Mezzotints in modern music /

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.

II

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!

Russia, a stripling with stout, straight limbs and white hair, is all fire, caprice, melancholy and revolt. Turgenev, more cosmopolitan, lighter in his touch than Tolstoy or Tschaïkowsky, is able to give us in these two prose poems the sadness and the big heart of the Slav, but in Tschaïkowsky we get the melancholy, the caprice, the fire and the revolt. If he be not the most Russian of composers, he is certainly the greatest composer of Russia!

III

Like Rubinstein, Tschaïkowsky became celebrated as a composer after he had written a little piano piece—a Chanson Sans Paroles, curiously enough in the same key as Rubinstein’s melody in F. A Polish dance, as we all know, lighted Scharwenka’s torch of fame in this country. Tschaïkowsky has never since written so tender, so dainty a piece as this little song without words. An op. 2, it gave him a vogue in the salon that has sent many a shallow admirer to sorrow, for it may be said at the outset that his compositions for piano are not Klaviermässig, do not lie well for the flat keyboard.

Read the very first opus, the Russian Scherzo in B flat, and you encounter a style that is decidedly orchestral. Massive octave and chord work, with dangerous skips and a general disregard for the well-sounding. In nearly all of his piano music I find this striving for the expression of the idea at the expense of smooth delivery, and we who have outlived the technical opportunism of the school that shuddered at the placing of the thumb on a black key must of necessity defend this course; but I wish to say for the benefit of those who groan over Brahms that he is a veritable Chopin compared to Tschaïkowsky—a veritable Chopin in his feeling for the right word and the right mechanical placing of it. Tschaïkowsky’s writing for piano is that of the composer for orchestra. He thinks orchestrally, and his position as a technician might be placed midway between Schumann and Liszt. Beethoven, employing the technics nearest at hand—the Clementi technics—writes more idiomatically for the instrument than this latter-day Russian master. Hence the general indifference to his music manifested by pianists; hence the rareness of his name on concert programmes, for the whole tribe of pianists is sheep-like in its aversion to a new pasture, and only after the leader has leaped the gap in the hedge does it timidly follow and sniff at novel herbage.

For teaching purposes the pedagogue encounters a genuine bar in Tschaïkowsky’s smaller pieces. After a page of delightful and facile writing, a flock of double notes or a nasty patch of octaves appear, and sometimes the teacher is himself floored by the difficulties. You may count on one hand the popular piano compositions of a small genre—the song without words, a real serenata, if ever there was one, with a streak of dark pathos in the middle; the number called June, from the Seasons, in the key of G minor, a barcarolle hinting of Mendelssohn and a stepfather to Moriz Moszkowski’s barcarolle; the theme and variations from op. 19, a scherzo in F from Souvenir de Hapsal, and the Album d’Enfants, op. 39.

I shall not consider in detail all the piano orchestral or lyric works of Tschaïkowsky, but only the typical ones, and, furthermore, I urge pianists who are clamoring for a novel repertory to study and search for themselves and not be deterred by the absence of stereotyped forms of passage work, for, while Tschaïkowsky is never a path-breaker in this respect, his piano music is not always cast in an acceptable mould.

I have mentioned op. 1, No. 1, as being a Scherzo à la Russe; the second number an Impromptu. The little scherzo in F from op. 2 is tricky and full of vitality.

It is not difficult. The second theme is very pretty. This op. 2 also contains “Ruines d’un Château,” and the familiar song without words, op. 3—you see, I am in deadly earnest and mean to give you the story to its bitter end—is the opera Voyevode. Op. 4 is Valse Caprice, for piano in A flat, very brilliant; op. 5, the piano Romance much played by Rubinstein; op. 6 is composed of six romances for voice; op. 7 is a piano Valse-Scherzo, also played by Rubinstein; op. 8, a Capriccio for piano in G flat; op. 9, three piano pieces—a Reverie, a Polka and a Mazourka; op. 10, two piano pieces—a Nocturne in B and a Humoresque; op. 11, the famous string quartet, E flat, with its entrancing slow movement; op. 12, an opera rejoicing in the felicitous title of Snegourotschka, or La Fille de Neige, a lyric drama in three acts. It was damned by Russian critics. Op. 13—at last we come to a symphony, the first in G minor, sometimes called A Winter’s Journey. It has been played here.

The work took shape under Rubinstein’s eyes and has an antiquated flavor. It was composed in 1868 when Tschaïkowsky taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. If it were not for the last movement, which has a smack of the Calmuck, and the modern instrumentation, I should say that Mendelssohn had more to do with this youthful composition than Rubinstein. There is the same saccharine volubility, the same saccharine cantabile and the same damnable fluency that characterizes the work of the feline Felix. Of the poet that penned those masterpieces, Francesca, Hamlet and Roméo et Juliette there is not the faintest spoor.

The symphony is monotonously in the key of G minor, with the exception of the adagio. It is called A Winter Journey, and the slush must have been ankle-deep. The first two movements are labelled, Winter Journey Dreams and Foggy Landscape, which of course may mean anything or nothing. The Allegro tranquillo is smooth, even smug, and one entire phrase for the woodwind occurs in the working-out section of the first movement of Rubinstein’s D minor piano concerto. The adagio is well made but is not musically convincing, notwithstanding its dark, rustling introduction, and the pretty conversation between oboe and flute. When the ’celli take up the solo one feels as if something were being accomplished. The scherzo is a melancholy apology and the trio cheap. In the finale, noisy and barbaric, we get a taste of our Tschaïkowsky, despite the garishness of loosely built fabric. The work is promising but we miss the large sweep, the poetic, passionate intensity, the keen note of naturalism and the fine intellectual acidity which we look for in this great composer.

Oddly enough it was Tschaïkowsky’s favorite as is evidenced by the following communication from Mr. E. Francis Hyde the president of the New York Philharmonic Society: “When Tschaïkowsky was in this country in the spring of 1891 I used frequently to see and converse with him about musical matters. One evening when he was at my house, I had taken from my library the scores of his second, third, fourth and fifth symphonies and narrated to him the times of their first production in this country, and the circumstances connected with their performance. I then asked him which one of all his symphonies he liked the best, naturally supposing he would mention one of those lying before us. To my surprise however, he replied that he liked his first symphony best of all. He said that it was the first expression of his feelings in a large composition of purely orchestral form, and he had a peculiar affection for his first born. He did not enter into any details regarding its subject-matter but he expressed a hope that it would soon be produced in this country.”

Tschaïkowsky may have been indulging in a little sentimental cynicism. Op. 14 is an opera, Vakoula, The Smith, in three acts; op. 15 is the Ouverture Triomphale; op. 16 comprises six romances for voice with piano; op. 17 the second symphony in C minor and known as the Russian.

In it Tschaïkowsky begins to reveal his skill in orchestration, and the themes of the first movement are all strong; at least two of its movements are not symphonic in character. The first allegro, the strongest, is very Russian in thematic quality. The entire movement is characterized by a bizarre freedom, even recklessness. But there can be no doubt about the skill of its maker. The fantastic Durchführungsatz and the melancholy beauty of the opening—and very Slavic theme—are intimations of the greater Tschaïkowsky who came later.

He omits the slow movement and marches us to the lilting rhythms of Raff and Gounod. The harmonies are more piquant, for the Russian wields a marvellous color brush. It is a clever episode, yet hardly weighty enough for symphonic treatment. For that matter neither is the banal march in Raff’s Lenore symphony.

The scherzo that follows is in the Saint-Saëns style. It reveals plenty of spirit and there is the diabolic, riotous energy that pricks the nerves, yet never strikes fire in our souls. The entire work leaves one rather cold. The finale is very charming and the variation-making genius of the composer peeps out. The movement has the whirl and glow of some wild dance mood and over all Tschaïkowsky has cast the spell of his wondrous orchestration. In the work are potentialities that are realized in his later symphonic works. It is our beloved Tschaïkowsky but as yet in precipitation. In style immature, there is much groping after effects—effects which he used with such a sure touch in Hamlet and Francesca. Those piano staccato chords for the brass choir, a genuine mannerism, are already here, and his fondness for chromatic scales, contrapuntally used, may be noted. An interesting symphony.

Op. 18 is The Tempest, a fantaisie for orchestra I never remember hearing. It was first played here by Mr. Frank Van Der Stucken.

In op. 19 we come once more upon familiar piano land, six pieces, the last of which is the variations in F. These are built upon an original theme, simply harmonized, savoring of a Russian cantus firmus. The first three are not striking; the fourth, an allegro vivace, is original in treatment; the fifth, an andante amoroso in D flat, suggests Chopin; the sixth, very bold and full of imitations; the seventh, short and in the mode ecclesiastic; eighth, in D minor, is Schumannish; nine is a fascinating mazourka; number ten is in F minor, and tender; number eleven, Alla Schumann, is characteristic; the twelfth on a pedal point is Brahms in color, and the presto finale, made of a figure in sixteenths, is very brilliant. These variations give us a taste of Tschaïkowsky’s quality in a form at which he was never beaten except by Brahms. They have served as models for several composers of the younger generation.

Op. 20 is “Le Lac de Cygnes,” a ballet in three acts, also unknown to us, but the title is a charming one; op. 21 is six pieces for piano, dedicated to Rubinstein, a prelude, fugue, impromptu, marche funèbre, mazourka and scherzo; op. 22 is the second string quartet, almost as famous as its predecessor, but, if more euphonious, is not marked by the rude Russian vigor and originality of op. 11; op. 23 is the first piano concerto in B flat minor, and here let us tarry before again plunging further in the thicket of twisting, octopus-like numerals.

This concerto, one of the most brilliant of works of its class written since Liszt, is quite as fragmentary as Xaver Scharwenka’s concerto in the same key, but it is more massive, more symphonic in the sense of development, weight, power, color, but not of form. The piano part is not grateful, yet it has attracted the attention of such a pianist as Von Bülow, to whom it is dedicated.

The work is interesting and full of surprises. The march-like first theme in three-quarter time, the astounding brilliancy and fulness of the piano part makes this opening very imposing. The processional quality is broken by the enunciation of the theme in dotted notes, followed by a Lisztian cadenza, with a repetition later in the orchestra of the subject. Then come those truncated, slurred triplets for octaves in unison, which are so portentous, and with which Tschaïkowsky accomplishes so much; makes a mountain out of a mole hill. The flutes and clarinets indulge in imitations of this until the full choir joins in, and then in augmented tempo the piano repeats, and finally it all dies away in a cavernous manner, leaving you in doubt as to its meaning or what to expect. But the Poco meno mosso is delightful, albeit its halting, syncopated accent breeds pessimistic doubts, soon resolved in the flowing lyric measures which ensue. The shadow of Schumann hovers here on brooding wings; yet another theme presents itself in A flat for the muted violins, with a zephyr-like accompaniment from the piano. Pastoral is the effect and plangent the rippling arpeggi. This theme leads off in the development with the profile only of the triplets of the intermezzo preceding. The piano part bursts in with octaves, and is singularly rich and vigorous. This reprise is full of learning and boldness of handling. I like the way the second theme reappears in B flat, although tonalities throughout are constantly shifting, and a harmonic haze, a blur of color, is often the only picture presented. The cadenza toward the close of the movement is more than three pages, and starts off in G flat, sounding suspiciously like the cadenza in Rubinstein’s D minor concerto. The finale is very impressive. The second movement in D flat is exquisite; a melting, amorous nocturne, charged with the soft languors of a summer night in Russia. There is atmosphere and there is a beloved one being sung to. The prestissimo, a fairy scherzo, with dancing, delicate shapes, all disporting themselves to a vague valse tune that must have been born on the Danube. This section has been charged with being commonplace, but a clever concert master can with a pencil stroke give the bowing and rhythm the distinction it needs. Yes, Tschaïkowsky could be distractingly banal; he could add the two of loveliness to the two of vulgar and make the sum five instead of four.

The andantino semplice ends serenely; and the Allegro con fuoco which follows is Russian in its insistent, irritable hammering accent on the second beat of the bar. You can’t help being carried away by the swing of it all, and the gay second subject relieves the drastic note at the beginning. All goes bravely, another subject appearing in Schumannish figuration. A dazzling movement this. Joseffy has altered the three pages of what he calls “Czerny unisons,” and made the passage work more modern. The finale is thundering. This B flat minor concerto is, after all, Tschaïkowsky at his best on the piano. His melodies are sweet, for the most part sane, and there is a sense of restless power suffusing the entire composition. It will stand as one of his representative efforts.

Let us, O weary sister, O bored brother! take up our staff and again wander down this flower and fungi-dotted path of opus land. Op. 24 is our next number, and is the opera Eugene Oneguine, or Jewgeny Onegin. This was produced in St. Petersburg in 1879. It never proved a success, although transplanted in various countries. The mazourka and valse are familiar, and the polonaise in G has been arranged by Liszt for concert. It is sonorous and pompous, but for me rather empty. The lyric theme or trio is commonplace. Upon the opera as a whole I can pass no judgment, not having a score. Op. 25, more romances, six for voice; op. 26 is the Sérénade Mélancholique, for violin; op. 27, six romances for voice; op. 28, seven more; op. 29, the third symphony in D, a further step in power and variety in this form. The first movement is beautiful music. The introduction in D minor hardly presages the brilliant allegro with its clear cut and animated figure. This theme is martial in character, a charming second subject being announced by the oboes. The movement is concise and shows an increased mastery in form. The second movement, an alla tedesco in B flat, is sweet and quaint but hardly belongs to a symphony. The andante comes next, in D minor, it is short and elegiac and seems better suited to a suite. This idea is further intensified when you are confronted by a fourth movement in B minor and a finale in D. Five short movements do not make a symphony, for there is neither unity of thought nor tonality in the work; not so pregnant a composition as the second essay in the symphonic form.

Op. 30 is the third string quartet; op. 31 is the delightfully fresh Marche Slave for orchestra, which we have so often admired in the concert room; op. 32 brings us to the Tschaïkowsky we all feel is great, for it is the overture-fantaisie, Francesca da Rimini, surcharged with the woe, the passion of the guilty pair who forgot that day to read their book, and so were slain, and were seen by Dante and the Shade of Virgil as their thin souls mounted in the spiral of sin and shame and in the stormy blasts of hell.

Not as often heard as the Romeo and Juliet, I nevertheless prefer it.

The Variations “Sur un air rococo,” for ’cello and orchestra, op. 33, are excellently written, very ingenious and very difficult. Op. 34 is a scherzo-valse for violin and orchestra, and op. 35 the concerto in D for the same instrument. This has been heard here several times. It is romantic in feeling and a very interesting work, although by no means a masterpiece. Op. 36 is the fourth symphony in F minor, a symphony that only falls short of being as great as the fifth and sixth. It is like all of his symphonies; loosely put together but certainly more homogeneous than the last one. The first strong, sombre movement, the andantino di modo canzona, the scherzo pizzicato ostinato and the harsh and sweeping finale are all fine imaginative mood pictures. There is the melancholy, the droning lament, the feverish burliness of the Russian poet, the Russian peasant. The scherzo is like a winged projectile. I shall speak of it again.

Op. 37, the only piano sonata of Tschaïkowsky, deserves resurrection. Its great length, fifty pages, has kept it in the libraries of pianists. Doubtless Karl Klindworth, to whom it is dedicated, plays it. Its opening is rudely vigorous, while a counter theme in G minor is a blending of Chopin and Mendelssohn; diffuseness follows, lack of cohesiveness being the gravest fault of the work. Here, as in most of the piano music, the thought is orchestral, and is writ large for orchestra. There is more simplicity in the E minor andante, and for a time the idiom is of the piano. The scherzo is the Tschaïkowsky of the merry mood, the waggish humor. He plays jokes throughout. The finale is all hammer and tongs. In a foot note the composer humbly suggests the correct use of the pedal, knowing that color, atmosphere, perspective are the very essentials of his piano music.

Six pieces for singing, as they call them, mark op. 38, the first being that devilish and rollicking and saturnine serenade of Don Juan in B minor, the text by Tolstoy. He sings to his love on the balcony. In the accents of a sinister Bravo he bids her from behind the lattice, and there is fear and cynicism in this wonderful song, so full of fire and the melancholy of a foredoomed soul. A great song, and I shall never forget the night Edouard de Reszke sang it, with its growling piano ritornello. It sounded satanic.

Op. 39, to pick up the arithmetical thread, is the Piano Album for Children, and contains just two dozen little pieces fit for the soft fingers of babyhood, except where a stretch wanders in, that would tax an organist’s thumb. Op. 40 is another collection of pieces, twelve in all, of medium difficulty. The Chanson Triste is familiar. Op. 41 is a Messe Russe for four voices, with organ and piano; op. 42 is for violin and piano, Souvenir d’un lieu cher; op. 43 is the first orchestral suite, and op. 44 the second concerto for piano and orchestra in G. This latter is dedicated to Nicolas Rubinstein, and the first time I heard it played in public was at the Philharmonic festival in 1892 at the Metropolitan Opera House, under Anton Seidl. Franz Rummel was the pianist, and even he, iron-handed as he was, had to make abundant cuts. The work, as I recollect it, is more closely knit in texture than the first of its form, and is more musical, more imaginative, if less brilliant and showy. It will figure on the programmes of the twentieth century virtuoso. The pianists of to-day refer to it as a symphony with piano obbligato. It has since been played here by Siloti. The last movement is the most Russian, the second being an exquisite pastoral, while the opening allegro is rhythmically noble and broadly eloquent.

There is no uncertainty in the ring of its first theme, a theme of sonorous nobility and virile assertiveness. The man who made such a theme has the blood of musical giants in his veins, peradventure the blood is a bit crossed with a Calmuck strain. The first movement is admirably developed, and the orchestra and piano have it out hammer and tongs fashion, the piano getting the better of the situation, particularly in the tremendous cadenza set in a decidedly unconventional place in the movement. The second movement contains some lovely writing, and the piano has to concede to the violin a solo of charming interest, although it later takes its revenge by playing the melody harmonically amplified. But the work is much too long.

Op. 45 is the Capriccio Italien, for orchestra, of which I once wrote: It is Russian icicles melted into fantastic shapes by Neapolitan fire and terpsichorean fury. The Russian loves to dream of the South. Even Heine wrote “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam.” Philip Hale says that there are in it “passages needlessly and ineffectively vulgar.” I accept his later judgment, for when I heard the piece I was color mad, and in those days I loved any color so it was red or purple. Op. 46, six vocal duos; op. 47, seven romances for voice and piano; op. 48, the serenade, for strings; op. 49, the Overture Solennelle, better known as “1812,” an impossible and noisy overture; op. 50 is the lovely trio in A minor for piano and strings, written to commemorate the death of Nicolas Rubinstein, who was a near friend of Tschaïkowsky. It is a true elegy.

Op. 51 contains six piano pieces, valse, polka, minuetto, valse, romance and a valse sentimentale; op. 52 is another Russian mass for four voices, and op. 53 is the second suite for orchestra; op. 54 is another collection of songs, sixteen in number, and for youth; op. 55 is the third and most popular suite for orchestra, the theme and variations of which are heard nearly every season. The finale-polonaise of these is most brilliant; op. 56 is that tremendously difficult and long fantasie for piano and orchestra, written for Annette Essipoff, and played here by Julia Rivé-King. I forget how many bars the cadenza contains, but it is so long that the audience is apt to forget there is an orchestra. Yet the themes are fresh, the execution in Tschaïkowsky’s most virile vein, and if the cadenza were cut or omitted the fantasie would certainly be heard oftener, especially as the orchestra is so eloquent and entertaining. But who will play the surgeon?

IV

We are now in the very thick of the fight of the fierce battle waged by Tschaïkowsky for his ideals. To know the complexion of his soul you must study his orchestral works, and after his op. 57, six Lieder, comes the noble Manfred symphony, op. 58. If I had a spark of the true critic in my veins I would be able to give the dates of the performances of this—to use a banal expression—inspired work. But I am not a handy man at figures of any sort, and indeed barely remember the composition except as a magnificent picture in poignant tones, Manfred seeking forgetfulness of his lost Astarte in the mountains, the Witch of the Alps; and after a wonderful sketch of the Alps, with the piercing blue above the calm, a ranz des vaches not at all in the Rossinian manner, the death of Manfred, and the maddening tonal debaucheries in the hall of Arimanes. Here is our Tschaïkowsky at his top notch; the temper of the man showing out clear and poetic and dramatic to all extremes. The passion of life and its folly are proclaimed by a master pessimist who from his birth was sacrificed to those three dread sisters told of by De Quincey. A most moving and agitated tale, and one that almost shakes your belief in the universe. No joy of life here but a morbid brooding, a mood of doubt and darkness. There are desperate moments in the music, and Manfred’s naked soul stands before us. The finale, with its sweeping melos, accompanied by the organ, is most melancholy, but not without a gleam of hope. Tschaïkowsky is a poet who sometimes prophesies.

Op. 59 is a Doumka, a rustic Russian scene for piano solo. Op. 60 consists of a dozen romances for voice, and op. 61 is the delightful fourth orchestral suite, Mozarteana, in which Tschaïkowsky testified in a lively manner to his love for Mozart. He has utilized the Ave Verum in a striking way, and not even Gounod himself was ever so saturated with the Mozartean feeling as the Russian composer in this suite. It is a great favorite.

The Pezzo Capriccioso is numbered op. 62 and is for violoncello, with orchestral accompaniment. It is as wayward and Slavic as anything Tschaïkowsky ever wrote, ending in mid air, as is occasionally his wont. More songs comprise op. 63, and the opus that follows, 64, is the fifth symphony in E minor. It is the most Russian of all his symphonies and its basis is undoubtedly composed of folksongs. Its pregnant motto in the andante, which is intoned by the clarinets, is sombre, world weary, and in the allegro the theme, while livelier and evidently bucolic, is not without its sardonic tinge. The entire first movement is masterly in its management of the variation, the episodical matter, the various permutations in the Durchführung all being weighed to the note and every note a telling one. Not themes for a symphony in the classic sense, Dvorák thinks, yet not without power, if lacking in nobility and elevation of character. But what an impassioned romance the French horn sings in the second movement! It is the very apotheosis of a night of nightingales, soft and seldom footed dells, a soft moon and dreaming tree-leaves. Its tune sinks a shaft into your heart and hot from your heart comes a response; the horizon is low, heaven is near earth and carking life beyond, forgotten in the fringes and shadows. Some pages of perfect writing follow; the oboe and the horn in tender converse, and you can never forget those first six bars; all youth, all love is clamoring in them.

How that slow valse, with its lugubrious bassoon and its capering violins in the trio, affects one! A sorrowful jesting, quite in the Russian style. It is a country where the peasants tell a joke with the tears streaming down their faces and if the vodka is sufficiently fiery, will dance at a funeral. The clatter and swirl of the finale is deafening, the motto in the major key is sounded shrill, and through the movement there is noise and confusion, a hurly-burly of peasants thumping their wooden shoes and yelling like drunken maniacs. All the romance, all the world-weariness has fled to covert, and the composer is at his worst with the seven devils he has brought to his newly garnished mansion. It is this shocking want of taste that offends his warmest admirers, and his skill in painting revelries is more accentuated than Hogarth’s. Certainly you can never affix the moral tag.

Tschaïkowsky is often possessed by these devils, and then the whole apparatus of his orchestra is shivered and shaken. His chromatic contrapuntal scales on the heavy brass, his middle voices never at peace, the whir and rush of the fiddles and the drumming and clash of cymbals are the outward evidence of the unquiet Calmuck man beneath the skin of Peter Ilyitch. That he can say obscure things I am willing to swear, and his neurotic energy is tremendous. This fifth symphony has its weak points; structurally it is not strong, and the substitution of the valse for the familiar scherzo is not defensible in the eyes of the formalists. But there are moments of pure beauty, and the mixing of hues, despite the Asiatic violence, is deft and to the ear bewildering and bewitching.

Just here I should like to make a digression and examine more fully the predecessor of the symphony in E minor, the fourth in F minor. In symmetry, beauty of musical ideas, suavity, indeed in general workmanship, it is not always the equal of the fifth symphonic work, but in one instance this may be qualified: The first movement is full of abounding passion, is more fluent in expression than the first allegro of the fifth symphony.

The theme in the introduction of the F minor symphony bears a strong resemblance to the opening of Schumann’s B flat symphony, but not in rhythm. It is used in several movements later as a sort of leading motive or perhaps to give an impression of organic unity. The theme proper is romantic in the extreme and charged to the full with passion and suspense. The halting, syncopated phrases, the dramatic intensity, the whirl of colors, moods and situations are all characteristic.

The episode which follows the principal theme can hardly be called a theme; it is a bridge, a transition to the second subject. Tschaïkowsky can sometimes be very Gallic, for Gounod is suggested—a phrase from the tomb music in Roméo et Juliette—but is momentary. Musically this first movement is the best of the four, more naïve, full of abandon and blood-stirring episodes.

The second movement in B flat minor, andantino in modo di canzona, is a tender, sad little melody in eighth notes, embroidered by runs in the woodwind—Cossack counterpoint. It has a sense of remoteness and dreary resignation. It is uncompromisingly Slavic. It is said to be the actual transcription of a Russian bargeman’s refrain. This is treated in a variant fashion—the second subsidiary in A flat being delivered by clarinets and fagottes, a middle part piu mosso in F, the whole concluding with the fagotte intoning the first melody. Sombre it is and not the equal in romantic beauty of the lulling horn solo in the slow movement of the E minor symphony.

The scherzo allegro in F, plucked by the string choir, is deficient in musical depth, but its novel workmanship fixes one’s attention. It is called a pizzicato ostinato, although the pizzicati are not continuous. It is full of a grim sort of humor, and the trio for woodwind, oboes and fagottes is rollicking and pastoral. The third theme—smothered staccato chords for brass with sinister drum taps—is thoroughly original and reminds us of the entrance of Fortinbras in the composer’s Hamlet. The working out is slim but clever.

The last movement in F is a triumph of constructive skill, for it is literally built on an unpretentious phrase of a measure and a half. It is all noisy, brilliant, interesting, but not of necessity symphonic. The main theme, almost interminably varied, is not new. It may be found in a baritone solo, Mozart’s Escape from the Seraglio, and in a slightly transformed shape it lurks in the romanza of Schumann’s Faschingschwank aus Wien. Tschaïkowsky’s wonderful contrapuntal skill and piquancy of orchestration invest this finale with meaning.

Western ears are sometimes sadly tried by the uncouth harmonic progressions and by the savagery of the moods of this symphony. Symphony perhaps in the narrow meaning of the term it is not. A wordless music drama it could be better styled. All the keen, poignant feeling, the rapidity of incident, the cumulative horror of some mighty drama of the soul, with its changeful coloring and superb climax are here set forth and sung by the various instruments of the orchestra, which assumes the rôle of the personages in this unspoken tragedy.

How intensely eloquent in this form is Tschaïkowsky, and what a wondrous art it is that out of the windless air of the concert room can weave such epical sorrow, joy, love and madness!

Op. 65 brings us to six romances for voice and piano, and op. 66 the ballet of La Belle au Bois Dormant. Op. 67 is the Hamlet overture fantaisie, which evidently finds its form in Wagner’s unsurpassable Eine Faust overture. It is remarkable in that it begins in A minor and closes in F minor. There seems to be little attempt to paint the conventional Hamlet mood, the mood of atrabiliary sluggishness and frenetic intellection, but rather hints of the bloody side of Shakespeare’s purple melodrama. In it stalks the apparition, and the witching hour of midnight booms to the bitter end. There is the pathetic lunacy of Ophelia—a lovely theme limns her—and there is turmoil and fretting of spirit. At the close I am pleased to imagine the figure of Fortinbras thinly etched by staccato brass and the rest, that is silence to the noble spirit who o’ercrowed himself, is sounded in thunder that may be heard in the hollow hills. It is not Tschaïkowsky’s most masterly effort in the form, but it is masterly withal, and its mastery is mixed with the alloy of the sensational.

Op. 68 is an opera in three acts, La Dame de Pique; op. 69, Yolande, opera in one act; op. 70, the lovely Souvenir de Florence, a sextuor for two violins, two altos and two ’celli. It is Tschaïkowsky at his happiest and he makes simple strings vibrate with more colors than the rainbow. Op. 71 is Casse-Noisette, a two-act ballet, a suite that has often been played here. It is dainty, piquant and bizarre. Op. 72 consists of eighteen pieces for piano solo, variously called Impromptu, Berçeuse, Tendres Reproches, Danse Caractéristique, Méditation, Mazurque pour Danser, Polacca de Concert, Dialogue, Un Poco di Schumann, Scherzo Fantaisie, Valse Bluette, L’Espiègle, Écho Rustique, Chant Élégiaque, Un Poco di Chopin, Valse à Cinqtemps, Passé Lointan and Scène Dansante, which last bears the sub-title of Invitation au Trepak.

These pieces are of value; many are graceful and suitable for the salon. The polacca and the scherzo are more pretentious and might be played in public. The imitations of Schumann and Chopin are clever. It must be confessed, however, that Tschaïkowsky often bundles the commonplace and the graceful and does not write agreeably for the piano. Rubinstein surpassed him in this respect. There is always a certain want of sympathy for the technical exigencies of the instrument and the suavely facile and the bristling difficult are often contiguous. There is no mistaking Tschaïkowsky’s handiwork in these pieces, the longest of which, the scherzo, is twenty-one pages and quite trying. The most brilliant is the polacca.

It cannot be denied that the composer must have boiled numerous pots with his piano pieces, many of them are so trivial, so artificial and vapid. Op. 73 is six melodies for voice, and in these are four vocal romances without opus number. I have not said much about the songs, although they are Tschaïkowsky’s richest lyric offerings. Some are redolent of the sentimentality of the salon, but there are a few that are masterpieces in miniature. Pourquoi, words by Heine, in German Warum sind denn die Rosen so Blass? is popular, not without justice, while Nur wer die Sehnsucht Kennt is fit to keep company with the best songs of Schubert, Schumann, Franz and Brahms. In intensity of feeling and in the repressed tragic note this song has few peers. It is a microcosm of the whole Romantic movement.

Among the unclassified works I find a cantata with Russian words, three choruses of the Russian Church, the choruses of Bortiansky, revised and annotated by Tschaïkowsky in nine volumes; an Ave Maria for mezzo soprano or baritone, with piano or organ accompaniment; Le Caprice D’Oksane, opera in four acts; Jeanne D’Arc, opera in four acts and six tableaux; Mazeppa, opera in three acts; La Tscharodeika, La Magicienne ou la Charmeuse, opera in four acts, and Hamlet—the overture I have already spoken of,—which consists of overture, melodrames, marches and entr’acts, regular music for the play. Then there is the Mouvement Perpétuel, from Weber’s C major sonata, arranged for the left hand—Brahms has had an imitator—and an impromptu caprice for piano. Tschaïkowsky has also made a Manual of Harmony in Russian. The richness and variety of this composer’s music is remarkable. Not coming into the world with any especially novel word to speak or doctrine to expound, he nevertheless has been gladly heard for his sincerity—a tremendous sincerity—and his passionate, almost crazy intensity. If you were to ask me his chief quality I should not speak of his scholarship, which is profound enough, nor of his charm, nor of the originality of his tunes, but upon his great, his overwhelming temperament—his almost savage, sensual, morbid, half mad musical temperament—I should insist, for it is his dominant note; it suffuses every bar he has written, and even overflows his most effortless production.

The history of the symphonic Ballade called Voyévode is interesting. In 1891 Tschaïkowsky gave the work a rehearsal and, not liking it, tossed the score into the fire. It was rescued in a semi-charred condition by his pupil, Siloti, the pianist. It has no opus number, but through internal evidence it may safely be called an early and immature work of the composer. This ballade, with its crude realism, its weakness in thematic material and above all its imitative instrumentation, strongly savoring of Wagner, may be classed as a youthful sketch worked over. The programme is a dramatic one. The music attempts to depict the jealousy of a chieftain, who, finding his young wife in the arms of another, shoots her. But the bullet never reaches her heart, for the servant he has commanded to fire on the lover misses his aim—purposely perhaps—and the Voyévode is killed instead. The poem is by Pushkin. Tschaïkowsky has succeeded in writing a vigorous, even rough, dramatic episode, in which the galloping of the chieftain’s horse as he returns from the war, the amorous scene in the garden and the catastrophe are all fairly well pictured. Melodramatic is the word that best describes this music, which contains in solution many of Tschaïkowsky’s most admirable characteristics. The bassoon is heard, with its sinister chuckle, and there is a richness of fancy and warmth of color in the love music, sensuous and sweet, but lacking in distinction, that we look for in this master. The sharp staccato chord that symbolizes shooting is sensational. The close is evidently suggested by Siegfried’s Funeral March. The garden music is from the second act of Tristan and Isolde. Indeed, Wagner is continually hinted at in the orchestration. Tschaïkowsky’s freedom from Wagner’s influence, as hitherto evidenced in his other and more important works, leads us to surmise that this is the effort of a beginner. It has historical interest and shows us the dramatic trend of the Russian’s mind, but as absolute music it is not many degrees removed from the barbaric “1812” overture solennelle. It was first played here in the autumn of 1897 by the Symphony Society under Mr. Walter Damrosch.

I still have left for review the Roméo et Juliette overture-fantaisie without opus number, the sixth symphony, op. 74, in B minor, and the third piano concerto in E flat, op. 75. The Jurgenson catalogue goes no further than op. 74, so the piano concerto is posthumous. An unpublished piano nocturne is announced for early publication; that ends the list.

V

As the Roméo et Juliette was first played here in 1876 it must have been composed about the time of the first piano concerto, perhaps later. It is evidently a work of the composer in the first gorgeous outburst of his genius. It is a magnificent love poem, full of the splendors of passion and warring hosts. How it strikes fire from the first firm chord! Imperial passion flames in it, and the violins mount in burning octaves. The Juliette theme is sealed with the pure lips of a loving maid; but I will spare you further rhapsodizing.

The third piano concerto, like Beethoven’s fifth, is in the key of E flat, but there the resemblance ends, although the work is unusually vigorous and built on a theme even shorter than the one used in the B flat minor piano concerto. The posthumous concerto is really a fantasy for piano and orchestra with a nine page cadenza in the first part. It is not as long as its predecessors, and the subsidiary themes are very amiable and fetching. I should dearly love to hear it if only for the orchestration, hints of which appear in the second piano part. Fantastic in form, it has one rattling good theme in the allegro molto vivace, a theme that is rhythmically related to one in Moniuszko’s opera, Halka. It is very Slavic, very piquant. The composer juggles with three subjects, and the cadenza is utilized as a working out section. This is extremely florid, possibly made so to suit the style of Louis Diémer, to whom the concerto is dedicated. The last movement is a more brilliant restatement of the first themes, and the song motive, this time in the tonic—it was in G at first—is very rich and melodious. The coda, a vivacissimo, is muscular and brief.

As far as the piano partition may be judged, this last composition of Tschaïkowsky’s does not build, neither does it detract from his fame. It smells a little of the piece made to order, although I may be mistaken in this. In any case I hope someone will play it; it is not very difficult or trying to one’s endurance. Its technical physiognomy resembles that of its brethren; there are octaves, chord passages in rapid flight and there are many scales; rather an unusual quantity in this composer’s piano music. The cadenza is especially brilliant.

My first impression of the sixth symphony, the “Suicide,” as it has been called, has never been altered; the last movement is Tschaïkowsky at his greatest, but the other movements do not “hang” together; in a word, there is a lack of organic unity. Tschaïkowsky is never a formalist. He works more freely in the loosely built symphonic poem, the symphonic poem born of Berlioz, although fathered by Liszt. Yet we look for certain specific qualities in the symphonic form, and one of them is homogeneity.

Consider this last symphony. The opening allegro has for its chief subject a short phrase in B minor, a rather commonplace phrase, a phrase with an upward inflection, that you may find in Mendelssohn and a half dozen other classical writers. The accent is strong to harshness, and after the composer considers that he has sufficiently impressed it upon your memory the entrance of an episodical figure leads you captive to the second theme in D. Here is the romantic Russian for you! It is lovely, sensuous, suave. It is the composer in his most melting mood, and is the feminine complement to the abrupt masculinity of the first subject. Atop of it we soon get some dancing rhythms under a scale-like theme, and then the working out begins.

The second subject is first treated, and this is followed by an exposition of the first subject, and in thundering tones and with all the harmonic and rhythmic skill the composer knows how to employ so well. There is constant use of scales for contrapuntal purposes, and the basses shake the very firmament. It is the old Tschaïkowsky—sombre, dreary and savage. The mood does not last long. The sky lightens with a return of the cantabile, and then comes the schluss. This is wonderfully made and very effective. The movement ends peacefully. Its color throughout is beautiful, leaning toward the darker tints of the orchestral palette.

But the second and third movements are enigmas to me.

Raff introduced a gay march into a symphony, Beethoven a funeral march and Tschaïkowsky penned a lugubrious valse for his fifth symphonic work; but the second movement of this B minor symphony is in five-four time and sounds like a perverted valse, but one that could not be danced to unless you owned three legs. It is delightfully piquant music and the touch of Oriental color in the trio, or second part—for the movement is not a scherzo—produced by a pedal point on D is very felicitous. The third movement starts in with a Mendelssohnian figure in triplets and scherzo-like, but this soon merges into a march. The ingenuity displayed in scoring, the peculiar and recurring accent, which again suggests the East, helps the movement to escape the commonplace.

But why these two movements in a symphony? They are episodical, fragmentary and seem intended for a suite. Can it be possible that Tschaïkowsky has only given us a mosaic—has made a short rosary of numbers that bear no active relationship! As well believe this as strive to reconcile these four movements. Dr. Dvorák’s words return with peculiar force after listening to this symphony. “Tschaïkowsky cannot write a symphony; he only makes suites.”

Therefore the most tremendous surprise follows in the finale. Since the music of the march in the Eroica, since the mighty funeral music in Siegfried, there has been no such death music as this “adagio lamentoso,” this astounding torso, which Michel Angelo would have understood and Dante wept over. It is the very apotheosis of mortality, and its gloomy accents, poignant melody and harmonic coloring make it one of the most impressive of contributions to mortuary music. It sings of the entombment of a nation, and is incomparably noble, dignified and unspeakably tender. It is only at the close that the rustling of the basses conveys a sinister shudder; the shudder of the Dies Iræ when the heavens shall be a fiery scroll and the sublime trump sound its summons to eternity.

No Richard Strauss realism is employed to describe the halting heart beats; no gasps in the woodwind to indicate the departing breath; no imitative figure to tell us that clods of earth are falling heavily on the invisible coffin; but the atmosphere of grief, immutable, eternal, hovers about like a huge black-winged angel.

The movement is the last word in the profoundly pessimistic philosophy which comes from the East to poison and embitter the religious hopes of the West. It has not the consolations of Nirvana, for that offers us a serene non-existence, an absorption into Neánt. Tschaïkowsky’s music is a page torn from Ecclesiastes, it is the cosmos in crape. This movement will save the other three from oblivion. The scoring throughout is masterly.

Whether or not the composer had a premonition of his approaching death is a question I gladly leave to sentimental psychologists.

Again we must lament the death of the master. What might his ninth symphony not have been! He was slain in the very plenitude of his powers, at a time when to his glowing temperament was added a moderation born of generous cosmopolitan culture.

Little remains to be added. All who met Tschaïkowsky declare that he was a polished, charming man of the world; like all Russians, a good linguist, and many sided in his tastes. But not in his musical taste. He disliked Brahms heartily, and while Brahms appreciated his music, the Russian shrugged his shoulders, and frankly confessed that for him the Hamburg composer was a mere music-maker. In a conversation with Henry Holden Huss he praised Saint-Saëns, and then naïvely admitted that it was a pity an artist whose facture was so fine had so little original to say. He reverenced the classics, Mozart more than Beethoven, and had an enormous predilection for Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. This was quite natural, and we find Rubinstein, with whom Tschaïkowsky studied, upbraiding him for his defection from German classic standards. Curiously enough, Wagner did not play such a part in Tschaïkowsky’s music as one might imagine. The Russian’s operas were made after old-fashioned models and, despite his lyric and dramatic talent, have never proved successful. He dramatically expressed himself best in the orchestra, and totally lacked Wagner’s power of projecting dramatic images upon the stage.

As regards the suicide story, I can only repeat that while it has been officially denied, it has never been quite discredited. Kapellmeister Wallner of St. Petersburg, a relative by marriage of Tolstoy, and an intimate of Tschaïkowsky, told me that his nearest friends had the matter hushed up. He is supposed to have died of cholera after drinking a glass of unfiltered water, but his stomach was never subjected to chemical analysis. The fact that his mother died of the same malady lent color to the cholera story. It is all very sad.