Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 5
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 King 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.
“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
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