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Page 41
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 Dvor�k 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.
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