By the side of the Blue Sea is a great and green oak tree girt with a
golden chain.
Day and night a marvellous and learned cat crawls around this oak.
When he crawls to the right he sings a song;
When he crawls to the left he tells a story.
It is there you must sit down and learn the understanding of Russian
legends....
There the spirit of Russia and the fantasy of our ancestors come to
life again.
PHILIP HALE, after PUSHKIN.
I
There you have Russia: when the Russian is not singing songs, saturated
with vodka or melancholy, he is spinning stories shot through with the
fantastic, or grim with the pain and noise of life. In the European
Concert his formidable bass tones make his neighbor’s voice sound thin
and piping. Napoleon prophesied that before the end of the century
Europe would be either Republican or Cossack, and only a few years
ago the Moscow _Gazette_ exultantly proclaimed that the “twentieth
century belongs to us.” By no means an anti-Slavophile in music, Henry
Edward Krehbiel, as far back as 1885, uttered his warning, “’Ware the
Muscovite!”
On the doorsill of the new century this old-young nation, if not
master, is almost a determining factor in politics, art and literature.
Tolstoy straddles the two hemispheres, having written one of the
greatest novels of the century, and like some John Knox of the North,
he thunders at our materialism and cries, “Ye of little faith, follow
me, for I alone am following the true Christ Jesus, our Lord and
Saviour!”
In politics Russia is the unknown quantity that fills the sleep of
statesmen with restless dreams. In painting she is frankly imitative
and too closely chained to the technical ideals of Paris; in sculpture
the name of Antokolsky rivals Rodin, while in music she is a formidable
foe of Germany.
One is almost tempted to write that much Russian music, certainly
all modern Russian piano music comes from Frederic Chopin, if you
did not remember Chopin’s Slavic affiliations. Yet in a sense it is
true. Chopin plays a big part in the harmonic scheme of all latter-day
composers, Wagner not excepted. Not alone in the use of dispersed
harmonies was he a pioneer, but in the employment of the chromatic
scale, in the manipulation of mixed scales, the exotic scales savoring
of Asiatic origin; Tschaïkowsky and Dvorák transferred to a broader
canvas and subjected to a freer handling many of the Polish master’s
ideas. To deny to Chopin originality of themes, rhythms and harmonic
invention would be pushing the story back one notch too many. Weber,
Rossini, Grieg, Liszt, Dvorák, Glinka, indeed all the nationalists in
music, might also be challenged critically on the score of originality.
If Russian music, the only organized musical speech of the nation, owes
something to Chopin, Michael Glinka was unquestionably its father, for,
like Weber, he lovingly plucked from the soil the native wild flowers
and gave them a setting in his Ruslan and Life for the Czar. In his
train and representing the old Russian school are Alexander Darjomisky
and Alexander Seroff, while with “Neo-Russia” rudely blazoned on
their banner, follow the names Cesar Cui, Rimski-Korsakoff, Borodin,
Balakireff, Liadow, Glazounow, Stcherbatcheff, Arenski, Moussorgsky,
Vladimir Stassoff and others. Outside of this pale and viewed with
suspicious eyes stand the figures of Anton Rubinstein, who went to
Germany and made music more Teutonic than Russian, and Piotor Ilyitch
Tschaïkowsky, who, like Chopin had French blood in his veins, his
mother being the descendant of a family of French emigrants.
It would be interesting to compare the cosmopolitanism of Tschaïkowsky
and Ivan Turgenev. The great novelist, one of the greatest in Russia
and France, was regarded by his contemporaries in the same fashion
as the little masters regarded Tschaïkowsky. The big men like Gogol,
Pushkin, Dostoïewsky were followed by scores of imitators, who wore
their blouses untucked in their trousers. This was their symbol, and
their watchword was “We are going to the people.” It was a savage
reaction against cosmopolitan influences, for Russia has successively
suffered from the invasion of English, French and German ideas,
customs, manners and even costumes. The rabid Slavophilist would have
none of these; he hated Italian pictures, German philosophy and French
literature.
Now Turgenev, loving Russia with a great love, yet exiled himself to
study his country from afar. He saw her faults, he knew her rash,
crass ignorance, her greed for foreign flattery, and he also felt
her heartbeat. Not even Tolstoy is more drenched with affection for
his land, not even Tolstoy wrote with more passion and pathos of his
countrymen. But Turgenev lived in Paris. He was a great artist in words
as well as ideas, and his artistry was so much damning evidence against
him by the cultivators of the new Chauvinisme. What was form and finish
to them that were “going to the people?” And so this noble man went to
his grave discredited by his own people, and homage was accorded him
by a foreign nation. It broke his heart, and the same rank nationalism
certainly embittered the last days of Tschaïkowsky who, like Turgenev,
practised his art passionately and persistently; and while the little
men, Cui, Borodin and the rest, were theorizing and dabbling with
nationalism, he, like a patient architect, reared his superb tonal
edifices, built of the blood and brawn and brain of Russia, even
though here and there the architecture revealed his Western European
predilections.
In a word, Turgenev, Tschaïkowsky and Tolstoy were travelled men; they
drank deeply at all the founts of modern poetry and philosophy, and
each, without losing his native quality, expressed himself after the
manner of his individual nature and experience, and how infinitely
wider in range, depth and versatility are the utterances of these
three masterful artists when compared with the narrow, provincial and
parochial efforts of their belittlers! And then the three are great,
not alone because of their nation; they are great personalities who
would make tremble the ground of any other land.
Rubinstein alone seems to have slipped between the stools of race
and religion. Born a Jew, raised a Christian, and of Polish origin,
he played the piano like a god, and his compositions are never quite
German, never quite Russian. He has been called the greatest pianist
among the composers and the greatest composer among the pianists, yet
has hardly received his just due.
Tschaïkowsky’s life is the record of a simple, severe workingman of
art. Clouded by an unfortunate and undoubted psychopathic temperament,
he suffered greatly and shunned publicity, and was denied even the joys
and comforts of a happy home. He died of cholera, but grave rumors
circulated in St. Petersburg the day of his funeral; rumors that
have never been quite proved false, and his sixth and last symphony
is called by some the Suicide Symphony. A complete nervous breakdown
resulted in 1877, and his entire existence was clouded by some
secret sorrow, the origin of which we can dimly surmise, but need not
investigate. A reticent man, a man of noble instincts, despite some
curious pre-natal influences, of winning manners, honest as the tides,
Tschaïkowsky went through his appointed days an apparition of art, and
in its practice he lived and had his being.
He was born April 25, 1840, at Votinsk, in the Government of Viatka, in
the Ural district. He died November 5, 1893, at St. Petersburg.
In May, 1891, Tschaïkowsky, at the invitation of Mr. Walter Damrosch,
visited America and appeared in the series of festival concerts with
which Carnegie Hall was opened. The composer conducted his third suite,
his first piano concerto in B flat minor, the piano part taken by Adele
Aus der Ohe, and two a capella choruses. He subsequently visited other
cities, and was everywhere received with enthusiasm.
Tschaïkowsky’s last notable public appearance was in the summer of
1893, when he conducted some of his own works at Oxford, and received
the degree of Doctor of Music from the University.