The duality of Tchaikovsky: Rhythm, woe, and the struggle for nuance

“ A hundred times commoner than a real sense of melodic beauty is the love of a powerful rhythm that carries the listener off his feet. Now Tchaïkovsky does that for the listener much more often than any other composer. He first captivates by something in which his gift of rhythm plays a leading part, and, having captivated, he does not disappoint us by saying empty things. Further points are his astonishingly rich harmony, which is never twisted and inconsequent, like so much of Berlioz's harmony, but always develops logically and clearly his vastness of design ”

“ No other instrumental work ever aroused so great a wave of genuine public interest, and even persons who are no great admirers of Tchaïkovsky ought, if they care for the musical life of this country, to take an interest in him, on account of the astonishingly sudden and powerful grip that he took of the public imagination. It is not to externals—such as instrumentation, counterpoint, form, and so forth—that we must look for the explanation. Glazounoff orchestrates no less brilliantly than Tchaïkovsky and has probably a greater mastery of scholastic device, and the same is true of Saint-Saëns. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As a matter of cold, hard fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the ancients were younger. Consider the Greeks and their naïve joy in creation! The twentieth-century man brings forth his works of art in sorrow. His music shows it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical and morbid. I shan't allude to Chopin, who was neurotic—another empty medical phrase!—or to Schumann, who carried within him the seeds of madness; or to Wagner, who was a decadent; sufficient for the purposes of my argument to mention the names of Liszt, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky [Pg 13] and Richard Strauss. ”

“ I am in love with Tatiana, I am under the spell of Poushkin’s verse, and I am drawn to compose the music as it were by an irresistible attraction.” This was the true mood of inspiration—the only mood for success.
We must judge the opera Eugene Oniegin not so much as Tchaikovsky’s greatest intellectual, or even emotional, effort, but as the outcome of a passionate, single-hearted impulse. Consequently the sense of joy in creation, of perfect reconciliation with his subject, is conveyed in every bar of the music. ”

“ Despite its psychology, it is always music for music’s sake. There is formal structure—Loeffler’s form—and a distinct climax. The sparing use of the exotic-toned viola d’amore is most telling. The fanfares, recalling the dim triumphs of the dusty dead, are superbly effective; and the cantilena is ever touching. It is all poetic, “atmospheric” music, yet it is none the less moving and dramatic.
Here then is the present situation: Wagner preaching in his music dreams; Tschaïkowsky passionately declaiming the cumulative woes of mankind in accents most pathetically dramatic ”

“ Such infelicities are difficult to account for in the work of a musician so exceedingly sensitive in matters of poetic fitness as he. It may be that his acute sense of dramatic and emotional values operated perfectly only when he was unhampered by the thought of the voice.
I have dwelt upon this point because it should be noted in any candid study of his traits as a song writer. Yet it is not a defect which weighs heavily against him when one considers the musical quality of his songs as a whole. Not, as a whole, equal to his piano music, they are admirable and deeply individual ”

“ 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. ”

“ To this new school, not wholly realistic yet certainly not idealistic in its aims, is piano playing and composing drifting. It may be the decadence—perhaps an artistic Götterdämmerung.
The nuance in piano playing is ruler. The reign of noise is past. In modern music sonority, brilliancy is present, but the nuance is necessary—not alone the nuance of tone [Pg 230] but of expression. Infinite shadings are to be found where before were but the forte, the piano and the mezzo forte. Joseffy taught America the nuance just as Rubinstein revealed to us the potency of tone. ”

“ What a festival it has been! How different everything looks in God's world to-day! And all this is the work of one man and his playing! What a power is music! I cannot collect my [300] thoughts—my whole being seems in a state of abnormal tension, of confused rapture!'
"Do we experience this exaltation nowadays? I think not. Rarely do we partake of the insane root. Are there no more enchanters like Liszt? Or has the capacity of such enthusiasm and expansion passed away for ever with the white stocks, the 'coiffure à l'Apollon Belvédère' and the frank emotionalism of the early Victorian period?" ”

“ and moreover, how the Giaour was to be pronounced, he showed himself so intimately acquainted with all the tenderest songs of the one poet, and all the impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony of the other; he repeated, with such tremulous feeling, the various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood, that she ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry, and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; ”

“ The enormous predominance of the rhythmical interest over every other kind of interest, such as that of melody or harmony, in Tchaïkovsky's music, can scarcely have escaped notice; and rhythm is the lowest element in music ”

“ It is certain that while Glinka was influenced by Beethoven, Serov by Wagner and Meyerbeer, Cui by Chopin and Schumann, Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov by Liszt and Berlioz, Tchaikovsky never ceased to blend with the characteristic melody of his country an echo of the sensuous beauty of the South. This reflection of what was gracious and ideally beautiful in Italian music is undoubtedly one of the secrets of Tchaikovsky’s great popularity with the public. It is a concession to human weakness of which we gladly avail ourselves ”

“ No longer the wheezings, gaspings, and short-breathed phrases of Liszt; no longer the evil sensuality, loose construction, formlessness, and drunken peasant dances of Tchaikovsky; but a blending of Wagner, Brahms, Liszt—and the classics. Oh, Strauss, Richard, knows his business! He is a skilled writer. He has his chamber-music moments, his lyric outbursts; his early songs are sometimes singable; it is his perverse, vile orgies of orchestral music that I speak of. No sane man ever erected such a mad architectural scheme. He should be penned behind the bars of his own mad music. ”

“ His technics are peculiar, but they make the piano sound beautiful; an eloquent tone is needed for Brahms, and your ten fingers must be as ten flexible voices. He never writes salon music, with its weak, vapid, affected mien. You needs must play much Chopin and Liszt, for too much Brahms makes the fingers sluggish, that is sluggish for the older and more rapid-fingered composers.
Touching on the content of his piano music we find much variety. He has felt the pessimism of his times, but his ideals were noble, and no man could prefer Fielding as an author and not be robust in temperament. ”

“ Like the “cold devils” of Félicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the winds of hell booming about them, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire is ecstatic. Poe and Heine knew ecstasy, and Liszt too; but Wagner, ill-tempered like all martyrs, was the master adept of his century. Tchaikovsky closely follows him, and in the tiny piano pieces of Chopin ecstasy is pinioned in a few bars, the soul rapt to heaven in a phrase. Richard Strauss has shown us a variation on the theme: voluptuousness troubled by pain, the soul tortured by the very ecstasy of ecstasy. ”

“ I say unhappily because no composer’s music is less adapted to concert than Wagner’s. Divorced from the context of gesture, speech, scenic display, his music becomes all profile. One misses the full, rich, significant glance of the eye. Wagner is a weaver, not a form-maker. He can follow a dramatic situation, or burrow deeply into the core of morbid psychology; but let him attempt to stand alone, to write music without programme or the fever of the footlights—then he is the inferior of several men, the inferior of Liszt, Tschaïkowsky, and Richard Strauss ”

“ "The London criminal is certainly a dull fellow," said he in the querulous voice of the sportsman whose game has failed him. "Look out this window, Watson. See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into the cloud-bank. The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim."
"There have," said I, "been numerous petty thefts."
Holmes snorted his contempt.
"This great and sombre stage is set for something more worthy than that," said he. ”

“ But so keen for symmetry, for all the term formal beauty implies, is Chopin, that seldom does his morbidity madden, his voluptuousness poison. His music has its morass, but also its upland where the gale blows strong and true. Perhaps all art is, as the incorrigible Nordau declares, a slight deviation from the normal, though Ribot scoffs at the existence of any standard of normality. The butcher and the candle-stick-maker have their Horla, their secret soul convulsions, which they set down to taxation, the vapors, or weather. ”

“ Enchanting is the effect when he murmurs in such studies as the F minor of Chopin and the Concert study of Liszt of the same tonality; or in mounting unisons as he breathlessly weaves the wind through the last movement of [431] Chopin's B-flat minor sonata. Less edifying are De Pachmann's mannerisms. They are only tolerated because of his exotic, lovely, and disquieting music. ”

“ I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.
I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; ”