gramophone

The gramophone is a gift from C. S. Lewis’s father that helps make Wagner’s music accessible to him, but its importance begins before he hears a record. Lewis reads gramophone catalogues avidly, then encounters Wagner through print, illustration, and opera synopses; when the gramophone finally gives him the Ride of the Valkyries, it makes music the next stage of an imaginative awakening already under way.

A gift and a reader’s instrument

Lewis and his brother receive the gramophone as one of their father’s many presents. At the time Lewis first sees the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods beside an illustration by Arthur Rackham, he is already fond of reading gramophone catalogues. Yet he does not imagine that the records listed under unfamiliar German and Italian names have anything to do with him. The machine is present in his life before Wagnerian music becomes imaginable as a personal experience.

That gap between object and possibility is central to the episode. A catalogue brings the names of records within reach, but it does not yet connect them to the mythic world that the book title and illustration suddenly open for Lewis. The gramophone is not simply a source of entertainment: it is a latent means of access whose significance arrives only after print has awakened his curiosity.

From printed names to heard music

The bridge comes through The Soundbox, a magazine that publishes weekly synopses of great operas and then presents the whole Ring. Lewis reads these accounts in a rapture, learns who Siegfried is and what the gods’ twilight means, and begins composing a heroic poem based on the Wagnerian version of the Niblung story. He has not yet heard a note of Wagner, but the composer’s name in print has already become a magical symbol.

During the next holidays, Lewis hears a record of the Ride of the Valkyries in the dark, crowded shop of T. Edens Osborne. He receives it not as an isolated concert piece but as part of heroic drama. For a boy already absorbed by Northernness, whose highest musical experience has been Sullivan, the record lands like a thunderbolt. Wagnerian records—chiefly from the Ring, but also from Lohengrin and Parsifal—then become the main drain on his pocket money and the presents he invariably requests.

The encounter does not simply enlarge Lewis’s existing taste in music. He distinguishes ordinary “music” from Wagnerian music as a new kind of pleasure, or perhaps something more unsettled: trouble, ecstasy, astonishment, and a conflict of sensations without a name. The gramophone makes the difference audible. What had been a fascination with a printed name and imagined world becomes an experience he repeatedly seeks through records.

The book, the brother, and the limits of ownership

That summer, while visiting his married cousin in Dundrum, Lewis finds Rackham’s Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods on her drawing-room table—the very book whose words and illustration had first stirred his interest. Its pictures seem to him like music made visible, deepening the delight that the records have begun to intensify. He covets the book and learns that a cheaper edition costs fifteen shillings, a sum that seems almost mythological to him.

Lewis eventually obtains it because his brother shares the cost. His brother is not himself enslaved by Northernness, but contributes seven shillings and sixpence out of kindness, despite having many better uses for the money. The episode places the gramophone within a wider chain of access: the gift makes records possible, while the brother’s generosity helps Lewis possess the illustrated book that first set the chain in motion. Sound and image remain distinct, but each carries him further into the same imaginative world.

A hinge in the imaginative life

The gramophone’s significance lies in how it joins media and stages of discovery. Catalogues first make records available as printed names; The Soundbox supplies the opera’s narrative; the Rackham illustration gives the myth a visual form; and the Ride of the Valkyries finally gives the imagined world sound. The machine does not create Lewis’s Northernness, which has already been awakened by the printed title and image. It gives that longing another form and sustains it through records he spends his pocket money on and asks to receive as presents.

The memoir presents this fascination as more than a youthful enthusiasm for opera. Lewis says that he cannot continue his story without marking its bearings on the rest of his life. In that account, the gramophone is a modest household object that becomes consequential through its place in a sequence: it helps turn literary curiosity into musical experience, while the illustrated book and his brother’s help show that this imaginative education depends on more than the machine alone.