Tschaikowsky and His “Pathetic” Symphony
A very little while since, Tschaikowsky was little more than a name in England. He had visited us some two or three times, and it was generally believed that he composed; but he had not written any piece without which no orchestral programme could be considered complete, and the mere suggestion that his place might possibly be far above Gounod would certainly have been received with open derision. However, when his fame became great and spread wide on the Continent, he became so important a man in the eyes of English musicians that Cambridge University thought fit to honour itself by offering him an honorary musical degree. Tschaikowsky, simple soul, good-humouredly accepted it, apparently in entire ignorance of the estimation in which such cheap decorations are held in this country; and it is to be hoped that before his death he obtained a hearing in Russia for the Cambridge professor’s music. The incident, comical as it appeared to those of us who knew the value of musical degrees, the means by which they are obtained, and the reasons for which they are conferred, yet served a useful purpose by calling public attention to the fact that there was living a man who had written music that was fresh, a trifle strange perhaps, but full of vitality, and containing a new throb, a new thrill. Since 1893 his reputation has steadily grown, but in a curious way. One can scarcely say with truth that Tschaikowsky is popular: only his “Pathetic” symphony and one or two smaller things are popular. Had he not written the “Pathetic,” one may doubt whether he would be much better known to-day than he was in 1893. It caught the public fancy as no other work of his caught it, and on the strength of its popularity many of the critics do not hesitate to call it a great symphony, and on the strength of the symphony Tschaikowsky a great composer. (For in England criticism largely means saying what the public thinks.) Passionately though that symphony is admired, hardly any other of his music can be truly said to get a hearing; for, on the rare occasions when it is played, the public thoughtfully stays away. It is true that the Casse Noisette suite is always applauded, but it is a trifling work compared with his best. Tschaikowsky shares with Gray and one or two others in ancient and modern times the distinction of being famous by a single achievement. The public is jealous for the supremacy of that achievement, and will not hear of there being another equal to it.
Whether the public is right or wrong, and whether we all are or are not just a little inclined to-day to exaggerate Tschaikowsky’s gifts and the value of his music, there can be no doubt whatever that he was a singularly fine craftsman, who brought into music a number of fresh and living elements. He seems to me to have been an extraordinary combination of the barbarian and the civilised man, of the Slav and the Latin or Teuton, the Slav barbarian preponderating. He saw things as neither Slav nor Latin nor Teuton had seen them before; the touch of things aroused in him moods dissimilar from those that had been aroused in anyone before. Hence, while we English regard him as a representative Russian, or at anyrate Slav, composer, many Russians repudiate him, calling him virtually a Western. He has the Slav fire, rash impetuosity, passion and intense melancholy, and much also of that Slav naïveté which in the case of Dvorák degenerates into sheer brainlessness; he has an Oriental love of a wealth of extravagant embroidery, of pomp and show and masses of gorgeous colour; but the other, what I might call the Western, civilised element in his character, showed itself in his lifelong striving to get into touch with contemporary thought, to acquire a full measure of modern culture, and to curb his riotous, lawless impulse towards mere sound and fury. It is this unique fusion of apparently mutually destructive elements and instincts that gives to Tschaikowsky’s music much of its novelty and piquancy. But, apart from this uncommon fusion, it must be remembered that his was an original mind—original not only in colour but in its very structure. Had he been pure Slav, or pure Latin, his music might have been very different, but it would certainly have been original. He had true creative imagination, a fund of original, underived emotion, and a copiousness of invention almost as great as Wagner’s or Mozart’s. His power of evolving new decorative patterns of a fantastic beauty seemed quite inexhaustible; and the same may be said of his schemes and combinations and shades of colour, and the architectural plans and forms of his larger works. It is true that his forms frequently enough approach formlessness; that his colours—and especially in his earlier music—are violent and inharmonious; and that in his ceaseless invention of new patterns his Slav naïveté and lack of humour led him more than a hundred times to write unintentionally comic passages. He is discursive—I might say voluble. Again, he had little or no real strength—none of the massive, healthy strength of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner: his force is sheer hysteria. He is wanting in the deepest and tenderest human feeling. He is plausible to a degree that leads one to suspect his sincerity, and certainly leaves it an open question how long a great deal of his music will stand after this generation, to which it appeals so strongly, has passed away. But when all that may fairly be said against him has been said and given due weight, the truth remains that he is one of the few great composers of this century. I myself, in all humility, allowing fully that I may be altogether wrong, while convinced that I am absolutely right, deliberately set him far above Brahms, above Gounod, above Schumann—above all save Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, and Wagner. His accomplishment as a sheer musician was greater than either Gounod’s or Schumann’s, though far from being equal to Brahms’—for Brahms as a master of the management of notes stands with the highest, with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner; while as a voice and a new force in music neither Brahms nor Schumann nor Gounod can be compared with him other than unfavourably. All that are sensitive to music can feel, as I have said, the new throb, the new thrill; and that decides the matter.
It is now a long time since Mr. Henry Wood, one winter’s afternoon, the only Englishman who may be ranked with the great continental conductors, gave a Tschaikowsky concert, with a programme that included some of the earlier as well as one or two of the later works. It served to show how hard and how long Tschaikowsky laboured to attain to lucidity of expression, and why the “Pathetic” symphony is popular while the other compositions are not. In all of them we find infinite invention and blazes of Eastern magnificence and splendour; but in the earlier things there is little of the order and clarity of the later ones. Another and a more notable point is that in not one thing played at this concert might the human note be heard. The suite (Op. 55) and the symphony (Op. 36) are full of novel and dazzling effects—for example, the scherzo of the symphony played mainly by the strings pizzicato, and the scherzo of the suite, with the short, sharp notes of the brass and the rattle of the side-drum; the melodies also are new, and in their way beautiful; in form both symphony and suite are nearly as clear as anything Tschaikowsky wrote: in fact, each work is a masterwork. But each is lacking in the human element, and without the human element no piece of music can be popular for long. The fame of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, is still growing and will continue to grow, because every time we hear their music it touches us; while Weber, mighty though he is, will probably never be better loved than he is to-day, because his marvellously graphic picturesque music does not touch us—cannot, was not intended to, touch us; and the fame of Mendelssohn and the host of lesser men who did not speak with a human accent of human woe and weal wanes from day to day. The composer who writes purely decorative music, or purely picturesque music, may be remembered as long as he who expresses human feeling; but he cannot hope to be loved by so many. It is because Tschaikowsky has so successfully put his own native emotions, his own aspirations and hopes and fears and sorrows, into the “Pathetic,” that I believe it has come to stay with us, while many of his other works will fade from the common remembrance. Surely it is one of the most mournful things in music; yet surely sadness was never uttered with a finer grace, with a more winning carelessness, as one who tries to smile gaily at his own griefs. Were it touched with the finest tenderness, as Mozart might have touched it, we might—if we could once get thoroughly accustomed to a few of the unintentionally humorous passages I have referred to—have it set by the side of the G minor and “Jupiter” symphonies. As it is, it unmistakably falls short of Mozart by lacking that tenderness, just as it falls short of Beethoven by lacking profundity of emotion and thought; but it does not always fall so far short. There are passages in it that neither Beethoven nor Mozart need have been ashamed to own as theirs; and especially there is much in it that is in the very spirit of Mozart—Mozart as we find him in the Requiem, rather than the Mozart of “Don Giovanni” or the “Figaro.” The opening bars are, of course, ultramodern: they would never have been written had not Wagner written something like them first; but the combination of poignancy and lightness and poise with which the same phrase is delivered and expanded as the theme for the allegro is quite Mozartean, and the same may be said of the semiquaver passage following it. The outbursts of Slavonic fire are, of course, Tschaikowsky pure and simple; but everyone who hears the symphony may note how the curious union of barbarism with modern culture is manifest in the ease with which Tschaikowsky recovers himself after one of these outbursts—turns it aside, so to speak, instead of giving it free play after the favourite plan both of Borodine the great and purely Russian composer, and Dvorák the little Hungarian composer. The second theme does not appear to me equal to the rest of the symphony. It has that curious volubility and “mouthing” quality that sometimes gets into Tschaikowsky’s music; it is plausible and pretty; it suggests a writer who either cannot or dare not use the true tremendous word at the proper moment, and goes on delivering himself of journalistic stock-phrases which he knows will move those who would be left unmoved were the right word spoken. There is nothing of this in the melody of the second movement. Its ease is matched by its poignancy: the very happy-go-lucky swing of it adds to its poignancy; and the continuation—another instance of the untamed Slav under the influence of the most finished culture—has a wild beauty, and at the same time communicates the emotion more clearly than speech could. The mere fact that it is written in five-four time counts for little—nothing is easier than to write in five-four time when once you have got the trick; the remarkable thing is the skill and tact with which Tschaikowsky has used precisely the best rhythm he could have chosen—a free, often ambiguous, rhythm—to express that particular shade of feeling. The next movement is one of the most astounding ever conceived. Beginning like an airy scherzo, presently a march rhythm is introduced, and before one has realised the state of affairs we are in the midst of a positive tornado of passion. The first tunes then resume; but again they are dismissed, and it becomes apparent that the march theme is the real theme of the whole movement—that all the others are intended simply to lead up to it, or to form a frame in which it is set. It comes in again and again with ever greater and greater clamour, until it seems to overwhelm one altogether. There is no real strength in it—the effect is entirely the result of nervous energy, of sheer hysteria; but as an expression of an uncontrollable hysterical mood it stands alone in music. It should be observed that even here Tschaikowsky’s instinctive tendency to cover the intensity of his mood with a pretence of carelessness had led him to put this enormous outburst into a rhythm that, otherwise used, would be irresistibly jolly. The last movement, too, verges on the hysterical throughout. It is full of the blackest melancholy and despondency, with occasional relapses into a tranquillity even more tragic; and the trombone passage near the end, introduced by a startling stroke on the gong, inevitably reminds one of the spirit of Mozart’s Requiem.
The whole of this paper might have been devoted to a discussion of the technical side of Tschaikowsky’s music, for the score of this symphony is one of the most interesting I know. It is full of astonishing points, of ingenious dodges used not for their own sake, but to produce, as here they nearly always do, particular effects; and throughout, the part-writing, the texture of the music, is most masterly and far beyond anything Tschaikowsky achieved before. For instance, the opening of the last movement has puzzled some good critics, for it is written in a way which seems like a mere perverse and wasted display of skill. But let anyone imagine for a moment the solid, leaden, lifeless result of letting all the parts descend together, instead of setting them, as Tschaikowsky does, twisting round each other, and it will at once be perceived that Tschaikowsky never knew better what he was doing, or was more luckily inspired, than when he devised the arrangement that now stands. Much as I should like to have debated dozens of such points, it is perhaps better, after all, just now to have talked principally of the content of Tschaikowsky’s music; for, when all is said, in Tschaikowsky’s music it is the content that counts. I might describe that content as modern, were it not that the phrase means little. Tschaikowsky is modern because he is new; and in this age, when the earth has grown narrow, and tales of far-off coasts and unexplored countries seem wonderful no longer, we throw ourselves with eagerness upon the new thing, in five minutes make it our own, and hail the inventor of it as the man who has said for us what we had all felt for years. Nevertheless, it may be that Tschaikowsky’s attitude towards life, and especially towards its sorrows,—the don’t-care-a-hang attitude,—is modern; and anyhow, in the sense that it is so new that we seize it first amongst a hundred other things, this symphony is the most modern piece of music we have. It is imbued with a romanticism beside which the romanticism of Weber and Wagner seems a little thin-blooded and pallid; it expresses for us the emotions of the over-excited and over-sensitive man as they have not been expressed since Mozart; and at the present time we are quite ready for a new and less Teutonic romanticism than Weber’s, and to enter at once into the feelings of the brain-tired man. That the “Pathetic” will for long continue to grow in popularity I also fully expect; and that after this generation has hurried away it will continue to have a large measure of popularity I also fully expect, for in it, together with much that appeals only to us unhealthy folk of to-day, there is much that will appeal to the race, no matter how healthy it may become, so long as it remains human in its desires and instincts.