Tolstoy

[N]o sooner had we met than he straightaway started expounding his views on music. According to him Beethoven lacked talent. And that was his starting point. So, this great writer, this brilliant student of human nature began, in a tone of the utmost conviction, by delivering himself of an observation which was both fatuous and offensive to every musician. What is one to do in circumstances such as this? Argue? … Although my acquaintance with Tolstoy has convinced me that he is a somewhat paradoxical, but good and straightforward man, even, in his own way, sensitive to music, all the same, my acquaintance with him, as with anyone, has brought me nothing but weariness and torment.

The meeting was followed by an evening of chamber music put on in Tolstoy’s honour, which included a performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Quartet, op. 11, written in 1871. The fabled andante cantabile of its second movement is based on a Russian folk tune which Tchaikovsky had heard a carpenter sing while he was composing at his sister’s house in Ukraine, and it brought tears to Tolstoy’s eyes. That, at least, Tchaikovsky found touching.⁷⁹

Tolstoy went to very few public musical performances, so his knowledge of, say, Mozart’s symphonies mostly came from four-hand piano arrangements. His antipathy to the artificial conventions of opera, meanwhile, was developed at an early age (and expressed through his faux-naive account of Natasha’s night at the opera in War and Peace, which is seen as if through her eyes). Tolstoy even exhorted Tchaikovsky to abandon writing operas,⁸⁰ so his response to the performance of Wagner’s Siegfried that he went to at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1896 was perhaps entirely predictable. Tolstoy writes more about Wagner than any other artist in What is Art? Criticism of the performance of Siegfried, and of Wagnerian opera, takes up an entire chapter. Taneyev shared a box with the Tolstoys at the performance they attended on 18 April 1896, and although he liked Wagner no more than Tolstoy, he was heartily ridiculed for following with a score and listening seriously.⁸¹ Tolstoy arrived late, and walked out before the end.

As with his analysis of Metropolitan Makary’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology back in 1880, Tolstoy was very parti pris when it came to analysing Wagner’s Siegfried – in both cases he took two isolated works out of context as exemplary of the whole, the easier to demolish them. Siegfried is the third part of a tetralogy, and by common consent the least engaging part of The Ring, so was a surprising repertoire choice for the sleepy Bolshoi Theatre in 1894, several years before even the Mariinsky, Imperial Russia’s premier opera house, had staged any of Wagner’s music dramas – works which place special demands both on singers and orchestra. The Mariinsky would finally complete a distinguished Ring cycle in 1907, but this Bolshoi Siegfried, sung in Russian, while a valiant effort, left a lot to be desired. Attendance at one of the two isolated revival performances in April 1896 was hardly the appropriate basis for a general assessment of Wagnerian art.⁸²

Tolstoy had more or less built an entire artistic and religious edifice on the foundation of one aspect of Christianity (the Sermon on the Mount), and although he can be forgiven for not reading Wagner’s ponderous aesthetic writings, here was a classic case of him wilfully refusing to consider all the dimensions of a structure in his path that did not conform to his specifications in the rush to tear it down. Although Wagner and Tolstoy were in certain important respects poles apart (the composer’s bombast and love of luxury spring to mind), there are also some intriguing parallels between them. Under the influence of Schopenhauer both formulated a religious vision based on a highly idiosyncratic theology of redemptive love which had little in common with traditional Christianity.⁸³ Redemption can be attained only by renouncing eros and practising compassion or agape, the word for love used in the New Testament: such are the lessons of Wagner’s last work Parsifal and all of Tolstoy’s late works from The Death of Ivan Ilyich onwards. Only love can redeem mankind and bring about a state where human beings can be at peace with themselves and with each other. Thomas Mann was quite correct when he wrote in 1933 that the pattern of Tolstoy’s artistic career was identical to that of Wagner, for in both cases, everything in their later oeuvre was prefigured in their earlier works.⁸⁴ For all its enthralling narrative, for example, War and Peace is ultimately about sin (separation from God, and the absence of human relatedness) and redemption (the restoration of love), as can be seen by following Natasha Rostova’s spiritual journey.