#Tchia classical music series

The symphony is dominated by the idea of fate, represented by a fierce motto hurled out by the brass at the start, and the immense first movement, with its spectral dances and intimations of disillusionment, twists conventional symphonic structure into something radically new and intensely personal. Onegin, based on Pushkin’s verse novel, is a work of deep, contained sadness, remarkable for its psychological realism and restrained dramaturgy that to some extent brings it closer to the later theatre of Chekhov than to anything else conventionally operatic. Nothing in his later correspondence suggests a man troubled by his sexuality.Īt the time of his marriage, he was working on his Fourth Symphony and had begun the opera Eugene Onegin, both completed in 1878. Tchaikovsky, however, subsequently came to accept “that which I am by nature”, as he told his brother Anatoly in 1878. The marriage, however, was disastrous: the couple separated after nine weeks, but never divorced. Of necessity, Tchaikovsky’s relationships with men had always been, and were to remain, discreet, and his decision is frequently ascribed to a combination of guilt and a fear of public exposure at a time when his reputation was steadily growing. Homosexuality was illegal in Russia, though accepted in aristocratic and artistic circles. In 1877, there was a crisis when Tchaikovsky decided to marry Antonina Miliukova, a former pupil who had written him several love letters. The year 1876 also marked the start of his relationship with Nadezhda von Meck, widow of a wealthy railroad engineer and a great admirer of Tchaikovsky’s music, who offered him an annual allowance on condition that they never meet. The Royal Ballet perform Swan Lake in March 2020. In his later correspondence, Tchaikovsky admitted to being overawed and also professed himself puzzled by Tolstoy’s ambivalence to Beethoven. They met several times but no record of their conversations survive. Tolstoy had been moved to tears by the Andante Cantabile from Tchaikovsky’s First String Quartet, and, while on a visit to Moscow in 1876 to oversee the publication of Anna Karenina, arrived unannounced at the Conservatory and insisted on speaking with the composer. Tchaikovsky’s career as a composer coincided with the great 19th-century flowering of Russian literature, set in motion by Pushkin and Lermontov in the 1820s and 30s and dominated in the 1860s and 70s by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Swan Lake, meanwhile, was considered overly symphonic at its 1877 premiere, and only became successful when it was re-choreographed by Marius Petipa for the Mariinsky theatre in 1895, two years after Tchaikovsky’s death. It was taken up by the German pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow, who gave the first performance in Boston the same year. His beautiful Third Symphony “Polish” dates from 1875, as does his First Piano Concerto, intended for Nikolay Rubinstein, who initially rubbished it as unplayable, a judgment he later regretted.

#Tchia classical music series

It was Balakirev who suggested to Tchaikovsky the subject of Romeo and Juliet, begun in 1869, and the first of a series of symphonic poems that includes The Tempest (1873), Francesca da Rimini (1876) and Hamlet (1888). His academic position, meanwhile, resulted in his being viewed warily by the nationalist, largely self-taught circle of composers, headed by Mily Balakirev and including Mussorgsky and Borodin, who dismissed conservatoire training as western and therefore “foreign”, though they admired Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony “Little Russian”, rooted in Ukrainian folk music. The first of his operas, The Voyevoda, was performed at the Bolshoi in 1869, but Tchaikovsky subsequently destroyed the score, reusing some of its material in later works. He always claimed it cost him more anguish than any of his other works.

His melancholy First Symphony “Winter Daydreams”, begun in 1866, marked the emergence of his individual voice. Highly strung, he was prone to self-doubt, which plagued him throughout his career.

Plagued by self-doubt … Tchaikovsky, photographed as a young man.