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t some composers should be put in jail for the villainies they smuggle into their score. This Tchaikovsky of yours--this Russian--was a wretch. He turned the prettiness and favor and noble tragedy of Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_ into a bawd's tale; a tale of brutal, vile lust; for such passion as he depicts is not love. He took _Hamlet_ and transformed him from a melancholy, a philosophizing Dane into a yelling man, a man of the steppes, soaked with _vodka_ and red-handed with butchery. Hamlet, forsooth! Those twelve strokes of the bell are the veriest melodrama. And _Francesca da Rimini_--who has not read of the gentle, lovelorn pair in Dante's priceless poem; and how they read no more from the pages of their book, their very glances glued with love? What doth your Tchaikovsky with this Old World tale? Alas! you know full well. He tears it limb from limb. He makes over the lovers into two monstrous Cossacks, who gibber and squeak at each other while reading some obscene volume. Why, they are too much interested in the pictures to think of love. Then their dead carcasses are whirled aloft on screaming flames of hell, and sent whizzing into a spiral eternity." "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
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