10. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

In the late 1860s Tolstoy began writing a story called ‘The Wife-Murderer’, but abandoned it – the relationship of the central characters didn’t seem right. Twenty years later, in the spring of 1888, in the grip of his self-mortifying obsession with sex and the New Testament, he heard a private performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata at the family home at Yasnaya Polyana. The three things – story, obsession and Beethoven – fused to create ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. The wife in the early drafts of the story has an affair with a painter; in the final version she is a pianist who commits adultery with a visiting violinist. The theme is the sensual excess brought about by fashionable idleness and especially by voluptuous, purposeless music. The Kreutzer Sonata, especially the opening presto, becomes, in the mind of the half-deranged Tolstoy and his fictional protagonist, the hallucinatory expression of his own – and by extension society’s – inner sexual depravity.

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