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.