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.
Tschaïkowsky lived, was unhappy, composed and died, and he will be forgotten. Let us enjoy him while we may and until “all the daughters of music shall be brought low.”
III
RICHARD STRAUSS AND NIETZSCHE
In discussing Richard Strauss’ symphonic poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra, its musical, technical, emotional and æsthetic significance must be considered,—if I may be allowed this rather careless grouping of categories. The work itself is fertile in arousing ideas of a widely divergent sort. It is difficult to speak of it without drifting into the dialectics of the Nietzsche school. It is as absolute music that it should be critically weighed, and that leads into the somewhat forbidding field of the nature of thematic material. Has Strauss, to put it briefly, a right, a precedent to express himself in music in a manner that sets at defiance the normal eight bar theme; that scorns euphony; that follows the curve of the poem or drama or thesis he is illustrating, just as Wagner followed the curve of his poetic text? The question is a fascinating one and a dangerous one, fascinating because of its complexity, and also because any argument that attempts to define the limits of absolute music is an argument that is dangerous.
Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, three heroes of poetic realism, pushed realism to the verge of the ludicrous, according to their contemporaries. Liszt was especially singled out as the champion of making poems in music, making pictures in music, and giving no more clue to their meaning than the title. Liszt’s three great disciples, Saint-Saëns, Tschaïkowsky and Richard Strauss, have dared more than their master. In Saint-Saëns we find a genial cleverness and a mastery of the decorative and more superficial side of music—all this allied to a charming fancy and great musicianship. Yet his stories deal only with the external aspects of his subject. Omphale bids Hercules spin, and the orchestra is straightway transformed into a huge wheel and hums as the giant stoops over the distaff. Death dances with rattling xylophonic bones; Phaeton circles about the Sun God, and we hear his curved chariot and fervent pace. But the psychology is absent. We learn little of the thoughts or feelings of these subjects, and indeed they have none, being mere fabled abstractions clothed in the pictorial counterpoint of the talented Frenchman.
In Tschaïkowsky, the lights are turned on more fiercely; his dramatic characterization is marvellous when one considers that the human element is absent from his mechanism. He employs only the orchestra, and across its tonal tapestry there flit the impassioned figures of Romeo and Juliet, the despairing apparition of Francesca da Rimini, and the stalking of Hamlet and Manfred, gloomy, revengeful, imperious, thinking and sorrowing men.
Tschaïkowsky went far, but Richard Strauss has dared to go further. He first individualized, and rather grotesquely, Don Juan, Til Eulenspiegel, Macbeth; but in Death and Apotheosis and in Also Sprach Zarathustra he has attempted almost the impossible; he has attempted the delineation of thought, not musical thought, but philosophical ideas in tone. He has disclaimed this attempt, but the fact nevertheless remains that the various divisions and subdivisions of his extraordinary work are attempts to seize not only certain elusive psychical states, but also to paint pure idea—the “Reine vernunft” of the metaphysicians. Of course he has failed, yet his failure marks a great step in the mastery over the indefiniteness of music. Strauss’ German brain with its grasp of the essentials of philosophy, allied to a vigorous emotional nature and a will and imagination that stop at nothing, enabled him to throw into high relief his excited mental states. That these states took unusual melodic shapes, that there is the suggestion of abnormality, was to be expected; for Strauss has made a flight into a country in which it is almost madness to venture. He has, on his own opinions and purely by the aid of a powerful reasoning imagination, sought to give an emotional garb to pure abstractions. Ugliness was bound to result but it is characteristic ugliness. There is profound method in the madness of Strauss, and I beg his adverse critics to pause and consider his aims before entirely condemning him.
The object of music is neither to preach nor to philosophize, but the range of the art is vastly enlarged since the days of music of the decorative pattern type. Beethoven filled it with his overshadowing passion, and shall we say ethical philosophy? Schumann and the romanticists gave it color, glow and bizarre passion; Wagner moulded its forms into rare dramatic shapes, and Brahms has endeavored to fill the old classic bottles with the new wine of the romantics. All these men seemed to dare the impossible, according to their contemporaries, and now Strauss has shifted the string one peg higher; not only does he demand the fullest intensity of expression but he insists on the presence of pure idea, and when we consider the abstract nature of the first theme of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, when we recall the passionate inflection of the opening measures of Tristan and Isolde, who shall dare criticise Strauss, who shall say to him, Thus far and no farther?