Petr Iljič Čajkovskij, foto z roku 1888

After Glinka Tchaikovsky was another founding figure of Russian musical culture, one who brought together what had formerly been opposing tendencies in Russian music. He was the first Russian music professional whose primary livelihood was not concertizing, conducting or teaching but rather composing. Thanks to that situation, the number of works completed by the composer is quite substantial and varied in genre, with a balance in quantity and quality of absolute, programme and theatre music. Psychologically he was an extremely colourful and heterogeneous personality, something that has paradoxically evoked many interpretations leading to rash and simplistic conclusions.

Mining engineer Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky and his family moved around in accordance with his various places of employment, and little Pyotr thus experienced life not only in Moscow and Saint Petersburg but also in Votkinsk in Udmurtia and Alapayevsk in the Urals. From the memoirs of persons close to the composer – a governess and a sister – it is clear that his extraordinary talents first revealed themselves mainly with his singular feel for words and his consummate mastery of foreign languages as he was able both to read and write French and German at the age of six. That he became a world-class figure was due to the fact that much like Janáček’s, his parents stressed a high-quality education more than emotional bonds so that the ten-year-old Pyotr felt very lonely in Saint Petersburg. Although he spent the 1850s studying law, this did not mean that the maturing composer neglected his training in music: his school allowed for musical education as well as attendance at top-quality concerts. After his graduation in 1859, he received a position in the Ministry of Justice, and it seems that he was a successful official, being promoted three times during his first eight months.

The year 1859 saw the founding of the Russian Musical Society, which a year later
began offering instruction to the public; 1862 brought the opening of the first Russian school of music, the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. In autumn 1861 Tchaikovsky began taking courses in music theory and then after that, turned down the offer of another promotion so that he could as one of its very first students enrol in the conservatory. Its founder and director, pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, took a liking to Tchaikovsky. During a mere three years of conservatory studies in theory, composition, piano, flute and organ, the young lawyer developed into a very capable musician and a first-rank composer. He gave up any idea of returning to public service when Rubinstein’s brother Nikolai offered him a position as professor in the newly opened conservatory in Moscow (1866).

Starting in the early 1960s the Russian musical scene was divided into two quite different and irreconcilable camps. The official elite around the two conservatories (and the two Rubinsteins) were conservative advocates of Western musical models, especially German and Italian ones. In contrast to them a group of growing influence composed of musical amateurs fired by radically nationalistic sentiments, known as the Mighty Handful, formed around Vladimir Stasov and Mily Balakirev. The fierce quarrels between these two camps were waged mostly in the press and in music reviews. The extremely sensitive Tchaikovsky was automatically assumed to favour the conservatives, and that could hardly be a surprise seeing that he had received a splendid conservatory education in music and that personally and professionally he was closely tied to the Rubinstein brothers. And yet emotionally he felt drawn to those in search of original Russian musical expression, and after timid beginnings he maintained regular contact with the Mighty Handful. He kept the threat of open conflict at bay by maintaining for the rest of his life a polite distance from the radicals on both sides. As a composer he managed to combine the best qualities of both camps and thus to resolve the Western versus Russian conflict once and for all.

The documentation on Tchaikovsky’s personality and character is substantial and heterogeneous, and it suggests that not even psychology as we know it now in the early 21st century would find it an easy task, were it to have the opportunity of dealing with the composer while he was still alive. On one hand, he was a bon vivant, an exemplary worker, a practical joker and a welcome, noisy companion; on the other hand, he tended to depression and melancholy, suffering fits of rage and anxiety, being someone incapable of coping with his personal problems, a heavy smoker and an irresponsible debauchee. A common thread running through all the reports is the strong, deep emotion that overrides all the other aspects of his personality. One much hashed-over question, the importance of which increases along with the reader’s fondness for the intimate taboo details fit for the tabloids, is Tchaikovsky’s possible orientation to his own sex. The growing general conviction of this is more a comment on today’s society than on Tchaikovsky. Irrefutable proof of his orientation does not exist (in contrast to the indisputable homosexuality of the composer’s brother Modest); those who believe Tchaikovsky was homosexual are persuaded by the many indications of problems in his relation to women, his warm comradely relations to men and references in his private correspondence.

Even more disconcerting are the speculations about the composer’s possible suicide. In this regard we can blame the unfortunate role played in the 20th century by musicology as practiced by emigrants from the Soviet Union to the West, who were more intent on rectifying the official ceremonial Soviet hagiography and in some cases overeager for quick success and attention. Yes, homosexuality and suicide are possibilities in Tchaikovsky’s case, and they would fit in perfectly with the logic of a Hollywood film like Forman’s Amadeus. Let those whom such information serves as a stronger motivation to get to know his music thus carry on for the reputation of the composer and the good of the cause. In truth, however, such ideas are merely a tabloid simplification of an obviously more complicated reality, similar to many others the history of music has known and which have next to nothing to do with music. We are quite familiar with the myths about the wicked, intriguing Salieri, the oversexed and godless Janáček and the syphilitic Smetana.

Alongside his mother, loss of contact with whom caused his early trauma, two other women play fundamental roles in Tchaikovsky’s life. His marriage to Antonina Miliukova in 1877 remains a mystery still today. Whatever the unstable groom may have been hoping to receive from his relationship with her, the result was his mental breakdown and his abandoning his wife forever after less than two months without ever being divorced. This traumatic event changed the composer’s life: his composing underwent a serious crisis, and he left the conservatory and spent his time travelling about Europe. A much more fortunate event for him was his association with Nadezhda von Meck This mother of thirteen children very definitely departed from the traditional role of a woman and housewife of her times when she thought up and planned for her husband the project of building railways; and after the successful realization of her plan, the family became one of the wealthiest in all Russia. When her husband died suddenly in 1873, she withdrew from society, conducting her business matters together with her children and devoting herself to other activities, among them the support of the arts. In the year of Tchaikovsky’s failed marriage, she came into contact with the composer, and they remained so for thirteen years. Over and above her generous financial support, it also produced an enormous amount of confidential communications (the letters between them total something like 1200), in which she became the composer’s confidant in spite of their never having met in person.

Tchaikovsky’s music took on the typically melancholy emotional charge for which it is today so much loved only gradually, mainly in connection with his leanings toward the solutions of the Mighty Handful. His early works are little known and have been for the most part lost or destroyed, only a few fundamentally revised works having been preserved. In the area of programme music, inspiration coming from Shakespeare’s works plays an important role, and Tchaikovsky worked on them jointly with Balakirev. The most popular of them is the programmatic overture Romeo and Juliet. He is in his six symphonies much closer to Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov than to his beloved Beethoven. His weakness for tender, compelling and asymmetrical melody does not leave room for any sophisticated thematic elaboration. One important aspect of his late symphonies is his growing fondness for musical quotation when, as would later be the case with Shostakovich, the principle of programme music is enhanced by the pulverizing of any meaning into something vague and mysterious. Among his concerto compositions the works that stand out by their boundless popularity are the Piano Concerto in B minor and the Violin Concerto in D major. As for his chamber music, many works for piano are well-known as are his three string quartets, his piano trio, and his songs and romances.

For many, the greatest works Tchaikovsky has left us are those for the musical theatre. His three ballets (Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker) changed the classical Minkus musical language of Russian ballet of that time. Along with the opera Eugene Onegin, they have become what Beethoven’s Ninth is for the Germans and what Libuše or My Country is for the Czechs. Besides Onegin, however, he wrote ten other operas which surprise us by the diversity of their subjects and their dramatic elaboration. Of his other works we should mention his liturgical sacred music, in particular, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and his Vespers.

Tchaikovsky’s many contacts with the culture of the Czechlands include two visits to Prague in 1888 when he conducted the very first performance ever of Onegin outside Russia. He was also a very close friend of Dvořák’s, whom he invited in 1890 to give concerts in Moscow and Saint Petersburg (and whom one year later he closely preceded in New York concert halls). A less widely known work is his choral Hymn in Honour of Saints Cyril and Methodius on the melody and a Russian translation of the traditional Czech sacred song.

During the 19th century Russian music developed with rocket speed from having to import musicians and compositions through relative self-sufficiency to achieving its own individual style and the capability of gaining success in the West. Tchaikovsky was the foremost figure in the last of these phases, and as the first top-rank export item, he stimulated the demand for other Russian composers, something the enterprising Petersburg intellectual Sergei Diaghilev was quick to exploit at the beginning of the 20th century with the gradual breakthrough of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky in Paris. The definitive triumph of Russian music in the world’s theatres and concert halls had been accomplished.

Author: Jan Špaček

Typ profilu: 
Osobnost (politik, vědec, herec….)
Téma: 
Klasika
Titulek obrázku: 
Petr Iljič Čajkovskij, foto z roku 1888
Administrační tagy: 
D-dur_Composers
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* 25 April / 7 May 1840 Votkinsk, Udmurtia (Russia)† 25 October / 6 November 1893 Saint Petersburg

Composers