Today's Fredlines: January 26, 2009 Archive

The Leos and Ludwig Chain

Posted at 6:26 PM on January 26, 2009 by Fred Child (3 Comments)

In 1803, Beethoven started a chain that is still going today. Music inspiring literature inspiring music inspiring literature inspiring...

His A Major Sonata for Violin and Piano is commonly called "The Kreutzer Sonata," since it was dedicated to Rodolphe Kreutzer. (Kreutzer said "Beethoven has no knowledge of my instrument," and thought it was impossible on the fiddle, Kreutzer never played the piece that has his name...but that's another story.

In 1890, Leo Tolstoy wrote a novella called "The Kreutzer Sonata." In Tolstoy's story, a fellow named Pozdnyshev tells about how he killed his wife. She played piano, and she had begun to work with a violinist...with a MALE violinist. They played Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata at a dinner party. Pozdnyshev saw that they shared some depth of feeling while playing the Beethoven. He leaves town on business, but comes home early, and finds them together. He kills his wife with a dagger.
His violence is inspired, in part, by the unbridled passion in the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata. The narrator asks:

"How can that first presto be played in a drawing-room among ladies in low-necked dresses? To hear that played, to clap a little, and then to eat ices and talk of the latest scandal? Such things should only be played on certain important significant occasions, and then only when certain actions answering to such music are wanted."

Czech composer Leos Janacek read Tolstoy's novella, and was inspired to write first a piano trio (now lost), and then his String Quartet No. 1. The quartet has the subtitle "after Tolstoy's 'Kreutzer Sonata'."

Janacek's quartet is not a moment-by-moment retelling of Tolstoy's tale, but it sets the mood: dark and brooding, sinister, forboding. In places loving and tender, elsewhere quite violent.

Janacek wrote his quartet in 1923.

And in 2005, ANOTHER author wrote a story, this time inspired by this Janacek quartet. Margriet de Moor wrote a novel ALSO called "The Kreutzer Sonata." About a torrid affair between a musicologist and a young violinist in a string quartet that's been practicing Janacek's Quartet.

So...a 2005 novel inspired by a 1923 quartet inspired by an 1890 novella inspired by the 1803 Beethoven. No word on any composers working on music inspired by Margriet de Moor's novel. Yet.

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