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Page 40
TSCHAIKOWSKY AND HIS "PATHETIC" SYMPHONY
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 na�vet� which in the case of Dvor�k 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 na�vet� 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.
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