completely new kind of eloquence introduced into the world of music in
the third movement--the Scherzo-March--of the "Pathetic," or of the
unparalleled poignancy of expression in the Finale. The fifth is a fine
picturesque work, chiefly interesting for the glimpse that it gives us
of those exercises by which the genius destined to produce No. 6
strengthened itself. We hear many of the same orchestral effects, such
as the frequent use of divided lower strings and the prominence of
bassoon parts. The figuration in the Valse, and again in the Finale,
also affords a faint premonition of the marvels that enthral us in the
latter work. But, before any comparison of the two is really possible at
all, one must knock off the last movement of the "Pathetic" and take it
as ending with the March, as the composer originally intended it to end.
[Sidenote: ="Pathetic" Symphony.=
_November 22, 1901._]
"Eighth time at these concerts," says last night's programme, in
reference to the great Tchaïkovsky Symphony, which is only eight years
old. The performances in London are to be numbered by dozens, and
whenever genuine orchestral concerts are given in this country the
swan-song of the late Russian master has probably been heard more often
than any other symphonic work. Let us not be in too great a hurry to
protest against this state of things. The enormous audience of yesterday
evening--much the largest of the present season so far--suggests that
the public have not lost interest in the Symphony. Nor do we dissent
from the views of the public in this respect. There is astounding
potency in the charm of the work and in the appeal that it makes to the
imagination. For some time past we have been preoccupied with the notion
that it forms a sort of pendant to Dvoràk's "New World" Symphony.
Dvoràk has caught in his music the breezy, hopeful, democratic,
optimistic, and free-thinking spirit of American life, with its upper
side of furious go-ahead civilisation, and its under side of primitive
humanity (Negroes and Red Indians) in which energy of feeling is out of
all proportion to intellectual faculty. Dvoràk's slow movement is
undoubtedly a hymn of such primitive humanity, with an undercurrent of
meditation on the prairie by night, in which the movements of sap and
the germination of seeds within the bosom of inexhaustibly fertile
nature become, as it were, audible. It is something like the poetry that
Walt Whitman would have written had he been a much better poet. In an
analogous manner Tchaïkovsky has caught up and fixed in his "Symphonie
Pathétique" the soul of modern Russia. Just as the American Symphony is
breezy, democratic, optimistic, and free-thinking, so the Russian is
languorous and oppressed, aristocratic, pessimistic, and hierarchic. The
absence of any slow movement, except the dirge at the end, is intensely
characteristic. The composer has no hymn of thanksgiving or serenely
contemplative interlude to give us, but only something with the perfumed
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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