He is one of the many composers that I like, especially for The
Nutcracker Suite.
In this thread, we shall know more about this composer and his many
pieces of wonderful works..
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky [also spelled Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky]
was born at Votkinsk, in the government of Vyatka, Russia, May7,
1840, second in a family of five sons (two last ones twins, whom he
loved as if he had been their father) and one daughter, to whom he
was tenderly devoted. Once in his early teens when he was in school
at St. Petersburg and his mother started to drive to another city,
he had to be held back while she got into the carriage, and the
moment he was free ran and tried to hold the wheels.
There is an anecdote of Tchaikovsky's earliest years that gives us
a clue to the paradox of his personality.Passionately kissing the
map of Russia and then, one regrets to state, spitting on the other
countries, he was reminded by his nurse that she herself was
French. "Yes," he said, accepting her criticism with perfect
sweetness and affectionate docility, "I covered France with my
hand." The child is father of the man; here we have already
Tchaikovsky's strange two-sidedness: on one hand his intense
emotionality in all personal matters, his headstrong impetuosity,
leaping first and looking afterwards; on the other his candor and
modesty, his intelligent acceptance of criticism, even his
carefulness and good workmanship-he had covered France with his
hand"! If he had only been able to reconcile that lifelong feud
between his over-personal heart and his magnanimous mind, he would
have been saved endless suffering. But he was not: in his music his
self-criticism, as on of his best biographers, Edwin Evans, has
remarked, "came after and not during composition"-he destroyed
score after score. And in daily life he never learned to apply the
advice of a wit tot he victim of a temperament like his: "less
remorse and more reform."
As a youth he reluctantly studied law, as much bore by it as
Schumann had been, and even became a petty clerk in the Ministry of
Justice.
But in his early twenties he rebelled, and against his family's
wishes had the courage to throw himself into the study of music at
the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He was a ready improviser, playing
well for dancing and had a naturally rich sense of harmony, but was
so little schooled as to be astonished when a cousin told him it
was possible to modulate form any key to another. He went
frequently to the Italian operas which at that time almost
monopolized the Russian stage, and laid the foundation of his
lifelong love for Mozart; but he had no acquaintance with Schumann,
and at 21 did not even know how many symphonies Beethoven had
composed. He was an ardent worker nevertheless, and once when Anton
Rubinstein, his teacher of composition, asked for variations, he
sat up all night and brought in two hundred. Is not that already
the very picture of a facility almost fatal?--a facility which in
even so fine a work as the Trio transforms an unoffending Russian
folk tune into a waltz, a mazurka, and even a fugue, like a
conjurer drawing rabbits out of the hat!
Early in 1866 he removed permanently to Moscow, with which all his
later musical fortunes are associated, accepting a teaching post in
the new conservatory just established by Rubinstein's brother
Nicholas. His early attempts at composition, largely because of
that same fatal facility, had displeased himself as well as his
friends; on one of them, with that same impersonal candour always
flashing out from him, he had scribbled the words: "dreadful muck."
Yet now he had the courage to attempt his first symphony, "Winter
Dreams." Musically it is not of great importance, any more than are
indeed the second and third, one strongly "folk and the other
rather featureless, in spite of a beautiful slow movement. But the
First Symphony is interesting biographically for two reasons. Over
it, to begin with , its composer worked his too-delicate nerves
into a state of almost pathological strain that was to recur at
intervals all his life. he suffers from insomnia, a sensation of
hammering in the head, and even hallucinations; and so painful was
the whole experience that he never again composed at night.
Of more importance is the vivid example his symphony give us of the
contrast between his passionately narrow attitude in personal
relations and his magnanimity and candour whenever he could get
away from that stifling atmosphere into the free air of impersonal
art. His eager wish for a performance of the symphony in St.
Petersburg, where his works had so far been badly received, was
peremptorily refused by his old teacher, Anton Rubinstein. Here was
the kind of slight that any composer finds hard, but above all a
morbidly shy man like Peter Ilyich, which his easily hurt pride.
"This was the last straw," writes Evans-"he never forgave Anton
Rubinstein-he included din his dislike of the Directors of the
Music Society, the Press and even St. Petersburg public. It was the
last time he asked to have a work performed there." And no doubt
this "complex," as a psychologist would be justified in calling it,
was intensified by the great success of the symphony, a year later,
in Moscow, when the young composer was called unexpectedly to the
stage-terribly nervous, carelessly dressed, holding his hat in his
hand, and making clumsy bows. So much for the personal side. Now
for the impersonal. Decades later, hardly more than a year before
his death, he was asked for his memories of Rubinstein. "In him,"
he wrote in answer, "I adore not only a great pianist and composer
but a man of rare nobility, frank, loyal, generous, incapable of
petty and vulgar sentiments . . . a man who towered far above the
common herd. . . . I took him an overture,The Storm, guilty of all
kinds of whims of form and orchestration. He was hurt, and said
that it was not for the development of imbeciles that he took the
trouble to teach composition. I left the Conservatory full of
gratitude for my professor."
Those who patronizingly regard Tchaikovsky as a neurotic will do
well to ask themselves how many artists there have ever been who
would be capable of such a disinterested detachment. But he goes
further.
"I have always regarded him," he continues, "as the greatest of
artists and the noblest of men, but I shall never become his
friend. . . . It would be difficult to explain the reason. I think
my amour propre as a composer has a great deal to do with it. in my
youth I was impatient to make my way. . . . Painful as it is, I
must confess that he did nothing, absolutely nothing, to forward my
plans. The most probably explanation of this mortifying
luke-warmness is that Rubinstein does not care for my music, that
my musical temperament is antipathetic to him. [ Tchaikovsky's own
italics.]
"I still see him from time to time," ends the letter, "and always
with pleasure. At the time of his jubilee I had the happiness of
going through much trouble and fatigue for him. . . . If I have
told too little it is not my fault, nor that of Anton, but of
fatality."
Another letter equally lovable in its magnanimity is the long
one-to long to quote here-of Jan. 5 1878, to his benefactress,
Nadejda von Meck, about the Russian Nationalists or Kutschka
(literally "Bunch") of St. Petersburg, placed by circumstances and
to some extent by tastes in opposition to himself and his Moscow
fellows, but always treated with consideration by him. The essence
of the opposition was that of Kutschka-Balakireff [sometimes
spelled as Balakirev], Rimsky-Korsakoff, Mussorgsky, Borodin and
Cesar Cui-were fanatical Nationalists, believed that music began
and ended with folk song, were all, except Rimsky, rather
amateurish in technique, and tended to regard Tchaikovsky-the
glibness of whose poor moments indeed give them some excuse-as
a
Some of them, notably Cui, were scarcely civil in the things they
said of him. He, on the other hand, describes in his letter their
merits as well as their defects with surprising freedom from bias.
For example: "The young Petersburg composers are very gifted, but
impregnated with the most horrible presumptuousness and a purely
amateur conviction of their superiority. Rimsky-Korsakoff
(Korsakov) is the only one among them who discovered. . . . that
their doctrines had no sound basis, that their denial of authority
and of the masterpieces was nothing but ignorance. . . . Cui is a
gifted amateur. Borodin possesses a great talent, which has come to
nothing because fate has led him in to the science laboratories
instead of a vital music existence. Moussorgsky's [Mussorgsky]
gifts are perhaps the most remarkable of all, but his nature is
narrow and he has no aspirations toward self-perfection. Besides,
his nature is not of the finest quality, and he likes what is
coarse, unpolished and ugly. . . ." "What a sad phenomenon," he
sums up. "so many talents from which, whit the exception of Rimsky,
we can scarcely dare to hope for anything serious. But all the
same, these forces exist. Thus Moussorgsky [Mussorgsky], with all
his ugliness, speaks a new idiom. . . .We may reasonably hope that
Russia will one day produce a whole school of strong men who will
open new paths in art."
The first decade of Tchaikovsky's life in Moscow was one of much
struggle, intensified by several attacks of the nervous depression
and morbid self-disgust always dogging him, of first meeting with
some of his great contemporaries, such as Turgenev, Tolstoi,
Berlioz, Liszt, Saint-Saens, and Wagner, of an abortive love-affair
with opera singer Desiree Artot, and above all of a varied
production of many kinds of music, of all types from operas to
string quartets, which laid the foundation of his skill and fame.
Most of the operas, written hastily, uncritically , and sometimes
on wretched librettos, were failures, the scores of which in a
number of cases he himself destroyed. At the other end of the gamut
of musical style are the three String Quartets (1871, '74, and
'76). All have interest but none quite achieve the reticence and
reserved beauty of true quartet style. The Andante cantabile
movement of the first, opus 11, founded on a folk-song the composer
heard whistled by a house painter, has become deservedly famous.
The third, in E-Flat Minor, contains music of a funereal solemnity
and tragic feeling anticipating the "Pathetic" Symphony. By far the
most successful of all these early works are the orchestral ones
where Tchaikovsky's passionate emotion and flair for gorgeous
colouring have full away: not perhaps the symphonies (No.2, 1872,
and No.3 1875) but more dramatic conceptions like The Tempest
(overture, 1873), the tone-poem Francesca da Rimini (1876) and two
masterpieces, Romeo and Juliet composed in 1869, and produced and
revised a year later, and the magnificent Piano Concerto in B Flat
Minor, composed in 1874, at first intended for Nicholas Rubinstein,
but owing to his indifference dedicated instead to Hans von Bulow.
These works, both by quantity and quality, amply justify the solid
and gradually spreading reputation of the middle seventies.
Then came a double crisis, involving two women, one of whom,
touching Tchaikovsky on his personal and most vulnerable side,
nearly wrecked him, and the other, lending timely aid to the
impersonal artist in him, the side of him that was truly great,
turned his life to new fruitfulness.
Antonina Ivanovana Milyukoff hurled herself at his head, declaring
in a letter her love for him. He, though misplaced chivalry, was
quixotic enough to marry her, July6, 1877. Within a month he
discovered their utter incompatibility and on the 26th wrote that a
few more days of such life would have driven him mad. He left her
for most of the Summer, but made another attempt in early September
to live with her in Moscow. Before the month was out he fled to St.
Petersburg, arriving in complete nervous collapse, and was taken to
the hotel nearest the station, where he became unconscious for 48
hours and then passed into high fever. Ordered by the doctors to
leave Russia, he gradually regained strength at Clarens, a quiet
village on Lake Geneva, where he later did some of his best work.
Neither partner to this unfortunate marriage had any blame to give
the other.
Nadejda Fillaretovna von Meck [also spelled Nadezhda von Meck], the
widow of a wealthy railway engineer, had fallen under the spell of
Tchaikovsky's music the year before, had given him several
commissions, and had begun the long correspondence with him that
reveals for us so much of his inner life.
Nine years older than he and living in a socially different world,
rich and apparently some what spoiled and autocratic but at any
rate sincere in her love for his music, she had the good sense or
the good luck (it was hard to tell which) to stipulate from the
first that they should have no personal intercourse. They could not
be sure to avoid one or two casual meetings at musical events, but
it is said they never spoke to each other-they who wrote so
inexhaustibly. Nothing could have been better suited to the queer
psychology of Tchaikovsky. Secure from upsetting attacks of his
personal privacy, he was provided form 1877 on, not only with an
income of 6,000 rouble, which enabled him to give up teaching but
with a tireless listener to all his opinions, beliefs, impressions,
hopes, despairs, and aspirations.
Almost at once he resumed work on the splendid Fourth Symphony
which he had begun before the unfortunate marriage; and early in
1878 finished it, and also his most successful opera, Eugene
Onegin. That same year he wrote at Clarens the immensely popular
Violin Concerto. Manfred followed in 1885; the Fifth Symphony in
1888; another successful opera, Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades),
in 1890; the Casse-Noisette Ballet, from which the delightful Suite
is drawn, in 1891. In these prosperous years his fame all over the
world was rapidly increasing; he visited most of the European
capitals for performances of his works; and there even began to be
Tchaikovsky Festivals.
Under the genial influence of all this sunshine he partially
forgot, or put aside, his shyness, and took up the baton again, at
first with many qualms, but gradually with so much assurance that
in 1888 he made an international conducting tour, appearing in
Leipzig, Hamburg, Prague, Paris, and London. Three years later he
even ventured to come across the Atlantic and conduct his own works
in New York at the ceremonies of the opening Carnegie Hall, as may
be read in his letters in amusing details of his triumph and
homesickness. And for the summers there were a series of modest but
comfortable country houses in Russia where he could compose in
peace, from Maidanova, with which he began to Klin, near Moscow.
Only at the end of 1890, three years before his death, came the
inevitable rupture with Madame von Meck, and by that time he was
financially independent, so the break affected his spirits more
than his music. In 1893 he wrote at Klin his most famous work, the
"Pathetic" Symphony, and conducted it at St. Petersburg on Oct. 28.
It was coolly received, and he did not live to witness its success.
Only a few days later he drank a glass of unfiltered water, and
died of cholera, Nov. 6, 1893.
