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.