Tchaikovsky's impact

Tchaikovsky was open about what he sought to achieve in his music, and that, above all, was beauty, whether in his melodies, his orchestration, or his formal architecture. The ideal he had chosen for himself was, strange to say, Mozart. Even though most listeners would consider Tchaikovsky as much a stormy Romantic as anyone, the composer himself longed for the grace and balance of an earlier age. Some of his contemporaries thought him old-fashioned for this, believing that conventional beauty could be sacrificed for the sake of musical "progress". But Tchaikovsky had no great concern to be remembered as an innovator. He hoped to find perfection in art as in life - in nature, in architecture, in fine clothes and wine, in human faces and bodies, and in human relationships. In his music, this resulted in some of the most powerful and memorable melodies to be heard in the concert hall: the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, for example, or the horn solo from the Fifth Symphony. These, like all his best melodies, sing, breathe, and speak like living beings, and yet they also have the poise and balance of great architecture. He used the characterful timbres of clarinet, oboe, or horn for his solo melodies, bathing them in a halo of strings, and bringing them to a moment of climax full orchestral sonorities that radiated splendour.

But Tchaikovsky also strove for popularity - indeed, few composers would admit to this as readily as he did. Unlike other composers of his era, he never claimed to be composing for himself, or for God, or for future generations. Instead, he sought to reach people's hearts directly, in the present, and he wanted them to enjoy and love his music from the first hearing onwards. When an audience was left cold by one of his works, he considered it his own failing. Opera was particularly elusive for him, and he had to endure many failures before he could find the winning combination of ingredients. He came to realise that he must feel real sympathy and pain for his characters, to imagine them so vividly as to become them. He could not, for example, have written an opera like Aida, since the fate of ancient Egyptians or other remote peoples utterly failed to move him. It took Russia's great literary giant, Pushkin, to fire up his spirit. There was the sensitive and passionate Tatiana from Eugene Onegin and the obsessive Herman from the Queen of Spades - these were the characters who could appeal to his imagination. When writing the Queen of Spades, Tchaikovsky entered so fully into the character of Herman that he felt that he too was rushing helplessly towards death.

From this artistic ferment music of great expressive power was born, so human and true that we often mistake it for confession, for autobiography in sound, hence the popular image of a hysterical, hyper-sensitive Tchaikovsky pouring out his life's troubles onto the pages of his scores. But this actually does the composer a great disservice. When he was passionately involved in his music, it was the involvement of a powerful artistic imagination, harnessed not only to create a stage character like Herman, but equally to create the utterly convincing struggling and suffering persona of the last three symphonies. This crucially required great insight and art in cultivating psychological realism, which paces and structures the music so that it makes your heart beat with it and the blood rush to your head, so that it causes you to feel pain and elation even in the absence of characters on stage. The magic lies in hundreds of little details of harmonic rhythm, of timing, of orchestration, details that the composer worked out at his desk, day in, day out, through exhausting hard graft. The result is the illusion of life itself, an alternative reality that immerses you while the music lasts. And at the end, you can emerge feeling enriched and renewed.
© Dr Marina Frolova-Walker/BBC

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