![]() ![]() ![]() Thus, in some of his earliest orchestral works Tchaikovsky paid tribute to this craze for music which illustrated a specific subject. Nevertheless, when Tchaikovsky was just starting out as a composer, it was very difficult not to fall under the sway of the new ideas proclaimed by Liszt and his followers - namely, that programme music, with its greater freedom of expression, was the way forward. In his obituary of Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Kashkin wrote in similar terms of his late friend's attitude to Liszt: "Pyotr Ilyich could not stand bombast in music, and that is why he did not rate Liszt particularly highly". He is the complete opposite of Schumann, whose awesome, mighty creative force was mismatched with a greyish, colourless exposition of the musical ideas. However, Liszt's works as such leave me cold: poetic intentions predominate in them over real creative force, colouring over draughtsmanship - in short, despite all their effective packaging, they are marred by an emptiness of inner content. It was impossible not to be moved by the sight of this great old man, who was touched and shaken by the ovations which the enthusiastic Italians gave him. Liszt himself was present at this concert. The programme was drawn up exclusively from his works. The day before yesterday I was at a gala concert in honour of the 70-year-old Liszt. He made this clear in a letter to Nadezhda von Meck from Rome, shortly after attending a concert in Liszt's honour in December 1881: More importantly, however, Liszt's music was deficient in substance as far as Tchaikovsky was concerned. One reason for this distrust towards Liszt may have been his vigorous campaigning for the 'new German school of music', as all such proselytizing in the name of new and radical principles repelled Tchaikovsky's nature (this also partly explains his ambivalence towards Wagner). It was only much later that he came to love the Faust-Symphonie, and for the sake of impartiality it is worth adding that Liszt's symphonic poems, which enthralled a whole generation of Russian musicians, exerted but an ephemeral and external influence on the style of his own compositions". ![]() Laroche himself would emphasize, when recalling his late friend's musical sympathies, how "Pyotr Ilyich came slowly, waveringly, and distrustfully to Liszt Of the symphonic poems only Orfeo roused any real enthusiasm during his time at the Conservatory. 4.1 In Tchaikovsky's Music Review ArticlesĪlthough Liszt - like Berlioz, Meyerbeer, and to some extent Wagner - was one of the 'forbidden' modern composers whose works Tchaikovsky and Herman Laroche would play through as students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, in defiance of the classical precepts of their teachers, it seems that Tchaikovsky never really warmed to Liszt's music.3.1 In Tchaikovsky's Music Review Articles.2 Tchaikovsky's Arrangements of Works by Liszt.
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