Revisiting Jean-Aubry's 'Joseph Conrad and Music' (1924)

The critic G. Jean-Aubry is best remembered for editing and publishing two volumes of Joseph Conrad’s letters and for translating his novels into French. Less well-known are his extensive activities as a musicologist which brought him to England during the First World War. In 1919, Jean-Aubry was appointed editor of The Chesterian, a journal associated with the London-based publishers J.W. Chester with the specific brief of promoting the latest contemporary music.
Throughout his career, Jean-Aubry sought to forge links between his literary and musical interests. It is therefore perhaps not entirely surprising that he should have chosen to follow this path in 1924 with the article “Joseph Conrad and Music” which appeared in The Chesterian. and served as a tribute to the recently deceased author.
Yet the unexpected context in which Jean-Aubry honoured Conrad, with whom he had established a long-standing working relationship ever since 1918, seems, at least on the surface, to be somewhat unconvincing Moreover, the plausibility of Jean-Aubry’s writing is called into question at the very outset, particularly given his admission in the opening paragraph that for many readers, it would have been somewhat surprising to “see the name of the author of Nostromo associated with an art towards which he does not appear ever to have manifested any such inclination.”.
Nevertheless, Jean-Aubry’s article remains a valuable historical document, not least for being the first concerted attempt to explore Conrad’s responses to a wide range of musical repertory that includes Chopin and French grand opera, as well as contemporary composers such as Ravel and Szymanowski. This chapter revisits Jean-Aubry’s article, attempting both to critique his arguments and provide us with a more nuanced picture of Conrad’s musical tastes by highlighting previously unexplored documentary evidence.