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It emasculates the drama with its pervasive prettiness, its lazy felicitousness where it ought to be monstrous and terrifying, its reminiscences of Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky and "Little Egypt." The lascivious and hieratic dance, the dance of the seven veils, is represented by a valse lente. Oftentimes the score verges perilously on circus-music, recalls the sideshows at county fairs.
Even Tchaikowsky, who was a good deal of an intellectualist himself, and dubbed "perfect," in a characteristically servile letter, every one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimsky composed in the course of a single month, complained that the latter "worshiped technique" and that his work was "Full of contrapuntal tricks and all the signs of a sterile pedantry."
On the evening of the 5th of September, while the American soldiers were patrolling the Smolny area, near Archangel proper, this Col. Tschaplin executed his coup d'etat. He quietly surrounded the homes of Tchaikowsky and other members of the Archangel State Government and kidnapped them, hiding them away on an island in the Dvina River. Great excitement prevailed for several days.
Company units were assisting Machine Gun units in guarding important public works and marching in strength occasionally on the streets to glare down the scowling sailors and other Red sympathizers who, it was rumored persistently, were plotting a riot and overthrow of the Tchaikowsky government and throat-cutting for the Allied Embassies and military missions.
The school of which M. Rachmaninoff is perhaps the chief living representative, and which was represented at various times by Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky and Arensky, is usually dubbed "universal" by its partisans. It is supposed to have its traditions in general European music, and to be a continuation of the art of the romanticists, in particular of the art of Chopin and Schumann.
The new government of Archangel was headed by the venerable Tchaikowsky, a man who had been a revolutionary leader of the highest and saneest type for many years. He had lived for a period of years in America, on a farm in Kansas, and had been a writer of note in Russia and England for many years. He was a democratic leader and his government was readily accepted by the people.
The other seems unable to concentrate energy and interest sufficiently to create a hard and living piece of work. The one seemed to blaze new pathways through the brain. The other steps languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. He has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, has taken to quoting unblushingly Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky, Wagner, himself, even.
For them, the music of Tchaikowsky, even, was the result of the manipulation of themes of Slavic color according to formulas abstracted from classical music. Without regard, however, for any question of musical theory; apart from all question of the value for us of the science of the classical masters, one finds oneself of this opinion.
It is rude and robust and male, full of angular movements and vigorous blows and lusty, childlike laughter, and, at the same time, of a singularly fine romantic fervor. It is almost the contrary of that of the neurotic, sallow Tchaikowsky of the hysterical frenzies and hysterical self-pity and the habits of morose delectation.
And one has but to compare the "Garden Scene" of "Roméo" with two other pieces of music related to it in style, the second act of "Tristan" and the "Romeo" of Tchaikowsky, to perceive in how gracious a light Berlioz's music reveals him. Wagner's powerful music hangs over the garden of his lovers like an oppressive and sultry night.
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