Tchaikovski and Liszt are often accused of "over wrought" emotionalism.
I think instead that the problem is reversed - our age, pampered and
protected enough to fight a war at 15,000 feet where the citizens under
arms were safer fighting than they would have been in civilian life - where
someone dying at 55 is thought to have had a tragically early death -
simply does not understand what Liszt and Tchaikovski were talking about,
and when forced to reach that level of intensity, fails.

Consider that early death is a pervasive theme of Romantic poetry, and a
subtext of a great deal of Enlightenment poetry.  The subject called forth
expression in the poetry of Keats, in the poetry of Tennyson.  It is the
subtext of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden", Chopin's funeral march and
a host of others.  In our own time there was an epidemic that swept with
a broad broom across the well to do and cultured - AIDS.  The best we
could do was The AIDs quilt, some low quality art songs, a third rate
symphony from Corigliano and an overly long banal play that is rapidly
falling into the mists of obscurity - and hundreds of incoherent screams
of rage.  In otherwords, we were able to stammer forth a crude documentary
of our feelings - because crude documentary is the art of a placid age.
It was completely incapable of dealing with emotions which people faced,
and with the aftermath - a large class of people who live in a sickliness
which would have been well understood by Chopin.

In the 19th century this was the stuff of tragedy, to us it is an
embarassment.

On one hand it is fortunate to live in a fortunate age - one would not wish
upon posters the life experiences to understand this art as viserally as it
was written.  However, to turn around and deride it, and especially to do
so in terms which are banal and flaccid - repeated thousands of times in
thousands of ways, is trivial.  Liszt and Tchaikovski will surivive Mr.
Satz' disdain of them, as they survived the disdain of a host of academic
modernists who derided their music in journals and lectures, and a host of
commentators in their own time.

Stirling S Newberry
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