ouch 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 Dvorak the little Hungarian composer. The
second theme does not appear to me equal to the rest of the symphony.
It has that curiou