This is the “delightful composition” that Sofia plays to win the student competition at the Moscow Conservatory (despite the Count’s concerns that it might be too delightful). Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Sonata No. It is the second of the three Nocturnes that Sofia plays for the Count in the 1954 Chapter, the day he discovers that she has been studying piano in secret. Horowitz, who defected from the Soviet Union in 1925, had his debut in the United States at Carnegie Hall in 1929 playing this piece.įrederic Chopin: Nocturnes, Op 9 No. It is a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing this concerto at Carnegie Hall that the Count listens to alone in his room at the end of the 1946 Chapter (thanks to Richard Vanderwhile), and which becomes a symbol for him of “the Former” over “the Latter” in the 1952 Chapter. Though The Nutcracker, its spirit, and its various characters (especially Drosselmeyer) are referenced throughout the novel, Act One is featured at the end of the 1926 Chapter in the Count’s list of three important contributions by Russia to the West.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker, Act One (1892) (Sept.The following playlist includes five classical pieces referenced in A Gentleman in Moscowlisted below in the order in which they appear in the novel: Gently but dauntlessly, like his protagonist, Towles is determined to chart the course of the individual. Episodic, empathetic, and entertaining, Count Rostov’s long transformation occurs against a lightly sketched background of upheaval, repression, and war. But when the adult Nina returns to ask Rostov for a favor, his unique, precariously well-appointed life must change once more. Standing in for the increasingly despotic Soviet government is the Bishop, a villainous waiter who experiences gradual professional ascent-he becomes headwaiter of the Boyarsky, finally putting his seating-chart and wine-pairing talents to use. Forbidden to venture out, Rostov explores the intricacies of the grand structure and befriends its other denizens: precocious nine-year-old Nina Kulikova, a bureaucrat’s daughter who demands instruction on how to be a princess Emile, virtuosic chef of the Boyarsky, “the finest restaurant in Moscow” Andrey, the Boyarsky’s French expatriate maître d’ and the beautiful actress Anna Urbanova, who becomes the count’s regular visitor and paramour.

To Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, the Metropol becomes both home and jail in 1922, when the Bolsheviks spare his life (on the strength of a revolutionary poem written in 1913, when the count was at university). House arrest has never been so charming as in Towles’s second novel (following Rules of Civility), an engaging 30-year saga set almost entirely inside the Metropol, Moscow’s most luxurious hotel. In A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles explicates the atmosphere and attitudes endemic to the era after the Russian Revolution, which witnessed the death rattle of its aristocratic class as.

A gentleman in moscow by amor towles