A very little while since, Tschaikowsky was little more than a name
in England. He had visited us some two or three times, and it was
generally believed that he composed; but he had not written any piece
without which no orchestral programme could be considered complete,
and the mere suggestion that his place might possibly be far above
Gounod would certainly have been received with open derision. However,
when his fame became great and spread wide on the Continent, he became
so important a man in the eyes of English musicians that Cambridge
University thought fit to honour itself by offering him an honorary
musical degree. Tschaikowsky, simple soul, good-humouredly accepted
it, apparently in entire ignorance of the estimation in which such
cheap decorations are held in this country; and it is to be hoped that
before his death he obtained a hearing in Russia for the Cambridge
professor's music. The incident, comical as it appeared to those of us
who knew the value of musical degrees, the means by which they are
obtained, and the reasons for which they are conferred, yet served a
useful purpose by calling public attention to the fact that there was
living a man who had written music that was fresh, a trifle strange
perhaps, but full of vitality, and containing a new throb, a new
thrill. Since 1893 his reputation has steadily grown, but in a curious
way. One can scarcely say with truth that Tschaikowsky is popular:
only his "Pathetic" symphony and one or two smaller things are
popular. Had he not written the "Pathetic," one may doubt whether he
would be much better known to-day than he was in 1893. It caught the
public fancy as no other work of his caught it, and on the strength of
its popularity many of the critics do not hesitate to call it a great
symphony, and on the strength of the symphony Tschaikowsky a great
composer. (For in England criticism largely means saying what the
public thinks.) Passionately though that symphony is admired, hardly
any other of his music can be truly said to get a hearing; for, on the
rare occasions when it is played, the public thoughtfully stays away.
It is true that the Casse Noisette suite is always applauded, but it
is a trifling work compared with his best. Tschaikowsky shares with
Gray and one or two others in ancient and modern times the distinction
of being famous by a single achievement. The public is jealous for the
supremacy of that achievement, and will not hear of there being
another equal to it.
Whether the public is right or wrong, and whether we all are or are
not just a little inclined to-day to exaggerate Tschaikowsky's gifts
and the value of his music, there can be no doubt whatever that he was
a singularly fine craftsman, who brought into music a number of fresh
and living elements. He seems to me to have been an extraordinary
combination of the barbarian and the civilised man, of the Slav and
the Latin or Teuton, the Slav barbarian preponderating. He saw things
as neither Slav nor Latin nor Teuton had seen them before; the touch
of things aroused in him moods dissimilar from those that had been
aroused in anyone before. Hence, while we English regard him as a
representative Russian, or at anyrate Slav, composer, many Russians
repudiate him, calling him virtually a Western. He has the Slav fire,
rash impetuosity, passion and intense melancholy, and much also of
that Slav naïveté which in the case of Dvorák degenerates into sheer
brainlessness; he has an Oriental love of a wealth of extravagant
embroidery, of pomp and show and masses of gorgeous colour; but the
other, what I might call the Western, civilised element in his
character, showed itself in his lifelong striving to get into touch
with contemporary thought, to acquire a full measure of modern
culture, and to curb his riotous, lawless impulse towards mere sound
and fury. It is this unique fusion of apparently mutually destructive
elements and instincts that gives to Tschaikowsky's music much of its
novelty and piquancy. But, apart from this uncommon fusion, it must be
remembered that his was an original mind--original not only in colour
but in its very structure. Had he been pure Slav, or pure Latin, his
music might have been very different, but it would certainly have
been original. He had true creative imagination, a fund of original,
underived emotion, and a copiousness of invention almost as great as
Wagner's or Mozart's. His power of evolving new decorative patterns of
a fantastic beauty seemed quite inexhaustible; and the same may be
said of his schemes and combinations and shades of colour, and the
architectural plans and forms of his larger works. It is true that his
forms frequently enough approach formlessness; that his colours--and
especially in his earlier music--are violent and inharmonious; and
that in his ceaseless invention of new patterns his Slav naïveté and
lack of humour led him more than a hundred times to write
unintentionally comic passages. He is discursive--I might say voluble.
Again, he had little or no real strength--none of the massive, healthy
strength of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner: his force is sheer
hysteria. He is wanting in the deepest and tenderest human feeling. He
is plausible to a degree that leads one to suspect his sincerity, and
certainly leaves it an open question how long a great deal of his
music will stand after this generation, to which it appeals so
strongly, has passed away. But when all that may fairly be said
against him has been said and given due weight, the truth remains that
he is one of the few great composers of this century. I myself, in all
humility, allowing fully that I may be altogether wrong, while
convinced that I am absolutely right, deliberately set him far above
Brahms, above Gounod, above Schumann--above all save Beethoven, Weber,
Schubert, and Wagner. His accomplishment as a sheer musician was
greater than either Gounod's or Schumann's, though far from being
equal to Brahms'--for Brahms as a master of the management of notes
stands with the highest, with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner; while as a
voice and a new force in music neither Brahms nor Schumann nor Gounod
can be compared with him other than unfavourably. All that are
sensitive to music can feel, as I have said, the new throb, the new
thrill; and that decides the matter.
It is now a long time since Mr. Henry Wood, one winter's afternoon,
the only Englishman who may be ranked with the great continental
conductors, gave a Tschaikowsky concert, with a programme that
included some of the earlier as well as one or two of the later works.
It served to show how hard and how long Tschaikowsky laboured to
attain to lucidity of expression, and why the "Pathetic" symphony is
popular while the other compositions are not. In all of them we find
infinite invention and blazes of Eastern magnificence and splendour;
but in the earlier things there is little of the order and clarity of
the later ones. Another and a more notable point is that in not one
thing played at this concert might the human note be heard. The suite
(Op. 55) and the symphony (Op. 36) are full of novel and dazzling
effects--for example, the scherzo of the symphony played mainly by the
strings pizzicato, and the scherzo of the suite, with the short, sharp
notes of the brass and the rattle of the side-drum; the melodies also
are new, and in their way beautiful; in form both symphony and suite
are nearly as clear as anything Tschaikowsky wrote: in fact, each work
is a masterwork. But each is lacking in the human element, and without
the human element no piece of music can be popular for long. The fame
of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, is still growing and will continue to
grow, because every time we hear their music it touches us; while
Weber, mighty though he is, will probably never be better loved than
he is to-day, because his marvellously graphic picturesque music does
not touch us--cannot, was not intended to, touch us; and the fame of
Mendelssohn and the host of lesser men who did not speak with a human
accent of human woe and weal wanes from day to day. The composer who
writes purely decorative music, or purely picturesque music, may be
remembered as long as he who expresses human feeling; but he cannot
hope to be loved by so many. It is because Tschaikowsky has so
successfully put his own native emotions, his own aspirations and
hopes and fears and sorrows, into the "Pathetic," that I believe it
has come to stay with us, while many of his other works will fade
from the common remembrance. Surely it is one of the most mournful
things in music; yet surely sadness was never uttered with a finer
grace, with a more winning carelessness, as one who tries to smile
gaily at his own griefs. Were it touched with the finest tenderness,
as Mozart might have touched it, we might--if we could once get
thoroughly accustomed to a few of the unintentionally humorous
passages I have referred to--have it set by the side of the G minor
and "Jupiter" symphonies. As it is, it unmistakably falls short of
Mozart by lacking that tenderness, just as it falls short of Beethoven
by lacking profundity of emotion and thought; but it does not always
fall so far short. There are passages in it that neither Beethoven nor
Mozart need have been ashamed to own as theirs; and especially there
is much in it that is in the very spirit of Mozart--Mozart as we find
him in the Requiem, rather than the Mozart of "Don Giovanni" or the
"Figaro." The opening bars are, of course, ultramodern: they would
never have been written had not Wagner written something like them
first; but the combination of poignancy and lightness and poise with
which the same phrase is delivered and expanded as the theme for the
allegro is quite Mozartean, and the same may be said of the semiquaver
passage following it. The outbursts of Slavonic fire are, of course,
Tschaikowsky pure and simple; but everyone who hears the symphony may
note how the curious union of barbarism with modern culture is
manifest in the ease with which Tschaikowsky recovers himself after
one of these outbursts--turns it aside, so to speak, instead of giving
it free play after the favourite plan both of Borodine the great and
purely Russian composer, and Dvorák the little Hungarian composer. The
second theme does not appear to me equal to the rest of the symphony.
It has that curious volubility and "mouthing" quality that sometimes
gets into Tschaikowsky's music; it is plausible and pretty; it
suggests a writer who either cannot or dare not use the true
tremendous word at the proper moment, and goes on delivering himself
of journalistic stock-phrases which he knows will move those who would
be left unmoved were the right word spoken. There is nothing of this
in the melody of the second movement. Its ease is matched by its
poignancy: the very happy-go-lucky swing of it adds to its poignancy;
and the continuation--another instance of the untamed Slav under the
influence of the most finished culture--has a wild beauty, and at the
same time communicates the emotion more clearly than speech could. The
mere fact that it is written in five-four time counts for
little--nothing is easier than to write in five-four time when once
you have got the trick; the remarkable thing is the skill and tact
with which Tschaikowsky has used precisely the best rhythm he could
have chosen--a free, often ambiguous, rhythm--to express that
particular shade of feeling. The next movement is one of the most
astounding ever conceived. Beginning like an airy scherzo, presently a
march rhythm is introduced, and before one has realised the state of
affairs we are in the midst of a positive tornado of passion. The
first tunes then resume; but again they are dismissed, and it becomes
apparent that the march theme is the real theme of the whole
movement--that all the others are intended simply to lead up to it, or
to form a frame in which it is set. It comes in again and again with
ever greater and greater clamour, until it seems to overwhelm one
altogether. There is no real strength in it--the effect is entirely
the result of nervous energy, of sheer hysteria; but as an expression
of an uncontrollable hysterical mood it stands alone in music. It
should be observed that even here Tschaikowsky's instinctive tendency
to cover the intensity of his mood with a pretence of carelessness had
led him to put this enormous outburst into a rhythm that, otherwise
used, would be irresistibly jolly. The last movement, too, verges on
the hysterical throughout. It is full of the blackest melancholy and
despondency, with occasional relapses into a tranquillity even more
tragic; and the trombone passage near the end, introduced by a
startling stroke on the gong, inevitably reminds one of the spirit of
Mozart's Requiem.
The whole of this paper might have been devoted to a discussion of
the technical side of Tschaikowsky's music, for the score of this
symphony is one of the most interesting I know. It is full of
astonishing points, of ingenious dodges used not for their own sake,
but to produce, as here they nearly always do, particular effects; and
throughout, the part-writing, the texture of the music, is most
masterly and far beyond anything Tschaikowsky achieved before. For
instance, the opening of the last movement has puzzled some good
critics, for it is written in a way which seems like a mere perverse
and wasted display of skill. But let anyone imagine for a moment the
solid, leaden, lifeless result of letting all the parts descend
together, instead of setting them, as Tschaikowsky does, twisting
round each other, and it will at once be perceived that Tschaikowsky
never knew better what he was doing, or was more luckily inspired,
than when he devised the arrangement that now stands. Much as I should
like to have debated dozens of such points, it is perhaps better,
after all, just now to have talked principally of the content of
Tschaikowsky's music; for, when all is said, in Tschaikowsky's music
it is the content that counts. I might describe that content as
modern, were it not that the phrase means little. Tschaikowsky is
modern because he is new; and in this age, when the earth has grown
narrow, and tales of far-off coasts and unexplored countries seem
wonderful no longer, we throw ourselves with eagerness upon the new
thing, in five minutes make it our own, and hail the inventor of it as
the man who has said for us what we had all felt for years.
Nevertheless, it may be that Tschaikowsky's attitude towards life, and
especially towards its sorrows,--the don't-care-a-hang attitude,--is
modern; and anyhow, in the sense that it is so new that we seize it
first amongst a hundred other things, this symphony is the most modern
piece of music we have. It is imbued with a romanticism beside which
the romanticism of Weber and Wagner seems a little thin-blooded and
pallid; it expresses for us the emotions of the over-excited and
over-sensitive man as they have not been expressed since Mozart; and
at the present time we are quite ready for a new and less Teutonic
romanticism than Weber's, and to enter at once into the feelings of
the brain-tired man. That the "Pathetic" will for long continue to
grow in popularity I also fully expect; and that after this generation
has hurried away it will continue to have a large measure of
popularity I also fully expect, for in it, together with much that
appeals only to us unhealthy folk of to-day, there is much that will
appeal to the race, no matter how healthy it may become, so long as it
remains human in its desires and instincts.