Why Beethoven by Norman Lebrecht

Author:Norman Lebrecht [Lebrecht, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

I was in torture, especially because I was sure that toward me she had no other feeling than of perpetual irritation, sometimes interrupted by the customary sensuality, and that this man, – thanks to his external elegance and his novelty, and, above all, thanks to his unquestionably remarkable talent, thanks to the attraction exercised under the influence of music, thanks to the impression that music produces upon nervous natures, – this man would not only please, but would inevitably, and without difficulty, subjugate and conquer her, and do with her as he liked.

Catching his wife eating dinner with the violinist, he pulls a dagger and kills her, letting the musician escape because ‘it is ridiculous to run after one’s wife’s lover in one’s socks.’ Tolstoy, whose domestic life is arid, concludes the novella with an appeal for sexual abstinence in marriage.

Thirty years on, the Czech composer Leoš Janáček, in love with a chaste housewife, Kamila Stösslová, titles his string quartet The Kreutzer Sonata. Janáček, in his sixties, is miserably married; Kamila is a contented wife, semi-educated and half his age. By no means a femme fatale, she is plump, provincial, uninquisitive. ‘You are so lovely in character and appearance,’ Janáček tells her. Kamila worries about her dress. He explains Tolstoy’s novella: ‘I had in mind a poor woman, tormented, run down and battered to death just like the one Tolstoy describes.’ Janáček’s infatuation is ferocious, Kamila’s passivity inflames him. They play out an intense soap opera over eleven letter-filled years.

Janáček’s Kreutzer Sonata quartet is a grenade that explodes with Beethoven fragments. Of the second quartet, ‘Intimate Letters’, he asks Kamila:

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