Hate is never out of fashion. Both in the giving and the receiving, it can be a badge of distinction, a spur to achievement and an act of self-exploration. What do you really believe in – so much so that it can drive you into hatred of someone else or their ideas? How far is it possible to admire deeply or to discern aesthetically without also deciding that some things are ugly, or unacceptable, or evil? And, perhaps most importantly, how far is it ever possible to hate the sin while loving the sinner? These are not questions that can be definitively answered, but they are very much worth asking. Hate is a messy, fascinating business, and its history rewards even casual plundering.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky [1840—1893] has long been a favorite among hate-watchers for the frank passions of his diary, in which he unburdened his soul on matters including his homosexuality, his struggle to create an authentically Russian music and his loathing of certain Germans – and perhaps above all of his distinguished fellow composer, Johannes Brahms [1833—1897]. This passage, from October 1886, has always stuck in my mind for the dashing conviction of its summary:
I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius. Why, in comparison with him, Raff [Joseph Joachim Raff, 1822—1882] is a giant, not to speak of Rubinstein [Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein, 1829—1894] who is after all a live and important human being, while Brahms is chaotic and absolutely empty dried-up stuff.
One imagines Tchaikovsky bashing out half of Brahms’s oeuvre in a morning on the piano before deciding, definitively, that it lacked all merit. It was with perhaps a twinge of guilt, then, that he wrote on a visit to Germany in 1888, “Brahms took great pains to be nice to me.”
