For nationalism in music has two very different bearings. The concrete
elements of folk-song, rhythm and scale, as they are more apparent, are
far less important. The true significance lies in the motive of an
unexpressed national idea that presses irresistibly towards fulfilment.
Here is the main secret of the Russian achievement in modern music,--as
of other nations like the Finnish. It is the cause that counts. Though
Russian song has less striking traits than Hungarian or Spanish, it has
blossomed in a far richer harvest of noble works of art.
Facile, fluent, full of color, Tschaikowsky seems equipped less for
subjective than for lyric and dramatic utterance, as in his "Romeo and
Juliet" overture. In the "Manfred" Symphony we may see the most fitting
employment of his talent. Nor is it unlikely that the special
correspondence of treatment and subject may cause this symphony to
survive the others, may leave it long a rival of Schumann's "Manfred"
music.
With Tschaikowsky feeling is always highly stressed, never in a certain
natural poise. He quite lacks the noble restraint of the masters who, in
their symphonic lyrics, wonderfully suggest the still waters that run
deep.
Feeling with Tschaikowsky was frenzy, violent passion, so that with all
abandon there is a touch of the mechanical in his method. Emotion as the
content of highest art must be of greater depth and more quiet flow. And
it is part or a counterpart of an hysterical manner that it reacts to a
cold and impassive mood,--such as we feel in the Andante of the Fourth
Symphony.
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