At the moment, I’m listening to Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony. Tchaikovsky published his symphony in 1878, only a few years after Wagner completed the Cycle. Although Tchaikovsky seems to have been at best indifferent to Wagner’s music (according to the internets he once remarked: “After the last notes of Götterdämmerung I felt as though I had been let out of prison.”), I nevertheless am hearing an incredible amount of Wotan from Wagner’s Ring Cycle in the 1st movement of Tchaik’s 4th. There is the ominous, menacing, bombastic descending spear motif, and, later, also Wotan’s pensiveness and heart-rendedness in the strings. In the 2nd movement, the extensive horn solo calls to mind the archetypal horn solo in the Tuba Mirum of Mozart’s setting of the Requiem Mass. Tchaikovsky apparently defended Mozart from Wagner’s accusations that Mozart’s music was actually not as valuable as people had thought.

Later in the 2nd movement I hear some of what I directly associate with the pathos in the string chorale sections of Mahler’s symphonies. The younger Mahler of course was a huge fan of Tchaikovsky and conducting Wagner’s operas jump-started his career as an internationally-acclaimed conductor, which of course allowed him to develop the intimate orchestral knowledge with which he would endow his symphonies (though, according to the man himself, having to conduct at all was the bane of his existence).

I do not mean to draw any more meaning from these connections than the fact that I have gravitated to these composers in the past, and so naturally I would make more connections between them than between the music of other composers. But the fact that the connections exist is in my mind indisputable, and on this I trust my intuition. I enjoy hearing these connections on the same level as I enjoy learning of any connection between two things — the connection shows something common throughout the world; suddenly I know that a relationship in fact exists between aspects of the world which previously had seemed random and chaotic.