"Pathetic" Symphony.
November 22, 1901.
"Eighth time at these concerts," says last night's programme, in reference to the great Tchaïkovsky Symphony, which is only eight years old. The performances in London are to be numbered by dozens, and whenever genuine orchestral concerts are given in this country the swan-song of the late Russian master has probably been heard more often than any other symphonic work. Let us not be in too great a hurry to protest against this state of things. The enormous audience of yesterday evening—much the largest of the present season so far—suggests that the public have not lost interest in the Symphony. Nor do we dissent from the views of the public in this respect. There is astounding potency in the charm of the work and in the appeal that it makes to the imagination. For some time past we have been preoccupied with the notion that it forms a sort of pendant to Dvoràk's "New World" Symphony. Dvoràk has caught in his music the breezy, hopeful, democratic, optimistic, and free-thinking spirit of American life, with its upper side of furious go-ahead civilisation, and its under side of primitive humanity (Negroes and Red Indians) in which energy of feeling is out of all proportion to intellectual faculty. Dvoràk's slow movement is undoubtedly a hymn of such primitive humanity, with an undercurrent of meditation on the prairie by night, in which the movements of sap and the germination of seeds within the bosom of inexhaustibly fertile nature become, as it were, audible. It is something like the poetry that Walt Whitman would have written had he been a much better poet. In an analogous manner Tchaïkovsky has caught up and fixed in his "Symphonie Pathétique" the soul of modern Russia. Just as the American Symphony is breezy, democratic, optimistic, and free-thinking, so the Russian is languorous and oppressed, aristocratic, pessimistic, and hierarchic. The absence of any slow movement, except the dirge at the end, is intensely characteristic. The composer has no hymn of thanksgiving or serenely contemplative interlude to give us, but only something with the perfumed and artificial atmosphere of the ballroom, as a relief from the ardours and terrors of his military and patriotic passages. Both in his first and third movements he reminds us that the Russian, for all his profound religiosity and mysticism, for all his abundance of talent and exquisite courtesy under normal conditions, lives in a cruel country and has it in him to be more cruel than any other modern white man. The dirge at the end we believe to be the most powerful expression of tragic emotion that exists in the entire range of music. Such a work will bear a good many performances, especially in a place where there is a Richter to interpret it. Of course neither the "New World" nor the Muscovite Symphony is for a moment to be compared with Beethoven. Fellows like Dvoràk and Tchaïkovsky, belonging to the fringe of civilisation, have something of the savage about them, whereas Beethoven inherited the central European culture and expressed in music the emotions of a completely civilised character. The part of the nineteenth century subsequent to the death of Wagner will probably be remembered for the avènement of the semi-savage in music. But, be it remembered, music is an art of expression, and all thoroughly and richly expressive music is good music, no matter what the informing emotion or underlying idea.