Eleven-year-old Igor Stravinsky announced one day in an awe-struck voice to his school class in St Petersburg, ‘Tchaikovsky has died.’ Instead of the expected response, one boy said ‘What class was he in?’ Stravinsky’s father was a singer at the Mariinsky Opera Theatre, and had pointed out the great composer to his musical son. The child was father to the man: Igor Stravinsky, to the annoyance of some of his modernist admirers, was to remain a lifelong lover of the music of Tchaikovsky, and paid a special tribute to it in his 1928 ballet The Fairy’s Kiss.
Few would quarrel with the assertion that Tchaikovsky was the greatest Russian composer of the 19th century, Stravinsky of the 20th. But if we took a popularity poll with the general concert-going public, we would get a rather different answer. As the Cold War recedes into memory, recall one of its most symbolic episodes: amidst the shock of the first Sputnik and the beginning of the space race, a young American, Van Cliburn, won the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, and soon his recording of the piano concerto, Tchaikovsky’s B flat minor, topped the classical best-seller lists everywhere. We suspect that the Russians, even under Communism, were pleased with the West’s love-affair with their great composer. Soon afterwards, an early thaw in the Cold War brought the triumphant return to Russia of Igor Stravinsky, long ago lost in embrace with the capitalist United States. But Stravinsky still sells fewer discs than Tchaikovsky.
Maybe musical Russians found our Tchaikovsky mania rather selective. The First Piano concerto, the Violin Concerto, the last three symphonies, Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, and the Marche Slave – orchestral works all, and they regularly filled concert halls. Generations of balletomanes learnt to regard Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker as the apogee of ‘classical’ ballet, and Tchaikovsky as ballet’s greatest composer.
Stravinsky, on the other hand, like most Russians, knew a Tchaikovsky with words. He encountered him in the opera house, above all in Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, stories based on Pushkin, the writer who gave words and form to the experience of generations of educated Russians. Non-Russians may have sensed from the symphonies that Tchaikovsky identified with lovesick youth and fate-ridden losers. Russian opera-goers had encountered them personified in his heroine Tatiana, and hero Hermann. Tchaikovsky setting Russian poetry as song, making music for the Orthodox liturgy – this is a more rounded Tchaikovsky than most Westerners know.
Fair game to the critics
A visiting conductor once shocked many hearers in Australia by admitting that he didn’t like Mozart’s music. These days this is lèse-majesté, just as it used to be (perhaps still is) to criticise Beethoven. Tchaikovsky has been fair game to the critics. His own well-documented self-doubts give the cue. It’s all too easy to write about shortcomings in form of the symphonies about which Tchaikovsky himself voiced such anxieties. Critics these days tend to oscillate between two self-repelling poles. Towards new music they often act as advocates, or are afraid to be too dismissive, lest they be wrong. Towards the music of the past they often behave as keepers of the seal, guardians of the great tradition. How useful to find a composer about whom the public, who love him so annoyingly, can be corrected! If Tchaikovsky doesn’t get the seal of critical approval, perhaps his music will eventually go away, to be replaced by other things – whether newer things or composers the perverse public has never learnt to like!
When you get right down to it, what most endears Tchaikovsky to the public is tunes – melodies memorable in themselves, surviving even translation into pop songs, and often memorably associated with a particular instrument’s sound. Above all, these tunes are brimming with sentiment, and speak to many listeners of a sensibility with which they can identify, in some moods. Tchaikovsky’s expression leans on the side of self-pity. This, no doubt, is what repels the severe-minded, including the critics.
There are those in our time, resistant perhaps to the more emotional side of Tchaikovsky, who have loved him selectively for some of the same ‘purely musical’ qualities which are admired in Mozart: seeming ease of melodic and harmonic invention; the deft suiting of ideas to instrumental possibilities. Such admirers of Tchaikovsky will love best the ballets, large stretches of the operas, and individual movements of the symphonies (usually the most dance-like). They will feel that Tchaikovsky is at his least self-conscious when dealing with a dramatic subject, or following a choreography; even merely providing supreme light music, as in the Serenade for Strings. This is the Tchaikovsky, some will say, best able to express his wonderful musical gifts.
But this is to try to turn Tchaikovsky into a classicist (as, we suspect, Stravinsky did). He is not a classicist manqué. In assessing Russian creative artists, in any case, rather than lining them up on either side of a Classical/Romantic divide, it may be more useful to see other distinctions. The Moscow-based Tchaikovsky and the St Petersburg-based ‘nationalists’ – the Mighty Five and their school – were inheritors, sometimes uncritical, of the musical language and form of mid-19th-century Romantic music. But both ‘schools’ were pouring new wine into the old bottles.
The nationalists at their best made two great contributions to music. One is the re-discovery of a vein of representative, illustrative music, putting colour, gesture and melodic inflection at the service of story-telling and scene-painting with the vividness of Russian picture story books (Stravinsky’s Firebird and Ravel’s Daphnis are unthinkable without Rimsky-Korsakov). The other, even more remarkable contribution is to see human life through music without evasion and varnish: the truthfulness of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Nursery Songs (with its heirs in Debussy and Shostakovich, its parallel in Janácek).
The Russian intellectuals get excited about.
This is the Russian music intellectuals get excited about. Yet Tchaikovsky is more often played, and more deeply loved. Of course, he is the romantic; Mozart was his musical hero, but Mozart can bring completely different characters to life in music, whereas Tchaikovsky’s Tatiana, Lensky, and Hermann are all aspects of his own personality. But Tchaikovsky is also the most complete musician of his country in his century. His westward-looking curiosity enabled him to absorb the expressive detail and the new forms of Schumann’s piano music and songs, the elegant orchestral gesture of Delibes’ ballets, the passion and colour of Bizet’s Carmen, the al fresco tunefulness of Italian popular song.
Tchaikovsky brought these all home to Russia, in every sense. That he reflected the sensibility of the Westward-looking Russian educated classes helps explain his appeal to his countrymen. The freshness and personal quality of his musical synthesis explain his appeal to everybody. In his Fourth, Fifth and Sixth symphonies, Tchaikovsky was able to externalise his subjectivity in memorable music, strongly and originally enough constructed to stand the test of (admittedly excessive) repetition. Among true Music Lovers, Tchaikovsky is as popular as ever.
First published for Symphony Australia in 1993