OPERA HEADLINERS OF THE YEAR From the Desk of Lyn Walker, Ian Failey, Ronald Bloom Ehprem Gourion, Ben Zorab, Judy Goldsmith.
Tchaikovsky
settled in Moscow in January 1866, although he underwent a mental crisis as a
consequence of overwork on his Symphony No. 1 in G minor (Winter Daydreams),
Opus 13 (1866). His compositions of the late 1860s and early '70s reveal a
distinct affinity with the music of the nationalist group of composers in St.
Petersburg, both in their treatment of folk song and in their harmonies
deriving from a common link with Mikhail Glinka, the "father" of a Russian
nationalist style. He corresponded with the leader of the group, Mily
Balakirev, at whose suggestion he wrote a fantasy overture, Romeo and
Juliet (1869). Tchaikovsky's intrinsic charm is nowhere more apparent than
in the nationalist comic opera Valkula the Smith (1874; first performed
1876), which in its revised form, Cherevicki (The Little Shoes),
is of similar merit to another opera, Sorochintsy Fair (also based on
one of Nikolay Gogol's Ukrainian tales), by the most original composer in the
Petersburg group, Modest Mussorgsky. Tchaikovsky's opera, however, is much
closer to Balakirev's own folkloric idiom than anything Mussorgsky wrote.
After a fleeting, but unsuccessful, love affair with Désirée Artôt, the prima
donna of a visiting Italian opera company, he had only one further romantic
relationship with a woman. In the mid-1870s he had another nervous breakdown.
One of the symptoms of this nadir in his life was almost hysterical activity
in composition culminating in the Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Opus 36 (1877),
and the opera Eugene Onegin (1877-78), based on a poem by Aleksandr
Pushkin. He felt in such sympathy with Pushkin's heroine, Tatyana, that when a
former music student, Antonina Milyukova, became infatuated with Tchaikovsky,
threatening suicide should he reject her, he identified her in his mind with
the cruelly spurned Tatyana and consented to marry her.
Late in 1876, Tchaikovsky had begun an extraordinary correspondence with an
admirer of his compositions, the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck. She created
an annuity sufficient to allow Tchaikovsky to devote himself entirely to
composition. By her wish, the two never met. Their intimate correspondence was
more revealing of her than of Tchaikovsky. Wishing always to be liked, he was
apt to write what he thought people wanted to read rather than what he really
thought. The detailed program of his Fourth Symphony, which he made up
especially for her, is generally regarded with circumspection. He later
averred that replying to her frequently effusive letters had become "irksome."
All the same, this curious relationship apparently fulfilled a deeply felt
psychological need for both, particularly for Tchaikovsky, whose wife, proving
importunate even after a separation had been arranged, had to be bought off.
Tchaikovsky's attempts to justify to himself her generous annuity caused him
to overwork during the next few years. He composed the Piano Sonata in G
major, Opus 37 (1878), the orchestral Suite No. 1 in D minor, Opus 43
(1878-79), music for the coronation of his patron the Emperor Alexander III,
and the first of his mature attempts to write a commercially successful opera,
The Maid of Orleans, (1878-79). The years 1878 to 1881 also included
several major achievements: the Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35 (1878),
and the popular Serenade for String in C major, Opus 48 (1880); Capriccio
italien, Opus 45 (1880); and the 1812 Overture, Opus 49 (1880).
Eugene Onegin, which was only a token success at its Moscow premiere,
enjoyed great popularity in St. Petersburg because of the emperor's
admiration.
The Manfred Symphony
Opus 58, composed in 1885, not only called forth unstinted praise but showed
in some of its histrionically despairing episodes the path that Tchaikovsky's
life and music were to follow in the last years.In 1885 he bought a house at
Maidanovo, near Moscow, where he lived until the year before his death, when
he moved into the house that is now the Tchaikovsky House Museum in the nearby
town of Klin. He began to travel more in Russia and vacationed twice in the
Caucasus. He overcame an aversion to conducting and in 1888 undertook an
important and well received foreign tour, directing his own works in Leipzig
(where he met the composers Johannes Brahms and Edvard Grieg), Hamburg,
Berlin, Prague, Paris, and London. This tour was the apex of Tchaikovsky's
later life. From then on, despite the continuing success of many of his former
compositions and the acclamation of new ones, including his second Pushkin
opera, The Queen of Spades, and his favorite ballet, The Sleeping
Beauty, he was working his way toward another nervous breakdown. His major
compositions, starting with Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Opus 64 (1888), became
more and more intense and emotional, filled with both exaltation and despair.
Tchaikovsky went on further tours, including to the United States and England,
where he conducted his popular Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Opus 23
(composed 1874-75), in 1889 and his Fourth Symphony in 1893. In 1893 Cambridge
University awarded him an honorary doctor of music degree. These and other
successes, including the tumultuous reception accorded to the suite he hastily
made for concert performance from his Nutcracker ballet music (1892),
did not alter the inexorable decline in his mental condition, which was
aggravated in 1890 when Nadezhda von Meck suddenly ended both their
correspondence and the annuity. From a financial standpoint this hardly
mattered, because the royalties from The Queen of Spades covered the
loss without difficulty, and he was by this time a recipient of a state
pension. Tchaikovsky never forgave her, and the nature of the psychological
wound it inflicted upon him can be judged by the fact that in the delirium of
his last illness he repeated her name again and again in indignant tones.
In August 1893 Tchaikovsky completed his Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 74 (Pathétique)
which was his last and which he rightfully regarded as a masterpiece. On
October 28 he conducted its first performance in St. Petersburg. Its novel
slow finale could hardly have been expected to induce such applause as had
greeted, only 18 months earlier, the premiere of the lighter Nutcracker
Suite. Into this work, with its "secret" program, he had put his whole
soul. Tchaikovsky was devastated by the public response. On November 2,
1893-six days after the premiere-he died.- Marios Gazdaria