The following paragraphs are extracted from Robin Holloway's essay, Sugar and Spice (whose subject is the music of Tchaikovsky).

He aspired to Verdi’s popular touch—the direct access to communal feeling, articulated by tight dramatic pacing, and plenty of good tunes—in as much as he aspired to be above all a composer of opera. Not, alas, the very un-Verdian kind of opera which he essayed but once, with complete success —intimate ‘scenes from provincial life’, at their heart two creatures of passion with whom he could wholly identify; but Grand Opera about Joan of Arc, etc. He didn’t have a chance with this, but the clearcut Italianate gestural character of the style certainly leaves audible traces.

Brahms he simply despised. Hearing the new Double Concerto in Hamburg, his contempt was boundless for the German pedantry that constructs a tune by sticking one fourth on top of another (forgetting that many of his own finest are just as systematic). Nor could he be expected to feel behind the apparent subservience to classical conventions a glow at the core not so different in kind from his own; nor to get through the apparently graceless scoring to appreciate its cross-hatching polyphonic subtleties.

Wagner he predictably loathed though he couldn’t afford to despise him. Emerging from Götterdämmerung was ‘like being let out of prison’. But Wagner’s mastery of a very different kind of orchestral sonority was not lost on his avid professional ear, and there are stretches in the ballets (notably the depiction of Beauty’s 100-year Sleep) where Wagner’s way with time and space shows that the prison-sentence has not been utterly irksome. And it is in comparison with Wagner that the particular character of Tchaikovsky’s genius can actually be more closely illuminated.

Wagner’s realm is mythology, saga, high romance; Tchaikovsky’s is gothic legend, classic fairy-tale and nurseryland fantasy. Wagner’s treatment of his stories is superhumanly vast and heiratic, his own texts are weighted with ideas, philosophies and interpretations, psychological exploration is everywhere latent, often explicit. Tchaikovsky’s is gestural and mimetic, decorative and formal; there are of course no words, neither concepts or declarations; depiction of character is by type, two-dimensional not in-depth, and interpretation is uncalled for. Wagner’s aims bring about his musical substance; his normal texture is a complex, omniscient interweave of nominating and commentating motifs, in themselves short and incomplete, then worked together in quasi-symphonic quasi-polyphonic sequential fantasia to produce unprecedented duration, with an underlying massiness of architecture beneath the improvisatory flux. Tchaikovsky’s aims bring about his musical substance, exactly, as with Wagner, commensurate with his compositional proclivities—melodic, formal, shapely, articulated, closed, virtually without polyphony and only in exceptional passages developmental. Wagner creates size by an ‘endless melody’ of musical prose, Tchaikovsky by effortless extension of the single melodic line—‘musical poetry’. Wagner’s motivic interweave is a means of bending time; the long reach into past and future brings them together with extraordinarily rich and powerful effect. Tchaikovsky’s time is a perpetual present in which listeners can always know their exact whereabouts. So he fills a whole evening by addition—an expansion of what Schumann (a German he really liked!) had achieved with the same kind of short complete song-and-dance-units in his larger piano-cycles. Tchaikovsky makes a mosaic, a cabinet of delights; Wagner an organism which can be exerpted only in painfully bleeding chunks. All in all, his medium is thick, Tchaikovsky’s thin (no criticism is intended of either; all this attempts only definition).

Then there is the question of momentum. Wagner’s is slow, even sluggish, gradually animating via long processes to a rich convulsive stream, oceanic and all-embracing, a rendition of the inner life. When physical he is primal, energetic, brutal—Mime hammering, Siegfried forging. True, the flower-maids waltz gracefully with Parsifal and the apprentices lustily with their Fräuleins; but the general poverty of body-motion in Wagner can be obliquely adduced from Chabrier’s burlesque quadrilles on themes from Tristan. Whereas Tchaikovsky of course is always utterly physical. The whole body, not just the feet, wants to move—he’s written the instructions, in the imperative and seductive mode! And while Wagner is metrically gallumphing and not very various, Tchaikovsky’s range is huge—The Sleeping Beauty in particular is a compendium of gestural and rhythmic models. This plentiful endowment is the reason he could fulfil the demand for tight choreographic lengths, and when, as often, he outran Petipa’s orders, the invention remains measured and shapely. Imagine Wagner attempting to fit into exact bar-counts obeying specific instructions as to tempos, type, even timbre! And finally, their way with expression itself—after all, their principal goal. Here it is Wagner who issues the imperatives—be elevated! be abased! be overwhelmed! Though Tchaikovsky undoubtedly exerts all his powers to excite in his listeners what excites him, the element of dispassion, even of impersonality, keeps a distance: an Invitation to the Dance, for delight, rather than a Summons to the Temple, for ritual purgation.

A direct comparison where myth and fairytale, thick and thin, actually converge, can help fix the connection. The motif of the 100-year slumber in The Sleeping Beauty—a virgin, protected from age and decay by supernatural suspension of time and from casual marauders by a thicket of prickles so that only the Chosen One can penetrate it to wake her with a kiss and claim her as his own—is a clear Double of Brünnhilde on her rock at the end of Die Walküre. (The only difference of storyline is that Brünnhilde is insured by flames not thorns, and that her sleep is a personal punishment.) Wagner’s handling is reckoned, rightly, to be sublime and deep.The ancient motif is placed as half-way climax in his saga; destiny, with long tangled antecedants and a future perilously uncertain between salvation and destruction, is poised in vast expectation. Its human dimension is equally charged. The God–Father, as one link only of the intricate enmeshings in the consequences of his actions and hopes for their resolution, must sacrifice the part of himself he most loves. The Goddess–Daughter, discovering her own will in an impulse towards compassion that disobeys his, must descend from her pedestal and become a Woman, admitting Life and Love their fullest scope. In the face of such manifest grandeur (which cries out for Archetypal Capitals) how can Tchaikovsky’s handling hold a candle?

In The Sleeping Beauty the same motif, so close to its composer’s inner desires, also makes at the heart of the work whose title it takes an extraordinary vastness and expectation. Life slumbers, waiting to be reborn into love. The apparatus of ballet—busy ceremonial, set-pieces of decorative display—is waived, to be re-assumed, after the Prince wakes her, with enhanced magnificence and a wealth of invention that even Tchaikovsky never surpassed. Neither before nor after the crucial event is there much plot; character is the merest type; the simplification and flatness are total. But the overall impact is not small. Poetic meaning and artistic expression are anything but impoverished. And there is an extra dimension, which gives this genre its raison d’être as singing does opera (including music-drama) and accounts for the flatness and simplification in character and story—the riveting beauty of complex and demanding motions executed with grace, exuberance, apparent ease, individual physical prowess and disciplined communal pattern-making that fuses into an indivisible unity with the music. If the genre had not been so hidebound and hung-up on divertissement, Tchaikovsky might have matched his three actual ballets with further works of comparable quality on themes that appealed to the positive side of his histrionic powers—Romeo and Juliet, Francesca da Rimini, Hamlet, Manfred, The Tempest for a start. If he had, his theatrical œuvre would be comparable to Wagner’s in weight as well as value.

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