Anton Rubinstein is considered to have been, next to Franz Liszt, the greatest pianist the world has ever heard. His technical execution was not flawless, but no one paid any attention to that, because of the overwhelming grandeur and emotional sweep of his playing. Like Liszt, however, he tired of the laurels of a performer, his ambition being to become the Russian Beethoven. He got no higher, however, than the level of Mendelssohn. Both Mendelssohn and Rubinstein were for years extremely popular. If they are less so today, that is owing to the superficial character of much of their music. Yet both were great geniuses; in their master works they reached the high water mark of musical creativeness. Rubinstein is at his best in his “Ocean” symphony, his Persian songs, some of his chamber works for stringed instruments, alone or with piano, two of his concertos for piano and orchestra, and his pieces for piano alone, the number of which is 238. Among these there are gems of the first water.
PEASANT WITH ACCORDION
A Rubinstein revival is much to be desired in these days, when so few composers are able to create new melodies. When it comes, in response to the demands of audiences, which are very partial to this composer, at least three of his nineteen operas will be revived: “The Demon,” “Nero,” and “The Maccabees.” Opera goers love, above all things, melody, and Rubinstein’s operas, like his concert pieces, are full of it. He was himself to blame for the failure of most of his operas, for he stubbornly refused to swim with the Wagnerian current, which swept everything before it. He hated Wagner intensely, yet he might have learned from him the art of writing music dramas of permanent value.
Five of his operas are on Biblical subjects. They are really oratorios with scenery, action and costumes. He dreamed of erecting a special theater somewhere for the production of these “sacred operas,” as Wagner did for his music dramas at Bayreuth; but nothing came of this plan, and he became more and more embittered as he grew older, because so many of his schemes failed.
Apart from their abundant melody there is nothing in Rubinstein’s best works that fascinates us more than the exhibits of glowing Oriental and Hebrew “coloring”—as we call it for want of a better word. He also made excellent use of national Russian melodies, though not nearly to the same extent as Glinka and his followers, the “nationalists.” Before considering them it will be advisable to speak of the greatest of all the Russian composers.
MUSIC AMONG THE LOWLY
Tchaikovsky, the Melancholy
It is commonly believed that in music the public wants something “quick and devilish”; but this is far from the truth. For social, political, and especially climatic reasons, the Russians, with their long and dreary winters, are supposed to be a melancholy nation. The most melancholy of their composers is Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, and of his works the most popular by far, throughout the world, is the most lugubrious of them all, the heart rending “Pathetic Symphony,” which is today second in popularity to no other orchestral work of any country. “All hope abandon, ye who enter here,” might well be its motto. More than any funeral march ever composed, it embodies, in the adagio lamentoso, which ends it, the concentrated quintessence of despair, “the luxury of woe.” It was Tchaikovsky’s symphonic swan song. At the time of his death there was a rumor that he had written it deliberately as his own dirge before committing suicide; but it is now known that he died of cholera.