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It is not widely known that Tolstoy was a composer. A waltz for piano, the one musical work of his that survives, is posted on this site as a result of an interview that took place between Humphrey Carpenter and Isaiah Berlin, near the end of Berlin's life. This interview came to the attention of Berlin's editor, Henry Hardy, who followed up the clue about Tolstoy's waltz that it contains.
Carpenter was working on The Envy of the World, his history of the BBC's Third Programme/Radio 3, and during his discussion with Berlin (a prominent figure on the Third Programme in its early days) happened to raise the subject of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, the story of a man so obsessively jealous of his wife's music-making with a male violinist that he kills her for her supposed infidelity. Apropos this musical background Berlin observes: 'He was very musical, Tolstoy. He wrote a waltz - [...] I've heard it played. It's printed in a book. My wife played it to me, it's very simple.' Hardy followed up these remarks and, to cut a long story short, found the waltz in a Russian book published in 1953 by N. Gusev and A. Gol´denveizer, Leo Tolstoy and Music. In his contribution, Gol´denveizer writes: 'In his youth Lev Nikolaevich composed a waltz for the piano. When, in 1906, I was at Yasnaya Polyana with Taneev, Lev Nikolaevich played it to us, and we noted it down. This was the only time that we heard Lev Nikolaevich play.' The waltz (in F) is printed in manuscript as an appendix to the book. It was recorded for the National Sound Archive by Imogen Cooper on 17 October 1997 (click here to listen to the recording), and has been played on Radio 3 by Brian Kay. It lasts less than a minute, and has great charm.
The above profile compiled from information provided by Henry Hardy.
Tolstoy's Waltz
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