TCHAIKOVSKY EDITION Liner notes and sung texts Liner notes A RICH, HUMANE LEGACY: THE MUSIC OF PYOTR ILYICH of Mozart’s spirit that he later paid homage in so many works TCHAIKOVSKY which turned out to be neo‐Classical avant la lettre. As Julian Barnes so elegantly demonstrated in his novel Flaubert’s Parrot, you can provide a number of selective, conflicting Even this is to limit the sheer encyclopaedic breadth of biographies around a great creative artist’s life, and any one of Tchaikovsky’s composing genius. He wrote in every medium them will be true. By those standards, one could counter Harold conceivable at the time, and if not every opus can possibly be at C. Schonberg’s thumbnail sketch of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky as ‘a his highest level of inspiration, there are masterpieces in each nervous, hypochondriacal, unhappy man – unhappy at home, genre: opera, song, symphonic music, occasion‐pieces (which unhappy away from home’, with a portrait of the composer as an includes the ‘1812 Overture’ – much‐maligned, but does what it older man: confident, healthy, a keen traveller, a generous spirit says on the tin), chamber works and choral settings of the who had come to terms with his demons even if they occasionally Russian Orthodox service, which it was then regarded as popped up to haunt him, and a lover of the Russian landscape pioneering to even attempt to promote. who was very much at peace with the natural beauty of the country surroundings he had chosen as his dwelling. His first fully fledged steps in composition contradict one perceived dichotomy: between his association with the Neither image is, of course, the whole story, and it is only slowly Germanically motivated founder‐brothers of Russia’s two that the public is learning, thanks to a wider retrospective on academic institutions – the St Petersburg Conservatoire founded Tchaikovsky’s genius in the round, to balance the tabloidised first by Anton Rubinstein in 1862, and its Moscow counterpart portrait with the less sensationalised second. Perhaps it was his instigated four years later by sibling Nikolai – and the antagonistic friend, the critic Herman Laroche, who summed up most nationalists or ‘free school’ of Russian music under Mily Balakirev. eloquently shortly after the premiere of his most comprehensive It was as if Tchaikovsky, one of the first Russian musicans to gain good‐and‐evil score, Sleeping Beauty: a formal education at the St Petersburg institution once he had decided he was not cut out to be the civil servant of his initial An elegist by nature, inclined to melancholy, and even a certain training, was destined forever to have ‘westerniser’ branded on despair, he has shown in those kinds of composition officially his forehead while the members of the circle gathered around labelled ‘serious’ a seriousness of another kind, a seriousness of Balakirev and known as the ‘mighty little heap’ (moguchaya thought, a frequent sadness and melancholy, not infrequently a kuchka) – Rimsky‐Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin and Cesar Cui – nagging feeling of spiritual pain, and this, if one may so express it, remained the torchbearers of the Slavic tradition. minor [key] part of his being … has been more grasped and understood. But alongside this there is another Tchaikovsky: nice, Tchaikovsky himself eloquently tried to clear up the journalistic happy, brimming with health, inclined to humour. black and white in this perception as late as 1892, when Rimsky‐ Korsakov remained the only supposed ‘competition’, along with a So there are two lines in his music. One runs from the doom‐ younger generation which included Glazunov and Lyadov: laden 1864 overture to Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Storm, a tale of persecution‐mania better known to us through Janácek’s operatic According to the accepted view of the Russian musical public, I incarnation of its heroine Katya Kabanova, to the ‘Pathétique’ belong to that party which is hostile to the Russian composer Symphony and the very last song of 1893, ‘Again, as before, whom I love and admire more than any other, Rimsky‐Korsakov. alone’. The other takes us from the early miniatures and He is the finest ornament of the ‘New Russian School’, but I nationalist flourishing to the exquisite delight of The Nutcracker belong to the old, retrograde school. Why? Rimsky‐Korsakov has in 1891 and the 18 piano pieces of the final year. been subject to the influences of his time to a greater or lesser extent, and so have I … In short, despite all the differences of our There is also the necessary counterbalance that so many musical natures, we are, it would seem, travelling along the same Romantic masters found healing: the refuge of Mozart’s genius. road; and, for my part, I am proud to have such a companion on As a child raised in Votkinsk, 600 miles east of Moscow, but the journey. And yet I am supposed to belong to the party which is regularly taken to see operas in St Petersburg, where he was soon opposed to Rimsky‐Korsakov. There is a strange misunderstanding to settle, Tchaikovsky found that Don Giovanni ‘was the first here which has had, and still has, regrettable consequences … it music to have a really shattering effect on me’. In fact it was the accentuates the extremes at both ends and ultimately it prettier side of this multifarious masterpiece which he initially compromises us, the musicians, in the eyes of future generations. encountered – Zerlina’s ‘Batti, batti’ and ‘Vedrai, carino’ mechanically reproduced on the home orchestrion, a kind of By the time he wrote that, Tchaikovsky was pursuing his own portable organ which also played Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. path. But in the 1860s and early 1870s, he was proud to be But Mozart was the one he loved, and it was to the brighter side associated with the ‘nationalists’. Most famously, he played 94650 Tchaikovsky Edition 1 through the finale of his Second Symphony, based on a Ukrainian What gives the musical narrative its extraordinary charge, quite folk song, ‘The Crane’ at a soirée chez Rimsky‐Korsakov, ‘and the apart from the string of distinguished variations and especially assembled company nearly tore me to shreds in their rapture’. the cornucopia of waltzes, is the doomed love of the heroine Little wonder: the variation technique as applied to a simple Odette and Prince Sigmund. Such literary images of Tchaikovsky’s traditional melody dated back to Kamarinskaya, a seminal piece own frustrated feelings had already found their outlet in the by the founding father of a Russian tradition, Mikhail Glinka, poignant violas‐and‐cor‐anglais love theme of Romeo and Juliet, which Tchaikovsky feted in the immortal remark that all Russian and were about to flourish again in the tempest‐tossed tone music was in it ‘just as the oak is in the acorn’. poem Francesca da Rimini – a work which, the composer admitted, showed the influence of his visit to Bayreuth to write Folk themes, or the composer’s own version of them, are as about the first performances of Der Ring des Nibelungen in spite abundant in Tchaikovsky’s early music as they are in Mussorgsky. of his antipathy to Wagner’s subject matter. The Rubinsteins were none too supportive of the First Symphony, which caused Tchaikovsky so much stress and nearly led to a Though Tchaikovsky was not a frustrated homosexual – he hardly breakdown as he burned the candles at both ends to finish it in needed to repress his sex drive given the fairly high profile of 1866; but the composer’s judgement in 1883 that ‘it has more what we would now call the ‘gay scene’ in Russian artistic circles substance and is better than many of my other mature works’ is – the sense of unquenchable yearning in so many of his greatest reasonably sound. The young Prokofiev, almost the same age themes can partly be explained in an elliptical conversation with when he came to know the work as Tchaikovsky was when he the woman who became his patroness in the late 1870s, composed it, exclaimed in his diary for January 1916 ‘what a Nadezhda von Meck. When she asked him if he had known ‘non‐ delight the first movement is!’. Platonic love’, his answer was ‘yes and no’. He clarified eloquently: Perhaps the second is even more original. Despite the folk song that is interestingly treated in the finale, it’s the spirit of Russia If we put the question in a different way and ask whether I have we hear in the Adagio cantabile, Tchaikovsky’s first great melody, known complete happiness in love, then the answer is No, no and which is truly remarkable. This is endless song, launched by oboe no again. In any case the question is answered in my music. If you with flute arabesques and reaching its climax in fullthroated were to ask me whether I understand the full force, the unison from the four horns, which embraces the familiar immeasurable power of this feeling, I would answer Yes, yes and melancholy contours of the folk tradition. And although the first yes again and I would say yet again that my repeated efforts to total masterpiece, the fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet, express in music the torments and, at the same time, the bliss of contained nothing Russian about it in its first version of 1869, it love have themselves been efforts lovingly made. was thanks to the guidance of Balakirev himself that Friar Laurence’s opening music changed from a placid benediction to a Art and life became precipitously intertwined in 1877, the crisis Russian orthodox hymn (though Liszt’s chorales also seem to year of Tchaikovsky’s life.