Poor composer musical judgements

[terry]

I like Brahms but I suppose I know why his music was so uninteresting for Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky composed music in which every voice - even in accompaniament - could be heard as independent melody of some beauty. Brahms worked in completely different style. Some voices in his compositions works only in the complete score and taken separately are just unlistenable. I suppose Tchaikovsky heard music in absolutely linear way so he couldn't appreciate technique of german composer.

VERY INTERESTING analysis! From a technical but not difficult point of view! Now I really understand why I LOVE Tchay while I sometimes find Brahms (not his pieces in general, but many passages in particular) so... heavy! :
Go on!

[Roehre]

VERY INTERESTING analysis! From a technical but not difficult point of view! Now I really understand why I LOVE Tchay while I sometimes find Brahms (not his pieces in general, but many passages in particular) so... heavy! :
Go on!

Nice analysis, but in composing terms not correct. Brahms is a very linear composer. It is known that as soon as a work was presented to him, e.g. a piano-solo-piece, he would cover the inner voices, and just analyzing the melody against the bass-line. If these were not congruent in one way or another, the composer was in for harsh criticism. And all Brahms' own works are demonstrations of linear melodic thinking (Whether regularly or irregularly shaped, that was beside the point). The same btw applies to most Mozart: ignore Mozart's bass-line, and the music falls apart.
It was according to classical harmonies and construction that music should be judged in Brahms' opinion (and why he dismissed Bruckner's symphonies as symphonic pythons, but was far from negative regarding Wagner).

Tchaikovsky tried to show that he knew his trade (the finale of the Fifth is an excellent example of a composer who insists on showing off, even if that means the work might be in danger to become overstretched), but his musical mind was essentially non-classical: the musical material of the symphonies, the suites for orchestra and the ballets are to some extent interchangeable.
For a classically orientated composer (like Brahms, or in this case like Wagner for that matter) that's simply unthinkable.

Mahler is one of the first composers for whom all musical material could be used within the frame work of the symphony: military signals, great classical melodies, marches, folksongs and art songs; name it and Mahler used it so to speak.
His composing to some extent therefore combines the approach to musical material of Brahms with that of Tchaikovsky (and Wagner, and Bruckner, and with of course Beethoven as an important point of departure)

[Peter]

There you are - a PhD thesis for somebody - performances of Handel in 19th c. Russia!

From what I can discover at the RMS (Russian Musical Society) concerts there were occasional performances of arias from Handel's operas and although it is unlikely Tchaikovsky ever saw a full staged production, he seems to have made a distinction between Handel's oratorios, which in an article of 1872 he described as "dry and colourless" (except for the "Hallelujah" chorus in Messiah), and his operas, which, as he pointed out in that article, were written in an altogether different style.

[Marek Krukowski]

Nice analysis,

Analysis? Just an impression.

but in composing terms not correct. Brahms is a very linear composer. It is known that as soon as a work was presented to him, e.g. a piano-solo-piece, he would cover the inner voices, and just analyzing the melody against the bass-line. If these were not congruent in one way or another, the composer was in for harsh criticism.

But this is exactly what I wanted to say. For Brahms the congruency was the point and this is the diffrence.

(...) Tchaikovsky tried to show that he knew his trade (the finale of the Fifth is an excellent example of a composer who insists on showing off, even if that means the work might be in danger to become
overstretched), but his musical mind was essentially non-classical: the musical material of the symphonies, the suites for orchestra and the ballets are to some extent interchangeable.
For a classically orientated composer (like Brahms, or in this case like Wagner
for that matter) that's simply unthinkable.

Mahler is one of the first composers for whom all musical material could be used within the frame work of the symphony: military signals, great classical
melodies, marches, folksongs and art songs; name it and Mahler used it so to
speak.
His composing to some extent therefore combines the approach to musical
material of Brahms with that of Tchaikovsky (and Wagner, and Bruckner, and
with of course Beethoven as an important point of departure)

I'm afraid you use the term "classical" in a very Marxian sense (I mean Adolf Bernhard Marx of course) which for me could be defined in the way like this: something is as classical as it is similar to Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

In fact in the real classical era all musical material could be used and was used within the frame work of the symphony. Have you ever heard Eroica, Pastoral or the Eighth? And Beethoven was not an exepction and he was not so revolutionary as we believe. There are a lot of strange ideas in dozens of symphonies composed by less known composers - Ditters von Dittersdorf for example. Thinking that Mozart was in the very heart of the mainstream of music of the classical era is for me a mistake which originated in commonly used Marxian conception of the classical form.

On the other hand Tchaikovsky was extremely interested and succesful in studying and developing some elements of a classical style of Mozart type. For me some of his works could be described as real forerunners of a neoclassicism. And I don't mean The Rococo-Variations or Mozartiana Suite, I mean rather great parts of The Sleeping Beauty or sceness with The Countess in The Pique Dame. But his conception of symphony is other than that of Marxian classicism.

Paradoxically the greatest influence on Tchaikovsky's symphony form conception was probably the symphonic music of Schumann, a composer so important for Brahms. But they find their inspiration in completly diffrent aspects of Schumann's music.

I must say that for me comoposers are only listeners who can justly neglected music of the other composers. They work in their own aesthetics and have right to neglect other aesthetic and therefore other music. We who only listen or play we have duty to try to understand every kind of musical aesthetic and every kind of music.

[Roehre]

And your point is?

[Marek Krukowski]

And your point is?

Meaning.