He was a toy Don Quixote, mild, chivalrous, ridiculous, and rather touching. He carried a mouse-trap on his saddle-bow, “because, if they do come, I don’t choose to have them running about.” He couldn’t ride very well, but he was a gentle soul, with good intentions. There are two themes: the first, a sort of instrumental prance, being the Knight’s own conception of himself as a slashing, dare-devil fellow. The second is bland, mellifluous, a little sentimental—much more like the Knight as he really was. The first theme starts off bravely, but falls out of the saddle before very long, and has to give way to the second. The two alternate, in various guises, until the end, when the Knight rides off, with Alice waving her handkerchief—he thought it would encourage him if she did.
PETER ILITCH
TCHAIKOVSKY
(Born at Votkinsk, in the government of Viatka, Russia, May 7, 1840; died at St. Petersburg, November 6, 1893)
It is true that in more than one page of his symphonies Tchaikovsky narrowly escapes the reproach of vulgarity; but the earnestness, the sincerity of the speech makes its way even before the development and the amplification make them seem inevitable. The heart of Tchaikovsky was that of a little child; the brain was that of a man weary of the world and all its vanities. And so we have the singular phenomenon of naïveté, accompanied by a super-refined skill—and all this in the body and mind of a man fundamentally oriental in his tastes and especially in his love of surprising or monotonous rhythms and gorgeous colors. The very modernity of Tchaikovsky, his closeness to us as the spokesman of the things we think and dare not say—these qualities may war against his lasting fame; but in our day and generation he is the supreme interpreter by music of elemental and emotional thought. The emptiness of life obsessed him, and in the expression of his thought he is again the man of his period. When faith returns again to the world, his music may be studied with interest and curiosity as an important document in sociology. But in the present we are under his mighty spell.
SYMPHONY NO. 4, IN F MINOR, OP. 36
I. Andante sostenuto; moderato con anima in movimento di valse II. Andantino in modo di canzona III. Scherzo: “pizzicato ostinato”; allegro IV. Finale: allegro con fuoco
If Tchaikovsky had a programme in mind when he composed his Fifth and Sixth symphonies, he never published it to the world; but for the Fourth he wrote an elaborate one. Does the music gain by it? To us the Fourth symphony is interesting because it seems nearer to the Russian spirit and life as portrayed by Dostoivsky than the later ones. Even the ornamentation, the arabesques, that in another’s music would seem as so many excrescences, perhaps frivolous, are here in place. The neurotic, self-torturing Tchaikovsky was for years obsessed by the thought of death and the charnel house. Fate was to him not a word to be associated only with the story of Œdipus or Pelop’s line. The Fourth symphony is a personal document, revealing the man, as his letters revealed him. It is easy to pick flaws in it; to dismiss it as a suite, not a symphony; to complain of this or that; but the music with its deep-rooted melancholy, its noisy attempt to forget the inevitable end, its drunken hilarity, its dark and sinister sadness, is not easily to be put aside, not easily to be forgotten.
Tchaikovsky composed this symphony during the winter of 1877-78. He had lost interest in an opera, Othello, for which a libretto at his own wish had been drafted by Stassov. The first draft was finished in May, 1877. He began the instrumentation on August 23 of that year, and finished the first movement September 24. He began work again towards the end of November. The andantino was finished on December 27, the scherzo on January 1, 1878, and the finale on January 7, 1878.
The first performance was at a symphony concert of the Russian Musical Society, Moscow, February 22, 1878. Nicholas Rubinstein conducted.