Anna Karenina

Chapter 5
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 Ring 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.
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"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,
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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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