considerable—Auerbach, whom in 1860 he had met in Dresden—had doubtless a hand in fortifying his prejudices. “He spoke of music as of a Pflichtloser Genuss (a profligate amusement). According to him, it was an incentive to depravity.”[1]
Among so many musicians, some of whose music is at least amoral, why, asks M. Camille Bellaigue,[2] should Tolstoy have chosen Beethoven, the purest, the chastest of all?—Because he was the most powerful. Tolstoy had early loved his music, and he always loved it. His remotest memories of Childhood were connected with the Sonata Pathétique; and when Nekhludov in Resurrection heard the andante of the Symphony in C Minor, he could hardly restrain his tears: “he was filled with tenderness for himself and for those he loved.” Yet we have seen with what animosity Tolstoy referred in his What is Art?[3] to the “unhealthy works of the deaf Beethoven”; and even in 1876 the fury with which “he delighted in demolishing Beethoven and in casting doubts upon his genius” had revolted Tchaikowsky and had diminished his admiration for Tolstoy. The Kreutzer Sonata enables us to plumb the depths of
- ↑ Letter of April 21, 1861.
- ↑ Tolstoï et la musique (Le Gaulois, January 4, 1911).
- ↑ Not only to the later works of Beethoven. Even in the case of those earlier works which he consented to regard as “artistic,” Tolstoy complained of “their artificial form.”—In a letter to Tchaikowsky he contrasts with Mozart and Haydn “the artificial manner of Beethoven, Schubert, and Berlioz, which produces calculated effects.”
