Musical Landscapes in E. M. Forster's “A Room with a View”

In this richly woven essay, Emre Aracı journeys from the windswept shores of Northumberland to the sunlit domes of Florence, tracing the music, memory, and emotional resonance of E. M. Forster’s "A Room with a View". Drawing upon Merchant Ivory’s adaptation, Beethoven’s sonatas, and Forster’s own love of music, Aracı explores how the novel’s emotional architecture mirrors the sonata form and reflects the eternal interplay between life and art. From Schumann to Puccini, from Lucy Honeychurch to Constantinople’s imagined pensione, this is a meditation on aesthetic longing, romantic freedom, and the perilous wonder of vulnerability.

We were walking along the desolate sands of Druridge Bay in Northumberland on a cold and blustery December afternoon. As the sun set, its light tinged the cotton-like clouds with a dusting of pink against an expanse of atlas-blue sky, and Coquet Island, the Duke of Northumberland’s property, grew increasingly indistinct on the horizon. As darkness fell, mist-like water droplets, rising from the North Sea’s foaming, formidable waves, descended upon us like a gossamer canopy. The curtain was drawing on the day, and the first stars of the evening began to gleam in the twilight. That night, the idea of journeying through time and distant cultures via a Merchant Ivory film—feeling the warmth of Florence in the flickering glow of a crackling fire—seemed utterly delightful. And so it proved to be.

"We were walking along the desolate sands of Druridge Bay" (photo © Emre ARACI)

It was, after all, the films of Merchant Ivory that had first introduced me to E. M. Forster’s novels. In the year 2000, when my first CD recording, European Music at the Ottoman Court, was released, I took care to send a copy to Ismail Merchant and James Ivory through a mutual acquaintance—yet, alas, no reply ever came. As Kiri Te Kanawa’s voice soared in the strains of Puccini’s O mio babbino caro, Florence, that evening, ceased to be merely a city; it became a portal. 

The past stirred amid its sunlit domes and shadowed alleys, and we, like Lucy Honeychurch, found ourselves no longer anchored in our own age but drawn irresistibly into Forster’s Italy—an Italy of innocence and awakening, where the early twentieth century had not yet surrendered to the encroachments of modernity.

Among E. M. Forster’s novels, A Room with a View stands as an exceptional work—one that probes the psychological effects of travel and encounter with foreign cultures. It interrogates conventional binaries of good and evil, vulgarity and refinement, love and marriage, selfishness and self-sacrifice, offering instead a finely wrought landscape of humanity’s perennial concerns. As a devoted reader of Forster, I find myself returning to A Room with a View for the fourth time, much as one might revisit a cherished symphony—not only for its familiar harmonies, but for the promise of new subtleties concealed within its elegant orchestration. Each reading, like each hearing, yields fresh cadences, overlooked turns of phrase, and quiet undercurrents of feeling that had previously eluded me. Indeed, this 1908 novel, structured with the precision and fluidity of a symphony, holds a particular fascination for the music historian.

It reveals itself as an unexpected score, awaiting analysis—its themes interwoven, its motifs recurring with subtle insistence. That Forster himself cherished music only deepens the intrigue, for one senses, beneath the measured prose, the presence of an unseen conductor shaping the ebb and flow of emotion, guiding the reader through a composition as meticulously crafted as any sonata. “I love music. Just to love it, or just to love anybody or anything, is not enough. Love has to be clarified and controlled to give full value, and here is where criticism may help. But one has to start with love; one has, in the case of music, to want to hear the notes. If one has no initial desire to listen, and no sympathy after listening, the notes will signify nothing—sound and fury—whatever their intellectual content,” Forster wrote in Two Cheers for Democracy.

E. M. Forster

Music played a vital role in Forster’s life. An amateur pianist and devoted concert-goer, he cultivated close friendships with musicians and, most notably, collaborated with Benjamin Britten on the libretto for Billy Budd (1951), working closely with the composer on the text. Forster’s passion for Beethoven—and the influence of the composer’s structural and emotional architecture on his prose—is well documented. In Howards End (1910), for instance, he weaves the ‘fate’ motif from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into the novel’s narrative structure. And in A Room with a View, he draws inspiration from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, with its turbulent diminished seventh chords. This sonata, which Forster himself likely played, serves as a mirror to the soul of Lucy Honeychurch, who ultimately breaks free from the stifling constraints of Edwardian convention and surrenders to true love. In many ways, Forster—keenly aware of the repressive limitations of his time—articulates his own internal conflict through Lucy’s emancipation.

The true aim is not merely to gaze upon the view from a room at the Pensione Bertolini overlooking the Arno, but to enter that view—to inhabit it fully—as a free-spirited individual.

“But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph”, Forster writes, capturing the essence of individual agency—just as Beethoven’s music allows the performer to shape its emotional trajectory. And Reverend Beebe, with his characteristic acuity, adds: “If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her”.

Merchant Ivory's timeless Forster adaptation A Room With a View

In his novel, Forster was influenced not only by Beethoven’s aesthetic but also by the formal structure of the sonata-allegro, comprising exposition, development, and recapitulation. A Room with a View is, in many ways, constructed along this tripartite framework, echoing the oscillation between Italy and England. In Merchant Ivory’s film adaptation, however, it is not Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 that sounds from Lucy’s fingertips at the Pensione Bertolini, but rather the more tempestuous Appassionata, Op. 57. Yet the message remains unchanged.

As Forster observes in the third chapter of his novel—infused with the twin motifs of music and violets—“The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions”. These lines, of course, lay bare the genius of the creative artist—one whose originality transcends the stifling conventions of society.

Whenever I visit Florence, A Room with a View invariably comes to mind. I must have passed the very building—Pensione Jennings-Riccioli—where Forster and his mother stayed in 1901, when it was still known as Pensione Simi. 

The view of the Arno has since changed beyond recognition, yet I recall a moment in the Bardini Gardens, gazing out across the city. I had paused there during a brief interlude on my way to Puccini’s house in Torre del Lago, following a morning coffee in Milan with his granddaughter, Simonetta Puccini. That scene returned to me with startling clarity when, in Merchant Ivory’s film, I later heard Kiri Te Kanawa sing “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta” from La Rondine. It was as though the past had momentarily materialised—a vision at once vivid and evanescent, like a living Renoir, suspended between the realms of memory and reverie.

"I recall a moment in the Bardini Gardens, gazing out over Florence" (photo © Emre ARACI)

Such “rooms with views” linger in the consciousness, their echoes resonating long after the moment has passed, transcending the boundaries of time. Perhaps that is why, as Forster advises Lucy to wander Florence without a Baedeker, cities are best explored not by the dry directives of guidebooks, but by allowing oneself to become lost in their streets—guided instead by novels, essays, and verses steeped in music, literature, and poetry. It is through such spontaneous immersion that the true essence of a place begins to emerge: where every corner and cobbled alley seems to hum with the weight of stories, both lived and imagined, that speak more eloquently than any map ever could. 

It was on just such a day of wandering that I found myself ascending the steps of Linley Sambourne House, a beautifully preserved Victorian residence at 18 Stafford Terrace in London’s Kensington.

The moment I entered the upstairs drawing room, where a grand piano immediately caught the eye, I was transfixed: one of the London scenes from A Room with a View had been filmed in this very space. The elegance of the candlelit gathering—with ladies in exquisite gowns and gentlemen in white tie and tails assembled around the piano—evoked Lucy’s recital in the novel. Here, Forster’s world and the aesthetic vision of Merchant Ivory converged not through an external gaze, but through an interior lens: a moment of perfect accord, as though the very walls were imbued with the atmosphere of Forster’s creation, living and breathing in quiet dialogue with its cinematic counterpart.

"The moment I entered the drawing room ... I was transfixed",  (photo © Emre ARACI)

That evening, unlike at the Pensione Bertolini, Lucy did not play Beethoven; she chose Schumann instead. As Forster remarks in the novel, it was “the sadness of the incomplete—the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art”. Schumann’s music, with its fragile balance of joy and melancholy, mirrored the emotional terrain of Lucy’s own journey. The composer’s inner world—its sorrows and exaltations—found expression in an aesthetic vision that Forster both cherished and, in his own way, bequeathed to us. 

To wander against the tide of tourists in Florence with Forster as one’s guide, or to encounter his spirit unexpectedly at Linley Sambourne House, is to step into a world where the boundaries between life, art, and memory dissolve with quiet poignancy. 

There is, too, an unexpected reference to Constantinople in the novel. Among the residents of the Pensione Bertolini are the Miss Alans, two elderly spinster sisters who dream of journeying to a pensione with a view in Constantinople: “So they call it out of decency, but in their hearts they want a pension with magic windows opening on the foam of perilous seas in fairyland forlorn!”. No ordinary view will content the Miss Alans. They want the Pensione Keats. Such a pensione, nestled in what is now modern-day Istanbul, may have existed only in Forster’s imagination, yet even this fleeting mention in A Room with a View carries quiet significance for kindred spirits. For in it, the city is not merely named, but transformed into a symbol of wistful longing—an idealised vision of a far-off, almost mythical place, where the mundane and the magical are not opposed, but held in gentle tension, and where the heart might find its most authentic expression.

As in the streets of Florence and London, I would often think of Forster during the years I lived in Cambridge; for from 1946 until his death in 1970, he resided in a high-ceilinged college room at King’s College—his alma mater—furnished with his personal belongings, lined with rows of books upon the library shelves, and housing his piano beneath its Gothic windows. Each time I passed through the courtyards of King’s, I imagined the view from that room, once captured in an old photograph I had seen.

King’s College always brought to mind the view from Forster’s rooms (photo © Emre ARACI)

If, like Forster, we are to remain faithful to the Sonata Allegro form, then we must now return to Northumberland, to Druridge Bay at sunset, where the clouds, like a field of cotton, blushed with roseate hues. To another land with a magic casement opening upon perilous seas. Here, the words of C. S. Lewis come to mind—words I first encountered in an edition of Wilde’s The Selfish Giant, after a stay at Magdalene College, Oxford, where Wilde had once studied, Lewis later taught, and where we took daily walks along Addison’s Way, much as we had at Druridge Bay.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken”, writes Lewis. 

And he continues: “If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable... The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell”, (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, 1960), pp. 121–122).

Had Forster and Beethoven not dedicated their works to this very truth? Surely, the music and message of A Room with a View are precisely this—a melody of human frailty, where the heart, in all its vulnerability, is both the source of greatest pain and ultimate triumph...

Emre Aracı's article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Manzaralı bir Oda'nın Müziği’ in the March 2023 issue (No. 197) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

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