Is brutal murder a suitable subject for the refined medium of the string quartet?
Beethoven, Tolstoy and Leoš Janáček are the three contributors to this unusual work. Beethoven supplied both the title – The Kreutzer Sonata – and a phrase that’s quoted in the third movement; Tolstoy penned the narrative – a tale of a jealous husband and a murder; and Janáček wrote the music:
I had in mind a miserable woman, suffering, beaten, wretched, like the great Russian author Tolstoy wrote in his Kreutzer Sonata.
Janáček
But while Tolstoy uses his story to attack the institution of marriage, Janáček draws a different moral. It’s hardly surprising, I suppose, that the composer of Jenůfa and Káťa Kabanová transformed Tolstoy’s anti-marriage tract into a paean of praise for the repressed, abused and ultimately murdered wife; and, in the process, conjured another of his great and memorable heroines.
00:04 – Adagio
04:27 – Con moto
09:07 – Con moto
13:32 – Con moto
The Art of Listening 