Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture

During his lifetime, Tchaikovsky achieved a degree of professional success unmatched
by any Russian composer of the 19th century. His music was performed and admired
not only in his homeland but throughout Europe and even in America, where
Tchaikovsky made a triumphant visit in 1891. He was decorated by the Czar, named
a member of the Académie Française, and received an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University. But these triumphs came only after years of struggle and a series of artistic and personal crises. Those trials inevitably left their impressions on his work, including the two pieces recorded on this disc.
The first crisis that concerns us was one of creative confidence. Throughout his life, Tchaikovsky was plagued by doubts concerning his own talent and the worth of his music. Frequently these would lead to prolonged depressions during which he
was unable to bring himself to compose. A particularly acute episode occurred in the summer of 1869. Tchaikovsky had recently suffered scathing receptions of several major works and was so dejected by their failure that he destroyed most of the music.
He then stopped composing, complaining in October that “not one passable musical idea has entered my head in months.”
But Tchaikovsky had a new ally and mentor, and it was his encouragement that prompted the composer finally to resume working. Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev was a man of relatively modest talent, but he had an enormous impact on the development
of 19th century Russian music. He became the leader and spokesman of a group of nationalist composers that would eventually include Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mussorgsky, and he was tireless in arguing for a new kind of music, one based on dramatic ideas rather than abstract classical modes imported from Western Europe.
Tchaikovsky was at first wary of Balakirev. But the two men took a liking to each other when they finally met and soon began a fruitful exchange of musical ideas.
Balakirev suggested that Tchaikovsky consider an overture based on Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet. The tale of the tragic, star crossed lovers would have been particularly
inviting to Tchaikovsky. A highly sensitive and literate person, he also was beginning
to realize that his own inability to find conjugal happiness would be a lifelong
torment. Shakespeare’s unhappy couple must have seemed kindred spirits. In any event, he set quickly to work and by November 29, 1869, could write to Balakirev that the score was complete.
In devising music for the play, Tchaikovsky focused on three principal elements of the drama. The long introductory section conveys a sense of resigned spirituality
very much in character with Shakespeare’s Friar Laurence. This is followed by a violent episode complete with cymbal crashes to represent the clash of Montague and
Capulet swords. Finally, the love of Romeo and Juliet is presented in a soaring melody.
Balakirev, ironically enough, was not happy with the work. The opening was too tame, he said, and the love theme lacked ardor! Early audiences evidently agreed. The overture was received with indifference at its first performance in Moscow and fared no better (and sometimes far worse) in the West during the ensuing decade. But Tchaikovsky lived to see that judgment reversed, and today Romeo and Juliet stands among the most popular musical treatments of Shakespeare in the orchestral literature.

Symphony No. 4 in F minor, op. 36

Tchaikovsky completed his Symphony No. 4 early in 1878 following the most trying
emotional episode of his life. In the previous year, in what was surely a desperate
attempt to quell his homosexuality and find some measure of the domestic tranquility
for which he longed, he had entered into a hasty and ill-considered marriage with a young woman who had once been a student at the Moscow Conservatory. Their union was brief and disastrous. Within weeks Tchaikovsky suffered an almost complete nervous collapse and attempted suicide. He was rescued by his brother Anatoly, who spirited the composer out of Russia and arranged a dissolution of the
marriage. Though shamed and chagrined, Tchaikovsky eventually recovered enough composure to resume working, but he emerged from the ordeal shaken and convinced
that he was destined to a life of personal torment.
This background is keenly relevant to the Symphony No. 4. We know from his letters and diary that Tchaikovsky believed his happiness was thwarted by forces beyond his ken and control, and that the Symphony No. 4 constituted a musical
expression of this belief. In a letter to Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow who provided him with financial support and sympathetic confidence, Tchaikovsky declared that the “symphony has a program that can be put into words.” He went
on to describe it as follows:

The introduction is the germ of the entire symphony. [Here he wrote out the horn call of the opening measures.] This is Fate, which prevents our hopes of happiness from being realized, which… hangs over us like the Sword of Damocles, a constant, relentless spiritual torment. It is invincible, inescapable. There is no recourse but submission to suffering: [He outlined the agitated principal theme presented first in the violins.] Despair and misery grow stronger. Would it not be better to turn from reality and lull oneself with dreams?: [The lilting clarinet melody, the movement’s second theme.] Little by little, dreams capture the soul. Despair and sadness vanish. There is happiness! But no, it is only a dream, which Fate dispels once more: [Return of the initial horn motive.] So life swings constantly between cruel reality and ephemeral dreams of happiness. There is no haven….
The second movement expresses another aspect of suffering. It is the melancholy of
evening,… [when] memories flood the mind. How sad that so many things are gone forever…. How bitter yet sweet it is to sink into the past.
The third movement expresses nothing so definite. Rather, it is a succession of capricious arabesques that pass through the mind when one has had a little wine and feels the first glow of intoxication…. The images are disconnected, like those that float through the brain as one falls asleep….
Fourth movement: If there is no joy within you, turn to others. Go to the people. They know how to lose themselves in revelry and pleasure…. But no sooner do you abandon yourself to merriment than Fate reappears, reminding you of your suffering. The others pay
no attention to your sorrow…. They still enjoy simple, primitive pleasures; join them, and life will yet be bearable.

Tchaikovsky’s description raises questions that have persistently surrounded the program symphony genre. How concretely is such a program embodied in the composition? Is knowledge or acceptance of the program a prerequisite for appreciation of the music? The difficulty of these questions is compounded by the apparently equivocal attitude toward program music held by Tchaikovsky himself. Having outlined the Symphony No. 4’s “meaning” to Madame von Meck, he
immediately qualified it by writing: “What I have said is neither clear nor complete. This follows from the very nature of instrumental music, which cannot be subjected to such detailed analysis.” Tchaikovsky reiterated this ambiguity in discussing
the Symphony No. 4 with the pianist, composer, and critic Sergei Taneyev.
“Most assuredly my symphony has a program,” he told Taneyev, “but a program that cannot be expressed in words; the very attempt would be ludicrous.” That this flatly contradicts what he originally expressed to Madame von Meck simply reveals the composer’s contradictory feelings on this difficult subject.
Finally, there is the music itself, whose power and internal cohesion are quite independent of any program. The themes of the first movement may well be the
emblems of existential angst Tchaikovsky explained so vividly to Madame von Meck, but they also present a typical symphonic opening movement: two contrasting
principal melodies preceded by a fanfare-like “motto” idea. (Comparable constructions
can be found in Schumann’s “Spring” Symphony and those of many other 19th
century composers.) Similarly, the rest of the work provides a slow movement, scherzo,
and finale, much as we would expect from any composer writing within the general framework of the expanded classical-style symphony, though of course the musical details bear unmistakably the imprint of Tchaikovsky’s own style and personality.
Perhaps this last point is the most important. Perhaps the essential thing is that this symphony partakes of Tchaikovsky’s unique sense of melody, rhythm and orchestral color, not that it relates any specific details of his biography or extends any particular tradition of symphonic thinking. But one can ponder such issues indefinitely. Ultimately, the choice of how to hear this symphony, and what to hear in it, is up to each listener.

Paul Schiavo © 2008

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