Emma Bain shines a light on the relationship between two of Russia’s greatest 19th century geniuses

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky met Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy in December 1876 when Tolstoy came to Moscow to publish an instalment of Anna Karenina. Tchaikovsky, not yet the famed composer that he would become, was delighted to learn that the revered author of War and Peace was keen to meet him. Soon afterwards, he wrote to his sister Aleksandra Davydova that he was “terribly flattered and proud about the interest which I awaken” in Tolstoy and “completely enchanted by his ideal personality”. Tchaikovsky’s joy at making such an impression only grew when he heard that Tolstoy had been moved to tears by the andante cantabile of his First Quartet, part of a concert of Tchaikovsky’s music put on specially for the writer at the Moscow Conservatory that December.

However, their meeting was not all charm and mutual admiration, and exhibits the disparities in their personalities and modes of artistic outlook. In contrast to the forthright Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky’s shy nature meant that he did not revel in the wide circle of acquaintances that his career brought him, and his encounter with Tolstoy was no exception. Quite apart from the great author’s intimidating demeanour, Tchaikovsky found himself drained and disillusioned by Tolstoy’s insistent declarations of his contentious opinions on music – an area in which he was by no means expert. Tchaikovsky’s reservations surrounding the encounter are well documented in a revealing letter he sent a few years later to his patron Nadezhda von Meck. Writing of how he initially “made a feeble attempt to hide” when Tolstoy arrived at the Moscow Conservatory to meet him, Tchaikovsky goes on to give his account of their conversation:

“In his view Beethoven is untalented. What a fine start! I mean, this writer of genius, this great student of human nature started off by saying, in a tone of complete certainty, something quite stupid and offensive for any musician… After that he visited me a couple of times, and, although from our conversations I became convinced that Tolstoy is a somewhat paradoxical man, though certainly frank, kind, and in his way even sensitive to music, at the end of it all making his acquaintance left me with nothing but a sense of weariness and pain, just like any other acquaintance.”

Although Tolstoy’s son, Sergey, was later to maintain that his father’s objection to Beethoven was simply intended to challenge the obsession with his music ubiquitous in the educated classes of the time, the roots of both Tolstoy’s statement and Tchaikovsky’s incredulous reaction to it can be found by looking at the differing ways in which the two perceived music and its value.

Tolstoy in an 1873 portrait by Ivan Kramskoy

Tolstoy revered music and its powerful capacity to arouse feeling and alter the state of our emotions, an effect that he was acutely aware of himself, as evidenced in his weeping on hearing Tchaikovsky’s andante cantabile. This emphasis on intuitive psychological and physical responses to music form the basis of Tolstoy’s measure of the value of a piece of music — the more directly and precisely the music can communicate feeling and invoke a response in the listener, the purer it is. He found this process to be particularly fruitful with Russian folk song, and such regard for folk music was not lost in Tchaikovsky who, especially in his earlier works (including the andante cantabile), drew plentifully upon Russian folk themes.

Nonetheless, any obvious similarity between their perspectives ends here. Tolstoy’s belief that the involvement of a programme or narrative in music had the effect of corrupting its emotional force was at odds with Tchaikovsky, who found programmes in his orchestral works to be an important means of providing a starting point for engaging his audiences who often possessed only a rudimentary knowledge of symphonic form. Even more effective in holding and directing an audience’s attention, with its staged performance of a dramatic narrative, was opera. This was a medium derided so strongly by Tolstoy as mere high society entertainment that, as Tchaikovsky recalls in an 1883 letter to von Meck, Tolstoy

“advised me to abandon my pursuit of successes on the stage… Tolstoy, who has spent many years in the countryside without going anywhere else and occupying himself exclusively with family affairs, literature, and pedagogical work, must inevitably feel more keenly than others the whole falseness and mendacity of the operatic form. Even I, when I am writing an opera, feel somehow constrained and not free, and then it really does seem to me that I shall never write an opera again.”

Despite this feeling of creative limitation that he did not experience with his orchestral works, Tchaikovsky knew, as he later wrote to von Meck, “opera has the advantage of making it possible to influence the musical feeling of the masses, whereas the symphonist deals with a small, elite audience.” While the moralising Tolstoy enjoyed the comfort and isolation of his country estate Yasnaya Polyana, and wrote a scene in War and Peace during which Natasha Rostova becomes so intoxicated by the dazzling artifice of an opera that she is driven to be unfaithful to her fiancé, Tchaikovsky had the more worldly concern of providing for his material needs as well as trying to fulfil his aspiration to become a canonical figure in Russian music, both at home and abroad. Opera was thus necessarily a core part of his work and, as many would argue, this was not to the artistic detriment of the composer who produced such giants of the repertoire as Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades.

Tchaikovsky’s statue in front of the Moscow Conservatoire. Image credit: esosedi

In many ways, the encounter between Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy perhaps might not be looked upon as the most harmonious meeting of minds. Tolstoy never went to see Onegin, Tchaikovsky complained to his brother of the “disgracefully banal nonsense” he found Anna Karenina to be and, it would seem, did not read Tolstoy’s later tale of jealousy and murderous impulse fuelled by the eponymous work of Beethoven in The Kreutzer Sonata. Nevertheless, they generally appear to have regarded one another highly in spite of their differences. Their acquaintance in 1876 was followed by a brief but amiable correspondence in which Tolstoy avowed that his visit “will remain to be one of my best memories.” More than a decade after responding to the letter with similar sentiments, Tchaikovsky was to write to pianist Yuliya Shpazhinskaya that he considered Tolstoy to be no less than “the profoundest and strongest genius of all those who have ever been active in the field of literature”.

“I made a feeble attempt to hide”: When Tchaikovsky Met Tolstoy