Rubinstein's orchestral and operatic works occupy a place between Schumann and Meyerbeer. His most popular orchestral compositions are 'Faust,' 'Ivan IV,' 'Don Quixote,' and his Second Symphony, 'Ocean.' The other five symphonies are rather stately, cold tone pictures without any definite foundation. More known, and even frequently performed, are his chamber music pieces, the 'cello sonata in D major, and the trio in B major. Of his operas and oratorios only one work, 'The Demon,' has survived in the classic Russian répertoire. The rest are long forgotten. Of longer life than Rubinstein's orchestral and operatic compositions are his piano pieces, especially his barcarolles, preludes, études, and dances. All of his larger piano pieces are, like his orchestral works, prolix, diffuse and full of unassimilated ideas. Through all his compositions there blows a breath of Oriental romanticism, something that reminds one of the 'Thousand and One Nights.' A peculiar sweetness and brilliancy of harmony distinguish his style, but these particular qualities make Rubinstein unpopular in our realistic age. It is true that his piano pieces have little that is individual, but they are graceful and aristocratic. To an ear attuned to modern impressionism they are nothing but graceful, warmly colored salon pieces devoid of arresting features. But whatever may be the fate of Rubinstein's instrumental music, he was a composer of excellent songs, which will be sung as long as man lives. They are the very crown of his creations. From among his numerous ballads and songs 'The Asra,' 'The Dream,' 'Night,' etc., are especially enchanting. In them he stands unmatched by any composer of his time. The number of his works surpasses one hundred; there are ten string quartets, three quintets, five concertos, three sonatas for violin and piano, two for 'cello and piano, two for violin and orchestra. According to Russian critical opinion he was an imitator of Mendelssohn and Schumann. But the fact is he suffered from the overwhelming influence of the German classics, whom he did not assimilate thoroughly, and from being one of the greatest of piano virtuosi of his age, which absorbed most of his attention and time. It is not unnatural that a great executive artist should acquire the forms of those composers whose works he performs most. In following these models Rubinstein simply demonstrated a psychological rule.
Rubinstein's main importance in Russian music resides in the fact that he laid the foundation of a nation-wide musical education, so that now the national and local governments are back of a serious æsthetic culture. Besides having been twice a director of the Imperial Conservatory of Music in St. Petersburg, he was from time to time a director of the Imperial Musical Society and conductor of the St. Petersburg symphony concerts. He died in 1894 in Peterhof and is buried in the graveyard of Alexandro-Nevsky monastery, near to his rivals, Balakireff, Borodine, and Moussorgsky.
IV
An artist of the same school as Rubinstein, yet entirely different in works and spirit, was Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky. Rubinstein was a creative virtuoso, Tschaikowsky was a creative genius. They took the same general direction in form and themes, but otherwise a wide abyss separated these two unique spirits of Russian music. Tschaikowsky had Rubinstein's passion and technical skill, the same lyric style, and, like him, adhered to West European form, but in his essentials he remains a Russian of the most classic tendencies; his language is that of an emotional Slav. His music glows with the peculiar fire that burned in his soul; rapture and agony, gloom and gayety seem in a perpetual struggle for expression. With all its nationalistic riches there is nothing in Tschaikowsky's tonal structures that resembles those of his contemporaries. He is a romantic poet of classic pattern, yet wholly a Russian. He is altogether introspective, sentimentally subjective, and ecclesiastically fanatic. With all his Slavic pathos and subjective vigor Tschaikowsky builds his tone-temples in Gothic style, which he never leaves. That is very largely the reason why his music is so phenomenally popular abroad, while his contemporaries have, despite their originality and greatness, remained in his shadow.
Tschaikowsky's compositions are as strange as his inner self. His likening his artistic expressions to a violent contest between a beast and a god no doubt had its psychological reason. That there is much mystery in his life and its relation to his art is apparent from the following passage with which Kashkin, his biographer, closes his book,[9] 'I have finished my reminiscences. Of course, they might be supplemented by accounts of a few more events, but I shall add nothing at present, and perhaps I shall never do so. One document I shall leave in a sealed packet, and if thirty years hence it still has interest for the world the seal may be broken; this packet I shall leave in the care of Moscow University. It will contain the history of one episode in Tschaikowsky's life upon which I have barely touched in my book.'
That seal is still unbroken. All we can guess of the nature of the secret is that it involves a tragedy of romantic character. We shall get a closer idea of the great composer when we consider a few characteristic episodes of his private life in connection with his career as a musician. Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky was born in 1840, in the province of Viatka, where his father was the general manager of Kamsko-Botkin's Mills. He showed already in his early youth a great liking for music and poetry, but the wish of his parents was that he should make his career as an official of the government. With this in view he was educated in the aristocratic law school in St. Petersburg. Graduated in 1859, he became an officer in the department of the Ministry of Justice. While he was a student in the law school he kept up his studies of music by taking lessons from F. D. Becker and K. I. Karel and did not give them up even when he became an active functionary with less leisure than before. The desire for a thorough musical education gave him no peace until he entered the newly founded Conservatory of Music, where Rubinstein and Zarembi became his teachers. Though regularly the course was longer, Tschaikowsky was graduated after three years of study, in 1866, and at once was invited to become a professor of harmony in the Imperial Conservatory of Music in Moscow. During the first years of his life as a teacher Tschaikowsky composed some smaller instrumental and vocal pieces, which were performed with marked success, partly by his pupils, partly by touring musical artists. His first large compositions were the First Symphony, which he composed in 1868, and his opera Voyevoda, which he wrote a year later. Both these compositions were less successful than his earlier ones. Nevertheless the disappointment did not discourage the young composer, for he proceeded to compose new operas, 'Undine,' Opritchnik, and 'Vakula the Smith,' besides some music for orchestra. In 1873 he composed the ballet 'Snow Maiden,' and then followed in succession his Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies.
Assured of a pension of three thousand rubles ($1,500) a year and an extra income from the royalty of his published music, Tschaikowsky resigned his teaching post and devoted all his time to composition. His Fourth Symphony had to some extent satisfied his ambition as a symphonic composer, since it had been received enthusiastically by the public in both Moscow and St. Petersburg; he now threw all his efforts into opera. In 1878 he finished his Evgheny Onegin, his greatest opera, besides his two ballets.
In spite of his stormy private life and various romantic conflicts Tschaikowsky was a prolific worker. Besides the above-mentioned operas he wrote six symphonies, of which the last two have gained world-wide fame, three ballets, the overtures 'Romeo and Juliet,' 'The Tempest,' 'Hamlet,' and '1812,' the 'Italian Caprice,' and the symphonic poem 'Manfred.' Besides these he wrote two concertos for piano and orchestra, one concerto for violin, three quartets, one trio, over a hundred songs, some thirty smaller instrumental pieces and a series of excellent church music. They vary in their character and quality. Some of them are truly great and majestic, while others are of mediocre merit. Opritchnik, Mazeppa, Tcharodeiki, and Jeanne d'Arc are dramatic operas, while Evgheny Onegin, Pique Dame, and Yolanta are of outspoken lyric type. Tscherevitschki and 'Vakula the Smith' are his two comic operas.
Though Tschaikowsky's ambition was to excel in opera, his symphonic compositions represent the best he has written, especially his Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies, 'The Tempest,' the Marche Slav, 'Manfred,' his piano concerto in B-flat minor, and his three ballets, 'Snow Maiden,' 'Sleeping Beauty,' and 'Swan Lake.' He is a perfect master of counterpoint and graceful melodies. How well he mastered his technique is proven by the careful modelling of his themes and figures. But in opera his grasp is behind those of his rivals. There is too much of the West European polish and sentimentality, and too little of the elemental vigor and grandeur of a Russian dramatist.
To the period of Tschaikowsky's last years as a teacher in Moscow, especially from 1875 to 1885, belong the mysterious romantic troubles which presumably became the foundation of his creative despair, the pessimism which has made him the Schopenhauer of sound. Here may lie the secret of all the turbulent emotionalism from which emanated those tragic chords, all the wild musical images, that incessant melancholy strain which characterize his works. In 1877 he married Antony Ivanovna Millukova, but their married life was of short duration. There are many strange stories as to his despair on account of an unhappy love. Tschaikowsky was an affectionate friend of a Mme. von Meck, with whom he was in perpetual correspondence and who gave him material aid in carrying out his artistic ambitions, though he had never met her. Why he did not is a mystery. It is said that he contemplated suicide upon many occasions. He told his friend Kashkin that twice he had gone up to his knees in the Moscow River with the idea of drowning himself, but that the effect of the cold water sobered him. When his wildest emotions seized him he would rush out and sit in the snow, if it was winter, or stand in the river until numb with the cold. This cured him temporarily, but he insisted that he remained a soul-sick man. 'I am putting all my virtue and wickedness, passion and agony into the piece I am writing,' he wrote to a friend while composing his Symphonie Pathétique.