Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

"Tchaikovsky" redirects here. For other uses, see Tchaikovsky (disambiguation).

This name uses Eastern Slavic naming customs; the patronymic is Ilyich and the family name is Tchaikovsky.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, c. 1888

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (English: /tʃaɪˈkɒfski/ chy-KOF-skee; Russian: Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский, IPA: [pʲɵtr ɪlʲˈjitɕ tɕɪjˈkofskʲɪj] (listen); 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally. He was honored in 1884 by Tsar Alexander III and awarded a lifetime pension.

Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant. There was scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at the time and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865. The formal Western-oriented teaching that he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five with whom his professional relationship was mixed.

Tchaikovsky's training set him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood. From that reconciliation, he forged a personal but unmistakably Russian style. The principles that governed melody, harmony and other fundamentals of Russian music ran completely counter to those that governed Western European music, which seemed to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or for forming a composite style, and it caused personal antipathies that dented Tchaikovsky's self-confidence. Russian culture exhibited a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great. That resulted in uncertainty among the intelligentsia about the country's national identity, an ambiguity mirrored in Tchaikovsky's career.

Tchaikovsky's birthplace in Votkinsk, now a museum

The Tchaikovsky family in 1848. Left to right: Pyotr, Alexandra Andreyevna (mother), Alexandra (sister), Zinaida, Nikolai, Ippolit, Ilya Petrovich (father)

Anton (right) and Nikolai Rubinstein

Music

See also: List of compositions by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Symphonies by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Original cast of Tchaikovsky's ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, Saint Petersburg, 1890

Creative range

Tchaikovsky displayed a wide stylistic and emotional range, from light salon works to grand symphonies. Some of his works, such as the Variations on a Rococo Theme, employ a "Classical" form reminiscent of 18th-century composers such as Mozart (his favorite composer). Other compositions, such as his Little Russian symphony and his opera Vakula the Smith, flirt with musical practices more akin to those of the 'Five', especially in their use of folk song. Other works, such as Tchaikovsky's last three symphonies, employ a personal musical idiom that facilitated intense emotional expression.

Compositional style

Melody

American music critic and journalist Harold C. Schonberg wrote of Tchaikovsky's "sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody", a feature that has ensured his music's continued success with audiences. Tchaikovsky's complete range of melodic styles was as wide as that of his compositions. Sometimes he used Western-style melodies, sometimes original melodies written in the style of Russian folk song; sometimes he used actual folk songs. According to The New Grove, Tchaikovsky's melodic gift could also become his worst enemy in two ways.

The first challenge arose from his ethnic heritage. Unlike Western themes, the melodies that Russian composers wrote tended to be self-contained: they functioned with a mindset of stasis and repetition rather than one of progress and ongoing development. On a technical level, it made modulating to a new key to introduce a contrasting second theme exceedingly difficult, as this was literally a foreign concept that did not exist in Russian music.

The second way melody worked against Tchaikovsky was a challenge that he shared with the majority of Romantic-age composers. They did not write in the regular, symmetrical melodic shapes that worked well with sonata form, such as those favored by Classical composers such as Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, but were complete and independent in themselves. This completeness hindered their use as structural elements in combination with one another. This challenge was why the Romantics "were never natural symphonists". All a composer like Tchaikovsky could do with them was to essentially repeat them, even when he modified them to generate tension, maintain interest and satisfy listeners.

Harmony

Harmony could be a potential trap for Tchaikovsky, according to Brown, since Russian creativity tended to focus on inertia and self-enclosed tableaux, while Western harmony worked against this to propel the music onward and, on a larger scale, shape it. Modulation, the shifting from one key to another, was a driving principle in both harmony and sonata form, the primary Western large-scale musical structure since the middle of the 18th century. Modulation maintained harmonic interest over an extended time-scale, provided a clear contrast between musical themes and showed how those themes were related to each other.

One point in Tchaikovsky's favor was "a flair for harmony" that "astonished" Rudolph Kündinger, Tchaikovsky's music tutor during his time at the School of Jurisprudence. Added to what he learned at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory studies, this talent allowed Tchaikovsky to employ a varied range of harmony in his music, from the Western harmonic and textural practices of his first two string quartets to the use of the whole tone scale in the center of the finale of the Second Symphony, a practice more typically used by The Five.

Rhythm

Rhythmically, Tchaikovsky sometimes experimented with unusual meters. More often, he used a firm, regular meter, a practice that served him well in dance music. At times, his rhythms became pronounced enough to become the main expressive agent of the music. They also became a means, found typically in Russian folk music, of simulating movement or progression in large-scale symphonic movements—a "synthetic propulsion", as Brown phrases it, which substituted for the momentum that would be created in strict sonata form by the interaction of melodic or motivic elements. This interaction generally does not take place in Russian music. (For more on this, please see Repetition below.)

Structure

Tchaikovsky struggled with sonata form. Its principle of organic growth through the interplay of musical themes was alien to Russian practice. The traditional argument that Tchaikovsky seemed unable to develop themes in this manner fails to consider this point; it also discounts the possibility that Tchaikovsky might have intended the development passages in his large-scale works to act as "enforced hiatuses" to build tension, rather than grow organically as smoothly progressive musical arguments.

According to Brown and musicologists Hans Keller and Daniel Zhitomirsky, Tchaikovsky found his solution to large-scale structure while composing the Fourth Symphony. He essentially sidestepped thematic interaction and kept sonata form only as an "outline", as Zhitomirsky phrases it. Within this outline, the focus centered on periodic alternation and juxtaposition. Tchaikovsky placed blocks of dissimilar tonal and thematic material alongside one another, with what Keller calls "new and violent contrasts" between musical themes, keys, and harmonies. This process, according to Brown and Keller, builds momentum and adds intense drama. While the result, Warrack charges, is still "an ingenious episodic treatment of two tunes rather than a symphonic development of them" in the Germanic sense, Brown counters that it took the listener of the period "through a succession of often highly charged sections which added up to a radically new kind of symphonic experience" (italics Brown), one that functioned not on the basis of summation, as Austro-German symphonies did, but on one of accumulation.

Partly due to the melodic and structural intricacies involved in this accumulation and partly due to the composer's nature, Tchaikovsky's music became intensely expressive. This intensity was entirely new to Russian music and prompted some Russians to place Tchaikovsky's name alongside that of Dostoyevsky. German musicologist Hermann Kretzschmar credits Tchaikovsky in his later symphonies with offering "full images of life, developed freely, sometimes even dramatically, around psychological contrasts ... This music has the mark of the truly lived and felt experience". Leon Botstein, in elaborating on this comment, suggests that listening to Tchaikovsky's music "became a psychological mirror connected to everyday experience, one that reflected on the dynamic nature of the listener's own emotional self". This active engagement with the music "opened for the listener a vista of emotional and psychological tension and an extremity of feeling that possessed relevance because it seemed reminiscent of one's own 'truly lived and felt experience' or one's search for intensity in a deeply personal sense".

Repetition

Sequence ascending by step Play . Note that there are only four segments, continuously higher, and that the segments continue by the same distance (seconds: C–D, D–E, etc.).

As mentioned above, repetition was a natural part of Tchaikovsky's music, just as it is an integral part of Russian music. His use of sequences within melodies (repeating a tune at a higher or lower pitch in the same voice) could go on for extreme length. The problem with repetition is that, over a period of time, the melody being repeated remains static, even when there is a surface level of rhythmic activity added to it. Tchaikovsky kept the musical conversation flowing by treating melody, tonality, rhythm and sound color as one integrated unit, rather than as separate elements.

By making subtle but noticeable changes in the rhythm or phrasing of a tune, modulating to another key, changing the melody itself or varying the instruments playing it, Tchaikovsky could keep a listener's interest from flagging. By extending the number of repetitions, he could increase the musical and dramatic tension of a passage, building "into an emotional experience of almost unbearable intensity", as Brown phrases it, controlling when the peak and release of that tension would take place. Musicologist Martin Cooper calls this practice a subtle form of unifying a piece of music and adds that Tchaikovsky brought it to a high point of refinement. (For more on this practice, see the next section.)

Orchestration

Like other late Romantic composers, Tchaikovsky relied heavily on orchestration for musical effects. Tchaikovsky, however, became noted for the "sensual opulence" and "voluptuous timbrel virtuosity" of his orchestration. Like Glinka, Tchaikovsky tended toward bright primary colors and sharply delineated contrasts of texture. However, beginning with the Third Symphony, Tchaikovsky experimented with an increased range of timbres Tchaikovsky's scoring was noted and admired by some of his peers. Rimsky-Korsakov regularly referred his students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to it and called it "devoid of all striving after effect, [to] give a healthy, beautiful sonority". This sonority, musicologist Richard Taruskin points out, is essentially Germanic in effect. Tchaikovsky's expert use of having two or more instruments play a melody simultaneously (a practice called doubling) and his ear for uncanny combinations of instruments resulted in "a generalized orchestral sonority in which the individual timbres of the instruments, being thoroughly mixed, would vanish".

Pastiche (Passé-ism)

In works like the "Serenade for Strings" and the Variations on a Rococo Theme, Tchaikovsky showed he was highly gifted at writing in a style of 18th-century European pastiche. In the ballet The Sleeping Beauty and the opera The Queen of Spades, Tchaikovsky graduated from imitation to full-scale evocation. This practice, which Alexandre Benois calls "passé-ism", lends an air of timelessness and immediacy, making the past seem as though it were the present. On a practical level, Tchaikovsky was drawn to past styles because he felt he might find the solution to certain structural problems within them. His Rococo pastiches also may have offered escape into a musical world purer than his own, into which he felt himself irresistibly drawn. (In this sense, Tchaikovsky operated in the opposite manner to Igor Stravinsky, who turned to Neoclassicism partly as a form of compositional self-discovery.) Tchaikovsky's attraction to ballet might have allowed a similar refuge into a fairy-tale world, where he could freely write dance music within a tradition of French elegance.

Antecedents and influences

Robert Schumann, lithograph by Josef Kriehuber, in 1839

Of Tchaikovsky's Western contemporaries, Robert Schumann stands out as an influence in formal structure, harmonic practices and piano writing, according to Brown and musicologist Roland John Wiley. Boris Asafyev comments that Schumann left his mark on Tchaikovsky not just as a formal influence but also as an example of musical dramaturgy and self-expression. Leon Botstein claims the music of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner also left their imprints on Tchaikovsky's orchestral style. The late-Romantic trend for writing orchestral suites, begun by Franz Lachner, Jules Massenet, and Joachim Raff after the rediscovery of Bach's works in that genre, may have influenced Tchaikovsky to try his own hand at them.

His teacher Anton Rubinstein's opera The Demon became a model for the final tableau of Eugene Onegin. So did Léo Delibes' ballets Coppélia and Sylvia for The Sleeping Beauty and Georges Bizet's opera Carmen (a work Tchaikovsky admired tremendously) for The Queen of Spades. Otherwise, it was to composers of the past that Tchaikovsky turned—Beethoven, whose music he respected; Mozart, whose music he loved; Glinka, whose opera A Life for the Tsar made an indelible impression on him as a child and whose scoring he studied assiduously; and Adolphe Adam, whose ballet Giselle was a favorite of his from his student days and whose score he consulted while working on The Sleeping Beauty. Beethoven's string quartets may have influenced Tchaikovsky's attempts in that medium. Other composers whose work interested Tchaikovsky included Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Gioachino Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi, Vincenzo Bellini and Henry Litolff.

Aesthetic impact

Maes maintains that, regardless of what he was writing, Tchaikovsky's main concern was how his music impacted his listeners on an aesthetic level, at specific moments in the piece and on a cumulative level once the music had finished. What his listeners experienced on an emotional or visceral level became an end in itself. Tchaikovsky's focus on pleasing his audience might be considered closer to that of Mendelssohn or Mozart. Considering that he lived and worked in what was probably the last 19th-century feudal nation, the statement is not actually that surprising.

And yet, even when writing so-called 'programme' music, for example his Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, he cast it in sonata form. His use of stylized 18th-century melodies and patriotic themes was geared toward the values of Russian aristocracy. He was aided in this by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, who commissioned The Sleeping Beauty from Tchaikovsky and the libretto for The Queen of Spades from Modest with their use of 18th century settings stipulated firmly. Tchaikovsky also used the polonaise frequently, the dance being a musical code for the Romanov dynasty and a symbol of Russian patriotism. Using it in the finale of a work could assure its success with Russian listeners.

Sources

• Asafyev, Boris (1947). "The Great Russian Composer". Russian Symphony: Thoughts About Tchaikovsky. New York: Philosophical Library.
• Benward, Bruce; Saker, Marilyn (200). Music: In Theory and Practice, Vol. 1 (Seventh ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-294262-0.
• Botstein, Leon (1998). "Music as the Language of Psychological Realm". In Kearney, Leslie (ed.). Tchaikovsky and His World. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00429-3.
• Brown, David, "Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich" and "Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich". In The New Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (London: MacMillan, 1980), 20 vols., ed. Sadie, Stanley. ISBN 0-333-23111-2.
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 1840–1874 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978). ISBN 0-393-07535-4.
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Crisis Years, 1874–1878, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1983). ISBN 0-393-01707-9.
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Years of Wandering, 1878–1885, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986). ISBN 0-393-02311-7.
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 1885–1893, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991). ISBN 0-393-03099-7.
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music (New York: Pegasus Books, 2007). ISBN 0-571-23194-2.
• Cooper, Martin, "The Symphonies". In Music of Tchaikovsky (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1946), ed. Abraham, Gerald. ISBN n/a. OCLC 385829
• Druckenbrod, Andrew, "Festival to explore Tchaikovsky's changing reputation". In Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 30 January 2011. Retrieved 27 February 2012.
• Figes, Orlando, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002). ISBN 0-8050-5783-8 (hc.).
• Holden, Anthony, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995). ISBN 0-679-42006-1.
• Holoman, D. Kern, "Instrumentation and orchestration, 4: 19th century". In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition (London: Macmillan, 2001), 29 vols., ed. Sadie, Stanley. ISBN 1-56159-239-0.
• Hopkins, G. W., "Orchestration, 4: 19th century". In The New Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (London: MacMillan, 1980), 20 vols., ed. Sadie, Stanley. ISBN 0-333-23111-2.
• Hosking, Geoffrey, Russia and the Russians: A History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001). ISBN 0-674-00473-6.
• Jackson, Timothy L., Tchaikovsky, Symphony no. 6 (Pathétique) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ISBN 0-521-64676-6.
• Karlinsky, Simon, "Russia's Gay Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution". In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: American Library, 1989), ed. Duberman, Martin, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey. ISBN 0-452-01067-5.
• Kozinn, Allan, "Critic's Notebook; Defending Tchaikovsky, With Gravity and With Froth". In The New York Times, 18 July 1992. Retrieved 27 February 2012.
• Lockspeiser, Edward, "Tchaikovsky the Man". In Music of Tchaikovsky (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1946), ed. Abraham, Gerald. ISBN n/a. OCLC 385829
• Maes, Francis, tr. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002). ISBN 0-520-21815-9.
• Mochulsky, Konstantin, tr. Minihan, Michael A., Dostoyevsky: His Life and Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). LCCN 65-10833.
• Poznansky, Alexander, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991). ISBN 0-02-871885-2.
• Poznansky, Alexander, Tchaikovsky Through Others' Eyes. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1999). ISBN 0-253-33545-0.
• Ridenour, Robert C., Nationalism, Modernism and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981). ISBN 0-8357-1162-5.
• Ritzarev, Marina, Tchaikovsky's Pathétique and Russian Culture (Ashgate, 2014). ISBN 9781472424112.
• Roberts, David, "Modulation (i)". In The New Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (London: MacMillan, 1980), 20 vols., ed. Sadie, Stanley. ISBN 0-333-23111-2.
• Rubinstein, Anton, tr. Aline Delano, Autobiography of Anton Rubinstein: 1829–1889 (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1890). Library of Congress Control Number LCCN 06-4844.
• Schonberg, Harold C. Lives of the Great Composers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 3rd ed. 1997). ISBN 0-393-03857-2.
• Steinberg, Michael, The Concerto (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
• Steinberg, Michael, The Symphony (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
• Taruskin, Richard, "Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il'yich", The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London and New York: Macmillan, 1992), 4 vols, ed. Sadie, Stanley. ISBN 0-333-48552-1.
• Volkov, Solomon, Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars (New York: Alfred A. Knopf House, 2011), tr. Bouis, Antonina W. ISBN 0-307-27063-7.
• Warrack, John, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969). LCCN 78-105437.
• Warrack, John, Tchaikovsky (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973). ISBN 0-684-13558-2.
• Wiley, Roland John, "Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich". In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition (London: Macmillan, 2001), 29 vols., ed. Sadie, Stanley. ISBN 1-56159-239-0.
• Wiley, Roland John, The Master Musicians: Tchaikovsky (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-19-536892-5.
• Zhitomirsky, Daniel, "Symphonies". In Russian Symphony: Thoughts About Tchaikovsky (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947). ISBN n/a.
• Zajaczkowski, Henry, Tchaikovsky's Musical Style (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1987). ISBN 0-8357-1806-9.

Further reading

• Bergamini, John, The Tragic Dynasty: A History of the Romanovs (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1969). LCCN 68-15498.
• Bullock, Philip Ross (2016). Pyotr Tchaikovsky. London, U.K.: Reaktion Books. ISBN 9781780236544. OCLC 932385370.
• Hanson, Lawrence and Hanson, Elisabeth, Tchaikovsky: The Man Behind the Music (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company). LCCN 66-13606.

External links

• Tchaikovsky Research
• "Discovering Tchaikovsky". BBC Radio 3.
• Tchaikovsky cylinder recordings, from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the Internet Broadway Database
• Works by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at Internet Archive
• Piotr Ilitch Tchaïkovski – Musique Classique – medici.tv
• Mutopia Project Tchaikovsky Sheet Music at Mutopia
• Free scores by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• Tchaikovsky Arias and Piano works performed live in Brussels