In The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy suggests that music’s emotional power is such that it is capable of destroying moral judgment and thereby of inducing immorality. This is not inherently an absurd idea. In the prison in which I worked, a prison officer of Jamaican origin discovered that if he played prisoners rock music they became agitated and aggressive, but if he played them baroque music they became calm and docile. I suggested Gregorian chant to the management, but no one took me seriously.

Since Sacks mentioned Tolstoy’s hostility to music, he might have mentioned also Lenin’s famous remark after listening to the Apassionata sonata, that it made him want to pat the heads of children out of general benevolence, and that therefore music was to be abjured. If only Lenin had allowed his susceptibility to music to flourish, how much less awful would have been the history of the 20th century!

There are many irresistible, astonishing and moving stories in this book, none more so than that of an orthopaedic surgeon in his forties who was struck by lightning and subsequently developed a passion, which he had not had before, for playing the piano and for composing. There is a Finnish entomologist who has such perfect pitch that he is able to recognise the species of insects by the frequency of the sound made by their wing beats. There are the patients with Tourette’s syndrome whose tics cease only when they are performing music. There is the chemistry student who remembers every word of her professor’s lectures because she sets them to music in her mind as she hears them. If it doesn’t all add up to anything very much in the end, because there is no overarching theory to account for all the disparate phenomena, we don’t really mind because we have learnt so much on the way.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP