Book Description

From the biographical introductory. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, if not the most Russian, is certainly the greatest of Russian composers. The only organized musical speech of this mighty nation owes its initial impulse to Mikhail Glinka; for, like Weber, he lovingly plucked from the soil native wild flowers and gave them a place in his Russian and Lzfe for the Czar. With him and representing the old Russian school are Alexander Daijomisky and Alexander Seroff; while the Neo-Russians include the names of César Cui, Rimski-Korsakoff, Borodin, Balakireff, Liadow, Glazounow, Stcherbatcheff, Arensky, Moussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, Scriabine, and others. Outside of this pale, and viewed with suspicious eyes, stand the figures of Anton Rubinstein, who went to Germany and made music more Teutonic than Russian, and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, with French and Polish blood in his veins. Tchaikovsky sometimes said great things in a great manner. Yet we feel that the manner often exceeds the matter; that his manipulation of mediocre thematic material often leads our judgment astray; but, at his best, when idea and execution are firmly welded, this man is a great man, one who felt intensely, suffered sadly, and drank deeply at the acid spring of sorrow. Not so logical or so profound a thinker as Brahms, he is more dramatic, more intense, and displays more surface emotion. We miss the mighty sullen ground-swells of feeling in Tchaikovsky; but he paints better than the Hamburg composer, his brush is dipped in more glowing colors, his palette more various in hues; while the barbaric swing of his music is occasionally tempered by European culture and restraint. Reticent in life, in his art he overflows. No composer except Schumann tells us so much of himself. Every piece of his work is signed, and he does not hesitate to make the most astounding confessions. He fulfilled in his music much that Rubinstein left undone. Rubinstein was really a Teutonic mind Russianized; but, unlike Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, despite his Western culture, kept his skirts fairly free from Germany. Her science he had at his finger-tips; but he preferred to remain Russian. His ardent musical temperament was strongly affected by France and Italy. He loved the luscious cantilena of Italy and worshipped at the strange shrine of Berlioz. Indeed, Berlioz and Liszt are his artistic sponsors; and the French strain in his blood must not be overlooked. It counted in his talents as surely as it did in Chopin's, whose father was half French. In his later years, as if his own clime had chilled his spirit, Tchaikovsky solaced himself in Italy and Spain, a not incurious taste in a stern Northman. Despite his Western affiliation, there is always some Asiatic lurking in his scores. One can never be quite sure when the Calmuck -- which is said to be skin-deep in every Russian -- will break forth. Gusts of unbridled passion recalling Gogol's wild heroes of the steppes sweep across his pages; and sometimes the odor of carnage is too much for us, unaccustomed as we are to such a high-noon of rout, revelry, and disorder.