Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky
A drawing of the composer late in life.
Tschaikowsky
AND HIS ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
By LOUIS BIANCOLLI
NEW YORK
Grosset & Dunlap
PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1944, 1950
The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York
Printed in the United States of America
Foreword
Included in this little book are analyses and backgrounds of most of Tschaikowsky’s standard concert music. A short sketch of Tschaikowsky’s life precedes the section devoted to the orchestral music. Yet, the personal outlook and moods of Russia’s great composer are so inextricably bound up with his music, that actually the whole booklet is an account of his strangely tormented life. In the story of Tschaikowsky, life and art weave into one closely knit fabric. It is hoped that this simple narrative will aid music lovers to glimpse the great pathos and struggle behind the music of this sad and lonely man.
Tschaikowsky
AND HIS ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
Few great names in music spell as much magic to the average concert-goer as that of Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky. In almost every musical form will be found a work of his ranking high in popularity. And quite deservedly so. Tschaikowsky’s music brims with a warm humanity and stirring drama. The themes and feelings are easy to grasp. The personal, intimate note is so strong in this music that we find it natural, while listening to the Pathetic symphony or the Nutcracker ballet suite, for example, to share Tschaikowsky’s joys and sorrows. His music seems to take us into his confidence and show us the secret places of his heart. Although Tschaikowsky’s range of moods is wide—from the whimsical play of light fantasy to stormy outcries of anguish—essentially he was a melancholy man, in his music as in his life. Perhaps it is the genuineness of his music in conveying great pathos and suffering that has drawn millions to his symphonies and concertos. A frank sincerity and warmheartedness well from his music. The best of his melodies linger hauntingly in the mind and heart. So long as sincere feeling expressed in sincere artistic form can move the hearts of men, Tschaikowsky’s music will continue to hold a high place in the concert hall and opera house.
Only Beethoven and Mozart can rival Tschaikowsky in the number of compositions in various musical forms that stand out as repertory favorites. Tschaikowsky’s violin concerto is as much a “request” item as Beethoven’s. The Pathetic symphony ranks with the three or four enduring favorites of the repertory. Tschaikowsky’s Nutcracker ballet is probably the most popular suite of its kind in music. The opera, Eugene Onegin, a masterpiece worthy to stand beside some of the best Italian and German operas, is widely loved even outside Russia. Tschaikowsky’s Piano Concerto, or, at any rate, the big opening theme, is doubtless known to more people than all other piano concertos put together. The overture-fantasies, Romeo and Juliet and Francesca da Rimini, rank with the most popular in that form, and the Overture 1812 is an international hit with music-lovers of all ages and stages. Tschaikowsky’s song, None But the Lonely Heart, is better known to many music-lovers than most of the songs of Brahms and Schubert, and the great String Quartet contains a melody familiar to every follower of popular song trends. For, of all the classical composers, Tschaikowsky has been a veritable gold-mine as a lucrative source of themes for popular arrangement.
Yet, this sad and sensitive musical genius who knew so well how to reach the human soul surprisingly began his career as a clerk in the St. Petersburg Ministry of Justice. Like other great Russian composers, Tschaikowsky arrived at music by a circuitous route, almost by accident. Moussorgsky, one recalls, was long an officer in the Czar’s Army before he switched to music. And Borodin always regarded music as a secondary pursuit to his medical practice and his laboratory experiments in chemistry. Tschaikowsky was first a lawyer. But soon he found court action and the preparation of briefs tiresome and unsavory toil, so at twenty-one he returned to his first love, which was music.
Born on May 7, 1840, Tschaikowsky had begun to study piano at the age of seven. When he was ten, his father, a director of a foundry at Votinsk with next to no interest in music, took the family to St. Petersburg. There young Peter continued his musical studies, never, though, with any thought of preparing for a career in music. Yet, later, even while studying law, he went on playing the piano and taking part in the performances of a choral society. Although he amused friends by improvising on the piano, few detected any signs of creative genius. At twenty-one Tschaikowsky made his crucial break. He abandoned law, began earnestly to master musical theory, and resolved to risk poverty and starvation by devoting himself to music professionally. Today we can only applaud his decision. The repertory would be the poorer without his music. Besides, it is not likely that the law lost a great practitioner when Tschaikowsky bade it farewell.
His first important step was to enroll in the Russian Musical Society, later to become the St. Petersburg Conservatory. There Anton Rubinstein, the renowned pianist and composer, then teaching composition and orchestration, exerted a lasting influence on him. At that time Anton’s brother Nicholas was founding the Moscow Conservatory. Impressed by Tschaikowsky’s brilliant showing at the St. Petersburg school, he engaged him as instructor in harmony for the new Moscow organization. Tschaikowsky held the post for eleven years. The pay was scant, but there were weightier compensations. Nicholas Rubinstein gave the young man a room in his Moscow house, encouraged him to compose, introduced him around, and gave him sound advice on sundry matters. Best of all, he produced many of Tschaikowsky’s early compositions. Tschaikowsky, loyal and devoted in all his ties, never forgot his friend. After Rubinstein’s death, he dedicated his Trio, In Memory of a Great Artist, to the great man who had given him his real start in music and a creative life.
During his second year in the Moscow Conservatory Tschaikowsky fell madly in love with the French soprano Désirée Artôt, then touring Russia. While the indecisive Russian wasted time weighing the advantages and disadvantages of marriage, a Spanish baritone named Padilla came along, made violent love to Mlle. Artôt, and hurried her off to the altar before she could catch her breath and notify her Russian suitor. We nevertheless owe the fickle French lady a debt of gratitude. Without the emotional disturbance Tschaikowsky might not have been moved to write the Romeo and Juliet overture-fantasy. His first serious rebuff in love had at any rate paid dividends in art.
From then on Tschaikowsky wrote at a feverish pace. Whenever his duties at the Conservatory could spare him, he retired to his study and wrote symphonies, overtures, operas, chamber music, songs, and religious choruses. Sometimes a gnawing doubt in his own talents assailed him. To his friends he wrote voluminous letters complaining of the strong sense of inferiority bedevilling his work. There were attacks of bleak gloom and diffidence lasting weeks. Trips to the country or to Italy and Switzerland were often needed to restore his damaged nervous system and jarred self-confidence to normalcy. Unfavorable reviews stung him like wasps. And while Moscow often evidenced great enthusiasm for his music, St. Petersburg was harder to please. The press there was often virulent with abuse.
Then Tschaikowsky pinned great hopes on his operas Eugene Onegin and Pique Dame (“The Queen of Spades”). Both proved fiascos at their premières, though the public and press later revised their opinions drastically. Moreover, reports reached him of the cold reception accorded his Romeo and Juliet in Paris and the catcalls greeting his music in Vienna. And there was a music critic named Eduard Hanslick in Vienna who kept Tschaikowsky awake nights wondering what new critical blast was awaiting his latest Viennese première.
Ironically, America and England were the only two countries instantly attracted to Tschaikowsky’s music. There his prestige rose with each new symphony or overture. Cambridge University conferred an honorary doctor’s degree on him in 1893. Europe was soon to be won over, however. Despite an often hostile press, the music publics of France, Germany, and Austria began clamoring for more and more of his music, and conductors were forced to acquiesce. But to the end he remained a sorrowing and morose man, hypersensitive, even morbidly so, but almost always the soul of kindliness and punctilio. When, on the invitation of Walter Damrosch, Tschaikowsky came to America in 1891, he was widely acclaimed by public and press. While here he gave six concerts in all, four in New York, one in Baltimore and one in Philadelphia. In New York he was guest of honor on the programs of the New York Symphony Society celebrating the opening of the Music Hall, now Carnegie Hall. The festival lasted from May 5 to May 9, and Tschaikowsky was widely feted socially and professionally. He conducted several of his own works in the hall constructed largely from funds provided by the steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie.
The year 1877 is an important one in the chronicle of Tschaikowsky’s life. He made his one disastrous experiment in marriage with a romantic-minded young conservatory student named Antonina Miliukov. The girl had aroused his pity and alarm by her passionate avowals of love and equally passionate threats of suicide. The story is discussed below in my account of the Fourth Symphony, which grew partly out of that distressing episode. Suffice it here to note that the experience was so shattering to Tschaikowsky that he attempted to end his life by standing up to his neck at night in the freezing waters of the Neva River. Antonina eventually died in an insane asylum. Tschaikowsky formed another alliance that year, one far more profitable and far less nerve-wracking than his short tie with Mlle. Miliukov. This was his famous friendship with Nadezhka von Meck, a wealthy and cultivated widow. Out of profound admiration for his music and a probable romantic hope to become Mrs. Tschaikowsky, Mme. von Meck settled an annuity amounting to $3,000 on the destitute and ailing composer. The gift continued for thirteen years. Many letters about life, music, and people were exchanged between Tschaikowsky and his Lady Bountiful. The two never met, however. Tschaikowsky’s Fourth Symphony is dedicated to this remarkable woman, who was the most famous Fairy Godmother in music.
Although Tschaikowsky himself thought of the Pathetic symphony as his crowning masterpiece, the première on October 28, 1893, in St. Petersburg proved a disappointment. Tschaikowsky took it bitterly. Two weeks later, however, the tables were turned. Everybody acclaimed it warmly. But Tschaikowsky was not there to bow his acknowledgment. He had fallen victim to the cholera epidemic then raging in St. Petersburg. Though warned by the authorities, Tschaikowsky drank some unboiled water on November 2. Four days later he was dead. No symphony was more appropriately named than this melancholy masterpiece, the Pathetic symphony, the brooding phrases of which sound truly like the “swan song” of a tired and abysmally disillusioned man of genius.