King Lear on the Heath

At the matinée there are two new works in the new style: a King Lear on the Heath fantasia and a quartet in memory of Bach. Levin plants himself behind a pillar, avoids the experts and the arm-waving conductor, and listens as conscientiously as he can — and the further he listens the further he is from an opinion. Every expression of feeling breaks off into fragments of other feelings or unrelated sounds, mirth and despair arriving without cause like a madman's thoughts. He feels like a deaf man watching a dance, and is tired by strained attention that is not rewarded. Pestsov praises the passage where Cordelia enters, das ewige Weibliche, and has to hand Levin the programme, on the back of which the Shakespeare is printed: you cannot follow without it. In the interval Levin argues that Wagner's mistake is to make music trespass on another art, and gives his image of the sculptor whose shadows cling to a ladder — then cannot remember whether he has used it on Pestsov before.

Music that requires a printed gloss to be followed is Tolstoy's case against programme art, made by a listener honest enough to admit he understood nothing. The deaf man watching a dance is exactly the position Levin has been in at the meeting, the elections and the calls. His own good phrase, suspected of being second-hand, sets up the pike from Krylov in the next chapter.