TCHAIKOVSKY
PIOTR TCHAIKOVSKY
(1840–1893)
London Philharmonic Orchestra – Symphony No 5
Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1996
While many of Tchaikovsky’s most famous pieces were the result of commissions, including the 1812 Overture and The Nutcracker (written, he claimed, without affection or enthusiasm), the symphonies were more subjective and autobiographical. Distinctive by their strong, memorable melodies, the dark hue of the harmonies and orchestration, and the frequent use of Russian folk melody they delineate his character and form a musical counterpoint to his turbulent, difficult life.
He was born on 7 May 1840 into a prosperous middle-class family, the second son of a mining engineer. Bright and sensitive from an early age, he was particularly close to his mother, Alexandra Andreyevna, and her death through cholera when he was only fourteen was a blow from which he never fully recovered. After a short spell as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice, he relinquished the post in order to concentrate full time on music and lodged with the pianist Nikolai Rubinstein in Moscow, teaching harmony at the Conservatoire. His 1st Symphony was greeted coldly, but the ‘Mighty Handful’ of nationalist composers based in St Petersburg approved of the work and their leader Balakirev encouraged him to complete his Romeo and Juliet Overture.
Other works, now famous, met with similar lack of appreciation at the time: Swan Lake, his first ballet, suffered from a poor first performance, and his teacher Anton Rubinstein declared his 1st Piano Concerto unplayable and vulgar. Although he was later to revise this opinion, the damage had already been done to the composer’s delicate psyche.
Then in 1876 Tchaikovsky began to correspond with the rich reclusive widow Nadezhda von Meck. Delighted with a commission he had produced, she agreed to finance him so long as they never met. This curious relationship suited both, and over the next fourteen years the letters they exchanged were filled with the kind of affectionate intimacy neither could have shared with another. In the first flush of creative activity this arrangement afforded, Tchaikovsky composed his 4th Symphony (“our symphony”) and the opera Eugene Onegin. But Fate again took a hand when, during the writing of the latter, he received an admiring letter from one of his pupils, Antonina Milyukova. Perhaps because he was so wrapped up with Tatyana in his opera, whose love for Onegin is brusquely rejected with tragic consequences, the composer let things go too far too quickly and ended up marrying her. It quickly proved a disaster and before he could extricate himself from the match, Tchaikovsky had suffered a mental breakdown and even attempted suicide.
For the next ten years he busked. With von Meck providing consistent financial support he had no need to push himself, so it is little wonder that he had scant interest in the commissions he undertook. But in time, with his works finding increasing popularity, he was able to pull himself together and began the series of conducting tours throughout Europe and the United States which were to prove so successful in his final years.
But a final blow still awaited him. In 1889, shortly after he had completed the ballet Sleeping Beauty and the 5th Symphony, Mme von Meck abruptly withdrew his annuity and put an end to their correspondence. Whether this was as a result of her supposed financial straits or simply the result of mental imbalance, Tchaikovsky was deeply hurt at the implication that their relationship was based purely on money. Neurotically sensitive to such reversals, he never fully got over the rebuff. On 6 November 1893, just a week after conducting the premiere of his 6th Symphony in St Petersburg, he was dead. He died, like his mother, of cholera, but whether the tainted water which killed him was taken by accident or as a deliberate act of suicide on the orders of a court of honour who wished to avert the scandal of his homosexuality, is a mystery to this day.
In the 5th Symphony the ‘theme of destiny’ formally united the work by reappearing in different forms. In the first movement it is played by the clarinet, in the third it becomes a waltz and in the fourth is undergoes further elaborations creating a satisfying cyclic structure to the whole. Its final appearance as a triumphant march symbolises, in the composer’s words, “complete submission to fate, or the unfathomable force of providence, which comes to the same thing”. The orchestration gives full play to Tchaikovsky’s predilection for low woodwinds and ‘antiphonal’ passages which alternate wind instruments and strings. Such powerful scoring draws the listener in from a position of mere observer to participant in the composer’s highly emotional and ultimately pessimistic outlook.
Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra – Symphony No 6 – ‘Pathétique’
Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1996
Tchaikovsky’s apparent suicide only nine days after conducting the premiere of his Symphonie Pathétique seemed a logical culmination of the sentiments expressed in the work. At the time, many thought that the music embodied a conscious premonition of death on Tchaikovsky’s part, and speculation on the circumstances surrounding his unhappy demise has abounded ever since. The contemporary explanation was that he died from cholera after drinking polluted water. A more recent theory was that he was impelled to take his own life to avoid a scandal involving a homosexual relationship between himself and a member of the aristocracy, and that he willingly complied since he himself was tortured by feelings of guilt over his sexual orientation.
Whatever the truth was, it certainly seems likely that guilt and social pressures regarding his sexuality exacerbated a long-established tendency to depression – his first nervous breakdown occurred in 1866. Tchaikovsky’s own words describing his gloomy world view leave us in no doubt: “All life is an alternation of painful reality with swiftly passing dreams and visions of happiness… there is no refuge.” These words were written about the time that he composed his 4th Symphony, and the uncharitable might say that there is a certain theatricality or self-indulgence about them. But his words on the Pathétique symphony have a starker existential quality: “I suffer not only from torments which cannot be put into words (there is one place in my symphony where they seem to be adequately expressed) but [also] an indefinable terror – though from what, the devil only knows.”
As the title Pathétique suggests, it was Tchaikovsky’s sufferings rather more than his terror which find expression in the 6th Symphony. He had originally intended calling it Programme Symphony (his brother Modeste suggested the present title – which, derived from the Russian pateticheskaya, strictly means ‘passionate’ or ‘emotional’ rather than anything which might imply pathos) and described it as being “penetrated with subjective sentiment”. The programme, however, was “of a kind which may remain an enigma to all: let them try to guess it.”
Such comments epitomise the difficulties of conveying specific meanings through so-called ‘programme music’: they are likely always to remain enigmatic. And in his earlier words on his sufferings at the time, the composer implies that music and music alone can express certain subjective states: any attempt to verbalise such natters would distort their meaning.
Tchaikovsky completed the full score of the Pathétique in the late summer of 1893 and dedicated it to his favourite nephew Vladimir Davidov (“Bob”). He wrote to Davidov: “I consider it the best and, especially, the most deeply felt of all my works.” After a student performance at the Moscow Conservatoire, Tchaikovsky took the symphony to St Petersburg, where the responses of orchestra, players and audiences to the work caused him bitter disappointment. A few days later he fell ill; by 6 November he was dead.
As in his Third and Fourth Symphonies, Tchaikovsky sets the prevailing mood in an introductory passage to the first movement: the bassoons in their lowest register weave a lugubrious theme. The mood is so close to that of the love theme from the Romeo and Juliet Overture that Tchaikovsky’s “programmatic intent” is only too clear. A sinuous counter-melody from flute and bassoon leads to an impassioned restatement of the love theme, which eventually dies away with t softest tones of the clarinet and bassoon. The development of these ideas begins with explosive violence. A hectic fugato (marked feroce) begins, dominated by restless, syncopated rhythms and extremes of dynamic range. The yearning theme once again emerges, and the movement ends with a solemn postlude for brass over pizzicato strings.
The second movement’s unusual 5/4 rhythm imparts to the graceful melodic line a somewhat sinister quality, a mood intensified in the darker central section where the plaintive sounds of the higher woodwind are accompanied by a relentlessly repeated pedal D in the lower instruments. This throbbing pedal note, so evocative of heartbreak, anticipates the last pages of the work, where Tchaikovsky uses pedal B natural to even more poignant effect.
It was a paradox of Tchaikovsky’s nature that he could shrug off his blackest moods and still find aspects of life to be celebrated, and the third movement of the Pathétique bursts out like a triumphant celebration of devil-may-care exuberance. It takes the form of a brilliant march, created from the repetition of a few melodic phrases which are skilfully varied by contrasts of orchestral colour. There is nothing forced about its mood of optimistic extroversion; so the reappearance, in the finale, of lamentation and hysteria comes as a shock.
The anguished opening phrases of the last movement, with their dissonance, and the alternate playing of each note of the melodic line by the 1st and 2nd violins, portray a mind prostrated by grief. The cry for help and consolation is eventually answered by a gentle theme in the major key with simple, hymn-like harmonies, marked con devozione. The theme is expanded on the full orchestra, rising in intensity like a hysterical prayer. The despairing phrases of the opening return, however, in a repeated and accelerating sequence, and the rise to another hysterical climax. The music grows weaker, as the consoling theme reappears transformed into a woeful minor key, and sink to the orchestral depths on the bassoons and cellos, while the double basses intone their sobbing note.
So ends a work in which Tchaikovsky went far beyond the familiar Romantic pose of “wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve”; for here, with the utmost truthfulness, he sums up the whole emotional crisis of ‘Romantic Agony’ and expresses in musical terms the spiritual hunger of the present century.
Concerto Grosso Frankfurt Orchestra – Mozartiana Suite
Eden Court, 1997
If nothing else, Tchaikovsky’s works reveal an intensely emotional and passionate nature, and on one level his Mozartiana Suite in G, op 61 could be said to represent an attempt to pull himself back from relentless self-exposure and find relief in a more formal, classical style. Certainly he idolised Mozart, and had been contemplating a suite derived from his works for some time. In the mid-1880s, with the centenary of Don Giovanni coming up, he decided to mark the occasion by finally getting down to it, and spent some days poring over various scores. But he was unable to make a final choice, and it was only the imminence of the anniversary date that forced him to bestir himself and make his selection.
The suite was finally composed over the summer of 1887, while Tchaikovsky was on holiday in the Caucasus. “I don’t know whether it’s the water, the air, or my lifestyle,” he wrote to friends, “(I’m walking a tremendous amount), bit up till now I haven’t felt the slightest impulse ‘to create’, so I’m doing practically nothing at all. I say ‘practically’ because I spend about an hour a day orchestrating some Mozart piano pieces which should form a suite by the end of the summer. I think it will have a great future, particularly abroad, due to the happy choice of pieces and its novelty (the past dressed up in modern form).” [Composer’s italics.]
The suite comprises orchestrations of Mozart’s Gigue in G, K574, the Minuet in D, K355, the motet for voices, strings and organ, Ave verum corpus, K618, and the variations on a theme of Gluck, ‘Unser dummer Pöbel meint’, K455. Three were keyboard works, and the Ave verum corpus was worked up from Liszt’s piano transcription which had an addended introduction and coda.
Begun on 29 June, the suite was finished by 9 August and Tchaikovsky himself conducted the premiere at a concert given by the Russian Musical Society in Moscow on 26 November. Although exhausted, he scored a great personal success – his greatest triumph to date, considering his late start as a conductor – and had to repeat the performance the following day. Also on the bill were Francesca da Rimini, the 1812 Overture, and various songs and romances. The St Petersburg premiere followed on 24 December, again to great acclaim, and again the third movement, or Preghiera as both Tchaikovsky and Liszt called it, was encored.
In his preface to the published score, Tchaikovsky suggested that the pieces he had chosen had been unjustly neglected, and he hoped his suite would bring them to a wider audience and encourage “the more frequent performance of these pearls of musical art which are modest in form, yet full of matchless marvels”.
Both the Gigue and the Minuet are late pieces and the Ave verum corpus even later, but all demonstrate Mozart’s masterful handling of delicate textures. Throughout, Tchaikovsky treats his material with the greatest respect, and any alterations or embellishments are carried out in the spirit of making these little-known works more accessible to a contemporary audience.
Some commentators now feel it was unnecessary for Tchaikovsky to set Liszt’s introduction and coda from his keyboard transcription of the third movement, and, more seriously, that it was a lapse of taste on Tchaikovsky’s part to smother the original’s ethereal scoring with a glutinous blanket of over-emphatic strings and harp. But on the whole the exercise was deemed a success, even though the work was not included among Tchaikovsky’s numbered suites until after his death.
St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra – Eugene Onegin: Polonaise
Waterfront Hall, Belfast, 1997
The three-act opera Eugene Onegin is the fifth of Tchaikovsky’s ten works in the form, and generally acknowledged to be his best. Based on Pushkin’s novel in verse, with a libretto by the composer and Konstantin Shilovsky, it was completed at San Remo in January, 1878. Although it was given a student performance in Moscow in 1879, it only received its professional premiere two years later at the Bolshoi.
The story concerns the love of Tatanya, a sensitive and unworldly young girl, for the cold and cynical Onegin. She declares her feelings in a letter to him, but he rejects her. At her birthday ball he flirts with her sister Olga, and is challenged to a duel by his friend Lensky. Lensky is killed and Onegin flees the country. Years later he returns to discover that Tatyana has married the elderly Prince Gremin. He now falls in love with her but she refuses to abandon her husband. Onegin is left despairing and alone.
It was while writing this opera that, in May 1876, Tchaikovsky received an admiring letter from one of his pupils, Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova. Perhaps identifying too closely with his heroine and the tragic consequences of her rejection by Onegin, the composer ended up marrying Antonina in July 1877. It quickly proved a disaster. She was physically repugnant to him and before he could extricate himself from the match, Tchaikovsky had suffered a mental breakdown and even attempted suicide. His patron Nadezhda von Meck, from whom he could keep no secrets, was only too pleased to provide funds for him to flee to the Caucasus. A divorce was only granted in 1881 when the birth of a child, not Tchaikovsky’s, proved Antonina’s adultery. After having several more children by various men, she spent the last twenty years of her life in an asylum.
In the aftermath of this said episode, Tchaikovsky assured Mme von Meck: “Henceforth every note that issues from my pen will be dedicated to you alone.”
Piano Concerto No 1
Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto, completed in 1874, is the work of a young man imbued with a clear sense of his creative talents and energies. Although he had already had his fair share of disappointments, notably the lukewarm reaction to his opera Vakula the Smith, the despair and frustration which were soon to be his constant companions had not yet gnawed their way into his soul.
Not that the concerto itself had a trouble-free passage into the world. On first hearing it, Tchaikovsky’s friend and colleague, the pianist Nikolai Rubinstein, called it “worthless, unpianistic, plagiaristic and tawdry”. Although he would later revise this view, the composer’s feelings were hurt and he offered the work elsewhere. Its first public performance took place in Boston, Massachusetts in 1875, with Hans von Bülow as the soloist.
The form in which we now know the work is the result of changes made after the composer had shown it to two other pianists, Edward Dannreuther and Alexander Silote. It was probably Silote who suggested the now famous layout of the massive piano chords at the opening so that they cover the whole keyboard.
Symphony No 5
While many of Tchaikovsky’s most famous pieces were, he claimed, written without affection or enthusiasm, the symphonies were more subjective and autobiographical. Distinctive by their strong melodies, the dark hue of the harmonies and orchestration, and the frequent use of Russian folk melody, they delineate his character and form a musical counterpoint to his turbulent troubled life.
In the 5th Symphony (1888) the ‘theme of destiny’ formally unites the work by reappearing in different forms. In the first movement it is played by the clarinet, in the third it becomes a waltz and in the fourth it undergoes further elaborations creating a satisfying cyclic structure to the whole. Its final appearance is a triumphant march which symbolises, in the composer’s words, “complete submission to fate, or the unfathomable force of providence, which come to the same thing”.
Variations on a Rococo Theme, op33
Composed in 1876, the Rococo Variations were written for the German cellist Fitzenhagen. While Tchaikovsky was abroad in 1878, Fitzenhagen made considerable alterations to the score – much to the composer’s annoyance – but it was the cellist’s version which Tchaikovsky finally agreed to have published in the autumn of 1889, maybe out of pity as by then Fitzenhagen was on his deathbed. Tchaikovsky’s original version, however, is far superior in structure.
Tchaikovsky achieves great variety by his treatment of rhythms. In Variation 3, for instance, the theme is transmuted into triple time; later he presents us with a Polonaise – closer in character to Beethoven’s Polonaise in C than to the Chopinesque kind. There is even a highly anachronistic variation in the rhythm of the Polka, the Bohemian dance which took Europe by storm in the mid-19th century.
While the variations are not purely a vehicle for the soloist’s self-advertisement, the solo part itself exploits every facet of the cellist’s art: legato phrasing, demisemiquaver runs ranging over nearly five octaves, trills, harmonics and triple stopping. As the music reaches the coda, all these skills are called into play in a dazzling exhibition of technical fireworks.
PS
I was already a huge fan of Tchaikovsky’s gift for melody – an EP of the 1812 Overture was one of the first records I ever bought myself – so in this instance it was a pleasure to get the chance to find out more than I had already gleaned from Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1971). (He’s a clever chap, Russell, and I value his work as a kind of easy introduction to the great composers. Too easy, in some cases, alas. The later cinema films like Mahler and Lisztomania had to contain, for commercial reasons I suppose, more tits and bums than the earlier TV bios like Elgar and Debussy that he directed for Monitor, but for low-brows like myself who were only just starting to get into the scene, these were seductive and exciting entertainments. The first time I saw Mahler I sat all the way through the closing credits because playing behind them were the final few minutes of the first movement of Mahler’s 6th Symphony, which would have turned me on to him even if I wasn’t already besotted by Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice which had deployed the famous Adagietto from the 5th Symphony with deleterious effect – deleterious to one’s make-up and macho image, I mean: I saw it first on a date and the poor girl had to practically carry me out, I was sobbing so hard.)
Tchaikovsky too would go on to tug at the heart strings. I already knew the Romeo and Juliet Overture, but I had yet to expose myself to the triumphant joys and piercing pains of the third and fourth movements of the 6th Symphony, and by the time I finally got round to the ‘Grand Pas de Deux’ from The Nutcracker, I was glad I was on my own the first time I heard it, because once again I was reduced to a snivelling, greasy spot.
How sad for him that he had to suffer so much while producing such wonderful art. It seems impertinent to argue that perhaps he might not have been so good if his life had not been so tortured, but on the other hand it’s only smart people who argue that; who are we to say he wouldn’t have been happier to lose the one as long as it also meant he was without the other? It’s an academic point at best. But it’s probably true that however unhappy we may be, given the choice to swap our troubles for those of others, most of us would prefer to stay as we are. The devil you know may not always be the most comfortable travelling companion, but at least you get used to the ways he can torment you, and do something about developing coping mechanisms.
Except I don’t believe it either, and you don’t have to be Tchaikovsky, or even saddled with one tenth of his talent, to want sometimes to wish for a quieter life.
