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
h