s 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.

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