In recent years, I have often lectured on literary developments in the years around 1900, and my focus was always on the crucial ‘shift towards music’ and on the century that followed, with musical authors including Milan Kundera, Thomas Mann, Simon Vestdijk, Jack Kerouac and Toni Morrison. This material by itself is enough for a lifetime of study, but gradually I found myself attending more and more to the presence of music in earlier novels. The 17th century was of particular interest, primarily due to recent publications noting that the novel had flourished to an exceptional degree during that century: hundreds of prose texts were printed, both in the Netherlands and abroad, and people loved them. However, a second reason for my curiosity had to do with the musicality of the 17th century. I have previously addressed the relationship between music and literature during that century in both a monograph on the use of music and songs in the Amsterdam theatre, and in a study about the popularity of songbooks in the Netherlands. Therefore, I was well aware of the ubiquity of music and song in that era, in the arts as well as in people's daily lives. At that time, music was at least as pervasive in Dutch society as it is now. Combining all these considerations, I started wondering about the situation preceding that of the new prestige accorded to music in 19th-century literature. In particular, I was interested in the 17th century, when authors were producing an abundance of prose fiction as well and were obviously also inserting music into their texts.

Samples from 17th-century Dutch prose indicate that this incorporation of music was indeed extensive. Moreover, musical elements were also present in the novels of other European countries. A search in the academic literature on the subject did not, however, yield much detailed information. Compared to the 19th and 20th centuries, there is very little research on musical influences on literary prose from earlier times. Here, the prevalence of poetry apparently still stands. This neglect is also due to the fact that prose is often connected to the ‘transformation of the oral into the literary’. In surveys of the development of the novel, either national or international, there is virtually no attention to the subject.