It has that curious volubility and “mouthing” quality that sometimes gets into Tschaikowsky’s music; it is plausible and pretty; it suggests a writer who either cannot or dare not use the true tremendous word at the proper moment, and goes on delivering himself of journalistic stock-phrases which he knows will move those who would be left unmoved were the right word spoken.  There is nothing of this in the melody of the second movement.  Its ease is matched by its poignancy:  the very happy-go-lucky swing of it adds to its poignancy; and the continuation—­another instance of the untamed Slav under the influence of the most finished culture—­has a wild beauty, and at the same time communicates the emotion more clearly than speech could.  The mere fact that it is written in five-four time counts for little—­nothing is easier than to write in five-four time when once you have got the trick; the remarkable thing is the skill and tact with which Tschaikowsky has used precisely the best rhythm he could have chosen—­a free, often ambiguous, rhythm—­to express that particular shade of feeling.  The next movement is one of the most astounding ever conceived.  Beginning like an airy scherzo, presently a march rhythm is introduced, and before one has realised the state of affairs we are in the midst of a positive tornado of passion.  The first tunes then resume; but again they are dismissed, and it becomes apparent that the march theme is the real theme of the whole movement—­that all the others are intended simply to lead up to it, or to form a frame in which it is set.  It comes in again and again with ever greater and greater clamour, until it seems to overwhelm one altogether.  There is no real strength in it—­the effect is entirely the result of nervous energy, of sheer hysteria; but as an expression of an uncontrollable hysterical mood it stands alone in music.  It should be observed that even here Tschaikowsky’s instinctive tendency to cover the intensity of his mood with a pretence of carelessness had led him to put this enormous outburst into a rhythm that, otherwise used, would be irresistibly jolly.  The last movement, too, verges on the hysterical throughout.  It is full of the blackest melancholy and despondency, with occasional relapses into a tranquillity even more tragic; and the trombone passage near the end, introduced by a startling stroke on the gong, inevitably reminds one of the spirit of Mozart’s Requiem.

The whole of this paper might have been devoted to a discussion of the technical side of Tschaikowsky’s music, for the score of this symphony is one of the most interesting I know.  It is full of astonishing points, of ingenious dodges used not for their own sake, but to produce, as here they nearly always do, particular effects; and throughout, the part-writing, the texture of the music, is most masterly and far beyond anything Tschaikowsky achieved before.  For instance, the opening of the last movement has puzzled some good critics, for it is written in a