A Note on Using this Book

As I have written in my Personal Note, I hope that this book will be read by anyone who has some interest in tracing Tchaikovsky’s personal biography and discovering something of his major works, and where they fit into his life. But my prime aim has been to provide a listener’s guide to readers who may have little or no knowledge of musical theory and terminology, but who may wish to make closer acquaintance with a selection of Tchaikovsky’s individual works. Especially I would wish to help those who seek a deeper knowledge of how Tchaikovsky mapped out these pieces, and of some of the procedures he used to create them, for I believe that, with this added knowledge to guide their ears, they may become conscious of things that can contribute richly to the listening experience, but of which they would otherwise have remained unaware.

The book can, of course, be read simply as a biography by omitting all the segregated discussions of individual works. As for the examinations of the music itself, these are done in clearly marked self-contained sections as each work crops up in the narrative. An introductory note in italics opens each of these sections, and I hope this will help the reader to decide whether he or she wishes to investigate that particular work, or to pass on. I have provided a specially detailed note on the second piece I have examined (the fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet ) so that those who may never have attempted to approach music other than through what their ears have picked up may have some guidance on how Tchaikovsky assembled a piece. (Readers in this category should bypass the examination of the 1st Symphony on pp. 31–4; they can always return to this later, should they wish.) By this I hope to alert them to things that can be of real significance to the listener, but that might otherwise be missed. Before my examination of Romeo and Juliet , I have also briefly discussed listening strategies.

Tchaikovsky’s output was huge, and it has been simply impossible to deal with every piece. I decided, sometimes very regretfully, to take virtually no account of his many songs and short instrumental pieces, nor to examine in any depth larger pieces that are universally agreed to be less than his best. I realize, of course, that the number of pieces individual readers will choose will vary enormously from perhaps just two or three up to, say, twenty or more; listening to the latter number might well be spread over many months, even years. I realize, too, that while some readers may want to choose for themselves which pieces they will listen to, most will wish to investigate only a selection of the most important works – say, six to a dozen – and to satisfy this preference I have set out below a series of Options. Such readers should select from Option 2’s ‘Top Dozen’, or from Option 3, fixing on the ‘Mixed Menu’. Others may want to have a wider range of choice. In an attempt to answer these varying demands, I have divided Tchaikovsky’s works in three ways:

Option 1

Here I have assumed that my reader wishes to make his or her own selection of pieces, but would appreciate an indication of how strongly I would recommend each piece. I have therefore grouped the pieces into five categories, a work’s placing signalled by the starring convention as each crops up for scrutiny in the main narrative (a bracket round the final star in some instances indicates that I have a certain reservation about my classification):

***** Top-priority pieces, discussed in detail (a dozen in all)

**** Major pieces, discussed in some detail

*** Important pieces, though usually less closely examined

** Pieces of interest, perhaps discussed in very general terms

* Pieces of some significance, but not discussed

Option 2

Here I have made a rather more precise selection specially for readers who know they will be wanting to listen to only a limited number of works. I have given first, in chronological order of composition, a ‘Top Dozen’ – but six of these also offer alternatives, which will, of course, be out of sequence. The point is that if, for instance, you want to tackle only one opera, I have named the two I consider to be the best – but very different – ones for you to make your own choice. If you decide you want to take an extra opera on board, you now know which one I would recommend. Likewise, you might want to stick with the piano for a second concerto, or you might prefer one with a violin. Then, if you should have also listened to all the alternatives in the ‘Top Dozen’ category, the ‘Next Eight’ gives you pointers to what you might then enjoy investigating; these appear in chronological order, with the exception of Mazeppa .

Top Dozen

Fantasy Overture: Romeo and Juliet

Symphony no. 2, Little Russian

Piano Concerto no. 1

Ballet: Swan Lake or The Nutcracker

Symphonic Fantasia: Francesca da Rimini or The Tempest

Symphony no. 4

Opera: Eugene Onegin or The Queen of Spades

Violin Concerto or Piano Concerto no. 2

Serenade for Strings or Suite no. 3

Manfred Symphony or Symphony no. 5

Ballet: The Sleeping Beauty

Symphony no. 6, Pathétique

Next Eight

String Quartet no. 1

Opera: Cherevichki or Mazeppa

Symphony no. 3

Rococo Variations, for cello and orchestra

Piano Trio

Fantasy Overture: Hamlet

String Sextet: Souvenir de Florence

Symphonic Ballad: The Voyevoda

Option 3

My third selection offers a series of mostly five-or six-a-piece menus for readers who may wish to investigate a particular kind of music. Two especially important pieces, Romeo and Juliet and the Sixth Symphony (Pathétique ), are to be included, as the first and last items respectively, in all menus.

All Menus

(as opener and closer respectively)

Fantasy Overture: Romeo and Juliet

Symphony no. 6, Pathétique

Mixed

Piano Concerto no. 1

Symphony no. 4 or 5

Ballet: Swan Lake or Opera: Eugene Onegin

Violin Concerto

Serenade for Strings

Suite no. 3

Symphony/Concerto

Symphony no. 2

Piano Concerto no. 1

Symphony no. 4

Violin Concerto

Symphony no. 5

Piano Concerto no. 2

Literary Trail

Symphonic Fantasia: The Tempest

Symphonic Fantasia: Francesca da Rimini

Fantasy Overture: Hamlet

Symphonic Ballad: The Voyevoda

Manfred Symphony

Ballet/Opera

Ballet: Swan Lake

Opera: Eugene Onegin

Ballet: The Sleeping Beauty

Opera: The Queen of Spades

Ballet: The Nutcracker

Concerted Works

Piano Concerto no. 1

Rococo Variations, for cello and orchestra

Piano Concerto no. 2

Violin Concerto

Sérénade mélancolique

Chamber Works

String Quartet no. 1

String Quartet no. 2

String Quartet no. 3

Piano Trio

String Sextet: Souvenir de Florence

I am assuming that many readers will know nothing of musical theory, but would wish to gain some knowledge of such things as may be of use to the listener. All but one of the matters on which I make observations require simply attentive listening, and do not depend on any specialized technical knowledge. The one exception is the matter of key. Some readers will already be thoroughly familiar with key and its usage, but others will not, and I do not believe that any reader will lose out significantly by not wishing to extend his or her knowledge here. Others, however, will want to fill this gap, and so I have given some explanation of key in Appendix 2. More importantly, in Appendix 1 I have described as briefly as possible some of the main musical forms that constantly recur in classical music – sonata form and rondo, for instance. In Appendix 3 I have also supplied glossaries of technical terms and foreign words (most of them Italian) that are used in this book.

Childhood 1: Votkinsk

In August 1844 a governess of French extraction was in St Petersburg seeking an appointment. Her name was Fanny Dürbach, and she was twenty-two. At the same time a young Russian mother who was looking to engage just such a person was travelling to the Russian capital with her eldest son, Nikolay. She had come from Votkinsk over eight hundred miles to the east, where her husband was the mining engineer in charge of the government iron works. The couple had three sons and a daughter. The two women met and an agreement was reached; Fanny would begin working for the Tchaikovsky family. And so a rather apprehensive governess set out on a three-week journey with her new employer. Some of her anxieties had eased as they progressed, but how would she be received on arrival? Fifty years later she recalled it all:

During the journey we became so closely acquainted that when we reached the factory we were on thoroughly intimate terms. The kindness and courtesy of Mrs Tchaikovskaya and the good looks, even handsomeness, of Nikolay disposed me to my companions, while the meticulous good manners of the latter [Nikolay] were an assurance that the task before me would not be difficult. Yet, all the same, I was very uneasy. All would be well if, on my arrival, I had to deal only with Mrs Tchaikovskaya and her son – but before me lay acquaintance with people and a way of life that were completely unknown. And so the closer we got to the end of our journey, the more my concern and uneasiness grew. But when at length we arrived at the house, one moment sufficed to show that all my fears were groundless. A host of people ran out to meet us, there began rapturous embracing and kissing, and it was impossible to distinguish family from servants in the crowd. All were made equal by an undivided, living joy; everyone greeted the return of the mistress of the house with equal warmth and affection. Mr Tchaikovsky came up to me and, without a word, embraced and kissed me like a daughter. The simplicity and patriarchal character of his action at once set the stamp of approval upon me, and sealed me almost as one of the family. I had not just arrived; rather, like Mrs Tchaikovskaya and her son, I too had ‘returned home’. Next morning I set about my work without the slightest agitation or fear for the future.

Among the throng that greeted Fanny was the couple’s four-year-old second son, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, the future composer.

It was indeed a happy family within which Fanny would work. Ilya Tchaikovsky, Pyotr’s father, came of a line with a strong military tradition, but Ilya had chosen differently, entering the School for Mining Engineers and qualifying with a silver medal. He would be three times married; by his first wife he had a daughter, Zinaida (born 1829). Soon after this her mother died, and in 1833 he married Alexandra (née Assier); the future composer was their second surviving child. Ilya was clearly a kindly, trusting man, gentle in manner, benign and sentimental. He had no particular interest in music: as a youth he had taken up the flute only to abandon it. But the theatre was a different matter; here he would readily give way to tears whatever the play, and this love of a world of the creative imagination helps explain why he would later support his second son’s mature decision to seek a professional career in the sister art of music.

Pyotr’s relationship with his father was easy but not particularly close. With his mother it was a very different matter. Though she would die when he was only fourteen, she would prove the most important woman in his whole existence, and to the end of his life each anniversary of her death brought a flood of treasured memories and painful emotions. She was half French, her father being an immigrant who had taken Russian nationality, married a local girl, and gone on to work as a customs official. Born in 1813, Alexandra scarcely knew her mother, who had died when she was only three, and at the age of six she had been placed in a school for orphan girls where she had received a good education, gaining a high competence in French and German, some skill in singing, and an ability to play dances on the piano. Ilya Tchaikovsky was eighteen years her senior. They would have six children who would survive into adulthood, of whom Pyotr (born 7 May 1840) was the second. He was preceded by Nikolay (‘Kolya’, born 1838), and followed by Alexandra (‘Sasha’, born 1842), Ippolit (‘Polya’, born 1843), and twins Modest and Anatoly (‘Modya’ and ‘Tolya’, born 1850).

As a person Alexandra was reserved, not given to open expressions of endearment, but conscientious and capable in all her domestic responsibilities. Modest Tchaikovsky (who scarcely knew her as a person, being only four when she died) later noted:

From the testimony of people who knew her she was a tall stately woman, not particularly beautiful, but with an enchanting expression in her eyes, and looks that involuntarily drew your attention. Certainly all who knew her unanimously affirm there was something exceptionally attractive about her appearance.

More interesting, however, is Modest’s record of his composer-brother’s special memory of her as ‘a tall, rather ample lady with a wonderful expression, and hands which, though not small, were unusually beautiful’. Pyotr’s noting of her hands seems particularly significant. For a young child, a mother’s hands are the primary instruments of close physical contact – of touch, tenderness, caress, ministration, and protection. Given that the homosexual Tchaikovsky would, some thirty years on, contract a harrowingly disastrous marriage with a woman whom he would declare, within only days of the wedding, had become ‘physically … totally repugnant’ to him, this enduring memory of the one woman from whom he had clearly yearned desperately for intimate physical contact must seem all the more poignant.

Fanny’s recollections of her four years as governess to the Tchaikovsky children were drawn from her by Modest in 1894, the year after his brother’s death. Rarely can we get such precise and vivid glimpses into the very earliest years of a great composer-to-be. Though there had been no intention that Pyotr should become one of Fanny’s charges, he begged tearfully to be allowed to join her two official tutees, Nikolay and Ilya’s niece, Lidiya, one of his family dependents. He outshone them both. Within two years he could read French and German without difficulty (so we are told), and within a further year was writing sentimental verse in French, including a celebration of Joan of Arc, upon whom he would, thirty years on, compose one of his largest operas. In transcribing these juvenilia from Fanny’s treasury, Modest seems to have retained faithfully his seven-year-old brother’s exact text, mistakes and all:

L’héroïne de la France,

On t’aime, on ne t’oublie pas,

Heroïne si belle!

Tu as sauvé la France,

Fille d’un berger!

Mais qui fait ces actions si belles!

Barbare anglais vous ont tuée,

Toute la France vous admire.

Tes cheveux blonds jusquà tes genoux,

Ils sont très beau .

Tu étais si célèbre

Que l’ange Michel t’apparut.

Les célébres on pense à eux,

Les méchants on les oublie!

Fanny used to call Pyotr ‘le petit Pouchkine’ after the greatest of Russian poets, Alexander Pushkin. There is no doubt that he became the favourite among her three pupils, and a tiny incident she recorded is a pointer to why this should have been, and to that sensitivity towards others close to him that would mark so much of his later life:

Once, during a break for recreation, he sat down before an atlas and examined it. Coming to a map of Europe, he suddenly began covering Russia with kisses, and then made as if to spit on the remaining portion of the world. I stopped him, and began explaining that it was shameful to behave thus towards fellow human beings who, like himself, addressed God as ‘Our Father’, that it was bad to hate fellow men because they weren’t Russian, and that it meant he was spitting on me also, because I wasn’t Russian. ‘You don’t need to scold me,’ Pierre replied. ‘Didn’t you notice I had covered France with my hand?’

Fanny may have cultivated zealously her young charge’s literary skills, but she clearly had little concern for his musical aptitudes. His first known attempt at composition had been made when his mother was on her trip to St Petersburg, Ilya writing to his wife that ‘Sasha and Petya have composed a song, “Our mother in St Petersburg”’. But his musical education proper was probably initiated by the orchestrion (a species of barrel organ that could simulate quite elaborate orchestral effects) that his father bought soon after arrival in Votkinsk. Part of its repertoire proved especially crucial for the future composer, introducing him to the giant who would forever remain for him the greatest of musical geniuses, and to the opera that would always remain the greatest of all musical creations. As Modest put it:

He was particularly captivated by the pieces of Mozart that it played. The composer himself [Tchaikovsky] repeatedly asserted that his passionate worship of that genius had its beginning in the unspoken delight, that ‘holy rapture’ which he’d experienced during his early childhood on hearing the orchestrion play Zerlina’s aria, ‘Vedrai carino’, and other excerpts from Don Giovanni . Moreover, this orchestrion also acquainted him with the music of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, and it was probably from this that there stemmed that love of Italian music that remained with him all his life, even when the persecution of it was in full swing in serious musical circles during the 1860s and 1870s.

Even before having piano lessons Pyotr had begun picking out the orchestrion’s tunes on the piano. Frustrated when his parents on occasion forbade him the instrument, he would continue fingering these tunes on some other surface, on one occasion practising so vigorously on a window pane that he broke the glass and cut his hand badly. This, Modest stated, was the moment that decided his parents he should have proper piano lessons. His teacher, a Mariya Palchikova, was competent, though her knowledge of the repertoire was limited, and within three years he could sight-read as well as she. Yet he remembered what he owed to her, for thirty-five years later, on receiving a letter from her revealing that she was in difficulties, he arranged for money to be sent to this woman to whom ‘I am very, very indebted’. Such generosity, often anonymous, was to mark his later life.

It is no surprise that for a future composer improvisation was of as much importance as learning music by other composers, though the effect of this on him could be drastic, as Fanny recalled:

After work or long periods of letting his imagination loose at the piano he was always nervy and edgy. On one occasion the Tchaikovskys had guests, and the whole evening was spent in musical entertainments. Because it was a holiday the children joined the adults. Pierre was initially very lively and happy, but towards the end of the evening he became so tired that he went upstairs earlier than usual. When I went to the nursery some time later he was not asleep; instead, his eyes glistening, he was weeping agitatedly. When I asked what was the matter with him, he replied, ‘Oh, it’s this music!’ But there was no music to be heard at that moment. ‘Get rid of it for me! It’s here, here,’ said the boy, weeping and pointing to his head. ‘It won’t give me any peace.’

The creative gift of the future composer was, it seems, already precociously stirring.

Childhood 2: St Petersburg

Sadly, the idyll with Fanny was about to end. Some fifty years later the governess herself would describe her four years with the Tchaikovsky family as the happiest of her life – and so, too, they would prove to be for the future composer. Her departure was, for him, cruelly abrupt. Though in 1848 Ilya retired from his government post with a pension, he still needed to work, for his growing family had increasingly to attend proper schools. Accordingly, he opened negotiations for a new appointment in Moscow; as for Fanny, she decided to remain in Votkinsk and find a position with another family. In October the moment came for the Tchaikovskys to move and, realizing how painful the break with Fanny would be, the parents arranged that she should slip away that very morning before the children awoke. The latter were distraught – above all Pyotr who, a year later, could still dissolve in tears on receiving a letter from her. Then further misfortune struck. Ilya’s hoped-for appointment did not materialize, and within a month the family had moved on to St Petersburg, where Nikolay and Pyotr were promptly enrolled in the fashionable Schmelling School. The routine was gruelling, the academic day lasting nine hours with much homework to follow, and this told on Pyotr’s health. Paradoxically it proved a blessing for him that he finally contracted measles, for his debilitated condition made a return to the school before June impossible, by which time the family had moved to Alapayevsk, where Ilya had secured a new post.

St Petersburg had provided Pyotr with two compensations: he had had some piano lessons with a very good teacher, and had been taken frequently to the opera and ballet. But Alapayevsk, like Votkinsk, was a provincial town, and even farther to the east. The pains of St Petersburg and of his illness had unsettled Pyotr to a degree that sometimes drove his mother to tears. Even his interest in music seemed to recede, and for pleasure he turned to reading – a diversion that would become a lifelong refuge. Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du christianisme he found, unsurprisingly, beyond him, but Nikolay Gogol’s fantastic tale, Christmas Eve , enthralled him; without knowing it, he had found a second subject on which, one day, he would compose an opera. The arrival of a second governess, Anastasiya Petrova, brought some stability into his world and set him on course for entry to a major school back in St Petersburg. Clearly he liked her, for in 1854 he would set her name on his earliest surviving composition, his Anastasie valse for piano.

We can only guess whether what also had unsettled Pyotr was awareness of the break with his family that this tuition would ultimately entail; what is certain is that, when the moment arrived, it could not have been worse. In May 1850 Alexandra, having given birth to her last children, the twins, set off within three months for St Petersburg where the ten-year-old Pyotr was to be enrolled in one of its best schools, the School of Jurisprudence. It would be two years before his entry into the main school, and meanwhile he was registered in the preparatory class, and lodged with Modest Vakar and his wife, old friends of his father. Significantly Ilya had shown his continued concern for his second son’s main interest: ‘Don’t, of course, forget about his music either,’ he had exhorted his wife. ‘It would be wrong to abandon a good thing already begun.’ But Ilya had already realized what the return of his mother to Alapayevsk would mean for Pyotr. In the event it proved traumatic – ‘one of the most terrible days of my life’, as he later told brother Modest:

The incident took place at the Central Turnpike where it was usual to go at that time to see off those who were taking the road to Moscow [Modest recorded]. On the way there Pyotr shed a few tears, but the end of the journey seemed a long way off and, cherishing every second he could look at his mother, he appeared comparatively calm. But with actual arrival at their destination, he lost all self-control. Pressing himself against his mother, he could not bear to let her go. Neither caresses, consolings, nor promises of a quick return had any effect. He heard and saw nothing, seeming almost to become one with the beloved being. Force had to be used to tear the boy away from Alexandra Andreyevna. At last their efforts succeeded, she took her seat in the carriage, the horses started to move – and then, summoning up all his remaining strength, the boy broke loose, and rushed after the carriage with a cry of mad despair, trying to grab hold of the footboard, the splashboard, whatever came to hand, in a vain hope of stopping her. Never in his life could Pyotr Ilich speak of that moment without a shudder of horror. The impression left by that first intense grief paled in comparison only with one yet more intense: his mother’s death.

It would be nearly two years before Pyotr would see his mother again, and in the meantime he poured his feelings into letters home. Anniversaries brought bursts of nostalgia: ‘Last week Advent began, and you, my Angels [his parents], will be fasting faithfully because, in those happy times when I was with you, you always did. And now I remember how joyfully we received the Christmas Tree from you. But I shan’t be able to join in with Sasha, Polya, Malya, Katya and Mina. But at least I shall remember it.’ In September 1851, however, his father resigned from his Alapayevsk post, his intention now being to bring the whole family back to St Petersburg. Yet it would be May 1852 before his parents at last arrived, a delight augmented by his success in the entrance examination to the School of Jurisprudence itself. Something of the new joyful – at times, exuberant – mood that now possessed him is underlined by one tale (for there are more of the same) from the following summer recorded by Modest. It is something of a surprise to learn that all his life Tchaikovsky delighted in practical jokes – as, for instance, on the occasion when Nikolay and another boy had perched themselves on a ladder to overhear Zinaida and two other girls who were confiding to one another their affairs of the heart, Pyotr engineered a drenching with cold water for the eavesdroppers in their turn. Modest (who thoroughly deplored such things) observed that his brother’s delight in pranks like this was exceeded only by his pleasure in recalling them.

In the autumn Pyotr settled into his new school. The School of Jurisprudence had a good reputation, being a highly disciplined institution whose primary function was to provide a vocational training in law which facilitated entry into the civil service. Pyotr’s relations with both the staff and his fellow pupils seem to have been good, all the surviving evidence pointing to him being well liked, though he also gained a reputation for his dishevelled appearance, the disorganization of his daily existence, and his forgetfulness. His one serious challenge to the rules was smoking, which was strictly forbidden. Yet it seems doubtful that this was simply an act of bravado, or a means to create for himself the image of a daredevil; rather, it relieved inner tension. Whatever the case, tobacco became, as he later freely admitted, a lifelong addiction, not simply a pleasure. Significantly for the future, perhaps, the most important of the friendships he forged at school was with Alexey Apukhtin, who would become a noted homosexual and leading poet, at least six of whose texts Tchaikovsky would later set in songs.

As for music, he would owe little to what he learned at the school itself. His one family ally in music making was his mother’s sister, Ekaterina, who would take him through the whole of Mozart’s Don Gio vanni , providing him with the greatest musical epiphany of his whole life. Equally important for his musical development were the three years of piano lessons that began in 1855 with Rudolf Kündinger, a young German pianist, whose brother, Auguste, also gave Pyotr a year’s lessons in music theory. As for his own creative activities, the only surviving evidence from this period is the Anastasie valse for piano of 1854. His next extant composition dates from 1857 or 1858, and is a song, ‘My genius, my angel, my friend’, ** a modest drawing-room romance that shows a remarkable sensitivity in one so young, and which can still occasionally be heard in Tchaikovsky song recitals.

However, the event that would forever mark the 1850s for Pyotr was a family matter. In 1854 his mother contracted cholera. More than two years passed before he could bring himself to write to Fanny about what followed:

Finally I have to tell you of a horrible misfortune that befell us two and a half years ago. Four months after Zina’s departure, Mama suddenly fell sick with cholera, yet though she was dangerously ill, she recovered her health, thanks to the redoubled efforts of the doctors. But this was only temporary, for after four days of convalescence, she died without having time to say goodbye to all those around her. Although she did not have the strength to utter a word distinctly, it was nevertheless understood that she wanted to take final communion, and the priest arrived in time with the blessed sacraments, for after taking communion she rendered up her soul to God.

The blow was shattering – all the more so for being so sudden. All his life Tchaikovsky would keep diaries, and an entry in 1877 says it all:

Despite the triumphal strength of my convictions [that there is no eternal life], I can never reconcile myself to the thought that my mother, whom I loved so much, and who was such a wonderful person, may have disappeared for ever, and that I shall never again have the chance to tell her that, even after twenty-three years, I still love her …

Yet Pyotr was now well practised in living without his mother’s presence, and he seems to have disciplined himself to adjust outwardly to the changed circumstances. To add to Ilya’s loss of his wife was the gradual dispersal of various members of his family. Zinaida had recently married, his niece Lidiya was about to wed, and feeling unable to cope with all but the twins, he enrolled Sasha and Ippolit in boarding establishments. In this reduced domestic situation Ilya soon arranged for his favourite brother, Pyotr, to bring his wife, Elizaveta, to share quarters with him in St Petersburg. The future composer was fortunate in his aunt; she had no compunction about enjoying life’s blessings to the full, seeing that her children learned to draw, enjoyed the best of literature, music and drama, and led a healthy social life. It made for a very congenial three years of joint living.

In May 1859 Pyotr graduated from the School of Jurisprudence, with the rank of titular councillor giving him a special eligibility for civil service employment. His childhood was behind him.

Civil Service: Personal Matters – and Conservatoire

Modest aptly described his brother’s career in the civil service in one word: ‘uncomplicated’. In June 1859, now aged nineteen, Tchaikovsky began employment in the Ministry of Justice, and after two modest promotions, remained in the same grade until his resignation in May 1863. Tchaikovsky himself always claimed he had been a conscientious worker, though when asked sometime later what his actual duties had been, he confessed he could not remember. Absentmindedness had always been one of his failings, and it was even alleged that once, having stopped to talk to a colleague while carrying a document signed by his chief, he unthinkingly tore off and ate pieces of the paper so that it had to be recopied. Modest questioned the authenticity of this story, though he confirmed that, all his life, his brother would devour pieces of theatre programmes in this way. Certainly his civil service career was inglorious, and when he resigned we might suspect sheer boredom – or dismissal for incompetence – as the cause. In fact, the reason was far more positive – and cheering.

For also in 1859 in St Petersburg there had occurred another event whose consequences for Tchaikovsky would be momentous: the establishment of the Russian Musical Society (RMS). Though there had always been an abundance of folk music in Russia and also a long tradition of music for the Orthodox Church, the Russian musical tradition, as we in the West understand it, had been founded only in 1836 with the first performance of Mikhail Glinka’s opera, A Life for the Tsar , the story of how a Russian peasant, Ivan Susanin, sacrificed himself to save the Tsar from marauding Polish troops. The opera’s popular success was enormous, far greater than that of its successor, Ruslan and Lyudmila , a tale of heroism and enchantment based on a poem by Pushkin, and produced in 1842. Nevertheless, Ruslan was probably even more important for later Russian composers, for it contained music that was far more original and radical than that of its predecessor, bequeathing to Glinka’s successors new styles and methods which they would avidly make their own. Without these two operas, together with the four short orchestral pieces which followed in the next ten years (the Valse Fantasie, the two Spanish Overtures and, above all, the orchestral scherzo, Kamarinskaya ), Russian music would never have evolved quite as it did.

But if by the middle of the century all these pieces were in place, there remained the problem of building a proper structure for musical tuition and for the concert performance of orchestral music. This was where the pianist and composer, Anton Rubinstein (born 1829), stepped in. A Russian Jew with a brother, Nikolay (born 1835), who was also a pianist, Anton had by the late 1850s become probably the most famous of all living Russian musicians. An insatiable activist, he was already aware of the yawning gaps in Russia’s musical world, and in 1859, and with the active support of the Tsar’s German-born greataunt, the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, the RMS was founded to promote orchestral concerts conducted by Rubinstein, and – in the long run more important still – to establish classes in music theory. Not only had there never before been such classes in Russia; there was not even a textbook on harmony in Russian (it would be Tchaikovsky himself who, in 1871, would fill this gap). So successful were these new classes that within three years they had grown into the St Petersburg Conservatoire, with Rubinstein as its Principal, and some remarkably distinguished musicians among its staff. Meanwhile, in 1860, similar classes had been instituted in Moscow by Nikolay Rubinstein, and these likewise had so flourished that in 1866 a matching conservatoire would be founded in that city, with Nikolay as its Principal. Among its earliest staff would be a man who, only two and a half years earlier, had still been a civil servant – Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky.

Back in 1859, with school now behind him, Tchaikovsky was free to organize his leisure time as he chose. For the period immediately following his departure from the School of Jurisprudence we have to rely on Modest’s memories, though since he was still only nine when his brother entered the civil service, his record is inevitably very circumscribed, and is certainly not scrupulously objective. Of all Tchaikovsky’s siblings Modest would be the closest to him, no doubt because he, too, was homosexual. But there would also be tension in the relationship, mainly from Modest’s side. The cause was clearly jealousy. Modest would aspire to be a playwright, but would enjoy little success (despite all his composer-brother’s strenuous efforts on his behalf), whereas Tchaikovsky for the last years of his life would be fêted everywhere as the greatest of living Russian composers – as, indeed, after Tolstoy, the greatest of all living Russians.

For a moment we must turn aside from the main narrative to take account of Modest and his activities, and also of Tchaikovsky’s sexuality. After the composer’s death in 1893 Modest set himself to be curator of his brother’s legacy, and especially of his letters to the family. Nervous about the effect on the composer’s personal reputation – and perhaps, by association, on his own – if Pyotr Ilich’s homosexuality became common knowledge, Modest suppressed and sometimes, certainly, even destroyed documentary evidence. Between 1900 and 1902 he would publish his three-volume life of his brother, packing it with quotations from his letters, over five thousand of which survive to this day, but carefully manicuring the texts to exclude anything that might point too markedly to his brother’s sexual preference, and ensuring that his own narrative did nothing to hint at it. Certainly we now have nothing that points clearly to any homosexual initiation or involvement that might have occurred during Tchaikovsky’s school years even though, as in any single-sex boarding school, there would certainly have been much heightened sexual curiosity and, at the very least, ‘foreplay’, both of an experimental and of a committed kind. The evidence of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality has been investigated exhaustively by Alexander Poznansky, an expatriate Russian scholar, now long resident in the USA. In very detailed research he has concluded that ‘it is quite likely that the majority of Tchaikovsky’s friendships at the school were erotically innocent, though several were still close in the “special” sense’ – that is, what might more recently have been labelled as a ‘mutual fixation’. 1 Sexually the most significant friendship begun by Tchaikovsky at the School of Jurisprudence was with Alexey Apukhtin. A prodigiously gifted boy, reputation for brilliance and wit, as well as for a poetic gift that would gain him status as one of the most popular of late nineteenth-century Russian poets. His lifespan was exactly that of Tchaikovsky (born 1840:died 1893), and by 1853, when they were both thirteen, he and Tchaikovsky became close in a friendship that would last all their lives. Even while at school Apukhtin had dedicated three poems to his schoolfriend, and twenty years later a poem that recalled their schooldays together, dreaming ‘of an ideal glory’, and which then went on to review their subsequent lives, Tchaikovsky’s with its personal pain and public praise, and Apukhtin’s with its measure of relative obscurity, would reduce Tchaikovsky to tears. It was not to be an untroubled relationship, but Apukhtin’s death only weeks before Tchaikovsky’s own would strike him with uncommon force.

The image Modest conjures of his brother in the latter’s post-school years is as sexually sanitized as it is, at times, personally resentful. From it we might gather that the newly emancipated Tchaikovsky, now with an income of his own, became something of a social butterfly, plunging into an empty-headed existence, dining out, going to dances, and becoming popular at parties for his readiness to provide piano improvisations for dancing. Tchaikovsky himself also claimed light heterosexual amours (‘Recently I became acquainted with a certain Mme Gernkross and fell a little in love with the elder daughter,’ he would write to Sasha in June 1861, for instance), and even aspired to become something of a dandy. In fact, this image might seem to hint at the kind of flamboyance typical of some of his gay friends and acquaintances. In addition, Modest particularly mentions his brother’s developing friendships with Apukhtin and Piccioli, an Italian singing teacher, noted for using cosmetics and for his ostentatiously affected appearance. This is no proof of Piccioli’s sexuality; in any case, he was married, though this was also true of many of Tchaikovsky’s future homosexual friends.

Poznansky has observed that Tchaikovsky’s ‘demi-monde existence’ during this social phase gave him a ‘full opportunity to satisfy his secret desires’, but that ‘it seems unlikely that at this time he perceived his homosexual inclinations as uncontrollable or irreversible’. 2 Certainly there is no hard evidence of what he may or may not have done, though the one major biographical event of Tchaikovsky’s first three post-school years seems to point, at the very least, to a very qualified view of homosexual engagement at this stage. In the summer of 1861 one of Ilya Tchaikovsky’s friends, a certain Vasily Pisarev, needed an interpreter for a visit to Europe, and Tchaikovsky, with his secure French and at least competent German, obtained leave of absence from his civil service duties to be Pisarev’s companion. This would be Tchaikovsky’s first trip abroad, and he viewed the prospect with excitement. They set out from Russia in mid-July, Tchaikovsky noting the places where they stayed, including London, where they visited Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the Crystal Palace (where he was overwhelmed by Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ chorus performed by ‘several thousand voices’), the Thames tunnel (where he was nearly stifled), and the Cremorne Gardens. London itself he found ‘very interesting, but the sun is never seen: it’s always raining’.

But it was Paris that provided the greatest delight, and always would. The plan had been then to head for a Normandy resort where Tchaikovsky’s cousin, Lidiya Olkhovskaya, was staying. Whether this intention was fulfilled is unknown; what is certain is that when Tchaikovsky returned to Russia in early October, he returned alone and in a state of shock. The letter he wrote to Sasha some weeks later points to the prime reason:

If ever I committed any colossal folly in my life, then this journey is it. You remember Pisarev? Imagine that beneath that mask of bonhomie , from which I took him to be an unpolished but worthy gentleman, there are hidden the most vile qualities of mind. Up till now I had not suspected that such incredibly base persons existed on this earth.

The most plausible reason for Tchaikovsky’s revulsion would seem to be that Pisarev had made an homosexual advance on (or even assault upon) him from which he had recoiled. Interestingly, this would seem further to support a view that the evolution of Tchaikovsky’s sexuality had followed a course similar to that of another composer who, as it happens, was a great Tchaikovsky admirer: Benjamin Britten. As in Russia in the 1990s, so in the United Kingdom the veil would now be increasingly lifted on the intimate lives of dead homosexuals, and Humphrey Carpenter’s account of Britten’s sexual awakening reveals a late developer in physical maturation, sexual drive and sexual commitment. That Britten had long felt a strong attraction to young boys (but also to young girls), and sought their company, is certain, but with adults in 1936, the year in which he became twenty-three, an ambivalence remained, and he would note in his diary that ‘life is a pretty hefty struggle these days – sexually as well. Decisions are so hard to make, & it’s difficult to look unprejudiced on apparently abnormal things’. 3 Also in 1936 the poet W. H. Auden, also homosexual, who knew Britten well, both personally and as a creative collaborator, considered that he was still holding back from full emotional commitment, and it seems it would not be until June 1939, when Britten was twenty-five, that he would make a complete sexual and emotional commitment when he began his lifelong relationship with the tenor Peter Pears.

Far more significant, however, than Tchaikovsky’s account of his European expedition was the information that he quietly slipped into the course of his letter to Sasha: ‘I have begun studying harmony, and it’s going extremely well. Who knows, perhaps in three years you’ll be hearing my operas and singing my arias.’

Exactly when Tchaikovsky had enrolled in the classes of the RMS is unknown. Though after Paris he returned to his civil service post, even for a while working more diligently in the hope of promotion and a higher salary, his personal lifestyle was now changing. He had long had a love of the theatre, and especially French theatre, which had flourished in St Petersburg because, ever since the eighteenth century, French had been a standard language of the aristocracy and upper classes – and as for Tchaikovsky, he had long been drawn to it because he was fluent in the language and because he was himself one-quarter French. Yet even this slipped in his priorities: ‘Two evenings a week are taken up with lessons. On Fridays I go alternately to Piccioli’s and Mariya Bonnet’s [both singing teachers],’ he informed Sasha. ‘On Sundays I’m at home. On Mondays I almost always play piano, eight hands, at someone’s home.’ This would not have been simply to pass a pleasant evening. Although Tchaikovsky’s visits to see operas would already have acquainted him with some of the customary operatic fare, his knowledge of other musical genres, especially the symphonic repertoire, would have been almost non-existent because of the dearth of orchestral concerts. Hence he learned such music, as did most musical enthusiasts before the gramophone-record industry became properly established during the middle years of the twentieth century, by playing symphonies and overtures in piano transcriptions, often arranged for two players, but on occasion, as on Tchaikovsky’s Monday evenings, for four. (Even as recently as the late 1940s, at university my future wife and I still had to learn much of the standard orchestral and chamber repertoire by playing it in piano-duet transcriptions.)

Having attended the RMS classes for a year, in September 1862 Tchaikovsky enrolled in the newly founded St Petersburg Conservatoire, though still retaining his civil service post. His letters to Sasha reveal how contented he was, now that he was on course for a profession in music. He had no illusions about the uncertainty that might lie ahead:

Don’t think that I imagine I’ll become a great artist. It’s simply that I want to do that to which I am drawn. Whether I shall be a famous composer or an impoverished teacher, I shall still think I have done the right thing, and I shall have no painful right to grumble at Fate or at people.

Now frequenting the Conservatoire, Tchaikovsky found himself in a substantial group of like-minded individuals within which it was natural to begin building friendships. One of his fellow students in particular, Hermann Laroche, would become a lifelong and loyal, though in many ways problematic, friend. Though Laroche himself would have little subsequent success as a composer, he would become one of Russia’s finest, most perceptive music critics, and a great supporter of Tchaikovsky’s cause.

Tchaikovsky had two main teachers during his three Conservatoire years: Nikolay Zaremba and Anton Rubinstein. The former has been much maligned by history as no more than a pedant with an implacably blinkered view of musical technique and a comprehensive intolerance of the trends that were now marking contemporary music. But such a teacher could be invaluable in laying the foundations of a secure composing technique, in that he demanded that all musical procedures that were essential were thoroughly learned and practised, even though the student might find some of them tedious – for a composer’s ability to compose is in direct proportion to his degree of control of his musical materials and of their employment. It was Zaremba above all who instilled in Tchaikovsky his self-discipline (as Tchaikovsky himself readily acknowledged), and who laid the foundations of that mastery of all aspects of musical technique which Tchaikovsky would command more absolutely than any of his Russian contemporaries.

Rubinstein could hardly have been more different. Where Zaremba preached the virtues of orthodoxy and correctness, Rubinstein applauded fluency and imagination. Not that his own compositions had much of the latter, for Rubinstein’s limited creative gift was for merely efficient, production-line products that would only occasionally rise above competent mediocrity; no one today need feel called upon to institute a Rubinstein revival. But that mattered not in 1862. What Rubinstein especially gave to the newly founded Conservatoire was the cachet of his name and the dynamism of his leadership – and for Tchaikovsky the stimulus of his enthusiasm and the indefatigable commitment that his authoritarian but supportive personality demanded not only of his students, but of himself. Something of the man and his method, and of what made him both liked and respected, comes through in an anecdote from one of Tchaikovsky’s fellow students:

Over and over again he [Rubinstein] repeated how harmful timidity was, advising that one should not stop over a difficulty but leave it and press on, accustoming oneself to write in sketches with indications of this or that form – and to avoid resorting to a piano. I remember on one occasion he came into Zaremba’s room beaming all over and, taking Zaremba’s arm, said, ‘Come into my room. I’ll acquaint you with one of Tchaikovsky’s composition exercises.’ Zaremba was about to resist, saying that he’d have to break off his own explanations when he’d barely started. ‘No matter! I’ll let you return straight away. Just listen to Tchaikovsky’s assignment.’ We, fifteen people in all, entered the hall in a merry crowd, where we found just two people, Tchaikovsky and [Gustav] Kross. Tchaikovsky had been set to write music to Zhukovsky’s Midnight Review . I hated the very idea, observing that Glinka had written a romance on this text. ‘So what? Glinka wrote his own music – and Tchaikovsky his own.’ Tchaikovsky’s piece turned out to be not a romance but an entire, complex picture having nothing in common with Glinka’s composition. Tchaikovsky had written the piece in two days.

But there was a side to Rubinstein that divided him fundamentally from Tchaikovsky. So different in other ways from Zaremba, Rubinstein resembled him in being a musical conservative who accepted as a model nothing after Mendelssohn (died 1847) and Schumann (died 1856), and this would cause a major incident when Rubinstein was presented with Tchaikovsky’s first composition of any serious interest to us. In fact, Rubinstein would, for instance, conscientiously introduce his students to the latest additions to the mid-nineteenth-century orchestra, but would then allow them to present nothing that went beyond the classically styled orchestration of Mendelssohn. Tchaikovsky, like any other eager young composer, was excited by what was happening in the contemporary creative world, and the visit of Wagner himself to St Petersburg in 1863 to conduct five concerts, mostly of his own music, must have inflamed a natural impulse to use all the latest orchestral possibilities as now revealed by Wagner. In 1864, when Rubinstein was confronted with Tchaikovsky’s vacation exercise, he would explode.

A whole bundle of exercises and compositions, some incomplete, survive from Tchaikovsky’s three years at the Conservatoire. Most are of only documentary interest, though an Impromptu for piano, composed as early as in his second year, would be published as the second of the two pieces comprising his opus 1. Yet even this gave not the slightest warning of the prodigious piece he would produce during the summer of 1864 – the orchestral overture , The Storm ,**(*) based on a play by Alexander Ostrovsky (we in the West are familiar with the outlines of its plot through Janáček’s opera, Kát’ya Kábanová , which takes its name from the play’s central character). Rubinstein had prescribed a substantial orchestral piece as his pupil’s vacation exercise, and Tchaikovsky, deeply impressed by Ostrovsky’s drama, opted to make this the basis for his assignment. It proved to be a prodigiously talented, if uneven, piece – and Rubinstein was initially furious at Tchaikovsky’s stylistic boldness. But then, clearly recognizing not only the piece’s promise for the future but also the level of attainment it represented for the present, he decided to proceed gently, for nothing must be done to undermine the confidence of such a student. Indeed, Tchaikovsky himself would judge one theme worthy of resurrection in a later work: now slowed to Adagio cantabile ma non troppo and scored for muted strings, it would provide the first eight bars of hushed music that both opens and closes the slow movement of his First Symphony.

Little of the music that Tchaikovsky would go on to compose during his final year at the Conservatoire even hints at the creative personality so remarkably delineated in much of The Storm , though three pieces deserve mention. One is an orchestral piece, Characteristic Dances , which Tchaikovsky would later rehabilitate into his first opera, The Voyevoda . But a greater interest attaches to the scherzo of a Piano Sonata in C sharp minor ,** which, now scored for full orchestra, would provide the flanks of the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony (the central trio would, however, be new). As for the third piece, an Overture in F ,** it was judged good enough by Rubinstein to be given a Conservatoire performance in November 1865 and, subsequently revised, it would provide Tchaikovsky with his first public success in Moscow, whither he would move in January 1866 on graduation from the Conservatoire.

Tchaikovsky’s favoured haven for his summer break would for many years be Kamenka in the Ukraine. In 1860 his sister Sasha had married Lev Davïdov, who managed his family’s estate at Kamenka, and by 1865 Sasha had already produced three daughters for whom Tchaikovsky would become very much a favourite uncle. His next major challenge was the composition of his graduation exercise. Only on 24 October was his task prescribed, with the examination itself to be a public performance a mere eleven weeks later. To be given Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ to set was a daunting challenge – but then, Tchaikovsky’s treatment was bound to be very different from Beethoven’s, and comparisons with the choral finale of the latter’s Ninth Symphony would hardly seem invited. Knowing that the work had to demonstrate a command of conventional musical mechanisms and forms, Tchaikovsky was certainly not going to risk repeating the imaginative boldness of The Storm , and his Ode to Joy is of only documentary interest. He must have realized this and, unable to face the public scrutiny the occasion would bring, he absented himself. Rubinstein was furious, initially thinking he would withhold Tchaikovsky’s diploma, but then relenting, and the truant graduated with a silver medal.

This accolade did not prevent one critic, a certain César Cui, from giving the cantata (and its composer) a blistering review:

The Conservatoire composer, Mr Tchaikovsky, is utterly feeble. It is true that his composition, a cantata, was written under the most unfavourable circumstances: to order, to a deadline, on a given subject, and with adherence to familiar forms. Yet all the same, if he had any gift, then at least somewhere or other it would have broken through the fetters of the Conservatoire. To avoid saying much about Mr Tchaikovsky, I will say only that Messrs Reinthaler and Volkmann [two contemporary minor German composers] would rejoice unutterably at this cantata, and would exclaim ecstatically: ‘Our numbers have been increased!’

Cui’s verdict would be a potent reminder to Tchaikovsky that there was a force other than the Conservatoire that was also driving Russia’s musical destiny. Yet within some three years Tchaikovsky himself would find the very composers (Cui included) who represented this force of critical importance in his own creative world.

1 Alexander Poznansky, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (London, 1993), p. 39.

2 Alexander Pozansky, op. cit , p. 55.

3 Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (London, 1992), p. 80.

Moscow Conservatoire: First Symphony

‘Nikolay Rubinstein’s life was devoted to Moscow and inseparable from its history.’ 1 Thus reads the first sentence of Nikolay Barenboim’s biography of Anton’s younger brother. Nikolay was born in the city, attended university there, and until his death in 1881 was at the very heart of its musical life. Six years younger than Anton, he trained as a pianist, though for a while he veered away from music, entering the Law Faculty of Moscow University; he then worked briefly as a civil servant, was married equally briefly, but finally returned to music to become a very successful piano teacher, establishing for himself a firm place in Moscow circles, both musical and social (he was also an inveterate gambler and nocturnal carouser). In 1860 he was responsible for founding the Moscow branch of the RMS. Though, like his brother, Nikolay was a truly virtuoso pianist, his style was very different and, unlike his brother, he composed very little (as he put it, Anton ‘wrote enough for three’). And also unlike Anton, his tastes encompassed the very latest music, both as pianist and as conductor. Tchaikovsky would owe Nikolay an enormous debt for all the performances of his music (some premieres) that he gave over the next dozen or so years.

It was on Anton’s recommendation that Tchaikovsky had been appointed teacher of music theory in the classes of the RMS’s Moscow branch. On his arrival in that city on 18 January, Nikolay had within twenty-four hours installed him in his own home, and begun to assume charge of his social life, taking him to the theatre and opera, and introducing him to certain of the Moscow social elite, an activity Tchaikovsky clearly did his best to thwart. ‘He’s a very sympathetic man,’ he wrote to his twin brothers three days after arriving, ‘without any of his brother’s certain inaccessibility. I occupy a small room alongside his bedroom and, to tell the truth, in the evenings when we go to bed at the same time (which, however, it seems will happen very rarely), I feel inhibited; I’m afraid the scratching of my pen will hinder him from sleeping (we are separated by a thin partition) – and meanwhile I’m frightfully busy. I scarcely ever go out, and Rubinstein, who lives a rather disorderly life, can’t stop being amazed at my diligence.’ But for all Rubinstein’s ‘disorderliness’, his views on professional attire were strict. ‘All my first month’s salary will go on new clothes,’ Tchaikovsky lamented to Anatoly. ‘Rubinstein requires me to buy these, saying that my present ones are not decent enough for a professor of music theory.’ But clearly recognizing Tchaikovsky’s impecunious condition, his new chief contributed handsomely to the assembling of Tchaikovsky’s personal wardrobe, and his sartorial principle was fully accepted: for the rest of his life Tchaikovsky would have a serious concern that his public attire should reflect the standards of taste and quality expected of his professional status.

There was much else to do. His teaching would start within only a few days (regular classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays at eleven o’clock), and there was much to prepare. Rubinstein naturally wished to exhibit the prowess of the latest acquisition to his staff, and accepted the Overture in F on condition Tchaikovsky revised it. Since this would be, in its way, another test piece, Tchaikovsky took this requirement very seriously, and the result made an excellent impression at the concert conducted by Rubinstein in March, where the applause was warm and unanimous. But, Tchaikovsky wrote to brother Anatoly:

Even more flattering to my self-esteem was the ovation accorded me at the supper which Rubinstein gave after the concert. I was the last to arrive, and when I entered the room exceedingly warm applause rang out, during which I bowed very clumsily in all directions, and blushed. At supper, after the toast to Rubinstein, he himself proposed a toast to me – again there was an ovation. I am writing this to you in such detail because this was virtually my first public success, and therefore very agreeable to me.

There were other good things. Tchaikovsky was totally inexperienced in group teaching, but his class consisted mainly of young women who, one supposes, must have been instinctively sympathetic to this amiable and seemingly very eligible young man, and after a fortnight he could report to Anatoly that ‘my classes are going very successfully, and already I’m enjoying an unusually sympathetic relationship with the Moscow ladies whom I teach. Little by little my shyness has passed completely.’

Within a month of arriving in Moscow Tchaikovsky would meet three people who would remain lifelong friends. One was Nikolay Kashkin who, as a teacher of piano and music theory, would be a professor at the Moscow Conservatoire for three decades, though today he is better remembered for his fifty-two years as a music critic. Tchaikovsky was particularly indebted to Kashkin for the hospitality he and his wife provided for him, especially during his early Moscow months, and for the good advice on matters musical and non-musical for which Kashkin was noted. Kashkin’s memoirs of Tchaikovsky are of much importance, though his memory was not infallible.

The second new acquaintance was Konstantin Albrecht. Of German extraction, Albrecht never properly mastered the Russian language, and his linguistic ineptitudes, especially with Russian verbs, were a constant source of amusement to his friends. (For centuries German colonies had been resident in some of Russia’s great cities and had continued to use their native tongue, to the bewilderment of the natives: it is perhaps no accident that the Russian word for ‘dumb’, nemoy , spawned the Russian word for ‘German’, nemets !) Konstantin had a Teutonic instinct for order, which made him a splendid administrator in the Conservatoire, and he was also a fine cellist. Tchaikovsky had much personal respect for Albrecht, and much gratitude for his kindness.

The third lifelong friend was Pyotr Jurgenson, Tchaikovsky’s main publisher, and a sorely needed manager of his financial affairs. Though Jurgenson was a businessman, there was an idealism to his publishing operations, for he declined to issue light music, concentrating instead on Western classics to be made available in moderately priced editions, and on new music by the best native composers. Jurgenson was to become not only Tchaikovsky’s main and very supportive publisher, but a good friend and counsellor in his private affairs.

Once he had revised his Overture in F, Tchaikovsky was naturally eager to set about a major piece through which, as a newly professional composer, he would make his wider mark. The obvious choice was between an opera and a symphony. Rubinstein was in favour of the former, but Tchaikovsky rejected as bad all the libretti he gave him, and instead in March he set about his First Symphony. In early May he reported that it was going only sluggishly, that he was suffering from insomnia, and that his nerves were in a terrible state. But the public success of his Overture in F in May in St Petersburg under Anton Rubinstein raised his morale, stimulated his creativity, and by 19 June he had begun to score the symphony.

At the end of August, and with the scoring still incomplete, he showed the symphony to Anton Rubinstein and Nikolay Zaremba, who both condemned it roundly. This verdict, as well as the beginning of the Conservatoire term, may have decided Tchaikovsky to set the symphony aside for the moment, a break that would be extended by a commission from Nikolay Rubinstein to compose a Festival Overture on the Danish National Anthem ,**(*) to be played during the visit to Moscow of the Tsarevich (the eldest son of the current Tsar, and the heir to the throne) and his new Danish bride. Tchaikovsky was to prove himself a true professional in the creation and delivery of such functional pieces, which might have no further use after their original purpose had been served, and at his life’s end he could still write that this Overture was ‘very effective, I remember, and far better as music than 1812 ’. Tchaikovsky decided to incorporate also the Russian national anthem to symbolize the union of the two realms, but this happy intention led to disaster and the cancellation of the official performance because, as one journal reported, our ‘talented young composer for some reason took it into his head to set forth our Russian national anthem in the minor key, which completely transforms the character of this well-known melody’. All the same, the Tsarevich expressed royal gratitude for Tchaikovsky’s effort by the gift of gold cuff-links with turquoises which the indigent Tchaikovsky promptly sold.

Nevertheless, despite this interruption, by the year’s end a revised version of the symphony was ready, but it was a full year before it was given its official premiere in February 1868. Yet though Tchaikovsky could report to Anatoly that the symphony ‘scored a great success, particularly the Adagio ’, fifteen years would pass before it was heard again, despite the score being published in 1874 after Tchaikovsky had made further revisions, especially to the first movement.

Symphony no. 1 in G minor ( Winter Daydreams ) ***(*)

[Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony is an immature work, though with some excellent music in it – but, taken as a whole, it is not a piece with which to start a first-time investigation of Tchaikovsky’s music. However, the slow second movement is very beautiful, rich in melody, and makes a very worthwhile listening experience that really requires little prepara tion from me: whether you will find Tchaikovsky’s heading for the movement (‘Land of gloom, land of mists’) convincing I leave you to decide. The scherzo that follows (taken over from the piano sonata of his student days) is also an approachable movement with a waltz at its centre. A glance at the observations below on these two movements may, of course, be helpful. Otherwise, pass on to chapter 5. For the sake of the widely experienced listener I have provided the following commentary.]

Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony (his Fourth) had been preoccupying Tchaikovsky as he set about his First Symphony, and the German composer’s example may have persuaded him likewise to give his new creation a title: Winter Daydreams – though neither this, nor the individual labels he gave to the first two movements (‘Daydreams on a winter journey’ and ‘Land of gloom, land of mists’) provide any particular insights into their natures. Nor does this music need suggestions of an imaginative content in order to hold the listener’s attention. Indeed, the first movement reveals not only a flair and inventiveness that already marks out Tchaikovsky as a really major composer discovering himself, but is, in some regards, a very innovative piece. In 1866 there were as yet virtually no Russian symphonies except Rubinstein’s three examples, which were, in any case, situated squarely in the pre-1850 West European tradition of Mendelssohn and Schumann; otherwise there were only the still unperformed or in-progress first symphonies of Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Balakirev. In his First Symphony, therefore, Tchaikovsky was truly a pioneer, but one determined to be himself and to confront some at least of the challenges the form could pose for a Russian composer; it is therefore worth pausing here to contrast briefly Tchaikovsky’s approach at the opening of his first movement to that of a West European symphonist. Like many symphonic first movements, this is in sonata form. 2

To generalize very freely (and perhaps somewhat dangerously), while a Western composer tends to think organically, a Russian composer tends to think decoratively, perhaps even in circles. To take, first, an example from Beethoven: his Third (‘Eroica’) Symphony. Two terse chords – and the first subject enters quietly, builds to a loud restatement – and then, through music which emerges seamlessly from the first subject’s restatement, we are moved on to a new key and a new theme (the second subject) introduced by the woodwind; thus this process has been an evolving one. Now let’s move to the corresponding section of Tchaikovsky’s first movement. Here the two subjects are themselves very extensive (each lasting more than two minutes), and are self-contained as far as their material is concerned: each modulates, yet ends back in the key in which it began (i.e., it has gone in a circle), and there is no transition passage between them: all that separates the two subjects is a single repeated chord (more a punctuation mark – or a jolt – than a transition). An over-arching organic process has had no part in this exposition.

Nevertheless, the melodic quality of Tchaikovsky’s two subjects is excellent, as is his treatment of them. As to what follows, the development (introduced by what sounds momentarily like an earlier version of the famous ‘Valse des fleurs’ from the ballet, The Nutcracker ) builds efficiently to a formidable climax, and the lead to the recapitulation is a quiet, mysterious crescendo that might be a forewarning of the yet stranger one to come in the finale. Also arresting is the movement’s extensive two-minute coda, which finally returns to the material and scoring of the symphony’s opening, and fades into a last ppp chord.

But if the most remarkable movement of the First Symphony is the opening Allegro tranquillo , the most perfect is the slow movement. Maybe its title, ‘Land of gloom, land of mists’, can be seen as some sort of clue to its content, even though the opening eight bars, which also close the movement, had originally served to convey the heroine’s ‘yearnings for true happiness and love’ in that precocious student work of 1864, The Storm , though its new slower tempo and re-scoring for muted strings transforms its character. Such a sustained flow of fresh, tender melody as fills out this movement (though its climax is powerful) needs little commentary; it is its own recommendation. Nor should we conclude that, because the workings of this music are less complex than those in the outer movements, it is more lightweight. It is not.

Though less impressive, the third movement contains some attractive music. In fact, the scherzo itself (that is, the outer portions) had been composed in 1865 during Tchaikovsky’s last year at the Conservatoire as part of a piano sonata, but it sounds better as an orchestral piece. The central trio, newly composed, is a waltz. Tchaikovsky’s unsurpassed genius for ballet music, and especially for the grand set-piece waltz, is universally acknowledged. Here was his first major venture into that dance, and his ability to extend his melody effortlessly, to vary it and build climaxes as landmarks that give it shape, truly makes this example worthy of its symphonic context; then, cunningly, Tchaikovsky starts to introduce the little rhythmic matrix of the scherzo itself and, in so doing, can slide almost seamlessly back into the expected repetition of that section to conclude the movement. But not quite, for there is another unexpected and very acceptable addition: while the timpani continue to reiterate the ubiquitous rhythmic cell of the scherzo, the main waltz theme slips in on the strings before gently allowing attention to return to the scherzo’s main theme. A very deft composer is at work here.

The slow introduction to the finale is based on a folksong presented (after numerous false starts) by the violins. A return to the hesitancy of the movement’s opening, followed by a powerful crescendo, an increase in pace – and a sturdy tune (the first subject) bursts in. Then an abrupt change – and a fugato, 3 based on the same tune, leads to the second subject – which turns out to be the folksong from the introduction, though now no longer brooding, but ebullient. If all had continued as it had begun, then all might have been well. But this movement uncovers Tchaikovsky’s inexperience in producing a finale that unfolds with assurance to provide the culmination of a multi-movement piece. For some reason Tchaikovsky decided to build the central development as a full-blown fugue on a theme derived from the first subject, but the music becomes rhythmically stodgy. The coda is vigorous, very noisy, and overblown.

If it had not been for the so impressive achievements of this symphony’s first two movements, the shortcomings of this finale would have been less noticeable. Nor did Tchaikovsky lose his pride in the whole work, for in 1874 he revised it, and in 1883, he could still write that ‘although it is in many ways immature, yet fundamentally it has more substance and is better than many of my other more mature works’. Certainly his First Symphony merits the occasional performances it is at last receiving.

1 Nikolay Barenboim, Nikolay Grigorevich Rubinstein (Moscow, 1982), p.14

2 For a brief description of sonata form, see Appendix 1.

3 For a description of fugue (fugato), see Appendix 1.

First Opera: Enter Balakirev

Tchaikovsky would spend some twelve years in Moscow, abandoning the city only in the autumn of 1877 in the aftermath of his disastrous marriage. During this period he would produce a steady flow of compositions that would firmly establish his national status, and begin to make his name known abroad. To augment his income he took on work as a music critic, showing himself to be a thoroughly competent writer and a perceptive judge. He was capable of blistering condemnation when confronted by incompetence, observing of one singer that ‘now in her stentorian voice she screams out some high note resembling the cry of some great owl, now she’ll rattle out a low, almost bass note which makes your flesh creep, and all this out of time with the orchestra, extremely off key, wildly, eccentrically’, yet also having sufficient objectivity to recognize the positive qualities in music even when it did not appeal to him personally. Other pieces seem to have simply bewildered him and, like so many composers past and present, he had his deaf spots. Beethoven overawed him, but not, for instance, for the overwhelming power with which his Ninth Symphony projected the blazing idealism of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’; instead Tchaikovsky heard it as ‘the cry of hopeless despair of a great creative genius who has irrevocably lost his faith in happiness, who has quit life for a world of impossible daydreams, for a realm of unattainable ideals’. He found special pleasure in French music (he was himself, of course, a quarter French), and Bizet’s Carmen , which he first heard in 1875, would become for him the greatest of all operas – that is, after Mozart’s Don Giovanni .

In his personal moments Tchaikovsky delighted in books. All his life he was a voracious reader, and not only of Russian authors; he was as attracted to French novels as to French music. Here he had no language problem such as confronted him with British authors, but the impression made upon him by Russian translations of writers such as Thackeray, George Eliot and, above all, Dickens (early on in Moscow he had revelled in The Pickwick Papers ) persuaded him to make efforts to learn English so that he could read their works in the original. Of native authors Pushkin received from him that special adoration which all Russians reserve for their greatest poet, and three of his four finest operas would be based on works by Pushkin. But Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Gogol were also favourites. In later life he would often end the day by retiring to his bedroom with a book and wine, and read into the early hours.

Apart from the First Symphony none of Tchaikovsky’s works from his first three Moscow years needs to be more than noted here. Clearly he had decided that he should launch his career as a composer by tackling the two main forms of mid-nineteenth century music: symphony and opera. The former had preoccupied him during most of 1866, but in the autumn this had been interrupted by the Danish Festival Overture; this commission discharged, he was now looking beyond the symphony to ‘gently setting about an opera. There is hope that Ostrovsky himself will write a libretto for me on his play, The Voyevoda [“The Provincial Governor”],’ as he confided to his brother Anatoly. The subject was a melodrama concerning an elderly and ruthless voyevoda who successively falls for two young women (one already married) and imprisons them, and of their respective partners’ joint attempt at rescue, an attempt that is initially thwarted, but is then saved by the deus ex machina appearance of a replacement voyevoda.

Alexander Ostrovsky’s nearly fifty plays were, as D. S. Mirsky noted, ‘of unequal merit but, taken as a whole, doubtless the most remarkable body of dramatic work in Russian’, 1 and the suggestion that such a celebrity should provide a libretto for a virtually unknown composer’s first opera sounds implausible. Yet within little more than three months a libretto for Act 1 had arrived – a measure, surely, of the deep impression Tchaikovsky had already made on Moscow’s creative community. Composition of The Voyevoda **(*) was begun in March 1867, but problems soon arose; initial progress was slow, then Tchaikovsky lost Ostrovsky’s libretto and had shamefacedly to ask the dramatist to rewrite it, which the latter promised to do, but then delivered only belatedly. Nevertheless, Tchaikovsky pressed ahead as best he could, finally devising most of the text himself, and adapting a number of extracts from compositions of his student years. The Voyevoda was first staged in February 1869 in Moscow, and appeared to be well received, with Tchaikovsky taking fifteen curtain calls. While there is no question that there are passages and moments in the opera that are thoroughly worthy of the mature Tchaikovsky, one suspects that the audience’s enthusiasm sprang more from a wish to encourage a young and promising first-time opera composer than from the overall quality of what it was hearing, for the opera survived only four further performances, and Tchaikovsky himself later destroyed the score. (After his death the opera was reconstructed from the surviving vocal and orchestral parts.)

Yet The Voyevoda was not without its legacy. Huge chunks from it would provide much of Act 1 of Tchaikovsky’s next surviving opera as well as passages elsewhere. A duet in Act 2 would, some dozen years later, become the basis for the broad string melody in the 1812 Overture. Even more, seven or eight years on, was Swan Lake a beneficiary, the entr’acte to the opera’s Act 3 launching the ballet’s final act, while the heart-wrenching music that had brought together the opera’s lovers would also reunite Odette and Siegfried in preparation for the ballet’s tragic ending. That Tchaikovsky could so early in his creative career compose such concentrated and characteristic music was a potent augury for his future.

Though it would become Tchaikovsky’s normal practice to escape from Moscow during the summer vacation, in 1867, because he lacked the funds for a lengthy journey, he ended up having to spend the break with members of the Davïdov family at Hapsal (now Haapsalu) on the Estonian coast. Among the party was Vera Davïdova, Sasha’s sister-in-law, who had fallen in love with Tchaikovsky. The latter was already aware of her feelings, and Hapsal had not been his first choice as a summer base, for he recognized that Vera’s desires were a challenge to his sexuality, and that, try as he might, he had no capacity to reciprocate. As an honourable man he pitied her, but knew no kindly way of responding, hoping helplessly that her recognition of all his ‘far from poetic qualities’ would finally smother her feelings. It was, of course, a forlorn hope, as he would discover over the next two to three years. Yet this interlude did have one positive result – the composition of three piano pieces issued under the title S ouvenir de Hapsal , the last of which, ‘Chant sans paroles ’,**(*) became the first of his compositions to achieve wide popularity. He inscribed all three to Vera, and she treasured his manuscript for the remainder of her days.

It has been too often assumed that, because of his sexuality (especially when it became public knowledge after the disaster of his marriage in 1877), Tchaikovsky was always a rather sombre, even dour person, and photographs of him mostly do little to dispel that image. Nothing could be farther from the truth, especially during his Moscow years. With people he knew and with whom he felt at ease, he could be very convivial, and he enjoyed eating out in company. During his civil service days he had participated in amateur theatricals and now, in Moscow, he could sometimes be induced to do the same. He was not above performing, as a prank, an elaborate deception. Sofiya Kashkina, daughter of Tchaikovsky’s very close friend, Nikolay, recalled one such incident. Her father and Tchaikovsky attended a masked ball, having made a bet that each would not recognize the other. To disguise himself Kashkin shaved off his beard, and this was judged sufficient to mask his identity, a friend who had been let into the secret then introducing him as a visiting musician. The event began, but then –

the appearance of a very elegant, tall lady produced something of a sensation. She was dressed in an unusually luxurious domino [a loose cloak with a small mask hiding the upper part of the face] made of black lace, and was wearing diamonds and carrying a fan made, I believe, from ostrich feathers. As she began grandly walking around on the arm of one of the male partners, many recognized this domino as the only one of its kind, made to the order of a wealthy Moscow lady. Her husband, who was also at the masquerade, was very embarrassed. His friends had alerted him to her arrival – for earlier she had told him she had felt unwell and would not be going to the masquerade, and he had now begun flirting with a certain actress. He hastened to make himself scarce, someone else took over his lady friend, and the author of this rumpus continued calmly strolling past the dancers and the guests, who were happily chatting together. Several times she passed the table where Kashkin was chatting with some others – when suddenly, having turned so that Kashkin became visible to her from behind, she stopped, with a pronounced gesture struck herself on the forehead, and exclaimed, ‘Idiot! Of course he would have shaved!’

The ‘lady’ had recognized Papa – and by the characteristic gesture the others had recognized Tchaikovsky. Their anonymity was broken, to the amusement of all.

Now for a time the main narrative will be abruptly broken as it moves some two hundred and fifty miles eastwards to Nizhni Novgorod, and takes a step backwards in time. The future composer, Mily Balakirev, was born in this city in 1837, and though only three years older than Tchaikovsky, he would become a powerful influence on the latter’s creative career and music. As a boy Balakirev had piano lessons, but far more important would be his contact with a local teacher, Karl Eisrich, who was also the conductor of the local theatre orchestra which played at soirées at the home of Alexander Ulibïshev, a writer on music, best remembered for his three-volume biography of Mozart. Balakirev became Eisrich’s assistant at these events, playing in chamber music, even conducting the orchestra in Beethoven symphonies and, through his ready access to Ulibïshev’s library, being able to study and lodge in his excellent memory knowledge of a wide range of musical styles and procedures which he then applied in his own compositions. At sixteen he entered Kazan University to study mathematics, but two years later, in 1855, Ulibïshev took him to St Petersburg where he met Glinka, who was deeply impressed by the eighteen-year-old. ‘Never have I met a man in whom I found views so close to my own on everything concerning music. He will in time become a second Glinka,’ the grand old man of Russian music informed his sister, Lyudmila Shestakova, whom he instructed to entrust to Balakirev the musical education of her young daughter.

Two years later Glinka was dead, and Balakirev, just twenty, inherited his mantle. He wasted no time. He had already encountered César Cui, a fortifications engineer a year older than himself (and who would be blistering about Tchaikovsky’s graduation cantata), and before the end of 1857 had enlisted an eighteen-year-old army officer, Modest Musorgsky. Starting with these two, Balakirev began assembling around himself a group of passionate music enthusiasts whom he proposed to turn into major composers. There being still no textbook on musical composition in Russian – as noted earlier, the first such would be provided by Tchaikovsky in 1871 – Balakirev taught mainly by playing and analysing works by major Western composers in piano-duet versions, then sending his ‘pupils’ away to attempt such pieces for themselves. Two more members were soon added to the group: a seventeen-year-old naval cadet, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, in 1861, and the following year a young chemist who would become one of Russia’s most distinguished scientists, Alexander Borodin. Though, technically, all but Rimsky would remain ‘amateurs’ in music, all grew as composers, and three at least – Musorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov – are now recognised as among the truly major figures of nineteenth-century music. Balakirev’s catalytic powers were manifestly extraordinary: rarely can one man be credited with creating such a galaxy of great achievers.

Nor in fostering the fortunes of this group should the services of the Stasov brothers, Dmitri and more particularly Vladimir, be overlooked. True, Dmitri, a lawyer, had been one of the founders with Anton Rubinstein of the RMS, but he was not one-sided in his views. As for Vladimir, a senior member of staff of the St Petersburg Public Library, he was a writer whose interests were as varied as his productivity was vast. A passionate champion of all things Russian, he gave tireless moral support to Balakirev’s group, dubbing them the moguchaya kuchka (the ‘mighty handful’), and feeding them with ideas upon which they might create works. Without Vladimir Stasov, for instance, we would not have had Borodin’s opera, Prince Igor , Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina – nor, as we shall see, Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasia, The Tempest , or his Manfred Symphony .

But the kuchka was by no means Balakirev’s only field of enterprise. Alarmed by the increasing influx of a very conservative Western musical influence that he saw could result from the projects of the newly founded RMS, in 1862 Balakirev founded the Free Music School (FMS) to provide tuition in composition gratis , and also instituted a series of concerts that would introduce recent Western music, with composers such as Schumann, Berlioz and Liszt featuring prominently, as well as pieces by the younger generation of Russian composers, such as the kuchka itself represented. The Tsarevich Nikolay agreed to provide the royal patronage, thus balancing the cachet afforded the RMS by the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna.

All this had happened while Tchaikovsky had been a civil servant and then a student in the classes of the RMS. But throughout his Conservatoire years the fortunes of the FMS had flourished, and when in 1867 Rubinstein had resigned as conductor of the RMS concerts, Balakirev, of all people, had been invited to replace him, a year later also taking over the directorship of the FMS itself. Thus this tireless activist, only just thirty, had become the most powerful force in St Petersburg’s music outside the opera houses. We know nothing of how Tchaikovsky viewed all these developments, but in January 1868, in connection with Berlioz’s second visit to Russia as conductor, he certainly met Vladimir Stasov. The great French composer was now old and ailing, and though Tchaikovsky had strong reservations about some aspects of Berlioz’s music, his admiration for the man and his implacable personal struggle for the cause of his art deeply touched him, and at a dinner at the Conservatoire he paid a wholehearted tribute to this visitor for whom he would retain a lifelong veneration. Then, hard on Stasov’s heels, Balakirev arrived. For Tchaikovsky it would prove his most momentous encounter since, six years earlier, he had come under Anton Rubinstein’s tutelage, for over the next two years Balakirev would be the most significant single factor in his creative life.

1 D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature (London, 1968), p. 39.

Aborted Marriage: Romeo and Juliet

In early April 1868 Tchaikovsky visited St Petersburg. He had already begun a correspondence with Balakirev over his own Characteristic Dances , which Balakirev wished to include in one of his concerts; now he despatched the score, at the same time soliciting ‘a word of encouragement’, a request that drew from Balakirev a response couched in a mixture of deferential and authoritarian terms that would become very familiar to Tchaikovsky:

Regarding the word ‘encouragement’, this I consider, as far as you are concerned, not only inappropriate, but also dishonest. Encouragements are only for the little children of art, whereas from your score I see you are, both in orchestration and technique, a fully fledged artist to whom only strict criticism and not encouragement is to be applied. When we meet in person I shall be very pleased to give you my opinion. It would be far better, when we are both in Moscow, to play through the piece at the piano and examine it bar by bar. Let us not substitute criticism for lively argument!

Whether Balakirev’s intended autopsy materialized is unknown, though doubtless it would have been a challenging experience. But Tchaikovsky’s first encounter with other members of the kuchka was heartening, and their reception of him cordial.

It was a very different atmosphere when he once again encountered Vera Davïdova. Evidently Tchaikovsky had said something that had encouraged her hopes that he might soon yield, and now he bitterly regretted it. Yet, curiously, at this very moment another women was entering his life with whom the seemingly impossible – matrimony – was actually planned.

Désirée Artôt was a Belgian soprano, thirty-two years old, and already enjoying a formidable European reputation, especially as an operatic actress. In April 1868 she arrived in Moscow with an Italian opera company, and was such a sensation that in the autumn the company returned. Tchaikovsky now made her acquaintance and the relationship developed apace. ‘I’ve become very friendly with Artôt and am enjoying extremely marked favour with her,’ he reported to Anatoly. ‘Rarely have I met such a pleasant, intelligent and sensible woman.’ In November he confirmed his admiration by composing and dedicating to her his Romance in F minor, for piano, op. 5 .**

Tchaikovsky was now involved for the first (and, evidently, the last) time in a relationship with a woman where it seems his sexual feelings may have been touched. Yet a strong suspicion remains that it was Artôt’s extraordinary talent for portraying operatic heroines, rather than the woman herself, that had really captivated him. Whatever the case, the fact is that they soon discussed marrying in the following summer. It quickly emerged, however, that Artôt was not prepared to abandon her career, and Tchaikovsky’s friends, led by Nikolay Rubinstein, were fiercely opposed to a marriage, arguing that he would become a kind of poodle trailing after her, and dependent on her. They need not have worried. By early January Artôt had gone off to Warsaw – and had promptly married a Spanish baritone! Nikolay Rubinstein broke the news to Tchaikovsky, making no attempt to hide his relief. As for the rejected bridegroom, he (as a friend who was present reported) ‘didn’t say a word; he simply went white and walked out. A few days later he was already unrecognizable; once again he was relaxed, at ease, and had only one consideration in the world – his work.’

Towards the year’s end Tchaikovsky had to meet Artôt again when she came back to Moscow for performances of Auber’s opera, Le Domino noir , with recitatives that Tchaikovsky had been commissioned to supply. He found his feelings ambivalent: ‘This woman hurt me greatly, yet some inexplicable sympathy draws me to her to such a degree that I am beginning to await her arrival with feverish impatience. Woe is me! All the same, this feeling is not love.’ Her hold on him would continue, and when she returned a month later to perform Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust , Kashkin remembered that when she appeared onstage, ‘Tchaikovsky hid himself behind his opera glasses and didn’t remove them from his eyes until the end of the act, though he can hardly have seen much because tears, which he appeared not to notice, were streaming out from under the glasses.’ Yet though the present relationship was certainly over, eighteen years on they would encounter each other again – with richly productive results, which we can still enjoy.

It is intriguing to speculate whether the substantial orchestral piece Tchaikovsky began in October and completed in December while his romance with Artôt was in progress was a wry comment on the affair, but there is no evidence that he was writing his symphonic poem, Fatum ( Fate ) **(*) to any programme. He was initially pleased with the piece when Nikolay Rubinstein conducted it in Moscow early the next year, but most of its materials are indifferent, some even banal – though there is one good string tune that unfolds promisingly, once the various fragments that make up the introduction are out of the way; indeed, Tchaikovsky would subsequently find a home for this in his opera The Oprichnik . But with the molto allegro introduced by the timpani the inventiveness slumps, and there is no identifiable structure to the piece. Tchaikovsky had dedicated Fatum to Balakirev, but some four weeks later, after conducting its premiere in St Petersburg, the latter had written privately to Tchaikovsky a savage but well-targeted criticism of his piece.

However, it was not Balakirev’s nature to write off Tchaikovsky on the evidence of one inferior work, and his damning letter ended with an expression of confidence:

I am writing to you with complete frankness, being fully convinced that you won’t go back on your intention of dedicating Fatum to me. Your dedication is precious to me as a sign of your sympathy towards me – and I feel a great weakness for you.

M. Balakirev – who sincerely loves you.

Tchaikovsky was too self-critical not to perceive the truth of Balakirev’s verdict, and later he would destroy the score of Fatum . (The piece was reconstituted after his death from the parts used at the performances.) If the initial impact of Balakirev on Tchaikovsky’s creative life had been negatively beneficial, its positive value would be brilliantly shown in another orchestral work that Tchaikovsky would set about before 1869 was out.

Yet it is a mark of Tchaikovsky’s seething creativity, and of his ability to focus on the creative project in hand, that in the meantime, between January 1869, while awaiting the premieres of both The Voyevoda and Fatum , and July, when he was taking his summer break with Sasha and her growing family at Kamenka, he should have composed and scored a whole new opera, Undine . Its subject was taken from a short story by the German writer, Friedrich de La Motte Fouqué, and for which a libretto already existed: thus there would be no problems such as Tchaikovsky had endured with Ostrovsky over The Voyevoda . It told of a water nymph, Undine, who is loved and then deserted by a knight, Huldbrand. She drowns herself and, after Huldbrand’s rekindled love has ended in his death, turns into a fountain. The opera completed, Tchaikovsky was frustrated by the delay in fixing a date for the premiere, then was told in November that it could not be mounted that season, and finally learned that it had been rejected as unsatisfactory. Like the manuscript of The Voyevoda , that of Undine was later destroyed by Tchaikovsky. Nevertheless, as with The Voyevoda , several pieces from it found their way into later compositions, notably a wedding march, which would provide the basis for the slow movement of the Second Symphony (The Little Russian ), and the main theme of the final lovers’ duet, which achieved universal fame by becoming the foundation for the great Pas d’action (with violin and cello solos) for Siegfried and Odette in Act 2 of Swan Lake , a scene that every ballet-goer adores.

In August, with Undine completed but its future unknown, Tchaikovsky returned to Moscow to find Balakirev in residence and about to make wearisome demands on his time. Yet it was, according to Kashkin, during one of the long walks on which Balakirev took Tchaikovsky that the former suggested a subject for an orchestral piece. The result was that on 7 October Tchaikovsky set about what would ultimately be his first masterpiece: the fantasy overture, Romeo and Juliet .

Yet it did not at first come easily, as Tchaikovsky admitted to Balakirev after a week’s work. The old autocrat’s response was exactly what might have been expected, and his interventions and Tchaikovsky’s responses afford such vivid insights into the way great composers’ minds can work that it is worth devoting significant space to it. Balakirev began by describing very specifically how he had tackled his own overture on another Shakespeare subject, King Lear :

First, after reading the play, I was inflamed with a desire to write the overture, but having as yet no materials, I fired myself by means of a ground plan. I projected a maestoso introduction, and then something mystical (Kent’s prophecy). The introduction fades away, and there begins a stormy, passionate allegro . This is Lear himself, already uncrowned, but still a strong lion. The characters of Regan and Goneril also functioned as episodes, and finally the quiet and gentle second subject personified Cordelia. Further on came the development (the storm, Lear and the Fool on the heath), then the recapitulation of the allegro . Regan and Goneril finally get the better of him and the overture ends with a dying down (Lear over Cordelia’s body). Then follows a repetition of Kent’s prophecy, now fulfilled, and then a calm, solemn death. I’ll tell you that at first, even with this plan, no ideas formed themselves – but then, afterwards, ideas did come and fit themselves into the frame I had created. I think this will happen to you also if you first inflame yourself with a plan. Then arm yourself with galoshes and a stick, set off for a walk along the boulevards – and I’m convinced that before you reach the Sretensky you’ll already have some theme – or at least some episode. At this very moment, while thinking of you and your overture, I am somehow involuntarily fired, and I conceive that your overture must begin straight away with a fierce allegro with sword clashes like this: [here Balakirev jotted down four bars of vigorous music]. If I were composing this overture then, having inspired myself with this germ, I would let it incubate – or, rather, would carry it around deep within my brain, and then there would issue something alive and feasible like this.

Balakirev could not resist taking the matter further, making suggestions for a key scheme. And the strategy worked, for on 9 November Tchaikovsky replied:

My overture is progressing quite rapidly. The greater part is already composed in outline, and when it’s crept out of my womb you’ll see that, whatever else it may be, a large portion of what you advised me to do has been carried out as you instructed. In the first place, the scheme is yours: the introduction depicting the friar, the feud (allegro ), and love (the second subject). Secondly, the keys are yours: the introduction in E, the allegro in B minor, and the second theme [in fact, two themes] in D flat.

Balakirev was, predictably, impatient to see what Tchaikovsky had already composed, promising to make no comment until the whole piece was completed. It was wise of Tchaikovsky to have limited his response, for even with no more than the four main themes, his St Petersburg mentor could not resist instant comment:

Because it’s already finished I consider it permissible to give you frankly my opinions of the themes you sent me. The opening theme is not at all to my taste. Perhaps when it’s fully realized it achieves some degree of beauty, but when written out unadorned as you have sent it to me, it conveys neither beauty nor strength, and doesn’t even depict the character of Friar Laurence in the way required. Here there ought to be something like Liszt’s chorales, with an ancient Catholic character. But instead your E major tune has a completely different character – the character of quartet themes by that genius of petty bourgeois music, Haydn, and which arouses a strong thirst for beer. As for your B minor theme [the feud music], this isn’t a theme but a very beautiful introduction to a theme , and after the C major rushing about there is surely need for a strong, energetic melodic idea. I assume it is there. The second theme in D flat is very beautiful, though a bit overripe, but the first D flat tune is simply delightful . I play it often, and I want very much to kiss you for it. Here is tenderness and the sweetness of love. When I play [here Balakirev wrote out the broad love theme with its two-note ‘sighing’ horn accompaniment], then I imagine you are lying naked in your bath and that Artôt–Padilla herself is washing your tummy with hot lather from scented soap. There’s only one thing I’ll say against the theme; there’s little in it of inner, spiritual love, and only a passionate physical languor (with even a slightly Italian hue) – whereas Romeo and Juliet are decidely not Persian lovers, but Europeans.

The first performance of Romeo and Juliet was conducted by Nikolay Rubinstein in Moscow in March 1870. Balakirev, having now seen the full score, wrote of the enthusiasm with which the kuchka had greeted the piece, and ‘how delighted everyone is with your D flat bit [the love themes] – including Vladimir Stasov, who says: “There were five of you: now there are six!” The beginning and end are to be strongly censured’, and required rewriting. Nevertheless, such was the enthusiasm of the kuchka for the piece that at their meetings Balakirev was always required to play it through at the piano, a feat he learned to perform from memory.

Tchaikovsky himself also remained ambivalent about his latest composition and in the summer of 1870 he revised it drastically, scrapping the whole slow introduction and opening its replacement (now in F sharp minor) with a chorale-like idea, exactly as Balakirev had prescribed. Much else was replaced, including almost the entire coda. In 1880 a final, much less drastic, revision produced the work’s ultimate, and perfect, form.

Fantasy Overture: Romeo and Juliet *****

[This is where readers unfamiliar with classical music should begin their investigation of Tchaikovsky’s work. Though this is obviously a highly descriptive piece, Tchaikovsky effortlessly designed it in sonata form [see Appendix 1 for a description of this], and its various sections should not be, in the end, particularly difficult to identify. Above all, however, Romeo and Juliet is a marvellously graphic and musically rich piece – on all counts, one of Tchaikovsky’s greatest. But not only is it a very attractive piece – it is also a very substantial one, so if you are a (relative) newcomer to classical music, do not try to complete its examination at one sitting – unless, that is, you become instantly hooked on it. Classical music is often so rich in varied details that it may require several hearings before you can begin to feel really famil iar with a piece, and even beyond this further hearings may reveal new treasures. You can, of course, simply play the whole piece a number of times until you feel comfortable with it, but I suggest you might adopt the following alternative strategy:

Listen to the lot – or at least a good portion of it. Have patience: it is lengthy (about 20 minutes), and don’t worry if getting your head round this (or keeping your attention constantly focused) proves formidable – though there may already be some bits that have struck you.

Now read on through the following three paragraphs. The third deals with the work’s slow introduction (about 6 minutes); listen to this, and try to pick out some of the things I have described in it. Pause when the feud music (noisy and violent) enters. If you think it will help, go back and listen again: things you missed first time round may now begin to become apparent.]

Romeo and Juliet is such a masterpiece, and so characteristic of the mature Tchaikovsky, that it is worth examining it more closely than space will permit with most later pieces in this book. Like Balakirev with his King Lear overture, Tchaikovsky had composed Romeo and Juliet as a sonata structure. It may seem odd that a composer, when turning a stage play into a musical organism, should cast it in a form where the preordained course of musical events is unlikely to have any plausible parallel to the narrative sequence of the play. But the point of music by itself (i.e. not as in opera, where it is tethered to a text and the events onstage) is that it can concentrate single-mindedly on the essence of the play. More precisely, it can focus, on the one hand, on the prime players whose characters and emotional responses create the play’s train of events and, on the other, it can suggest, either through graphic projection or by mood, the context in which they act and react. In fact, though music may conjure certain of the landmark events into which the characters are caught (here, for example, the skirmishes between the Montagues and the Capulets), we learn little from Tchaikovsky’s music of Shakespeare’s actual plot except that its outcome is catastrophic. Instead, Tchaikovsky encapsulates the two conflicting forces of the play (the love of Romeo and Juliet on the one hand, and the bitter mutual hostility of their families on the other) in two savagely contrasting kinds of music, then proceeds to a deeper exposure, but in musical terms, of these two fevered worlds and of the human consequences of their confrontation.

But there is a third factor in the story: Friar Laurence – and his role is very different. He is the activist who enables the course of love, but who stands outside the central conflict. Yet his presence must be clearly signalled, and so he is given his own musical badge, the dignified hymnlike theme that opens the work pointing to his priestly status and always retaining its stable identity, even when later we hear him desperately intervening in a forlorn attempt to calm and separate the warring clans.

Romeo and Juliet begins with a slow introduction so substantial that it is a very significant section in its own right. As already noted, the solemn initial theme introduces Friar Laurence, the string music that immediately follows suggesting, perhaps, a smothered restlessness, reinforced by the insistent dissonance marking the following crescendo which passes into a solemn, harp-decorated theme. Tchaikovsky repeats all this, though rescoring it and starting in a different key. This ended, the action moves away from the uneasy calm of this introduction; the string music recurs, this time urgently and with a following powerful crescendo , then is heard again quietly as before, as though Friar Laurence is willing a return to the stability of his own world. It is not to be. A chord, first quiet, but then repeated with growing force and impetus – and the Allegro giusto feud music (the first subject, marking the beginning of the exposition) erupts from it.

Now investigate the next stretch from the beginning of the feud music (but again, perhaps, first have a look at the diagram of sonata form in Appendix 1). I suggest simply listening to the whole of the exposition (about 5 minutes), then track your way through it again, using the following commentary. Again, if you think it will help, listen to this section for a third time.

In the work’s introduction, which we have just listened to, I sense that Tchaikovsky may indeed have been imagining an unfolding process, though emotional rather than graphic. Yet ‘erupts’ surely fits the feud music that has now arrived. This first subject is long enough to bring home the implacable aggression that marks this inter-family vendetta. Then the following increasingly calm transition prepares us for the new music (the second subject) to come, and for a total change of mood and climate: warm, secure, calm and reassuring. From the field of strife we have passed to the closet (or the balcony?) of love.

This is the second subject, which it would become quite normal practice for Tchaikovsky to build from two very distinct themes; Romeo and Juliet sets a precedent for this. Nevertheless, one reason for the pair here could be to present a broader perspective on one of the deepest of human experiences than would be possible through a single theme. And yet this duality also poses a question: are we to hear these two themes as complementary, the first spacious, ardent and conveying the warmth and strength of love, the second (on muted strings) intimate, delicate and breathing love’s gentleness and tenderness? Or are they, in fact, separate representatives of the lovers themselves, the first of Romeo, full of masculine but tender ardour, the second of Juliet and her feminine adoration? The latter hypothesis will gain some support from their treatment in the recapitulation, where the themes’ order is, unusually in a symphonic work, reversed, the feminine theme, now desperately agitated, coming first, the masculine theme spreading itself with an unexpected breadth and power that might suggest Romeo’s implacable assertiveness in defence of his love until he is finally, but surely, overwhelmed. Yet in Shakespeare he did not die a violent death. Thus the question remains open, and each of us can make up his or her own mind.

The development is relatively brief (about 2 minutes), and it topples over into the recapitulation (where the feud music recurs). Since the work’s main themes will now be becoming more familiar, perhaps it is a good idea to play on to the end of the recapitulation (that is, up to the silence that precedes the last stage (the coda) – about 4 further minutes on). Then, as before, go through all of this again, using the commentary.

The second subject has fully presented the lovers, the third party in the case, and the exposition has ended ravishingly with muted strings and low woodwind cushioning a gently rocking harp figure and brief, receding cor anglais phrases; now it is the development’s concern to present the first stage in which the drama itself is played out. Here matters are clearly between the Friar and the two families, the former heard from the beginning against constant rumblings of dissent. Slowly but remorselessly the hubbub grows, the Friar shouting two final desperate appeals (his theme on trumpets), but to no avail, and the turmoil spills over into the recapitulation, introduced by the feud music exactly as it had appeared in the exposition, though here very much shortened. It is succeeded by the love music (the second subject), but now represented first by the second love theme (Juliet’s?), this time not tenderly rapturous, but desperately agitated.

Whatever criticism may have been levelled at Tchaikovsky in the past, no critic has ever questioned his melodic gift. And if any doubters remain, then they should experience Tchaikovsky’s exploitation of the broad love theme that will go on to dominate the recapitulation. In the first version it had already been spacious, but in the 1870 revision Tchaikovsky had extended it enormously, both in expressive range and in duration. The point at which his second revision begins is fairly easy to spot – it is where the grand melodic surge is suddenly softened, the theme dropping to the cellos before resuming its full-throated course, only to encounter the feud music, which grapples with it, swiftly achieving ascendency. This is where Friar Laurence attempts to intervene, but without success. The final catastrophe is embodied in the work’s most brutal and violent climax, from which issues a descending line that tumbles to the bass of the orchestra and, after a brief but violent timpani eruption, expires.

Only the coda remains. Use the same double procedure as before .

After such turmoil, even silence seems eloquent as (I imagine) the two families stand, stunned by what they have caused. But then, to a muffled-drum rhythm suggestive of a funeral march, the twisting line resumes, but now given a rhythm – and we can hear that, extraordinarily but so aptly, it had already, even before the timpani eruption, been a broken, mutilated version of the broad love theme. A quiet hymnlike theme for woodwind and horns signals, presumably, Friar Laurence’s benediction over the tragic lovers; then the opening of the broad love theme, its true character restored, rides majestically above a strong, darkly descending bass. An apotheosis of the lovers perhaps, it provides a final, perfect touch before six unsparing chords bring to an end one of Tchaikovsky’s greatest masterpieces.

[None of the following examinations of individual works will offer as precise listening guidance as has been given in the case of Romeo and Juliet. Nevertheless, I hope the experience of getting to grips with this piece will have helped you decide what are the most useful things you found in my method of approach (and what perhaps you found was not helpful: we all listen in our own ways) so that you can begin build ing/discovering the way that suits you for getting inside a classical piece and getting the best out of it.]

First Quartet and The Oprichnik

Romeo and Juliet was certainly a masterpiece, but it was only years later that it achieved the popularity it enjoys today – surely a reminder to us that works we may initially not connect with, even reject, may subsequently gain not only our acceptance but our affection. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Tchaikovsky’s fame was first established by certain of his shorter pieces such as could be performed domestically, or in concerts involving only one or a very few performers. Here piano pieces were important, and so were songs. Of the former we have already noted the swift popularity gained by Tchaikovsky’s ‘Chant sans paroles’, the last of the three pieces that make up Souvenir de Hapsal . If he did produce a set of pieces, it would usually comprise six items (the dog-loving Tchaikovsky once jokingly asserted this was prompted by the habit of a bitch he had owned of always presenting him with litters of six puppies). In December 1869, with the first version of Romeo and Juliet completed, he set about his first set of six songs, the final one of which quickly gained wide currency, and has remained ever since by far his most famous example of the genre. Outside Russia as late as 1943 the Welsh novelist and dramatist, Richard Llewellyn (best known for his play How Green was My Valley ) used the English title of the song, ‘ None but the lonely heart’, ***(*) as the title of a novel, and a year later it was employed for a film starring Cary Grant and Ethel Barrymore (also providing the theme tune). Unlike so many pieces by great composers that achieved a currency that their purely musical quality did not justify, ‘None but the lonely heart’ is one of its creator’s finest songs. Its text was a Russian translation of one of Mignon’s four songs from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (oddly, Lev Mey, whose Russian translation Tchaikovsky used, had turned it into a song for a man). This agonized lament of the young Mignon at separation from her beloved had already engrossed earlier composers (Beethoven had set it four times, Schubert no fewer than six), and though Tchaikovsky’s response was very different, it proved as perfect in its form as in its melodic distinction. ‘None but the lonely heart’ is a little masterpiece.

Tchaikovsky’s personal life at this period had its strains. While these songs were being created Vera reappeared in Moscow, her passion for Tchaikovsky still lingering. Simultaneously Artôt returned to Moscow to sing in Gounod’s Faust , and Vera attended a performance with Tchaikovsky and members of her family, but left before the end. All this, and the lukewarm reception of the first version of Romeo and Juliet at its Moscow premiere in March, decided Tchaikovsky that he needed a substantial break and in June, as soon as the Conservatoire term was over, he headed west to join his young friend, the eighteen-year-old Vladimir Shilovsky, in Paris. He would be away for some three months – though far from completely idle, for during extended stays in Bad Soden in Germany and Interlaken in Switzerland he completed his first, and most substantial, revision of Romeo and Juliet . September found him, with his morale restored, back in Moscow for the new Conservatoire session.

By now Tchaikovsky was thoroughly settled in Moscow. He had established a good circle of friends, was frequently invited to dine out, and enjoyed a rich cultural life of plays, concerts and operas. And early the following year he delivered the first substantial piece that would carry his name around the world. By 1871 his national fame had grown sufficiently for Nikolay Rubinstein to suggest that he should mount a concert devoted entirely to his own music. Tchaikovsky concurred; he was short of money, and such a concert might make a profit – but to make it really attractive, it should contain a completely new work. An orchestra would have been far too costly, but a string quartet made up of his professional friends was feasible. The result was Tchaikovsky’s First String Quartet, begun in February for a concert scheduled for the end of March. The audience was gratifyingly large, and the event’s prestige was heightened by the appearance of Ivan Turgenev, one of Russia’s most famous and respected novelists.

‘Chamber music’ – that is, music for a small group of (usually) instrumental soloists, such as might be played in a room of a large house – does not feature very prominently in Tchaikovsky’s output. Nevertheless, his three string quartets, Piano Trio (for violin, cello and piano), and string sextet (Souvenir de Florence ) contain some excellent music. The form of most string quartets and quintets, etc., composed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (i.e. in the Classical and Romantic periods) paralleled that of the contemporary symphonies in that they were usually in four movements and normally employed the corresponding musical structures. Clearly a small group of instrumentalists cannot match the sheer power and variety of an orchestra, but what it can offer is intimacy and a greater refinement; also, on the assumption that the smaller audience is likely to be a more consistently committed and receptive one, the composer may be encouraged to present a musical experience that is more subtle and sophisticated, and sometimes even of a personal, perhaps almost confessional, nature.

There is, however, nothing of the latter quality in Tchaikovsky’s first quartet, and from the circumstances of its composition, it cannot be expected that there would be. Instead it is a straightforward four-movement piece of great charm, vitality and inventiveness (especially in its rhythmic flexibility), and it contains the movement that would, more than any other, introduce his name to the rest of the world.

String Quartet no.1 in D major ****

[This is an engaging work, and a good first-time piece for those read ers who are largely unfamiliar with the rather individual and slender sound of music for only two violins, a viola and a cello. It can fairly be described as a symphony for four soloists, and its form is pretty straightforward. But even if you do not go for the whole piece, listen to the slow movement, which has always been one of Tchaikovsky’s most popular pieces.]

The quartet’s first movement is in sonata form, and the boundaries between the chief components are mostly clear. It opens with a gently pulsing chordal idea; the beginning of the transition is marked by the intervention of melodic roulades that pass between the instruments (these will also be a prominent feature of the finale, and contribute to the work’s sense of unity). The second subject is a new theme plainly presented, the ornamental lines soon reappearing and building to a powerful climax before the whole exposition is repeated (or should be: in recorded performances this is often omitted, presumably because the producers want to squeeze two quartets on to one CD). Though the development opens with the first subject unadorned, the ornamental lines quickly reappear, but now they home in on a little five-note scalic figure that not only dominates the whole development but persists in the first violin as a companion to the first subject when the recapitulation slips in on the three lower strings. In due course the second subject recurs, and a vigorous coda rounds off the movement. Only here does one suspect Tchaikovsky might have wished he had an orchestra at his disposal.

The scherzo and finale (movements three and four) are clear siblings of this first movement, their rhythmic characters equally attractive. The scherzo follows the usual ternary pattern of such movements at this time, the central trio ushered in by a slow trill on the cello. The finale is in sonata form, the second subject easily identified as the playfully repeated morsel against which a broad sustained melody, initially delivered by the viola, enters (again the repeat of the exposition may be omitted). Otherwise these movements require no further comment.

But the slow movement, the Andante cantabile built around a folksong that Tchaikovsky himself had noted down in 1869 from the singing of a peasant at his sister Sasha’s home in the Ukraine, is a very different matter. Rendered into doggerel English that fairly matches the literary quality of the original words, the text runs thus:

Upon the divan Vanya sat

And filled a glass with rum:

Before he’d poured out half a tot

He ordered Katenka to come.

The folksong itself is a world away from this. It is, in fact, barely a quarter of a minute long, but within this tiny span it establishes a memorable individuality. Tchaikovsky forthwith repeats and then effortlessly extends it, returning to the original tune before continuing with a theme of his own creation over a four-note pizzicato ostinato from the cello. These facts observed, no further comment is needed, surely, on the rest of this simple and perfectly conceived movement. Certainly Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries fell for it completely – and not only in Russia; constantly he was encountering it abroad, played by every sort of instrument and instrumental combination. This came to irritate him because the obsession with this particular movement was not matched by interest in his other, more important, pieces. But it did occasion one incident, the memory of which he treasured for the rest of his days – the occasion in 1876, when the colossus of Russian literature was alongside him during a performance of this Andante : ‘Perhaps I was never so flattered in my life, nor was my pride as a composer so stirred, as when Lev Tolstoy, sitting beside me listening to the Andante from my First Quartet, dissolved in tears.’

The summer of 1871 was passed first at Kamenka. Sasha’s family now presented Uncle Pyotr with a growing bevy of young nieces who could be enlisted into modest domestic entertainments, and this was probably the year in which he dreamed up a ballet for them to perform. He, of course, composed the music, but he also acted as choreographer, and years later one of his nephews recorded his part in the proceedings:

The staging was done entirely by Uncle Pyotr. It was he who invented the steps and pirouettes, and he danced them himself, showing the performers what he required of them. At such moments Uncle Pyotr, red in the face, wet with perspiration as he sang the tune, presented a pretty amusing sight. But in the children’s eyes he was so perfect in the art of choreography that for many years the memories of this remained with them down to the finest details.

Uncle Modest, who was also in residence, danced the Prince, and their eldest niece, Tatyana, was Odette – for it was in this tiny, unambitious domestic entertainment that the embryo was conceived of the most famous ballet in the world, Swan Lake . It would also prove to be the first of a whole series of theatrical enterprises at Kamenka, which would include Nikolay Gogol’s hilarious play The Marriage and Molière’s Le Misanthrope , Uncle Pyotr almost always acting as designer, producer, and prompter.

From Kamenka Tchaikovsky headed for the estate of a friend, Nikolay Kondratyev, at Nizy, some eighty miles north-west of Kharkov. Kondratyev was noted for his unfailing optimism, and Modest believed it was this capacity to see the bright side in everything that endeared him to Tchaikovsky. Here at Nizy Tchaikovsky completed his textbook on harmony commissioned by Jurgenson. On returning to Moscow in September he was at last able to detach himself from Nikolay Rubinstein and move into quarters of his own. Now needing a personal servant, he engaged Mikhail Sofronov, who had formerly been in the service of the violinist Ferdinand Laub, the leader in the recent premiere of Tchaikovsky’s First String Quartet. Mikhail was joined – soon, it seems – by his teenage brother, Alexey, and when Mikhail and his master parted company in 1876, Alexey stayed on. It was the beginning of a lifelong relationship, Tchaikovsky becoming increasingly attached to Alexey, missing him greatly when circumstances caused significant periods of separation (he was especially distraught when Alexey was conscripted into the army for a time), being much concerned for his welfare, and placing great trust in him personally. The closeness of their relationship would become a source of deep jealousy among some of Tchaikovsky’s relatives, and in his will Tchaikovsky would bequeath Alexey one-seventh of the capital from his estate, as well as furniture. In consequence, by selling his legacy the former servant was able to purchase Tchaikovsky’s last home at Klin, which would become the Tchaikovsky Museum. Alexey would survive his master by thirty-three years, himself bequeathing to the Museum some scores of Tchaikovsky’s music which he had concealed from Modest.

The generosity of his bequest to Alexey indicates the affection Tchaikovsky had developed for his servant, and raises the question of whether their relationship was entirely a business one. Certainly the very heightened tone of some of Tchaikovsky’s letters reveal that the strength of his personal concern for Alexey was very great. Poznansky has pointed out that in Russia at this time servants could also become convenient sexual partners, and it seems plausible that Tchaikovsky did indeed seek sexual satisfaction from Alexey (who himself was very obviously heterosexual). As already noted, Alexey was in his mid-teens when he entered Tchaikovsky’s life, a time when the teenage male seems to have been a particular preoccupation of Tchaikovsky. Another youth from this period was a certain Eduard Zak, in 1871 seventeen years old, to whom Tchaikovsky’s brother, Nikolay, had been showing some kindness. Tchaikovsky himself knew the lad and became very emotionally involved with him, as is clear from the letter he sent to Nikolay in October:

I beg you, old chap, to let him – and even order him – to travel to Moscow. In doing this, you’ll give me great pleasure. I have missed him a great deal, and I’m fearful for his future. I fear that manual work will kill all higher aspirations in him. But whatever happens, it’s absolutely essential that I see him. For God’s sake, arrange it!

Zak did come to Moscow and associate with Tchaikovsky, but then two years later committed suicide. Yet he was not forgotten; sixteen years on Tchaikovsky could confide to his diary:

How amazingly well do I remember him: the sound of his voice, his movements, but in particular the uncommonly wonderful expression at times on his face. I think I never loved anyone as much as he. My God, but what did they not say to me then – and however much I console myself, my guilt before him is terrible! And yet I loved him, and the memory of him is sacred to me.

The pain, the longing, the mysterious guilt which is clearly the consequence of some incident which was, presumably, homosexual, the ineradicable memory: all are there. And at the same time, in 1871, gossip about Tchaikovsky’s relationship with the nineteen-year-old Shilovsky had been circulating. The latter had invited Tchaikovsky to spend nearly a month with him in Nice around the New Year – but no one must know about this, Tchaikovsky told brother Anatoly, ‘and because in Moscow everyone (except Rubinstein) must think that I am going to Sasha’s, please don’t tell anyone’.

As it was, the break in Nice proved beneficial and, back in Russia, Tchaikovsky resumed work on a major project: the completion of his second opera, The Oprichnik , which he had begun a year earlier, and which is the first of his operas to have survived intact. In the West Tchaikovsky is not normally perceived as a composer much interested in opera. Only two – Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades – are regularly mounted outside Russia, but Tchaikovsky wrote eight others. In the later nineteenth century, with symphony concerts still being generally (and especially in Russia) neither as prestigious nor as numerous as they would later be, opera dominated the musical scene, and it was in the opera house that the composer could achieve supreme fame. Tchaikovsky was always on the lookout for viable operatic subjects. In early 1870, with Undine rejected by the Imperial Theatres, he projected Mandragora , an opera based on an idea from a certain Sergey Rachinsky, a botanist friend:

A knight, rejected by his lady love, learns of the all-powerful mandragora, an enchanted root that may do the trick for him. At night he seeks it out in an enchanted garden; the mandragora bursts into flower, and the knight tears it out by its roots – whereupon it is transformed into an enchanted beauty who immediately is enamoured of him. Turning herself into a page, she attaches herself to him, but he now falls in love with another woman, at which the unfortunate mandragora turns herself back into a flower.

Tchaikovsky actually composed a rather beautiful chorus of flowers and insects for the nocturnal garden scene of Mandragora , but then dropped the subject. Rachinsky promptly offered another, Raimond Lully :

Raimond, a Spanish knight, is so debauched that his lady love, Donna Inez, has sought refuge in a nunnery. During a chapel service Raimond bursts in (on horseback), scattering everyone except Donna Inez, who joins him in a duet, during which he is converted into a warrior missionary who sets out for Africa, only to be struck down by an old accomplice who is disconcerted by the improvement in his character. Meanwhile Donna Inez has also arrived in Africa to negotiate the freedom of some Christian prisoners; she just happens to be passing – so Raimond is able to die in her arms.

Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest, alleged the composer found this ‘very interesting’, but then rejected it. If we may feel that he would have been wiser to have accepted something other than the highly melodramatic subject he was about to settle on for his next opera, we can reflect that its plot was at least a vast improvement on either of the previous two. In fact, Tchaikovsky based The Oprichnik on a tragedy by a respected Russian playwright Ivan Lazhechnikov, set in the time of the sixteenth-century tsar, Ivan the Terrible. Ivan was, historically, a brutal ruler (though with contrasting bouts of extreme piety) who maintained a corps of personal bodyguards known as Oprichniks, and who were notorious for their atrocities. Tchaikovsky was his own librettist, and had begun composition early in February 1870. For a year progress had been slow and intermittent, and though the success of the concert devoted to his own works in March 1871 had fired his creativity, it was still May 1872 before all was done, and a further two years before the opera reached the stage.

The Oprichnik : opera in four acts * * *

[ The Oprichnik may be safely left to those who like high-powered melodrama with music to match. However, do not judge the whole piece from Act 1, which is stuffed with music taken over from The Voyevoda before Tchaikovsky destroyed the latter. But opera buffs should find plenty to enjoy in the later acts: there is some very good, sometimes very touching, music here. Other readers should move on to Chapter 8.]

The plot of The Oprichnik is briefly as follows:

Act 1. Andrey and Natalya are in love, but the former’s family has been dispossessed by Natalya’s father, Zhemchuzhny, who demands she marries the elderly Mitkov. Natalya is dismayed. In despair, Andrey confides to his friend, Basmanov (already an Oprichnik), that he has decided to join the Oprichniks in the hope of getting justice through the Tsar himself. Alone, Natalya voices her yearning for Andrey. Her women enter and try to cheer her with a choral dance.

Act 2 Scene 1. The Boyarina, Andrey’s mother, worries about Basmanov’s influence on her son, despite the latter’s reassurances. Andrey reaffirms his determination to remain virtuous.

Act 2 Scene 2. In the Tsar’s mansion the Oprichniks are assembled. Vyazminsky, their commander and a deadly enemy of Andrey’s father, is enraged to learn the Tsar will accept Andrey as an Oprichnik, but then sees in this a hope of getting his revenge. Andrey enters, and Vyazminsky administers the Oprichniks’ oath to the young man who, if he should break it, will have to die – and only too late does Andrey discover that he will have to renounce even his mother and Natalya. He is already committed, but only after phases of terrible doubt does he finally and fully complete the oath.

Act 3. In a square in Moscow a crowd is lamenting its troubles, and the Boyarina voices her anxieties concerning Andrey. Natalya has fled from her father’s house, and now pleads with the older woman for her protection. Zhemchuzhny enters with servants, and Natalya confesses her love for Andrey, the Boyarina interceding, though unsuccessfully, on the lovers’ behalf. Andrey, Basmanov and the Oprichniks rush in and rescue Natalya. When Andrey confesses to the Boyarina that he is now an Oprichnik, she curses and disowns him in the most uncompromising erms. Basmanov counsels Andrey to go straight to the Tsar to gain release from his Oprichnik’s oath.

Act 4. The Tsar agrees to this plea, and the wedding begins joyfully, Andrey pledging his undying loyalty to Ivan. But he is not to be released from his oath until midnight. Natalya remains uneasy, and while the wedding is being celebrated, a message arrives: Ivan demands to see the bride – but alone. Andrey curses the Tsar, is arrested, and Vyazminsky fetches the Boyarina. Through a window she witnesses her son’s execution, and drops dead.

The Oprichnik is unblushing melodrama, and not a truly great opera – but neither is it a bad one. The overture provides a clear introduction to the three principal forces that drive the opera: the Oprichniks, who have a single collective function, and the two prime individuals – the Boyarina, and her son Andrey. Each in the opera has a personal theme, and after the overture’s opening, which promises a turbulent tale to come, the Oprichniks’ badge is heard, a terse, clipped theme which will become very familiar, once this group has presented itself at the beginning of Act 2 Scene 2. The woodwind theme that follows is the Boyarina’s – the dignified melody which, in Act 2 Scene 1, will carry her exhortation to her precious son to practise resignation and virtue (note the instant rejoinder in the overture from the Oprichniks’ theme, now muttered on pizzicato strings – a tiny harbinger of the conflict between good and evil which is what this opera is all about). The third theme follows forthwith – the fine violin melody is that to which Andrey will present himself before the Oprichniks in the oath scene, still unaware of the terrible dilemma he is about to face, and which will ultimately destroy him.

The first act is by far the weakest, for Tchaikovsky was intent on recycling as much as he could of his Voyevoda music, and some three-quarters of this act were adapted, or simply transferred bodily, from the earlier opera. Sometimes even the original text was taken over, and to accommodate all this, characters and elements of the new plot had to be distorted, with dismal consequences for the tale itself. Only the fine recitative and arioso for Basmanov (a ‘trouser’ role taken by an alto: presumably Basmanov is to be seen as very young), his ensuing exchanges with Andrey, and Natalya’s splendid monologue of love (vintage Tchaikovsky, this!) were new.

From the beginning of Act 2 the whole level of The Oprichnik rises, and there will be very few transfers from earlier works. We encounter the Boyarina, the first of a succession of ill-starred women who would prove to be some of the most memorable creations in Tchaikovsky’s subsequent operas. Whatever we may think of the dramatic hyperbole of The Oprichnik , the Boyarina comes over as a truly credible, and very Russian, woman: vulnerable because of her sex, yet courageous, patient in suffering, and possessed of a moral resolve that will make her prepared to curse to all damnation the son she loves for what she sees as his recourse to evil. From the aria that opens Act 2 we may gauge her troubled but dignified condition, then observe her moral firmness in her ensuing scene with her son. But if this has been a static one-to-one encounter, the next scene will be action packed. We meet the massed Oprichniks themselves with their commander, Vyazminsky, their music here overlaid with an ecclesiastical tone – for, like their master Ivan, they pretend to a religious devoutness, though even here there are also eruptions of their more truthful music of violence. Basmanov announces that Andrey’s initiation into the Oprichniks’ ranks is to take place, and Vyazminsky reacts with violent hostility, then shifts his ground as he sees how he can turn this to his own purposes. Andrey pleads his cause in a well-calculated aria (already presaged in the overture), and the initiation begins. What follows is powerful stuff, set in progress by the Oprichniks’ terse theme, which will be a ubiquitous concern of the orchestra in what follows. The preliminaries over, Vyazminsky begins to administer the oath itself, the Oprichniks adding their collective voice. A brief abatement as Andrey realizes with horror that he must renounce both his mother and Natalya – but Vyazminsky demands obedience, and the Oprichniks remain adamant. More than once Andrey resists their demands (on one occasion, with Andrey rendered speechless by weeping, the orchestra has to act as his surrogate by recalling his pre-oath aria, while Vyazminsky mutters to himself gloatingly). Finally threatened by death if he will not accept the oath, Andrey yields. Whatever underlying reservations some listeners may have about the hyperbole and unashamed melodrama of this whole situation, there is no denying that Tchaikovsky’s treatment (and pacing) of it was exactly what was required, right up to the final triumphal trumpeting of the massed Oprichniks’ theme that brings the scene to the noisiest – and most audience-rousing – of conclusions.

To open Act 3, a chorus of the peasantry gives voice to its troubles, and prays to God for pity. The Boyarina laments her loneliness and her continuing anxieties concerning Andrey; a tiny chink of harmless mischief in an otherwise tormented world is provided by a bunch of urchins harassing her before being driven off by a group of men. The meeting between a desperate Natalya and a wise-counselling Boyarina consolidates further the latter’s character, demonstrating that already Tchaikovsky can treat an intimate encounter such as this with a sensitivity that complements the panache with which he had handled the supercharged turmoil of the oath scene. Zhemchuzhny appears and Natalya begs to be heard, couching her appeal in the simplest possible terms which are reiterated exactly by the Boyarina, only to have her plea rejected.

What follows is a full-blown operatic finale – that is, an expansive movement concerned with some crucial incident marking a watershed in the plot, and in which the fullest-possible performing forces are mustered onstage to provide the opera’s most grandiose display of stage spectacle and musical grandiloquence. It begins with the sounds of the Oprichniks’ theme, signalling the approach of Andrey and his fellow Oprichniks. It might fairly be questioned whether Tchaikovsky was wise to use for a third time the music, to which both Natalya and the Boyarina had already pleaded with Zhemchuzhny, as the dressing for Andrey’s plea to his mother to accept he is still the same son she had always known. Ignoring the urgent appeals of Basmanov and the Oprichniks that he should remember his oath to forsake his mother, he confesses he is an Oprichnik. The Boyarina’s reaction is the most critical moment of the opera: to the insistent challenges of the Oprichniks’ theme in the orchestra, she curses her son, then is led away.

The essential business of this Act being now over, the finale gets down to its real task – that is, to consolidate in both individual and corporate terms the supercharged dramatic atmosphere which the Boyarina’s curse has fostered, and to reflect on its immediate impact and its consequences for the future. First the four principals – Andrey, Natalya, Basmanov and Zhemchuzhny – voice their individual reactions corporately in a quartet, to be in due course joined by the chorus, who reflect on the horror of the curse. It may be objected that, with such a multitude of voices simultaneously singing a variety of texts, no verbal sense can be grasped – though a skilful composer can ensure that, from time to time, certain crucial phrases from the individual participants can break the surface of the texture and be caught by the attentive listener. But in any case, by this stage we may fairly guess the matters and feelings that will be preoccupying the various participants, and the purpose of this vast ensemble becomes simply to give vent to the massed emotion these have engendered. This stage past, Basmanov takes the initiative; Andrey must beg the Tsar to release him from his vow. The chorus, now as much participants as observers, add their endorsement, and an even more prolonged ensemble rounds off the act.

It may be felt that the sheer scale that this finale attains was a miscalculation on Tchaikovsky’s part – that he was guilty of overkill. It is indubitably a blockbuster, but there is no denying that it is also a powerful foil to the happier event that opens the last act. An audience of Tchaikovsky’s time would have expected a liberal dose of dancing in an opera, and the entertainment attached to the wedding of Andrey and Natalya was a fair enough excuse for this, to which Tchaikovsky responded handsomely. True, this ballet clogs the action but, with the turbulence of what has gone before and the horrors that are to come, this period of respite has its positive side. Andrey now pledges undying loyalty to the Tsar, bids his comrades farewell (to which they respond) in one of the most indelibly Russian passages in the whole score (another appropriation from The Voyevoda ), and reaffirms his loyalty to the Tsar (again his companions respond). But in the duet that ensues Natalya remains ill at ease, despite Andrey’s reassurances, Tchaikovsky employing the main theme of his symphonic poem Fatum (withdrawn from circulation after Balakirev had condemned it), to set Natalya’s troubled declaration of devotion. The guests’ attempt at reassurance is ruptured by Basmanov’s entry to forewarn of disaster, confirmed when Vyazminsky, with feigned affability, enters to deliver the Tsar’s final requirement: to see the bride – and alone. In an ensemble Basmanov and the chorus beg Andrey to agree – and a finale evolves, involving all onstage. What follows is expeditiously treated: Andrey’s defiance, Natalya’s terror, the Oprichniks’ theme increasingly assertive in the orchestra. Andrey is led away to execution and Vyazminsky leaves to fetch the Boyarina, her reappearance foretold in the orchestra by a portion of her exhortation to Andrey to submit to the will of God – and never to leave her. Even more expeditious is the end itself: the return of Vyazminsky with the Boyarina, her witnessing, through a window, the brutal act which destroys her, and the Oprichniks (offstage) glorifying their Tsar to the theme that throughout the opera has constantly projected their true nature.

The premiere of The Oprichnik took place in St Petersburg in April 1874. Its reception was rapturous, and the opera was swiftly taken up by other houses: by Odessa in August, Kiev in December, and by Moscow the following May. It was Tchaikovsky’s first great success, and he might have been expected to revel in it. He did not. A fortnight after the opening night he wrote to Modest:

The Oprichnik torments me. This opera is so bad that I fled from all the rehearsals (especially those of Acts 3 and 4) so that I shouldn’t hear a single sound, and at the performance I would willingly have vanished. Isn’t it strange that when I had written it, it seemed to me initially such a delight. But from the very first rehearsal, what disenchantment! There’s no movement, no style, no inspiration.

Tchaikovsky was too hard on himself and on the opera. But in recognizing that its subject was contrived – no more than a shock-horror tale whose characters were caught up in extreme predicaments, and whose consequent tensions and torments were designed simply to manipulate audiences – he was pointing the way to his own future. How much better in an opera to uncover the misfortunes, pains and sorrows such as may arise in everyday life and afflict any one of us, real people. Though some of his operas to come would contain tough, sometimes harrowing situations, the ones that are most precious are those that expose the sorrows (and joys) that we, as ordinary mortals, can understand from our own observation and experiences. It is no wonder that the Tchaikovsky opera that draws audiences again and again is Eugene Onegin , Pushkin’s tale of an innocent teenage girl who is ultimately denied, by the chain of real-life circumstances and experiences into which she is caught, the love that would have given her fulfilment and happiness.

High Nationalism: Second Symphony and The Tempest

The broader pattern of Tchaikovsky’s living during the summer of 1872 followed that of the previous year: first a visit to Kamenka and then, after two delightful days in Kiev with Modest, visiting friends and sightseeing, ten days with Kondratyev at Nizy and with Shilovsky at Usovo. But on leaving Usovo, Tchaikovsky was struck with disaster, prompting an episode he delighted in retelling for the amusement of his friends, though the joke was against himself. Arriving at the first staging post, he ate well; then, fortified by wine, and anxious to continue his journey, he demanded that the horses be harnessed. But the postmaster declared that this was impossible, and there followed a heated exchange, upon which Tchaikovsky called for the complaints book, signing himself ‘Prince Volkonsky, gentleman of the Emperor’s bed chamber’. Instantly an abjectly apologetic postmaster had had the carriage ready. It was at the next stop that Tchaikovsky discovered that he had forgotten to have his baggage loaded. Here the brothers’ ways parted, and Tchaikovsky, not wishing to face the postmaster, sent an emissary to recover his possessions. But the postmaster insisted that its owner’s eminence demanded that he should release the baggage only to ‘Prince Volkonsky’ in person. And so a very embarrassed Tchaikovsky was forced to make the journey himself. This time he dealt affably with the postmaster, finally enquiring his name. ‘Tchaikovsky’ was the reply. Mystified, Tchaikovsky suspected this was the postmaster’s sharp-witted revenge. Enquiries revealed it was indeed his true name.

It was well that the baggage was recovered, for in it were the first sketches of Tchaikovsky’s most important composition since Romeo and Juliet , his Second Symphony, the Little Russian , so called for its incorporation of three folksongs from the Ukraine (or ‘Little Russia’). By now Tchaikovsky’s dealings with Balakirev had also fostered contacts with the kuchka generally, and there began cautious relations with others in the group. In October 1871 Cui had published a gratifying article praising Romeo and Juliet , and Tchaikovsky had warmed to Borodin in particular as a man of ‘gentle, subtle and refined nature’ (as he recalled him in 1887 after Borodin’s death). Of all Tchaikovsky’s orchestral works, the Little Russian Symphony moved closest to the kind of musical world cultivated by Balakirev and his colleagues. It is also perhaps the most consistently joyful of all his non-operatic compositions, and this may be in part a reflection of his state of mind at this time. He had now completed The Oprichnik , and his personal disenchantment with that opera was still in the future. Anxieties over the Conservatoire’s financial future had been relieved by a government grant, and Tchaikovsky’s own salary had been increased by over a half, enabling him to move to a more comfortable apartment. In his now buoyant mood he gave every spare moment he could to the symphony. ‘This work of genius (as Kondratyev calls my symphony) is close to completion,’ he wrote in mid-November to Modest. ‘I think it’s my best composition as regards perfection of form, a quality for which I have not been conspicuous.’ Three more weeks, and it was finished. That Christmas he introduced it to the kuchka in St Petersburg. Their response could not have been more favourable. ‘I played the finale at a soirée at Rimsky-Korsakov’s, and the whole company almost tore me to pieces in rapture – and Madame Rimskaya-Korsakova begged me in tears to let her arrange it for piano duet,’ he further informed Modest. In February 1873, at an RMS concert in Moscow, it received its premiere, enjoying (so Tchaikovsky informed Vladimir Stasov) ‘a great success, so great that Rubinstein wants to perform it again at the tenth concert of the RMS’s season as by public demand. To tell the truth, I’m not completely satisfied with the first three movements, but “The Crane” itself [the finale, which employs most prominently a Ukrainian folktune with that title] hasn’t come out so badly.’ Two months later Rubinstein kept his promise, Tchaikovsky receiving an ovation after each movement, and a laurel wreath and silver cup at the end. Between these performances it had been introduced to St Petersburg; so popular was it that in May it was given for a third time in Moscow at a special RMS concert.

But before listening to the piece, a word of explanation. What we almost invariably encounter today as Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2, the Little Russian , is by no means the symphony as it was first heard. It was the opening movement that troubled Tchaikovsky, and seven years later he completely rewrote it, leaving only the slow introduction and coda untouched; at the same time, he made minor revisions in the remaining three movements. In fact, the original first movement had been a far more substantial and complex piece. As such, it balanced the finale well, and the comparatively lightweight slow movement provided the right degree of contrast to such a weighty utterance, such as is not required when the replacement first movement of 1879 is performed. Thus there were both gains and losses, a situation that still applies, whichever version of the symphony is played. Some of Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries (including Sergey Taneyev, his former pupil – and, of all men, the one whose criticism of his own music Tchaikovsky valued most) were outspoken in preferring the original. For us, surely, the message is clear: both versions are valid, both are worth having, and which we prefer is our own business. But since the revised version is the official one that is still almost invariably played, that is the one that we will now investigate.

Symphony No. 2 in C minor ( Little Russian ) *****

[The Second Symphony is one of Tchaikovsky’s most approachable large-scale works – and especially the finale. It is no surprise it was so successful.]

Of all his large scale, multi-movement creations, the Little Russian Symphony is the most consistently accessible, and its structure one of the clearest. Moreover, it is such an engaging piece. The horn solo that opens the first movement’s slow introduction presents the first of the symphony’s three folksongs, and the tune is forthwith twice repeated intact, but with different backgrounds – a process that places it squarely in the national tradition initiated by Glinka. The scale of this introduction makes the conciseness of the following movement all the more striking, while the lucidity of the movement’s material, the clarity of its outlines and its compactness makes finding one’s way through it relatively easy. The first subject is a vigorous, bustling creation introduced by the strings; the second subject has two distinct themes, the first a gentle oboe melody, the second a generous but concise string tune (in fact, really a countermelody to the oboe tune, which is still present in the lower strings). But note also the fidgety little seven-note figure that unobtrusively punctuates both these tunes; it will become far more prominent later. A sudden hush and a rather mysterious crescendo (the darkly rising bass is, in fact, the opening of the oboe theme, though now sounding very different), and the material from the energetic first subject resurges to round off the exposition.

Now the opening of the folksong from the introduction, partnered enthusiastically by the fidgety figure, returns to launch the development, which rapidly grows in complexity as the first subject asserts its right to be heard. Indeed, once that right has been claimed, it parades itself with increasing grandiloquence (and noise), leading us straight into the recapitulation. The latter is little more than a repeat of the exposition (with the expected adjustments of key), and though, towards its end, it might sound for a while as though the development will be rerun, it is not to be, and it is a brief return of the slow introduction’s horn theme with one of its backgrounds that rounds off the movement.

The wedding march for the rejected opera Undine provided the main theme of the slow movement. It is a charming invention, heard over oscillating timpani taps, its delicacy making it thoroughly plausible as having once been the accompaniment to a nymph’s nuptials. The movement is planned as a rondo ( ABACABA , plus brief coda), the wedding march providing the A sections. The B sections (both absolutely identical) are marked by a simple dotted rhythm and are more expansive, while the central c section brings in the symphony’s second folksong, sounding it four times to changing backgrounds before proceeding more freely. A delicate dying coda, incorporating tiny allusions to the b section’s pervasive dotted rhythm, closes the movement.

The symphony’s most arresting movement is its scherzo and trio, and the source for its special character may lie in Tchaikovsky’s consolidating association with the kuchka . In 1869 Borodin’s First Symphony had received its premiere, and Tchaikovsky’s new acquaintance with the group, and their enthusiasm for Romeo and Juliet , would certainly have, in turn, drawn their recent works to his attention. In 1872 the relationship seemed to be thriving, and one wonders whether the scherzo of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony would have come out quite the way it did if that of Borodin’s First Symphony had not existed. What was so striking about Borodin’s scherzo was its harmonic boldness – its spiciness, even pungency, and its quietly elemental rhythmic pulse. It had that very energy which the scherzo of Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony, its rhythm confined within a single tiny cell, had lacked. And it is not just the rhythmic inventiveness that is so striking about Tchaikovsky’s scherzo: constantly phrase lengths are being altered, fleeting melodic fragments may decorate the texture, even sometimes momentarily dislocate the momentum. Stop the music at any point and try to guess what will come next (if only what sort of music might come next), and you are likely to be wildly wrong – yet listen to the lot, and it sounds totally coherent. That is a mark of creative genius. As for the insistent quaver pulsing of the central trio, this provides the most extreme, but appropriate, of contrasts. The brief coda, like that in the First Symphony’s scherzo, incorporates elements from both the scherzo and the trio.

However, it is the finale that is the real tour de force of the Second Symphony, and where Tchaikovsky’s allegiance to the Glinka tradition is most complete. Here it is that the third folksong (‘The Crane’) comes into its own. First parading itself in a grandiose introduction (was this haunting Musorgsky’s imagination when, two years later, he composed ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’ which so majestically rounds off his Pictures at an Exhibition ?), it then declares its true and mischievous identity to launch the Allegro vivo , virtually monopolizing the next two minutes against a succession of varying backgrounds. So spacious a deployment leaves no time for a transition, and the very different second subject enters forthwith, its contrasting character nicely reinforced by a very abrupt and clear change of key. If its predecessor had been a merry Russian dance, this tune could almost be of South American provenance – for, with its slightly tipsy rhythm, it might be a lightly disguised, rather decorous rumba. But there is no containing its spirited companion, and it is the Russian tune that will soon monopolize the exposition’s end.

All this has been dazzling, but it is eclipsed by what follows. The development is introduced by a series of widely striding notes, seeming to direct themselves whither they wish, like some sportive colossus. Against these the two subjects re-enter, and are taken on a bizarre journey, the second subject sometimes twisted in mid-course and even made to take on the personality of its boisterous companion. The trip becomes more heady, the excitement and turmoil ever greater. To change the metaphor: this is the strongest potion Tchaikovsky ever brewed. But when the recapitulation arrives, and firm ground is at last regained, it is the second subject that enters, Tchaikovsky having excised the first subject, with its further succession of changing backgrounds, in his 1879 revision (such a pity!). Further comment is unnecessary here. The recapitulation concluded, a brief recurrence of the striding theme, a single mighty stroke on the tam-tam, a moment of silence – and the presto coda brings the symphony to the most unbuttoned of conclusions.

As we have noted, Vladimir Stasov knew a great composer when he heard one, and during that evening at the Rimsky-Korsakovs’ at Christmas 1872, when Tchaikovsky had roused the company to rapture over his new Little Russian Symphony, Stasov had talked to him about what the subject of his next composition would be. Within days he had come up with three proposals, of which two were by British authors: Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott and The Tempest by Shakespeare. Tchaikovsky reflected on these for a fortnight and then decided: for a second time it would be Shakespeare. But one point immediately troubled him:

Does there need to be a tempest in The Tempest ? That is, is it essential to depict the fury of the elements in a piece in which this incidental circumstance [the tempest] serves simply as the point of departure for the whole dramatic action? If a tempest is necessary, where should it go: at the beginning or in the middle? If it’s not necessary, why not call the overture Miranda ?

Stasov could not resist the opportunity this provided, and within a fortnight he had sent a programme for the whole piece. ‘Should there be a tempest in The Tempest ?’ Tchaikovsky had asked. ‘Of course there must be!’ Stasov had replied:

Certainly, certainly certainly! Without it the overture won’t be an overture, and the whole programme will be changed! I have pondered every moment, both for their continuity and their contrasts. I had thought of presenting the sea twice, at the beginning and at the end – only at the beginning it would be introductory , quiet and gentle, and Prospero, uttering his magic words, would break the calm and raise a storm. But I think this storm should differ from all preceding ones in that it should begin suddenly , at full strength, in utter turmoil, and should not grow and arise by degrees , as normally happens. Let your storm rage and engulf the boat with the Italian princes in it, and let it immediately afterwards subside. And now, after this picture, let another begin – the enchanted island of wonderful beauty, and Miranda passing across it with light tread, a creation of even more wonderful beauty – all sun, with a smile of happiness. A moment of conversation between her and Prospero – and immediately afterwards the youth, Ferdinand, who fills her with wonder, and with whom she immediately falls in love. I think a motif of someone who is falling in love, a substantial crescendo that bursts into bloom (this will be plainly drawn from the end of Shakespeare’s Act 1) should exactly match the requirements of your talent and your whole nature. After this I would suggest the appearance of Caliban, a bestial and base slave, and then Ariel toying with the Italian princes: the inspiration for him is the lines which Shakespeare himself wrote at the end of the first act, to my mind a whole picture in themselves:

Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands:

Courtsied when you have, and kiss’d –

The wild waves whist:

Foot it featly here and there;

And, sweet sprites, the burden bear.

two strophes in all.

After Ariel, Miranda and Ferdinand should appear for a second time, but now at the height of their passion; then the majestic figure of Prospero, renouncing his magic power and sadly bidding farewell to all his past: finally a picture of the sea, now calm and quiet, lapping the desert and deserted island, while all the former brief inhabitants fly away in the boat to distant happy Italy.

Taking all this in order, I consider it quite impossible to omit the sea at the beginning and end, and to call the overture Miranda .

Tchaikovsky was delighted with Stasov’s ‘superb programme, enticing and inspiring to the highest degree’, as he put it in his acknowledgement. But he did not intend to hurry and, in any case, an urgent (and lucrative) commission had intervened.

Tchaikovsky’s incidental music for Ostrovsky’s The Snow Maiden **(*) is one of his least-known compositions. Two of Moscow’s state-run theatres were the Maly (‘Little’) and the Bolshoy (‘Big’), the former accommodating a dramatic troupe, the latter a Russian opera company and a ballet company. But as the Maly was closed for renovation early in 1873, it was decided that the drama company should move to the Bolshoy and share in a new drama-music ‘spectacular’ involving all three companies. Ostrovsky was approached to provide the text, was enthusiastic, and chose as his subject the Russian folktale of the Snow Maiden who can survive only if her heart is never warmed by love. But, wishing to be as other girls, she enters the human world and innocently disrupts a wedding when the bridegroom falls in love with her. Accused of seduction by the bride, she is brought before Tsar Berenday and told she must marry. By now that is what the Snow Maiden herself also wishes but, being warmed by love, she is unprotected from the rays of the Sun God, and melts away. Tchaikovsky was commissioned to provide the music, composing it rapidly during March and early April. It comprised nineteen numbers incorporating at least a dozen folksongs and, though uneven in quality, some items are very attractive. Tchaikovsky’s own verdict on it was affectionate: ‘The Snow Maiden is not one of my best works, but it is one of my favourite offspring. I think the happy, springlike mood with which I was filled at the time must be audible in the music.’ If some enterprising choral-society-plus-orchestra (with, perhaps, a tenor soloist) should be seeking some effective but not very demanding material to complete a programme, then possibly a selection of pieces from Tchaikovsky’s The Snow Maiden music might be worth investigating.

Having received 350 roubles for this Bolshoy commission, in June, after visits to Kondratyev at Nizy and sister Sasha and family at Kamenka, Tchaikovsky headed abroad. By now he was becoming something of a celebrity, and learning that Liszt, one of the most famed and respected of all contemporary musicians, had expressed a wish to meet him, he decided he would include Weimar, Liszt’s current home, in his itinerary. But it was not to be. Instead he directed himself to Dresden, where he could enjoy the company of his publisher Jurgenson and his wife: then via Cologne to Zurich (‘The Rhine falls are magnificent: Zurich’s a charming place,’ he noted in his diary), Berne, Vevey, Montreux and Geneva. Next Italy (Turin, Milan, Lake Como), but the heat drove him north to Paris, which was already his favourite European city. A week there, and his funds all but ran out – and so it was back to Russia. In midAugust he arrived at his final destination: Usovo. Here, on 19 August, now mentally refreshed – and undistracted by his often demanding host, Shilovsky, who was absent – he set to work on The Tempest .

‘I cannot convey to you my state of bliss during these two weeks,’ he would remember for his secret patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, in 1878:

I was in a kind of exalted, blissful frame of mind, wandering during the day alone in the woods, towards evening over the immeasurable steppes, and sitting at night by the open window, listening to the solemn silence of this out-of-the-way place – a silence broken only by some indistinguishable sound of the night. During these two weeks I wrote The Tempest in rough without any effort, as though moved by some supernatural force.

In fact it was composed in eleven days, though the scoring was delayed until after his return to Moscow in September.

The Tempest received its premiere that December in Moscow, with Nikolay Rubinstein conducting, and its success was sufficient to win it a second hearing before the concert season was over. But it was nearly a year before St Petersburg – and Stasov – heard it. The latter was in raptures:

What a delight your Tempest is! What an incomparable piece! Of course the storm itself is inconsequential and isn’t marked by any originality, Prospero is unremarkable – and finally, near the end, there is a cadence just like something out of an Italian operatic finale. But these are three tiny blemishes. All the rest is wonder upon wonder! Caliban, Ariel, the love scene – all these have a place among the loftiest of musical creations. In both love scenes, what beauty, what languor, what passion! Then the magnificently wild, ugly Caliban, Ariel’s miraculous flights and sporting – all these are absolutely capital! And, again, the orchestration in these scenes – wonderful! Both of us, Rimsky-Korsakov and I, send you our profound, most profound compliments.

Balakirev, too, approved, and even Cui, who had crucified Tchaikovsky for his Ode to Joy , his graduation exercise, was won over: ‘a most fine, most impassioned, talented composition, wonderfully, sonorously and beautifully scored,’ he wrote for his St Petersburg readership.

Symphonic Fantasia: The Tempest ****

[ The Tempest is not as consistently excellent a piece as Romeo and Juliet, but it offers some very good descriptive listening, and some of the other music, especially that which relates to the participants in the story, is superb.]

As has been noted, back in January, when Tchaikovsky had voiced to Stasov some of his own uncertainties about The Tempest ’s proposed content, he had prompted that old autocrat to an instant detailed prescription for the whole piece, and this now proved as profoundly important for Tchaikovsky as had Balakirev’s for Romeo and Juliet (in fact, it is almost a programme note for what Tchaikovsky went on to create in his symphonic fantasia). Though both subjects were taken from Shakespeare, their natures were fundamentally different. Romeo and Juliet had been the precisely focused story of a feud between two families, and of the disastrous consequences for two young lovers who had dared to challenge that mutual hatred. Since this dual focus was so clear, it could be played out musically through the duality fundamental to sonata form, the two forces first presented as the two very contrasted subjects of a sonata movement, with Friar Laurence, the compassionate observer, in the preceding introduction; the development had then projected the conflict and the peace-maker’s unavailing urgings as mediator, and the recapitulation the disastrous consequences of his failure, with the coda a tragic epilogue. But there was no such single, focused issue in The Tempest . Where Romeo and Juliet was a human drama of close engagement, The Tempest presented a world of both enchantment and humanity, inhabited by an exiled magician, a sprite, a grotesque, and two very human lovers, disparate beings caught into a fantasy plot with a variety of outcomes. Sonata form could not have worked here, and Stasov’s very different programme focused on each of these elements in a series of separate, contrasted sections. Tchaikovsky accepted this scheme fully, but amplified it into a mirror structure so as to present a musically balanced whole:

As this diagram shows, the sea provides the flanks, Prospero’s two crucial actions (the raising of the tempest, and his renunciation of his magic powers) are symmetrically placed, the lover’s two scenes (their meeting, and their ultimate commitment) likewise. The portrayals of Ariel and Caliban provide the central pivot.

Russian composers have always had a special flair for the fantastic, whether visual or atmospheric, and Tchaikovsky’s creative powers were fired to the full by this so diverse assortment of imaginative challenges. Navigating one’s way through The Tempest raises few problems, each section being so vividly conjured or characterized. First the sea, still calm, though constantly in gentle motion with woodwind flickerings across its surface – but also awesome and vast, the background to a solemn brass phrase – Prospero’s thematic surrogate, surely. The music gathers momentum, the magician thrice utters his incantation – and the tempest erupts and rages with intimidating violence, Prospero’s phrase signifying his personal control of the elements. Next Miranda, her cello phrase sounding the more tenderly after the tumult, while the pauses, and especially the tremulous flutterings, reflect the nervousness of a girl who has never before seen any man, other than her father. Twice her cello phrase recurs, each time some of its intervals widened: her interest and assurance is strengthening – and then follows, surely, the broader, more masculine declaration of Ferdinand. This is exquisitely done. Now confidence and commitment grow, and the fading conclusion to this whole amorous episode is wonderful, especially for some of its harmonic touches.

The lovers have departed, we may presume, to be truly alone. Now it is the supernaturals’ turn, Ariel fleet and fantastic – but it is the grotesque, blundering Caliban who is the more graphically projected, already displaying Tchaikovsky’s gift for vivid caricature. At length we hear Prospero’s impatience with Caliban asserting itself, and the lovers return, the nervous viola line underlining their still veiled but growing inner excitement. Again their love music dies away. But this is not the end, simply a moment of suspense before constraint suddenly vanishes, and a final, passionate commitment is made. And so a silence, a swift, frenzied string crescendo , and the love music bursts in again, quintuple forte , the loudest dynamic marking Tchaikovsky had ever written. Then we hear Prospero, in equally unequivocal terms, renounce his magic powers, and it is the sea music, this time finally fading into silence, that signals the disappearance of the mortals beyond the horizon, bound for their homeland ‘in distant, happy Italy’.

The success of The Tempest at its premiere clearly raised Tchaikovsky’s morale, and within little more than a fortnight he had begun his next major work, his Second String Quartet. Completed during January 1874, it was tried out at a soirée in mid-February, where the select listeners greeted it warmly (except, that is, for Tchaikovsky’s old teacher, Anton Rubinstein, who happened to be present and had little sympathy with the direction his former pupil’s music had taken), and it was received with equal enthusiasm at its premiere in March.

String Quartet no. 2 in F ***(*)

[The Second Quartet will clearly be of interest to those readers who are drawn to chamber music. It is a less engaging piece than the First Quartet, and less characterful than the Third Quartet, still to come. Nevertheless, the slow movement is a substantial and particularly affecting piece. Chamber music buffs should pause here and, on the assumption that they are likely to be people who already have at least a fair knowledge of the quartet repertoire, I have set this one in a wider context, as well as examining the piece itself. But I recognize that the whole quartet will be of interest to only a small minority of my readers, but those who are interested in the slow movement should jump ahead to pp. 82–3, where I discuss this movement. Other read ers can, of course, choose to pass on to chapter 9, which deals with one of the most unclouded – and, in some ways, most surprising – works Tchaikovsky ever wrote – and one of which, I imagine, few of my readers will ever have heard.]

Even allowing for the difference in medium, the style of Tchaikovsky’s Second String Quartet could hardly be further removed from that of The Tempest – or, indeed, from that of his First Quartet. Though string quartets were being composed in Russia in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, they were neither plentiful nor in any way comparable with those of the contemporary Viennese classical tradition, and the quartet had remained a minority interest in Russian concert life up to Tchaikovsky’s time. Fundamental to the quartet market were the often significant expatriate German communities in the larger cities, and to such connoisseurs of the great West European tradition a modest quartet such as Tchaikovsky’s First must have seemed thoroughly acceptable, but unambitious. We can only guess that this provided a prime motivation for its very different successor. Larger in scale and more weighty in content, where the First Quartet had sought to entertain (in the best sense), the Second clearly aspired to emulate the scale and ambition of the great products of the German–Austrian school as represented by Beethoven. The first two bars of the slow introduction suggest a shift westward, for it has been observed that lurking distantly behind these is what is probably the most famous musical moment in all post-Beethoven nineteenth-century music: the opening of Wagner’s great music drama, Tristan and Isolde (those readers who happen to know that opera will, I think, find it interesting to check this point for themselves). There are also some strange moments in some of what immediately follows; where may this music be leading? Yet we arrive soon on stable ground, for when, after a great flourish from the leader, the main body of the movement begins, we could hardly be in a more untroubling world. Instead, the insistence seems to be on fluency, clarity and balance in a movement of spacious dimensions and no expressive surprises.

And yet – after the so vividly contrasting turmoils and tenderness of The Tempest , can we recognize this as by the same composer? And if not, are we to judge this music as inferior? That depends. If we are listening for music that instantly says, ‘Tchaikovsky!’, and if we believe that this quality is essential before the piece can be rated as of supreme quality, we still need to be cautious, for not every piece that sounds thoroughly characteristic of Tchaikovsky is necessarily a masterpiece. The 1812 Overture is one of his most characteristic works, but it is not one of his greatest (though elsewhere I have defended it from the blanket denigration that it has often suffered), its blemish being primarily one of overstatement, especially towards its end. Tchaikovsky himself was often very aware of the shortcomings in his own pieces, especially in matters of form. As has already been noticed, with his very natural way of building his more ambitious symphonic pieces in expansive and highly focused stretches, one of his particular problems when using sonata form could be getting smoothly from his first to his second subject. (As he himself once frankly put it, ‘My seams always show.’) And it was probably an awareness that Beethoven’s ability to compose truly organic transitions was one of that composer’s strengths that made Tchaikovsky rein in his more rampant creativity in this new quartet, firmly containing his most natural impulses, and inventing music that was still original, but with the component parts rigorously proportioned to ensure a balanced and integrated whole.

To this end the melodic material of the Second Quartet’s first movement is far less arresting, more concise and less self-assertive than we might have anticipated, thus facilitating far greater flexibility in what is built from it. In fact, the form of Tchaikovsky’s first movement reflects closely the outlines of a typical Beethoven first movement. There are two subjects linked by a classically modelled transition, the proportions of the development and recapitulation also reflecting those of a typical first movement of fifty years earlier, and there is an expressive single-mindedness that is never waylaid by surprises: contrasts are there, but always only relative. While The Tempest , being written to a programme, was a piece pre-ordained to be a rich array of dazzlingly varied materials deployed in distinct, highly characterized, and very contrasted sections, the Second Quartet’s first movement uses expressively modest, succinct materials to build an expansive, integrated experience rich in its detail, that is (and this is most important of all) greater than the sum of its parts. Commentators have sometimes referred to this process as ‘an argument’ (that is, as a coherently unfolding process), and it requires quiet, attentive listening.

Such is the condition I find of the Second Quartet’s first movement; it wins my respect, but only a portion of my affection. However, the middle two movements, and especially the second of these, are rather different matters. Listeners confronting the second movement, the Scherzo , for the first time may be struck by its slightly tipsy gait. The vast bulk of music that we normally experience is written in bars of consistent length. But here Tchaikovsky mixes his bar lengths, using the same tiny 2+2+3-bar (that is, two two-beat bars, plus one three-beat bar: try counting through a bit of this) phrase length almost throughout, but occasionally stretching it to 2+2+2+3 – once, even to 2+2+2+2+3. It imparts a special character to this quietly engaging music, thrown into relief by the regular three-beat metre of the waltz-like trio.

After these two relatively detached (in the expressive sense) movements, the Andante ma non tanto slow movement strikes home the more powerfully. But while it is the succession of six plangent, silence-separated phrases that sets the tragic tone, it is the following four-bar phrase, each bar founded on the same tiny three-note drooping figure, that will prove by far the more important. This figure had been pre-echoed in both the third and sixth of those preliminary phrases, and it will be not only within the recurrences of this new phrase that it will be heard; it may crop up anywhere, becoming the nucleus of whole stretches of the movement (in all, it recurs over eighty times). One of the problems for any writer on music is to fix clearly for his reader the expressive character of a piece, and (this is the trickiest thing) to assess how much of its character has been objectively determined by its creator, and how much may be subjective. Some writers scorn the idea that such emotional self-confession can truly exist in music (music is out there – and that’s that!), and unless we know (as we do in some instances) that the composer was consciously responding to some circumstance, great caution is needed. But there is in this seemingly pain-filled music an intensity – indeed, an obsessiveness – not previously displayed anywhere in Tchaikovsky’s music, though this intensity will become a familiar element in some of his works to come. Whatever the case, this drooping figure recurs time and again in this movement with, finally, an almost lacerating insistence, and especially after the central section has produced the whole quartet’s dynamic fff climax; then finally, after a portion of the central section, now pp and tranquillo , has brought some ease, this morsel, so tiny but so telling, will also, three-fold and ppp , bring a kind of peace at the movement’s end.

This movement has brought into Tchaikovsky’s work for the first time an element that may be autobiographical, not in the sense of reflecting a particular incident or relationship, but rather a prevailing inner mood or reaction. It is significant, perhaps, that in the autumn of 1873 Modest noticed his brother’s fits of depression becoming longer, stronger and more frequent, and that in December he had confessed to a sense of personal isolation. Yet his next major composition after this quartet would be not only one of his finest, but one of his most unclouded. Nor does he let this slow movement provide the Quartet’s final mood, for the Finale returns to the style of the first movement. As was not uncommon in finales of classical quartets, this one makes no attempt to outdo that movement either in expressive ambition or in its scale (rather less than half that of the first movement); instead it provides a lively culmination and exit to the whole piece. It is cast as a rondo ( ABACABA ), the melody of the B section the one lyrical element in an otherwise bustling piece, the C episode a constant rattle of semiquavers, with the A theme used on its final recurrence as the subject for a fugue leading into an unexpected rerun of the B theme, then an ebullient coda.

TCHAIKOVSKY

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

A Personal Note

A Note on Using this Book

Option 1

Option 2

Top Dozen

Next Eight

Option 3

All Menus

Mixed

Symphony/Concerto

Literary Trail

Ballet/Opera

Concerted Works

Chamber Works

A Word on Russian Style

Russian Names

Russian Dates

P RELUDE