Tchaikovsky’s Theatre

Encyclopaedia Britannica calls him the most popular Russian composer of all time. The sentence is not a slight. It is a fact about what travelled: Swan Lake in 1877, The Sleeping Beauty in 1889, The Nutcracker in 1892; the Romeo and Juliet overture of 1870; Symphony No. 6, the Pathétique, in 1893. Carnegie Hall, opening in New York on 5 May 1891, asked him to launch the building. He conducted his Marche Solennelle that night and played three more times in the opening week. Popularity, here, is not a later marketing word. It is the sound a city already thinks it knows before it has a name for the man.

He was born on 25 April 1840, Old Style — 7 May New Style — in Votkinsk. In 1854 his mother died of cholera. Britannica records the boy’s last years at school in the shadow of that death, and, at the other end of the life, his own death from complications of cholera in St Petersburg on 25 October 1893, Old Style — 6 November New Style — while an epidemic moved through the city. Rumours of suicide have been revived by some biographers; Britannica says they cannot be supported by documentary evidence. The two choleras are not a symbol he arranged. They are the bookends a biography is stuck with. Between them he wrote the music that made Russian ballet a European sentence.

Nikolai Kuznetsov painted him in 1893, the last year, for the Tretyakov: oil, a public face. Alfred Fedecki photographed him in Kharkov on 14 March that year, Old Style, aged fifty-two. The earlier photograph, about 1870, is the young man of Romeo and Juliet. Britannica’s years of fame include a European journey at the end of 1875: Carmen in Paris impressed him powerfully; Wagner’s Ring at Bayreuth the next summer left him cold. He finished the fantasia Francesca da Rimini in November 1876 and felt particularly pleased. The taste is a map. He would take from France a lesson in theatrical truth and leave German music-drama to those who wanted it. Russian ballet, when he wrote it, would not sound like a duty to a school. It would sound like a theatre that had decided to sing.

Swan Lake was the first of the three ballets. Tchaikovsky Research, the scholarly catalogue of his works, dates the score from August 1875 to April 1876, with additions in 1877. The manuscript title was The Lake of Swans. He wrote to Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov that he had taken the Moscow commission partly for the money, which he needed, and partly because he had long wanted to try this type of music. Two acts were already in outline by August 1875, after the Third Symphony. The first performance was at the Bolshoi on 20 February 1877, Old Style — 4 March New Style — a benefit for Pelageya Karpakova, choreographed by Julius Reisinger. Britannica’s Swan Lake article places the debut in March 1877 at that theatre. After seeing Delibes’s Sylvia in Vienna he told Nadezhda von Meck that Swan Lake was poorer by far. The comparison is his, not a later slight. The lakeside music did not yet know it would outlive the slight.

Swan Lake

Act II, No. 10, the Scène, is the lakeside everyone means: an oboe line, harp, the flock as a single instrument. Tchaikovsky Research lists it among the original numbers, Moderato, seventy bars in the catalogue’s count for that scene’s first page of action. After his death, Modest Tchaikovsky and Riccardo Drigo refashioned the ballet; Lev Ivanov staged Act II in St Petersburg in 1894; the full posthumous production at the Mariinsky on 15 January 1895, Old Style — 27 January New Style — with Pierina Legnani as Odette and Odile, is the version later stages inherited. In 1888, in Prague, Act II was already the first Russian ballet shown abroad in the composer’s presence. He had told his publisher, when asked which act to give outdoors, to choose the second, not the fourth. The second is the lake. The lake is the reputation.

The American week in 1891 sits between the last two ballets. Britannica says he was invited for the inauguration of Carnegie Hall, conducted before enthusiastic audiences in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and came home to finish Iolanta and The Nutcracker. Carnegie Hall’s own history names him the pre-eminent living figure in late-nineteenth-century classical music, the celebrity with enough gravitas to open the house. The Nutcracker, Op. 71, was written and orchestrated between February 1891 and April 1892, after E. T. A. Hoffmann as adapted by Alexandre Dumas. The premiere, with Iolanta, was at the Mariinsky on 6 December 1892, Old Style — 18 December New Style — conducted by Drigo, staged by Lev Ivanov. Antonietta Dell’Era danced the Sugar-Plum Fairy. In the score Tchaikovsky noted that the celesta part should be played by a good pianist, and that if the instrument was missing the dance might be played on the piano. The glass sound was not an accident. It was an instruction.

The Nutcracker

The Sugar-Plum dance is a minute of clockwork that has to remain tender. Celesta, not charm for its own sake: a new colour asked to behave like a character. The Sleeping Beauty, 1889, is the middle sister of the trilogy, the court ballet Britannica names between lake and nutcracker. Together the three scores did what Italian and French ballet music had long done for other capitals: they made a night at the theatre a nation’s visiting card. He is not, in these works, a folklorist of The Five. He is a professional of the Imperial theatres who happened to write tunes the street would later whistle. The whistling does not make the orchestration small. It makes the orchestration famous.

Before the ballets there was already a concert manner that could hold a theatre without dancers. Romeo and Juliet, 1870, is among the works Britannica names beside the Pathétique. The young photograph, about that year, is the face of a man who had not yet been asked to open a hall in New York. Francesca da Rimini pleased him; the Ring did not. The difference is a temperament: he would rather a story sung than a myth argued. When the Imperial theatres later asked for swans and sugar-plums, they were asking the same temperament to walk on stage. The lake is a story. The celesta is a character. The festival overture is a story he did not love and told anyway.

The concert piece the world thinks it knows best is not a ballet. The Year 1812, Op. 49, was composed between September and November 1880 for an exhibition concert in Moscow, to commemorate Russia’s defeat of Napoleon. Tchaikovsky Research prints the letters. Nikolay Rubinstein, through the publisher Jurgenson, wanted a ceremonial work. Tchaikovsky asked for a fee, a length, a subject, and confessed an extreme aversion to glorifying what did not inspire him — neither a jubilee nor a cathedral that did not appeal. On 18 September 1880, Old Style, Rubinstein asked for something in any form, fifteen to twenty-five minutes. The official premiere, delayed after the assassination of Alexander II, was on 8 August 1882, Old Style — 20 August New Style — under Ippolit Altani at the All-Russian Arts and Industrial Exhibition. Tchaikovsky conducted the overture thirteen times, more than any other of his works. The cannons in the score, he told Jurgenson, were a theatre drum. The noise was an instruction, not a battlefield.

The Overture will be very loud and noisy — but I wrote it without any warm and loving feelings, and consequently it will probably be lacking in artistic merit.

To von Meck, a few days earlier, he had already said there was nothing more antipathetic than composing for festivities, and asked what one could write for an exhibition besides banalities and noisy passages. He did not refuse. He called it a disagreeable task and then, to his brother Anatoly, reported that he had finished the exhibition overture with speed. In 1882 he told Jurgenson he did not know whether 1812 was good or bad, but rather thought it the former. The last minutes — bells, hymn, the festival cadence — are the part a park concert still uses as national weather. The letter stands beside the coda without cancelling it. He could dislike the occasion and still write the noise that would outlive it.

In February 1893 he began the Sixth Symphony, which Britannica says was destined to become his most celebrated orchestral work. Nine days after its premiere he was dead. The Pathétique and the cholera sit in the same autumn; the suicide rumours sit in the same sentence and, on Britannica’s evidence, should not be allowed to finish it. What remains is easier to hear than to narrate: a lake, a celesta, a coda with bells, a last symphony that asks a hall to sit in a minor key and not get up. He is the composer who made Russian music travel as tune rather than as argument. After him, a swan is never only a bird. It is a line of oboe that has already happened in the listener before the curtain has finished rising.

The Sleeping Beauty, 1889, is easy to skip if you came for the lake or the cannons. Britannica names it as the middle of the trilogy, the court ballet between Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. A sleeping house, a waltz, a hundred years that pass as music rather than as plot. It is the Imperial theatre at full furniture: not a folk night, not a children’s party, a ceremony that knows how long a phrase can last. If Swan Lake is a story about a vow, and The Nutcracker a story about a gift that grows a world, The Sleeping Beauty is a story about time agreeing to wait. The visitor who finds it merely pretty has not yet heard how patience can be orchestration.

He was not one of The Five. The distinction matters if you arrive from Mussorgsky. Britannica’s nationalist school is a different argument: speech, folk night, a refusal of conservatory polish. Tchaikovsky trained as a professional of the Moscow Conservatory world, wrote for the Imperial theatres, and took from Carmen a lesson in theatrical truth while leaving Wagner’s Ring cold. Popularity is the result, not a betrayal of a school he did not join. Carnegie Hall did not open with a promenade among Hartmann’s watercolours. It opened with a living celebrity who could fill a new room. Both facts can be true in one culture. A country that has a lake and a hut on fowl’s legs is richer than a country that must choose.

The Pathétique is the last orchestral word Britannica gives him as celebrity. Begun in February 1893, premiered days before the cholera, it is the work later ears hear as farewell whether or not the composer arranged a farewell. The rumours that would make the symphony a suicide note are, on the encyclopaedia’s showing, without documentary support. What the score supports is simpler and harder: a slow ending that will not rise into triumph because triumph is not what the argument has earned. Listeners who know only 1812’s bells have not yet sat in that minor key. The bells are a festival. The Sixth is a room after the guests have gone.

The overture is a collage of other people’s tunes as much as a festival. Tchaikovsky Research lists the borrowings: the opening prayer Lord, preserve thy people; a motif from his own opera The Voyevoda; the folksong By the Gates, which he had already arranged in 1868; quotations of the Marseillaise; and, in the coda, Aleksey Lvov’s God Save the Tsar of 1833. He asked that the bells be large and of one pitch, struck as celebratory ringing, and that the cannon be the theatre’s suspended drum. Early printed editions carried a subtitle about the consecration of the Church of the Saviour. An optional military band joins the coda. Duration, the catalogue says, is around fifteen to twenty minutes. The collage is the method. The letter to von Meck is the mood. Both belong to the same weeks in 1880.

Jurgenson’s first letter, in May 1880, offered three ceremonial doors: an overture to open the exhibition; an overture for Alexander II’s silver jubilee; or a cantata for the consecration of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, built to commemorate the same defeat. Tchaikovsky Research prints the reply. He would not lift a finger until something was commissioned: a fee, a length, a subject. Ceremonial work, he said, needed precise instructions; the other inspiration came from the heart. He confessed extreme aversion to glorifying a jubilee or a cathedral that did not appeal. Rubinstein then asked for a piece in any form, fifteen to twenty-five minutes. The dislike did not cancel the job. It only made the noise honest. He could refuse the mood and still accept the table.

In the same October letter that called the overture loud and without warm feelings, he told von Meck he had written two things with good speed: the festival overture and a Serenade for String Orchestra in four movements, both then being orchestrated little by little. The muse, he said, had been kind. The serenade is not in the park programme that kept 1812. It is the other work from the same table. A visitor who only knows the cannons has not heard what he wrote when the burden was being lifted. The catalogue places both completions in that autumn of 1880. One became national weather. The other remained a room of strings.

From The Nutcracker he compiled a concert suite of eight numbers, the form in which many halls still meet the sugar-plums without the mice. Tchaikovsky Research records Modest’s report that the composer was very little pleased by the subject — more precisely by the scenario, since Hoffmann’s tale had long ranked high in his estimation and was why he agreed. Vsevolozhsky wrote to him in August 1891 of agonies of remorse for asking him to do a ballet he knew was unappealing. The celesta instruction remains: a good pianist, and a piano if the new instrument is missing. A complete performance of the ballet lasts around ninety minutes. The suite is how the ninety became a visiting card. The mice stayed in the theatre. The glass sound travelled.

Begin with the lakeside Scène if you want the reason his name is a ballet word. Stay for the Sugar-Plum dance if you want to hear how a new instrument became a character. 1812 is allowed, even required, once you have read the letter that calls it loud and then listen to the loudness anyway. Romeo and Juliet is the earlier door, from 1870, the year the young photograph still looks like a future. The Sleeping Beauty is the court that learned to wait in three-four time. He wrote, Britannica says, seven symphonies’ worth of orchestral argument and more than a hundred songs. The visitor who only knows the cannons has met the festival and missed the lake. The lake is still there, older than the fireworks, and it does not need them in order to be true.