Tolstoy Inspired… Music by Prokofiev, Janáček, & Beethoven

Connecting these works through the lens of Leo Tolstoy – particularly his novella The Kreutzer Sonata – reveals a powerful intersection of music, psychology, and morality. All three works orbit the emotional and thematic space carved out by Tolstoy’s philosophical engagement with music.

Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” sonata is not just a title reference, it is the catalyst of the story’s crisis. In the novella, the protagonist hears this sonata performed by his wife and a violinist, and it ignites a jealous, existential unraveling that leads to murder. For Tolstoy, Beethoven’s sonata embodies passionate intensity, music of dangerous emotional power that bypasses reason and evokes involuntary passions. He later described music as “a shortcut to the heart,” and a potentially morally hazardous one. Janáček takes Tolstoy’s fear of music’s power and turns it into artistic form, imitating not the surface of the “Kreutzer Sonata” but its emotional impact: alienation, desire, and emotional rupture. Prokofiev reflects a post-Romantic, post-Tolstoyan world where beauty is aesthetic, not moral, and emotional ambiguity prevails; a kind of artistic answer to the dilemma posed by Tolstoy.

Program

Prokofiev Cinq Melodies, Op. 35
Janáček Violin Sonata
Beethoven Sonata for Piano & Violin in A, Op. 47, “Kreutzer”

Louisa Stonehill – Violin & Nicholas Burns – Piano