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!
I was walking along the street.... I was stopped by a decrepit old beggar.
Bloodshot, tearful eyes, blue lips, coarse rags, festering wounds.... Oh, how hideously poverty had eaten into this miserable creature!
He held out to me a red, swollen, filthy hand. He groaned, he mumbled of help.
I began feeling in all my pockets.... No purse, no watch, not even a handkerchief.... I had taken nothing with me. And the beggar was still waiting, ... and his outstretched hand feebly shook and trembled.
Confused, abashed, I warmly clasped the filthy, shaking hand.... “Don’t be angry, brother; I have nothing, brother.”
The beggar stared at me with his bloodshot eyes; his blue lips smiled, and he in his turn gripped my chilly fingers.
“What of it, brother?” he mumbled, “thanks for this too. That is a gift too, brother.”
I knew that I, too, had received a gift from my brother.
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!