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I can never hear Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" without thinking of General de Flahault. The present Lord Lansdowne is the Comte de Flahault's grandson. Nearly fifty years later another interesting link with the past was forged. I was dining with Prince and Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein at Schomberg House.
The eldest son is a quiet, modest, intelligent, hardworking young man with no talents; he has no pretensions, and is apparently content with what life has given him. He speaks little. He loves farming and the land and lives in harmony with the peasants. The second son is a young man mad over Tchaikovsky's being a genius. He dreams of living according to Tolstoy. Pleshtcheyev is staying with us.
We marched on through Farra to Gradisca, both blazing in the night. The towns and villages everywhere in this sector had been deliberately fired by the retreating Italians, in addition to the ammunition dumps. The whole countryside was blazing and exploding. I thought of Russia in 1812, and the Russian retreat before Napoleon, and Tchaikovsky's music.
He quoted Prout, he quoted Vincent d'Indy; he minutely compared passages in Elgar's second symphony with passages in Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony; he dissected the delicate orchestral effects in Debussy's Nuages and Fête Nocturne, compared the modern French methods in orchestration with Richard Strauss's gigantic, and sometimes monstrous combinations.
It was the year of the Exposition, and MacDowell and his mother attended a festival concert at which Nicholas Rubinstein played in memorable style Tchaikovsky's B-flat minor piano concerto. His performance was a revelation to the young American. "I never can learn to play like that if I stay here," he said resolutely to his mother, as they left the concert hall. Mrs.
Possibly even women will regret that they are no longer the subject of universal comment. Who knows? A woman will forgive injury, but never indifference. The next few years marked a tremendous advance. The graceful danseuses who interpreted Mendelssohn's "Spring Song," Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, and Shakespeare's "Tempest" were the pioneers of a vast movement.
The bulk of his music no more discloses its full measure of beauty and eloquence to one who is in ignorance of its poetic basis than would Wagner's "Faust" overture, Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet," or Debussy's "L'Après-midi d'un Faune."
She was recalled ... but it was some time before she made her appearance, advanced to the piano with the same uncertain tread as before, and after whispering a couple of words to her accompanist, who was obliged to get and place on the rack before him not the music he had prepared but something else, she began Tchaikóvsky's romance: "No, only he who hath felt the thirst of meeting".... This romance she sang in a different way from the first in an undertone, as though she were weary ... and only in the line before the last, "He will understand how I have suffered," did a ringing, burning cry burst from her.
Tchaikovsky's 'Eugene Onegin' is occasionally given in London, but has won little success. Much of the music is interesting, but the disconnected character of the libretto and the lack of incident fully account for the scanty favour with which it is received. 'Le Flibustier, an opera by César Cui, was performed in Paris a few years ago with even less success.
Then he went to his piano, raised the cover in an abstracted sort of way, tried to search out in his memory the melody of Tchaikóvsky's romance; but he immediately banged to the piano-lid with vexation and went to his aunt, in her own room, which was always kept very hot, and was forever redolent of mint, sage, and other medicinal herbs, and crowded with such a multitude of rugs, étagères, little benches, cushions and various articles of softly-stuffed furniture that it was difficult for an inexperienced person to turn round in it, and breathing was oppressive.
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