The social conventions, artifice and pretensions governing these performances intrigue her and allow her to sharpen her wit, but music wasn’t only an occasion for slapstick humour or social satire. It played a central part in the political vision of Woolf’s writing, shaping her understanding and representations of feminism and sexuality, pacifism and cosmopolitanism, social class and anti-Semitism. And it informed, too, the formal experiments of her prose. Woolf learned many of her astonishing literary innovations from music – adopting from Wagner’s operas, for example, the technique of shifting from one narrative perspective to another in order to represent the unspoken thoughts and feelings of her characters.

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She was fascinated by, but wary of, the idea that music was a form of total expression, a model that writing could aspire to or imitate.

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In her first novel, The Voyage Out, her heroine plays a Beethoven piano sonata usually perceived as ‘unattainable’ for women, augmenting the references to her growing feminism. In Night and Day, references to Mozart’s operas criticise the power of patriarchal society and in Jacob’s Room a performance of Tristan contributes to the numerous allusions attacking the war mongering of Edwardian society and its imperial activities. In The Years, Woolf’s account of a performance of Wagner’s Siegfried resists the composer’s notorious anti-Semitism, using the opera to embed more sympathetic attitudes towards Jews in the novel.