As we launch into a very literary month in Austin, with American Short Fiction celebrating its 25th Birthday on November 3rd, and the Texas Book Festival on November 5th and 6th, host Sara Schneider created this playlist of classical music that has inspired great writers. 

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Jane Austen's art closely imitated life, including the musical scenes she placed her novels: balls, public concerts, and private music-making activities. Austen loved music, practiced the pianoforte at least an hour each day before breakfast, and included bits of musical news in many of her letters. In 2004, Albany Records released a CD called Jane Austen's Songbook, featuring songs copied by Austen in her own hand. Singers Julianne Baird, Laura Heimes, and Anthony Boutté perform them with far more skill than Mary Bennet did in Pride and Prejudice.

Thomas Mann was exposed to music from a young age, and was strongly influenced by Romantic music in general, and Wagner in particular. The author described his novel Buddenbrooks as an “epic train of generations interwoven by Wagnerian leitmotifs.” In the novel, music is presented as a decadent influence which contributes to the downfall of a once prosperous Lübeck merchant family. Mann's short story Tristan centers on the devastating impact of Wagner's music on the residents of a sanitarium.

Unlike Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy was not a big Wagner fan. He wrote: “…around me I saw a crowd of three thousand people, who not only patiently witnessed all this absurd nonsense, but even considered it their duty to be delighted with it...sit in the dark for four days in company with people who are not quite normal, and, through the auditory nerves, subject your brain to the strongest action of the sounds best adapted to excite it, and you will no doubt be reduced to an abnormal condition and be enchanted by absurdities.”

So whose music did Tolstoy admire? Natasha Rostova's ball scene in War and Peace was inspired by Mikhail Glinka's Valse-Fantasie, despite being set about thirty years before Glinka set pen to paper to write his piece. Tolstoy also loved Beethoven's early works, before the composer became deaf. He believed Beethoven's deafness robbed his music of feeling. Tolstoy evidently found enough feeling in Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9 to write a novella with that piece at its heart: Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata was published in 1889. In this story of rage, jealousy, and music's power to excite emotion, Tolstoy wrote, “music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time.”

In an interesting turnabout, Tolstoy's novella inspired another piece of music! Leoš Janáček was a passionate admirer of both Russian literature and a much younger woman named Kamila Stösslová. These two loves intersected in his String Quartet No. 1, subtitled The Kreutzer Sonata. While not programmatic in the strictest sense, Janáček did intend to evoke the feeling of Tolstoy's novella. Every measure of this turbulent work seethes with rage, passion, and love in Janáček's intensely personal style.

Early music fans may be familiar with the film version of Pascal Quignard's novel Tous les Matins du Monde (All the World's Mornings). The story centers around composers Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe and Marin Marais. Marais is fascinated by the introspective music for viola da gamba created by Sainte-Colombe, and presents himself as his student. He also learns from Sainte-Colombe's talented daughter Madeleine, later seducing, impregnating, and dumping her when his ambition drives him to the royal court. He later returns to Sainte-Colombe's rural retreat and plays Le Rêveuse, the dreaming girl, for Madeleine on her deathbed. 

If you're planning on attending the Texas Book Festival, come visit KMFA! We'll be at Booth #605 (corner of 9th and Congress), asking the question, "What music inspires you to write?"