PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Piotr Tchaikovsky Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia. Died November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Selections from The Snow Maiden, Op. 12

Tchaikovsky began composing incidental music for Alexander Ostrovsky's play The Snow Maiden in March 1873 and completed the score on April 6. The first performance was given on May 23 at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. The orchestra for these selections calls for three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. The narration for this week’s performances of selections from The Snow Maiden was adapted from the Ostrovsky play by Gerard McBurney.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has performed selections from Tchaikovsky’s The Snow Maiden on subscription concerts only once previously, on January 5, 6, 7, and 10, 1995, at Orchestra Hall with Neeme Järvi conducting.

In 1873, when Tchaikovsky was about to begin work on a tone poem based on The Tempest, he was invited to provide music for a new version of the old Russian fairy tale Snegoruchka (The snow maiden), to be presented as a play with a prologue and four acts. He agreed as soon as he learned that his friend Alexander Ostrovsky had been hired to write the play.

“Spring had already begun,” the critic Nicolai Kashkin wrote, “and her approach always put Peter Ilyich in an enthusiastic, poetic mood. . . . The spring of 1873 was, I believe, quite early, so that the composition of the music to this ‘spring tale’ . . . coincided with the arrival of spring itself.” Tchaikovsky worked with “unusual” enthusiasm, according to Kashkin—even writing at night, not his habit—composing the Snow Maiden music in just three weeks. He completed the score on April 6, although Ostrovsky did not finish the play for another ten days. The production, which opened at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on May 23, was a success, although it never achieved the popularity of the opera Rimsky-Korsakov composed on Ostrovsky’s play less than a decade later. (This irked Tchaikovsky, and for many years he refused to see the opera.)

Tchaikovsky's complete incidental music calls for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. (Although more than half of the nineteen numbers call for voices, this week’s selections feature only instrumental pieces, omitting the chorus from the ending of the final march.) Tchaikovsky relies heavily on folk song, in spirit and often in actuality (scholars have identified a dozen folk tunes in the full score). The story of the snow maiden, the daughter of incompatible parents, the King of Winter and the Princess of the Spring, is part of Russian folklore; it is told in this week’s performances by our narrator, in a text that is drawn from Ostrovsky’s play.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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