The Vinteuil Sonata is a fictional musical work described in the novel sequence In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The sonata features mainly in the section Un amour de Swann. The character Charles Swann associates a musical phrase in the piece with his love for Odette de Crécy.
It was on one of those days that [Odette] happened to play for me the passage in Vinteuil’s sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had been so fond. But often one hears nothing when one listens for the first time to a piece of music that is at all complicated ... For our memory, relatively to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them, or as that of a man in his second childhood who cannot recall a minute afterwards what one has just said to him...[1]
Proust was interested in music's power to trigger involuntary memory, a term which he invented.[2] The Vinteuil Sonata is thus comparable to the celebrated episode of the madeleine earlier in the novel, which triggers memories on the part of the narrator.[3]