[3] Naumann: Musikgeschichte, new ed. by E. Schmitz, 1913.
[4] Waldo Selden Pratt: 'The History of Music,' New York, 1908.
[5] Strauss' father, Johann, Sr. (1804-1849), was, with his waltzes and the wonderful travelling orchestra that played them, as much the hero of the day as his son. The son first established an orchestra of his own, but after his father's death succeeded him as leader of the older organization.
[6] Karl Millöcker, b. Vienna, 1842; d. 1899, Baden, near Vienna.
[7] He was divorced from her in 1869 and she became the wife of Richard Wagner in the following year.
CHAPTER II
THE RUSSIAN ROMANTICISTS
Romantic Nationalism in Russian Music; Pathfinders; Cavoss and Verstovsky—Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka; Alexander Sergeyevitch Dargomijsky—Neo-Romanticism in Russian Music; Anton Rubinstein—Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky.
I
Russian music as a whole is a true mirror of Slavic racial character, life, passion, gloom, struggle, despair, and agony. One can almost see in its turbulent-lugubrious or buoyant-hilarious chords the rich colors of the Byzantine style, the half Oriental atmosphere that surrounds everything with a romantic halo—gloomy prisons, wild mountains, wide steppes, luxurious palaces and churches, idyllic villages and the lonely penal colonies of Siberia. It really visualizes the life of the empire of the Czar with a marvellous power. With its short history and the unique position that it occupies among the world's classics, it depicts the true type of a Slav, the melancholy, simple and hospitable moujik, with more fullness of color and virility than, for instance, the German or Italian compositions depict the representative types of those nations. In order to understand the reason of this peculiar difference between Russian and West European music it is necessary to understand the social and psychological elements upon which it is built.
While the West European composers founded their creations upon the traditions of the masters, Russian music grew out of the very heart, the joys and the sorrows of the common people. All the Russian composers of the early nationalistic era were men of active life, who became musicians only on the urgency of their inspiration. Glinka, for instance, was a functionary in the Ministry of Finance, Dargomijsky was a clerk in the Treasury Department, Moussorgsky was an army officer, Rimsky-Korsakoff an officer of the navy, Borodine was a celebrated inventor and scholar. Academic musicians are wont to find the stamp of amateurishness on most of the Russian classic music. To this Stassoff, the celebrated Russian critic, replied: 'If that is the case, our composers are only to be congratulated, for they have not considered the form, the objective issues, but the spirit, the subjective value of their inspirations. We may be uneven and amateurish as nature and human life are, but, thank Heaven, we are not artificial and sophisticated!'