Opening the Season: Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto with Di Wu

This weekend, the Harrisburg Symphony and conductor Stuart Malina open the new season with a masterworks concert that includes a well-known favorite – the Tchaikovsky 1st Piano Concerto with pianist Di Wu – an almost unknown but delightfully tuneful jazz-classical cross-over hit from the 1930s by Morton Gould – his “American Symphonette No. 2” with its once very well-known “Pavanne” which many listeners might recognize even if they don't know the piece – and a grand symphony by a late-Romantic French master – Ernest Chausson's only symphony, in fact – which few people in the audience may have had many opportunities to hear live.

The Saturday night concert begins at 8:00; the Sunday afternoon concert, at 3:00. There's a pre-concert talk, as usual, an hour before each performance with a post-concert Q/A “Talk Back” session with Stuart and a guest or two (perhaps the soloist or a member of the orchestra). 

Here is Di Wu playing Franz Liszt's transcription of Gounod's "Waltz from Faust," one of her performances at the Van Cliburn Competition in 2009.


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Several seasons ago, Stuart Malina mentioned, when faced with conducting a ubiquitous favorite like Beethoven's 5th again, a quote he'd heard from conductor Robert Shaw who said something to the effect that every time you perform a work like Beethoven's 5th there's always somebody who is hearing it for the first time – and somebody who is hearing it for the last time.

Tchaikovsky's 1st Piano Concerto is just such a work.

I'm sure there will be people in this weekend's concert audience who've never heard the whole piece before, live or otherwise – beyond its famous opening – and who knows who in the audience we may lose between then and the next time Tchaikovsky's concerto will be performed?

Our soloist for the first concert of the New Season is Di Wu who appeared here a few seasons ago to play another concert favorite, the Grieg Piano Concerto.

And since she was a finalist in the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition, founded by the great American pianist who won the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 at the height of the Cold War and who was even treated to a ticker-tape parade in New York City when he returned – when was the last time a classical musician received a tribute like that? – it seems appropriate to include here a video of the complete concerto recorded from Cliburn's return to Moscow in 1962, again with Kiril Kondrashin conducting the Moscow Philharmonic.



And yes, that is Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev smiling and applauding at the concert's conclusion. In 1958, when the judges had decided on Cliburn as the winner, they felt compelled to ask Krushchev if they could award the first prize of this competition – designed to demonstrate Soviet prowess in the arts the year after they'd launched Sputnik – to an American. Krushchev is reported to have asked “Is he the best? Then give him the prize!”

Incidentally, Cliburn performed two great Russian concertos during that competition. The other was Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto, a work you can hear when the HSO concludes the 2015-2016 season with Ann Schein in May.

While it's difficult for me to imagine a better performance than Cliburn's, for those of you who might prefer a more “modern” recording of the Tchaikovsky, here is a 2001 Van Cliburn Competition winner born in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, Stanislav Iudenich, with James Conlon conducting the Fort Worth Symphony. This performance is from the actual competition final round, not just a live concert performance (talk about pressure). That year, Iudenich shared the Gold with another Russian pianist, Olga Kern who, incidentally, played the Rachmaninoff 3rd in her concerto competition final.

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But what makes a popular hit like the Tchaikovsky 1st Piano Concerto?

Since it's called the 1st, clearly there must be at least a 2nd, and there's also a 3rd, but since these are little known and rarely heard, it's also clear Tchaikovsky did not have the same luck with the public with these two later works.

Here are some early reviews of one of Tchaikovsky's most beloved works, beginning with the world premiere, Hans von Bülow, the soloist, which took place, of all places, in Boston in October 1875.

“This elaborate work is, in general, as difficult for popular apprehension as the name of the composer... There are long stretches of what seems, on the first hearing at least, formless void, sprinkled only with tinklings of the piano and snatchy obbligatos from all the various wind and string instruments.” – Boston, Evening Transcript, October 25th, 1875.

“Tchaikovsky is unmistakably a disciple of the 'new school' and his work is strongly tinged with the wildness and quaintness of the music of the North. Taken as a whole, his Piano Concerto appeared chiefly as a novelty. It would not soon supplant the massive production of Beethoven, or even the fiery compositions of Liszt, Raff, and Rubinstein.” – Boston Journal, October 25th, 1875.

“This extremely difficult, strange, wild, ultra-modern Russian concerto is the composition of Peter Tchaikovsky... We had the wild Coassack fire and impetus without stint, extremely brilliant and exciting, but could we ever learn to love such music?” – Dwight's Journal of Music, published in November, 1875.

At it's first performance in Russia, a concert in St. Petersburg the following month, the critic of Novoye Vremya was more succinct. “Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, like the first pancake, is a flop.”

Tchaikovsky's said of that same Petersburg performance pianist Gustav Kross had reduced his concerto to “an atrocious cacophony.”

It should also be mentioned that, the Boston critics aside, the audience at that world premiere cheered the concerto enough that the finale had to be encored! George Whitefield Chadwick, a leading composer in Boston, wrote the performance was not well rehearsed and at one point, when the trombones came in early during a passage in the middle of the first movement, the soloist could clearly be heard singing out “the brass may go to hell.”

Anyway, just a few things to keep in mind when you hear a new piece for the first time...

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You can read more about the other works on the program in a subsequent post on this blog.

Over the summer, I was asked to read and review a new book by English author Sheila Seymour, a novel about Tchaikovsky called Sons of Janus. You can read that review, here.

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Tchaikovsky, Early 1875

Tchaikovsky's concerto, which he worked on between November, 1874, and February, 1875, was also not a hit with the composer's own former teacher, mentor and, at the time, boss.

Tchaikovsky, who had always wanted to be a musician though when he was growing up there were no music schools in Russia where he could study, had finally graduated from the recently formed St. Petersburg Conservatory founded by pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein who then sent his younger brother Nikolai (also a pianist and composer) off to Moscow to open a branch there along with Tchaikovsky who would teach theory and composition, though he was just out of school himself, totally inexperienced and not yet successful. 

So far, he had composed a small number of works but the only ones that endure are the song “None but the Lonely Heart” (rarely heard today, but once another ubiquitous favorite); his 2nd Symphony (later to be eclipsed by the popularity – and comparative greatness – of his 4th, 5th and 6th Symphonies); the original version of his Romeo & Juliet though we know it by the 3rd version rewritten 11 years later; and the 1st String Quartet but only because its slow movement became popular as the Andante cantabile.

If you look at the published opus numbers, it would look like the ballet Swan Lake pre-dates the concerto, also, but he didn't begin composing it until after he had completed the concerto. Arguably one of the great ballets in the repertoire, it, too, by the way, was a complete failure at its premiere.

Nikolai Rubinstein

So here's a 34-year-old composer, just finished school (finally, after having finished a law degree and worked for a few years as a law clerk), who hands his teacher a big piano concerto. It was Christmas Eve and Tchaikovsky sat down and played through the first movement for Nikolai Rubinstein – nothing – and then he played through the remaining two movements – still nothing.

And then all hell broke loose.

“It turned out,” Tchaikovsky wrote years later to his friend and patron Nadezhda von Meck, “that my concerto was worthless and unplayable; passages were so fragmented, so clumsy, so badly written that they were beyond rescue; the work itself was bad, vulgar; in places I had stolen from other composers; only two or three pages were worth preserving; the rest must be thrown away or completely rewritten. 'Here, for instance, this—now what's all that?' (he caricatured my music on the piano) 'And this? How can anyone…' etc., etc.”

He continued, “I was not only astounded but outraged by the whole scene. I am no longer a boy trying his hand at composition, and I no longer need lessons from anyone, especially when they are delivered so harshly and unfriendlily [sic]. I need and shall always need friendly criticism, but there was nothing resembling friendly criticism. It was indiscriminate, determined censure, delivered in such a way as to wound me to the quick. I left the room without a word and went upstairs. In my agitation and rage I could not say a thing. Presently R[ubinstein] enjoined me, and seeing how upset I was he asked me into one of the distant rooms. There he repeated that my concerto was impossible, pointed out many places where it would have to be completely revised, and said that if within a limited time I reworked the concerto according to his demands, then he would do me the honor of playing my thing at his concert. 'I shall not alter a single note,' I answered, 'I shall publish the work exactly as it is!' This I did.”

Hoping that Nikolai Rubinstein would premiere the work, instead (somehow) he convinced the German conductor and pianist, Hans von Bülow, a friend and champion of Brahms (who at the time had not completed his 1st Symphony), to take on the first performances even though he quickly dropped it from his repertoire.

But by the Moscow performance in November of that same year, Nikolai Rubinstein had changed his mind about the piece and, even though Tchaikovsky's own student Sergei Taneyev was the soloist, Rubinstein conducted the performance. Later, he would perform the work frequently as soloist, especially on his European tours.

Regardless of the composer's reaction to Rubinstein's suggestions – most of which were about the piano-writing or technical issues of “balance” between soloist and orchestra, as well as concern about the famous Introduction being in “the wrong key” and, beautiful as that theme is, never being heard from again – Tchaikovsky did make slight revisions on three subsequent occasions: in 1876, after a German pianist had given the London premiere; when the work was finally published in 1879, following advice from the Russian pianist Alexander Siloti, one of his own students (who later taught Rachmaninoff); and finally a few more simplifications and adjustments made in 1890, fifteen years after the premiere, the edition we usually hear today.

In the five years after showing his piano concerto to Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky then composed Swan Lake, the opera Eugene Onyegin, the “Rococo Variations” for cello and orchestra, the Violin Concerto, the 4th Symphony and The 1812 Overture.

You could say he was on a roll.


- Dick Strawser

Out with a Bang: Tchaikovsky's Triumphant 'Fate' Symphony

Tchaikovsky in 1888

This weekend marks the final Masterworks Concert of the season and it's called "Out with a Bang" not just because of Jennifer Higdon's incredible Percussion Concerto with its stage-wide array of instruments for the soloist - there are few bigger (indeed, few noisier) endings for a symphony than Tchaikovsky's 5th. By compensation, the program opens with Aaron Copland's Quiet City, evocative of a night-time scene overlooking a usually noisy New York. HSO's principal percussionist Christopher Rose is once again the soloist for Higdon's concerto. The concerts are Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm at the Forum - come an hour before each performance for Stuart Malina's pre-concert talk. If you come Saturday night, you'll get to meet Jennifer Higdon! (Sorry, Tchaikovsky has a previous engagement...)

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The old joke is "Tchaikovsky wrote three symphonies - his Fourth, Fifth and Sixth." It's true, in a way, because they're the only ones performed with any regularity. And there are those who said "he wrote one symphony three different times."

In one sense, that's almost true, as unfair as it is. These three symphonies are all about Man contending with Fate much in the way we often think of Beethoven's 5th (Beethoven himself described the opening motif as "Fate Knocks at the Door").

In his 4th, Tchaikovsky has a fanfare that represents fate which recurs throughout the symphony. In his 5th, it's an out-and-out theme, very dolorous at the opening but turned into a raucous triumphal march in the finale (a bang, indeed). In fact, both symphonies - if they express fate slightly differently and how the 'hero' responds to it - end triumphantly. It is the 6th, subtitled the Pathetique, that ends with one of the saddest endings in the symphonic repertoire: reminding us that the hero is not always victorious.

(You can read more about the 4th and the 6th symphonies in other posts of mine.)

In this performance of the complete symphony, Herbert von Karajan conducts the Vienna Philharmonic:
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Tchaikovsky's Fifth is one of the most popular symphonies in the repertoire but when the composer was writing it, he was unsure of its quality, in fact was having difficulty writing it. Even after it was done, having warmed up to it only as he was finishing the piece, Tchaikovsky wrote “There is something repellent about it... This symphony will never please the public.”

Tchaikovsky was always a fairly insecure composer. Four years after he finished law school, he quit his job as a government clerk and began to study at the new music school Nicholas and Anton Rubinstein founded in St. Petersburg. Though Tchaikovsky had been playing the piano for years and loved improvising for dances, he didn’t know very much about the simple details of music nor was he aware of how many symphonies Beethoven had written, since he’d not had the chance to hear any of them. One of the first graduates of the Rubinsteins’ school, he moved to Moscow where Nicholas Rubinstein recruited him to teach at the new music school he’d just opened there, feeling he was barely one step ahead of his students. Any confidence would have been severely damaged when his former teacher declined to premiere his first symphony, a refusal he never forgave, though he always thought highly of Anton Rubinstein otherwise (“it is just that he does not care for my music, that my musical temperament is antipathetic to him”).

There are certainly wonderful pieces in these early works, but the music we would consider his greatest began appearing when he was in his mid-30s: the 1st Piano Concerto, the ballet “Swan Lake” (a failure at its premiere), the opera on Pushkin’s “Eugene Onyegin,” the 4th Symphony, and the Violin Concerto (famously reviled at its premiere as music that “stinks in the ear”). All of these works, now considered masterpieces, were composed over a four-year span.

In the midst of composing “Onyegin,” Pushkin’s tale of a young woman who contemplated suicide after writing a love letter to an older man who patronizingly rejected her, Tchaikovsky received a love letter from one of his own students, Antonina Miliukova. He couldn’t even remember who she was but, perhaps feeling a bit like Onyegin, agreed at least to meet her. Even though he felt no love for her, he decided to marry her because, as a homosexual when it was against the law to be one, he felt it would please his family and stop any rumors.

The marriage turned out to be a disaster and it was the older man, in this case, who contemplated suicide. Only days into their honeymoon, Tchaikovsky realized this had been a huge mistake, that they had nothing in common: following a nervous breakdown, he waded into a freezing river hoping to catch pneumonia. His younger brother Modeste took Tchaikovsky away to Petersburg and then, after arranging a separation from Antonina, took him to Switzerland to recover. Technically, the couple never divorced but they also never saw each other again during the remaining sixteen years of his life (she would spend the last twenty years of her life in an asylum).

At this same time, however, Tchaikovsky met another woman. Well, not actually “met.” Nadezhda von Meck was the widow of a wealthy railroad tycoon who liked Tchaikovsky’s music (keep in mind, of that list of works I’d mentioned, only the Piano Concerto had been written so far) and wanted to subsidize him so he could quit teaching and devote himself entirely to composing. The only stipulation was that they should never meet, just write letters! He later described his 4th Symphony, already underway at the time of his marriage, as “our symphony” in a famous letter to her, describing it as a “musical confession” echoing the intense despair he felt at that time of his life. He detailed a story about how the opening fanfare represented fate, an invisible force you will never overpower. After detailed accounts of each movement, he ends with a P.S. in which he mentions how impossible it is to “put into words and phrases musical thoughts and ideas.” Clearly, he is looking back over the work – “I was down in the dumps last winter when the symphony was in the writing, and it is a faithful echo of what I was going through at that time” – and trying to find words to explain the music, rather than saying “these are my thoughts from which I composed the music.”

The 5th Symphony seems to have a similar program – instead of a fanfare, a whole full-blown theme that first appears as a dirge which later is transformed into a triumphant march – but he never quite put it into words. There exists in his notebooks a ‘verbal sketch’ for a new symphony he would begin a month later:

"Introduction. Complete submission before Fate, or, which is the same, before the inscrutable predestination of Providence. Allegro. Murmur of doubt, complaints, reproaches to XXX. To leap into the embrace of faith??? A wonderful program, if only it can be carried out". (In his private writings, “XXX” or “Z” appear frequently, usually referring to his inner secret – his homosexuality. )

While it’s possible the symphony may have begun with another personal crisis, the music that evolved from it, however intelligently designed, transcends the in-the-moment reality of the composer writing it as well as the people making or listening to it.

So what “personal crisis” inspired these thoughts in April of 1888?

First of all, it was now ten years after he completed the 4th Symphony. Despite the immense successes, the busy and often harrowing social schedule (always a trial for a shy person) and the acclaim he received from meeting the likes of Brahms (with whom he found little in common), Grieg and Dvorak (whom he liked a lot), he had not found much consolation in a three-month European tour in which much of his recent music – the piano and violin concertos, the Serenade for Strings, the 3rd Orchestral Suite, and the 1812 Overture – was performed to great acclaim. It was, however, not reported in the Russian press: no one at home knew how he and his music were being received in Germany or Prague, Paris or London, and yet he was representing all of Russian art for which no one at home cared a bit.

But before all that, he had spent a month with a dying friend, witnessing his deathbed struggles and feeling totally powerless to help, a time which the composer described to Mme von Meck as “one of the darkest periods” of his life. A sister and a niece were also mortally ill at the time and he felt “a sort of weariness with life... a sad apathy, the feeling that I myself must die soon, and because of this nearness everything that I had held to be important and essential in my life now appears to me trivial, insignificant and utterly pointless."

So he returned home where the effects of his success quickly wore off and thoughts of mortality continued to linger, settling into a period of quiet months at his country estate where nothing seemed to come to him. He was concerned about being “written out.” A month after sketching the idea about “submitting to Fate,” he began work on a symphony that did not progress smoothly. In his letters to Mme von Meck and his brother Modeste, he wrote more about his discussing poetry with Grand Duke Constantine, the tsar’s nephew, and about the enjoyment he got from planting flowers and watching them grow and blossom. He was approached with the possibility of an American tour which would bring in $25,000 (this, in 1888) which he considered a princely sum. But about the new piece, he remained despondent, proclaiming to Mme von Meck, "There is something repellent about it... This symphony will never please the public." In early August, he tells her that signs of age are beginning to bother him (he is now 48 years old), tiring easily and no longer able to read at night. Half of the new symphony, however, is orchestrated. That fall, in Petersburg to conduct the premiere, he was busy making corrections and changes in the score. It seemed to be a popular success though not well received by the critics. Other successes followed and he took it on another European tour which similar results, but still Tchaikovsky had doubts.

While finishing the new symphony, he had written to the Grand Duke disagreeing with him on his assessment of Brahms’ music: “in the music of this master (for one cannot deny he is a master) there is something dry and cold that repulses me.” But he had met Brahms on his tour the year before and liked Brahms the man. Now in Hamburg, he found that Brahms was staying at the same hotel – in the next room, in fact – and had stayed an extra day before returning to Vienna so he could hear this new symphony, something that greatly touched Tchaikovsky. Afterwards, Brahms was very frank about his reaction, liking everything but the noisy finale (earlier, a German orchestra asked to drop the 1812 Overture from the program because of its “noisy finale”). Tchaikovsky wrote to his nephew that the symphony was magnificently played and “I like it far better, now, after having held a bad opinion of it for some time.” The press was hailing him as a Second Wagner but he also notes that news of these successes were again ignored in Russia. The only disappointment, it seemed, was the fact the dedicatee was unable to attend the concert.

During the tour before he’d begun the 5th Symphony, Tchaikovsky met the director of Hamburg’s Philharmonic Society, Count Theodore Ave-Lallemant who was in his 80s. He told Tchaikovsky he could not understand his music, especially its noisy orchestration, but felt he had in him “the makings of a really good German composer” if only he would leave Russia and settle in Hamburg where classical conventions and traditions would correct his faults. They managed to part good friends. The following year, Lallemant’s frailty and illness kept him from hearing a symphony dedicated to him but one wonders what he would have made of such an un-German, untraditional and overall noisy piece!

The year after it was composed, Tchaikovsky’s 5th was performed in New York: "In the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony ... one vainly sought for coherency and homogeneousness ... in the last movement, the composer's Calmuck blood got the better of him, and slaughter, dire and bloody, swept across the storm-driven score." - New York City "Musical Courier" March 13, 1889

A few years later, still a piece of fresh contemporary music, it was performed in Boston: "Of the Fifth Tchaikovsky Symphony one hardly knows what to say ... In the Finale we have all the untamed fury of the Cossack, whetting itself for deeds of atrocity, against all the sterility of the Russian steppes. The furious peroration sounds like nothing so much as a horde of demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, the music growing drunker and drunker. Pandemonium, delirium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse confounded!" – Boston “Evening Transcript” Oct 24, 1892.

Really, they just don't write reviews like that any more...

Dr. Dick

January's Masterworks: Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique"

This weekend's concerts with the Harrisburg Symphony – Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm at the Forum in downtown Harrisburg (with a pre-concert talk an hour before each performance) – features a young pianist, 16-year-old Yen Yu Chen, winner of the second Rodney & Lorna Sawatsky "Rising Stars" Concerto Competition, playing the Ravel Piano Concerto in G. The program opens with a relatively unknown work by a composer who was something of a "Rising Star" himself when he composed it, Miklós Rózsa, who would later become more famous for his award-winning film scores.

(My previous post was an introduction to both of these pieces.)

The second half of the program is one of those "war-horses" which most concert-goers should be quite familiar with, given the frequency it's performed and how much it is loved – Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, subtitled the "Pathétique."

It's a work that comes with a lot of emotional baggage – given the title, the tragic, heart-rending "finale" ("final" in more ways than one), and the fact the composer was dead nine days after he'd conducted its premiere – which gives rise to a whole raft of mythology that I'm not sure is historically accurate but (like the play and movie Amadeus, about Mozart's death) makes for great theater.

After I'd talked with conductor Stuart Malina about the program and this perception of the composer's death and the symphony's back-story, I thought I'd look into my collection of Tchaikovsky's letters (an old 1970s reprint of an edition first published twelve years after his death with commentary by his brother, Modést) to see what his state of mind was when he wrote it and I found it very surprising.

Most people assume he wrote it either fully aware he was dying (he was only aware of that, according to his brother, a few days before he died, not while he was composing what became his final symphony) or that he was so depressed as a result of writing it, he committed suicide after the premiere which most people believe was a failure (true, it wasn't that well received but it was no failure). Some believe the symphony was intended as his farewell or even a "symphonic suicide note."

Then there is his death, itself – did he commit suicide? Was he ordered to commit suicide by a tribunal of his fellow law-school alumni (to avoid scandal that would, by association, bring shame on them)? Did he knowingly drink a glass of unboiled water in the midst of a cholera epidemic?

When I started researching this (such as my research is – just compiling material that is already there), it turned into, unfortunately, a very long and detailed post which, if you wish to pursue it (and of course I would highly recommend it), you can read it in its entirety at my other blog, Thoughts on a Train.

But this post is just about the music. And in fact, I'm going to make my job easier here (and presumably yours) by letting Leonard Bernstein tell you about it.

This famous analysis of Tchaikovsky's 6th looks at "how the piece is put together," primarily from the composer's use of two rather primitive "germs" or ideas – the prominent use of scales both obvious and more subtly embedded within a melodic idea; and the interval of a Perfect 4th which is the foundation of the tonic-to-dominant harmonic motion that is the simplest of all chord progressions. Out of these seemingly simple building blocks, Tchaikovsky builds his themes, gives them background and continuity and yet also creates variety between the ideas and, depending on the variety of character in the music, between movements.

The symphony is in the basic four movements – this is what textbooks would call the "symphonic form." But what constitutes a "symphony" deals with more than just this four-movement structure – "symphonic" also indicates a certain amount of "development" of its musical ideas (themes or motives) which takes these ideas and expands them in some dramatic way into something perceivable as structure whether it's something you understand or just comprehend without realizing what the composer's doing with it.

The first movement, the longest, bears the brunt of the symphonic drama. Usually, this drama may simply be the contrast between "keys" or tonality, the first theme in one key, the next in another. This sense of drama is worked out in such a way, when things are restated, brought to a well-rounded conclusion, these themes are now in the same key.

With Tchaikovsky, this drama takes on a much more literal sense, more... well, "dramatic." High drama – tragedy – violence. The characters in Shakespeare's Midsummer Nights Dream have conflicts that are eventually resolved – this also is 'drama' – but the 'drama' of Hamlet is a whole different level, both emotionally and physically.

The middle movements are a kind of dramatic respite – a graceful "Waltz" that is in the very un-waltz-like meter of 5/4, not 3/4. The third movement, usually a minuet or scherzo to previous generations of symphony composers, is a wild and exciting March that usually leaves people applauding and cheering even though it's not the end of the symphony (it just sounds like it).

The final movement is the "odd-man-out." Usually, symphonies would end with something light-hearted or triumphant – a big finish, loud-and-fast, something that brings everything to a Happy Ending or at least a positive outcome. But here, Tchaikovsky places his slow movement (which should normally be the 2nd movement, maybe the 3rd) and not just any slow movement but one of the most tragic-sounding conclusions in the orchestral repertoire.

Here is Leonard Bernstein talking about how the composer creates this music which fills these pages with the sounds we will hear as Tchaikovsky's final symphony:

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Part 2

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Part 3

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From a mildly technical stand-point (and musicians and specialists in music theory or composition can get even more technical until your eyes would glaze over in complete boredom), this is how Tchaikovsky puts the elements of his symphony together, to create what you hear and what becomes a dramatic, emotional musical statement that then leads us to want to interpret what that "means."

The problem is, music is abstract – it can be just notes on a page or about the balance of form and structural technique. Music can also imply emotional responses – happy, sad, dramatic, tense, relieved – but by itself it can't tell a story.

Music that suggests a story is called "program music" (or as the British spell it, "programme"), meaning the music is "about" some narrative that may have tunes or elements that suggest characters or plot elements that may or may not unfold the way the story does. Tchaikovsky's own Romeo and Juliet Overture doesn't follow the chronological details of Shakespeare's play but it does give you a few basic character sketches, underscores a few key dramatic points (the lovers, the duel, their deaths). You could never listen to this music and think it's about a day at the beach (well, unless your day at the beach had a very unhappy conclusion).

Tchaikovsky told his friends there is a program behind this last symphony of his – he even called it (working title) "A Program Symphony" – but he refused to tell anyone what it was. To his nephew (to whom he'd dedicated the work), he wrote "Let them figure it out."

And ever since, listeners have been taking the details of his death, so soon after completing it, and coming up with "what it means" (to them).

"What it means" is very elusive especially since nowhere did the composer leave any insights into his program.

Like his earlier two symphonies, the 6th also fits into a type of symphony that depicts Man's Struggle with Fate – that much might seem obvious, especially from the use of a "Fate Motive" (or theme) that occurs throughout the entire work. This, we know, is how Beethoven viewed his own 5th Symphony: a struggle in the 1st movement, some respite in the middle movements, before the struggle is resolved triumphantly in the finale. This is the same "plan" Tchaikovsky used in his 4th and 5th Symphonies.

But in the 6th, the struggle with Fate is different. Anyone who's read Tolstoy's War and Peace might hear one of the Imperial Balls in Tchaikovsky's 2nd movement and one of the epic battle scenes in his 3rd. And while the struggle of the 1st movement could be personal (who would not mistake that gorgeous lyrical theme for anything but a Love Theme straight out of "Romeo & Juliet" or perhaps between Tolstoy's characters Natasha and Prince Andrei?), the outcome is not triumphant: not every hero survives his battle. Perhaps in the last movement, Tchaikovsky was thinking of that great scene where Prince Andrei is lying on the battlefield (given that 3rd Movement), wounded and near death, in fact believing he is dying – and later, dies in one of this epic novel's most personal moments.

Or maybe not.

If Tchaikovsky had lived a few more years, composed a few more pieces, people would never think of this music as his own personal struggle with his demons or that he was envisioning his own death (sooner than later).

Rather than depressing him, it actually elated him – primarily because he had thought himself "burned-out," no longer able to create anything great (or even good). He was convinced this symphony was his greatest work, so far, and his reservations about the last movement were more from the audience reaction rather than any misgivings about his own confidence.

If he was thinking about War and Peace (we have no idea he was or wasn't), why not just say "Yes, you got it, that's it!" Obviously the "program" behind this music is also very personal – or possibly so trivial that it would lessen the impact of the music on the listener's emotions. We might assume Beethoven's 5th is about his struggle to overcome his deafness but what if Tchaikovsky's 6th was about his struggle to deal with his own homosexuality in a country where simply being homosexual was punishable by imprisonment and exile to Siberia? And why, then, end the symphony in "defeat"?


No one can answer these questions. But you can listen to the music and appreciate it on whatever level you want: what was going through the composer's mind to write such incredibly emotional music or how he put together such a long work with such simple basic building blocks like scales and intervals?

Here is what I consider one of the finest recordings ever made of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique with Evgenny Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic in a 1960 recording that (as I recall) was made while they were on tour in London. The drama is more intense, the March is more hair-raising, the finale sounds like everyone was weeping in grief and despair by the end.

(Since there is no "video" in this video, you could listen to the performance here, and download the full score here to follow along.)

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1st mvmt


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1st Mvmt beginning w/Development Section (alas, the break here destroys one of the symphony's most shockingly dramatic moments)


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2nd Mvmt


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3rd Mvmt


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4th Mvmt


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Perhaps, for some, it's a bit over-the-top, but personally, I think that was Tchaikovsky - and to me this makes the music come (ironically) more alive than anything.

- Dick Strawser