Tolstoy

Of all the arts, Tolstoy regarded music as the most powerful, and also the most dangerous. He was a sentimental man, often reduced to tears by his favourite pieces, and it was probably his inability to control his emotional reactions to music as much as his moral scruples which made him condemn much of it. There is here a link here, of course, to Tolstoy’s punitive attitude to female sensuality, which also exerted a hypnotic hold over him, and which he also censured on moral grounds in works like The Kreutzer Sonata. The writer d. H. Lawrence, for one, was incensed that the vibrant, warm-hearted Anna Karenina had to fall victim to Tolstoy’s didactic urge and be essentially punished for her sexuality. As someone who in 1912 himself eloped with a married woman who had three children, Lawrence took strong exception to the idea that Tolstoy’s admirably brave and passionate heroine should have to pay for committing adultery by committing suicide.⁷⁵ Similarly, Tolstoy seemed to find it easier to deal with the ‘terrible power’ of music by dismissing it.⁷⁶

There was always a lot of music at Yasnaya Polyana, and the Becker concert grand in the main drawing room was at some point joined by a second, smaller model made by the same firm, which was reputed to be the best in Russia. (Jakob Becker, a German immigrant, had set up his piano manufacturing business in St Petersburg in 1841.) Both Tolstoy and his sister Masha were keen pianists who sometimes played for hours at a stretch (Sergey Tolstoy remembered his father sometimes playing until one in the morning in the 1870s while he was growing up), while Sonya also played, and her sister Tanya had a fine soprano voice. Of the Tolstoy children, Sergey and Misha were musically the most talented. Sergey went on to become a respected composer and ethnomusicologist who collaborated with the Indian Sufi musician and philosopher Inayat Khan, and he taught at the Moscow Conservatoire in the late 1930s. Misha was an accomplished pianist and violinist.

Apart from the family’s amateur music-making (which involved lots of duets), there were also impromptu concerts given by the professional musicians who came to visit Yasnaya Polyana and the house in Moscow. These increased as Tolstoy grew more famous. Visitors ranged from the legendary Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who performed Rameau, to Boris Troyanovsky, the first great virtuoso balalaika player, whose repertoire consisted mostly of Russian folk tunes. Tolstoy personally invited this ‘Russian Paganini’ to Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1909, shortly before he played for Queen Alexandra at Windsor Castle. The opera singers Nikolay and Medea Figner came up to Yasnaya Polyana from their nearby dacha on a number of occasions and bewitched the local peasants with their powerful voices, while one winter’s evening Shaliapin and Rachmaninov turned up to perform at the Moscow house. The musician to whom Tolstoy became closest, despite the almost fifty years difference between their ages, was the pianist Alexander Goldenweiser, whom he got to know in 1897. Goldenweiser often played Tolstoy’s favourite Chopin pieces, and later became a trusted friend of Chertkov – the memoirs he began publishing in 1922 are heavily biased against Sonya.

Even Goldenweiser had to admit that Tolstoy was a dilettante when it came to music.⁷⁷ Tolstoy liked folk music and gypsy music, and most of Haydn, but otherwise was very selective about approving works by the other major western European composers. According to his son Sergey, Tolstoy liked Mozart’s symphonies, some of his sonatas and a few of his arias, and he liked certain early Beethoven sonatas (definitely none of the late works). He liked some of Schumann’s piano pieces and the Dichterliebe, one of Schubert’s impromptus, and a handful of his Lieder. Otherwise his favourite composer, despite his general animus towards elite Western culture, was by far and away Chopin, which is somewhat ironic given that he was the salon musician par excellence.⁷⁸ Tolstoy certainly did not like Taneyev’s own music, but then there was barely any contemporary music he had time for, Russian or otherwise. He professed to being choked by the news of Tchaikovsky’s untimely death in October 1893, but he had not always been very complimentary about his music.

They had met in 1876 at the Moscow Conservatoire at Tolstoy’s express insistence. Tchaikovsky was very flattered that Tolstoy wanted to meet him (he was still at a relatively early stage of his career) but he was a very retiring man, and found the one serious conversation they had very onerous. It was not just that he was constantly terrified the novelist’s penetrating gaze would bore straight into the ‘innermost recesses’ of his soul, but that he also did not enjoy being lectured at about music. He recounted the gruesome experience afterwards in a letter: