Tchaikovsky. Deep Emotion Of A Russian Soul – Part One

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music.  My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you.

And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for today it is… the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Now as I planned the episode I just kept stumbling onto more and more music that deserved inclusion. And whilst that could be said of any of the composers I’ve devoted a single episode to; there is something about the large scale of the works that Tchaikovsky composed. He worked on a big canvas and to give you an overview of his output that includes representative works has demanded quite a bit of music. And that can only be a good thing but that would make a very long episode.

So ‘Tchaikovsky’ is the first double episode for Classical For Everyone. If plans go well both episodes will be released at about the same time. So you can get the full experience or save part two for later.

Ok. Part One. If you know much about Tchaikovsky it might be that his life was in some senses tragic. Search for his biography and the frustrations and disappointments of his personal life will dominate the results. But this can perhaps be balanced by the pretty incredible success that he had as a composer and a conductor during his lifetime. One example. He was featured as one of the two conductors at the opening night of New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1891. For that performance and some others in the Opening Week Festival for the Hall… Tchaikovsky was paid $2,500. Which sounds like a modest sum but that is over $80,000 in today’s money.

I’ll give you some biography through the show but let’s get going with some music. Amongst his earliest successes was his first concerto for piano and orchestra completed in 1875 when he was 35. Despite a lukewarm reaction from a few critics whose names are now lost in the mists of time, the concerto found popularity with audiences almost from the very beginning. It remains pretty popular and it is in fact one of the most recorded pieces of classical music of all time. There are easily over two hundred recordings available.  So, which one to play. Well the one I’ve chosen is the subject of much vociferous debate on the internet but let’s not be troubled by that. Trust me when I say it is a great pianist and a great conductor and a great orchestra. Here with the amazing 22 minute opening of Tchaikovsky’s 1^st Piano Concerto is the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the conductor Herbert von Karajan and the pianist Sviatoslav Richter.  

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That was the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the conductor Herbert von Karajan and the pianist Sviatoslav Richter with the opening of this week’s featured composer Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s 1^st Piano Concerto.

The next piece I am going to play you I only heard at a concert a couple of months back and that might have been the moment when I went… ‘Hmmm Tchaikovsky’. In May 1878 the composer spent a two week vacation at the country property of the railway heiress Nadezhda von Meck, who was his patroness for 13 years and correspondent in over 1200 letters but who fascinatingly Tchaikovsky never actually met. If you have the time you could do worse than look up Nadezhda von Meck on Wikipedia. A quite remarkable person and her importance in Tchaikovsky’s life can’t be underestimated. Anyway on her property he completed a work for violin and piano… the only time he wrote for this combination of instruments… and he called it ‘Memory of a Beloved Place’. Here is the opening section called ‘Meditation’. The violinist is Johan Dalene and the pianist is Peter Friis Johansson. It is about 9 minutes long.

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That was the opening of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Memory of a Beloved Place’. The violinist was Johan Dalene and the pianist was Peter Friis Johansson. Now here is a little 90 second biography…

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in 1840, in Votkinsk, a small town in the Russian Empire about 1,000km east of Moscow by road, where his father worked as a mining engineer. Tchaikovsky initially studied law in St. Petersburg and worked as a civil servant. But due to an irresistible passion for music at the relatively late age of 21, he enrolled in the newly founded St. Petersburg Conservatory to study composition.

His early professional years were marked by both struggle and gradual recognition. In 1866, he moved to Moscow to teach at the Moscow Conservatory, where he began composing his first major works.

This music uniquely blended Western European compositional techniques with distinctly Russian melodic and harmonic elements, creating a style that was both internationally appealing and unmistakably Russian.

The 1870s and 1880s saw Tchaikovsky reach artistic maturity and international fame. He composed a remarkable series of masterworks during these decades, including the ballet "The Sleeping Beauty", his last three symphonies, the opera "Eugene Onegin," and the "1812 Overture.". And I will be playing you excerpts from most of these.

Despite this success, Tchaikovsky struggled with depression and anxiety throughout his life and darker emotions often found their way into his intensely personal musical expressions. His life was also complicated by his homosexuality, which had to be concealed from the world as it was both illegal and socially unacceptable in 19th-century Russia. But as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, in spite of these challenges he reached astonishing professional heights… successfully conducting his works through Europe and North America from his late 40s onwards.

Tchaikovsky died on November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg most likely from cholera at the age of 53.

Back to the music. I’ll tell you a little about the next work after I play it but I think many people’s earliest exposure to Tchaikovsky is this one… his ‘1812 Overture’ written in 1880. Here is the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antal Dorati. It is a bit over 16 minutes long. It starts quietly.

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That was Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Antal Dorati. The thing most people who know it, know about the 1812 Overture is that it needs cannons. But here are another couple of details. It was written for the planned completion of a church that was being built to celebrate the retreat of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army from Russia in 1812. But the church was still not finished in time so it was performed in a tent beside the construction site. And the assassination of Tsar Alexander II a little earlier in the year had dampened the enthusiasm for celebrations. And one of the incredibly successful aspects of the composition is that Tchaikovsky liberally quotes from both the Russian and the French national anthems. That is the real battle taking place. The cannons at the end are there to mark the Russian victory.

Ok. Next. Music for a few less instruments. Here is the beautiful slow section from Tchaikovsky’s 1^st String Quartet… one of his earliest works from 1871. It is about 7 minutes long and is performed here by the Esmé Quartet.

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That was the slow section from Tchaikovsky’s 1^st String Quartet performed by the Esmé Quartet. I hope you are enjoying this first of two all-Tchaikovsky episodes. Next up is one of the choruses from his opera Eugene Onegin from 1879 based on the verse novel by Alexander Pushkin. Tchaikovsky wrote 11 operas and two of them are still regularly performed internationally. Onegin and The Queen Of Spades… also based on a work  by Pushkin. But Onegin is today considerably more popular. Early in the opera some peasants sing a teasing folk song to celebrate the harvest. It is about a handsome stranger arriving in a village and a certain degree of competition amongst the local girls for his affections. Here is the Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by James Levine.

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That was the Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by James Levine with the Peasant’s Chorus from the 1^st Act of Tchaikovsky’s opera ‘Eugene Onegin’. And that is the end of Part One of the two part ‘Classical For Everyone’  Tchaikovsky special. I’ll save the credits and calls to action for Part Two. Which should be available right now on all the usual platforms.

So... Thanks for listening.