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Updated: May 5, 2025
As Schumann declared, the dancers of these valses should be at least countesses. There is a high-bred reserve despite their intoxication, and never a hint of the brawling peasants of Beethoven, Grieg, Brahms, Tschaikowsky, and the rest. But little of Vienna is in Chopin.
He was, like most composers, very sensitive to criticism and had a perfect dread of controversy. Efforts to engage him in arguments of this sort only made him withdraw into himself. Tschaikowsky held the operas of Mozart before him as his ideal. He cared little for Wagner, considering his music dramas to be built on false principles.
To be sure, they can at times be as dull as he, but that is when they forget the lesson they should before now have learnt from him, when they leave the field in which they work with real enjoyment and produce results which may be enjoyed. A very little while since, Tschaikowsky was little more than a name in England.
Conditions there, however, were not just to his liking, and after two years he began to think the school was not the place for him. It was the summer of 1878, the year of the Exposition. Edward and his mother attended a festival concert and heard Nicholas Rubinstein play the Tschaikowsky B flat minor piano Concerto. His performance was a revelation.
Wistful almost is the slow vanishing until the last chords come like the breaking of a fairy trance. The Byron of music is Tschaikowsky for a certain alluring melancholy and an almost uncanny flow and sparkle. His own personal vein deepened the morbid tinge of his national humor. We cannot ignore the inheritance from Liszt, both spiritual and musical.
Simple in structure and sentiment, the Chopin lieder seem almost rudimentary compared to essays in this form by Schubert, Schumann, Franz, Brahms and Tschaikowsky. A word of recommendation may not be amiss here regarding the technical study of Chopin.
Thus his first opera, "Voivoda," composed in 1866, evidently had his ideal, Mozart, clearly in mind. It is a somewhat curious fact that Tschaikowsky, who was almost revolutionary in other forms of music, should go back to the eighteenth century for his ideal of opera. Soon after it was completed "Voivoda" was accepted to be produced at the Moscow Grand Theater.
It is full of astonishing points, of ingenious dodges used not for their own sake, but to produce, as here they nearly always do, particular effects; and throughout, the part-writing, the texture of the music, is most masterly and far beyond anything Tschaikowsky achieved before.
That depends, it seems to us, on how far repetition is an essential part of clarity and coherence. We know that butter comes from cream but how long must we watch the "churning arm!" If nature is not enthusiastic about explanation, why should Tschaikowsky be? Beethoven had to churn, to some extent, to make his message carry.
To listen to him immediately after Tschaikowsky is hard, sometimes impossible, yet to me it seems anything but impossible that our descendants will be listening to him when students are turning to the biographical dictionaries to find out who Tschaikowsky was.
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