IV
An artist of the same school as Rubinstein, yet entirely different in works and spirit, was Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky. Rubinstein was a creative virtuoso, Tschaikowsky was a creative genius. They took the same general direction in form and themes, but otherwise a wide abyss separated these two unique spirits of Russian music. Tschaikowsky had Rubinstein's passion and technical skill, the same lyric style, and, like him, adhered to West European form, but in his essentials he remains a Russian of the most classic tendencies; his language is that of an emotional Slav. His music glows with the peculiar fire that burned in his soul; rapture and agony, gloom and gayety seem in a perpetual struggle for expression. With all its nationalistic riches there is nothing in Tschaikowsky's tonal structures that resembles those of his contemporaries. He is a romantic poet of classic pattern, yet wholly a Russian. He is altogether introspective, sentimentally subjective, and ecclesiastically fanatic. With all his Slavic pathos and subjective vigor Tschaikowsky builds his tone-temples in Gothic style, which he never leaves. That is very largely the reason why his music is so phenomenally popular abroad, while his contemporaries have, despite their originality and greatness, remained in his shadow.
Tschaikowsky's compositions are as strange as his inner self. His likening his artistic expressions to a violent contest between a beast and a god no doubt had its psychological reason. That there is much mystery in his life and its relation to his art is apparent from the following passage with which Kashkin, his biographer, closes his book,[9] 'I have finished my reminiscences. Of course, they might be supplemented by accounts of a few more events, but I shall add nothing at present, and perhaps I shall never do so. One document I shall leave in a sealed packet, and if thirty years hence it still has interest for the world the seal may be broken; this packet I shall leave in the care of Moscow University. It will contain the history of one episode in Tschaikowsky's life upon which I have barely touched in my book.'
That seal is still unbroken. All we can guess of the nature of the secret is that it involves a tragedy of romantic character. We shall get a closer idea of the great composer when we consider a few characteristic episodes of his private life in connection with his career as a musician. Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky was born in 1840, in the province of Viatka, where his father was the general manager of Kamsko-Botkin's Mills. He showed already in his early youth a great liking for music and poetry, but the wish of his parents was that he should make his career as an official of the government. With this in view he was educated in the aristocratic law school in St. Petersburg. Graduated in 1859, he became an officer in the department of the Ministry of Justice. While he was a student in the law school he kept up his studies of music by taking lessons from F. D. Becker and K. I. Karel and did not give them up even when he became an active functionary with less leisure than before. The desire for a thorough musical education gave him no peace until he entered the newly founded Conservatory of Music, where Rubinstein and Zarembi became his teachers. Though regularly the course was longer, Tschaikowsky was graduated after three years of study, in 1866, and at once was invited to become a professor of harmony in the Imperial Conservatory of Music in Moscow. During the first years of his life as a teacher Tschaikowsky composed some smaller instrumental and vocal pieces, which were performed with marked success, partly by his pupils, partly by touring musical artists. His first large compositions were the First Symphony, which he composed in 1868, and his opera Voyevoda, which he wrote a year later. Both these compositions were less successful than his earlier ones. Nevertheless the disappointment did not discourage the young composer, for he proceeded to compose new operas, 'Undine,' Opritchnik, and 'Vakula the Smith,' besides some music for orchestra. In 1873 he composed the ballet 'Snow Maiden,' and then followed in succession his Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies.
Assured of a pension of three thousand rubles ($1,500) a year and an extra income from the royalty of his published music, Tschaikowsky resigned his teaching post and devoted all his time to composition. His Fourth Symphony had to some extent satisfied his ambition as a symphonic composer, since it had been received enthusiastically by the public in both Moscow and St. Petersburg; he now threw all his efforts into opera. In 1878 he finished his Evgheny Onegin, his greatest opera, besides his two ballets.
In spite of his stormy private life and various romantic conflicts Tschaikowsky was a prolific worker. Besides the above-mentioned operas he wrote six symphonies, of which the last two have gained world-wide fame, three ballets, the overtures 'Romeo and Juliet,' 'The Tempest,' 'Hamlet,' and '1812,' the 'Italian Caprice,' and the symphonic poem 'Manfred.' Besides these he wrote two concertos for piano and orchestra, one concerto for violin, three quartets, one trio, over a hundred songs, some thirty smaller instrumental pieces and a series of excellent church music. They vary in their character and quality. Some of them are truly great and majestic, while others are of mediocre merit. Opritchnik, Mazeppa, Tcharodeiki, and Jeanne d'Arc are dramatic operas, while Evgheny Onegin, Pique Dame, and Yolanta are of outspoken lyric type. Tscherevitschki and 'Vakula the Smith' are his two comic operas.
Though Tschaikowsky's ambition was to excel in opera, his symphonic compositions represent the best he has written, especially his Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies, 'The Tempest,' the Marche Slav, 'Manfred,' his piano concerto in B-flat minor, and his three ballets, 'Snow Maiden,' 'Sleeping Beauty,' and 'Swan Lake.' He is a perfect master of counterpoint and graceful melodies. How well he mastered his technique is proven by the careful modelling of his themes and figures. But in opera his grasp is behind those of his rivals. There is too much of the West European polish and sentimentality, and too little of the elemental vigor and grandeur of a Russian dramatist.
To the period of Tschaikowsky's last years as a teacher in Moscow, especially from 1875 to 1885, belong the mysterious romantic troubles which presumably became the foundation of his creative despair, the pessimism which has made him the Schopenhauer of sound. Here may lie the secret of all the turbulent emotionalism from which emanated those tragic chords, all the wild musical images, that incessant melancholy strain which characterize his works. In 1877 he married Antony Ivanovna Millukova, but their married life was of short duration. There are many strange stories as to his despair on account of an unhappy love. Tschaikowsky was an affectionate friend of a Mme. von Meck, with whom he was in perpetual correspondence and who gave him material aid in carrying out his artistic ambitions, though he had never met her. Why he did not is a mystery. It is said that he contemplated suicide upon many occasions. He told his friend Kashkin that twice he had gone up to his knees in the Moscow River with the idea of drowning himself, but that the effect of the cold water sobered him. When his wildest emotions seized him he would rush out and sit in the snow, if it was winter, or stand in the river until numb with the cold. This cured him temporarily, but he insisted that he remained a soul-sick man. 'I am putting all my virtue and wickedness, passion and agony into the piece I am writing,' he wrote to a friend while composing his Symphonie Pathétique.
In 1890 Tschaikowsky celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his musical activity and was honored with the degree of Doctor of Music by Cambridge University. He made a tour of America, of which he spoke in high terms as a country of new beauties and new life. One of his remarks is characteristic. 'The rush and roar of that wild freedom of America still haunts me. It is like fifty orchestras combined. Although you do not see any Indians running about the streets of New York, yet their spirit has put a stamp on its whole life. It is in the everlasting activity and the stoic attitude toward what we call fate.'
One of the peculiar traits of Tschaikowsky was his indifference to his creations after they had been produced. He even disliked to hear them and always found fault with his early compositions, especially with his operas; yet he did not know how he could have improved them. Exceptions, however, were his Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, his 'Eugen Onegin,' Sérénade Mélancholique, his Concerto in D, and a few other compositions. While working upon his favorite opera he was also engaged upon his Fourth Symphony. When 'Eugen Onegin' was first performed in Moscow, Tschaikowsky whispered to Rubinstein, who was next to him in the audience: 'This and the Fourth Symphony are the decisive works of my career. If they fail I am a failure.'
Tschaikowsky died suddenly, October 25, 1893, in St. Petersburg—of cholera, as it was said officially. But according to men who knew him intimately he poisoned himself. This, we may be sure, is one of the secrets sealed by Kashkin.
Tschaikowsky was one of the greatest masters of the orchestra the world has seen. In effects of striking brilliance and of sombreness he is equally successful, and it is no doubt in a great measure on account of this Slavic splendor that his orchestral works have won the public. Yet he is far more than a colorist. His mastery over orchestral polyphony is supreme. There is always movement in his music, a rising and falling of all the parts, a complicated interweaving, never with the loss of sonority and richness. He is a great harmonist as well and an irresistible melodist. His rhythms are full of life, whether they are march, waltz or barbarous wild dances. The movement in five-four time in the Sixth Symphony is in itself a masterpiece and has stimulated countless efforts in the directions to which it pointed. It must be admitted that melody, harmony, and rhythm, all bear the stamp of the Slavic temperament, and, in so far as they are Slavic or racial, they are vigorous and healthy; but often Tschaikowsky becomes morbidly subjective, is obviously not master of his mood, but slave to it. Hence, after frequent hearings, there comes a weight upon the listener, an intangible oppression which he would be glad to avoid, but which cannot be shaken off. One detects the line of the individual and forgets the splendor of the race.
Yet through Tschaikowsky the glories of Russian music were revealed to the general public. He occupies a double position, as a Russian and as a strange individuality, whose influence has been pronounced upon modern music. The Russian composers unquestionably hold a conspicuous place among those composers who have been specially gifted to hear new possibilities of orchestral sound and to add to the splendor of orchestral music. Many of them denied Wagner. The question of how far the peculiar powers of the orchestra have been developed by them independently of Wagner, with results in many ways similar, may become the source of much speculation. It is quite possible that, thanks to their own racial sensitiveness, they have devised a brilliant orchestration similar but unrelated to Wagner.
I. N.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Established by the Imperial Musical Society in 1862.
[9] Kashkin: 'Life of Tschaikowsky' (in Russian).
CHAPTER III
THE MUSIC OF MODERN SCANDINAVIA
The Rise of national schools in the nineteenth century—Growth of national expression in Scandinavian lands—Music in modern Denmark—Sweden and her Music—The Norwegian composers; Edvard Grieg—Sinding and other Norwegians—The Finnish Renaissance: Sibelius and others.
The most striking characteristic of the music of the nineteenth century has doubtless been its astonishing enrichment in technical means. Its next most striking characteristic is easily its growth in national expression. National art-music in the modern sense was almost unknown before the nineteenth century. The nearest thing to it was a 'Turkish march' in a Mozart operetta or sonata, or an 'allemand' or 'schottisch' in a French suite. The national differences in eighteenth century music were differences of school, not of nationality. It is true that Italian music usually tended to lyricism, French to dexterity of form, and German to technical solidity; it is true further that these qualities corresponded in a rough way to the characteristics of the respective nations. But all three used one and the same musical system; they differed not so much in their music as in the way they treated their music.
In the nineteenth century the national feeling found expression as it never had before. The causes of this were numerous, but the most important were two of a political nature: First, the spread of the principles of the French Revolution made democracy a far more general fact than it had ever been before; political authority and moral influence shifted more and more from the rulers to the people and the character of the ordinary men and women became more and more the character of the nation. Second, the resistance called forth by Napoleon's wars of aggression aroused national consciousness as it had never been aroused before. Napoleon, with a solid national consciousness behind him, was invincible until he found a national consciousness opposed to him—in Spain in 1809, in Russia in 1812, and in Germany in 1813. Only the sense of nationality had been able to preserve nations; and it was the sense of nationality that thereafter continued to maintain them.
To these two political causes we may perhaps add a third cause—one of a technical-musical character. With the early Beethoven the old classical system of music had reached its apogee. When this was once complete and firmly implanted in people's consciousness contrasting sorts of music could be clearly apperceived. Once the logical course of classical development was finished, men's minds were free to look elsewhere for beauties of another sort. So when a political interest in the common people led men to investigate the people's folk-songs, musical consciousness was at the same time prepared to appreciate the striking differences between art-music and folk-music.
Now all the national music of the nineteenth century is based in a very real sense on the folk-music of the people. The music of the eighteenth century could not be truly national, because it was supported chiefly by the aristocracy, and an art will inevitably tend to express the character of the people who pay its bills. The differences between the aristocracy of one nation and that of another are largely superficial. The court of Louis XV was distinguished from that of Frederick the Great chiefly by the cut of the courtiers' clothes. But the France of 1813 was distinguished from the Germany of 1813 by the mould of the national soul. And the national soul can be seen very imperfectly in the official art of a nation; it must be sought for in the popular art—in the myths, the fairy tales, the ballads, and the folk-songs. So when the newly awakened national consciousness began to demand musical expression, it inevitably sought its materials in the music of the people.