ardent and energetic practice (Letters<\/em>, IV:120, 127). In 1862, the Lewes\u2019s rearranged their entire drawing room to improve the piano\u2019s position and sound (Letters<\/em> IV:30). It became a centrepiece of social gatherings including the increasingly important Sunday salon held at The Priory, their house at 21 North Bank, Regents Park, purchased in 1863; from 1869 this will have been the place occupied by the new piano, when the Sunday salon resumed shortly after the death of Thornton Lewes for whom Eliot had frequently played during his illness. Their musical evenings were attended by an array of literary and scientific figures, including the poet Robert Browning and Herbert Spencer, founder of sociology, who would join in the singing.<\/p>\n The arrival of Eliot\u2019s first Broadwood had been celebrated, on 5th<\/sup> October 1861, with a \u2018Beethoven night\u2019 the first of many musical evenings in which music of the Romantic period predominated (Letters<\/em>, III:456). Eliot owned numerous Beethoven scores and when she acquired her first Broadwood, had been playing Beethoven duets \u2018with increasing appetite every evening\u2019 with her eldest step-son, Charles Lee Lewes (Letters<\/em>, III:346). The liberal politician Frederick Lehmann (1826-1891), who visited The Priory to play Mozart and Beethoven sonatas for piano and violin with Eliot during 1866, described her as \u2018a very fair pianist, not gifted, but enthusiastic, and extremely painstaking\u2019; their audience was Lewes who would \u2018groan with delight whenever we were rather successful in playing some beautiful passage\u2019 (Letters<\/em>, VIII: 385 n.7). In October 1868, Eliot wrote to Charles requesting him to buy \u2018some music from your city man\u2019; she asked Charles to choose \u2018things by Schumann and Schubert, of the genre, for example, of Schumann\u2019s Arabesque.\u2019 (Letters<\/em>, IV:478). Also I should like to have an arrangement of Verdi\u2019s best operas for the Piano. Pater likes hearing those things\u2019 (Letters<\/em>, IV:478). Verdi was certainly not the only opera composer to be played, in piano reduction, on this new piano. In the late 1870s, when Lewes was already seriously ill, John Cross discovered him giving enthusiastic renderings of Rossini, singing \u2018the great portion of the tenor part in the Barber of Seville <\/em>\u2013 George Eliot playing his accompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun\u2019 (Cross, III:334). The composers that Eliot played on this piano are frequently alluded to in her novels and Romantic composers in particular were a standard against which literary contemporaries were measured. In an 1856 review she wrote that \u2018Turning from the ordinary literature of the day to such a writer as Browning, is like turning [\u2026] to the distinct individuality of Chopin\u2019s Studies or Schubert\u2019s Songs\u2019 (Selected Essays<\/em>, 350). While most details of their existence are lost to us, the wood and metal structures of this piano, that once sounded in response to Eliot\u2019s touch, embody the meetings in music and conversation shared by the writer and her contemporaries.<\/p>\n Works Cited<\/p>\n George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters<\/em>, ed. Gordon Haight, 9 vols., (Yale University Press, 1954-78). Cited as Letters<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Journals of George Eliot<\/em>., eds. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Cited as Journals<\/em>.<\/p>\n George Eliot\u2019s Life: As Related in her Letters and Journals, <\/em>ed. J.W. Cross, 3 vols., (Blackwood, 1885). Cited as Cross<\/em>.<\/p>\n Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings<\/em>, ed. by A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren, (Penguin, 1990). Cited as Selected Essays<\/em>.<\/p>\n Further Reading<\/p>\n Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture<\/em>, (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003).<\/p>\n \u2018George Eliot, Schubert and the Cosmopolitan Music of Daniel Deronda<\/em>\u2019, The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music<\/em>, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).<\/p>\n Photographs of George Eliot\u2019s piano by kind permission of the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dr Delia da Sousa Correa, Senior Lecturer in English 22nd November 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of novelist George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans. Appropriately 22nd November is St Cecilia\u2019s day, in honour of the patron saint … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Delia-piano-one-1024x768.jpg\")
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