The Vogue for Tchaikovski

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 544, 25 November 1949, Page 10

The Vogue for Tchaikovski

HY is the music of Tchaikovski so popular in broadcasting programmes? A glance through a recent Listener showed that during the week from Main National stations alone, there were 41 broadcast works by Russian composers, both early and modern. Tchaikovski easily headed the list with 12 performances. The previous week had offered 36 Russian works (nine by Tchaikovski) and the following week promised 34 (once again 10 by Tchaikovski). This generosity, of course, is simply an automatic assessment of the worth and interest of the works as music. It is an undeniable fact that the Slav race appears to have an inexhaustible supply of ability, often amounting to genius. In music, ,a steady stream of composers ever since the first "nationalist,’ Glinka, has compelled the attention and respect of the Western world because of the sincerity, patriotism, technique, originality, and sheer beauty of what they have written. ‘ Tchaikovski’s supreffie popularity is not, of course, proof of musical worth, but in spite of lapses into triviality there-remains in his best works an instinctive kinship with the. troubled minds, and the intense emotions of ordinary people, and an unsurpassed ability to render these feelings into music. One cannot simply dismiss the "Pathetic" by saying it is an abandonment to sickly self-pity; so many of his hearers have got much more out of it than that. Though we rightly regard Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, and such giants as superlative in their fields, perhaps the carivases they used are a little outsized for many people, and the portraits those of gods rather than men. It is the fashion in some circles to regard as of secondary or even little importance such men as Liszt, Berlioz, Tchaikovski, Strauss, Delius and Elgar. But music, however intellectually. written, is primarily an emotional art; is a composer teally of such little importance if he can affect deeply feelings that cannot yet quite respond to more sublimated works? é Tchaikovski always worried that he had written himself out, and for one who had to be at composition all the time that was purgatory, but what would have been his status as a composer had he mot written the last three symphonies? And why are some works of composers performed to satiety while others are practically never heard? In some of the latter cases an unfamiliar, perhaps racial, idiom is the reason, as in the Borodin No. 2 and the Chausson (both heard recently over the air here); sometimes difficulty of performance, us in the Beethoven Ninth and the Mahler "Symphony of a Thousand," and sometimes simply complete overshadowing by the composer’s greater works, as with the Bizet No. 1 (also broadcast here lately). This seems to be the. case in Tchaikovski’s first three symphonies. Musically they are interesting, but often reminiscent in themes and treatment. of

what was to be accomplished much more movingly in Nos, 4, 5, and 6, and in the tone-poems. His second symphony was broadcast recently from 2YA, 3YA, and 4YA, and his third from 2YA. Those who know only the more familiar Tchaikovski should take any future opportunity of hearing these tw@ works, and then reasoning out just why they have been so completely overshadowed. In the same programme with No. 3 was Borodin’s Steppes of*Central Asia, an illuminating contrast.-Is it that we instinctively realise in the latter an honesty of feeling, an absence of effect for .theatricality’s sake, and a compactness of expression that is missing in much of the No. 3? One might well listen, at all events, to this symphony, and muse on why Borodin’s No. 2, composed about the same time (1875-6), is so much more satisfying, expressive, and rightly esteemed a greater work of art. Great achievements must be sincere, though not all sincere ones aré great.

H.J.

F.