The subject line reminded me of one of my favourite entries in Grove Opera:
the biography of Tolstoy.  It opens thus:

   Tolstoy, Lev [Leo] Nikolayevich

   (b Yasnaya Polyana, 28 Aug/9 Sept 1828;
    d Astapovo railway station, 7/20 Nov 1910).

   Russian writer, distinguished hater of opera.  He had some musical
   education: he could play the piano after a fashion and even composed
   waltzes.  Sensitive not only to the pleasures of music but also to
   its `hypnotic' influence and hence its power to uplift or corrupt,
   he maintained that there could be no aesthetic judgment without an
   ethical component.  Good art was art that communicated simple ideas
   and emotions directly and intelligibly, uniting artist and audience
   in accord with Christian teachings.  For Tolstoy opera, with its
   mongrel mixture of media, its needless complexity, its irreality and
   its reliance on flamboyant convention, epitomized the falsity of art
   at its most debased and stood as metaphor for falsity in social
   relations.  The scene of Natasha Rostova's moral downfall in his
   novel Voyna i mir (`War and Peace', 1869) is set fittingly against
   the background of an opera performance ...

The article goes on to comment on the irony of Tolstoy's works being
used as the basis for operas.  The author was Richard Taruskin.

Mike Gibb
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