My Favourite Things: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Prompted by the RSNO concert on the 8th of December, when the orchestra played scenes from Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker’ ballet, I have spent much of the Festive Season listening to the composer’s orchestral music. Back in summer 2021, I wrote about Tchaikovsky’s vocal music as part of my Singer’s Guide to composers on EMR, so I thought I might write a little about the great Russian composer’s non vocal music. The more I listen to this music, the more I find myself in awe at his astonishing creativity. In a life brought to a dramatic and tragic end by his early death at the age of 53 of suspected cholera, he managed to find time to write some of the greatest works of all time, both deeply Russian and wildly romantic, and to leave behind him a story of extraordinary variety, a tale of passion, tragedy, romance and sadness. He was, like Mahler, a great composer and a great conductor, and a man searching for meaning in his life, almost always unsuccessfully. As Mahler was haunted by his Jewish background, Tchaikovsky was haunted by his undisclosed homosexuality. Watching Leonard Bernstein’s documentary on Mahler’s Jewish heritage recently, I became aware of close parallels to Tchaikovsky’s battles with his own emotional situation, and how it must have affected everything he wrote.
I have always loved the last three symphonies (4, 5 and 6), but had not heard the first three and the Manfred Symphony before. I sent off for a box set of Rostropovich conducting all the orchestral works with the London Philharmonic, and I’ve been working my way through them. I studied forty years ago with Rostropovich’s wife, the wonderful Russian soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya, about whom I have written for the EMR, and sang once with him in a concert performance of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Iolanta’ in which she sang the title role. This one act opera was the last Tchaikovsky wrote, premiered in December 1892 in St Petersburg, with its first performance outside Russia in Hamburg in January 1893, conducted by Gustav Mahler, and it was Mahler again who conducted its first performance in Vienna.
Rostropovich was the greatest cellist I have ever heard, and I will never forget when he played some of the Bach cello suites in St Cuthbert’s Church at the West End in the Edinburgh Festival, probably fifty years ago now. I also heard him accompany Galina, before I knew her, in the Leith Theatre, also in the Festival, in a marvellous recital of Russian song. He was a real Renaissance man, great cellist, pianist and conductor – a friend of Britten, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, who all wrote major cello works for him.
His humanity and Russian spirit made me want to hear him conduct Tchaikovsky, and his interpretations are excellent. I know of no other composer who can excite the senses more than Tchaikovsky, and I suppose that is why I am writing about him today.
My first acquaintance with the composer was a record in my parents’ collection, part of a Reader’s Digest ‘Introduction to Classical Music’, where I discovered the 1812 Overture, written in 1880 by Tchaikovsky for the completion of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow and the 25th anniversary of the coronation of Tsar Alexander II. Several events got in the way of a timely premiere, principally the non-completion of the Cathedral and the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. It eventually appeared in 1882, Tchaikovsky hated it and it has proved to be perhaps his most famous work! It celebrates the heroic defence of Moscow against the French army of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812, and its well-known finale with bells and cannon fire, and the mocking use of the Marseillaise just before the defeat, is stunning and stirring even for pacifists like me.
My next exposure to Tchaikovsky was the title music for the BBC TV adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Ivanhoe’ in 1970, which used the fanfare to the 4th Symphony as its opening music. Starring Eric Flynn and a host of British stalwarts, it played the early Sunday evening slot for ten 25 minute episodes. The music was so dramatic and exciting for a schoolboy – almost as good as the William Tell Overture for the ‘Lone Ranger’!
Those two introductions got me interested and I soon found myself listening to the symphonies in the Usher Hall, and then buying the records. The crazy Ken Russell film, ‘The Music Lovers’, which was released in 1971, appealed to this adolescent youth mainly through the wild nudity of Glenda Jackson and Richard Chamberlain (playing a gay composer not long after being TV’s favourite heart throb, Dr Kildare, a bold career choice). I loved the excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s music played by André Previn and the LSO, but even an over-sexed teenager could see that this was a truly terrible film. What I hadn’t realised until today was that the screenplay was by Melvyn Bragg! Reading some of the contemporary reviews is revelatory. It was not liked, at all!
However, it didn’t stop me falling in love with Tchaikovsky’s music, and the sheer energy of his creativity is stunning.
The first three symphonies, written in 1866, 1872 and 1875 were attempts by the composer to reconcile sonata form (the basic classical structure of the symphony) with his imagination and his natural mixture of exuberance and depression. By 1866, he had been appointed to a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory and it was clear from contemporary correspondence that he went through hell to create a classic work. Given the title ‘Winter Dreams’, his First Symphony was first performed in February 1868, but not performed again until 1883. It’s a delightful short symphony, but its traumatic creation, causing Tchaikovsky both mental and physical stress, showed him that he was unlikely to ever produce the typical western sonata-form symphony.
The Second Symphony, a truly joyful creation, was a success from the beginning. Written mainly during Tchaikovsky’s summer holiday in Ukraine at his sister’s family estate, he made great use of Russian and Ukrainian folk melodies and found favour with the group of Russian nationalist composers (the Five) who normally gave him a hard time for being too western. It was called the Little Russian Symphony and was premiered in Moscow in February 1873. The tune in the finale was apparently based on a folk song, ‘The Crane,’ which his sister’s butler sang to the composer one evening on the estate.
Premiered in Moscow in November 1875, the Third Symphony was quite successful. It is his only symphony in a major key (D Major), and with five movements. It received its nickname, the ‘Polish’ symphony, after the composer’s death, when, in 1899, it was first played in Britain, at the Crystal Palace, conducted by Sir August Manns, who apparently referred to it as ‘The Polish’ because of the recurring polonaise dance rhythms in the final movement. It appears that Tchaikovsky would have been shocked at such a name, perhaps inferring criticism of Imperial Russia, which was not at all his intention.
With the 4th Symphony, we arrive at his first great symphonic work, premiered in and incidentally, my favourite. We’ve seen that I first met it through ‘Ivanhoe’ in 1970, but I have lived with it for many years particularly in the recording by Mariss Jansons from 1984, one of the first CDs I bought. His interpretation, with a wild accelerando at the end of the finale, is certainly exciting, and I try to listen to this and various other recordings at least every year. It was a great treat to hear the symphony live last season in the Usher Hall, played by the RSNO conducted by Patrick Hahn on my birthday 14 months ago. We had something of a Tchaikovsky Feast in Season 22/23 of the RSNO, with the 4th, 5th and 6th Symphonies, the First Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto, and I for one was delighted. Live performances of Tchaikovsky are a visceral experience because you feel he has put all his heart and soul into his compositions, holding nothing back. I think this freaks some people out, as such unharnessed emotion can shock, but it gives an audience a direct thrill which few other composers can do. In my experience, only Richard Wagner comes near the emotional directness of Tchaikovsky, and he does it in a completely different way.
Interestingly, Tchaikovsky was present at one of the great moments in musical history, as he attended the first performances of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Bayreuth in the summer of 1876, and we know what he felt about his experience because he wrote a full and fascinating account for the Russian language ‘Russian Register.’ I would encourage our readers to look up this account, which you can find on the internet by searching for ‘Tchaikovsky at Bayreuth’. I spent an absorbing hour last night reading Tchaikovsky’s impressions of Bayreuth, the people, the theatre, the music, and the moment in history. It is fascinating to read an account of someone who has lived through such an experience, especially if he is one of the greatest composers of all time. We read about the excitement of the event, the arrival of the Emperor by train and coach, followed by the composer himself, described by Tchaikovsky as a small man with a big personality. We read about the small town, completely unable to cope with the influx of so many grand people, where catering was overwhelmed to such an extent that few of the audience members could find a table at a restaurant or anything to eat or drink. He tells us that every act ended with people streaming out of the theatre desperate for food, far more interested in finding a restaurant than thinking about what they had heard. We read about the completely new concept of a theatre, with the orchestra under the stage and the auditorium filled with rows of uncomfortable seats (I can only agree, having sat through three operas there in 1990 in some discomfort). Tchaikovsky tells us about his reaction to this wildly new music, with no arias and ensembles, and only one chorus, over fifteen hours into the cycle, music which he has hardly had a chance to look at and which no one had heard before. He says it was like one long recitative, with many boring bits, and that most of the singers (completely new to this concept of writing) were quite inadequate. He praises the Austrian Brünnhilde, and the Mime, and says many of the smaller parts were well sung, but Wotan and Siegfried are average at best! I found it utterly riveting to read the first impressions of such a monumental work, through the eyes of a young composer, at the age of 36 on the cusp of a great career, two years before the 4th Symphony. We are lucky indeed, firstly that he was such a good writer and secondly, that his writings are preserved for us to read now.
This digression about Bayreuth has served to stop me, also an amateur journalist like Tchaikovsky, from running through all his works in order. There are books and articles about the composer much more learned than anything I could write, and my purpose here today is more to guide you to an appreciation of this mercurial figure, through the eyes of a performer. I have always enjoyed singing Tchaikovsky’s music, as he wrote with an understanding of the human voice, and the human condition, which is very rare among composers. He has become enormously famous, both for his fabulous music but also for his tragic life story and early death. At least he lived longer than Mozart and Schubert, Chopin and Bizet, but there is always a what if about these Romantic composers, what would they have gone on to write if they had been spared? It’s a useless question really, but speculation is always fun. How would his symphonies have developed, would he have written another opera having heard Wagner’s and Verdi’s contributions, would there have been more concertos?
At least he left us with a fantastic body of work, and I can only advise here that you investigate the compositions of this quintessentially Russian but also deeply international genius, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), but maybe avoid ‘The Music Lovers!’
