Piotr ilyich tchaikovsky

Piotr Iiyich Tchaikovsky

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

In 1866, the year Tchaikovsky wrote his First Symphony, a middle-aged Anton Bruckner finally finished his own first symphony, after fifteen months of tough going and with two earlier efforts left abandoned and unfinished. Johannes Brahms had already been working quietly on his first symphony for a decade--and it would take another ten years before he was satisfied with it. But Tchaikovsky, in his mid-twenties and fresh from the conservatory, launched his symphonic career with little anxiety or experience, turning out this Symphony no. 1 in a matter of months.

For most nineteenth-century composers, writing symphonies was serious business, particularly after Beethoven's watershed cycle of nine works, and, in the second half of the century, starting a first symphony was a genuine act of courage. Unlike Brahms, Tchaikovsky clearly did not suffer from the fear of following Beethoven's example--without apparent difficulty he composed a setting of Schiller's "An die Freude" (which Beethoven set as the finale of his Ninth Symphony) to mark his graduation from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in the fall of 1865. Straight out of school, with a silver medal and fine recommendations, Tchaikovsky set off for Moscow in January 1866, where he had accepted a teaching post at Nikolai Rubinstein's Russian Musical Society (later the Moscow Conservatory). The move at first proved difficult, but Tchaikovsky soon fell into the pattern of teaching; reported "an unusually sympathetic relationship with the Moscow ladies whom I teach"; made many new friends, including his future publisher, Piotr Jurgenson; discovered Dickens (The Pickwick Papers made him laugh aloud); and benefitted from the domineering presence of Rubinstein, who not only oversaw Tchaikovsky's musical affairs and dictated his musical tastes, but also bought him an entire new wardrobe.

Tchaikovsky arrived in Moscow with no experience writing for orchestra, beyond his student efforts--an overture, The Storm, and the "An die Freude" cantata. Once settled, he finished the orchestration of a Concert overture in C, which Rubinstein greatly disliked, and revised an Overture in F, which was successfully performed on March 16. By then, he had begun his first symphony, apparently at Rubinstein's urging. Work went smoothly at first, at least until Tchaikovsky's progress was derailed by the first artistic setback of his career. César Cui, still known to music students today as the spokesman of The Five--the group of Russian composers including Borodin, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, who banded together in 1875 to foster a national school of music--published a belated review of Tchaikovsky's "An die Freude" which he dismissed as "utterly feeble." Tchaikovsky was devastated:

When I read that frightful judgment, I don't know what I did with myself. My vision grew dark, my head spun, and I ran out of the cafe like a madman. I didn't realize what I was doing, nor where I was. All day I wandered aimlessly through the city, repeating "I'm sterile, insignificant, nothing will come out of me, I'm ungifted."

But Tchaikovsky went back to work on the symphony, which occupied several hours of each day and night. By May, he reported that it was going "sluggishly"; he was having trouble sleeping and began to fear death. For the rest of his life, he avoided composing at night because it reminded him of this painful time. That summer, when he went to visit his sister, he suffered from nervous attacks, numbness in his hands and feet, and hallucinations. Not for the last time in his life, a doctor pronounced him "one step from insanity."

When Tchaikovsky went back to Saint Petersburg in August, his former teachers, Nikolai Zaremba and Anton Rubinstein (Nikolai's brother), both criticized the music harshly. Tchaikovsky returned to Moscow and to work on the symphony, no doubt incorporating some of their suggestions. The piece was introduced to the public in stages. In December, the scherzo alone was played publicly in Moscow, without apparent success. Two months later, both the Adagio and the scherzo were performed to enthusiastic applause, and at least one decent review: "It is melodious to the highest degree, and excellently scored." The entire symphony was given, under Nikolai Rubinstein's baton, a year later, though it was not heard again for fifteen years. By then, Tchaikovsky had written many of the works for which he would long be remembered--Romeo and Juliet, the B-flat piano concerto, his only violin concerto, Swan Lake, the great opera Eugene Onegin, the 1812 Overture--and he had made great strides as a symphonist, with four already under his belt. Before the First Symphony was published in 1874, Tchaikovsky made a few minor adjustments. (Bruckner, on the other hand, revised his First Symphony in 1868, 1877, and 1884, and made even more extensive changes in 1890 and 1891.) At the time Tchaikovsky's Symphony no. 1 was performed in this final version, in Moscow in 1883, Tchaikovsky told a friend, "I have a soft spot for it, for it is a sin of my sweet youth."

All his life Tchaikovsky was painfully aware of his deficiencies as a composer--weaknesses that have never stood in the way of enormous public favor. By 1883, he had enough experience with the problems of symphonic form to recognize how naive he was to tackle a symphony in his sweet youth, but the work is hardly a sin. Even in 1866, Tchaikovsky had a sense of drama and orchestral color, and a way with melody that was far in advance of most other composers of the day. And he had already found his own voice. Listen to opening of the symphony: an oddly distinctive melody in the flutes and bassoons over a mysterious rustle from the violins. The whole first movement, despite and some spotty seam work, is remarkably fresh in its melodic outline and scoring-there is a moment at the start of the development section, when distant chords from the horns dance quietly over low strings, that is right out of the Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker, written two decades later.

Not only is the oboe melody in the Adagio one of the first characteristic Tchaikovsky tunes, but the way it is echoed by the bassoon and encouraged by glistening scales from the flute would quickly become one of his signature effects. The first eight measures, serenely setting the stage for the main melody, were borrowed from his student overture The Storm.

Tchaikovsky wrote the scherzo first, reusing material originally intended for a piano sonata in C-sharp minor and demonstrating how much he had learned from the scores by Mendelssohn he admired. (The Italian Symphony was a particular favorite.) The music for the trio midsection is new--Tchaikovsky's first great orchestral waltz.

There is wonderfully evocative and fiery, dramatic music in the finale--enough to disguise Tchaikovsky's uncertainty in bringing a symphony to a satisfying conclusion, the challenge that had troubled nearly every composer since Beethoven. A rather labored fugue sits where heavy-duty development ought to take place, and there is a bit more bombast at the end than even Tchaikovsky could sustain, but there are many splendid moments, and the lasting impression is of a composer who was born to write symphonies.

A final word about the nickname, Winter Daydreams, which Tchaikovsky himself invented, with no apparent programmatic idea in mind. He intended to give titles to all four movements, but got no further than the Adagio before he decided to let the music stand on its own.

While Rimsky-Korsakov is best known in the West for his orchestral works, his operas far outweigh them in importance, offering a far wider variety of orchestral effect as well as his finest vocal writing. Subjects range from historical melodramas The Tsar’s Bride to folk operas May Night to fairytales and legends Snowmaiden, Kashchey the Immortal and The Tale of Tsar Saltan).

The May Night was the second of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, and the overture bears the hallmark of tradition of being a self-contained piece, unlike overtures to Rimsky-Korsakov’s later stage works. The solemn opening chords are given to the songlike themes of this comic and fantastical work. However, the composer still shows strong influence of the father of Russian music, Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka. The orchestral forces and the composer’s treatment of them are still firmly rooted in Russia’s musical past.

© 1996 Columbia Artists Management Inc.

Most celebrated for his symphonies and ballets (though he wrote more operas), Tchaikovsky also produced oodles of chamber, piano, vocal, choral and concertante music, plus a substantial body of other orchestral works. I'm not sure what distinguishes “Symphonic Fantasy” from “Fantasy Overture”, but Tchaikovsky assures us that, of his three Shakespeare-inspired orchestral works, The Tempest (1873) is of the former, while Romeo and Juliet (1869) and Hamlet are of the latter persuasion. 

The premiere of Hamlet was not a resounding success. Balakirev was unimpressed, and one critic even bemoaned the lack of narrative (?). Tchaikovsky had deliberately eschewed “narrative” in favour of more generalised reflection on the drama, at least partly, one would guess, to allow the piece to have a clear-cut musical form. Yet Hamlet seems thoroughly rhapsodic: the ear is confused by a form which is not musical, but theatrical! The brilliantly innovative composer moulds his music like a play, cumulatively introducing six main ideas as the “plot” develops.  The introduction's chord sequence prepares the “coda”. 'Cellos and basses descend into an abysmal gloom of woodwind and brass over a pulsing drum: a transformation like that of the love theme in Romeo and Juliet seals the tragic fate.