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It is the cause that counts. Though Russian song has less striking traits than Hungarian or Spanish, it has blossomed in a far richer harvest of noble works of art. Facile, fluent, full of color, Tschaikowsky seems equipped less for subjective than for lyric and dramatic utterance, as in his "Romeo and Juliet" overture.
The modern men who care nothing for rules for instance Wagner and Tschaikowsky could not have come immediately after Byrde; even Beethoven could not have come immediately after Byrde and Sweelinck and Palestrina, all of whom thought nothing of the rules that had not been definitely stated in their time.
This latter is to be preferred, for it leads your companion to say, "But don't you like TschaiKOWsky?", pronouncing the second syllable as if the composer were a female bull. You can then reply, "Why, yes, TschaiKOFFsky DID write some rather good music although it's all neurotic and obviously Teutonic." Don't fail to stress the "v."
"Unto us a Child is born" is written in a form devised by Handel and used with success by no other composer since, until in a curiously modified shape Tschaikowsky employed it for the third movement of his Pathetic symphony.
He was mightily intrigued. She was a queer kid, he told himself, as changeable and difficult to follow as some of the music by men with such weird names as Rachmaninoff and Tschaikowsky that his sister was so precious fond of playing.
Tschaikowsky, simple soul, good-humouredly accepted it, apparently in entire ignorance of the estimation in which such cheap decorations are held in this country; and it is to be hoped that before his death he obtained a hearing in Russia for the Cambridge professor's music.
It served to show how hard and how long Tschaikowsky laboured to attain to lucidity of expression, and why the "Pathetic" symphony is popular while the other compositions are not. In all of them we find infinite invention and blazes of Eastern magnificence and splendour; but in the earlier things there is little of the order and clarity of the later ones.
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