pumpkinstrokemarrow

Sonata a good thing, although I have yet to run down a live performance and without the calm and serenity of the Mozart violin sonatas. Not a thing to be winding down with. No doubt we will get to a performance one day and get a second take on it.

But it did make me think that Tolstoy might have a point; that two people spending time together playing this thing, a rather intimate duet, could lead to trouble. I have heard tell that there are plenty of goings on in amateur music groups and amateur dramatic groups. All these emotions, faked or otherwise, flying around in a confined space often result in one thing leading to another. So entirely reasonable that a husband should get jealous of a musician or an actor with whom his wife is playing.

Not so sure about the short story, despite its being the most talked about short story of its day, with its core being a chap who gets jealous about the violinist with whom his wife plays the Kreutzer sonata and so murders her. The story being framed by being recounted by said chap to a fellow passenger on a railway journey some time after the event. Presumably no death penalty for crimes of passion in Russia at that time, at least not for the rich, despite the rampant brutality on other fronts. Much banging on about various Tolstoyan hobby horses to the detriment of the story, a feature which mars (from the old Norse. Not from the Syriac where it means lord or the Latin where it means sea. Not the planet and not the god. The god, despite being a Roman god, presumably comes from the Syriac) 'War and Peace'. Tolstoy comes across as a strange bird: full of passion but also full of anger about where that passion and the underlying desires can lead. I suspect that much of the anger arises from the more or less untreatable nature of sexually transmitted diseases, the absence of decent birth control and the high rate of disease and death among the resultant children. (Which, incidentally, is where I think where much of the more unpleasant wing of Protestantism originated). Full of anger about doctors who do more harm than good - which might well have been true in his time and place. I also suspect that he had a huge temper when aroused. He describes the central character getting into a rage - something he also does a propos of both old and young Counts Bezuhov in War and Peace - in a way which suggests that he knows all about rages. Red mist coming down and all that. So, all in all, the story is interesting but rather tiresome. Perhaps I will do better on a second read.

And then there is the film, described on the box as a thriller and delivered by Amazon more or less the day after it came out on DVD, and which it has taken me some months to more or less see through to the end. A rather unpleasant thing, altogether rather off putting. The star, Danny Huston, manages to exude evil. So far, so good. The chap in the story is evil. The story has been transposed from a late 19th century Russian landowner to a late 20th century Beverley hills moneyowner. Again, so far so good. But there is much bad language and much bad sex, more or less full frontal. None of which is very necessary to the story. And the film focuses more or less entirely on the jealousy which arises from performing the sonata, more or less to the exclusion of the working up to that point in the story, in which the sonata is more the trigger than the whole business. Although to be fair, the point that the relationship is entirely founded on the physical attractions and appetites of the wife is made. So not very encouraged but perhaps I will manage a second view.

It also seems to focus entirely on just one part of the sonata. But I don't complain on that account.