Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy
Chapter 197
798 words | Chapter 197
At the concert in the afternoon two very interesting things were
performed. One was a fantasia, _King Lear;_ the other was a quartette
dedicated to the memory of Bach. Both were new and in the new style,
and Levin was eager to form an opinion of them. After escorting his
sister-in-law to her stall, he stood against a column and tried to
listen as attentively and conscientiously as possible. He tried not to
let his attention be distracted, and not to spoil his impression by
looking at the conductor in a white tie, waving his arms, which always
disturbed his enjoyment of music so much, or the ladies in bonnets,
with strings carefully tied over their ears, and all these people
either thinking of nothing at all or thinking of all sorts of things
except the music. He tried to avoid meeting musical connoisseurs or
talkative acquaintances, and stood looking at the floor straight before
him, listening.
But the more he listened to the fantasia of _King Lear_ the further he
felt from forming any definite opinion of it. There was, as it were, a
continual beginning, a preparation of the musical expression of some
feeling, but it fell to pieces again directly, breaking into new
musical motives, or simply nothing but the whims of the composer,
exceedingly complex but disconnected sounds. And these fragmentary
musical expressions, though sometimes beautiful, were disagreeable,
because they were utterly unexpected and not led up to by anything.
Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one
another without any connection, like the emotions of a madman. And
those emotions, like a madman’s, sprang up quite unexpectedly.
During the whole of the performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching
people dancing, and was in a state of complete bewilderment when the
fantasia was over, and felt a great weariness from the fruitless strain
on his attention. Loud applause resounded on all sides. Everyone got
up, moved about, and began talking. Anxious to throw some light on his
own perplexity from the impressions of others, Levin began to walk
about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see a well-known
musical amateur in conversation with Pestsov, whom he knew.
“Marvelous!” Pestsov was saying in his mellow bass. “How are you,
Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so to
say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia’s
approach, where woman, _das ewig Weibliche,_ enters into conflict with
fate. Isn’t it?”
“You mean ... what has Cordelia to do with it?” Levin asked timidly,
forgetting that the fantasia was supposed to represent King Lear.
“Cordelia comes in ... see here!” said Pestsov, tapping his finger on
the satiny surface of the program he held in his hand and passing it to
Levin.
Only then Levin recollected the title of the fantasia, and made haste
to read in the Russian translation the lines from Shakespeare that were
printed on the back of the program.
“You can’t follow it without that,” said Pestsov, addressing Levin, as
the person he had been speaking to had gone away, and he had no one to
talk to.
In the _entr’acte_ Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the
merits and defects of music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that
the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take
music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it
tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an
instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble
certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the
pedestal. “These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they
were positively clinging on the ladder,” said Levin. The comparison
pleased him, but he could not remember whether he had not used the same
phrase before, and to Pestsov, too, and as he said it he felt confused.
Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest
manifestations only by conjunction with all kinds of art.
The second piece that was performed Levin could not hear. Pestsov, who
was standing beside him, was talking to him almost all the time,
condemning the music for its excessive affected assumption of
simplicity, and comparing it with the simplicity of the Pre-Raphaelites
in painting. As he went out Levin met many more acquaintances, with
whom he talked of politics, of music, and of common acquaintances.
Among others he met Count Bol, whom he had utterly forgotten to call
upon.
“Well, go at once then,” Madame Lvova said, when he told her; “perhaps
they’ll not be at home, and then you can come to the meeting to fetch
me. You’ll find me still there.”
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