"The Waves" by Virginia Woolf is surely the most beautiful novel in the English language. To call it a novel is something of a misnomer, as it blurs the distinction between prose and poetry. Woolf herself referred to it as a "playpoem". There are 6 characters who appear, and a seventh who never appears in person. the novel follows the 6 main characters from birth to death through the series of interior monologues. There are no direct exchanges between the characters, only inner voices. Woolf wrote in her Diary that the six were not meant to be separate "characters", but rather facets of a single consciousness. Each character has role in this group consciousness. Susan is the nurturer, and early in her life leaves the machinery of the city to settle in the country, where the sole focus of her life is her family. It is remarkable that Woolf, herself childless, writes the most astonishingly beautiful language of her career in Susan's monologues about her children. But the true nature of art is to illuminate the universally human, and Susan's powerful emotions speak directly to all of us. Significantly, there is a similar monologue, much later in Susan's life, when her children have grown up, in which she allows herself to doubt her choice to give up her own life for her children. The journey of her life is complicated, as it is for all of us.
The subtitle of this work is "Chamber Symphony". A symphony is a psychological journey in which our perception of the basic material, whether textural or musical, grows and is altered through the progress of the work. The work is in five sections, although they are joined, and sometimes merge into each other imperceptibly. The three lullaby passages are interrupted by two instrumental interludes. The music is linked together by several figures which recur, as well as by melodic lines and a harmonic language which unify the sections. The work is a genuine chamber quartet, not a "song" in the traditional sense of the word. The vocal part intertwines with the other parts as though it is an instrument, and the piano writing is often just simple single lines, as though it is a stringed instrument or voice. The text remains the focal point, but there is an abundance of complex counterpoint and each instrument and the voice, at one point or another, makes a solo statement.