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Thither came in shoals the intensely musical and the almost intensely musical, who are very many, and in still greater numbers the merely musical, who know how Tchaikowsky's name is pronounced and can recognize several of Chopin's nocturnes if you give them due warning; these eat in the nervous, detached manner of roebuck feeding in the open, and keep anxious ears cocked towards the orchestra for the first hint of a recognizable melody.
In the interval things have taken an amazing turn. I am still bewildered but I must put it all down from the beginning. The Colonel left as she said he would, and I went round to lunch with her. We had a delightful tete-a-tete, and after lunch she played the piano. I was feeling in splendid voice and she accompanied me to perfection in Tchaikowsky's "To the Forest," always a favourite of mine.
Foliage and streams and the very moonlight pulsate with the fever of the blood. But there is no tenderness, no youth, no delicacy, no grace in Wagner's love-passages. Tchaikowsky's, too, is predominantly lurid and sensual.
He went to the Ballet and saw Tchaikowsky's "Swan Lake"; but bearing Diagilev's splendours in front of him, and knowing nothing about the technique of ballet-dancing he was bored and cross and contemptuous.
It had everything in it beauty, wealth, force, power; it could be anything, it could do anything. But it was held by an evil enchantment as though a wicked magician had it in thrall, and everything slept as in Tchaikowsky's Ballet. But one day, he told me, the Prince would come and kill the Enchanter, and this great world would come into its own.
Before we left I sang to her Tchaikowsky's beautiful song, "To the Forest," and I think she was pleased, for I may say with justice that my voice is of high quality for an amateur, and the song goes well without an accompaniment, whilst the atmosphere and surroundings were ideal.
A choral society of New York a year or two ago produced two small a capella choruses of his that might have been the work of some obscure pupil of Tchaikowsky's. The piano sonatina of the Funeral March, although by no means as insignificant, is nevertheless uncharacteristic in the resemblances it bears the music of Ravel. One thing the earlier compositions are not, and that is, derivative.
And while Wagner's at least is full of animal richness, Tchaikowsky's is morbid and hysterical and perverse, sets us amid the couches and draperies and pink lampshades instead of out under the night-time sky. Berlioz's, however, is full of a still and fragrant poesy. His is the music of Shakespeare's lovers indeed. It is like the opening of hearts dumb with the excess of joy.
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