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It was evidently a hasty affair and subsequently brought untold suffering to the composer. When the professors of his Conservatoire re-assembled in the autumn, Tschaikowsky appeared among them a married man, but looking the picture of despair. A few weeks later he fled from Moscow, and when next heard of was lying dangerously ill in St. Petersburg.
Goethe, at the beginning of the century, moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and of Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in Tristan and in Parsifal, has woven the Oriental and the mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the Minnesinger's lays and the mystic vision of the Upanishads into a rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its rivals, the masterpieces of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky, make this century the Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the Periclean age of painting, and the sixteenth of poetry.
Here, with Tschaikowsky, hardly a single note of brass intrudes on this perpetuum mobile of light, plashing spray until, later, strains that hark back to the first scene cloud the clear brilliancy of the cascade.
In the "Manfred" Symphony we may see the most fitting employment of his talent. Nor is it unlikely that the special correspondence of treatment and subject may cause this symphony to survive the others, may leave it long a rival of Schumann's "Manfred" music. With Tschaikowsky feeling is always highly stressed, never in a certain natural poise.
For we can never forget the deeply human and touching message which is brought to us through the music of Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky. Edward MacDowell has been acclaimed America's greatest composer. If we try to substitute another name in its place, one of equal potency cannot be found.
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.
And he succeeded in interesting in his undertaking, not only the principal French musicians, such as César Franck, Saint-Saëns, and Gounod, but also foreigners, such as Hans von Bülow, Tschaikowsky, Grieg, Sgambati, and Gevaert. Unhappily this society never got farther than arranging what it wanted to do, and only sketched out the plans that were realised later by Charles Bordes.
He is unhappy, and he weeps floods of tears, beats his breast, curses the daylight; he sees only the misery of the moment, and he sees the misery of the moment as a thing endless and overwhelming. The child who has broken his toy can realise nothing in the future but a passionate regret for the toy. In Tschaikowsky there is none of the quieting of thought.
It may be remarked that Edvard Grieg has not only given Norway a conspicuous place on the map of musical Europe, but that he has influenced unmistakably composers of the rank of Tschaikowsky, the Russian; Paderewski, the Pole; Eugene d'Albert, the Scotch-English-German; Richard Strauss, the German; and our own lamented Edward McDowell, the American.
A gay waltz that made her think of flashing water, the laughter of children. Tschaikowsky. Thrilled, she waited for the finale. Silence. Scharwenka's "Polish Dance," with a swing and a fire beyond anything she had ever heard before. Another stretch of silence a silence full of interrogation points. Then a tender little sketch, quite unfamiliar. But all at once she understood.
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