Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Jonyungk (talk | contribs) at 04:39, 3 September 2007 (→Russian versus Western: Changed heading to "Musical style." Made "Russian versus Western " a sub-head.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Pyotr (Peter) Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Template:Lang-ru, Pjotr Il’ič Čajkovskij; listen) ( May 7 [O.S. April 25] 1840 – November 6 [O.S. October 25] 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic era. While not part of the nationalistic music group "The Russian Five", Tchaikovsky wrote music now known and loved for its distinctly Russian character, rich harmonies and stirring melodies. His works, however, are much more western than those of his Russian contemporaries as he effectively uses international elements in addition to national folk melodies.

As biographer Anthony Holden maintains, no indigenous tradition of Russian music existed before Tchaikovsky's birth in 1840 other than folk tunes and a cappella music for the Russian Orthodox Church. Twenty years after Tchaikovsky's death, in 1913, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring erupted onto the musical scene, signalling Russia's arrival into 20th century music. Between these two very different worlds Tchaikovsky's music became the sole bridge.

Tchaikovsky was perhaps the first Russian composer to think seriously about his country's place in European musical culture. As he wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, from Paris, "How pleasant it is to be convinced firsthand of the success of our literature in France. Every book étalage displays translations of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky.... The newspapers are constantly printing rapturous articles about one or another of these writers. Perhaps such a time will come for Russian music as well!"

With this in mind, Tchaikovsky became the first Russian composer to personally acquaint foreign audiences with his own works, as well as those of other Russian composers, after conquering an initial fear of conducting. He also formed close business and personal ties with many of the leading musicians of Europe and the United States. For Russians, this was all something new and unusual.

Life

Childhood

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk, a small town in present-day Udmurtia (at the time the Vyatka Guberniya under Imperial Russia). He was the son of Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, a mining engineer in the government mines, and the second of his three wives, Alexandra Andreyevna Assier, a Russian woman of French ancestry. He was the older brother (by some ten years) of the dramatist, librettist, and translator Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Tchaikovsky began piano lessons at age five with a local woman, Mariya Palchikova, and within three years could read music as well as his teacher. Another person to whom he became musically indebted was a Polish amateur pianist named Maszewski, whose skill in performing Chopin mazurkas was considered outstanding. Tchaikovsky prepared two Chopin mazurkas for one of the Pole's visits, impressing Maszewski enough for the Pole to bestow a kiss upon him.

In 1850, Tchaikovsky was enrolled in the preparatory class for the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg. He would graduate from the school in 1859, obtaining an excellent general education. Though music was not considered a high priority on the curriculum, Tchaikovsky was taken with classmates on regular visits to the theater and the opera. He was thus able to better know the work of Rossini, Bellini, Verdi and Mozart. The only music instruction he received at school was some piano tuition from Franz Becker, a piano manufacturer who made occasional visits as a token music teacher.

In the midst of his studies, in June 1854, his mother died of cholera. The 14-year-old Tchaikovsky was devastated, and for two years could not write about his loss. He reacted by turning to music. Within a month of her death, he was making his first serious efforts at composition.

Tchaikovsky's father indulged his interest in music, funding studies with Rudolph Kündinger, a well-known piano teacher from Nuremberg, beginning in 1855. But when Tchaikovsky's father consulted Kündinger about prospects for a musical career for his son, the answer was not encouraging. Tchaikovsky, Kündinger wrote, possessed a good ear and memory plus a talent for improvisation. Otherwise, nothing suggested a potential composer or even a fine performer. Tchaikovsky was told to finish his course work, then try for a post in the Ministry of Justice.

Bureaucrat and music student

Tchaikovsky graduated on May 25, 1859 with the rank of titular counselor, the lowest rung of the civil service ladder. On June 15, the Ministry of Justice appointed him. Six months later the Ministry made him a junior assistant to his department and a senior assistant two months after that, where he remained.

Modest Tchaikovsky writes that " career was uncomplicated", yet he also suspected that Tchaikovsky's superiors suffered a good deal. Tchaikovsky's general performance in school had degenerated into competent mediocrity. While he had been well liked by staff and fellow students alike, as one school friend phrased it, "it needed all the exceptional, ineffable charm of his personality to make you forget Tchaikovsky's absent-mindedness, carelessness and slovenliness."Tchaikovsky, M., 98. As quoted in Brown. Tchaikovsky made the minimum effort necessary to keep his job. He showed no real interest in his new profession or much else other than his social life—a busy one for someone who was basically shy and retiring.

Nevertheless, nearing his 21st birthday and three years in civil service, Tchaikovsky still considered a career in music. He wrote to his sister Sasha, "At supper my musical talent was discussed. Papa assures me that it isn't too late for me to become a professional musician. It would be splendid if that were so—but the point is this: if there is talent in me, it is still most likely that's impossible to develop it by now. They've made a civil servant out of me—and a bad one at that. I try to improve the best I can, to do my job more seriously—and suddenly at the same time I am studying thorough-bass..."

After a trip to Western Europe, translating for an engineering friend of his father's, Tchaikovsky started studying music in earnest on his off-hours. He also played piano, eight hands, at a friend's house, learning much of the standard musical literature.

Modest notes the change wrought by his brother's new, serious preoccupation with music:

I can attribute to this period two striking discoveries: first, that brother Pyotr and work were two comparable concepts, and second, that besides pleasant and interesting music, there existed also an uncommonly unpleasant and boring kind which was much more important than the former. I remember perfectly my brother's relentless playing for several hours on end, not of operas and the melodious pieces pieces I liked so much, but of certain abominable preludes and fugues which were beyond my comprehension.... My surprise was boundless when he explained to me that he was "solving problems." It seemed strangely absurd to me that such a nice entertainment as music had something in common with hateful mathematics. At the same time I learned that Beethoven was not such a bore as I had thought, because his symphonies, which Pyotr began to perform as piano duets with various companions from the courses at the Mikhailovsky Palace, not only pleased me, but one of them, the fifth, straightway delighted me.

The Mikhailovsky Palace was where music classes were held by the Russian Musical Society (RMS). Tchaikovsky learned of these classes purely by accident. According to Tchaikovsky's friend Nikolay Kashkin, Tchaikovsky enjoyed a friendly rivalry with a music-loving cousin, an officer in the Horse Grenadiers. This cousin boasted one day that he could make the transition from one key to any other in no more than three chords. Tchaikovsky took up this challenge and lost. His cousin told him that he had learned to do this at the RMS classes.

The RMS tutor in music theory, Nikolai Zaremba, held conservative musical views but imposed the discipline Tchaikovsky needed. The following year, Zaremba joined the faculty of the new St Petersburg Conservatory. Tchaikovsky followed his teacher and enrolled, but did not give up his post at the ministry until his father consented to support him. From 1862 to 1865, Tchaikovsky studied harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Zaremba, and orchestration and composition under director and founder Anton Rubinstein.

After Tchaikovsky graduated, Rubinstein's younger brother Nikolai asked him to become professor of harmony, composition, and music history at the then-opening Moscow Conservatory. He accepted, as his father had retired and lost his property.

Tchaikovsky and the Five

As Tchaikovsky studied with Zaremba, the critic Vladimir Stasov and the composer Mily Balakirev formed a nationalistic school of music, recruiting what would be known as The Russian Five in St. Petersburg. As he became Anton Rubinstein's best known student, Tchaikovsky was also seen as representing the conservative opposition—a natural target especially for Cesar Cui's scathing reviews. However, when Rubinstein exited the St. Petersburg musical scene in 1867, Tchaikovsky entered into a working relationship with Balakirev that, over the next two years, allowed him to grow into his true musical maturity.

Tchaikovsky remained ambivalent about The Five's music and goals, and his relationship with its members cordial but never close. With the "New Russians" who followed The Five, matters improved. Tchaikovsky enjoyed close relations with Alexander Glazunov, Anatol Lyadov and, at least on the surface, the elder Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Homosexuality, marriage and "hidden passion"

Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich reportedly told Solomon Volkov, "Really, musicians do like to talk about Mussorgsky, in fact I think that it's the second favorite topic after Tchaikovsky's love life." Tchaikovsky's homosexuality, as well as its importance to his life and music, has been known to the West for at least 75 years. Suppressed in Russia by the Soviets, it has only recently become widely known in post-Soviet Russia.

More controversial is how comfortable Tchaikovsky might have been with his sexual nature. Alexander Poznansky surmises that the composer "eventually came to see his sexual peculiarities as an insurmountable and even natural part of his personality ... without experiencing any serious psychological damage." Holden claims British musicologist and scholar Henry Zajaczkowski's research "along psychoanalytical lines" points instead to "a severe unconscious inhibition by the composer of his sexual feelings":

One consequence of it may be sexual overindulgence as a kind of false solution: the individual thereby persuades himself that he does accept his sexual impulses. Complementing this and, also, as a psychological defense mechanism, would be precisely the idolization by Tchaikovsky of many of the young men of his circle , to which Poznansky himself draws attention. If the composer's response to possible sexual objects was either to use and discard them or to idolize them, it shows that he was unable to form an integrated, secure relationship with another man. That, surely, was tragedy.

Regardless of which camp may truly be right, music became an imperative and increasingly intense psychic outlet for Tchaikovsky, especially after the Fourth Symphony, As biographer Edward Garden suggests, "All the frustrations of his endemic homosexuality and bottled-up emotions, further engendered rather than released by the fiasco of his marriage, are let loose in this symphony—the first and perhaps least important in a line of masterpieces or near-masterpieces in this vein which included the Manfred Symphony and the last two symphonies, the symphonic ballad The Voyevoda and The Queen of Spades."

Tchaikovsky's marriage began as a classic case of life imitating art. He received a passionate love letter from one his former conservatory students, Antonina Miliukova, at the time he was hard at work on the "Letter Scene" in his opera Eugene Onegin. A second letter followed, then a third, in which she threatened suicide if he did not answer.

He met with Antonina, doing his best to explain why he could not love her—an explanation which appears to have fallen on deaf ears. He married her on July 18, 1877 and within days deeply regretted his decision; by the time the couple returned to Moscow on July 26, he was a state of near-collapse. He attempted suicide by wading into the freezing Moscow River, hoping to catch his death of pneumonia, then rushed to St. Petersburg and promptly suffered a nervous breakdown. A mental specialist recommended Tchaikovsky make no attempt to renew his marriage, nor try to see his wife again. Tchaikovsky followed this specialist's advice.

Tchaikovsky's marital débacle forced him to face the truth concerning his sexuality. He never again considered matrimony as a camouflage or escape. Neither would he consider himself capable of loving women in the same manner as men. He wrote to his brother Anatoly that there was "nothing more futile than wanting to be anything other than what I am by nature."

Moreover, the composer's abortive marriage enhanced rather than endangered his creativity. Despite some interruptions, the six months between Tchaikovsky's engagement to Antonina and his "rest cure" in Clarens, Switzerland, following his marriage saw him complete two of his finest works, the Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onegin.

Tchaikovsky's need to convey the true extent of his suffering, relieved by occasional moments of optimism, makes the Fourth Symphony a more remarkable combination of angst and serenity than it might have turned out otherwise. Likewise, without his confused feelings for Antonina, Eugene Onegin "might not be the affecting imbroglio it is of love lost, promise betrayed."

Given the intensity and emotional directness which now poured through Tchaikovsky's music, it was perhaps inevitable that, in Russia, his name would be placed alongside that of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A typical passage about the two reads, "With a hidden passion they both stop at moments of horror, total spiritual collapse, and finding acute sweetness in the cold trepidation of the heart before the abyss, they both force the reader to experience those feelings, too."

Beginning with the Fourth, Tchaikovsky's younger contemporaries equated his symphonies with Dostoyevsky's psychological novels. This was because, for the first time in Russian music, at the heart of these works was an ambivalent, suffering personality. Like Dostoyevsky's characters, Tchaikovsky's hero persisted in exploring the meaning of life while trapped in a fatal love-death-faith triangle in the best Dostoyevskian fashion

In these symphonies, Tchaikovsky's music conveys a Dostoyevskian confusion about the mysteries and contradictions of life. Tchaikovsky does this by using the musical equivalent of techniques characteristic of Dostoyevsky's novels. These techniques include the writer's—and composer's—favorite piling up of events and emotions leading to a catastrophic, climactic explosion.

A frenzied longing for love also saturates many pages of Tchaikovsky's symphonies and Dostoyevsky's novels alike. The other pole of the same passion—a fascination with and fear of death, combined with the need to confront it—is also typical of both composer and novelist. For both Tchaikovsky and Dostoyevsky, the most perplexing mystery was death, not life.

Tchaikovsky's notes concerning the hidden "program" of the Fifth Symphony are a case in point: "The fullest submission before fate, or, which is the same thing, before the inexplicable predestination of Providence." A reader, Volkov writes, could almost feel the pain Tchaikovsky suffers as fatalism and pessimism bring down upon him. Then Tchaikovsky adds, in a note relating to the second movement of the same symphony, "Should one throw oneself into the arms of faith??"

For Dostoyevsky leaping into the arms of faith was both natural and profound. Tchaikovsky could not make such a leap. John Warrack phrases Tchaikovsky's dilemma this way:

Lonely, desperately unhappy and, for all the fictions he consciously assumed, fundamentally honest with himself, he turned to composition for consolation and delight, and gradually, as his art grew to maturity, for the release into music of his frustrated personality. It is not until we understand his threefold isolation—a man feeling himself cut off from the ordinary world, an exceptional talent projected into a young musical tradition struggling to form itself, and a Russian of intense patriotism ambitious for his isolated country's artistic and intellectual maturity—that we shall fully appreciate the scope of his achievement.

Timely benefactress

One who was especially taken with Tchaikovsky's music was Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy widow of a Russian railway tycoon. Herself a keen amateur musician, she was well-known as a discriminating patroness of the arts and a generous benefactress.

Von Meck had commissioned some minor works from Tchaikovsky and begun an ongoing correspondence just before his marital episode. Tchaikovsky in turn had asked her for loans to cover his marital and living expenses. Now von Meck suggested paying Tchaikovsky an annual subsidy of 6,000 rubles a year, in monthly installments, to avoid any embarrassment of asking for future loans. This would also allow Tchaikovsky to resign from the Moscow Conservatory in October 1878 and concentrate primarily on composition.

Von Meck and Tchaikovsky's correspondence would grow to over 1,200 letters between 1877 and 1890. Holden comments that the details of these letters, after a formality in the initial few, is extraordinary for two people who would never even meet, let alone become lovers.

From their letters, we may glimpse a good deal of Tchaikovsky's inner self and more. Tchaikovsky was also prepared to be more openly and abundantly confiding to his patroness about some of his attitudes to life and about his creative processes than to any other person.

Rumors and wandering

In the wake of Tchaikovsky's marital disaster, a deluge of rumors circulated in Moscow. In an urgent attempt at damage control, the composer's family and friends circulated the story that he and Antonina would be reunited abroad, then Anatoly and Nikolai Rubinstein gave Antonina money and sent her to Odessa. Later, realizing what mischief she could make of Tchaikovsky's reputation while on the loose, Tchaikovsky's sister Sasha tracked her down and brought her to Kamenka, where she could be supervised, at least for a short time.

Meanwhile Rubinstein, realizing that Tchaikovsky's stay abroad might be prolonged, nominated him as a delegate to the Paris International Exhibition of 1878. The nomination was approved. When the official notification of the approval came, however, Tchaikovsky changed his mind and withdrew his acceptance, claiming he was in no condition to take up the appointment. Rubinstein was furious.

After a year away from his post, Tchaikovsky returned to Moscow Conservatory in the fall of 1879. Shortly into that term, however, he resigned. He also received an offer from the director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Karl Davidov, for half the work load of his Moscow post at twice his current salary. Tchaikovsky turned down this position.

Tchaikovsky eventually settled at his sister's estate in Kamenka, just outside Kiev. Even with this base, he travelled incessantly; David Brown's subtitle for the volume dealing with this period, "The Years of Wandering," is particularly apt. With the assurance of a regular income from von Meck, he took advantage of open-ended wandering, living a restless, rootless life at favorite locations around Europe and rural Russia. He did not stay long in any one place, living mainly solitary, avoiding social contact.

He may have also lived in fear of Antonina's revealing his sexual orientation to the public. She had already written him wild letters during her stay at Kamenka, sometimes accusing him, sometimes cajoling him. The question of divorce arose in 1878 and 1879. Since the only legal grounds for divorce in Russia at that time was adultery, the possibility of unwanted revelations may have led him to drop the matter—even, in 1878, with a 10,000-ruble incentive for Antonina's cooperation from von Meck, payable through Tchaikovsky's publisher Jurgenson once a divorce had been finalized. In July 1880 Antonina wrote, accusing him of spreading rumors about her throughout Moscow and threatening the worst: "Why didn't you start with yourself, telling ... about your own terrible vice?"

However, in March 1881, Tchaikovsky received news that Antonina had given birth to a child out of wedlock. This gave him grounds for divorce. Still, he did not act. He never divorced her, as legal action might drag up matters he hoped were forgotten or at least buried. He continued to send her a regular allowance, which may have helped buy her silence. Divorce would have meant Tchaikovsky's freedom from any further financial responsibility for her.

Celebrity and return

During these rootless years, Tchaikovsky's reputation as a composer grew rapidly beyond Russia. Having previously been merely respected, now he was developing a popular following. His friend Sergei Taneyev gently chided him for coyness, even hypocrisy, about his growing reputation. Tchaikovsky replied:

I compose, i.e. express my moods and feelings via the language of music. So of course, like anyone with something to say, or pretensions to saying something, I need people to listen to me—and the more they do listen, the more gratifying it is. In that sense I love fame, naturally, and hope for it with my whole heart.... But it does not follow that I love the trappings of fame as manifested in all those dinners, suppers and musical soirées which I find completely alien, and at which I always suffer mightily.

A reevaluation and consequent upswing for Tchaikovsky's music took place in Russia, as well. In 1880, during the commemoration of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow, Dostoyevsky gave a famous speech on Pushkin, in which he called for the Russian "to become brother to all men, uniman, if you will." While Dostoyevsky had been a fervent nationalist, like Tchaikovsky he also had a trait that Osip Mendelstam would call "a longing for world culture." The conclusion he gave in his speech on the "European" essence of Pushkin's work was that the poet had given a prophetic call to Russia for "universal unity" with the West

Reaction to this speech was unprecedented. Near its end, the audience was virtually hysterical, with people weeping and embracing one another. Cries of "prophet," "saint" and "genius" rang out. Dostoyevsky received a 30-minute ovation, and the speaker scheduled to follow him refrained from giving his address, even after an hour's interim. Acclaim for Dostoyevsky's message spread quickly throughout Russia.

Most of all, the cultural nationalism espoused by The Five and its followers was suddenly considered a dead end.

The benefit of the uniman speech for Tchaikovsky was overwhelming. Before the speech, Alexandre Benois writes in his memoirs, "it was considered obligatory to treat Tchaikovsky as a renegade, a master overly dependent on the West." Now he was seen as an idol for expanding and renewing Russian artistry. He also drew a cult following among the young intelligentsia of St. Petersburg, including Benois, Leon Bakst and Serge Diaghilev.

Tchaikovsky realized the power of Dostoyevsky's words on foreigners for both their acceptance of Russian culture in general and of his music in particular. In his notebook for 1888-1889, amid addresses and other notations, is a note he made to himself before a trip to Prague, where he would appear at frequent receptions held in his honor. The note reads, "Start speech with Dostoyevsky's uniman."

Something in Dostoyevsky's address might have also reminded Tchaikovsky of his rootlessness. Dostyevsky describes Pushkin as the first, in Aleko and Eugene Onegin, to depict the "historical Russian wanderer," torn away from his native soil, oppressed and suffering. He then challenges, "Humble yourself, proud man, and above all dissolve your pride. Humble yourself, idle man, and first of all, exert yourself on your native field."

Regardless of what he may have taken from the speech, by the early 1880's, Tchaikovsky wondered why his feelings for homeland, while extremely powerful, were also highly ambiguous. He loved the Russian countryside, Russian people and their folk culture, but he had never laid any real roots there. He had also begun seeing himself as a parasite, sponging off of friends and his sister's family by constantly staying with them while in Russia. It was time, he felt, to settle in a place of his own.

A summons to St. Petersburg from Tsar Alexander III in 1885 may have cemented Tchaikovky's decision. There, the Tsar conferred upon him the Order of St. Vladimir (fourth class). This gave the composer the right of hereditary nobility. Tchaikovsky had lived nearly seven years haunted by public knowledge of his failed marriage and a gnawing sense of public humiliation. He may have seen the Tsar's honor as a sign of rehabilitation, especially since the regent had bestowed it upon him personally. The public might never forget what had happened or stop wondering why it had happened, but at least they would now forgive and wagging tongues be quieted.

In 1885, Tchaikovsky settled in a country house in Maidenovo, near Klin. In 1888, craving increased solitude, he moved to Frolovskoye, also near Klin. Upon his return from his American tour three years later, he found that in his absence the forest around his home had been felled totally. At first moving back to Maidenovo, he finally settled at Klin, in a house he found less suitably located but with comparatively large rooms both for guests to stay and for him to compose. After Tchaikovsky's death, his brother Modest and his nephew Vladimir "Bob" Davydov converted this house into a museum in the composer's honor.

Conductor in demand

Tchaikovsky took to orchestral conducting after leading the first four performances of his opera The Enchantress in St. Petersburg in 1887. Within a year, he was as much in demand as any veteran maestro. He overcame a life-long stage fright, gaining confidence to regularly lead orchestras in his pieces, those of other Russian composers and, on one occasion, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Tchaikovsky's friend Nikolay Kashkin had witnessed the composer's early fumblings at the podium (with Tchaikovsky keeping one hand firmly on his chin because he was afraid his head would literally fall off). Kashkin writes this of Tchaikovsky's more assured conducting later in life:

He has all the essential attributes for conducting an orchestra: total self-control, extreme clarity and definition in his beat ... His direction of the orchestra is distinctive for its utter simplicity ... If he had few of the conductor's virtuoso gestures which are acquired only with years of experience, he has instead a quality which cannot be learnt: that inner fire, that animation which communicate themselves to the players, and which irresistibly impress the audience with the integrity and inspiration of the performance.

Though more assured, Tchaikovsky never became a virtuoso on the podium. A violinist who played under him in a concert in Kharkov writes,

He did not hold the baton in his fingers, as most conductors do, but clasped it firmly in his fist. He then raised it above his head, on the first beat brought it down sharply, on the second beat to his left shoulder, on the third to his right shoulder, and on the fourth again raised it. The players were not accustomed to such a way of conducting. Everyone glanced around, but the sense that the composer himself was conducting the piece mde us quickly forget this initial awkwardness, and we tried our best—and by the end of the rehearsal we were already accustomed to Pyotr Ilyich's idiosyncratic way of conducting.

Apparently, as happened similarly with Sir Edward Elgar and the London Symphony Orchestra some 50 years later, it was the respect with which the players held Tchaikovsky that made them cooperate more fully than they might have with a lesser composer. Nevertheless, Tchaikovsky's conducting appearances boosted his self-confidence hugely. He wrote to von Meck, "Would you now recognize in this Russian musician travelling across Europe that man who, only a few years ago, had absconded from life in society and lived in seclusion abroad or in the country!!!"

Among those Tchaikovsky met on his conducting tours were composers Johannes Brahms, Antonin Dvořák and Edvard Grieg. He invited both Brahms and Dvořák to conduct their works in Moscow during the 1890 season. Brahms refused. Dvořák insisted on coming no sooner than March 1890 for fear of Russian frosts.

American tour

Through his Berlin concert agent, Tchaikovsky received an invitation for a conducting tour of the United States. This tour would have as its centerpiece a concert of his music at the inaugural concert of Carnegie Hall in New York City. Tchaikovsky accepted, arriving in New York on April 27, 1891.

"I was greeted with dignity and honor," he writes to his brother Anatoly, "My picture is in all the papers, accompanying reports of my arrival. It transpires that I am far more famous in America than in Europe. Here I am a big shot." He adds this, in a letter to Bob Davydov:

Everyone here flatters, honors and celebrates me. It turns out that I am ten times better known in America than in Europe. At first, when people told me this, I assumed it was an exaggerated compliment. But now I see it is the truth. Works of mine that are still unknown in Moscow are performed here several times a season, and are the subject of whole reviews and commentaries (Hamlet, for example).

During this time he met Walter Damrosch, the conductor who had convinced Andrew Carnegie that New York needed a new concert all, as well as Carnegie himself. Tchaikovsky liked both men, appreciating in particular a warm impromptu speech Damrosch gave the New York Music Society's orchestra at Tchaikovsky's first rehearsal. Carnegie, to the composer's surprise, was "a modest and simple man, never one to turn up his nose," inspiring in Tchaikovsky "unusually warm feelings, probably because he displays such warmth toward me."

On May 5, Carnegie Hall opened. Tchaikovsky's presence was largely symbolic, with his leading just his Marche Slave. Two days later, however (on his 51st birthday), he took New York by storm, conducted his Third Suite The reporter for the Morning Journal calling Tchaikovsky's performance "Wonderful .. a power that at once enchains and charms us. "Genius" agreed the writer from the New York Daily Tribune. The reporter from the Evening Telegram added, "It would be impossible for an orchestra to play badly under such a conductor. Tchaikovsky's leading was a perfeect revelation. He inspires his orchestra with his nervous force, and seems to hold every musician at the end of his baton.".

The fourth and final of Tchaikovsky's New York concerts, on May 9, proved the most successful. He conducted his First Piano Concerto with Liszt pupil Adele aus der Ohe as soloist. He called aus der Ohe's performance "perfect" and wrote, "There was greater enthusiasm than I have ever before managed to achieve, even in Russia...."

Cambridge

In 1893, Cambridge University awarded Tchaikovsky an honorary Doctor of Music degree. Other composers honored included Camille Saint-Saëns, Max Bruch and Arrigo Boito; Edvard Grieg had also been scheduled to attend but could not due to illness.

At Cambridge, Tchaikovsky led the British premiere of his tone poem Francesca da Rimini. Tchaikovsky wrote that the audience received the piece with such enthusiasm that it completely overshadowed Saint-Saëns' music in the same program.

Saint-Saëns' impression was equally vivid:

Bristling with difficulties, Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini, which lacks neither pungent flavors nor fireworks, shrinks from no violence. In it the gentlest and most kindly of men has unleashed a fearful tempest, and has no more pity for his performers and listeners than Satan for the damned. But such was the talent and supreme skill that one takes pleasure in this damnation and torture.

At the commemorative dinner in King's College, Tchaikovsky was pleased to be seated next to Walter Damrosch. He told Damrosch he had just finished a new symphony, "different in form from anything he had written." Pressed for more details, Tchaikovsky replied, "The last movement is an adagio and the whole work has a program." When Damrosch asked what this program was, Tchaikovsky said, "No, that I shall never tell...." It was one of many such occasions that Tchaikovsky let slip that his Sixth Symphony had a program. Even with Rimsky-Korsakov at the work's premiere, he withheld further details. As he phrased it to Bob Davidov, "Let them guess."

Death

Tchaikovsky died nine days after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, on November 6, 1893.

Most biographers of Tchaikovsky's life have considered his death to have been caused by cholera, most probably contracted through drinking contaminated water several days earlier. In recent decades, however, theories have been advanced that his death was a suicide. According to one variation of the theory, a sentence of suicide was imposed in a "court of honor" by Tchaikovsky's fellow alumni of the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, as a censure of the composer's homosexuality.

Musical style

Tchaikovsky wrote several works well known among the general classical public—Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture and Marche Slave. These, along with two of his concertos and three of his latter symphonies, are probably his most familiar works, thanks in great part to what former New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg called "a sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody." Solomon Volkov concurs, writing that it is the lushness of Tchaikovsky's melodies, along with the emotional accessibility of his music, that has helped make it so popular.

Some of those melodies have proved popular enough for Tin Pan Alley song composers to re-use. The love theme from Romeo and Juliet reappeared in the song Our Love in 1939, and the melody for the 1941 song Tonight We Love was taken from the Piano Concerto No. 1. Another 1939 song, Moon Love, also incorporates a melody by Tchaikovsky.

Second only to Tchaikovsky's gift for melody was his sense of orchestral color. Perhaps one of his best-known touches is his use of the celesta as a solo instrument in the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from Act II of The Nutcracker, but on the whole his ear for novel combinations of instruments was highly refined. Schonberg calls Tchaikovsky's orchestration "dark-colored yet brilliant sounding and perfectly-calculated scoring."

"Surcharged emotion"

Add to this mix of elements what Schonberg termed "surcharged emotion", a "neuroticism, as emotional as a scream from a window on a dark night" Western form was analytical and architectural; it simply was not designed to handle personal expression of such magnitude. Nor was this challenge exclusively Tchaikovsky's. The Romantics in general were never natural symphonists because music was to them primarily evocative and biographical—generally autobiographical. .

With Tchaikovsky the challenge was not simply emotion in music, but intensity of emotion. The turbulent changes in the composer's personal life, including his marital crisis, led him to write down in the Fourth Symphony meant that structural matters could not stay as they had been

Two changes came to pass. One was melodic. Here, Tchaikovsky's greatest single gift could be more freely deployed than it had previously. The second change would alter completely the nature of the symphony. As the Fourth Symphony shows, the symphony had become a human document—dramatic, autobiographical, concerned not with everyday things but with things psychological. This was because Tchaikovsky's creative impulses had become invaded with an element that was unprecedentedly personal, urgent, capable of enormous expressive forcefulness, even violence.

Tchaikovsky described this new element to von Meck:

You ask me if this symphony has a definite programme. Usually when asked this question about a symphonic piece, I reply: none. And indeed it is difficult to answer such a question. How can one express those inexpressible sensations which pass through one when writing an instrumental work without a definite subject? It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which is full to the brim and which, true to its essential nature, pours itself out in sound, just as the lyric poet expresses himself in verse. The difference is that music possesses incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for the articulation of the thousand different moments of the soul's moods.....

This new element could be as disruptive structurally as it could be disconcerting expressively. Once unleashed, it could prove uncontainable, devouring musical space voraciously until it had for the moment expended itself..

Russianness

Volkov maintains that, as emotive as Tchaikovsky could be on his own, he may have been further encouraged by hearing a popular form of St. Petersburg song called romansy:

They were beautiful, darkly erotic flowers that grew in fashionable salons after a complex cross-fertilization of Russian folk tunes and Italian arias. Glinka and a group of Russian amateur composers had worked over the creation of this strange and attractive hybrid. Spicy notes of anguish and passion, borrowed from Gypsy songs that filled Petersburg at that time, were added to their refined creations.

The Petersburg romansy, shaded with Gypsy idiom, lost their hothouse tenderness when they boldly crossed the threshold from the fashionable salons to real life. And yet, they became the delight of the broad masses of Russian music lovers, the Russian pop music of the time. The comfortably sentimental and sad or sensually passionate formulas of the romansy appeared more than once—reworked and ennobled—in Tchaikovsky's music

Schonberg calls Tchaikovsky's melody "peculiarly Russian ... plangent, introspective, often modal-sounding." Michael Steinberg adds, in technical terms about that melody, that "hen Apthorp wrote about the 'peculiar character' of Tchaikovsky's melodies, he must refer to the way they droop." This "drooping" quality, David Brown explains, is Tchaikovsky's tendency to let a melody fall or love lower on the musical scale as it comes to its end. This can lend it a melancholy or bittersweet tinge which can heighten its emotional content.

Musicologist and Tchaikovsky specialist Dr. David Brown writes that, unlike The Five's work, folk songs and folk-like melodies appear only sporadically in Tchaikovsky's work, except for a brief period in the 1870's when he placed himself squarely in line with The Five's ideals and practices. (The 1872 version of the Second Symphony and the opera Vakula the Smith are from this period.) He writes that the sources of Tchaikovsky's most characteristic melody are elusive, though Italian operatic cantilena is clearly one. In these themes the melodic line unwinds broadly, is expressively full, and presents a clear periodic structure. This structure, however, can be disguised by the theme's own expansiveness; it can also be hidden by the sequences extending the melody, which in Tchaikovsky's case can be long. The love theme in Romeo and Juliet is a perfect example.

Yet, Brown continues, even while crafting melodies that in themselves are totally unrelated to folk song, Tchaikovsky shows something akin to the Russian folk-composer's instinct of using one version of a theme in the musical foreground while keeping another version of the same theme in the background as an accompaniment or general musical shape. In the slow movement of the First Symphony, a phrase taken from the center of a melody played by oboe solo is also used to create still another theme. In Romeo and Juliet, a swift series of restructurings show that two otherwise totally dissimilar tunes have a common element in their contours. When the central theme of Francesca da Rimini turns back on itself, Tchaikovsky unfurls a new formation of that theme's notes against its old shape—the theme essentially accompanying itself, acting as its own backdrop.

Imperial style

Tchaikovsky's musical cosmopolitanism made him especially adept in writing in an "Imperial style" favored by Tsar Alexander III and the Russian upper classes, as opposed to the "Russian" harmonies of Mussorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Imperial style, historian Orlando Figis writes, was symbolized by the polonaise. Imported into Russia by the Polish composer Jozek Kozlowski near the end of the 18th century, the polonaise "became the supreme courlly form and the most brilliant of all the ballroom genres." The polonaise also came to symbolize the European brilliance of 18th-century Petersburg itself. Pushkin and Tchaikovsky both use this dance for Tatiana's climactic entry in the ball scene of Eugene Onegin. Leo Tolstoy also uses it at the climax of the ball in War and Peace, where the Emperor makes his appearance and Natasha dances with Andrei.

Tchaikovsky's wriuting in Imperisl style echoed a theme traditional in Russian culture and first sounded by Pushkin. This theme was glorification of the Russian empire and the victories of Russian arms. The rapid expansion of the empire following the defeat of Napoleon, the ethnic vareity of its peoples and the capital's growing appetite for conquests wss reflected especially in Russian music.

Volkov suggests that the finales of Tchaikovsky's first three symphonies could be read as imperial anthems or apotheoses. A Russian folk song is heard in the finale of the First Symphony, a Ukranian folk song in the finale of the Second, and a polonaise in the finale of the Third. At the time Tchaikovsky wrote these works, Poland and the Ukraine were parts of the Russian Empire. Therefore, by including those themes into the framework of his symphonies, Volkov claims, Tchaikovsky may have signified his support for various nations being under the rulership of the Russian Tsar.

Tchaikovsky also made full use of the emotional and symbolic possibilities of the Russian anthem, "God save the Tsar," in several commemorative works—including two of his most popular compositions, the Marche Slave and the 1812 Overture. Tchaikovsky wrote Marche Slave in support of one of the most cherished ideas of imperial Russia—Pan-Slavism. When Serbia rebelled against Turkish rule in 1876, the atmosphere in Russia toward the Serbs became so electric that performances of the Marche Slave, with its Serbian folk melodies, inevitably elicited outbursts of patriotism. This was something the equally patriotic composer did not mind one bit. The 1812 Overture likewise glorified the greatest miliitary and political victory of the Romonov dynasty, in the Patriotic War against Napoleon.

"Captivating nightmares"

In The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky conjures a "world of captivating nightmares" of E.T.A. Hoffmann, as Alexandre Benois phrases it, "a mixture of strange truth and convincing invention." Another glimpse of this world comes earlier, with the Second Orchestral Suite. The unsuspecting would not expect a radical musical adventure in a movement titled Rêves d'enfennt (A Child's Dream). Nothing in the movement's opening hints at the strange, even unnerving sounds that Tchaikovsky will conjure.

Yet at the center section of this music come strange, delicate, fragmented textures, with no recognizable harmonic foundation. Fleeting harp arpeggios. An oboe melody spun from a tiny repeated seven-note fragment. A fragment that, set on high piccolo, will flutter above a low, nagging clarinet-viola phrase, against a backdrop of ever louder tremololando strings. Not even the music of enchantment Tchaikovsky would write for The Sleeping Beauty will come close to what seems here the kingdom of sleep itself.

As for The Nutcracker, the music setting the scene in Act One once the guests have left shows Tchaikovsky's skill at orchestrating dark fantasy; none of his other works is the scoring so important in setting the tone. Especially striking is the use of harp and wind instruments. All becomes dark, spooky, unstable and unsafe; against a gently quivering muted string background come snatches of melody, harp washes, sometimes little chains of rapidly repeated notes, sudden brief interruptions. Then the clock strikes midnight.

Whimsy and delicate fantasy

Tchaikovsky also had a lighter side. He could be whimsical, such as in the Chacteristic Dances that make up most of Act Two of The Nutcracker and, several years earlier, the Marche miniature (originally titled March of the Lilliputians) from the First Orchestral Suite. He could also be good-natured, almost tongue-in-cheek, such as in the scherzo and gavotte which follow the Marche miniature in the First Orchestral Suite and the Danse baroque which concludes the Second Orchestral Suite.

Then there are moments of delicate, almost ethereal fantasy. The scherzo of the Manfred Symphony is subtitled "The Alpine Fairy appears before Manfred in a rainbow." Tchaikovsky had explored fresh possibilities in orchestration throughout his musical career. In previous years, this had allowed him to present his music with new colors and more refined contrasts, but the music being orchestrated had still been made with tunes and harmonies as before. The music had come first, then the orchestration, with the music dictating the orchestration

In the Manfred scherzo, the positions are reversed. Now the orchestration dictates the music, as though Tchaikovsky has thought directly in terms of colors and textures to move us, like magic, into a world that is alluring, fragile and elusive. There is no tune at first, and little definition of any harmonic base. We hear, at most, the tiniest of melodic fragments and the lightest film of harmony; and where those things slip in, they very quickly melt away.

When an actual tune arrives to fill out the movement's central section—the musical semblance of the Alpine fairy—the contrast to what we have already heard is perfectly judged, as though the fairy has just appeared to us in sound. This new melody is partnered with Manfred's theme, now tempered by the graceful companion, while slivers of the scherezo music which preceded this slip in from time to time. If, when the movement's rainbow music is about to return, Manfred's theme returns far less gracefully, it will sound almost wistful at the movement's end while the Alpine fairy flickers upward and disappears.

"Passé-ism"

In The Sleeping Beauty and The Queen of Spades, Tchaikovsky reconstructs the imperial grandeur of the 18th-Century world. Tchaikovsky sets The Sleeping Beauty in the realm of Louis XIV, a nostalgic tribute to the French influence of 18th-century Russian music and culture. This may have been dictated at least in part by the source of the story, Charles Perrault's fairy tale La Belle au bois dormant. Nevertheless, the Francophilia Benois and his friends heard in the music made them embrace it all the more readily.

The Queen of Spades, based on the Pushkin story, evokes the St. Petersburg of Catehrine the Great—an era where the Russian capital was fully integrated with, and played a major role, in the culture of Europe. Infusing the opera with rococo elements (Tchaikovsky himself describes the ballroom scenes as a "slavish imitation" of 18th-Century style), he uses the story's layers of ghostly fantasy to conjure up a dream world of the past.

At the same time, Benois emphasized, Tchaikovsky's talent for writing in this vein was more than simply stylization. (Tchaikovsky was, however, also highly gifted at stylization, as shown by his Serenade for Strings and Fourth Orchestral Suite, subtitled Mozartiana.) Tchaikovsky's evocative powers gave timelessness and immediacy, making the past seem as though it were the present. Benois calls this quality "passé-ism."

Musical form

Russian versus Western

Tchaikovsky's studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory made him a true musical professional. He learned European principles and forms of organizing musical material while gaining a sense of belonging to world culture. However, in using these principles for himself, Tchaikovsky's Rusianness could work as much or more against him as it did for him. The result was a continual struggles with Western sonata form. One major block for Tchaikovsky in this department, David Brown suggests, may have been cultural:

... a cardinal flaw in the Russian character: inertia. It is a flaw that has conditioned every sector of the nation's life. It has dogged its history, which has tended to unfold as long periods of stasis, followed by short, sometimes very violent periods of activity when the state has been convulsed into progress....

Inertia of a kind is also intrinsic to Russian creativity. In literature it produces the novel that proceeds as a succession of self-contained sections, even set-piece scenes....Indeed, such tableau organization is fundamental to the most Russian of operatic scenarios.... he most characteristic Russian scenario is like a strip cartoon, each scene presenting a crucial incident or stage in the plot, leaving the spectator to supply in his imagination what has happened in the gaps between these incidents....

Using a series of self-contained sections is also at the heart of the most characteristic structures of Russian composers—one that would occur as a natural fall-back, since many Russian folk songs are actually a series of variations on one basic shape or pattern of a few notes. Constant repetition of this pattern means the song remains essentially static; noting truly moves forward or progresses as in Western music.

Brown gives the example of Mikhail Glinka's Kamarinskaya as "a Russian folksong write large." Glinka uses the principle from folk song of unfolding around a thematic constant—or actually two constants, since he uses two folk songs. Glinka varies the material surrounding these tunes more than the tunes themselves. Also, as in Russian folk song, the music does not evolve or progress toward an all-embracing point. Instead, it repeats itself over and over with ever new significances. By doing this the music does not expand the listening experience, but instead consolidates it. It remains a decorative rather than an organic creation, remaining static while elaborating on itself instead of moving forward.

This static quality is at the heart of Russian creativity. It is also a paradox. Russian practice would have a musical theme essentially stay in place. Western practice would have two contrasting themes interacting like a conversation or an argument—discussing, agreeing and disagreeing, but always building toward an inevitable and hopefully persuasive conclusion.

By these working definitions, Russian and Western practice would seem to work at cross-purposes, against instead of alongside each other. Russian working methods would seem totally unsuitable for building large-scale, evolving Western-style structures due to the nature of their own reflectiveness. Making the two systems work in consort toward one united goal would seem insoluble.

Melody versus form

An equally large challenge facing Tchaikovsky was, paradoxically, his greatest compositional gift—his own sense of melody. Beethoven, for example, did not think melodically but architecturally; he could construct a complete movement from musical material of which anyone could have thought because he could look at and work on that material in terms of how to structure it effectively

Tchaikovsky's problem by thinking melodically was that a melody is complete on its own terms. Because it is already complete, that melody is not amenable to development. As Taneyev points out, a composer can do little more with a melody than repeat it, though it can be repeated and modified in the hands of a master such as Tchaikovsky to create interest, tension and satisfaction over a large span.

Tchaikovsky was well aware of his limits in terms of traditional Western classical structure and writes about it to von Meck:

All my life I have been much troubled by my inability to grasp and manipulate form in music. I have fought hard against this defect and can say with pride that I have achieved some progress, but I shall end my days without having ever written anything that is perfect in form. What I write has always a mountain of padding: an experienced eye can detect the thread in the seams and I can do nothing about it.

Imagination and invention were never a problem for Tchaikovsky. Ideas he generally had in abundance. However, as Cooper writes, the principle of sonata form is both a study in contrast and one of unity in diversity. First and second subjects must be contrasted and united. They must be capable of coming into organic growth and development, meaning they can come into direct contact with each other, coalesce and separate. They must contrast yet remain fundamentally at unity with each other.

A melody of great individuality, such as many of the ones Tchaikovsky wrote, is impatient of this process. By its very individuality, instead of interacting with any other themes with which it is placed, that melody can dominate an entire movement. This refuses equal rights to any other melody, ruining the balance and proportion considered the proper beauties of sonata form.

Because of his penchant for such melodies, Tchaikovsky went through pain and grief in attempting to force his ideas to develop and grow organically. This would also mean curbing the natural Romantic tendency to improvise, to force a free fantasia into sonata form. To use Tchaikovsky's analogy, when he attempts to sew together a movement in the traditional Western manner, the seams are often highly visible.

The true successor of the symphony for the Romantics was the symphonic poem. Dramatic turns of phrase, highly colored melodies and "atmospheric" harmony—all things the Romantics loved—were primarily opposed to the nature of the symphony. With the symphonic poem, large-scale orchestral writing could be combined with the strong emotions and brilliant color of Romanticism. . With a new range of emotions meeting the old classical symphony, the symphony's whole nature was changed and widened. However, the same principles do not apply to both genres. A symphonic poem is not simply a bad symphony.

Tchaikovsky admitted to von Meck that his Fourth Symphony was program music. By implication, Cooper suggests, the same could be said for his other symphonies, as well. Taneyev commented to Tchaikovsky that to him the Fourth "gives the effect of a symphonic poem to which the composer has slapped on three other movements and called it a symphony." Tchaikovsky replied:

As to your remark about my symphony being programmatic, I quite agree, but don't see why you consider this a deficit. On the contrary I should be sorry if symphonies that mean nothing should flow from my pen, consisting solely of a progression of harmonies, rhythms and modulations. Most assuredly my symphony has a program, but one that cannot be expressed in words: the very attempt would be ludicrous. But is this not proper for the symphony, the most purely lyrical of musical forms? Should not a symphony reveal those wordless urges that hide in the heart, asking earnestly for expression?... As a matter of fact the work is patterned after Beethoven's Fifth Symphony—not as to musical content but as to the basic idea. Don't you see a programme in the Fifth?..

To Tchaikovsky, the only difference between a symphony and a symphonic poem lay in the vagueness of the program underlying the one and the explicitly literary programme of the other.

Perhaps even more revealing is Tchaikovsky's description of the symphony as "the most purely lyrical of forms." "Lyrical," Cooper suggests, could be that emotion or mood which can be expressed only on music—the spontaneous expression in sound of those fears, longings and desires both too vague and too violently definite for expression in words.

Whether that lyrical expression could be expressed naturally in sonata form is not implausible. This would only be true, he counters, if that form is so natural to a composer, both by instinct and habit, to become second nature, and Tchaikovsky was never that kind of composer.

Instead, Tchaikovsky learned to adapt the form to fit the music he wished to pour into it — a process sounding like Cooper's description mentioned above of the workings of the symphonic poem. Tchaikovsky described his method, again about the Fourth Symphony, to von Meck:

You ask if I keep to established forms. Yes and no. There are certain kinds of compositions which imply the use of familiar forms, for example symphony. Here I keep in general outline to the usual traditional forms, but only in general outline, i.e. the sequence of the work's movements. The details can be treated very freely, if this is demanded by the development of the ideas. For instance, in our symphony the first movement is written with very marked digressions. The second subject, which should be in the relative major, is minor and remote. In the recapitulation of the main part of the movement the second subject does not appear at all, etc. The finale, too, is made up of a whole row of derivations from individual forms....

Tchaikovsky had already written three well-crafted but comparatively minor symphonies in which his concern for good form conflicted with his ability to express himself. This was a challenge he may or may not have recognized but was definitely not equipped or ready to meet. When he discovered a method to put his emotional life to work in large-scale abstract structures, Tchaikovsky was able to match his temperament fully to his talent. By doing so, he successfully enlarged the scope of his talent to its fullest potential.

Warrack adds, "Out of the crisis that nearly wrecked his life in 1877 came the strengthened belief in himself as a composer, and with it cane the still more powerful need for expression of what he had seriously come to believe was a personal Fate that dogged his life and would always wish upon him the most profound unhappiness."

Tchaikovsky's solution

The compromise Tchaikovsky makes with sonata form is as follows:

In each of his symphonies except the First, he begins with a slow introduction , setting the atmosphere for the mood of the listener instead of alerting him that a piece of musical action is going to take place. The ensuing sonata movement follows basically the same pattern. A first subject or melody is introduced. This subject cannot be developed readily, so it is repeated with new orchestration and changes in emotional emphasis taking the place for musical development. A second, more lyrical subject follows and is similarly extended. After a second long transition, both melodies are recapitulated and the movement ends with a coda.

What has taken place in this movement has been an ingenious episodic treatment of two contrasting melodies. Because these melodies are self-sufficient in themselves, they do not act upon each other in an organic, evolutionary progress. Instead, they impose a comparatively mechanical role upon those passages where the substance of a symphonic movement should properly reside.

To keep this mechanism going, and to give the impression that something is actually happening, Tchaikovsky falls back on a number of musical devices mainly for the sake of generating listener expectation for the next entry of a melody. He employs ostinato figures, dramatic pedal points, sequences to fuel anticipation. The melody being re-introduced must therefore live up to this expectation being created. It must be more sensationally scored, perhaps made more intense by a passionately throbbing accompaniment figure or anguished fluctuations of tempo from bar to bar.

The fact that there may be as many essentially repetitive sequences as there are in Tchaikovsky's work—or Russian symphonic works of the period in general, for that matter—does not mean they are boring. On the contrary, Brown writes that there is rarely a lack of ingenuity in the development sections of Russian symphonic works when it comes to manipulating musical material. Very often, however, this ingenuity can seem a game played according to a well-learned method instead of a stage-by-stage musical argument moving logically toward its conclusion. In this sense, Brown admits there may be much truth in Mussorgsky's dictum: "The German, when he thinks, will first examine and explore, then make his conclusion: our brother will first make his conclusion, then amuse himself with examination and exploration."

Synthesis

While Brown admits such an approach can rarely produce totally satisfactory results, he warns it would be a mistake to discount the Russian symphony. The best of these works, including Tchaikovsky's last three numbered ones, are totally different conceptions from their Western counterparts, despite their indebtedness to the same structural scheme and many elements of the same method..

Also, whole all these traits are fundamental to Tchaikovsky's work, Tchaikovsky's training was thoroughly Western, and the problem of marrying the arsenal of techniques he had learned to the St. Petersburg Conservatory with the kind of invention his native instincts drew from him was to be a formidable problem..

Nevertheless, as Schonberg writes,

Analysis who use as a criterion the German symphonic form as laid down by Mozart and Beethoven have been citing "defects" in the Tchaikovsky symphonies since they were written. But strict application of formalistic criterion misses the point. Tchaikovsky's symphonies, even the first three, have such personality and such melodic appeal that they continue to sound emotionally fresh. Despite the frequent naïveté of such works as the Polish and Little Russian symphonies, they are full of color, originality and a very personal kind of speech. The last three Tchaikovsky symphonies break all the rules as laid down by the textbooks, but here Tchaikovsky achieved a kind of synthesis that makes them as convincing structurally as any Brahms symphony—waltzes, march movements, and free forms notwithstanding. For they have a consistent emotional line and a consistency of workmanship, and the ideas progress surely and naturally....

Martin Cooper adds about this formal synthesis,

If symphonies are be judged ... by the strict academic tests, by his manipulation of sonata form in the appropriate movements, then they may be fine music but they are poor symphonies. If, on the other hand, they are judged as a hybrid species, a cross between the primarily architectural form of the symphony and the primarily "literary" or "poetic" form of the symphonic poem, they are completely successful.

Judging Tchaikovsky's music strictly by the rules of sonata form, Cooper continues, would be on the par with the once-popular viewpoint that since no more beautiful or satisfactory churches than the Gothic cathedrals have been built, all churches should therefore be built in the Gothic style. However, if a person accepts sonata form as one proved successful in a number of great compositions, and Gothic as an architectural style proved successful by the same test, then he could find a parallel development in each art.

From uniting Gothic style with the new ideals of the Renaissance and the Reformation, Cooper explains, Baroque style was created. Baroque style was not merely a decadent form of Gothic style but a genuinely new architectural style. It was related to Gothic yet as individual as a child from its father. Likewise, the symphonic poem grew from the Classical symphony by cross-fertilization with Romantic ideals of color, emotional expressiveness and dramatic intensity. Judging a symphonic poem by the same standards as those of a symphony would be like judging Baroque style with Gothic standards. The two styles may be related, but each one by itself is distinct, with each having its proper excellence

Moreover, as John Warrack points out, Tchaikovsky is finally able in the finale of the Fourth Symphony to fuse many elements of his style into a single symphonic experience—his love of dance and folk music, his feeling for the atmosphere of the Russian countryside and people, his personal sense of Fate looming over him. Warrack adds that if Tchaikovsky remained no Beethoven after writing the Fourth Symphony (as Tchaikovsky would be the first to admit) he still succeeded in rallying his creative gifts, giving them new power in what would become the first of three landmark subjective symphonies.

Media

Template:Multi-listen start Template:Multi-listen item Template:Multi-listen end

See also

• Nadezhda von Meck
• Antonina Miliukova Tchaikovskaya
• Nikolai Grigoryevich Rubinstein
• International Tchaikovsky Competition
• Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio
• Category:Compositions by Pyotr Tchaikovsky
• Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Sources

• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 1840-1874 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978).
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Crisis Years, 1874-1878, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1983).
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 1885-1893, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991).
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music (New York: Pegasus Books, 2007).
• Cooper, Martin, ed Abraham, Gerald, Music of Tchaikovsky (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1946).
• Figes, Orlando, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).
• Hanson, Lawrence and Hanson, Elisabeth, Tchaikovsky: The Man Behind the Music (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company)
• Holden, Anthony, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995).
• Mochulsky, Konstantin, tr. Minihan, Michael A., Dostoyevsky: His Life and Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
• Poznansky, Alexander Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991)
• Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, Letoppis Moyey Muzykalnoy Zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1909), published in English as My Musical Life (New York: Knopf, 1925, 3rd ed. 1942).
• Schonberg, Harold C. Lives of the Great Composers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 3rd ed. 1997).
• Steinberg, Michael, The Symphony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
• Stravinsky, Igor, "An Open Letter to Diaghilev," The Times, London, October 18, 1921.
• Tchaikovsky, Modest, Zhizn P.I. Chaykovskovo , 3 vols. (Moscow, 1900-1902).
• Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, Perepiska s N.F. von Meck , 3 vols. (Moscow and Lenningrad, 1934-1936).
• Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, Polnoye sobraniye sochinery: literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska , 17 vols. (Moscow, 1953-1981).
• Volkov, Solomon, tr. Bouis, Antonina W., Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1979).
• Volkov, Solomon, tr. Bouis, Antonina W., St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1995).
• Warrack, John, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969).
• Warrack, John, Tchaikovsky (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973).

Further reading

• Greenberg, Robert "Great Masters: Tchaikovsky -- His Life and Music"
• Kamien, Roger. Music : An Appreciation. Mcgraw-Hill College; 3rd edition (August 1, 1997) ISBN 0-07-036521-0
• ed. John Knowles Paine, Theodore Thomas, and Karl Klauser (1891). Famous Composers and Their Works, J.B. Millet Company.
• Meck Galina Von, Tchaikovsky Ilyich Piotr, Young Percy M. Tchaikovsky Cooper Square Publishers; 1st Cooper Square Press ed edition (October, 2000) ISBN 0-8154-1087-5
• Meck, Nadezhda Von Tchaikovsky Peter Ilyich, To My Best Friend: Correspondence Between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda Von Meck 1876-1878 Oxford University Press (January 1, 1993) ISBN 0-19-816158-1
• Poznansky, Alexander & Langston, Brett The Tchaikovsky Handbook: A guide to the man and his music. (Indiana University Press, 2002) Vol. 1. Thematic Catalogue of Works, Catalogue of Photographs, Autobiography. 636 pages. ISBN 0-253-33921-9. Vol. 2. Catalogue of Letters, Genealogy, Bibliography. 832 pages. ISBN 0-253-33947-2.
• Poznansky, Alexander, Tchaikovsky's Last Days, Oxford University Press (1996), ISBN 0-19-816596-X
• Poznansky, Alexander. Tchaikovsky through others' eyes. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1999). ISBN 0253335450
• Tchaikovsky, Modest The Life And Letters Of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky University Press of the Pacific (2004) ISBN 1-4102-1612-8
• Tchaikovsky's sacred works by Polyansky
• Biography of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

External links

• Tchaikovsky research (active site)
• Tchaikovsky (inactive site)
• Tchaikovsky page (inactive site)
• PBS Great Performances biography of Tchaikovsky
• Tchaikovsky cylinder recordings, from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
• WorldCat Identities page for 'Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich 1840-1893'
• Tchaikovsky's great ballets choreographied by Rudolf Nureyev

Public Domain Sheet Music:

• Free scores by Tchaikovsky at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• Mutopia Project Tchaikovsky Sheet Music at Mutopia
• Sheet music in PDF format
• Template:IckingArchive

References

1. Note: His names are also transliterated Piotr, Petr, or Peter; Ilitsch, Ilich, Il'ich or Illyich; and Tschaikowski, Tschaikowsky, Chajkovskij and Chaikovsky (as well as many other versions as Russian transliteration can be vary much between different languages)
2. Holden, Anthony, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995), xxi)
3. Volkov, Solomon, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1995)126.
4. ^ Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Literaturnye proizvedeniia i perepiska (Complete Collected Works. Literary Works and Correspondence), vol 13 (Moscow, 1971), 349. As quoted in Volkov, 126.
5. Warrack, 209
6. Although never its official name, Votkinsk is often referred to both colloquially and in some reference works as "Kamsko-Votkinsk". Votkinsk was built around the Kamsko-Votkinsky mining and metallurgical works , of which the composer's father was Chief Inspector. "Kamsko-" refers to the Kama River, and "Votkinsky-" refers to the Votka River, a tributary of the Kama. "Votkinsk" is derived from the river Votka.
7. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 28.
8. Holden, 24.
9. Holden, 24.
10. Warrack, 29.
11. Warrack, 31
12. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 45-46; Warrack, 31
13. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 49
14. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 51
15. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 51
16. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 40
17. ^ Brown, Tchaikovsky:: The Early Years, 42
18. Holden, 30
19. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 54.
20. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 58
21. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 59
22. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 60
23. Holden, 36
24. Holden, 38
25. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, Page cit. needed.
26. Hanson and Hanson, 63-63
27. Holden, 52
28. Holden, 63
29. Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 1885-1893 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 90-91.
30. Volkov, Solomon (tr. Bouis, Antonina W.), Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1979), 235.
31. Holden, xx.
32. Some historians still consider evidence to this effect scant or non-existent. Dr. Petr Beckmann claims Tchaikovsky's homosexuality has been asserted "not without bias ... too often ... done by tone setters who had a stake in the outcome." (Petr Beckmann, Musical Musings, Golem Press, August 1989.) Others, such as Rictor Norton and Alexander Poznansky, conclude some of Tchaikovsky's closest relationships were homosexual, citing Tchaikovsky's servant Aleksei Sofronov and his nephew, Vladimir "Bob" Davydov, as romantic interests.
33. As quoted in Holden, 394.
34. Zajaczkowski, Henry, The Musical Times, cxxxiii, no. 1797, November 1992, 574. As quoted in Holden, 394.
35. Garden, Edward, Tchaikovsky (London, 1993, 1973), 75-76. As quoted in Holden, 171.
36. In this scene, the young country girl Tatyana spends all night writing a long, passionate and deeply personal love letter to Eugene Onegin, a friend of her sister's fiance. She has only just met Onegin but had fallen madly in love with him at first sight: however, Onegin rejects her, saying that he is such a man that could never be the kind of devoted husband she deserves.
37. Holden, 123-124
38. Holden asserts that Antonina may not have been "the crazed half-wit" Modest portrayed after Tchaikovsky's death. She may have been a simpleton, "even, perhaps, 'an incarnation of the commonplace,' as she has recently been dismissed," but the responsibility for how the marriage turned out was more Tchaikovsky's doing than hers. "In truth," Holden concludes, "Antonina was as much the right woman for Tchaikovsky as any other. It was marriage which was the wrong institution" (Holden, 126).
39. Letter to Anatoly Tchaikovsky, February 25, 1878, as quoted in Holden, 172
40. Holden, 156, 157
41. Holden, 156, 157
42. Volkov, 115-116.
43. ^ Osoovskii, A.V., Muzykal'no-kritcvheskie stat'i, 1894-1912 (Musical Criticism articles, 189401912) (Lenningrad, 1971), 171. As quoted in Volkov, 116.
44. ^ Quoted in Muzykal'noe nasledie Chaikovskogo: Iz istorii ego proizvedenii (Tchaikovsky's Musical Heritage: From the History of His Works) (Moscow, 1958), 239. As quoted in Volkov, 116.
45. Warrack, John, Tchaikovsky (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973) 30.
46. Holden, 135-136
47. Holden, 157
48. Holden, 180-182
49. Holden, 159
50. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Crisis Years, 220.
51. ^ Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 174.
52. Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music (New York: Pegasus Books, 2007), 171.
53. Holden, 180-181.
54. Holden, 183.
55. Struttle, 85.
56. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 172.
57. ^ Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 230.
58. ^ Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 232.
59. Holden, 206-207.
60. Letter to Taneyev, August 12, 1880. As quoted in Holden, 207.
61. ^ Volkov, St. Petersburg, 126.
62. Mochulsky, Konstantin, tr. Minihan, Michael A., Dostoyevsky: His Life and Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 640.
63. Volkov, St. Petersburg, 126.
64. Volkov, St. Petersburg, 122-123.
65. Mochulsky, 640.
66. Holden, 241.
67. Holden, 241-242.
68. http://en.wikipedia.org/Order_of_St._Vladimir.
69. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 268-269.
70. Warrack, Tchaikovsky, 184, 189.
71. Warrack, Tchaikovsky, 251.
72. Warrack, Tchaikovsky, 251.
73. Warrack, Tchaikovsky, 260.
74. Holden, 402-403.
75. Holden, 265
76. Holden, 266
77. Warrack, 232
78. Holden, 266
79. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 320-321.
80. Brown, ""Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 321.
81. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 329.
82. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Misoc, 344, 346.
83. Holden, 296.
84. Holden, 299.
85. Letter to Anatoly, from New York, April 27, 1891. As quoted in Holden, 300.
86. Letter to Bob Davydov, April 30, 1891. As quoted in Holden, 300.
87. Holden, 300.
88. Holden, 303.
89. Holden, 301.
90. Diary entry, May 9, 1891. As quoted in Holden, 303.
91. Holden, 328-329.
92. Holden, 330, 340
93. Warrack, 264-265
94. Saint-Saëns, Camille, "Docteur à Cambridge," Portraits et Souvenirs (1899), as quoted in Brown, Tchaikovsky: The man and His Music, 428
95. Holden, 341
96. Damrosch, Walter, My Musical Life (New York, 1923), 144-145. As quoted in Holden, 344.
97. Holden, 344.
98. Schonberg, Harold C. Lives of the Great Composers, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 3rd ed 1997), 366.
99. Volkov, 98.
100. Steinberg, Michael, The Symphony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 633.
101. Schonberg, 367.
102. Schonberg, p. 367.
103. Schonberg, 366.
104. Cooper, Martin, ed Abraham, Gerald, Music of Tchaikovsky (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1946), 24-25.
105. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 441.
106. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 441-442.
107. As quoted in Warrack, Tchaikovsky, 129-130.
108. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 442.
109. Volkov, 112.
110. Schonberg, 366.
111. Steinberg, 630, 632 footnote 9.
112. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 427.
113. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 430-431.
114. Figis, Orlando, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 274.
115. Volkov, St. Petersburg, 100-101.
116. Volkov, St. Petersburg, 113.
117. Volkov, St. Petersburg, 113.
118. Benois, Alexandre, Moi vospominaniia (My Reminiscences), vol. 1 (bks. 1-3), 603. As quoted in Volkov, 124.
119. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The man and His Music, 260.
120. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 260.
121. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 405.
122. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 295-296.
123. Brown, Tchaikovsky: THe Man and His Music, 296.
124. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music, 296.
125. This illustration was commissioned for "Les Contes de Perrault" (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1867), Tchaikovsky's source for the story of The Sleeping Beauty.
126. Volkov, St. Petersburg, 123-124).
127. Figis, 274.
128. Volkov, St. Petersburg, 124.
129. Volkov, 111.
130. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 421.
131. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 422.
132. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 422-423.
133. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 423-424.
134. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 424.
135. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 424.
136. Warrack, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, 8.
137. Warrack, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, 8-9.
138. As quoted in Warrack, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, 11.
139. Cooper, 28-29.
140. Cooper, 29.
141. Cooper, 29.
142. Cooper, 24-25.
143. Cooper, 27.
144. As quoted in Cooper, 27 (italics Cooper)
145. Cooper, 27.
146. Cooper, 28.
147. Cooper, 28
148. As quoted in Warrack, Tchaikovsky, 132.
149. Warrack, Tchaikovsky, 133.
150. Warrack, Tchaikovsky, 133.
151. Warrack, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, 11.
152. Warrack, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, 11.
153. Warrack, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, 11-12.
154. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 425.
155. M.P. Mussorgsky, Pisma, ed. E. Gordeyeva (Moscow, 1981), 75. As quoted in Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 425-426.
156. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 426.
157. Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 426.
158. Schonberg, 371.
159. Cooper, 30.
160. Cooper, 26-27.
161. Cooper, 27.
162. Warrack, Tchaikovsky, 137.

• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
• 1840 births
• 1893 deaths
• Cause of death disputed
• Opera composers
• Romantic composers
• Russian ballet
• Russian composers
• Russian music critics
• LGBT people from Russia