t some composers should be put in jail for the
villainies they smuggle into their score. This Tchaikovsky of
yours--this Russian--was a wretch. He turned the prettiness and favor
and noble tragedy of Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_ into a bawd's
tale; a tale of brutal, vile lust; for such passion as he depicts is
not love. He took _Hamlet_ and transformed him from a melancholy, a
philosophizing Dane into a yelling man, a man of the steppes, soaked
with _vodka_ and red-handed with butchery. Hamlet, forsooth! Those
twelve strokes of the bell are the veriest melodrama. And _Francesca da
Rimini_--who has not read of the gentle, lovelorn pair in Dante's
priceless poem; and how they read no more from the pages of their book,
their very glances glued with love? What doth your Tchaikovsky with this
Old World tale? Alas! you know full well. He tears it limb from limb. He
makes over the lovers into two monstrous Cossacks, who gibber and squeak
at each other while reading some obscene volume. Why, they are too much
interested in the pictures to think of love. Then their dead carcasses
are whirled aloft on screaming flames of hell, and sent whizzing into a
spiral eternity."

"Bravo! bravo! great! I tell you he's great, your friend. Keep it up old
man. Your description beats Dante and Tchaikovsky combined!" I was not
to be lured from my theme, and, stopping only to take breath and a fresh
dip of my beak into the Pilsner, I went on:

"His _Manfred_ is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on God." "Byron,
too," murmured Jenkins. "Yes, Byron, another blasphemer. The six
symphonies are caricatures of the symphonic form. Their themes are, for
the most part, unfitted for treatment, and in each and every one the
boor and the devil break out and dance with uncouth, lascivious
gestures. This musical drunkenness; this eternal license; this want of
repose, refinement, musical feeling--all these we are to believe make
great music. I'll not admit it, gentlemen; I'll not admit it! The piano
concerto--I only know one--with its fragmentary tunes; its dislocated,
jaw-breaking rhythms, is ugly music; plain, ugly music. It is as if the
composer were endeavoring to set to melody the consonants of his name.
There's a name for you, Tchaikovsky! 'Shriekhoarsely' is more like it."
There was more banging of steins, and I really thought Jenkins would go
off in an apoplectic fit, he was laughing so.

"The songs are barbarous, the piano-solo pieces a muddle of