20. Tchaikovsky (1840—1893)

The music of Russia, with its rich harmonies, is typical of that exotic and rugged country, and the folk songs of the people play an important part in it. In Russia the people have always found an outlet for their emotions in song. There are songs for all the seasons, for work, games and dances, for marriages and deaths, and like the folk songs of most northern nations, they are tinged with many minor cadences.

One popular Russian composer whose music mirrors the deep emotional character of his people is Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky.

As a child he was keenly emotional and his mother watched carefully to guard him against any strain that would enhance this tendency. At seven years of age, the boy began the study of the piano, but at this time had no particular enthusiasm for music. One day at the age of twelve he was taken to see Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, and at once he formed an inner determination to live for music. But he graduated in law, and he worked for a while in the Ministry of Justice. However, he did not neglect his music. His talents made him popular in society. He could improvise the most fascinating waltzes, and his playing, added to his good looks and refinement, made him sought after in the social world of St. Petersburg. Soon he met Anton Rubinstein, a well-known musician, who urged him to adopt music as a profession. Under the latter's influence he gave up his official position and entered as student of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, newly founded by Rubinstein, at the age of twenty-three. Three years later, he was appointed Professor of Harmony at the Conservatory in Moscow.

Tchaikovsky was often awakened by a labourer who sang at his work near by. The haunting rhythm so touched Tchaikovsky's fancy that he used it in the second movement of his first string quartet, Andante Cantabile. When the quartet was being played for the first time, the famous author Leo Tolstoy sat with the composer, arid wept as he listened to this movement, saying: "I have heard the soul of my patient and suffering people."

An unhappy marriage in 1877 brought him to the brink of a nervous breakdown. His brother carried him off to Switzerland to recover from the combined effects of overwork and matrimony. At this crisis, a wealthy widow, Madame Von Meek came into his life: she so admired his music that she paid off his debts and awarded him an annuity which would enable him to give up teaching and devote himself wholly to composition, on condition that they should never meet. This new financial freedom brought on a fresh burst of his creativeness which produced such masterpieces as the Fourth Symphony, the opera Eugen Onegin, and the Violin Concerto.

Symphony No. 4 in F minor was written for Madame Von Meek. Tchaikovsky always had a weakness for it. "How glad I am," wrote the composer to her, "that it is our work, and you will know when you hear it how much I thought about you in every measure." The Violin Concerto in D major is primarily a sensuous work, to be enjoyed for the opulence of its melodies, its tireless rhythmic variety and vigour.

When fifty, Tchaikovsky's physical condition began to show the effects of the hard mental work he had accomplished. His eyesight weakened and he suffered from melancholy and depression of spirits.

Early in 1893 he set to work on his sixth and last symphony ("Pathetic"), in B minor. It was his best-loved work. In no other work did Tchaikovsky express the suffering and mental pain of his life more poignantly than in the first and fourth movements of this symphony. It is almost as if, in the closing months of his life, he were reviewing his lifelong sufferings, and as if, in writing into it a heart-rending expression of grief, he were writing his own threnody. Tchaikovsky himself conducted the premiere of the Symphony on October 28, 1893 in St. Petersburg. Nine days later he died of cholera.

Tchaikovsky's music had been called consistently melancholy. Subjective melancholy, however, was by no means the whole of Tchaikovsky, who was a master craftsman of the highest class, an ardent Russian patriot, and capable at times of forgetting his own troubles. The message of the tumultuous festivity which ends the Fourth Symphony reads thus, in Tchaikovsky's own words: "There is still such a thing as joy. Rejoice in the happiness of others, and it will still be possible for you to live."