The Program
PYOTR ILYICH
TCHAIKOVSKY
Symphony No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 13, “Winter Daydreams”
Winter Charm
Like the “Winter” section from Vivaldi’s Four
Seasons, Tchaikovsky’s “Winter Dreams” Symphony takes a normally bleak subject
and transforms it into inspiring art. Indeed, Tchaikovsky’s symphony is
“wintry” in a pictorial sense only; emotionally it is perhaps the “sunniest”—or
at least the happiest—of the six
symphonies. Like many other Russian artists, Tchaikovsky regarded vast
winter landscapes in a tranquil way. “The Russian winter landscape,” he once
wrote, “has for me an incomparable charm.”
And charm is what this work is about. Indeed, there is perhaps a greater contrast between this symphony and the one that shares this program, the
“Pathétique,” than the first and
final symphonies of any other major composer. From the opening flute and
bassoon theme against shimmering
strings to the finale’s racy coda, this work has a consistent geniality unusual
for a Tchaikovsky symphony. With its delicate scoring, dance-like-fleetness,
and fairy-like dreaminess, “Winter Dreams” is more a forecast of the mature
Tchaikovsky ballets than the later symphonies.
Romantic Agony, Russian Style
Yet the 26-year-old Tchaikovsky had
terrible troubles with this symphony, as indeed he continued to have
with almost everything else in the form. In addition to his usual morbid
self-doubt (apparent from the beginning), he had an aesthetic problem: He was
determined to make this a “Russian” symphony colored
by what he called “the indescribable magic of true Russian folk music.”
Reconciling this magic with the
dominant Germanic symphony model was tricky (as Rimsky-Korsakov
discovered in his own First Symphony). Composition was hard, done mainly
at night during a long stretch between June and November 1866; the First’s birth struggles fit well into the
mythology of self-tortured Russian Romantics—Rachmaninoff, for example, who
dedicated his Second Piano Concerto to his psychiatrist for saving him from a
catatonic depression. In this case, Tchaikovsky’s doctor supposedly rescued him
from a state “only one step from insanity.”
The early performance history was no better, again a grim forecast of troubles
to come: His mentor Anton Rubinstein (who, despite all the glowing things written
about him, must have been a pill, considering the continuing trouble he gave
his most brilliant pupil) dished out only harsh criticism, and when Rubinstein’s brother Nikolai finally
premiered the Scherzo of the symphony in Moscow as a trial run, it flopped. After the first complete
performance in 1868, Tchaikovsky was
at first enthusiastic (coming out for the curtain call nervous and badly
dressed, according to contemporary accounts) but later became so depressed by
the work’s “enormous shortcomings” that he
extensively cut and revised it.
Still, Tchaikovsky had a weakness for this early work, which he called
“a sin of my dear youth,” later confessing to his patron Madame von Meck that
he found it “actually better and more substantial than many other more mature
things.” One can only feel for this endlessly self-deprecating artist: Even
when he was finally able to like something he wrote, he often could do so only by denigrating something else.
About the Music
In mood and design, this is one of the most
consistent of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies. The work is dedicated to “Winter
Daydreams,” and that is what the work sustains for four movements. The first,
subtitled “Daydreams on a Winter Journey,” evokes the openness and sparseness
of its subject through cool winds, transparent strings, and a development
section suggesting snow flurries. At the end, the swirling main tune seems to be building to a dramatic coda, but
the music dies away, leading to an Adagio subtitled
“Land of Gloom, Land of Mist” that continues its basic mood of wintry restraint. Strings sing the opening melody, but
Tchaikovsky is generous with the entire orchestra, giving the winds several
elegant turns and the brass a
soaring version of the main tune. The
Scherzo, even more delicate than the
opening movements, is a reworking of a student piano sonata and an early
forecast of Tchaikovsky’s ballet music.
The finale is held up by commentators as representing, for the first
time in a symphony, the kind of strong contrast and stormy drama that were to
characterize Tchaikovsky’s mature symphonies. Indeed, the brass and cymbals
sound boldly at a few climactic points, contrasting with a rumbling string
fugue. But as a whole, this movement too is relatively restrained, full of happy
snatches of Russian folk tunes—a far cry from Tchaikovsky’s usually impassioned
rhetoric in a finale. When the volume does rise, as in the big chorale at the
end, so does the music’s spirits, as if the listener is being invited to
celebrate the end of winter’s journey.
—Jack Sullivan
© 2011 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
PYOTR ILYICH
TCHAIKOVSKY
Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74, “Pathétique”
Dark
Speculation
Speculation that Tchaikovsky did not die of cholera, as officially reported,
but committed suicide to avoid exposure as a homosexual, gives his final
symphony a dark and compelling twist. “As regards the suicide story,” music
critic James Huneker wrote as far back as 1899, “while it has been officially
denied, it has never been quite discredited.” Eighty years later, an ugly
account—one given the authority of the 1980 New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians—emerged, suggesting that the
longstanding claim that Tchaikovsky died of cholera was indeed a cover-up.
Tchaikovsky, these reports claim, voluntarily took poison after being
blackmailed by a St. Petersburg law
tribunal, which hauled him into a secret meeting and demanded his death:
The secret “It” alluded to in the Fifth Symphony, the force of “Fate” that
haunted his life, finally ended it. Whether or not one chooses to believe this
still-disputed story, it is given a kind of artistic credence in Tchaikovsky’s
“Pathétique,” written just before these events are alleged to have occurred, a
work that often sounds like the musical equivalent of despair.
A New Sincerity
Tchaikovsky called this his most “sincere”
symphony, and indeed it brought a new emotional honesty to music. The
gloom of the outer movements—made all the more convincing by the groping toward
light in the inner ones—is gripping and emotionally real. The darkness of this
symphony (dubbed the “Pathétique” by
Tchaikovsky’s brother) looks forward to desolate moments in Mahler,
Shostakovich, and others, yet the work carries a feeling of profound isolation.
In Lawrence Gilman’s words, it remains “a lonely and towering masterpiece.
Where, indeed, is there anything at all like it?”
Part of the power of the “Pathétique” comes from Tchaikovsky’s decision to
conclude the work not with a desperate life-affirmation, as he’d done in his
two previous symphonies, but with defeat and resignation, a completion of the
tragic gesture rather than a defiance of it. After a poignant first movement
with a shattering development section, a bittersweet waltz that initially
puzzled critics with its emotional subtlety, and a manic, explosive march, Tchaikovsky brings the symphony down with an
Adagio lamentoso where, in Huneker’s words, “an atmosphere of grief, immutable,
eternal, hovers about like a huge black-winged angel.” The most famous melody,
one unmistakably Tchaikovskian, is the long second subject in the first movement,
which seems to sum up the heartbreak this composer poured into his life’s work.
Ironies and Surprises
Yet the immediate period during which this
symphony was composed was—at least for Tchaikovsky—a relatively happy
one. He was alone in a secluded village called Klin, the kind of isolated
natural setting he found congenial. He later told his nephew that he often
“wept bitterly” while writing, but this was apparently because the “deeply
subjective” symphony was going well.
This is not to say that Tchaikovsky had conquered his usual difficulties. He
was still afflicted with self-doubts that often left him “staring all day at
two pages,” and when he conducted the premiere of the new symphony in October
1893, he was convinced that the orchestra was “bored” by the work. Indeed, he
harbored such intense doubts about the finale—possibly his most powerful and
original symphonic movement—that he pondered destroying it. Typical of
Tchaikovsky’s bad luck, the symphony was received coolly at its premiere, but
was enthusiastically embraced at subsequent performances a month later—right
after his sudden, tragic death.
Perhaps the most astonishing fact about the “Pathétique,” Tchaikovsky’s
monument to negation, is that it was composed only one year after The Nutcracker, his most enchanting,
life-affirming work. (In fact, he was in a far more troubled mood when he wrote
the ballet than when he composed the symphony.) The confluence of these two
pieces is a testament not only to Tchaikovsky’s emotional range, but to the
complexity of the human psyche and the mystery of the creative process.
—Jack Sullivan
© 2011 The Carnegie Hall Corporation