List of composers in literature explained

This list includes fictional representations of real (named) composers and musicians, and fictional characters under other names that are generally agreed to be based on a specific composer, or sometimes a composite of several.

Johann Sebastian Bach

• Esther Meynell: The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach (1925)^[1]
• James Runcie: The Great Passion (2022)^[2]

Arnold Bax

• Rebecca West: Harriet Hume (1929) (The title character based on Harriet Cohen)^[3]

Ludwig van Beethoven

• Andrew Crumey: Beethoven's Assassins (2023)
• Jessica Duchan: Immortal (2020)^[4]
• Sanford Friedman: Conversations with Beethoven (1980s, published in 2014)^[5]
• Paul Griffiths: Mr Beethoven (2020)^[6]
• Esther Meynell: Grave Fairytale (1931) (as Melchior)^[7]
• Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Rumour: A Novel (1858) (as Rodomant)
• John Suchet: The Last Master (1997–99) (fictional biography in three volumes)

Bix Beiderbecke

• Dorothy Baker: Young Man With a Horn (1938)

William Sterndale Bennett

• Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Starwood Burney)

Hector Berlioz

• Anthony Burgess: Mozart & the Wolf Gang (1991)^[5]
• Jude Morgan: Symphony (2006)^[8]
• Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Florimond Anastasa)

Lord Berners

• Nancy Mitford: The Pursuit of Love (1945) (as Lord Merlin)^[9]
• Osbert Sitwell: 'The Love Bird' from Dumb Animal and Other Stories (1930) (as Sir Robert Mainwroth)

Hildegard of Bingen

• Mary Sharratt: Illuminations (2012)^[5]

Mario Braggiotti

• F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is The Night (1934) (as Tommy Barban)^[10]

Benjamin Britten

• Ian McEwan: Amsterdam (1998) (Clive Linley, correspondencies with Britten)^[11]

Thomas Busby

• George Borrow: Lavengro (1851) (as editor of the "Universal Review")

Frédéric Chopin

• George Sand: Lucrezia Floriani (1846)^[12]
• Nell Stevens: Briefly, a Delicious Life (2022)^[13]

Harriet Cohen

• William Gerhardie: Pending Heaven (1930) (as Helen Sapphire)^[3]
• D H Lawrence: Kangeroo (1923) (as Harriet)^[14]
• Rebecca West: Harriet Hume (1929)^[14]

Michael Costa

• Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as St Michel)

Noël Coward

• Charles Brackett: Entirely Surrounded (1934) (as Nick Farraday)
• Beverley Nichols: Death to Slow Music (as Nigel Fleet)
• David Pownall: Facade (radio play, 2002)

Christian Darnton

• Nigel Balchin: Darkness Falls From the Air (1942) (as the poet Stephen Ryle)^[15]

Claude Debussy

• Pierre La Mure: Clair de lune (1962)^[16]
• Marcel Proust: À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) (aspects of Vinteuil, see also Franck and Saint-Saëns)

Frederick Delius

• C F Keary: The Journalist (1898) (as Sophus Jonsen)^[17]

Edward J Dent

• E. M. Forster: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) (as Philip Herriton)^[17]

Delia Derbyshire

• Rosemary Tonks: The Bloater (1968) (as Jenny)^[18]

Arnold Dolmetsch

• George Moore: Evelyn Innes (1898) (as the father of Evelyn)^[19]

Edward Elgar

• Keith Alldritt: Elgar on the Journey to Hanley: A Novel (1979)
• Anthony Burgess: Mozart & the Wolf Gang (1991)^[5]
• James Hamilton-Paterson: Gerontius (1989)^[5]
• David Pownall: Elgar’s Rondo (1993)^[20]
• David Pownall: Elgar’s Third (1994)^[20]

César Franck

• Marcel Proust: À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) (aspects of Vinteuil, see also Debussy and Saint-Saëns)

George Gershwin

• Anthony Burgess: Mozart & the Wolf Gang (1991)^[5]
• Mitchell James Kaplan. Rhapsody (2021)^[21]
• George Kaufman and Moss Hart: Merrily We Roll Along (1934) (as Sam Frankl)^[17]

Carlo Gesualdo

• David Pownall: Music to Murder By (1976)^[20]

Jimmy Glover

• George Moore: A Mummer's Wife (1885) (as Montgomery)

Eugene Aynsley Goossens

• Inez Baranay: Pagan (1990)
• Louis Nowra: The Devil is a Woman (2004)

Glenn Gould

• Christopher Miller: Sudden Noises from Inanimate Objects: A Novel in Liner Notes (2004)^[22]

Cecil Gray

• H.D.: Bid Me to Live (1960) (as Vane)^[23]
• Aldous Huxley: Antic Hay (1923) (as the critic Mercaptan)
• D.H.Lawrence: Aaron's Rod (1922) (as Cyril Scott)^[24]
• D.H.Lawrence: Kangaroo (1923) (as James Sharpe)^[24]
• Anthony Powell: Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (Maclintick and Gossege as a composite)^[25]

Jan Hambourg

• Willa Cather: The Professor's House (as the professor's son-in-law, Louie Marsellus)^[26]

George Frideric Handel

• Nick Drake: All the Angels: Handel and the First Messiah (2015)

Josef Matthias Hauer

• Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943) (as model for Joculator Basiliensis ("the player from Basel").
• ': Sonnenmelodie (1923)
• Franz Werfel: (1924) (as Matthias Fischboeck)

Charles Edward Horsley

• Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Charles Auchester)

John Pyke Hullah

• Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Lenhart Davy)^[24]

Halfdan Jebe

• C F Keary: The Journalist (1898) (as Hauch)^[27]

Maurice Jacobson

• Stevie Smith: Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) (as Herman)^[28]

Joseph Joachim

• Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Charles Auchester)^[24]

Aram Khachaturian

• David Pownall: Master Class (1982)^[20]

Constant Lambert

• Anthony Powell: Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (as Moreland)^[29]
• David Pownall: Facade (radio play, 2002)

Henry Lawes

• Robert Graves: Wife to Mr Milton (1942)

Madame Levinskaya

• Bernice Rubens: Madame Sousatzka (1962)^[30]

Franz Liszt

• Daniel Stern: Nélida (1846)^[31]
• Susanne Dunlap: Liszt's Kiss (2007)
• George Eliot: Daniel Deronda (1876) (aspects of Julius Klesmer, see also Rubenstein)^[32]

Elisabeth Lutyens

• Henry Reed: The Private Life of Hilda Tablet (1954) (as Tablet)^[33]

Alma Mahler

• Max Phillips: The Artist’s Wife (2001)^[34]
• Mary Sharratt: Ecstasy (2018)^[35]

Gustav Mahler

• Ronald Harwood: Mahler’s Conversion (2001)^[36]
• Thomas Mann: Death in Venice (aspects of the author Aschenbach)^[37]
• Stefan Zweig: The Return of Gustav Mahler (1915), semi-fictional essay^[38]

Florence Ashton Marshall (and her sister, the clarinettist Frances Marshall)

• Bertha Thomas: The Violin Player (1880)^[39]

Fanny Mendelssohn

• Peter Härtling: Liebste Fenchel (2011)
• Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Maria Cerinthea)^[24]

Felix Mendelssohn

• Anthony Burgess: Mozart & the Wolf Gang (1991)^[5]
• Pierre La Mure: Beyond Desire (1955)^[40]
• Elizabeth Sara Sheppard: Charles Auchester (1853) (as Seraphael)^[41]

Noel Mewton-Wood

• Sonia Orchard: The Virtuosso (2009)^[42]

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

• Anthony Burgess: Mozart & the Wolf Gang (1991)^[5]
• Stephanie Cowell: Marrying Mozart (2004)
• Alexander Pushkin: Mozart and Salieri (1830)
• Peter Shaffer: Amadeus (1979)

Hubert Parry

• George Bernard Shaw: Love Among the Artists (1881) (as Owen Jack)^[41]

Helen Perkin

• Carl Ginsburg: Medicine Journeys: Ten Stories (Center Press, 1983) (as Mrs Todd Ashby)^[43]

Sergei Prokofiev

• Anthony Burgess: Mozart & the Wolf Gang (1991)^[5]
• David Pownall: Master Class (1982)^[20]

Maurice Ravel

• Arnold Bennett: The Lion's Share (1916)

Notes and References

1. A. H. Weiler. "Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968)" in The New York Times, April 7, 1969
2. Erin Douglass. 'A novel envisions what it would be like to study with Bach', Christian Science Monitor, 29 April 2022
3. https://corymbus.co.uk/the-music-that-time-forgot/ Corymbus: The Music That Time Forgot
4. https://unbound.com/books/immortal/ Duchan, Jessica. Immortal at Unbound
5. Freya Parr. 'Ten of the best (and worst) novels about composers', BBC Music Magazine, 26 February 2019
6. https://www.nyrb.com/products/mr-beethoven?variant=37889862893736 New York Review of Books, 26 October, 2021
7. https://www.proquest.com/openview/06291dc2408e6362/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=2796 British Musician and Musical News, Vol. 7 no 67, July 1931, p. 153
8. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780312369514 review, Publishers Weekly
9. Amory, Mark. Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric (1999)
10. The Letters of Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (1964), p. 570
11. Robert E Kohn. 'The Fivesquare "Amsterdam" of Ian McEwan', in Critical Survey, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2004), pp. 89-106
12. Diedre Bair. 'Getting even with Chopin', in The New York Times, 11 August 1985, Section 7, p.9
13. https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/nell-stevens/briefly-a-delicious-life/9781529083422 Pan Macmillian
14. Fry, Helen. Music & men : the life and loves of Harriet Cohen (2008)
15. Collett, Derek (2015). His Own Executioner: The Life of Nigel Balchin. SilverWood. .
16. https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=y8AtAAAAIBAJ&pg=2934,4991485&dq=pierre-la-mure&hl=en Claire de Lune review
17. Amos, William. The Originals: Who's Really Who in Fiction (1990)
18. Audrey Wollen. 'The Writer Who Burned Her Own Books', in The New Yorker, 3 January, 2023
19. Richard Lines. 'George Moore's Evelyn Innes', in The Norwood Review No 174 (2008)
20. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/composer-plays-9781870259415/ The Composer Plays, Oberon (1996)
21. http://www.mitchelljameskaplan.com/ Rhapsody, by Mitchell James Kaplan
22. https://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/09/sudden_noises.html Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise blog (2004)
23. Book: Leo Hamalian. D.H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers. 1996. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. 978-0-8386-3603-9. 51.
24. M.C. Rintoul: Dictionary of Real People and Places in Fiction (2014)
25. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anthony-Powell-Dancing-Music-Time/dp/0241143837/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536519618&sr=1-1&keywords=dancing+to+the+music+of+time Spurling, Hilary: Dancing to the Music of Time, Hamish Hamilton, 2017
26. 'Willa Cather and the Professor's House', in Western American Literature, Vol. 7, No. 1, A Willa Cather Issue (Spring 1972), pp. 13-24
27. https://books.google.com/books?id=HbQ4DwAAQBAJ&dq=Charles+Francis+Keary+The+Journalist&pg=PA175 Boyle, Andrew J. Delius and Norway (2017), p. 175
28. Bluemel, Kristin. George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (2004), Chapter 1, p.27-66
29. Lloyd, Stephen. Constant Lambert: Beyond The Rio Grande. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014.
30. Allis, Michael. Temporaries and Eternals: The Music Criticism of Aldous Huxley (2013), p. 56
31. https://www.sunypress.edu/p-3852-nelida.aspx Nélida, Suny Press
32. Walker, Alan. Franz Liszt: The Weimar Years, 1848–1861 (1989), p. 250
33. Henry Reed: Hilda Tablet and Others, BBC Books, London, 1971
34. https://www.artinfiction.com/novels/the-artist-s-wife Art in Fiction: The Artist's Wife
35. https://www.artinfiction.com/novels/ecstasy Art in Fiction. Ecstacy
36. https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571212316-mahlers-conversion/ Faber, Mahler's Conversion
37. https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/contemporaries/thomas-mann/ 'Thomas Mann', Mahler Foundation
38. Werley, Matthew. Mahler in Context (2020), Chapter 32, 'Influences in Literature'
39. Shannon Draucker. Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature (2024)
40. Beyond Desire review, The Age. 12 December, 1956
41. Weliver, Phyllis. The Musical Crowd in English Fiction (2006)
42. https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780732288075/the-virtuoso/ Harper Collins, The Virtuosso
43. https://gurdjieffclub.com/en/helen-ejdi/ 'Helen Adie', at Gurdjieff Club