CHAPTER ONE

Tchaikovsky

This period witnessed the composition of Tchaikovsky’s last four operas

and two ballets, the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and Manfred, as well
as many works in other genres. It was marked by increasing celebrity at
home and ever greater international success.
(a) G. A. Laroche: Liturgy of St John Chrysostom for
four-part mixed choir. Composition by Pyotr Tchaikovsky,
op. 41 (Moscow: P. Jurgenson). Russian Herald, January
1880, no. 1. Laroche 2, pp. 109–18
The Imperial Court Kapella held a stranglehold over the music of the
Russian Orthodox Church by virtue of the requirement that any church
music composition be approved by the Kapella’s director for use in
public worship before it could be published. The incident described
here illustrates the growing perception among musicians that Russian
church music had stagnated. The resulting court case broke the strangle-
hold, leading to the efflorescence of sacred composition in Moscow (see
Chapter 5 (g)).

Among the artists in whom present-day Russia can take pride vis-à-vis
Western Europe, a foremost place belongs to the composer whose name
appears in the title of this article. Pyotr Il’ich Tchaikovsky has not yet reached
the age of forty and was a comparatively late starter: fourteen years ago,
at the beginning of 1866, his Concert Overture in F was performed at one
of the Moscow concerts of the Imperial Russian Musical Society, which must
be considered the start of his career. Since then his name has swept through
Germany, Belgium, France, England and the United States. This reputation
seems the more remarkable if one recalls that Mr Tchaikovsky is not himself
a virtuoso performer; he has not been able to promote his compositions’
success through his own performances of them; he has found himself, so
to speak, constantly in the hands of conductors, singers and pianists, and his
success has been entirely dependent on the degree of their attention, talent
and zeal. A composer so placed is rightly thought to be at a disadvantage;
but it is essential to add that by the very kind of composition which has

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

made him famous beyond Russia’s borders, Mr Tchaikovsky has had even
fewer chances of easy victory than many of his colleagues. Tchaikovsky is
the composer of five operas, four of which have been staged. Not one of them
is known abroad; only his instrumental works are known, and, although the
audience for such compositions is more serious and enlightened than that
for opera, it is far smaller in numbers. Just as it is harder for a composer
to reach the majority of the public than a virtuoso performer, similarly, it is
more difficult for an instrumental composer to win fame than for a composer
of operas, and, as far as the West is concerned, Mr Tchaikovsky is for the
moment a purely instrumental composer. If, despite all the disadvantages of
this position, the young artist has nonetheless managed to win conspicuous
and honourable standing, then we are justified in seeing therein evidence
of those intrinsic qualities in his music which have overcome the external
impediments and difficulties.
I shall allow myself to say a few words about these intrinsic qualities.
Tchaikovsky is not a master of form in the highest meaning of the word.
Taken as an entirety, his compositions (with only a few exceptions) make
an impression which is not fully pleasing aesthetically. It is not so much
longueurs as the absence of a sustained mood, the absence of unity and the
juxtaposition of sections not completely suited to one another which disturb
the listener and frequently leave him cold. The demand for unity is perhaps
the most pressing of aesthetic demands, but it is in any case not the only one;
and the works of the composer with whom we are concerned demonstrate
what first-rate jewels there is room for even where that demand is [not] met.
Mr Tchaikovsky is above all a wonderful melodist. The nobility, grace, depth
of feeling and variety in our compatriot’s abundant melodies set him apart,
to extraordinary advantage, from the majority of his coevals (particularly
the Germans), in whom one notices, for all their many admirable qualities,
a complete absence of melodic invention. Mr Tchaikovsky’s melodies are
not only lyrical and easily remembered, but are marked at the same time by
an individual stamp by which one can always recognize their composer even
without his signature. He possesses ideas of his own, atmosphere of his own,
and a world of musical images of his own. Mr Tchaikovsky is, moreover, a
superlative harmonist. Though he seldom resorts to those risky, harsh chord
progressions by which musicians of our day are so easily carried away, he
shows no lack of boldness for all that; the chief merits of his harmony are
refined taste and a transparency of part-writing inherited from the founder
of Russian music, Glinka. He is able to retain these qualities even in the midst
of the most daring chromatic and enharmonic shifts. The third virtue of his
writing is an exceptional talent for instrumentation. Not only his orchestral
pieces but his piano ones too always excel in their full and brilliant sonority;

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 Tchaikovsky

the instrument is used skilfully, in a versatile manner and with many effects
which are new and striking. All these external qualities of his work represent
a casing for its original inner content which has a well-defined and extremely
appealing form. The prevailing mood is an elegiac one, alien to stunning or
heart-rending accents – one of reconciliation and harmony, like the sad,
gentle colours of a fine autumn day. Mr Tchaikovsky also has moments of
triumph and rejoicing; he loves even splendour and brilliance, and there are
many successful pages in his works that are by no means all confined within
the framework just outlined; but he is nevertheless most true to himself where
the graceful melancholy at the root of his nature can pour forth freely. His
lyricism is not a matter of ready-made phraseology taken over from others,
any more than his melodic writing is a collection of commonplaces picked
up in the theatre or the concert hall. One has to approach Mr Tchaikovsky’s
compositions with the respect that any manifestation of original creativity
inspires.
It is understandable that a composer with a talent developing so strongly
and gloriously should have aroused the greatest expectations when he turned,
in the prime of life and at the zenith of his creative powers, from the secular
music which has occupied him exclusively hitherto to sacred music and,
moreover, to music intended for a practical function, that of worship. The
Liturgy of St John Chrysostom which he has set to music was bound to
represent a milestone in his work, a moment of the greatest concentration of
an artist’s strength, when he turned his back on the fair of worldly vanities
and became engrossed in contemplating an eternal ideal. As the work of
a favourite and esteemed artist, the Liturgy would have been met in any
event with the keenest interest, even had no exceptional fate befallen it; but
an incident unique of its kind has occurred which has given this innocent
four-part choral composition an almost political significance.
A few days after publication a police officer entered Jurgenson’s music
shop and confiscated 141 copies of the edition, in spite of the fact that the
Liturgy had been printed with the preliminary censorship’s permission. The
shop, of course, surrendered without question all the copies to hand, but
nevertheless was visited over the next few days by officials from either the
police or the censorship department. Among other things, on one of these
visits the censorship copy was demanded. The police went round all the
music shops in Moscow and seized all the copies sold to them from the pub-
lisher’s warehouse. It soon became known that the Moscow police were
acting on the basis of a memorandum received from the director of the
Court Kapella. The director of the Kapella demanded that a sequestration
order be imposed on the new work based on the legal requirement that
the censorship of all religious music compositions belonged by right to him

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

exclusively, whereas Mr Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy had gone through only the

general censorship.
As everyone knows, this misunderstanding has now been cleared up. The
right of the director of the Kapella relates not to the publishing but to the
performance in public worship of sacred music compositions; even without
being permitted to be used in churches, Mr Tchaikovsky’s composition when
freely circulating for sale is not unemployed capital. It may be of benefit in
domestic worship, to say nothing of concerts of sacred music. The repertory
of Russian music has been enriched by a new religious composition and one
moreover written by the most celebrated representative of contemporary
Russian music.
Russian sacred music has up to now led a lonesome existence. Not a single
composition for the church has been conspicuous at the summit of art; the
leading lights of music have subsisted on activities which were exclusively
secular, held back in this one-sidedness, no doubt, by special conditions of
censorship whose rigour was no secret to anyone even before the incident
involving Mr Tchaikovsky. Sacred music was written by specialists; last cen-
tury they bore famous names and their talents were recognized both in Russia
and abroad; during the current century the level of our sacred music began
to decline in inverse proportion to the growth and strengthening of secular
music. A composer emerged on the musical horizon in the 1830s who, by his
imposing stature, gave Russia for the first time an independent place among
the musical nations of the civilized world. Thanks to the creator of A Life for
the Tsar, Russia became one of the classical countries of musical creativity:
her compositions, though few in number, may stand alongside compositions
from nations which have progressed through a school lasting many cen-
turies. Glinka, like his successors, was exclusively a secular composer. The
aspiration towards religious art which gripped him near the end of his life
was unquestionably genuine and, had it arisen earlier, might have yielded
a valuable harvest; but the inspired composer died before he had time to
bestow a single composition worthy of his great spirit on the church.1 The
composers active at the same time and later did not take even the slightest
step towards writing music for worship: one of them, and moreover one on
whom Glinka had the strongest influence, Serov, composed for the church,
but for the Catholic church: his Stabat Mater will remain an eloquent tes-
timony to the estrangement from his native church in which the creative
mind of the Russian composer lives. Since the day of the first performance
of A Life for the Tsar, a day which may be regarded as marking an epoch

1 Glinka left only three short compositions: First Litany (?1856), Da ispravitsya molitva moya
(?1856) and Resurrection Hymn (1856 or 1857).

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 Tchaikovsky

in Russian music, a half-century has passed, during which Russian musi-

cal composition worthy of the name of art has served the theatre and the
concert hall exclusively; sacred music has been composed detached from art
music, in a realm of hackwork or superficial dilettantism, and its standard
testifies deplorably to the abyss which this censorship has managed to open
up between the ecclesiastical and secular worlds.
This is not what has happened in the West. I shall not dwell on the fact
that all those composers whose talents have held the public’s attention have
worked to a greater or lesser extent for the church as well, or at least have
used religious subjects. With the majority – with Schumann, Meyerbeer,
Richard Wagner and Verdi – religious compositions occupy only a very sub-
ordinate place among their works; in only a few cases, such as Mendelssohn-
Bartholdy, is religious music represented by many outstanding scores. Of far
greater significance than these solitary diversions of gifted musicians from
the concert hall or operatic routes more familiar and precious to them, far
more fruitful and important for the fate of music in the future, is the move-
ment in music criticism and history which has arisen and spread over the
last fifty years. Choral music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has
been rediscovered, suddenly becoming visible to researchers in a radiance of
imperishable and irresistible beauty. Just as an excavation by an industrious
archaeologist is rewarded beyond measure and expectation by the resurrec-
tion of an ancient statue, so investigations into musical history, undertaken
exclusively in terms of intellectual curiosity, have led us to an inexhaustible
source of aesthetic delight. The excitement of scholars has communicated
itself to performers: the enthusiasm of performers has begun to infect the
public. The names of Palestrina, Vittoria, Luca Marenzio, Orlando Lasso,
Gombert, Willaert and Josquin have ceased to be empty words; their works,
foreign to our age in technique and evidently even more so in spirit, have
begun appearing in choral concerts and churches and to resound with a
harmony unusual to ears new to it but nonetheless majestic. Groups dedi-
cated exclusively to cultivating and promoting the masters of the sixteenth
century, the era of what is known as strict style, have been formed; expen-
sive multi-volume editions of these masters’ works have begun to appear,
at first only occasionally, but later, when success stimulated emulation, with
increasing frequency. This overwhelming mass of compositions, brought to
light from beneath the dust of three centuries and received with undoubted
pleasure – at times even enthusiasm – was bound to make an impact in the
end both on critics’ verdicts and composers’ methods, in spite of the com-
plete absence of similarity to the music of our times. Composers succumbed
to the influence of sober and austere harmony, restrained in its use of dis-
sonance and not prone to frequent modulation: elements long consigned to

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

oblivion as well as melodic turns of phrase unknown in the Viennese pe-

riod (and little known even in the Neapolitan one) again won the right of
citizenship. Critics in their turn began to find that these treasures, wrested
from the murk of oblivion and winning unanimous appreciation, were not
created to serve as useless ornaments, objects of dilettantish amusement or
museum curiosities: they answer the keen demands of the religious spirit;
the need for vocal music for the Christian church has found complete satis-
faction in them; and a new school of church music must be educated upon
these models for too long forgotten. A movement in many ways reminiscent
of the cult of Pre-Raphaelite painting has now gripped a significant part of
the musical world. A cult of pre-Bach music has arisen and begun to spread.
Dissatisfaction with the mediocrity, coldness and sheer ordinariness of the
most recent church music has engendered in many people a desire to return
to that life-giving source which slaked the thirst of so many and such gifted
generations for strict counterpoint. The movement grows with every year,
and one can predict that in the near future we shall see the living fruits of
a new critical consciousness and hear compositions created under the direct
influence of the masters of the ‘strict style’, written in conformity with its
exacting and onerous requirements.
Something similar to this reaction (meaning by that word a movement to
return to a style given up for a time) could be observed even here in Russia
in the 1860s and 1870s. The harmonizations of G. A. Lomakin and N. M.
Potulov2 and Prince V. F. Odoyevsky’s critical articles3 were expressions of
the dissatisfaction here with church music and the aspiration towards the se-
vere simplicity of a time long past. The reform, had they succeeded in bringing
it about, would have been of an extremely radical character. The reformers
were all plus royalistes que le roi. Prince Odoyevsky’s theories and Potulov’s
practice sought to create a style which was even more strict that the ‘strict
style’, to bind future composers by draconian rules which would have left
no scope for their imagination and reduced musical work to the simple filling-
in of a framework laid down in advance by an inexorable law. One cannot fail
to admit, however, that even this ascetic tendency was received with a certain
amount of sympathy. Lovers of our church chant who adopted a conscious
attitude towards it recognized long before Lomakin and Prince Odoyevsky
the vanity of spirit and insensitivity to form which over the course of time

2 G. A. Lomakin (1812–85) was mentioned in RRM vol. 1 as a choirtrainer and director of

the Free School of Music. Work with choirs drew him into church music. N. M. Potulov
(1810–73) was a pioneer in harmonizing ancient Russian chants using an austere idiom.
3 The articles which Prince V. F. Odoyevsky (1803–69) published in the 1860s articulated his
dissatisfaction with the Kapella style, arguing for a treatment of the chants more in tune with
their historical origins and more appropriate to worship by virtue of restraint and solemnity.

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 Tchaikovsky

had crept into both our arrangements of sacred church melodies and our
sacred music compositions, and naturally longed for a gifted and inspired
hand to erect in place of ephemeral and tawdry constructions a monument
filled alike with religious animation and artistic beauty.
Shortage of space does not allow me to develop here the idea which I
set out just over ten years ago on the pages of the Russian Herald,4 the
idea that the ‘strict style’ of the sixteenth century is the method of writing
which corresponds entirely to the spirit of the Russian church melodies and
the demands of Orthodox worship. I willingly deny myself the pleasure of
backing up my thesis here, since a whole series of facts indicate that the
general movement of the age will sooner or later lead to it being corroborated.
The progress of contrapuntal and historical learning in Germany, Belgium
and France, where the ‘strict style’ gains new experts and disciples every
year, is beginning to exert a slow but irresistible influence on our Russian
musicians as well. One after another, our young composers are turning their
attention to works in contrapuntal style and coming before the public with
work of that kind. The stimulus given to our music by Glinka retains its
momentum to this day and the spirit of the age lends assistance. One may
rest assured that Russia’s future church music (not all of it, of course, but
the most serious and artistic part of it) will be music in the ‘strict’ style, or,
as many people call it, the Palestrina style.
But we should not look for these reformist currents in Mr Tchaikovsky’s
Liturgy. It stands firmly on the basis of established usage; a performance
of it would not startle ears used to our church compositions by anything
especially out of the ordinary. Mr Tchaikovsky’s heart, apparently, is not
in strict counterpoint; just how much he is in love with free, post-Bachian
counterpoint, and how much he is the master of all its resources he proved
recently in his superb D minor Suite, played in December last year at one
of the symphonic assemblies of the Russian Musical Society. But even free
counterpoint finds the smallest, less than modest application in the present
work. The same composer who has lavished the riches of fugal and imitative
style on many of his works with secular content has here seemingly vowed
to forget all his art and be content with the simplest means comprehensi-
ble to everyone. Generally speaking, he has kept to the limits within which
our nineteenth-century church music has been accustomed to revolve. The
voices sing in continuous chords and only very rarely do not all enter si-
multaneously; the four-part structure is not kept to throughout as the voices
divide and form six- and seven-part chords. In choosing chords and chord

4 Mı̈sli o muzı̈kal’nom obrazovanii (‘Thoughts on Music Education’), Russkiy vestnik, 1869,

no. 7.

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

progressions, the composer has not followed in the footsteps of the Weimar
school,5 nor made any attempt to create anything reminiscent of Liszt’s Gran
Mass, but still less has he inhibited himself by using constant triads in the di-
atonic scale after the manner of Mr Lomakin or Mr Potulov: one encounters
chords of the seventh with their inversions as well as rather wide-ranging
modulation; there is no one-sided parti pris in one direction or the other.
The single fugato in the whole composition (to the word ‘Alliluiya’ [no. 14,
bars 31–57]) is written very concisely and simply; in other places, such as
for instance in the Kheruvimskaya (‘Hymn of the Cherubim’ [no. 6]), there
are only gentle, scarcely evident hints of imitation.
It goes without saying that, while remaining within the framework laid
down and established by use and wont, Mr Tchaikovsky has been able to fill
it with such content as nevertheless allows one to sense in many respects that
exceptional power, first being applied here to a task left for so many years to
the untalented and unskilful. It is sufficient to point to the simple, transparent
but deft and graceful construction of the Otche nash (‘Our Father’), with
the splendid curve of melody at ‘yako zhe mı̈ ostavlyayem’ (‘as we forgive’)
[no. 13, bars 18–20], to note the presence in this score of a genuine artist. The
Alliluiya fugato is sketched in a light and carefree way, but even here there
is a feature (the bass pedal on A [no. 14, bars 58–61] which shows the true
master of part-writing. I shall also point out the fresh, bright modulation
after the words ‘Soblyudi nas vo vsey svyatı̈ne, ves’ den’ pouchatisya pravde
tvoyey’ (‘Keep us in Thy holiness, that all the day we may meditate upon Thy
righteousness’) [no. 15, bars 34–41], where, after A minor, A major enters
unexpectedly and to great effect; or to the expressive but perhaps for the
church too coquettish melodic phrase at the end of the Dostoyno est’ (‘It is
meet’) (at the words ‘Tya velichayem’ (‘we magnify thee’)), the melody in the
tenor [no. 11, bars 44–7].
Mr Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy is free of that saccharine, salonish tone which,
unfortunately, has held sway hitherto in our church arrangements and com-
positions. But here and there you are unpleasantly struck by an Italian pla-
gal cadence (a minor triad, a 6–5 chord on the subdominant, followed by
a major triad), a legacy of the operas of Donizetti and Verdi, from which it
would be more appropriate for church music to abstain. We find this turn of
phrase at ‘Gospodi pomiluy’ (‘Lord have mercy’) [no. 1, bars 9–10], at ‘Spasi
blagochestivı̈ya i uslı̈shi nı̈’ (‘O Lord, save the pious and hear us’) [no. 3, bars
15–20], at ‘I dukhovi tvoyemu’ (‘and to Thy spirit’) [no. 4, bars 9–11] and
at ‘Slava Tebe, Gospodi, Slava Tebe’ (‘Glory to Thee, Lord, glory to Thee’)

5 The ‘Weimar school’, so called because Liszt was based there from 1848 to 1861, denotes all
the innovations and new approaches associated with Liszt and Wagner.

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 Tchaikovsky

[no. 4, bars 12–15]. I would also list among remnants of the manner which
prevailed in Russia previously the so-called natural harmony (in the manner
of the old horns) which has crept into the work of our composer at the words
‘yedin sı̈y svyatı̈ya troytsı̈’ [no. 2, bars 44–5]. This turn of phrase occurs hun-
dreds of times in Bortnyansky and is explained by the eighteenth century’s
passion for horns and huntsmen’s fanfares. Small blots like these on the pic-
ture do not, however, upset the general impression. Mr Tchaikovsky’s style
is in general a serious and noble one, which is more necessary in Russia than
anywhere because our church permits only a cappella singing, but where
we have not up to now heard such a style. The preparation of suspensions
and the frequently used sevenths on all degrees of the diatonic scale impart
to the harmony a fresh, steadfast character which has a pleasing effect after
the flaccid mellifluousness with which the composers licensed by the Kapella
charmed our ears for so many years. As far as one can judge from reading
the score without hearing a performance, choral sonority is exploited with
skill and effectiveness; unfortunately, the high register predominates, espe-
cially in the sopranos and tenors. These constant Fs, Gs and even As give
an impression of festive brilliance and magnificence at first, but then lose
their fascination as a result of too frequent repetition. What at first seemed
a truthful expression of rapture and exultation turns gradually into a purely
external embellishment, like gilding on the expressionless face of an icon.
The singers tire, while the character of reverent concentration on humility
and spiritual peace gains nothing from this loud splendour. I do not consider
it superfluous to add that these very high notes often occur on the vowels u,
ı̈ and i, and thus can be pitched properly only with the greatest difficulty.
To sum up, we have here the work of a conscientious artist whose sub-
lime gift has called him – judging by the sum total of his compositions – to
a new sphere of activity and who as a result has brought to his Liturgy an
experienced, practised hand and a sense of decorum, rather than powerful in-
spiration. Mr Tchaikovsky’s composition, wholly satisfactory and estimable
though it be in itself, holds only a secondary place among his other works.
It does not enhance his profile by a single characteristic trait; it does not
introduce any schism, nor any attempt at reform, still less any revolution
into our church music.
And that is precisely what one should have expected from the uncom-
mon severity with which the privileged censorship office treated the com-
poser. One should have been expecting extraordinary deviations from the
accepted norm, audacious endeavours to do something completely new,
unprecedented and unheard of. Nothing of the sort has happened, and
Mr Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy, with its conciliatory, almost conservative charac-
ter, ought to have disarmed the censorship rather than caused it to sharpen

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

and hone its weapon. But the privileged censorship is implacable. The char-
acter of a work has little influence on its verdicts: with rare impartiality it
punishes the innocent as well as the guilty, and raises impediments alike to
the man who takes the smooth path as to the man who makes efforts to
leave it. It acts ‘knowing neither compassion nor wrath’ and, we might add,
without doing any particular harm, because it has turned out in the end
that in its own eyes it had exaggerated its competence. Whether a religious
composition is printed or not does not depend on it, and one may hope that
this circumstance now clarified will rouse young Russian talents to follow
Mr Tchaikovsky’s example and try their strength in a field which they have
until now despised but which offers an inexhaustible wealth of challenge to
a musician’s creative imagination.
(b) Ts. A. Cui: P. Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony.6
Music Review, 31 December 1886, no. 15, pp. 116–17.
Cui, pp. 361–4
Composed in 1886, Manfred was first performed on 11 March 1887 at
the Russian Musical Society in Moscow.

The appearance of a large-scale symphonic work by a Russian composer, par-

ticularly Tchaikovsky, is a major event; his importance as one of the most
highly talented and versatile of present-day symphonists has been firmly es-
tablished by a whole series of works of that kind. He has written four sym-
phonies, three suites (the second of which has not yet been performed here),
two symphonic poems: The Tempest (after Shakespeare) and Francesca da
Rimini, and the overture to the play Romeo and Juliet. In these last three
compositions he is in successful competition with Franz Liszt (Divina co-
media) [i.e. Dante Symphony] and Berlioz (with his symphonies Roméo et
Juliette and Lélio); in Manfred, his new symphony in four scenes after Byron,
Tchaikovsky has found himself in competition with Robert Schumann – in
idea, of course, though not in form – because the latter composed music for
the play which, apart from the overture, contains no symphonically elabo-
rated movements. Tchaikovsky has cleverly chosen the moments which most
lend themselves to musical illustration from Byron’s dramatic poem without
regard to their importance in the poem itself. Berlioz made use of similar
devices in his Harold symphony; it seems to me that in general that work by
Berlioz served our composer as a model in the composition of his Manfred;
firstly, in respect of outward form, it is a work with a programme which
6 Editor’s note: We have been supplied with this note concerning the first performance here in
Russia of this new symphony by the Russian composer; we willingly publish it in full because
in general we entirely share the opinions of its esteemed author which do not differ essentially
from the analysis of Manfred in no. 29 of Music Review (first year).

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 Tchaikovsky

nevertheless retains the usual symphonic structure of four movements; sec-

ondly, in its inner contents, the third movement portrays the free life of shep-
herds who live in the mountains, while the fourth movement represents an
orgy. There is no orgy in Byron’s poem, so obviously the composer thought
it up to obtain a more animated finale for his symphony.
Of all the four movements of Manfred, the first is the most significant; this
movement of the symphony, it seems to me, belongs in profundity of con-
ception and unity of development amongst Mr Tchaikovsky’s finest pages,
alongside Francesca. The first, main theme provides a masterly description
of Manfred’s gloomy, noble image as conceived by Byron:
Manfred: ‘But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter’ [Act III scene 4, lines 139–407 ]

The orchestral timbre in which the first theme appears is extremely suc-
cessful; the dull sound of three bassoons and bass clarinet in unison is inter-
rupted by dry, fitful chords in the violas and the cellos with basses in their
lowest registers. Lacking the opportunity of following all the beauties of
the main theme’s development in the orchestral score, we confine ourselves
to pointing out the second, delightful theme of Astarte (Andante, 34 ), the
magnificent pedal-point on C, and the majestic final occurrence of the main
theme (Andante con duolo) in the strings in unison, rhythmically accompa-
nied by clarinets, bassoons and horns – a device of instrumentation often
employed by Franz Liszt. We must also note here the original and beautiful
effect of three flutes in their lowest register combined with strings in uni-
son. It is no more possible to describe the enchanting instrumentation of the
second scene (Scherzo) than it would be to paint a picture ‘of the rainbow
of spray from a waterfall from which an Alpine fairy appears to Manfred’
[quotation from score].
We shall restrict ourselves to pointing out to the reader the second scene
of Act II of Byron’s drama where Manfred describes the Alpine fairy. The
Witch of the Alps asks: ‘What wouldst thou with me?’ Manfred replies: ‘To
look upon thy beauty – nothing further’ [Act II scene 2, lines 37–8]. As with
this reply of Manfred’s, the critic is obliged, referring to this movement of the
symphony, to answer the question ‘What wouldst thou with me?’ ‘only by
listening’. The trio of this movement, which is well contrasted with the main
section (by means of a clearly defined tonality), is nonetheless somewhat
insipid in its ideas; on its repetition Manfred’s theme appears. The ending of
the Scherzo, that is the fairy’s disappearance, is of ravishing refinement.
7 Quotations from Byron’s Manfred have been checked against Byron: Poetical Works edited
by Frederick Page in the new edition corrected by John Jump (London: Oxford University
Press, 1970).

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The third movement is a pastorale, elaborated in various ways using fa-

miliar techniques: the sustaining of the tonic and the fifth in the basses. It
is very difficult to be original here because the character of the pastorale
depends on the use of shepherds’ instruments – bagpipes and shepherd’s
horn. We shall allow ourselves at this point to draw the reader’s attention to
one place which is particularly interesting as regards harmony. The second
section ends in B major [III, bars 35–6]; immediately after that comes an
A minor triad [bar 36], forming parallel fifths; and then, in the eleventh bar
of the same page [bar 46] the harmony returns afresh to the triad of B minor
(again with parallel fifths), which then moves to a dominant seventh in the
key of G [bar 47] to serve as transition to the first variation. Manfred’s en-
trance makes a strong impact; is it not depicting his rescue at the moment
when he intends to throw himself into the abyss? The decline of his strength
is graphically portrayed by the gradually clearing harmonic progressions –
up to the sustained C, in the woodwind [bars 178–91].
In the final movement, the first theme is made out of the second motive of
the principal theme of the first movement. This borrowing seems extremely
characteristic of subterranean spirits if one recalls that Manfred fell under
their influence by his own fault. It also makes a significant impression in
combination with the second theme of the infernal orgy (in the form of an
oriental dance) and in the fugato (four spirits attacking Manfred – fourth
scene of Act II in the play). The sudden breaking-off of the wild dance makes
a huge effect. The episode corresponding to that, Lento [IV, bar 161ff.] is
very fine; it is based on the main motive of the whole work. Similarly fine is
the appearance of Astarte’s shade and the repetition of the excerpt from the
first movement Andante con duolo [bar 394ff.]. In Tchaikovsky, Manfred
dies unbending, at his full strength, just as in Byron. At the conclusion of
this movement, with the organ, the finale’s first motive appears again, but in
D major [bar 464] [actually on an E major triad, preceding the final key of
B major], as if lightened, that is, depicting his redemption.
It is very remarkable that, in portraying the hero’s death, both composers,
Tchaikovsky and Schumann, present a scene of his salvation and pardon in
addition, which is entirely contrary to Byron’s intentions. The final words of
the poem are:

Abbot: ‘He’s gone – his soul hath taken its earthless flight;
Whither? I dread to think – but he is gone’.
[Act II scene 4, lines 152–3]

We can see, therefore, how powerfully an all-forgiving conclusion is

demanded by music, the resolution of every discord, even the most
inexplicable – the dissonance of life itself. It is superfluous to mention that

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Tchaikovsky’s texture and instrumentation are masterly; we can only thank

him for his new contribution to the treasure-store of our nation’s symphonic
music.
(c) G. A. Laroche: The concert on 11 August at Pavlovsk,
Tchaikovsky’s Manfred and Hamlet. Theatre Gazette, 15
August 1893, no. 7, p. 6. Laroche 2, pp. 155–9
The fantasy overture Hamlet was composed in 1888. This concert was
given in pleasure gardens at a distance from the capital.

P. I. Tchaikovsky is at the forefront of contemporary Russian music. But

being in the forefront of it now, when musical technique and musical learning
have spilled over to an extensive constituency of specialists and a great many
talented composers have emerged, is by no means the same thing as it was
in the 1860s when Russian composers were very thin on the ground. Along
with five or six others, mostly older than him, he is also at the forefront of
the music of the whole civilized world – and there too his kingdom, though
shared with others, is as little open to question and as gladly acknowledged
as it is in Russia.
He has attained this eminent position by the intensity and magnetic power
of his talent, and not at all by its universality. He has tackled the most
varied kinds of music and displayed a colossal gift in every one, but he
displays himself completely in only a few. If ever beneficent nature contrived
to produce a musical genius as an illustration or practical corroboration of
the theory of ‘absolute music’, Hanslick’s theory,8 then that musical genius
is Tchaikovsky – so greatly is he filled with music on the one hand, so little
on the other hand is he drawn towards musical illustration of poetic content,
towards programme music or music drama.
To opera, as to programme music, he has devoted a huge share of his time
and energy, and as regards opera one may say that, after a whole series of
more or less unsuccessful experiments, he at length found a form in com-
plete affinity with his gift, that is one where the present-day demands for
musical drama are reduced to a minimum. Maybe some day he will reach
the equivalent position in the orchestral fantasy on a poetic subject, that is,
in the ‘symphonic poem’. That will be when he finally discards the recently
introduced but already long outmoded seasonings which for some reason are
considered essential once a title has been taken from some famous poet: long
sequences in an uncertain key, pauses, instrumental recitatives, a colossal din
8 The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) set out these ideas in Vom musikalisch-
schönen (‘On the Musically-Beautiful’), first published in Leipzig in 1854; they offered a
viewpoint contrary to that of the ‘Weimar school’. Laroche was a rare Russian subscriber to
Hanslick’s ideas.

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

on the diminished seventh, unfinished short phrases transposed from key to

key and the obligatory tam-tam [Laroche has a play on words: ‘iz tona v
ton i . . . tam-tam’]. In rejecting all this and being satisfied with writing music
which is melodious and rounded in form, we are reverting to the standpoint
of Raff, who calmly composed one symphony after another and gave them
such titles as The Fatherland, The Forest, Leonore, Spring and so on. In the
eyes of M. A. Balakirev, to whom Manfred is dedicated, that will be the
ultimate degradation, the rejection in music of everything poetic, everything
ideal. I, on the other hand, do not give a brass farthing for that idealism which
comprises instrumental recitative, the diminished seventh and the tam-tam.
But Mr Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poems are not all recitative and tam-
tam. Alongside the direct imitation of Liszt which holds sway in the weakest
sections of these compositions, each of them contains a greater or smaller
number of pages where the composer apparently forgets altogether the
Weimar wisdom, with which he has so little kinship and which he has
adopted so superficially. A beautiful melody will be flowing along (gener-
ally speaking, the more beautiful it is the less it shares the character of the
poem or situation), the orchestration will set itself free from the thunder of
the percussion – that invariable sign of the most profound thoughts – and
unfold all its magic from pianissimo to fortissimo; you don’t even have time
to look round before the real symphonist has awakened and an animated
development section begins, with that pungent dissonant counterpoint of
which our composer has such an inimitable command. Dante, Byron and
Shakespeare are all forgotten. Alas! their turn will come again: like the ghost
of Hamlet’s father, they will stand before the composer again and start to
eat away at him: ‘What are we doing here? When are you going to get down
to poetry? When are scrappy phrases, transpositions, pauses, general pauses
and the tam-tam going to come along?’ And, torn forcibly from the world
of inspiration and beauty, the composer will again stick to the beaten track,
and the protracted ‘programmatic’ proceedings will stretch out before us
once more.
This inorganic mixture of two mutually alien and irreconcilable elements
does not occur in the same way in all Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poems. In this
respect Manfred numbers among the most raw and unfinished of his compo-
sitions. Harmonic sequences extend over whole pages, going somewhere –
but not getting anywhere, leaving an impression of mystery and uncertainty
cribbed from Liszt, though cribbed not in a mechanical fashion but with the
addition of some of the technical sequins which cost our deft and resourceful
composer so little effort. There are particularly many such ultrapoetic pages
in the symphony’s first movement which, contrary to convention, is not an
Allegro but a huge Adagio with various more or less faster episodes. And,

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 Tchaikovsky

while we are on the subject of poetry, why is this first movement scored
so loudly? Has Manfred really endured a shipwreck or bombarded Paris? I
can understand the percussion instruments being used in the central section
of Romeo and Juliet, because the composer was imagining a street fight in
the savage Italy of the fourteenth century; I can doubly understand them in
Hamlet, for in Shakespearian tragedy material catastrophes, violence and
murders take a large place, although we have become used to looking only
for philosophical and psychological subtleties; I am ready, finally, to accept
the bass drum and cymbals in the finale of Manfred, as it is there that the
court of the subterranean king Arimanes is displayed in all its glory. But the
first movement, which according to the programme represents something
like the quintessence of Manfred’s monologues, not only does not need such
cheap seasonings in my opinion, but because of their use distorts the spirit of
Byron’s poem and takes on the character of some battle or natural calamity,
which is not even so much as mentioned in the English poet. In Byron the
drama springs from within, and Manfred’s torments are essentially those of a
solitary melancholic and monomaniac haunted by a kind of idée fixe; for all
his criminality, the hero is a member of the aristocracy of the spirit, and the
hellish apparitions with which he habitually holds conversations understand
the most subtle speeches and are able in their replies to wound him without
resorting to noisy yelling.
But along with the ‘programmatic’ side of Manfred, which seems to me
false and even prosaic, there is a purely musical side which is barely linked
to the other – and here Tchaikovsky may be seen at his full stature, though I
cannot say at one of his loftiest moments, not the Tchaikovsky of the Third
Suite or the Fourth Symphony, but nonetheless full of melodic warmth and
sincerity, rich in graceful harmonic turns, in unforced and euphonious coun-
terpoint, rhythmically interesting and original, inexhaustibly diverse and
captivating in instrumentation. To all this part of Manfred (much greater
in bulk than the poetic or Lisztian part), one listens with the greatest inter-
est, it is splendid in thematic development even more than in its melodies,
has nothing in common with Liszt and, to my way of thinking, nothing in
common with Manfred.9 To that category first and foremost belongs all of
the third movement – the ‘pastorale’, although the only thing pastoral about
it is that there is an episode representing bagpipes, but where the elegance
of form and musical development are sublime beyond description. Also to
it belongs the so-called trio in the scherzo which has the character of a free

9 Author’s note: To clarify this attitude for the listener by means of a concrete example, I shall
point to Schumann’s Manfred. There one finds music which, in my opinion, contains both a
Byronic atmosphere in general as well as various episodes in the drama, each one individually
conveyed with astonishing vitality and truth.

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

expanse of steppe and idle languor, evocative of Gogol, Turgenev or Fet

rather than Manfred, but in any case enchanting; to it belongs, lastly (apart
from a few short episodes in the first movement, which it would take me too
long to enumerate), the superb polyphonic development in the finale, full of
movement, fire and compelling interest.
Hamlet (which in general terms I place immeasurably higher than
Manfred) – is a completely different matter. It was saved, apparently, by
the circumstance that it was initially envisaged not as a symphonic poem at
all but as the overture to the tragedy which it was intended to perform in
Russia in a French adaptation. When performed together with the literary
work by which it was inspired, music does not need to cast about for the
intelligibility of the spoken word, for the spoken word will itself show in
due course wherein the subject lies and what the poet’s individual ideas are.
However that may be, Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet is to a significant extent more
free than his Manfred from the ballast of the commonplaces of ‘programme
music’: it is simply an overture, though not, of course, one composed to a
template, though again with an episode in the national Russian style, very
well done and completely out of place, but coherent and robust in form with
the most superb principal theme,10 slightly Beethovenian in character and
with a development section which one can call straightforwardly a work of
genius (the harmonic progression before the return of the principal section
[from 8 bars before ‘Non si cambia il Tempo’]). The only thing which pains
me in this work, which is as inspired as it is masterly, is the loud baying of
the orchestra on the diminished seventh, masked not without skill by passing
notes, but nevertheless representing a trite illustration of every sort of storm –
at sea, on dry land and in the soul.
[The rest of the programme and the standard of performance are
discussed.]

(d) N. D. Kashkin: P. I. Tchaikovsky’s new symphony.

Russian Thought, January 1889. Kashkin/Tchaikovsky,
pp. 199–202
The Fifth Symphony was composed in the summer of 1888 and first
performed in St Petersburg on 5 November of that year.

[Tchaikovsky’s career goes from strength to strength, despite the hostility of

a section of the St Petersburg press.]
P. I. Tchaikovsky’s new Fifth Symphony in E minor is made up of the usual
four movements, but with the scherzo replaced by a waltz. The symphony’s

10 Author’s note: I regard as the principal theme not that which opens the introduction (Lento
lugubre, A minor), but what is known as the principal section (Allegro vivace, F minor).

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 Tchaikovsky

first movement is preceded by an introduction where the main theme which

occurs in every movement is stated, with a change from the minor mode to the
major where the symphony ends. The first Allegro opens with a beautiful
theme of powerful character which is distantly related melodically to the
first theme but completely different in rhythm. The course of the first theme
takes it in the normal way to the second theme in the key of the dominant
minor. This theme is elegiac in mood and extremely graceful and beautiful,
and a third so-called closing section follows it in the key of D major. After
the development, the first section of the Allegro returns, but the second
theme occurs in C-sharp minor instead of B minor and the closing section in
E major. A very significant addition returns to the initial E minor where the
first movement ends.
The symphony’s second movement is an Andante cantabile, the unusual
beauty of whose melody can stand alongside the best works of Tchaikovsky,
who is so rich altogether in melodic inventiveness. The whole dreamily pas-
sionate colouring of this movement is superbly maintained, with the move-
ment rising in places to moments of the most powerful excitement, shifting
with an uncommonly beautiful and powerful modulation based on 64 triads
to a calmer, fading mood. The theme of the introduction appears in the sec-
ond half of the Andante, here with a menacing character, and leads to a
repetition of the Andante’s main theme which occurs here in its most pow-
erful statement; the theme of the introduction appears again before the end
in a compressed version, then everything dies away and finishes in a scarcely
audible pianissimo. This entire movement is so beautiful, so permeated by
genuine, deep feeling, that it constitutes a masterpiece in itself.
The third movement, a waltz, is kindred to those delightful waltzes found
previously in Mr Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings and Suite; it repre-
sents a moment of tranquillity after the passionate spiritedness of the pre-
ceding movement. The waltz contains an abundance of superb harmonic
details of refinement and elegance, such as the violins’ rising scale against
the theme in progress in the wind instruments. The Trio of the waltz is
built on a rapid figure in which the two-beat pattern sometimes gives way
to a three-beat one, thus imparting an especial rhythmic savour. The theme
from the introduction enters again at the end, but now in a mood of calm
reconciliation.
The final movement opens with the theme of the introduction, but now
no longer in the minor, as on its first appearance, but in the major. From
this theme the Allegro of the finale develops, again in E minor. This whole
movement is the work of a master of the first order, and although its themes
are inferior to those of the previous movements, it nonetheless offers such a

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

wealth of development, such artistic finish as a whole, that one may call it
the best of all the movements in the symphony.
The new symphony as a whole is the work of a talent which is fully mature
and in free and easy command of all the resources of the art of music. With
regard to artistic balance, clarity and perfection of form, it occupies, if not
the first place, then one of the very first places among Tchaikovsky’s works.

(e) G. A. Laroche: P. Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa. Moscow

Bulletin, 2 January 1889, no. 22, pp. 3–4. Laroche 2,
pp. 129–35
This opera, composed in 1881–3, was staged in the Bol’shoy Theatre in
Moscow on 3 February 1884.

Perhaps the reader will resent me telling too hackneyed an anecdote, but I
cannot resist quoting an apocryphal dictum of the dying Hegel, so apt to the
occasion does it seem. The philosopher – as the legend affirms – said first:
‘Of all my pupils there was only one who understood me’. Then, after a
short silence, he added: ‘And even he misinterpreted me’. The original form
in which the great writer wrapped his idea is eminently suitable to describe
the state of musical drama in present-day Russia. Imitating him, we shall say
that, of all present-day Russian composers, Tchaikovsky alone is capable of
writing operas, and Tchaikovsky’s operas are in essence not operas at all.
When we say that the creator of Cherevichki (‘The Slippers’) is one of
those first-class musicians who lack a genuinely dramatic temperament, or
that Mr Tchaikovsky’s operas when compared with his other compositions,
especially his symphonies, occupy a secondary place, we are placing him
in an extremely honourable company. The same may be said of Beethoven
and Schumann, who wrote one opera apiece, and of Berlioz, who wrote as
many as four. It is true that, in the number of his attempts in this genre
and by the strength of will with which he tries again and again to solve
the riddle of the sphinx called Russian musical drama, Tchaikovsky differs
sharply from the Western masters I have named, whose operas, even those
of Berlioz, are merely episodes in an extended field of activity devoted to
entirely different ends. Counting Undina, which was never staged anywhere
and which, if I am not mistaken, the composer destroyed, Tchaikovsky, who
has by no manner of means reached old age yet, has already written eight
large-scale operas. It is not open to doubt that he is indebted precisely to
them, or to some of them, for a significant part of his fame, or that there is a
whole division of his admirers who know him only as the creator of Eugene
Onegin. But the very predilection of the public for this opera above all the
others by the same composer already provides a partial description of his

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 Tchaikovsky

attitude to musical drama. Not one of Tchaikovsky’s other operas shows so

few pretensions to drama; in no other does the inspiration flow in such an
even, uninterrupted stream. One may say without being paradoxical that,
for this intelligent, sensitive and educated artist, so-called dramatic truth in
music always comes in inverse proportion to the efforts made to achieve it.
I have just spoken about the large number of our composer’s operas, but his
taste for drama is demonstrated not by quantitative definitions alone.
It is most interesting to cast a glance over his choice of subjects. Leav-
ing his first two operas to one side as youthful works, Eugene Onegin as a
score intended initially for production in a conservatoire and consequently
written for a particular ensemble with the limitations which such a situation
inevitably entails, and The Slippers which was composed for a competition
on a prescribed libretto, we are left with four operas written when his talent
was more or less at a mature stage in its development and using subjects,
obviously, chosen by him in complete freedom. What is immediately striking
is the sombre, harrowing character of the plots, the abundance of horrors
and blood, the note of melodrama. Born in 1840 and growing up, appar-
ently, like all Russians of our generation, on the peaceful literature of Gogol,
Turgenev and Ostrovsky, our composer – as one could reason a priori –
ought to have been bound to share the distaste common to people of our
time for daggers, scaffolds, scoundrels and red cloaks. But in fact it turns out
that, except for the red cloaks, all these ingredients play a significant role in
his works: from the horrors of the oprichnina11 to the evil deeds within a
family in The Enchantress, a broad river of blood runs through his operas,
and the brutality of the dramatist, who in private is of astounding gentle-
ness and placidity, goes so far that even Schiller’s Joan of Arc, whose fate
the German poet softened, is again condemned to a terrifying death in the
flames. It goes without saying that subjects of this cast (and Mazeppa too be-
longs among them, with its executions and torturing) require the strongest,
harshest, and most staggering means of expression in the music as well. I
invariably have the impression of a highly gifted composer doing violence to
his talent. I certainly do not wish to say that Tchaikovsky is capable of setting
only tender and sentimental scenes. No, he does have energy and breadth of
scale, but his energy and broad scale are, if one may put it this way, exclu-
sively major-key. Rejoicing, celebrating, a splendid festive tone – these are
what he succeeds magnificently with time and again, and an unconscious
sense of his innate power, as it seems to me, tempts him to employ it in ex-
actly the opposite direction, where it almost invariably refuses to serve him.
The weakest places in his operas are those where he has to depict dramatic

11 This term refers to a special bodyguard created by Tsar Ivan IV.

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

confrontations; among such places in Mazeppa is the scene of the quarrel

[no. 6], where constant divergence can be sensed between the situation and
the music, where, for example, the big ensemble in C minor, even by the
choice of metre ( 98 ) and rhythm, cannot have the dramatic energy for which
the composer was evidently striving. Equally alien to Mr Tchaikovsky’s na-
ture, and just as unsympathetic to me in its treatment, is the challenge posed
by the prison scene.
For all his love of strongly dramatic subjects, our composer takes little
interest, apparently, in one of musical drama’s most vital resources. I mean
recitative. One can point to many phrases in Mazeppa whose declamation
[word-setting] is hard to accept: read the text without the music, adopting the
expression suggested naturally by the situation of the characters involved,
and very often your declamation will be different from Mr Tchaikovsky’s.
If that phenomenon can be observed in recitative, where no demands of
cantilena constrained him, then it occurs even more frequently in lyrical
and rounded phrases; moreover, there are instances where the initial motive
of the cantilena, which is normally composed directly under the influence
of declamation, reveals no such influence in Tchaikovsky’s case. The gifted
master’s operas, exactly like his symphonic poems, remind us often and
eloquently of the too easily forgotten axiom of right-minded aesthetics that
music is not an art of expression, that, by forcing her to speak and depict,
we are doing violence to her nature, that she finds her true power and beauty
where she is completely free of poetic pretensions. The greatest models of
musical drama are no more than compromises between the nature of art
and our age’s striving to illustrate stage action musically, compromises in
which the composer is obliged at every turn to hold the balance between
opposing demands, to walk a tightrope. This tightrope-walking calls for a
special talent which has become particularly rare in our day and age, and
Mr Tchaikovsky is a true child of his time in this, as in many other respects,
in possessing this special talent only in the smallest degree.
And why should he grieve for it when he has all the others? While, for
the most part, displaying major deficiencies in construction and scenario
and not exploiting musically even those advantages which are preserved in
their libretti, his operas, nonetheless, afford aesthetic enjoyment year in year
out to the most musical, most enlightened part of our public. Together with
Mr Tchaikovsky’s symphonic scores, albeit to a lesser extent, they are num-
bered with the noblest creations of Russian art, and the musical beauties so
generously strewn through them more than compensate for the absence of
that dramatic nerve which present-day criticism pursues so exclusively. An
incomparable melodist, who as the years go by acquires even more richness,
versatility, succulence and grace in his melody, our composer has displayed

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 Tchaikovsky

all the charm, all the poetry of his song even in Mazeppa. It is very charac-
teristic that as soon as Mazeppa himself stops being a bloodthirsty tyrant
and becomes simply a baritone in love, the music too at this point becomes
superlative, and melodies, each more beautiful than the last, flow from his
lips (‘Mgnovenno serdtse molodoye’ (‘A young heart instantaneously’) in
Act I [no. 5, Andante], ‘Moy drug, nespravedliva tı̈’ (‘My friend, you are
unjust’) in Act II [no. 11, Moderato assai, quasi andantino], and most of all
the arioso which the composer added after the printing of the vocal score
[no. 10a]). There are equal melodic pearls in the parts of Mariya, Andrey
and even Kochubey, the least richly endowed (‘Tak, ne oshiblis’ vı̈’ (‘Thus
you were not mistaken’) [Act II no. 9]); but the first place among all these
inspired pages belongs to the phrase sung by the dying Andrey (‘V glazakh
temneyet, budto noch’ kholodnaya lozhitsya nado mnoyu’ (‘My eyes grow
darker, as if cold night was falling upon me’) [no. 19]), whose tender and rec-
onciled character forms an amazing contrast with the bitterness and tragedy
of the situation, as if before his dying eyes the dawn of a new day, one not
of this earth, was already breaking. Unfortunately, this melody, like several
others in the opera, is not developed into a coherent number, but breaks off
abruptly to satisfy the need for ‘dramatic truth’. What a Moloch is this ‘dra-
matic truth’, and how much musical beauty, how many composers’ talents it
has devoured in our day in its insatiability! With Tchaikovsky, fortunately,
his talent is so lively and healthy that no theory can cause it any general
organic harm at all; but he makes frequent concessions to this tendency, and
one cannot but deplore profoundly even those frequent concessions.
Since our composer is principally a symphonist, it would be right to expect
the culminating points in his operas to be those numbers which are purely
instrumental (the overture, the dances and the Battle of Poltava entr’acte);
but in practice it does not work out quite like that and the statement finds
least justification as regards the overture. It is strange that the composer of
such instrumental masterpieces as the first Allegro of the Third Symphony
and the finale of the Second Symphony could fall for the type which the
modern French overture represents, that formless and perplexing rhapsody
with incessant pause-signs and changes of tempo; but the fact is that even
Tchaikovsky cultivates precisely this genre and the overture to Mazeppa,
whose opening gives promise of a mighty symphonic work, vanishes there-
after in a mosaic of successive fragments, like a river in sand. The dances in
Act I (gopak) [no. 4] display, of course, a more cohesive organization. To tell
the truth, I am not a particular admirer of Mr Tchaikovsky’s operatic dances
(Swan Lake is a different matter altogether!); it always seems to me that in
them he is following in the footsteps not so much of Glinka as of Serov, that
in his striving for sharp characterization and strong colours he sacrifices

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

that harmonic and contrapuntal side, of which Glinka provided such ele-
gant models in both his operas. Thus even the gopak in Mazeppa opens with
a flurry of semiquavers of a burlesque character with (for me) a note which
is unpleasantly Serovian; but who will not forgive this opening and a dozen
other mistakes (if this is indeed a mistake) when he hears the magical E-flat
major melody, captivating in its idle monotony, which suddenly, like a smile
on a beautiful face, lights up the whole piece?
It remains for me to give an opinion about the ‘Battle of Poltava’ (the
entr’acte to the last act [no. 15]), a number which is very extended and com-
posed with evident love. As is well known, ‘battles’ in the repertory for piano
and especially for orchestra (above all at the beginning of this century) repre-
sent a very widespread phenomenon but, despite the undoubted musicality
of the task, there are no examples of it being realized especially success-
fully, least of all classical examples. The first Allegro of Beethoven’s Eroica
Symphony could only be classified as a depiction of a battle by stretching
the meaning of the term, and his programmatic ‘Wellington’s Victory’ (The
Battle of Vittoria) belongs among his weakest compositions. From the whole
literature known to me, I can bring to mind only one page which is truly
grandiose: it is the battle episode in Paradies und die Peri; but Schumann
was not composing a separate symphonic number: his battle amounts to no
more than an orchestral ritornello to the chorus which follows. In the end,
one can say that in the ‘Battle of Poltava’ we are seeing for almost the first
time a serious composer setting seriously about a task which until then had
been in the hands of simple artisans writing to amuse the pleasure-garden
public. The experiment succeeded brilliantly: from the very first chords one
has a sense of formidable, shattering power; the alternating chords in bars
9 to 12 (subsequently repeated a second higher) and the motive in sevenths
(F–G–B–C) a few bars later are especially good. The actual plan of the
work is very poetic: the composer begins fortissimo, introduces us to the
strongest heat of the battle and then in a long, gradual diminuendo depicts
the rumble as the hostilities gradually recede. But the execution of the task
strikes me as not being on the same level as the conception everywhere: the
first pages (in 32 metre) are marvellous; compared to their iron strength, the
last section ( 44 ), although called Allegro marziale, suffers from being precisely
of too peaceful a character: that is in spite of whistling scales here and there,
which suggest peacetime policemen’s training exercises rather than a fight
to the death. There is not enough turmoil, chaos, fumes – which are just as
capable of being portrayed in a pianissimo as in the most deafening forte.
The reader will not ask me to draw a general conclusion from my discon-
nected remarks because I began by placing it at the start of this column. But
justice demands that I give him an opposite proposition. Mr Tchaikovsky’s

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 Tchaikovsky

opera is not an opera at all, but nevertheless he is our only composer of

operas in Russia. A critic’s task would be very easy if he could approach a
living phenomenon with a ready-made yardstick and his only concern were
to see whether the work fitted his measurements or not. For such criticism
it would be sufficient for each species and genus of artistic work to establish
terms, as is done for goods ordered for delivery to the state: so much of such-
and-such, the length such-and-such, the width such-and-such, the weight
such-and-such. I have colleagues in the musical press who have adopted this
very approach to Mr Tchaikovsky: the reviewer will take as the norm some
single opera, sometimes of his own manufacture,12 sometimes written by a
friend, will look for similarities and differences in Tchaikovsky, where it’s
longer and where shorter, where it’s louder and where softer, and will then
draw up a balance sheet. To be sure, the creator of Mazeppa presents many
difficulties to the conscientious critic who has no wish to get away with
just the conventional wisdom. A self-sufficient, independent nature, perhaps
sometimes capricious, he submits to classification only with extreme diffi-
culty and not one of the pre-existing frames fits him exactly. Eugene Onegin,
as everyone knows, is entitled not ‘opera’ but ‘lyrical scenes’. Should we not
extend that title to everything Tchaikovsky has written in the genre of opera?
Should we not admit that Mazeppa too, while not forming a coherent opera,
is wonderful as a series of lyrical moments, that precisely the lyrical element
in it is full of truth and beauty, whereas its dramatic side affords us the
spectacle of a powerful talent embarking on a path alien and antipathetic
to him? And should we not at the same time abandon once and for all the
unjust and tactless complaints that Tchaikovsky’s operas are not written in
the manner of Gluck, or Meyerbeer, or Wagner, or Serov, and state that our
composer is first and foremost faithful to his personal ‘I’ and with perfect
sincerity gives us this ‘I’ in every one of his works? These ‘lyrical scenes’ – not
subordinated to modern templates, full of distinctive content and individual
life – these lyrical scenes are uneven works far from being beyond reproach:
very often the form does not match the idea, even more frequently you wish
that the composer would break decisively with modern usage and return
to the classical path which suits the cast of his talent far better, but for all
the objections which one could level against him, there remains the general
impression of a rich nature and a virtuoso master, an inspired poet and a
brilliant technician, a musician whose magnificent native powers have not
been suppressed and distorted by training but have attained the most for-
tunate and healthy development. The exemplary type of Russian opera will

12 The most likely target of this barb was probably Cui, though M. M. Ivanov (1849–1927) is
another candidate.

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probably be created unbeknownst to the composer of Mazeppa, just as the

development of German opera left the creator of Genoveva [Schumann] to
one side: but while they do not stand on the main highway of progress
ahead, the operas of Tchaikovsky, like Genoveva, will always give the
impression of fresh and alluring oases, and their very remoteness from fa-
miliar paths will lend them ever greater fascination.
(f) G. A. Laroche: P. Tchaikovsky and musical drama (about
The Enchantress). Moscow Bulletin, 8 February 1890, no.
39, pp. 3–4. Laroche 2, pp. 145–55
Composed between 1885 and 1887 to a libretto by I. Shpazhinsky,
this opera was staged for the first time at the Mariinsky Theatre on
20 October 1887 and at the Bol’shoy Theatre on 2 February 1890.
The Russian Middle Ages and the Russian Renaissance have only recently,
if one leaves [Pushkin’s] Boris Godunov out of account, become the object
of truthful artistic representation in verse drama entirely faithful to the na-
tional spirit and language and also to history – if not in factual matters,
then certainly in matters of everyday life. As has been observed repeatedly,
the trends and currents which emerge in poetry are reflected in music as
well, but that reflection is always chronologically delayed. Similar or corre-
sponding phenomena in poetry and music are separated from one another
sometimes by a quarter of a century (the operas of Glinka constitute an in-
teresting exception, in that they appeared only a few years later than the
most mature works of Pushkin, to which they correspond fully). Serov’s
[opera] Rogneda, contemporary with Ostrovsky’s first dramatic chronicles,
or Aleksey Tolstoy’s Ivan the Terrible, seemed at first sight something similar
to them or to the dramas of Mey, which it antedates by a few years; but by
our time it has become clear that with its sickly sweetness, abundance of
poorly concealed Italianisms and falsely patriotic tone, for all its outward
impact and entertaining quality, it corresponds more to Kukol’nik13 than to
the poets of the 1850s. What occurred in our spoken drama about 1860 is
now taking place or ‘ought to be taking place’ in musical drama. That ‘ought
to be taking place’ is a small attempt at constructing history a priori, but I
shall now immediately wash myself clean of that sin by appealing to facts.
I am intentionally leaving to one side the operas of Rubinstein, which are
original, written in masterly fashion, strict in style and truthful in expres-
sion. They stand apart by virtue of the cosmopolitanism which saturates all
the compositions of the present-day head of Russian musicians, the sharply
oppositionist attitude which he adopted towards his age, and, lastly, the
13 N. V. Kukol’nik (1809–68) is best known in literature as a writer of patriotic plays on
historical themes and in music as a collaborator with Glinka.

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 Tchaikovsky

conspicuously energetic individuality which makes itself felt equally in his

dramatic and lyrical music as in his vocal and instrumental music. There
remain Borodin’s Prince Igor and Tchaikovsky’s The Enchantress14 – two
‘signs of the times’ in the sense that both these operas now await their turn,
that The Enchantress was produced in St Petersburg in the autumn of 1887
and is at the present moment being staged in Moscow, and Prince Igor is
a posthumous work of Borodin who died in February in the same year of
1887. Although part of the music of Igor is older than The Enchantress, as
it was transferred from Mlada written in the 1870s, Igor on the other hand
was completed by Borodin’s friends after his death; its orchestration is also
for the most part posthumous, and it has not yet been produced and will not
be during the current season. In general terms, both The Enchantress and
Igor are works of the present moment, and, coming approximately a quar-
ter of a century after Ostrovsky’s dramatic chronicles and Tolstoy’s Ivan the
Terrible, may be called phenomena corresponding to those literary works.
For a broad drama taken from everyday life in the Russian Middle Ages,
Tchaikovsky, of all the musicians of our generation, that is who were born
between 1840 and 1855, ought to be the most richly endowed. The Mighty
Handful (moguchaya kuchka), comparison with whom suggests itself above
all, does not include an outstanding melodist, and outside the Handful – I am
still speaking about this specific generation – there are no talents, or almost
none. Tchaikovsky’s work shows both Russian subject-matter and cultivated
form; in his work melodies and harmonies, orchestration and rhythm are in
perfect balance; prolific and indefatigably active in all sorts of music,15 he
evidently gravitates towards the dramatic, towards musical tragedy, and in
tragedy shows a no less evident preference for Russian subjects. Of his six
operas staged before The Enchantress, only one had an overwhelming suc-
cess; but not a single one passed unnoticed, and, if Tchaikovsky’s reputation
is based mainly on Eugene Onegin, then one cannot deny that his other
operas have contributed to it too, not excluding that youthful venture The
Voyevoda, or that Tchaikovsky’s operas, taken together, have made the com-
poser loved and prized in spheres which neither a suite nor a quartet, neither

14 Author’s note: One may place Mr Rimsky-Korsakov’s Maid of Pskov in the same category,
although she is already seventeen years of age, if one regards that opera as a pendant not
to Mey’s drama of the same name but to his The Tsar’s Bride. In that case, too, one finds
a distance of approximately a quarter of a century between the poetic prototype and its
musical reflection.
15 Author’s note: Comic opera, operetta, dance music and military music constitute exceptions
so far. Like all the musicians of his circle, he will be too fastidious to write operetta and he is
not really suited to it by nature. As regards the other three kinds of music mentioned, in my
opinion he has an undoubted aptitude for them and could stimulate a fruitful and beneficent
advance in any one of them.

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

a sonata nor a symphony, can reach. Tested by experience, fostered equally

by continual good fortune as a whole and failures in particulars, his talent
entered on its most flourishing period at the end of the 1870s and is now –
or, what amounts to the same thing, was on the eve of The Enchantress – in
the most advantageous circumstances: maturity has been attained, but youth
has not yet departed.
Mr Shpazhinsky, the author of the libretto, possesses a talent rare here in
Russia (and at the present time even rarer in the West) as a master of matters
dramatic, a skilful craftsman and purveyor of what is fashionable; he is no
less capable than a Frenchman of tying and untying a dramatic knot; it is no
wonder that a composer of operas should turn more willingly to him than
to the luminaries of contemporary Russian poetry. Poetry’s luminaries have
always too much of lyricism or philosophy and rhetoric; in either case, there
are too many verses: whole pages of text which captivate one by their beauty
when read, coarsen and turn into tedious verbosity under the magnifying
glass of music. For a composer of operas, it is not monologues, not dialogues
and not the living flesh and blood of a poem in general which are important
but its skeleton, that is the plot and its development into a scenario. This
skeleton has been solidly and handsomely put together in The Enchantress;
the dramatic conflict is striking, the characters are simple and outlined in bold
strokes, and the situations are set out naturally. Only Act III offends by an
attempt at subtle psychology in the manner of Shakespeare: the scenes of the
Prince and Kuma, with the Prince’s rapid transition from hatred to passionate
love, recalling the famous scene of Gloucester and Anne in Richard III, is full
of interest in a spoken drama but becomes enigmatic and therefore false in a
musical drama. In an opera, just as with pantomime in a ballet, the subject
must be comprehensible to the eye in its entirety by means of stage action
alone, without the aid of a text or at least only with a little occasional help
from it. Like ballet, opera is also analogous to the tragedy of the ancients
(and therefore also to the ‘pseudoclassical’ tragedy of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries) and gains from observing all the conditions of that kind
of drama strictly, although they are outmoded for our spoken drama based
on Shakespeare. The emergence of a new character (the sorcerer Kud’ma) in
the final act, contrary to the rules of classical poetics, violates the integrity
of the plot’s development and gives the impression of being a mechanical
impulse from outside. Despite these two defects, of which the first (i.e. the
lack of clarity in the contents of Act III) is the more important, as a whole,
however, The Enchantress represents a task of rare nobility for an opera
which inspires a composer by its subject and does not hold things up with
dialectical longueurs. I repeat: such a subject in such a composer’s hands
could not fail to arouse intense curiosity and high expectations.

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 Tchaikovsky

Expectations of that kind are only half-lived up to by the opera’s rich and
original music.
When you listen at a concert, or play through at home, an individual page
or a long individual excerpt from Mazeppa, The Slippers or The Oprich-
nik, you surrender involuntarily to the fascination of the music’s power and
good health combined with such delicate nerves, such thoughtful melancholy,
such wealth of colour, such responsiveness to the demands of the age. When,
seated in the theatre, you take in for yourself the totality of these pages,
these excerpts, in their dramatic sequence, then little by little you begin to
feel a certain mysterious awkwardness. Explaining to myself the reason for
this contradiction would probably be more difficult for me, with my con-
servative view of musical drama, than if I were to be simply bored during
Tchaikovsky’s operas, finding them insufficiently similar to Musorgsky or
Serov. The reflective mood induced in me by Tchaikovsky’s method of com-
position has nothing in common with complaints founded on the cult of
[Serov’s] The Power of the Fiend or with Boris Godunov as set to music.
[Laroche reiterates views of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poems found
in (c).]
I did not set myself the task here[, however,] of analyzing Tchaikovsky’s
symphonic poems, where the absence of artistic truth may be demonstrated
only by a slow roundabout route; but I have before me the pearls in The
Enchantress, which make an irresistible effect at a concert or when read but
whose ardour is invariably cooled in a staged performance. Despite its great
strength of talent, despite the advantages of education and technique, of
graceful and subtle nature and the present-day striving for musical drama,
The Enchantress suffers from one affliction – only one, but that affliction is
fundamental, organic: the opera lacks ‘truth in sound’. Two years ago the
Petersburg Serovians discovered a great resemblance to Serov’s operas in it,
and even a direct imitation of them. I do not know what a critical paradox
of that kind rests on. Tchaikovsky is free of the majority of Serov’s faults: his
formless composition, his weakness in figuration and his mannerism, linked
to that weakness, of writing continuous chords or tremolo, his harmonic one-
sidedness, and, finally, from old-fashioned ‘reminiscences’ of Spontini and
Auber, Verstovsky and Gurilyov. [The comparison with Serov is explored
further.]
In comparison with our master’s preceding operas, The Enchantress is no-
table for its correct declamation. Declamation is a real hobby-horse of our
Russian reviewers and I have confessed more than once that with respect to
this hobby-horse I keep to the most ‘open tendency’. Had Tchaikovsky taken
a step backwards rather than forwards in his latest opera; had his declama-
tion been as boundlessly wrong and capricious as in Russian folksong or

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

in Glinka’s songs and A Life for the Tsar, then I would have had nothing
against that so long as the general meaning, the general spirit of the words,
had been accurately caught in the music. As I have already said, this hap-
pens sometimes, but just as often or more often we see the opposite. With
Tchaikovsky there is never that abstract, indifferent music exemplified by
many superb contrapuntal workings. There is no impersonal, mercilessly
logical architecture of sound combinations in which the subject vanishes.
On the contrary everything is warmed by feeling, the pulse of lyrical life
beats everywhere; but between the feeling in the musician’s soul and the idea
expressed in the poet’s verses, no connection is achieved. In a newspaper
column I do not wish to cite a long series of individual examples, so I shall
restrict myself to two. Let us take Kuma’s arioso in Act IV [no. 20]. After a
whole series of stupendous scenes, on the verge of death, the young woman
awaits her beloved (the son of the voyevoda who is in love with her), with
whom she intends to flee from his father’s pursuit. The mood in which the
audience watches her is well known to anyone who has read the sensational-
ist (though historical) novels or seen the dramas of Victor Hugo, Dumas-père
and their imitators in the theatre. Do not be deceived by the Russian décor
and the folksy manner of Mr Shpazhinsky’s language: we are here exactly in
the realm of French drama with its finely interwoven horrors. Not mental
conflict but crude physical danger oppresses the spectator’s imagination: he
is waiting for blood, he is all athirst for the loving couple’s successful flight;
he wavers between fear and hope. The music of this whole scene (however
it may be split up into separate moments) must be imbued with this alarm,
this haste and feverish impatience. The librettist writes thus:
Gde tı̈, moy zhelannı̈y? Ya zdes’! Poskorey
Prikhodi, svet dushi moyey, krasa radost’ ochey!
Neterpen’yem goryu ya tebya uvidat’
I k goryachemu serdtsu prizhat’.
Bez tebya istomilo mne dushu toskoy,
Prikhodi poskorey i umchimsya s toboy
Mı̈ podal’she otsyuda, ot zol i ot bed.
Prikhodi zhe skoreye, moy svet.
[Where are you, you that I long for? I am here! come
At once, light of my soul, joy of my eyes!
I burn with impatience to see you
And press you to my burning heart.
Without you my soul is weary with anguish,
Come at once and let me fly away with you
Far from here, from evils and troubles.
Come at once, my light.]

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 Tchaikovsky

The charming music of this number, an Andante in the minor in 98 , is filled

with reverie and pensive sadness, but at the same time with such idle languor
and northern frost that it loses all verisimilitude on the lips of someone whose
life is hanging by a thread. Kuma may say that she is afire with impatience,
but she cannot listlessly, in long drawn-out fashion and with repetitions sing
at length about this fire which is consuming her as if she were warming her-
self at a fireside while swaying evenly in a rocking-chair. I shall say, be it to
the point or otherwise, that these minor Andantes in Tchaikovsky’s operas
(often ensembles), usually occurring at moments when the dramatic situa-
tion is very tense, represent one of the greatest sins of his musical expression
not only because they are Andantes but still more because they are often in
triple metre and this calm rocking metre reduces the spectator’s participa-
tion if it is appealing to the listener, and on the contrary forms a hindrance
if the spectator continues to gain the upper hand over the listener. Num-
bers of this kind have a separate Italian origin: although there are many
intermediate stages, they stem from the quartet in [Bellini’s] I Puritani or
the quintet in [his] Sonnambula which, as we know, made a great impact
precisely as lyrico-dramatic moments. I explain the apparent contradiction
for myself not by the fact that Bellini’s music has a stronger character than
that of Tchaikovsky, but by the difference in ‘form’ (i.e. composition): all
this precedes the Italian master’s Andante finale so much as an adjunct, so
insignificantly, of such little interest, that it is scarcely listened to. Before the
big ensemble marking the culmination of the whole act, the public signifi-
cantly coughs only intermittently, the conversations in the boxes come to an
end, and artists and listeners alike feel that only now has the ‘psychological
moment’ arrived. Is that the attitude we are to adopt to our Russian master’s
operas where there are interesting details at every turn, where the most pre-
cious features (including those for showing character) have already preceded
the Andante finale? That is not in fact how we Russians listen to operas: we
follow the events on the stage as well as the singing, and the orchestra too,
from the first bar to the last. But in Italy, so it is said, the people in the boxes
play cards (or did so until very recently) during the performance and forsake
the card-table at once for a ‘favourite’ number. What in Bellini is not only
pardonable but gives an impression of being perfectly legitimate and reason-
able, in a Russian composer of our day, though it be altered in form, though
passed through the crucible of Meyerbeer and Schumann, Glinka and Dar-
gomı̈zhsky, is startling in its lack of inner truth. There is nothing more feeble
or absurd than the attempts to explain the significance of Tchaikovsky’s op-
eratic style in which St Petersburg newspaper critics entangled themselves
both over The Enchantress and earlier over other operas – Onegin, for

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 Russians on Russian music, 1880–1917

instance. The late Galler16 (in Talk) went so far as to bewail the composer’s
harmonic and contrapuntal talent, assuring him bitterly that ‘even at the
conservatoire he wrote his set exercises with the greatest of ease’. Would
Onegin have gained greatly, would The Enchantress have gained greatly,
if Mr Tchaikovsky’s exercises had been written equally well, but with the
greatest of effort or if, in spite of despairing pangs of diligence, they had been
as bad as the exercises of Galler himself? But despite the ridiculous form of
logic, the newspaper pseudocritics’ complaints contain a grain of truth, al-
beit a tiny one. Out of those Serovians, in the name of whom they reject The
Enchantress or rejected Tchaikovsky’s previous operas, there is not one who
could compete with him even in the matter of expression, to say nothing
of the absolute side of music. But, regarded as works of our day and age,
offered to a listener reared on Verdi, Gounod, Meyerbeer and Rubinstein,
and principally on Glinka, Dargomı̈zhsky and Serov, these operas as a whole
make an impression, as I have already said, of cooling ardour. The exception
is Onegin, because it has no pretensions to well-articulated drama but is wo-
ven from a series of scenes forming something like an unfinished novel (as
one might have expected from Pushkin’s original). The impression of ardour
cooling is made most strongly of all by The Enchantress, where the music
is no worse and the declamation is in fact better than in its predecessors,
but which with its melodramatic, externally arresting subject, passionate in
the French manner, confronted the dreamy elegist wrapped up in his own
reveries with a task inherently alien to his own spirit.
But this mutual estrangement between the temperament of the librettist
and the composer’s favourite realm is only relative. Even in The Enchantress,
such an abundant nature as Tchaikovsky can discover itself, catch fire, bur-
geon and compensate you a hundredfold for all his sins against musical
drama. Even out of The Enchantress, he has managed to weave enchanting
‘lyrical scenes’ strung together somehow. If looked at from this point of view,
then even Act III, where the excessive subtlety of the psychological analysis
is so disadvantageous for the composer (and by the way obliges him to write
a whole sequence of numbers in slow tempos), is full of charming details.
In matters of detail not only the ideal but also the characterful come easily
to Tchaikovsky: in what a masterly fashion can he shade in the feminine
irony in Kuma’s speeches; what a gloomy and original figure is Kud’ma, a
sorcerer in Act IV, the very same Kud’ma about whose late introduction
into the cast we levelled a complaint against the librettist. I shall say nothing
about Tchaikovsky’s more special sphere, the pathos of unsatisfied passion,

16 Konstantin Petrovich Galler (1845–88) was a critic of military background who had under-
taken some study at the new Conservatoire in St Petersburg.

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 Tchaikovsky

the sad but not despairing and rather submissive mood, in conveying which
Tchaikovsky has the same importance for the Russian public as Gounod
has for the French one (or should one say the Italian one?), except that his
resources are much more extensive. I shall cite as examples of this unpro-
found, reconciled but still sorrowful mood ‘Kogda tı̈ gnev v dushe moyey’
(‘When will you [still] the anger in my soul?’) in the duet of Yury and Kuma
[no. 17], and Kuma’s arioso already mentioned in another context ‘Gde zhe
tı̈, moy zhelannı̈y’ (‘Where are you, you that I long for?’), and finally the
duet of mother and son ‘Day nam bog v schast’i zhit’’ (‘May God allow us
to live happily’ [no. 9]), one of the most successful numbers in the entire
score.
But that’s enough of details. Behind that Enchantress which I have been
analyzing here in my captious manner – I shall not say with implacable
impartiality, for I cannot disguise myself in that mantle, but with a profound
attachment to a conservative aesthetic – thus, behind this Enchantress which
tantalizes and ensnares me with its magic but which I have not come to believe
in, there lies another Enchantress which I acknowledge in its entirety – the
Enchantress of Act I.
In the exposition, where the dramatic conflict has not yet become clear,
where his characteristic major-key-Russian, cheerful and bold tone which
forms the other side of his being could display itself with its full brilliance,
where the task presented no contradictions with the artist’s character and
gave magnificent scope for his imagination, we have found Tchaikovsky –
if not Tchaikovsky the symphonist, the composer of instrumental works
without programmes or poetic titles, then at any rate the one who endeared
himself to us forever with his Onegin. But the public is created in such a way
that in serious music it prefers what is touching and sad to what is joyful or
triumphant, so that for instance Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is more popular
than his Seventh or Eighth. Be that as it may, Act I of The Enchantress belongs
among the composer’s masterpieces and gladdens one’s heart not only by
the unflagging interest of its details but also by the consistency of its general
atmosphere, its ‘long breaths’, and by the ability to compose keeping the
whole in view without being deflected, not heightening the tone prematurely
or slackening it before the end. May I confess to a slight Schadenfreude? I
am enormously pleased that the finale of this miraculous first act opens with
a dectet. I do not seem to remember such a thing as a dectet in the operatic
repertory. The word is derived from decem, ten, just as duet, trio, quartet
and so on stem from the corresponding numerals. Duets, trios, quartets and
so on are most strictly prohibited by the Wagnerian (and therefore also by the
Serovian) catechism. In the same way they are proscribed too by the Mighty
Handful, seemingly so disdainful of Wagner while in reality so dependent on

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him. And here in the opera of a composer whom some accuse of ‘Wagnerism’
while others give condescending encouragement to his incipient ‘Serovism’,
is a finale that is the very number in an act which even last century was
reckoned the most dramatic and the most free of conventional form, which
had to be steeped in the pure spirit of ‘dramatic truth’, which opens not with
the tedium of recitative, not with orchestral clamour but with an ensemble
with three voices’ worth more of ‘falsehood’ than the septet in Les Huguenots
of the impious Meyerbeer.
In celebration, I am prepared to offer a small concession. In the comic
details of the folk scene in this Act I, in the speeches of Lukash, Potap,
Kichiga and the others, one notices a compromise between Russian song
style and musical declamation, the avoidance of recitative is noticeable, and
if you definitely wish it, then the Russian operas of Serov contain something
similar. But, after all, even in your idol Richard Wagner there is much that
comes from Weber and much that is Donizettian. Ought we not to embark
on a prosecution of Tristan und Isolde for misappropriating motives from
Lucia? What in a well-intentioned dilettante such as Serov was coarse and
clumsy becomes refined and virtuosic in a genuine artist like Tchaikovsky –
that’s the first point; the second is that what in Serov, Dargomı̈zhsky and the
Mighty Handful is the sole or the predominant component, will enter our
‘future’ opera like a moment, like material that will drown in the general
element. I wish from the bottom of my heart that Act I of The Enchantress
vindicates itself as a promise of this opera of the future, as a specimen of its
aims and resources.

(g) N. D. Kashkin: The Queen of Spades. Opera in three

acts and seven scenes. Subject taken from the story by
Pushkin. Libretto by Modest Tchaikovsky, music by Pyotr
Tchaikovsky. Russian Review, December 1890, no. 12,
pp. 780–93. Kashkin/Tchaikovsky, pp. 129–47
At first sight Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades does not by any means offer
particularly suitable material for an opera libretto; it may perhaps be termed
a psychological study, the main figure in which, Herman, is incapable of
rousing any special feelings of sympathy. For Pushkin, the story was prob-
ably shot through by the passion for card-playing which reigned at that
time among the upper and middle classes; he knew and saw celebrated gam-
blers who won colossal sums as well as the victims of a ruinous passion for
cards. Pushkin himself gave way to this passion at times, though in a weak
form. In those days cards often led to grave situations which ended tragi-
cally. In our time card-playing has lost that significance [though some peo-
ple continue to waste time and energy on gambling of various disreputable

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kinds]. There was something heroic about the gambler of former times, in his
duel, sometimes really a matter of life or death, and this heroism, though in
reality false, was able, from a certain point of view, to clothe such a figure in
poetic garb. In Pushkin Herman has these features; his passion is a base one,
but his enthusiasm for it, although abnormal, is sincere, and one can sense
that it contains the unconquerable energy of nature. Herman’s very failure,
destroying all his plans and ruining him irrevocably, reconciles one to him
at the same time, for had he not made his fateful mistake and won his three
cards, he would have fallen to the level of a card-sharp who spies on others’
cards or shuffles them unfairly and wins for certain; his downfall preserves
for Herman’s character the mark of an energetic nature come to grief in an
impassioned struggle. That is not much, however, for the principal figure
in an opera, and Pushkin’s subject in untouched form cannot provide the
substance for a large-scale opera. [. . .] Significant deviations from Pushkin
have been made in Modest Tchaikovsky’s libretto The Queen of Spades,
but entirely in the opposite direction: here the tragic intensity of the char-
acters’ situations is taken to an extreme degree and the music, as we shall
see, heightens this tension further, lending it a certain palpability or real-
ity. Mr Tchaikovsky’s deviations from Pushkin are important not so much
quantitatively as qualitatively [. . .].
[The action of Act I of the opera is recounted.]
I shall dwell on this act for the moment in order to try to describe Mr
Tchaikovsky’s new work. In the first place, the libretto contains major di-
vergences from Pushkin, as a result of which the main characters Herman
and Liza are shown in a completely different light, and in addition the time
of the action is transferred from the era of Alexander I to that of Catherine.
I must confess that I do not fully understand why it was necessary to ef-
fect this transposition in the period of the action; if it was for the sake of
the costumes, then the reason is much too feeble: we have already seen that
costumes from the 1820s did no harm to the success of Eugene Onegin; if
it was necessary for the sake of the intermedia in Act II, then that would
have been much less of an anachronism in the time of Alexander than a
great deal of what we find in the text of the libretto in Catherine’s time. The
libretto of The Queen of Spades has the merit that on account, firstly, of
its origin in a story by Pushkin and, secondly, of the undoubted skill and
intelligence of the librettist, the characters in it are completely unlike the
stereotyped, impersonal figures of opera – on the contrary, they are all living
people with definite personalities and positions. This also applies to all the
secondary characters; as far as the main characters are concerned, then Liza
has without any doubt read Karamzin and even Zhukovsky, and Herman
has perhaps heard something of Byron. An era never fails to put its mark on

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living characters, and they will remain closely linked with it, in spite of any
costumes. The spectator cannot be deceived for a moment in this respect, and
no stage props or assurances from the author can make him believe that the
time designated for the action is right. What is more, it is sufficient to change
a mere few lines of text to put everything in order and into its proper place.
While retaining all the paramount features of his prototype, Herman adds
one new and important one to them: he is madly, passionately, in love with
Liza, and making her his own is the chief aim and objective of his aspirations;
his attraction to gambling seems to stem from this predominant passion but,
thanks to the ardour and single-mindedness of Herman’s nature, the attrac-
tion turns into an obsession which drives him mad. He regards a win at cards
not as an end in itself but as a means of becoming wealthy and running away
with Liza from other people, as he says at one point in the opera. If this love
brings Herman nearer to the usual type of operatic tenor, to a certain extent
erasing the distinctive outlines of the character in Pushkin’s story, then at
the same time it gives him a more sympathetic human character, and the
happy inspiration of the composer who has delineated this love with un-
common power supplements the truthfulness of the figure of Herman and
rewards him with a surplus for the loss of some of his originality. As far as
Liza is concerned, she is put in an entirely different position from the one
in Pushkin. In the opera she is not a poor lady’s companion but the grand-
daughter and heiress of the rich and exalted Countess***, and at the same
time Liza is the fiancée of Prince Yeletsky, one of the most brilliant represen-
tatives of the St Petersburg aristocracy. Liza in the opera has thus extremely
little in common with Liza in the story. Liza’s character suffers from a cer-
tain vagueness, but this very vagueness of itself gives greater scope to the
composer who has clothed her image in flesh and blood, giving Liza through
music that independent life of her own which she lacks to some extent in
the libretto. The remaining characters in the opera, apart from the Countess
who stays just the same as in Pushkin, do not play an especially prominent
part and there is therefore no need to dwell on them particularly. We shall
move on to a survey of the general course of the action in Act I and of how
it is illustrated musically.
The music of the first scene of The Queen of Spades forms a single entity
which falls into separate episodes closely linked to one another. After a short
introduction the curtain rises and the opera opens with a very lively scene
with choruses of children playing catch, playing at soldiers, of nannies, etc.
The miniature children’s march included here is very fine and is brought to a
striking conclusion with a basso ostinato figure. This number moves imme-
diately to Herman’s scene and arioso. The arioso, with its elegiac melody, is

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very beautiful. This scene again moves on to a chorus of promenaders whose

bright cheerfulness is excellently set off by the previous mood; the following
scene contains a brief duet between Herman and Prince Yeletsky who are
animated by opposing moods. The Countess and Liza enter. A mood of ag-
onized alarm overcomes all the principal characters at this encounter like
a premonition of impending misfortunes. This gives rise to a short quintet,
which is constructed perfectly. After the Countess, Liza and the Prince have
left, Tomsky recounts in a ballad the adventure the Countess had in Paris
where she learned the secret of the three cards. The ballad is composed in
the form of free variations for orchestra, and within it there appear for the
first time the motives which are later encountered frequently in the opera:
one of them describes the Countess, and another is associated with the three
cards. The first of these motives is a highly original harmonic sequence of
enigmatic character. The whole ballad is composed superbly and constitutes
one of the most effective numbers in the opera. The concluding scene is de-
voted musically to the depiction of the storm, the background against which
Herman utters his impassioned phrases. All the music of this scene is written
in a very concise and lively fashion.
The second scene opens with a duet-romance sung by Liza and her friend
Polina. This number and Polina’s song which follows are imitations of the
romances current in the first quarter of the present century. These numbers
have the same significance and character as the Larin sisters’ duet which
opens Eugene Onegin. In spite of its imitative style, the music of these num-
bers is delightful, and they will probably both enjoy as much success with
the public as they do with Liza’s young lady-friends in The Queen of Spades;
[. . .]. To dispel the gloomy mood left by Polina’s song, the young ladies sing
a cheerful Russian song and dance. After the comic-serious arioso of the
governess reproving the young ladies for their levity, they leave. The con-
cluding scene of Act I is one of the most precious jewels in The Queen of
Spades. Liza’s state of unaccountable alarm expresses itself in an extremely
beautiful arioso in C minor which portrays that state of mind uncommonly
well and reaches a climax in her rapturous and fervent appeal to the night;
this moment is outstandingly good [. . .]. Herman’s entry is thereby prepared
in masterly fashion. This preparation wholly replaces the missing story of
the development of Liza’s passion for him, and the mutual situation of these
characters becomes perfectly clear without the slightest straining of inter-
pretation. Also perfectly understandable is why Liza was more startled than
frightened by Herman’s appearance – she more or less had a presentiment
of it, his appearance had become almost a logical necessity. After a brief
recitative a duet begins. The captivatingly passionate first theme constructed

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on a short rhythmical phrase opens with a three-beat rhythm, which lends

the theme a particularly restless and passionate quality of movement; after
the first six bars a broad lyrical counter-theme appears, to which the first
motive becomes a counterpoint. This entire first part of the duet is permeated
by an unusual degree of passion which, so to speak, dies away agonizingly
at the words ‘then let it be death and with it peace’ (‘potom pust’ smert’
i s ney pokoy!’). Liza is by now almost vanquished and can only utter in
a weakening voice ‘leave me’ (‘Uydite!’). Key, time signature and rhythm
change. Herman movingly implores Liza to take pity on him, takes her hand
and kisses it. The Countess enters, and her appearance is characterized by a
motive from Tomsky’s ballad. On the Countess’ departure Herman distract-
edly repeats the entire section of the ballad relating to the secret of the three
cards but drives that recollection out of his mind and turns again to Liza;
the first theme of the duet appears once more, only instead of F major it is at
first in E major, and then again in F major. Then begins a modulating stretta
based on the first motive of the duet which ends in E major. This duet can
stand alongside the very strongest works of this kind; it is absolutely bound
to captivate the listener by its passionate quality [. . .]. The first section of the
drama comes to an end with the duet. The fates of the dramatis personae
are irrevocably determined, and all the rest is the logical, inevitable outcome
of what has so far occurred. Liza, having given herself wholeheartedly to
Herman, becomes his obedient slave, and the pressing idea which will drive
him mad and bring about the ruin of him, Liza and the Countess, has im-
printed itself on his soul. This act, which represents the crux of the drama,
forms a finished whole, and for that reason I have divided it from the re-
mainder. Here we meet all Mr Tchaikovsky’s finest qualities as an artist, his
wealth of melody, his immense mastery of technique and, finally, that healthy
realism which constitutes one of the most typical features of his talent and
bears far clearer and stronger witness to his kinship with Russian artists,
poets and novelists than any use of folksongs could do.
[The action of Acts II and III is recounted.]
The main function of an opera libretto is to furnish the composer with an
advantageous canvas of situations and scenes without those trivial details
which place heavy fetters on a composer. Beautiful verse and the presence
of strict metre are in general secondary matters. Poetic metre is not needed
and can be sensed in an opera only when there is symmetrical repetition of
musical phrases corresponding to the metre of the verse; in all other cases
there is no need for it because for the most part the breaking-down of the
phrases in rhythm and music demands a division of the text by logic rather
than rhythm. Modest Tchaikovsky has exploited this very successfully – an

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 Tchaikovsky

example is the superlative scene in the Countess’ bedroom, where Pushkin’s

text is preserved almost inviolate; not even the very best verses could have
replaced this speech unconstrained by metre. In fact, in Modest Tchaikovsky
we have almost the first Russian librettist who fully understands his job and
possesses sufficient talent to do it. He deserves a large measure of the credit
for the successful creation of such a work as Mr Tchaikovsky’s new opera.
The scene of the Countess’ death marks the opera’s climax as far as mu-
sic is concerned. The very beginning of the orchestral introduction gives a
complete picture of the scene’s atmosphere. Something threatening and irre-
sistible is heard; it is as if a heavy cloud has gathered over all the characters’
heads, a cloud bringing inevitable death, as if a terrible fate has already taken
charge of their lives. The whole of the music for the fourth scene forms an
entity which does not lend itself to description; it is a combination of beauty,
truth and expressiveness such as one rarely finds even in the works of mas-
ters of the very front rank. Even the secondary sections, such as the chorus
of hangers-on or the Countess’ little song borrowed from Grétry, are essen-
tial to the general colouring, and Herman’s impassioned entreaties, where
beauty contends with profundity, sincerity and truthfulness, are of striking
power.
The next scene, the fifth one, is also uncommonly powerful. In the music
of the entr’acte, that is the orchestral introduction, one can already hear
the sounds of a funeral chant interrupted in an unusually poetic manner by
a trumpet fanfare sounding the retreat. It is like a confrontation between
sepulchral gloom and a peaceful, clear reflection of life; its impact grips the
heart. It is heightened as the curtain rises when the chant from the funeral ser-
vice (a distant off-stage choir) becomes audible to Herman; Herman grows
faint under the heavy burden of reminiscences. The wind starts to howl, one
detects in the music the approach of something terrible, from beyond the
grave, the Countess’ motive is heard, and finally the ghost appears; over a
deathly stationary note accompanied by alternating mysterious harmonies,
the ghost utters its secret; Herman loses his senses from terror and involun-
tarily repeats the ghost’s words. The impression made by this scene was such
that not every listener could endure it while retaining his composure, a thrill
of horror seized many of them if not all.
After two such scenes the remaining two are not so powerfully disturbing.
The sixth scene, the one on the Winter Canal, is musically weaker than the
others. The final scene, set in the gaming-house, is very concise. The carefree
mood which reigns at the beginning changes at once on Herman’s arrival,
and one senses a dreadful dénouement approaching; Herman’s superb song
is like a final cry of desperation, and the heavy atmosphere is dissolved by

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his suicide, like a terrifying thunder-clap, after which comes the tranquillity
of all-forgiving, all-reconciling death.
It is still too early to deliver a general judgement on the music of The
Queen of Spades. One should allow the initial impression to subside, and
then one could analyze the work more accurately; one thing is certain – that
we are dealing here with a work of art which will come to occupy one of
the first places in the repertory of Russian music. Later, too, one will be able
to speak about details which will emerge more distinctly; for the moment,
everything is swallowed up in the general, uncommonly powerful impact.
[Performance and production were of the highest quality.]
For the time being Mr Tchaikovsky’s opera overshadows all other events
in musical life [. . .].

(h) G. A. Laroche: The First Symphony Concert of the

Musical Society on 16 October. Musical Chronicle in
Theatre Gazette, 22 October 1893, no. 18. Laroche 2,
pp. 159–61
The major item in the first concert of the Russian Musical Society, given [. . .]
to a full hall with Mr Tchaikovsky conducting, was the conductor’s new sym-
phony (no. 6, B minor, manuscript). [. . .] I approached the new symphony
with a sympathy formed in advance purely from the fact that it is simply no. 6,
and not The Giaour, not Cymbeline, and not Purgatory. Has this sympa-
thy remained with me after hearing the piece three times (at two rehearsals
and the concert)? It has in part increased, and in part decreased. In the new
work one must first of all draw a distinction between the material and the
form. The ‘material’, that is the melody and its contrapuntal development,
is magnificent everywhere. As regards melody, in the last few years a special
richness has opened up in Tchaikovsky, an inexhaustible abundance and a
passionate charm in his themes, and the new symphony is in this respect a
worthy adjunct to the entire period. From all points of view the contrapuntal
working glows with compressed energy and constant beauty; just as with the
fates of the characters in a skilfully constructed novel, so in the contrapuntal
sections of the B minor Symphony the fate of the themes constantly ‘intrigues’
you, and interest never flags. The form is somewhat enigmatic. The ‘second
subject’, i.e. the second theme of the first Allegro, takes the form of a short
independent Andante enclosed within but detached from the continuation
with uncommon firmness, with the aid of an often repeated cadence; after it,
comes a sort of dramatic seething, resembling those rhythmic and orchestral
devices used in operas to depict popular agitation, a crowd rushing in, etc.
Then begins what is known as the ‘development’, that is the contrapuntally
developed central section of the Allegro. The secondary section itself is more

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in the operatic than the symphonic style. I consider it my duty to add that
in my own observation in the Allegro third movement mutually alien ele-
ments converge and blend comparatively better perhaps [than in the opening
movement] simply because we have had time to hear both the first and sec-
ond themes. There remains nevertheless the idea of something alluring and of
rare beauty, but going beyond the framework of a symphony. In precisely the
same way, the concluding (fourth) movement of the symphony, an Adagio
instead of the customary Allegro or Presto, opens with a smooth melody in
the major and ends in the minor with a muffled morendo in the orchestra’s
lowest register, and seems to be accompanying something taking place on
the stage – the slow snuffing-out of the hero’s life, for example; likewise, here
too, for all the melody’s uncommon beauty, one detects a character which
is not symphonic but operatic. The same thing cannot be said of the two
central movements of the symphony, which in my opinion (in spite of all
the fine things in the first and last movements) constitute the pearls of the
score. In them music lives on her own resources alone and makes an en-
tirely aesthetic impression, not confusing and troubling the listener with the
notion of a [different] sphere combined with music or bordering on it. The
second movement is a species of Intermezzo in 54 , keeping to a middle way
between a fast and a slow tempo, based on a graceful, charming theme
(constructed on a rising major scale) and once again captivating us by
the inexhaustible pliancy and variety of its contrapuntal accompaniment.
The third movement belongs to that type of fast scherzo so popular in our
day and age where the main theme rushes along and is glimpsed only fleet-
ingly pianissimo and spiccato in the string section; the first example, if I am
not mistaken, was furnished by Beethoven in his Eroica Symphony. But here
we are dealing with a wholly new species or, to put it better, with a wholly new
and distinctive species indivisible from this widespread genus. The fast, light
theme of the Scherzo is combined with the theme of a carefree and dandified
march, whose 44 time makes up four bars of the first theme; in the subse-
quent development, which is lively, animated and bold, the march becomes
increasingly solid and powerful, attains increasing predominance and in the
end, after decisively overwhelming the flimsy opening theme, rings forth in a
magnificent fortissimo. The purely elemental process of gradual thickening
(like all the processes of mobile elements in the highest degree akin to music)
is presented here in a matching musical picture which is not only technically
brilliant but also full of genuine poetry. I cannot call to mind a single one of
Tchaikovsky’s compositions from among those I like best, which to a greater
extent combines originality of concept with artistry of execution, the dexter-
ity of the craftsman with the inspiration of the creator, and I suppose that the
time is not far off when the audience too, which reacted with respect but

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restraint to the new score in general, the Scherzo included, will understand
the beauty of it and place it alongside the composer’s most precious
pages . . .
[The audience is praised – for being silent during the performance.]
(i) E. K. Rozenov: Concert in aid of the Fund for Artists’
Widows and Orphans. News of the Day, 14 February 1896,
no. 4536. Rozenov, pp. 182–4
Emily Karlovich Rozenov (1861–1935), a musicologist, pianist and com-
poser, studied with Safonov, Laroche and Arensky and taught piano at
the Moscow Conservatoire between 1906 and 1916.

The concert in aid of the Fund for Artists’ Widows and Orphans which took
place on 11 February with Vasily Safonov conducting was attended by un-
common success. The programme was of great interest, and the performance
of all the pieces without exception was astonishingly good; seldom has one
left the hall of the Assembly [of the Nobility] with such a complete and vivid
impression as after that concert. [. . .] Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony made a
gripping, deeply tragic impression, startling in its crystal-clear, graphic qual-
ity and the true-to-life development of the idea embedded in it. There could
scarcely have been among those present an ignoramus or a musical sceptic
from among the devotees of Hanslick’s theories who did not understand that
music of that kind is written not for the sake of elegant forms and combina-
tions alone but for a definite idea fully acknowledged by its composer. Music
acts upon us by hints, by analogies drawn from her resources, of the phe-
nomena of life. Such an inspired selection of hints and analogies as is found
in the Sixth Symphony speaks to us with sufficient clarity. The mastery which
Tchaikovsky possessed in the final period of his work is staggering. He had
every resource at his service in perfect freedom, without the slightest tension,
as if no difficulty existed for him in making his choice. Thanks to this ease,
the technical side of composition, in itself astoundingly beautiful, rich and
varied, remains in the background when the impression is being perceived.
One even has no wish to divide up the whole in the normal aural fashion,
analyzing the make-up of the orchestral sonorities and musical forms, so
tightly are form and content united here in a single whole. Let us take just
the inspired development section of the first movement; it contains fugato
as well as orchestral imitation and progressions constructed on the main
theme; everything there is the purest thematic work, there is not a single
fortuitous note – everything follows from the data set forth in the exposi-
tion (the opening section in which a composition’s themes are expounded
in lucid succession). With a less experienced composer all these devices in-
hibit creativity and restrict the imagination. Here, the contrary is true: the

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development is one of the most irresistibly logical and stupendous moments

in the musical drama which unfolds in this movement, and all the forms
of technique mentioned above are obedient means of expressiveness in the
hands of the inspired composer. This very combination of perfection of form
with profundity and consistency of content is indeed the true task of musical
creativity; it is only when that condition is met that music attains the level
of true art rather than mere entertainment for the senses. Paltry is the work
lacking content which strives only for grace and symmetry in its sounding
forms. Based on physiological sensations of order, similarity, contrast and
harmonic combinations agreeable to the ear, its effect is a purely external one
which calls forth no vital ideas, even in arbitrary fantastic combinations, and
is therefore alien to our spiritual process of perception and leaves no trace in
our consciousness. On the other hand, a programmatic or conceptual work
is inartistic and ephemeral whose form is arbitrary, its images unexpected
and unmotivated, where everything is accidental, and therefore in the event
that it is without verbal explanations, it allows wholly arbitrary interpre-
tations. Such compositions arouse merely curiosity, and that a chance one,
or an ephemeral one. If those of us who defend this point of view began to
analyze attentively some musical work or other, then we would be able at
any rate to determine their aesthetic significance more accurately than can be
done under the influence of a simple impression. Unfortunately, the dimen-
sions of a newspaper article do not allow us to go into those details which
the assessment of compositions in terms of concepts and forms demands,
which in essence is the only thing which could provide any real possibility
of reliably understanding and writing a critique of compositions and perfor-
mances of them. Meanwhile, a work such as Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony
fully deserves the publication of individual critical studies of a scholarly or
aesthetic character, since it represents a splendid specimen of conceptual mu-
sical work – a specimen worthy of examination and capable of exerting no
little influence on the direction of a future Russian school of musical compo-
sition. We must hope that with the present-day blossoming of Russian music
a genuine critical assessment of it, which we lack at present, will not be long
in appearing. [The other items in the concert are mentioned briefly.]

41
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