Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky’s operas, ballets, and symphonies are firmly entrenched in the classical canon. His three Pushkin-based operas—Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, and Mazeppa—are staples of major opera houses. Swan Lake and The Nutcracker cover the annual operating expenses of top-tier and regional ballet companies alike, while every symphonic orchestra embraces opportunities to program his Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies, especially the Pathétique (No. 6), completed in August 1893 just after the death of his poet friend Alexei Apukhtin. Perhaps the most obvious example of his global reach is the International Tchaikovsky Competition for pianists, violinists, cellists, and singers, held every four years since 1958 as a symbol of Russian cultural might. Tchaikovsky also wrote a pops concert favorite, the 1812 Overture (which he derided as “filthy noise”), along with other occasional pieces for religious and political occasions. Several films have been made about the composer and his life and times, all of which tendentiously distort his achievement to reinforce stereotypes about Russia and romantic suffering. 

Early Years: The St. Petersburg Conservatory and a Widowed Heiress

Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, an industrial town in Russia’s Udmurt Republic. He was close to his five siblings, especially his brother Modest—a playwright—and his sister Alexandra, who raised a large family of her own on an estate in Kamenka, Ukraine, where Tchaikovsky spent large parts of his career. Tchaikovsky’s parents enrolled him in the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, expecting that he would establish a career in the Russian Imperial civil service, but his obvious musical talents, manifest as a child, led him to study music at the newly founded St. Petersburg Conservatory. There, his mentor was Anton Rubinstein, a virtuoso pianist and composer much enamored of the German musical traditions. After graduation, Tchaikovsky received an offer to teach in the Moscow Conservatory under the direction of Anton’s brother Nikolai.

After several years in the classroom, a lucky break came: a reclusive, recently widowed heiress with a passion for music, Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck (née Fralovskaya, 1831–94), offered him a stipend to compose. Her support bolstered Tchaikovsky creatively; he composed symphonies, operas, ballets, and incidental music for plays. By the mid-1880s, he had outgrown the need for her support, becoming comfortably ensconced in the St. Petersburg court as an imperial artist, his music a simulacrum of Tsar Alexander III’s rule in its combination of nationalism and imperialism.

Tchaikovsky: Trio in A minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 50

Middle Period: A Genius, and a Regular Person

In 1887 the magazine Nouvelliste published an article about his rise and how he had, “so brilliantly justifying the hopes placed in him, held the banner of Russian art so high. Tchaikovsky did not need to become a general or take any official position—in Russia these conditions are almost a cornerstone for success even in the arts—to earn popularity.” His achievement is documented in his letters, which have been published and republished, interpreted and reinterpreted. Tchaikovsky shared his self-doubts and vulnerabilities as a composer but—in part because of his highly mannered, sentimental epistolary style—seemed always to offer too much or too little insight into his intentions and his everyday self.

Although he found a home in elite circles at court, he was no elitist. He wasn’t of aristocratic lineage and knew he didn’t look and behave like an aristocrat, so he quickly abandoned any attempt to fit in. He shared his thinking about himself and his temperament with his brother Anatole: “It’s comical to recall the extent to which I tormented myself for failing to get into high society to become a social success! . . . How much time it took for me to understand that I belong to the category of the reasonably intelligent, but do not belong in the class of those whose minds possess abilities which are out of the ordinary.”

He leaned into that unlearned side of himself and embraced the ideal of regular folk, with a tilt toward the kind of people the Enlightenment philosopher and late-blooming composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau privileged for their “proximity, equality, and similarity.” Tchaikovsky also read Octave Feuillet and appreciated the writer’s representation of the “subtleties of the normal.” (His favorite Feuillet novel is La morte [Death], which is about marriage—for Tchaikovsky, itself a kind of death.) The composer highlights the plainer side of existence, the unthinking hours, and in his operas focuses on people of all ages who aren’t distinguished or unique, individuals who lack, or who have been denied, a metaphysical aspect to their existences.

The man of the people was upwardly mobile, lodging in the better neighborhoods of Europe’s cities, dining in good restaurants, and choosing department stores over markets. No one ever caught him at the pie exchange or haggling over the price of a hat. Tchaikovsky liked popular theater, especially vaudeville, and occasionally quoted from them in his compositions. He treated his servants very well and never forgot the people who raised him and helped him out.

Late Period: An Experimenter of an Accessible Sort

In the final years of life, cut short by cholera, Tchaikovsky expanded his syntax in a proto-surrealist direction. The painterliness of his music anticipates Debussy, as does the fragmented distribution of melodies into string and woodwind sections, and the use of fractal forms. He was described in the Symbolist journal Vesï (Libra) as a modernist seer and polestar of Zukunftsmusik, the “music of the future.” The word is borrowed from Richard Wagner but was applied to Tchaikovsky’s final opera Iolanta, first performed on a double bill with The Nutcracker in 1892. The brief overture to Iolanta is an upside-down, woodwind-dominated paraphrase of the opening of  Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde prelude. Far from a deferential Russian homage to Wagner, however, Tchaikovsky’s music offers an insubordinate critique. The sourly discordant overture represents the heroine’s groping blindness.

Thus, he had an experimental side to him, even as he composed in a manner reminiscent of 18th-century composers. (Mozart was his idol.) He relied on the number format in his operas and adhered, in general, to a diatonic (major and minor) system. But he embraced these things to counter them, to highlight and enhance them with his own unmistakable signature—just as he embraced actual human experience and his immediate cultural context—and to take us to a place where nothing is real. Lives, Tchaikovsky believed, should have the textures of dreams.

Gossip

Much of the more recent English-language literature on Tchaikovsky focuses on his homosexuality as a source of self-doubt and self-loathing, to the point of him committing suicide. (He is ludicrously imagined as having deliberately contracted the cholera that killed him) There is zero evidence to support the gossip, but stacks of evidence to debunk it: medical records, diaries, letters, jokes, caricatures, and photographs. Though he briefly married, he regretted the decision, having made it clear to his bride, Antonina Milyukova, that their relationship would be platonic. In his letters to his patron von Meck, he occasionally expressed disappointment in himself for his inadequate service to his divine talent, but elsewhere he admitted to taking tremendous pride in his achievements while disdaining his naysayers. He didn’t pursue fame, much less prestige, but achieved both through contentedly disciplined work. Tchaikovsky was much loved by friends and family and benefited immensely from the support of homosexual members of the imperial aristocracy.

Watching and Listening

In 1871, shortly after graduating from the St. Petersburg Conservatory and accepting a teaching job at the Moscow Conservatory, Tchaikovsky organized a concert of his works at the Assembly of the Nobility, a social club near the Bolshoi Theater with space for concerts and glittering balls. The greatest success on the program was his String Quartet No. 1, especially the second movement, which sets a folksong that Tchaikovsky heard a carpenter sing on his sister’s estate in Ukraine (the melody is also included in his 1868–69 collection of Fifty Russian Folksongs). In 1876, the movement was performed at a reception for Leo Tolstoy, who had traveled to Moscow from his home in Yasnaya Polyana to attend to the publication of Anna Karenina. The great writer was moved to tears by the string quartet’s second movement, heard here in an arrangement for cello soloist and strings.

Tchaikovsky dedicated his Third String Quartet (1876) to violinist Ferdinand Laus, a mentor of sorts. Performances range from intensely to distantly emotional, with this performance by the Escher String Quartet occupying the middle ground. Tchaikovsky’s Trio for Piano, Volin, and Cello addresses a painful loss: the death in 1881 of Nikolai Rubinstein, at once his employer and promoter as well as his harshest critic. Tchaikovsky was not a fan of trios, but as this performance evinces, he found the tortured, difficult-to-reconcile dialogue between piano, violin, and cello appropriate for expressing his complicated relationship with Rubinstein. Tchaikovsky’s 1882 Valse sentimentale, heard in this arrangement for cello and piano, was originally composed for piano and dedicated to Emma Genton, a French governess who fell awkwardly in love with Tchaikovsky.

His late Souvenir de Florence (1890) imitates Italian music yet quotes nothing Italian. The string sextet is instead influenced by Florence’s visual culture, namely the paintings commissioned by the Medici banking family. It was written for the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society, which premiered it on a special program dedicated to “classical and historical music.” Tchaikovsky includes meticulous imitative passages (adjacent to the grand finale fugato), dialogues between violin and cello (the first music he sketched), sassy trilling beneath legato lines, ppp to ff shifts in dynamics at cadences, and (as heard in this 2020 performance led by violinist Cho-Liang Lin) go-for-broke solos.

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