"I know nothing about any story and don't care to know it. I come of a generation of musicians that concerned itself little with the scandals and private life of composers, but lots with their music and its meanings." "Go it, Fogy," called out Sledge, hammering the table with his seidl. "I believe that some composers should be put in jail for the villainies they smuggle into their score. This Tchaikovsky of yours—this Russian—was a wretch. He turned the prettiness and favor and noble tragedy of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into a bawd's tale; a tale of brutal, vile lust; for such passion as he depicts is not love. He took Hamlet and transformed him from a melancholy, a philosophizing Dane into a yelling man, a man of the steppes, soaked with vodka and red-handed with butchery. Hamlet, forsooth! Those twelve strokes of the bell are the veriest melodrama. And Francesca da Rimini—who has not read of the gentle, lovelorn pair in Dante's priceless poem; and how they read no more from the pages of their book, their very glances glued with love? What doth your Tchaikovsky with this Old World tale? Alas! you know full well. He tears it limb from limb. He makes over the lovers into two monstrous Cossacks, who gibber and squeak at each other while reading some obscene volume. Why, they are too much interested in the pictures to think of love. Then their dead carcasses are whirled aloft on screaming flames of hell, and sent whizzing into a spiral eternity."
"Bravo! bravo! great! I tell you he's great, your friend. Keep it up old man. Your description beats Dante and Tchaikovsky combined!" I was not to be lured from my theme, and, stopping only to take breath and a fresh dip of my beak into the Pilsner, I went on:
"His Manfred is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on God." "Byron, too," murmured Jenkins. "Yes, Byron, another blasphemer. The six symphonies are caricatures of the symphonic form. Their themes are, for the most part, unfitted for treatment, and in each and every one the boor and the devil break out and dance with uncouth, lascivious gestures. This musical drunkenness; this eternal license; this want of repose, refinement, musical feeling—all these we are to believe make great music. I'll not admit it, gentlemen; I'll not admit it! The piano concerto—I only know one—with its fragmentary tunes; its dislocated, jaw-breaking rhythms, is ugly music; plain, ugly music. It is as if the composer were endeavoring to set to melody the consonants of his name. There's a name for you, Tchaikovsky! 'Shriekhoarsely' is more like it." There was more banging of steins, and I really thought Jenkins would go off in an apoplectic fit, he was laughing so.
"The songs are barbarous, the piano-solo pieces a muddle of confused difficulties and childish melodies. You call it naïveté. I call it puerility. I never saw a man that was less capable of developing a theme than Tchaikovsky. Compare him to Rubinstein and you insult that great master. Yet Rubinstein is neglected for the new man simply because, with your depraved taste, you must have lots of red pepper, high spices, rum, and an orchestral color that fairly blisters the eye. You call it color. I call it chromatic madness. Just watch this agile fellow. He lays hold on a subject, some Russian volks melody. He gums it and bolts it before it is half chewed. He has not the logical charm of Beethoven—ah, what Jovian repose; what keen analysis! He has not the logic, minus the charm, of Brahms; he never smells of the pure, open air, like Dvořák—a milkman's composer; nor is Tchaikovsky master of the pictorial counterpoint of Wagner. All is froth and fury, oaths, grimaces, yelling, hallooing like drunken Kalmucks, and when he writes a slow movement it is with a pen dipped in molasses. I don't wish to be unjust to your 'modern music lord,' as some affected idiot calls him, but really, to make a god of a man who has not mastered his material and has nothing to offer his hearers but blasphemy, vulgarity, brutality, evil passions like hatred, concupiscence, horrid pride—indeed, all the seven deadly sins are mirrored in his scores—is too much for my nerves. Is this your god of modern music? If so, give me Wagner in preference. Wagner, thank the fates, is no hypocrite. He says out what he means, and he usually means something nasty. Tchaikovsky, on the contrary, taking advantage of the peculiar medium in which he works, tells the most awful, the most sickening, the most immoral stories; and if he had printed them in type he would have been knouted and exiled to Siberia. If——"
"Time to close up," said the waiter. I was alone. The others had fled. I had been mumbling with closed eyes for hours. Wait until I catch that Sledge!
XVII
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY MADE TO ORDER
No longer from Dussek-Villa-on-Wissahickon do I indite my profound thoughts (it is the fashion nowadays in Germany for a writer to proclaim himself or herself—there are a great many "hers"—profound; the result, I suppose, of too much Nietzsche and too little common sense, not to mention modesty—that quite antiquated virtue). I am now situated in this lovely, umbrageous spot not far from the Bohemian border in Germany, on the banks of the romantic river Pilsen. To be sure, there are no catfish and waffles à la Schuylkill, but are there any to be found today at Wissahickon? On the other hand, there is good cooking, excellent beer and in all Schaumpfeffer, a town of nearly 3000 souls, you won't find a man or woman who has heard of any composer later than Haydn. They still dance to the music of Lanner and the elder Strauss; Johann, Jr., is considered rather an iconoclast in his Fledermaus. I carefully conceal the American papers, which are smuggled out to my villa—Villa Scherzo it is called because life is such a joke, especially music—and I read them and all modern books (that is, those dating later than 1850) behind closed doors. Oh, I am so cheerful over this heavenly relief from thrice-accursed "modernity." I'm old, I admit (I still recall Kalkbrenner's pearly touch and Doehler's chalky tone), but my hat is still on the piano top. In a word, I'm in the ring and don't propose to stop writing till I die, and I shan't die as long as I can hold a pen and protest against the tendencies of the times. Old Fogy to the end!