Burgess, Tolstoy, Beethoven and the nature of art

Beethoven's music romps gleefully through two excellent works of fiction: A Clockwork Orange (Burgess) and the Kreutzer Sonata (Tolstoy).

In Clockwork, Beethoven is played during Alex's aversion therapy. The result: Alex cannot listen to his beloved Ludwig Von without feeling nauseated. The standard interpretation – with which Kubrik beats us over the head in his film – is that Beethoven’s music represents Alex’s soul, which the authoritarian state has stolen.

But does the novel support this notion? Kubrick whitewashed some of Alex’s more disgusting practices: raping 10 year old girls, crushing pet rodents with his boots, raping, pillaging and plundering. Kubrik presents the rich twits so unattractive that the audience has no sympathy for them. Close-ups of Alex’s tortured visage as he undergoes aversion therapy invite our sympathy instead.

The novel Is more graphic and less sympathetic lying in bed after making after maiming the writer and his wife, Alex lies naked in his bed blasting Beetboven.

“And I thought slooshying away to the brown gorgeousness of the starry old German master that I would like to have tolchocked them both harder and ripped them to ribbons on their own floor.”

Beethiven’s music inspires dreams of supremacy and conquest. Perhaps Alex’s soul should have been excised.

In the Kreutzer Sonata Tolstoy’s narrator listens as a man tells him the story of how he murdered his wife. She was having an affair with her piano teacher, stimulated to that sin, apparently, by listening to Beethoven’s famous Sonata, Tolstoy notoriously claimed Beethoven’s 9th was false art, more like a drug than a meditation. In his long short story, he. continues this notion.

What is ir about Beethoven that engenders such suspicious doubts? Does his music stimulate whatevwe propensities the listener might otherwise suppress? Tolstoy was a didact, wanting art to “infect” the consumer with enlightened emotions and thoughtjs But might not it also stimulate those who have a tendency to evil?. And why is Beethoven often selected has the perpetrator of this art?