"Bravo! bravo! great! I tell you he's great, your friend. Keep it up old man. Your description beats Dante and Tchaikovsky combined!" I was not to be lured from my theme, and, stopping only to take breath and a fresh dip of my beak into the Pilsner, I went on:
"His _Manfred_ is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on God." "Byron, too," murmured Jenkins. "Yes, Byron, another blasphemer. The six symphonies are caricatures of the symphonic form. Their themes are, for the most part, unfitted for treatment, and in each and every one the boor and the devil break out and dance with uncouth, lascivious gestures. This musical drunkenness; this eternal license; this want of repose, refinement, musical feeling--all these we are to believe make great music. I'll not admit it, gentlemen; I'll not admit it! The piano concerto--I only know one--with its fragmentary tunes; its dislocated, jaw-breaking rhythms, is ugly music; plain, ugly music. It is as if the composer were endeavoring to set to melody the consonants of his name. There's a name for you, Tchaikovsky! 'Shriekhoarsely' is more like it." There was more banging of steins, and I really thought Jenkins would go off in an apoplectic fit, he was laughing so.
"The songs are barbarous, the piano-solo pieces a muddle of confused difficulties and childish melodies. You call it naïveté. I call it puerility. I never saw a man that was less capable of developing a theme than Tchaikovsky. Compare him to Rubinstein and you insult that great master. Yet Rubinstein is neglected for the new man simply because, with your depraved taste, you must have lots of red pepper, high spices, rum, and an orchestral color that fairly blisters the eye. You call it color. I call it chromatic madness. Just watch this agile fellow. He lays hold on a subject, some Russian _volks_ melody. He gums it and bolts it before it is half chewed. He has not the logical charm of Beethoven--ah, what Jovian repose; what keen analysis! He has not the logic, minus the charm, of Brahms; he never smells of the pure, open air, like Dvořák--a milkman's composer; nor is Tchaikovsky master of the pictorial counterpoint of Wagner. All is froth and fury, oaths, grimaces, yelling, hallooing like drunken Kalmucks, and when he writes a slow movement it is with a pen dipped in molasses. I don't wish to be unjust to your 'modern music lord,' as some affected idiot calls him, but really, to make a god of a man who has not mastered his material and has nothing to offer his hearers but blasphemy, vulgarity, brutality, evil passions like hatred, concupiscence, horrid pride--indeed, all the seven deadly sins are mirrored in his scores--is too much for my nerves. Is this your god of modern music? If so, give me Wagner in preference. Wagner, thank the fates, is no hypocrite. He says out what he means, and he usually means something nasty. Tchaikovsky, on the contrary, taking advantage of the peculiar medium in which he works, tells the most awful, the most sickening, the most immoral stories; and if he had printed them in type he would have been knouted and exiled to Siberia. If----"