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For these young composers, the plans and shapes of phrases, the modes, the rhythms, the counterpoint, the "Rules," the entire musical theory and science that had been established in Europe by the practice of generations of composers, was a convention; the Russian music, particularly that of Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky, which had sought to ply itself in accord with it, an artificial and sophisticated thing, as artificial and sophisticated a thing as the pseudo-Parisian culture of the Petrograd salons.
But when the Haynes-Cooper company, by referring to its inventory ledgers, learns that it is selling more Alma Gluck than Harry Lauder records; when its statistics show that Tchaikowsky is going better than Irving Berlin, something epochal is happening in the musical progress of a nation.
David R. Francis, with characteristic American directness and fairness called the impetuous Tschaplin before him and gave him so many hours in which to restore the rightful government to power. And Tchaikowsky came back into the State House on September 11th much to the rejoicing of the people and to the harmony of the Allied Expedition.
Even through the bold and rugged and splendid Violin Concerto there flit at moments the shadows of Beethoven and Wagner and Tchaikowsky. The first theme of the quartet "Voces intimæ" resembles not a little a certain theme in "Boris." The close of "Nightride and Sunrise" is watered Brahms and watered Strauss.
Nor can one discover in this music a distinctly original sense of either rhythm of harmony or tone-color. The E-minor Symphony, for all its competence and smoothness, is full of the color and quality and atmosphere of Tchaikowsky. It is Tchaikowsky without the hysteria, perhaps, but also without the energy. In all the music of M. Rachmaninoff there is something strangely twice-told.
For it has none of Strauss's glitter and point, and is rather dull and soggy. The great, bristling, pathetic climax is of the sort that has become exasperating and vulgar, rather than exciting, since Wagner and Tchaikowsky first exploited it. On the whole, the work is much less "Pelléas et Mélisande" than it is "Pelleas und Melisanda."
The Rachmaninoff was followed by Chopin, Tchaikowsky, Debussy, and others of the modern school, and when finally he dropped his hands from the piano, laughingly declaring that he must be thinking of taking his departure before he played them all to sleep, Joan burst out bluntly: "We understood you were a dramatist, Mr. Errington. It seems to me you have missed your vocation." Every one laughed.
When the Allies early in the fall found they could not forge through to the south, rolling up a bigger and bigger Russian force to crush the Bolsheviki, who were apparently, as told us, fighting up to keep us from going a thousand miles or so to hit the Germans a belt a fly-weight buffet as it were and when we heard of the Armistice and began digging in on a real defensive in the late fall and early winter, the Provisional Government at Archangel under Tchaikowsky had already made some progress in assembling an army.
No doubt, the brilliant and ironic scherzo of the C-sharp minor Symphony, whose verve and passion and vigor make the composer of "L'Apprenti sorcier" seem apprentice indeed, is already characteristic of the composer of the string quartet and the suite for viola and piano. But much of the symphony is derivative. One glimpses the influence of Liszt and Tchaikowsky and Strauss in it.
The melody of jazz, the tin pan ghosts of Chopin, Tchaikowsky, Old Black Joe, Liszt and Mumbo Magumbo, jungle troubadour of the Congo, come whinnying out from under the pendant derby. The dancers on the cabaret floor close their eyes and grin to themselves. The cornet kids them along. When they grow sad it burlesques their sorrow. The cornet laughs at them.
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