MUSIC.
TCHAIKOVSKY'S INFLUENCE.
IN the Reminiscences of Liszt by his compatriot, Mme. Janke Virohl, published shortly after his death in 1886, the author records at considerable length the substance of a conversation in which Liszt expressed his opinions as to the tendencies and the fitture of Russian music:—
"Properly speaking," he. said, " there is as yet no. Russian mask, but there are some first-rate composers. The Russian mind, which is in continual activity on the one side and comatose on the other, wiil have to do an immense amount of work in
order to guidelte natural tendencies in the right direction ; and this is the result of the climate of the country and of the Slav character in general. Just as the long months of their winters are followed by short summers full of rapid expansion, so Russian music has long monotonous, intervals in between the .bursts of melody; but these inelodies ought to be brimful of the sap of their short summer.. . . . Besides, there is yet too much of the vague, of the undecided, too rench'of dreaminess in thin music, destined, nevertheless, I believe, to have a great future. One feels that the Russian composers go to work under a more or less senti- mental inspiration, and not under the all-powerful impression of a master-idea. . . . . . The Rdssians have not yet sufficiently fathomed the secret of working on the salient points of their musical nationality. Their originality is deep rooted in the soil ; it is an emanation of the land, and is inseparable from its snows, its steppes, and from the way its sons look upon life and death. It is this which some day will give to their music that stamp of individuality without which it will never be anything more than a variation of the music of other countries With their dash, their faith, and their talent, they are sure to discover what will be the national music. Their art is young, you see, and, in art, youth is rarely an advantage."
These conversations took place from fifteen to twenty years ago, since when Russian music has made great strides in. popularity and achievement, yet their pbint and suggestive- ness are so little impaired that they might almost serve as the text for Mrs. Newmarch's recently published and very interesting work on Tchaikovsky.* The sources of Tchaikovsky's great popularity are acutely analysed in the opening pages of Mrs. Newmarch's excellent study. Though he owed the most striking qualities of his work to " the imperishable fibre of race," it was easier for him to drop the Slav than for many of his fellow-workers. He
was not consecrated to the service of nationality " like Glinka ; a Russian at heart, he was a cosmopolitan by educa- tion. " This susceptibility to the antagonistic currents of thought and feeling which surrounded him is not altogether a fault in Tchaikovsky. On the contrary, it has lent to his music qualities of pliancy, variety, and eclecticism which have proved sources of charm and attraction. Even if we admit that this division of thought and emotion is a source of weakness in Tchaikovsky, we must also acknowledge that it has its element of popularity. At a time when the entire world of Art is divided upon questions of law and liberty, this subjective confession of unsettled faith and dual allegi- ance puts him in closer touch with his own generation, though it may weaken his hold upon succeeding ones.". . Another source alike of weakness and popularity is that he was steeped in the maladie du Bade; he had the " command of every note in the gamut of melancholy." To that we are inclined to demur to the extent of adding the qualifying word " almost," for of the serene yet sombre melancholy of Turgenieff there is little trace in the music of Tchaikovsky. In him the mutinous quality is seldom absent. It is the emotion of a wounded soul that he especially excels in translating into sound; the word "resignation" finds no counterpart in his music, and he is never so impressive as when he pours forth' the rebellious rhetoric of despair. Hence Mrs. Newmarch does well to
point out the injustice involved in the view that because Tchaikovsky happens to be the most accessible and the best known among Russian composers, and at the same time the most pessimistic, his music must be typically and •representa- tively Russian. "Russian art, as a whole, is far too vigorous and healthy a growth to remain continuously under the sway of one emotional influence,"—that of romantic despair. Two further sources of Tchaikovsky's popularity remain to be noted,—the extraordinary brilliancy, picturesqueness, and sonority of his orchestration, and the quality of his melodic vein. Though he began his musical career as an amateur, and was regarded by his early teachers as an incorrigible dilettante, he attained in time to such a mastery of orchestral resource that one can say of him as was once said of Berlioz: " His instinct for orchestration was so abnormally acute that whatever experiments he tried, from the most delicate and slender combinations to those of utmost volume, they were sure
to sound as he intended." Anton Rubinstein complains —not altogether without reason—of modern composers that they always paint with all the colours in their palette. Now Tchaikovsky very often used this method, but his effects were
never blurred. When he chose, again, he could produce the most delicate, fanciful, and original results with limited resources, as in his famous caese-noieette suite, notable, apart
• Tchaikaralq. By Rosa Newmarcb. London : Grant Richards. [Sal from its-weloome. gaiety and humour for its truly wonderful glimpses of the Orient-The 'Lit number in the Suite, a cleverly orclaeStrated-brit rather commonplace—indeed, by comparison with:Anoit of the' preceding numbers,. one might call it a vulgar—waltz tune, serves as a good illustration of the popu- larityana weakness of TchaikoVsk-y as a melodist. He had a rich-gift of tune-coining, but in the realm of tender sentiment, as opposed: to -the-heroic or tragic vein, his melodies, though flowing and pleasant, were seldom really distinguished,—the charm of the second subject in the opening movement of the Symphonic Pathgtique lies more in its harmonisa- tion and varied- presentation than in the theme itself. One of the -best pieces of criticism in the book is that in which Mrs. Newmarch weighs Tchaikovsky's virtues and defects as a song-writer. There is, she says, no denying the extra- ordinary charm, the penetrating sweetness and melancholy, the vocal excellence, of many of his songs. But she refuses all the same to admit his claim to inclusion in the ranks of the great song-writers,—Schubert and Schumann, Brahms and. Franz :— "Nearly all his songs would be condemned if tried by the standard of formal perfection. His greatest weakness as a song- writer lies in the fact that he never realised the principle that in the ideal song, music and poetry must meet upon an equal footing. The union of the .two arts, says Cui, ' appeared to Tchaikovsky in the light of a misalliance for the one which he represented.' Starting with this idea, that music is the only element of real importance in song, Tchaikovsky does not hesitate to mutilate the text of the greatest poets, to interpolate such exclamations as Good heavens,' Alas I " Woe is me,' and occasionally by a stroke of his arbitrary pen to turn fine verse into indifferent prose A fault which is common in Tchaikovsky's orchestral music is also noticeable in his songs. Not always very fastidious in his choice of musical ideas, he seems to find a difficulty in quitting them. He will develop, vary, and repeat an idea with a kind of mechanical skilfulness which becomes wearisome."
Finally, she charges him, with a certain amount of deliberate and artificial sentimentality, a gratuitous indulgence in the luxury of grief without any adequate motive. The passage which we quoted and the words we have italicised indicate the fact that Mrs. Newmarch approaches her task in anything but a spirit of adulation. Though a great admirer of Tchaikovsky, she is by no means blind to his imperfections, and refuses to commit herself positively to the opinion that he is the greatest of the Russian composers.
While there was a good deal that reminds us of Byron in Tchaikovsky's music, the man himself was anything but a poseur. He shrank from publicity; he was morbidly sensitive, and so singularly reticent about himself or his schemes that to this day a veil of mystery hangs over the episode of his ill-starred marriage and his sudden death, commonly attributed to cholera after drinking a. glass of impure water in a St. Petersburg restaurant. Yet while admitting a general correspondence between the nature of the man and of his' music, Mrs. Newmarch does well to refrain from the temptation to read autobiographical significance into his principal compositions. How misleading such a course may be is sufficiently shown by the fact that the brightest and most humorous of his symphonies—the Fourth. —was written shortly after the great domestic tragedy of his life. That his influence on the nerves of contemporary audiences has been profound cannot be gainsaid; it is another matter to credit him with a permanent influence on the evolution df music. The stream of his inspiration seldom ran clear ; it was not given him integros accedere fontes atque haurire, to attain to the ecstasy of Bach, the Olympian heights of Beethoven, or the vernal freshness of Mozart. The amari aiiguid was seldom absent ; his distinguishing note was that of poignancy. In a collection of parallel Lives of musicians he might well be bracketed with Berlioz; for both were cosmopolitan in their education and leanings, both were past-masters of orchestral resource, both achieved their most resounding successes in England, both wrote largely for the lyric stage yet .won popularity chiefly in compositions not destined for the boards, and both, to conclude, were sensitive, unhappy, and disappointed men. C. L. G.
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