The Tchaikowski Festival, held recently by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, offered concrete demonstration of the continued popularity of Tchaikowski. For two weeks the orchestra featured his music, and for two weeks it played to capacity houses. In the face of evidence like this, one begins to doubt whether the supposed reaction against Tchaikowski, a current byword, has any meaning. If there was a reaction, it probably never did cut very deep, but stayed up in the rarefied atmosphere of the musical literati. Sophisticates talked and theorists argued, and the public went right on listening. Even reducing Tchaikowski's melodic appeal to its lowest common denominator by adding tawdry lyrics and the cliches of jazz has not dimmed popular enthusiasm.

The real basis for disgust with Tchaikowski among many music lovers has little to do with the music itself, but a great deal to do with the way it is played. It is so universally cheapened in the cannonball these days that an accurate performance is become a curiosity. Conductors think that to interpret Tchaikowski means whipping themselves up into a fine poetic frenzy, and loading the music with trite sentimentality. As a result it has sounded cheap and sugar-coated, has rung sour on men's ears, and turned them to music less easily perverted by a conductor's bad taste. It is all very well to invoke the old formulate and say that Tchaikowski wrung sublimity from an anguished soul. But if for no other reason than this must his music be played with the utmost restraint. Music so thoroughly and unashamedly emotional in character can ill afford the lily-gilding to which conductors subject it. Must every shadow of subtlety be dragged out, and nothing at all left to the listener's imagination?

In the same way, we like better a portrayal of Hamlet which understates the passion in the lines. Then we feel the passion and emotion rising in us from the force of the language itself. If you heard at any time Stokowski's recording of the Tchaikowski Fifth Symphony, you heard a rendition which for all its treacly sweetness might have come from Guy Lombardo as a sample of the "sweetest music this side of heaven." If you heard Koussevitzky's version last Saturday night at Symphony Hall, you listened to a performance clipped and almost terse, which bound together the loose ends of Tchaikowski's orchestration and made the entire symphony an unforgettably dramatic thing. Stokowski's prettifying turns a symphony, with its connotations of logic and coherence, into a series of lush effects. Only the most straightforward kind of treatment can bring out half the greatness in a Tchaikowski symphony, the balance and the color and the drama, and the clarity of motion, which make Brahms's symphonies sound like academic exercises.