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Updated: May 5, 2025
All that are sensitive to music can feel, as I have said, the new throb, the new thrill; and that decides the matter. It is now a long time since Mr. Henry Wood, one winter's afternoon, the only Englishman who may be ranked with the great continental conductors, gave a Tschaikowsky concert, with a programme that included some of the earlier as well as one or two of the later works.
Oh, remember, you music-fed ascetic, many, aye, very many, regard the transition from Tschaikowsky to terrapin, from Beethoven to burgundy with hearts aflame with anticipatory joy and Mrs. Llewellyn's dining-room was crowded. Miss Wallace and Diotti had wandered into the conservatory. "A desire for happiness is our common heritage," he was saying in his richly melodious voice.
Three or four arrogant competitors stood forth and valiantly spelled such words as "Popocatepetl," "Tschaikowsky," "terpsichorean," "Yang-tse-Kiang," "Yseult," and scores of words that could scarcely be pronounced by the teacher herself. But at last, just as the sleepy watchers began to nod and yawn the hardest, Mrs.
In some of his compositions there is a barbaric splendor which proclaims the Russian and delights those who like exotic novelty in music. Like all the Russians, Tschaikowsky was strongly influenced by Liszt; indeed, it may be said that in Russia Liszt was more potent in shaping the course of modern music than even Wagner.
A broken melody entered her head. Sleepily she sought one channel of thought after another to escape; still the melody persisted. As her consciousness dodged hither and thither the bars and measures joined.... She sat up, chilled, bewildered. That Tschaikowsky waltz! She could hear it as clearly as if Johnny Two-Hawks and the Amati were in the very room. She grew afraid. Of what? She did not know.
When he himself was conducting concerts all over Europe he entrusted the conductorship at the Châtelet to the great German Kapellmeister and to foreign composers to Richard Strauss, Grieg, Tschaikowsky, Hans Richter, Hermann Levi, Mottl, Nikisch, Mengelberg, Siegfried Wagner, and many others.
The outbursts of Slavonic fire are, of course, Tschaikowsky pure and simple; but everyone who hears the symphony may note how the curious union of barbarism with modern culture is manifest in the ease with which Tschaikowsky recovers himself after one of these outbursts turns it aside, so to speak, instead of giving it free play after the favourite plan both of Borodine the great and purely Russian composer, and Dvorák the little Hungarian composer.
France has given the world the Revolution; Germany, the Reformation; Italy, modern Art; but Russia? "We," Tourgenieff once said, "we have given the samovar." But that poet's own works, the symphonies of Tschaikowsky, the one novel of Dostoievsky, have changed all this. Nevertheless the Truce of God is one of the noblest efforts of mediaeval Europe.
With all the unfailing flow of lesser melodies where the charm is often greatest of all, and the main themes of each movement with a chain of derived phrases, one melody prevails and reappears throughout. The fluency is more striking here than elsewhere in Tschaikowsky. All the external sources, all the glory of material art seem at his command.
She knew the latest operas, and loved the spirit of unrest, the unsettled minor chords of the new school of music; preferred the leit motif to the aria, music drama to opera, and was altogether exceedingly modern in her tastes. She did not like recitative in music, and preferred Wagner and Tschaikowsky to Bach and Verdi. She loved to be stirred up, she said.
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