Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

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

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky by Nikolay Kuznetsov, 1893

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Russian: , romanized: Pëtr Il'ich Chaikovskiy, IPA: [ˈpʲɵtr ɪlʲˈjitɕ tɕɪjˈkofskʲɪj]; often called Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (Template:Pron-en) in English) (May 7, 1840 [O.S. April 25]–November 6, 1893 [O.S. October 25]), was a Russian composer of the Romantic era. Tchaikovsky wrote music across a range of genres, including symphony, opera, ballet, instrumental, chamber and song. He wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, as well as the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, his last three numbered symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin.

Born into a middle-class family, Tchaikovsky was educated towards a career as a civil servant, despite the musical precocity he had demonstrated. Against the wishes of his family, he chose to pursue a musical career, and, in 1862, he entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, graduating in 1865. The formal, Western-oriented training he received set him apart from the contemporary nationalistic movement embodied by the influential group of young Russian composers known as The Five, with whom Tchaikovsky sustained a mixed professional relationship throughout his career.

Although he enjoyed many popular successes, Tchaikovsky was never emotionally secure, and his life was punctuated by personal crises and periods of depression. Contributory factors were his suppressed homosexuality and fear of exposure, his disastrous marriage, and the sudden collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck. Amid private turmoil Tchaikovsky's public reputation grew; he was honored by the Tsar, awarded a lifetime pension and lauded in the concert halls of the world. His sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera, but some attribute it to suicide.

Although perennially popular with concert audiences across the world, Tchaikovsky's music was often dismissed by critics in the early and mid-20th century as being vulgar and lacking in elevated thought. By the end of the 20th century, however, Tchaikovsky's status as a significant composer was generally regarded as secure.

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Music

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

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

Tchaikovsky wrote many works which are popular with the classical music public, including his Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, his three ballets (The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty) and Marche Slave. These, along with two of his four concertos, three of his six numbered symphonies and, of his 10 operas, The Queen of Spades and Eugene Onegin, are probably among his most familiar works. Almost as popular are the Manfred Symphony, Francesca da Rimini, the Capriccio Italien and the Serenade for Strings. His three string quartets and piano trio all contain beautiful passages, while recitalists still perform some of his 106 songs. Tchaikovsky also wrote over a hundred piano works, covering the entire span of his creative life. Brown has asserted that "while some of these can be challenging technically, they are mostly charming, unpretentious compositions intended for amateur pianists." He adds, however, that "there is more attractive and resourceful music in some of these pieces than one might be inclined to expect."

Creative range

Tchaikovsky's formal conservatory training allowed him to write works with Western-oriented attitudes and techniques. His music showcases a wide range and breadth of technique, from a poised "Classical" form simulating 18th century Rococo elegance, to a style more characteristic of Russian nationalists, or (according to Brown) a musical idiom expressly to channel his own overwrought emotions. Despite his reputation as a "weeping machine," self-expression was not a central principle for Tchaikovsky. In a letter to von Meck dated December 5, 1878, he explained there were two kinds of inspiration for a symphonic composer, a subjective and an objective one, and that program music could and should exist, just as it was impossible to demand that literature make do without the epic element and limit itself to lyricism alone. Correspondingly, the large scale orchestral works Tchaikovsky composed can be divided into two categories—symphonies in one category, and other works such as symphonic poems in the other. According to musicologist Francis Maes, program music such as Francesca da Rimini or the Manfred Symphony was as much a part of the composer's artistic credo as the expression of his "lyric ego." Maes also identifies a group of compositions which fall outside the dichotomy of program music versus "lyrical ego," where he hearkens toward pre-Romantic aesthetics. Works in this group include the four orchestral suites, Capriccio Italien, the Violin Concerto and the Serenade for Strings.

One of the recognizable characteristics of Tchaikovsky’s works is his use of harmony or rhythm to create a sudden, powerful release of emotion. Like the other Romantic composers of the era, Tchaikovsky colored his works with rich harmonies, utilizing German Augmented Sixth chords, minor triads with added major sixths, and augmented triads. These colorful harmonies progressed to moments of extreme emotion. Though the peaks were preceded by building tension, Tchaikovsky was often criticized for his lack of development throughout his material. Yet what critics failed to accept was that fact that Tchaikovsky was not attempting to smoothly develop his works, but rather disregard seamless flow and embrace the intense emotion created by momentous bursts of fervid harmonies.

Reception and reputation

Although Tchaikovsky's music has always been popular with audiences, it has at times been judged harshly by musicians and composers. However, his reputation as a significant composer is now generally regarded as secure. The initially criticized Swan Lake is currently seen as the first step in Tchaikovsky’s reputation as one of the most important and talented ballet composers. His music has won a significant following among concert audiences that is second only to the music of Beethoven, thanks in large part to what Harold C. Schonberg terms "a sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody ... touched with neuroticism, as emotional as a scream from a window on a dark night." According to Wiley, this combination of supercharged melody and surcharged emotion polarized listeners, with popular appeal of Tchaikovsky's music counterbalanced by critical disdain of it as vulgar and lacking in elevated thought or philosophy. More recently, Tchaikovsky's music has received a professional reevaluation, with musicians reacting more favorably to its tunefulness and craftsmanship.

Public considerations

Tchaikovsky believed that his professionalism in combining skill and high standards in his musical works separated him from his contemporaries in The Five. He shared several of their ideals, including an emphasis on national character in music. His aim, however, was to link those ideals to a standard high enough to satisfy Western European criteria. His professionalism also fueled his desire to reach a broad public, not just nationally but internationally, which he would eventually do.

He may also have been influenced by the almost "eighteenth-century" patronage prevalent in Russia at the time, which was still strongly influenced by its aristocracy. In this style of patronage, the patron and the artist often met on equal terms. Dedications of works to patrons were not gestures of humble gratitude but expressions of artistic partnership. The dedication of the Fourth Symphony to Nadezhda von Meck is known to be a seal on their friendship. Tchaikovsky's relationship with Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich bore creative fruit in the Six Songs, Op. 63, for which the grand duke wrote the words. Tchaikovsky found no aesthetic conflict in playing to the tastes of his audiences, though it was never established that he satisfied any other tastes but his own. The patriotic themes and stylization of 18th-century melodies in his works lined up with the values of the Russian aristocracy.

Compositional style

According to Brown in the New Grove (1980), Tchaikovsky's melodies ranged "from Western style to folksong stylizations and occasionally folksongs themselves." His use of repetitions within these melodies generally reflect the sequential style of Western practices, which he sometimes extended at immense length, building "into an emotional experience of almost unbearable intensity." He experimented occasionally with unusual meters, although more usually, as in his dance tunes, he employed a firm, essentially regular meter that "sometimes becomes the main expressive agent in some movements due to its vigorous use." Tchaikovsky also practiced a wide range of harmony, 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; the latter was a practice more typically used by The Five. Since Tchaikovsky wrote most of his music for the orchestra, his musical textures became increasingly conditioned by the orchestral colors he employed, especially after the Second Orchestral Suite. Brown maintains that while the composer was grounded in Western orchestral practices, he "preferred bright and sharply differentiated orchestral coloring in the tradition established by Glinka." He tends to exploit primarily the treble instruments for their "fleet delicacy," though he balances this tendency with "a matching exploration of the darker, even gloomy sounds of the bass instruments."

Impact

Wiley cites Tchaikovsky as "the first composer of a new Russian type, fully professional, who firmly assimilated traditions of Western European symphonic mastery; in a deeply original, personal and national style he unified the symphonic thought of Beethoven and Schumann with the works of Glinka, and transformed Liszt's and Berlioz's achievements in depictive-programmatic music into matters of Shakespearean elevation and psychological import."

Holden maintains that Tchaikovsky was the first legitimate professional Russian composer, stating that only traditions of folksong and music for the Russian Orthodox Church existed before Tchaikovsky's birth. Holden continues, "Twenty years after Tchaikovsky's death, in 1913, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring erupted onto the musical scene, signalling Russia's arrival into 20th century music. Between these two very different worlds Tchaikovsky's music became the sole bridge."

Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov maintains that Tchaikovsky was perhaps the first Russian composer to think seriously about his country's place in European musical culture. As the composer wrote to Nadezhda von Meck from Paris,

How pleasant it is to be convinced firsthand of the success of our literature in France. Every book étalage displays translations of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky ... The newspapers are constantly printing rapturous articles about one or another of these writers. Perhaps such a time will come for Russian music as well!

Tchaikovsky became the first Russian composer to personally acquaint foreign audiences with his own works, as well as those of other Russian composers. He also formed close business and personal ties with many of the leading musicians of Europe and the United States. For Russians, Volkov asserts, this was all something new and unusual.

Finally, the impact of Tchaikovsky's own works, especially in ballet, cannot be underestimated; his mastery of danseuse (melodies which match physical movements perfectly), along with vivid orchestration, effective themes and continuity of thought were unprecedented in the genre, setting new standards for the role of music in classical ballet. Noel Goodwin characterized Swan Lake as "one of [ballet's] enduring masterworks" and The Sleeping Beauty as "the supreme example of 19th century classical ballet," while Wiley called the latter work "powerful, diverse and rhythmically complex."

See also

• Tchaikovsky in popular media

References

• ed Abraham, Gerald, Music of Tchaikovsky (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1946). ISBN n/a. OCLC 385829
  • Lockspeiser, Edward, "Tchaikovsky the Man"
  • Cooper, Martin, "The Symphonies"
  • Blom, Eric, "Works for Solo Instrument and Orchestra"
  • Wood, Ralph W., "Miscellaneous Orchestral Works"
  • Mason, Colin, "The Chamber Music"
  • Dickinson, A.E.F., "The Piano Music"
  • Abraham, Gerald, "Operas and Incidental Music"
  • Evans, Edwin, "The Ballets"
  • Alshvang, A., tr. I. Freiman, "The Songs"
  • Abraham, Gerald, "Religious and Other Choral Music"
• Brown, David, ed. Stanley Sadie, "Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich", The New Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (London: MacMillan, 1980), 20 vols. ISBN 0-333-23111-2.
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 1840–1874 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978). ISBN 0-393-07535-2.
• 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.
• Figes, Orlando, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002). ISBN 0-8050-5783-8 (hc.).
• Goodwin, Noel, ed. Stanley Sadie, "Dance: VI. 19th Century, (iv) The classical ballet in Russia to 1900", The New Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (London: MacMillan, 1980), 20 vols. ISBN 0-333-23111-2.
• Hanson, Lawrence and Hanson, Elisabeth, Tchaikovsky: The Man Behind the Music (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company). Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 66–13606.
• Holden, Anthony, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995). ISBN 0-679-42006-1.
• Jackson, Timothy L., Tchaikovsky, Symphony no. 6 (Pathétique) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ISBN 0-521-64676-6.
• 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). Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 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.
• Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, Letoppis Moyey Muzykalnoy Zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1909), published in English as My Musical Life (New York: Knopf, 1925, 3rd ed. 1942). ISBN n/a.
• 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).
• Tchaikovsky, Modest, Zhizn P.I. Chaykovskovo [Tchaikovsky's life], 3 vols. (Moscow, 1900–1902).
• Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, Perepiska s N.F. von Meck [Correspondence with Nadzehda von Meck], 3 vols. (Moscow and Lenningrad, 1934–1936).
• Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, Polnoye sobraniye sochinery: literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska [Complete Edition: literary works and correspondence], 17 vols. (Moscow, 1953–1981).
• Volkov, Solomon, tr. Bouis, Antonina W., St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1995). ISBN 0-02-874052-1.
• Warrack, John, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969). Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 78–105437.
• Warrack, John, Tchaikovsky (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973). SBN 684-13558-2.
• Wiley, Roland John, Tchaikovsky's Ballets (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). ISBN 0-198-16249-9.
• Wiley, Roland John. "Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition (London: Macmillian, 2001). ISBN 1-56159-239-0.

• Zajaczkowski, Henry. Tchaikovsky's Musical Style (Russian Music Studies, 19). Ann Arbor, MI: Umi Research Pr, 1987.

Further reading

• Kamien, Roger. Music: An Appreciation. Mcgraw-Hill College; 3rd edition (August 1, 1997). ISBN 0-07-036521-0.
• ed. John Knowles Paine, Theodore Thomas, and Karl Klauser (1891). Famous Composers and Their Works, J.B. Millet Company.
• E. Evans : Tchaikovsky (London, 1906/R, 3/1966)
• Garden, Edward. Tchaikovsky.. New York: London: Dent 1973. (Master Musicians), 1973
• Holden, Anthony. Tchaikovsky. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Penguin, 1997.
• L. and E. Hanson : Tchaikovsky: a New Study of the Man and his Music (London, 1965)
• Meck Galina Von, Tchaikovsky Ilyich Piotr, Young Percy M. Tchaikovsky Cooper Square Publishers; 1st Cooper Square Press edition (October, 2000) ISBN 0-8154-1087-5.
• Meck, Nadezhda Von, Tchaikovsky Peter Ilyich, To My Best Friend: Correspondence Between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda Von Meck 1876–1878 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) ISBN 0-19-816158-1.
• Meck, Galina von. Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky: Letters to His Family: An Autobiography.
• Review: Brown, David. "Review: Tchaikovsky Revealed." The Musical Times, 123 (Jan., 1982): 32
• Norris, Geoffrey. "Tchaikovsky and the 18th Century." The Musical Times 118 (1977),715-16.
• Poznansky, Alexander & Langston, Brett The Tchaikovsky Handbook: A guide to the man and his music. (Indiana University Press, 2002).

  Vol. 1. Thematic Catalogue of Works, Catalogue of Photographs, Autobiography. ISBN 0-253-33921-9.

  Vol. 2. Catalogue of Letters, Genealogy, Bibliography. ISBN 0-253-33947-2.

• Poznansky, Alexander, Tchaikovsky's Last Days, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), ISBN 0-19-816596-X.
• Warrack, John Hamilton. Tchaikovsky Ballet Music (BBC Music Guides, 41). The Art Institute of Chicago: Olympic Marketing Corp, 1980.
• Review: Garden, Edward. "Review: Tchaikovsky in Perspective," The Musical Times (Oct. 1979), 831.
• Bowen, Catherine Drinker and Barbara Von Meck, "BELOVED FRIEND": THE STORY OF TCHAIKOWSKY AND NADEJDA VON MECK, New York: Random House (1937).

External links

• Tchaikovsky Research
• Istituto Musicale Tchaikovsky Template:It icon
• Tchaikovsky – biography, works and miscellaneous
• PBS Great Performances biography of Tchaikovsky
• Tchaikovsky: listen to a playlist on Magazzini Sonori Template:It icon
• Biography of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
• Tchaikovsky cylinder recordings, from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
• Tchaikovsky performances on ClassicalTV
• How Homosexual Was Tchaikovsky? by Petr Beckmann

Public domain sheet music

• www.kreusch-sheet-music.net Free Scores by Tchaikovsky
• Mutopia Project Tchaikovsky Sheet Music at Mutopia
• Free scores by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
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• Free scores by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)

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