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Pathétique --appeals more strongly to the emotions, No. 5 is constructively the finer work. On the other hand, we have the opinion of the Russian critic Berezovsky--quoted together with the same writer's detailed account of the work in a recent English book on Tchaïkovsky--that No. 5 is the weakest of all the Symphonies. There is something rather depressing in such extreme divergence of opinion. It proves one of two things;--either Tchaïkovsky is not one of the sane composers whose works stand in a certain clear relation to the musical needs of human nature; or else, for all our greatly increased musical culture, we are no quicker than were the men of Beethoven's day in our perceptions; and, in the absence of perception, we are even more tied down than were our predecessors by pedantic notions. The reception of the great
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Symphonic Pathétique in this country disposes of the former alternative. 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. Yet neither of those masters ever did or could stir anything in the least like the interest that Tchaïkovsky stirs. We believe the secret of Tchaïkovsky lies first in his sincerity, his being in earnest, his intentness, his search after the true symbol of his idea or feeling, his rejection of mere fabricated music. In listening to Glazounoff one perceives the trotting out of device.
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Note how cleverly, the composer seems to say,
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Whereas Tchaïkovsky is always intent on his idea, and, when he uses device, it is with the air of a man deeply in earnest and grasping at a resource of expression. Thus the centre of gravity is with Glazounoff as often as not in the device, with Tchaïkovsky always in the message, and with that dim sub-consciousness of the musical soul we perceive the one to be a cultivated trifler, the other a man with something important to say. That is the first and chief point. Next comes Tchaïkovsky's gift of rhythm--the quality in music for which the general public of the present day cares most. When a person of rudimentary musical notions says that he likes a good tune, it will nearly always be found that what he likes is the rhythm, and that the melody can be freely changed without his perceiving it. The same taste exists in the higher stages of cultivation. 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; his warmth of colouring, and his picturesque force. Needless to say, that to explain sudden and signal success with the general public there must always be a mention of weak points. Among Tchaïkovsky's weak points that which has gained him most popularity is his persistent habit of presenting his ideas in a sort of balanced and antithetical manner. He does not expect too much intelligence in the listener. First he says a thing, then he says it again an octave lower down or higher up and with different instrumentation; next he repeats a tag of what has just been said, and repeats that once or twice, and so forth. And the thing is not done artificially; such procedure evidently came natural to him. By the time he has finished, something of the idea has been conveyed into the dullest mind; and all this is done along with the extremely modern harmony and with instrumentation so dashing, brilliant, and varied that only a dreadfully analytical person takes note of the thematic iteration. It is a remarkable point that while all the other symphonies are full of Slavonic folk-melodies, the thematic invention in the
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Pathetic is all original--every scrap of it. There is not a folk-tune from beginning to end. One has only to think of the first theme of the first quick movement to perceive how thoroughly the composer was worked up. The originality of it is absolute. One may go over all the orchestral composers from Haydn to Wagner and Brahms, asking oneself whether that theme could be by any one of them. Obviously it could not be the work of anyone else except Tchaïkovsky. On hearing that theme for the first time the listener pricks up his ears.
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Here is a man with something to say, he thinks. Now there is nothing of that kind in No. 5. The thematic material has been obtained in an easy-going manner--mostly by borrowing. And the superiority of the great No. 6 is just as remarkable in the richness and spontaneity of development as in originality of thematic invention. In other respects the case against Mr. Jacques's view is much stronger. There is not the ghost of an indication in No. 5 of the power which produced that overwhelming battle-picture in the first movement of the
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Pathetic, or of the completely new kind of eloquence introduced into the world of music in the third movement--the Scherzo-March--of the
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Pathetic, or of the unparalleled poignancy of expression in the Finale. The fifth is a fine picturesque work, chiefly interesting for the glimpse that it gives us of those exercises by which the genius destined to produce No. 6 strengthened itself. We hear many of the same orchestral effects, such as the frequent use of divided lower strings and the prominence of bassoon parts. The figuration in the Valse, and again in the Finale, also affords a faint premonition of the marvels that enthral us in the latter work. But, before any comparison of the two is really possible at all, one must knock off the last movement of the
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Pathetic
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Pathetic
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Eighth time at these concerts, says last night's programme, in reference to the great Tchaïkovsky Symphony, which is only eight years old. The performances in London are to be numbered by dozens, and whenever genuine orchestral concerts are given in this country the swan-song of the late Russian master has probably been heard more often than any other symphonic work. Let us not be in too great a hurry to protest against this state of things. The enormous audience of yesterday evening--much the largest of the present season so far--suggests that the public have not lost interest in the Symphony. Nor do we dissent from the views of the public in this respect. There is astounding potency in the charm of the work and in the appeal that it makes to the imagination. For some time past we have been preoccupied with the notion that it forms a sort of pendant to Dvoràk's
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New World Symphony. Dvoràk has caught in his music the breezy, hopeful, democratic, optimistic, and free-thinking spirit of American life, with its upper side of furious go-ahead civilisation, and its under side of primitive humanity (Negroes and Red Indians) in which energy of feeling is out of all proportion to intellectual faculty. Dvoràk's slow movement is undoubtedly a hymn of such primitive humanity, with an undercurrent of meditation on the prairie by night, in which the movements of sap and the germination of seeds within the bosom of inexhaustibly fertile nature become, as it were, audible. It is something like the poetry that Walt Whitman would have written had he been a much better poet. In an analogous manner Tchaïkovsky has caught up and fixed in his
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Symphonie Pathétique the soul of modern Russia. Just as the American Symphony is breezy, democratic, optimistic, and free-thinking, so the Russian is languorous and oppressed, aristocratic, pessimistic, and hierarchic. The absence of any slow movement, except the dirge at the end, is intensely characteristic. The composer has no hymn of thanksgiving or serenely contemplative interlude to give us, but only something with the perfumed and artificial atmosphere of the ballroom, as a relief from the ardours and terrors of his military and patriotic passages. Both in his first and third movements he reminds us that the Russian, for all his profound religiosity and mysticism, for all his abundance of talent and exquisite courtesy under normal conditions, lives in a cruel country and has it in him to be more cruel than any other modern white man. The dirge at the end we believe to be the most powerful expression of tragic emotion that exists in the entire range of music. Such a work will bear a good many performances, especially in a place where there is a Richter to interpret it. Of course neither the
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New World