In 1877 Tschaïkowsky became engaged to a lady whom he had met at the
house of her relatives sixteen or seventeen years previously.
That he married her was known to few, and the musical world was
surprised at the mention of a wife Antonina in the composer’s will. She
received an annuity, but not a liberal one, and perhaps that is the
reason she disclosed the history of the curious courtship and marriage
of Peter Ilyitch Tschaïkowsky.
He was constitutionally timid, and morbid in his dislike of women;
his friends advised marriage. But he was nervous and moody and in no
hurry, yet when Antonina told him that she intended to study at the
Conservatory he said:
“It were better that you married!”
Peter hung fire, and Antonina, who had secretly loved him for four
years, finally, after much church going and prayer vigils, determined
to assist her modest friend--suitor he was not. She wrote him a letter
proposing marriage, which he answered, and of all their acquaintance
this seems to have been the happiest time. She must have had a good
literary style, for Peter praised it, and finally called on her. He
spoke of his gray hairs, but never mentioned hers, although she was at
least thirty-four--he was seven years her senior. She answered that
merely to sit near him and hear him talk or play was all she asked.
Again he hesitated and begged for a day’s grace. The next time he saw
her he said he had never loved; that he was too old to love, but as she
was the first woman he had ever met that had pleased him he would make
a proposition. It was this: If a brotherly love and union would satisfy
her ideal of mated life he would consent to a marriage. After this coy
proposal the matter was debated in a perfectly calm manner, and as he
left her he asked:
“Well?” She threw her arms about his neck, and he hastily fled.
After that he visited her during the afternoons, but avoided all
attempts at tenderness, only kissed her hand, and even dispensed
with the familiar “thou.” In a week he begged for a month’s leave
of absence, as he had to finish his opera, Eugene Onegin. Madame
Tschaïkowsky declared that it was “a composition dictated by love.”
Onegin is Tschaïkowsky, Tatjana is Antonina, and she furthermore
said that all the operas he had written before or since meeting her
were cold. The marriage occurred July 27, 1877, eleven days after
Tschaïkowsky returned to Moscow.
The sequel of such an extraordinary wooing may be easily foreseen.
Tschaïkowsky’s morbidity increased, and he seems to have taken an
intense dislike to his bride. Everything she did displeased him; he
objected to her costumes, and one can hardly blame him, for at the tea
table one evening she appeared in a light yellow gown, wearing a coral
necklace! When he discovered the corals were imitation he burst from
the room, crying: “How fine, my wife wears false corals!”
In six weeks Tschaïkowsky had enough of married life, and left for a
Caucasian water cure; but it was really an excuse, as he went to visit
his sister. She must have given him advice, for he returned to his
wife; but after three weeks more, and in the middle of the month of
November, he told her that he had a business trip to make. She went
unsuspectingly with him to the railroad depot, where his courage almost
forsook him, and he took his final leave of her, trembling like a
drunken man. He embraced her several times, and finally pushed her away
with the ejaculation:
“Now go; God be with you!” They never met again. She only partially
explains the catastrophe by saying that outside influences were brought
to bear on her husband. Averse to conjugal life, credulous as a child
and extremely irritable, he was led to believe that matrimony would
prove fatal to his development as a musician. There is no doubt that
this was true; indeed for such a neurotic, erratic temperament marriage
was little better than prussic acid. Antonina doubtlessly suffered much
and understood Tschaïkowsky’s peculiarities, yet she did not complain
until after his death, and then only when she found that the bulk of
his property had been left to his favorite nephew.
There is no need of further delving into the pathology of this case,
which bears all the hall marks familiar to specialists in nervous
diseases, but it is well to keep the fact in view, because of its
important bearing on his music, some of which is truly pathological.
I once wrote of Tschaïkowsky that he said great things in a great
manner. Now I sometimes feel that the manner often exceeds the matter;
that his masterly manipulation of mediocre thematic material often
leads us astray; yet, at his best, when idea and execution are firmly
welded, this man is a great man; one who felt deeply, suffered and
drank deeply at the acid spring of sorrow. Not as logical nor as
profound a thinker as Brahms, he is more dramatic, more intense, and
displays more surface emotion. You miss the mighty sullen and sluggish
ground swells of feeling in Tschaïkowsky; but then he paints better
than the Hamburg-Vienna composer; his brush is dipped in more glowing
colors; his palette is more various in hues, while the barbaric swing
of his music is usually tempered by European culture and restraint.
Reticent in life, he overflows in his art. No composer except Schumann
tells us so much of himself. Every piece of his work is signed, and
often he does not hesitate to make the most astounding, the most
alarming confessions.
He fulfilled in his music much that Rubinstein left unsaid. Rubinstein
was a Teutonic mind Russianized; but, unlike Rubinstein, Tschaïkowsky,
with all his Western culture, kept his skirts clear of Germany. Her
science he had at his finger tips, but he preferred remaining Russian.
His ardent musical temperament was strongly affected by France and
Italy. He has certainly loved the luscious cantilena of Italy, and has
worshipped at the strange shrine of Berlioz. Indeed Berlioz and Liszt
are his artistic sponsors; and the French strain in his blood must not
be overlooked.
In his later years, as if his own clime had chilled his spirit, he
solaced himself in Italy and Spain, a not incurious taste in a stern
Northman. Despite his Western affiliation there is always some Asiatic
lurking in Tschaïkowsky’s scores. One can never be quite sure when the
Calmuck--which is said to be skin deep in every Russian--will break
forth. Gusts of unbridled passions, smelling of the rapine of Gogol’s
wild heroes of the Steppes, sweep across his pages, and sometimes the
smell of blood is too much for us, unaccustomed as we are to such a
high noon of rout, revelry and disorder.
He was a poet as well as a musician. He preached more treason against
his government than did Pushkin, or those “cannons buried in flowers”
of the Pole Chopin. His culture was many sided; he could paint the
desperate loves of Romeo and Juliet, could master Hamlet, the doubting
thinker and man of sensibility; could feel the pathetic pain of
Francesca da Rimini, and proved that Lermontov was not the only Slav
who understood Byron’s Manfred; he set Tolstoy’s serenade to barbaric
Iberian tones, and wrote with tears at his heart that most moving
song, Nur wer die Sehnsucht Kennt, a song that epitomizes Goethe’s
poem; and then only think of the F minor, the E minor and the B minor
symphonies! What a wonderful man he was! and how his noble personality
tops all the little masters of the Neo-Russian school!
Tschaïkowsky was one who felt many influences before he hewed for
himself a clear cut, individual path. We continually see in him the
ferment of the young East, rebelling, tugging against the restraining
bonds of Occidental culture. But, like Turgenev, he chastened his art;
he polished it, and gave us the cry, the song of the strange land in
a worthy, artistic setting. His feeling for hues, as shown in his
instrumentation, is wonderful. His orchestra fairly blazes at times.
He is higher pitched in his color scheme than any of the moderns, with
the exception of Richard Strauss; but while we get daring harmonic
combinations, there are no unnatural unions of instruments; no forced
marriages of reeds and brass; no artificial or high pitched voicing,
nor are odd and archaic instruments employed. Indeed Tschaïkowsky uses
sparingly the English horn. His orchestra is normal. His possible
weakness is the flute, for which he had an enormous predilection.
His imagination sometimes played him sinister tricks, such as the
lugubrious valse in the Fifth Symphony and the stinging shower of
pizzicati in the Fourth.
He was not a great symphonist like Brahms; he had not the sense of
formal beauty, preferring instead to work in free fashion within the
easy and loosely flowing lines of the overture-fantaisie. The roots
of the form are not difficult to discover. The Liszt symphonic poem
and its congeries were for Tschaïkowsky a point of departure. Dr.
Dvorák was therefore in a sense correct when he declared to me that
Tschaïkowsky was not as great a symphonist as a variationist.
He takes small, compact themes, nugget-like motives, which he subjects
to the most daring and scrutinizing treatment. He polishes, expands,
varies and develops his ideas in a marvellous manner, and if the form
is often wavering the decoration is always gorgeous. Tschaïkowsky is
seldom a landscape painter; he has not the open air naïveté of Dvorák,
but his voice is a more cultivated one. He has touched many of the
master minds of literature--Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Byron and
Tolstoy, and is able to give in the most condensed, dramatic style his
subjective impressions of their poems. He is first and last a dramatic
poet. He delineates the human soul in the convulsions of love, hate,
joy and fear; he is an unique master of rhythms and of the torrential
dynamics that express primal emotions in the full flood. His music has
not the babbling rivulets, the unclouded skies, the sweet and swirling
shepherds and shepherdesses of Dvorák, but it is more psychologic.
Give Tschaïkowsky one or two large human figures, give him a stirring
situation, and then hark to the man as his dramatic impulse begins to
play havoc. As well talk of form to Browning when Ottima and Seebold
faced each other in the ghastly glare of the lightning in that guilty
garden of old Italy!
Tschaïkowsky has more to say than any other Russian composer, and
says it better. He is no mere music maker, as Rubinstein often is,
writing respectable, uninspired routine stuff. He worked earnestly,
tremendously. Hence we find in his music great intellectual energy,
great dramatic power, ofttimes beauty of utterance, although he is less
spontaneous than Rubinstein. He had not that master’s native talent,
but he cultivated his gifts with more assiduity. His style is not
impeccable, and is seldom lofty, but he has plenty of melody, charming
melody, and while he was not a seeker after the one precious word, the
perfect phrase, yet his measures are more polished; show the effect of
a keener and more rigorous criticism than Rubinstein’s.
Tschaïkowsky is eclectic, and many cosmopolitan woofs run through the
fabric of his music. Italy influenced, then Germany, then France, and
in his latter day he let lightly fall the reins on the neck of his
Pegasus, and was much given to joyously riding in the fabled country of
ballet, pantomime and other delightful places.
He is eminently nervous, modern and intense; he felt deeply and
suffered greatly; so his music is fibred with sorrow, and sometimes
morbid and full of hectic passion. He is often feverishly unhealthy,
and is never as sane as Brahms or Saint-Saëns. His gamut is not so wide
as deep and troubled, and he has exquisite moments of madness. He can
be heroic, tender, bizarre and hugely fierce. His music bites, and the
ethical serenity of Beethoven he never attains; but of what weighty
import are some of his scores; what passionate tumults, what defiance
of the powers that be, what impotent titanic straining, what masses of
tone he sends scurrying across his pain-riven canvases! The tragedy
of a life is penned behind the bars of his music. Tschaïkowsky was out
of joint with his surroundings; women delighted him not, and so he
solaced himself with herculean labors--labors that made him the most
interesting, but not the greatest composer of his day.
He had in a rare degree the gift of musical characterization; the
power of telling in the orchestra a poetic story, and without the
accessories of footlights, scenery, costumes or singers. Charles Lamb
most certainly would not have admired him.
And Russia, how he loved her! That wonderful Russia which Turgenev
loved and divined so perfectly. Listen to Turgenev; listen to the
pessimistic side of the Russian:
“Sadness came over me and a kind of indifferent dreariness. And I was
not sad and dreary simply because it was Russia I was flying over.
No; the earth itself; this flat surface which lay spread out beneath
me; the whole earthly globe, with its populations, multitudinous,
feeble, crushed by want, grief and diseases, bound to a clod of
pitiful dust; this brittle, rough crust, this shell over the fiery
sands of our planet, overspread with the mildew we call the organic
vegetable kingdom; these human flies, a thousand times paltrier than
flies, their dwellings glued together with filth, the pitiful traces
of their tiny, monotonous bustle, of their comic struggle with the
unchanging and inevitable--how revolting it all suddenly was to me!
My heart turned slowly sick, and I could not bear to gaze longer on
these trivial pictures, on this vulgar show.... Yes, I felt dreary,
worse than dreary. Even pity I felt nothing of for my brother men; all
feelings in me were merged in one, which I scarcely dare to name: A
feeling of loathing, and stronger than all and more than all within me
was the loathing--for myself.”
Now turn from this Hamlet-mood and read The Beggar!
I was walking along the street.... I was stopped by a decrepit old
beggar.
Bloodshot, tearful eyes, blue lips, coarse rags, festering wounds....
Oh, how hideously poverty had eaten into this miserable creature!
He held out to me a red, swollen, filthy hand. He groaned, he mumbled
of help.
I began feeling in all my pockets.... No purse, no watch, not even a
handkerchief.... I had taken nothing with me. And the beggar was still
waiting, ... and his outstretched hand feebly shook and trembled.
Confused, abashed, I warmly clasped the filthy, shaking hand....
“Don’t be angry, brother; I have nothing, brother.”
The beggar stared at me with his bloodshot eyes; his blue lips smiled,
and he in his turn gripped my chilly fingers.
“What of it, brother?” he mumbled, “thanks for this too. That is a
gift too, brother.”