Download PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY SEASON FINALE: ALL

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May 21/22
SEASON FINALE:
ALL TCHAIKOVSKY
by Dr. Richard E. Rodda
30 SECOND NOTES: … You see, my dear friend, I am made up of contradictions, and I have
reached a very mature age without having calmed my restless spirit either by religion or
philosophy. Undoubtedly I should have gone mad but for music. Music is indeed the most
beautiful of all Heaven’s gifts to humanity wandering in the darkness. Alone it calms,
enlightens and stills our souls. It is a true friend, refuge and comforter, for whose sake life is
worth living. — Tchaikovsky to Nadezhda von Meck, December 5, 1877
PETER ILYICH
TCHAIKOVSKY
Born in Votkinsk, Russia,
May 7, 1840;
died in St. Petersburg,
November 6, 1893
CAPRICCIO ITALIEN, OP. 45
• First performed on December 18, 1880 in
Moscow, conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein.
• First performed by the Des Moines Symphony
on January 12, 1958 with Frank Noyes
conducting. Subequently performed in 1971,
1988, 2000, and most recently on October 2,
2007 with Joseph Giunta conducting.
(Duration: c. 16 minutes)
For nearly a decade after his disastrous marriage
in 1877, Tchaikovsky was filled with selfrecrimination and doubts about his ability to
compose anything more. He managed to finish
the Violin Concerto during the spring of 1878, but
then had to wait more than three years for
someone to perform it, and he did not undertake
another large composition until the Manfred
Symphony of 1885. His frustration was only
increased when he stayed at home in Moscow,
so he traveled frequently and far during those
years for diversion. In November 1879 he set off
for Rome via a circuitous route that took him and
his brother Modeste through Berlin and Paris,
finally arriving in the Eternal City in midDecember. Despite spending the holiday in Rome
and taking part in the riotous festivities of
Carnival (Tchaikovsky recorded that this “wild
folly” did not suit him very well), the sensitive
composer still complained in a letter written on
February 17, 1880 to his benefactress, Nadezhda
von Meck, that “a worm gnaws continually in
secret at my heart. I cannot sleep. My God, what
an incomprehensible and complicated
mechanism the human organism is! We shall
never solve the various phenomena of our
spiritual and material existence!”
Though Tchaikovsky was never long parted
from his residual melancholy, his spirits were
temporarily brightened by some of the local
tunes he heard in Rome, and he decided to write
an orchestral piece incorporating several of
them. As introduction to the work, he used a
bugle call sounded every evening from the
barracks of the Royal Italian Cuirassiers, which
was adjacent to the Hotel Costanzi where he
was staying. He sketched the Capriccio in a
week, but then did not return to the score until
he was back in Russia in the spring; the
orchestration was completed in mid-May at his
summer home in Kamenka.
The Capriccio Italien opens with the
trumpet fanfare of the Royal Cuirassiers, which
gives way to a dolorous melody intoned above an
insistent accompanimental motive. There follows
a swinging tune given first by the oboes in sweet
parallel intervals and later by the full orchestra in
tintinnabulous splendor. A brisk folk dance
comes next, then a reprise of the dolorous
melody and finally a whirling tarantella, perhaps
inspired by the finale of Mendelssohn’s “Italian”
Symphony. This “bundle of Italian folk tunes,” as
Edwin Evans called the Capriccio Italien, ends
with one of the most rousing displays of
orchestral sonority in all of Romantic music.
Scored for piccolo, three flutes, two oboes,
English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons,
four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, bass
drum, cymbals, tambourine, triangle, harp
and the usual strings consisting of first
violins, second violins, violas, violoncellos
and double basses.
VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MAJOR, OP. 35
• First performed on December 4, 1881 in
Vienna, conducted by Hans Richter with Adolf
Brodsky as soloist.
• First performed by the Des Moines Symphony
on February 4, 1945 with Ruth Posselt as soloist
and Frank Noyes conducting. Seven subsequent
performances occurred with soloists Michael
Rabin, Yuko Takahashi, Victor Tretyakov, Elmar
Oliveira, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and most
recently on October 23 & 24, 2010 with Chad
Hoopes as soloist and Mischa Santora
conducting.
(Duration: c. 32 minutes)
In the summer of 1877, Tchaikovsky undertook
the disastrous marriage that lasted less than
three weeks and resulted in his emotional
collapse and attempted suicide. He fled from
Moscow to his brother Modeste in St.
Petersburg, where he recovered his wits and
discovered that he could find solace in his work.
He spent the late fall and winter completing his
Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onégin.
The brothers decided that travel outside of
Russia would be an additional balm to the
composer’s spirit, and they duly installed
themselves at Clarens on Lake Geneva in
Switzerland soon after the first of the year.
In Clarens, Tchaikovsky had already begun
work on a piano sonata when he was visited by
Joseph Kotek, a talented young violinist who had
been a student in one of his composition classes
at the Moscow Conservatory, who brought with
him a score for the recent Symphonie Espagnole
for Violin and Orchestra by the French composer
Edouard Lalo. They read through the piece and
Tchaikovsky was so excited by the possibilities
of a work for solo violin and orchestra that he set
aside the gestating piano sonata and
immediately began a concerto of his own. He
worked quickly, completing the present slow
movement in a single day when he decided to
discard an earlier attempt. (This abandoned
piece ended up as the first of the three
Meditations for Violin and Piano, Op. 42.) By the
end of April, the Concerto was finished.
Tchaikovsky sent the manuscript to Leopold
Auer, a friend who headed the violin department
at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and who was
also Court Violinist to the Czar, hoping to have
him premiere the work. Much to the composer’s
regret, Auer returned the piece as “unplayable,”
and apparently spread that word with such
authority to other violinists that it was more than
three years before the Violin Concerto was heard
in public.
It was Adolf Brodsky, a former colleague of
Tchaikovsky at the Moscow Conservatory, who
finally accepted the challenge of this Concerto.
After having “taken it up and put it down,” in his
words, for two years, he finally felt secure
enough to give the work a try, and he convinced
Hans Richter to include it on the concerts of the
Vienna Philharmonic in 1881. The critical
reception was not kind to the new work (the
powerful doyen of Viennese critics, Eduard
Hanslick, said it was “music that stinks in the
ear,” a comment that irritated Tchaikovsky until
the day he died), but Brodsky remained devoted
to the piece and played it throughout Europe.
The Concerto soon began to gain in popularity,
as did the music of Tchaikovsky generally, and it
has become one of the most frequently
performed compositions in the violin literature. It
is a revealing side-note that Leopold Auer, who
had initially shunned the work, eventually came
to include it in his repertory, and even taught it
to his students, some of whom — Seidel,
Zimbalist, Elman, Heifetz, Milstein — became its
greatest exponents in the 20th century.
The Concerto opens quietly with a tentative
introductory tune. A foretaste of the main theme
soon appears in the violins, around which a
quick crescendo is mounted to usher in the
soloist. After a few unaccompanied measures,
the violin presents the movement’s lovely main
theme above a simple string background. After
an elaborated repetition of this melody, a
transition follows that eventually involves the
entire orchestra and gives the soloist the first of
many opportunities for pyrotechnical display. The
second theme is the beginning of a long dynamic
and rhythmic buildup that leads into the
development with a sweeping, balletic
presentation of the main theme by the full
orchestra. The soloist soon steals back the
attention with breathtaking leaps and double
stops. The grand balletic mood returns, giving
way to a brilliant cadenza as a link to the
recapitulation. The flute sings the main theme
for four measures before the violin takes it over,
and all then follows the order of the exposition.
An exhilarating coda asks for no fewer than four
tempo increases, and the movement ends in a
brilliant whirl of rhythmic energy.
The slow middle movement begins with a
chorale for woodwinds that is heard again at the
end of the movement to serve as a frame around
the musical picture inside. On the canvas of this
scene is displayed a soulful melody intoned by
the violin with the plaintive suggestion of a
Gypsy fiddler.
The finale is joined to the slow movement
without a break. With the propulsive spirit of a
dashing Cossack trepak, the finale flies by amid
the soloist’s dizzying show of agility and speed.
Like the first movement, this one also races
toward its final climax, almost daring listeners to
sit still in their seats. After playing the Concerto’s
premiere, Adolf Brodsky wrote to Tchaikovsky
that the work was “wonderfully beautiful.” He
was right.
Scored for flutes, oboes, clarinets and
bassoons in pairs, four horns, two trumpets,
timpani and the usual strings.
SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN E MINOR, OP. 64
• First performed on November 17, 1888 in St.
Petersburg, conducted by the composer.
• First performed by the Des Moines Symphony
on March 27, 1939 with Frank Noyes conducting.
Subsequently performed in 1949, 1981, 1989,
1998, and most recently on September 25 & 26,
2010 with Joseph Giunta conducting.
(Duration: c. 45 minutes)
Tchaikovsky was never able to maintain his
self-confidence for long. More than once, his
opinion of a work fluctuated between the
extremes of satisfaction and denigration. The
unjustly neglected Manfred Symphony of 1885,
for example, left his pen as “the best I have ever
written,” but the work failed to make a good
impression at its premiere and his estimation of
it tumbled. The lack of success of Manfred was
particularly painful, because he had not
produced a major orchestral work since the
Violin Concerto of 1878, and the score’s failure
left him with the gnawing worry that he might be
“written out.” The three years after Manfred
were devoid of creative work. It was not until
May 1888 that Tchaikovsky again took up the
challenge of the blank page, collecting “little by
little, material for a symphony,” he wrote to his
brother Modeste. Tchaikovsky worked doggedly
on the new symphony, ignoring illness, the
premature encroachment of old age (he was only
48, but suffered from continual exhaustion and
loss of vision), and his doubts about himself. He
pressed on, and when the orchestration of the
Fifth Symphony was completed, at the end of
August, he said, “I have not blundered; it has
turned out well.”
Tchaikovsky never gave any indication that
the Symphony No. 5, unlike the Fourth
Symphony, had a program, though he may well
have had one in mind. In their biography of the
composer, Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson
reckoned Tchaikovsky’s view of fate as the
motivating force in the Symphony No. 5, though
they distinguished its interpretation from that in
the Fourth Symphony. “In the Fourth Symphony,”
the Hansons wrote, “the Fate theme is earthy
and militant, as if the composer visualizes the
implacable enemy in the form, say, of a Greek
god. In the Fifth, the majestic Fate theme has
been elevated far above earth, and man is seen,
not as fighting a force that thinks on its own
terms, of revenge, hate, or spite, but a wholly
spiritual power which subjects him to checks
and agonies for the betterment of his soul.”
The structure of the Fifth Symphony
reflects this process of “betterment.” It
progresses from minor to major, from darkness
to light, from melancholy to joy — or at least to
acceptance and stoic resignation. The
Symphony’s four movements are linked together
through the use of a recurring “Fate” motto
theme, given immediately at the beginning by
unison clarinets as the brooding introduction to
the first movement. The sonata form proper
starts with a melancholy melody intoned by
bassoon and clarinet over a stark string
accompaniment. Several themes are presented
to round out the exposition: a romantic tune,
filled with emotional swells, for the strings; an
aggressive strain given as a dialogue between
winds and strings; and a languorous, sighing
string melody. All of the materials from the
exposition are used in the development. The solo
bassoon ushers in the recapitulation, and the
themes from the exposition are heard again,
though with appropriate changes of key and
instrumentation.
At the head of the manuscript of the second
movement Tchaikovsky is said to have written,
“Oh, how I love … if you love me…,” and,
indeed, this wonderful music calls to mind an
operatic love scene. (Tchaikovsky, it should be
remembered, was a master of the musical stage
who composed more operas than he did
symphonies.) Twice, the imperious Fate motto
intrudes upon the starlit mood of this romanza.
If the second movement derives from
opera, the third grows from ballet. A flowing
waltz melody (inspired by a street song
Tchaikovsky had heard in Italy a decade earlier)
dominates much of the movement. The central
trio section exhibits a scurrying figure in the
strings. Quietly and briefly, the Fate motto
returns in the movement’s closing pages.
The finale begins with a long introduction
based on the Fate theme cast in a heroic rather
than a sinister or melancholy mood. A vigorous
exposition, a concentrated development and an
intense recapitulation follow. The long coda uses
the motto theme in its major-key, victory-won
setting.
Scored for piccolo, three flutes, two oboes,
two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani
and the usual strings.