Key works

• Swan Lake, Op. 20
• Eugene Onegin, Op. 24
• The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66
• The Queen of Spades, Op. 68
• The Nutcracker, Op. 71

Tchaikovsky's operatic career began with a nationalist flourish; but neither The Voyevoda, set to leading Russian dramatist Nikolay Ostrovsky's play about a provincial governor, nor The Oprichnik, set in the time of Ivan the Terrible, have held their place in the repertoire. Less accountable is the neglect of Vakula the Smith, composed in 1873 and revised in 1885 as Cherevichki or The Slippers. The subject, a Ukrainian fairy-tale by that master fantasist Nikolay Gogol, was the same as that later chosen by Rimsky-Korsakov for his Christmas Eve and although Tchaikovsky's treatment is pervaded by a characteristic melancholy, it has no less charm than Rimsky's version.

In Eugene Onegin (1877-8), Tchaikovsky created one of the most original and enduring masterpieces of Russian opera. The verse novel by the founding father of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, did not lend itself easily to operatic treatment, and Tchaikovsky was sufficiently confident of the public's familiarity with what was already a classic to call his stage work 'lyric scenes'. Each of the three acts focuses on one of the main characters. The young Tatyana, whose impetuous letter to the world-weary fop Onegin prompted Tchaikovsky to compose his opera in the first place, dominates the first act. The second culminates in the senseless death of Onegin's young friend, the poet Lensky, who challenges him to a duel for flirting with his beloved Olga, Tatyana's sister. The third and final act brings Onegin himself to light as he realises, too late, that he is in love with Tatyana, now the wife of a fat general. Tchaikovsky was anxious that his characters should be true to life, and entrusted the 1879 premiere to students of the Moscow Conservatory.

By the time that Onegin came to be recognised as a national treasure in the 1880s, Tchaikovsky's views on opera had changed. From the intimacy and freshness of Onegin he paid a homage to the set-pieces of French grand opera in The Maid of Orleans, culminating in the burning at the stake of his childhood heroine Joan of Arc. Then he moved on to the blood and thunder of Mazeppa, based on Pushkin's Poltava and centring on the catastrophic May-December relationship between an ageing Cossack leader and the young daughter of his best friend. The Enchantress of 1885-7 is the most melodramatic of his grander operas, though like its predecessors it shines in the handful of dramatic situations which attracted Tchaikovsky to his subject in the first place.

Tchaikovsky's third Pushkin opera The Queen of Spades (1890) marks a more consistent return to form, though in expanding to a three-act work Pushkin's masterly short story about an outsider-figure obsessed by the secret of three cards that will bring him gambling success, the composer sometimes diffused the narrative tension. In the extraordinary scene where anti-hero Hermann visits the mysterious countess who possesses the secret and frightens her to death, however, Tchaikovsky created his finest piece of music theatre. In it, he wrote, 'I experience such a sense of fear, dread and shock that the audience too is bound to feel the same, at least to some degree', and he was right.

The end of the operatic line was a diverting one-act fantasy about a blind princess cured by the power of love, Iolanta. Composed as something of a showcase for the same operatic husband-and-wife team who had created the roles of Hermann and Lisa in The Queen of Spades, Nikolay and Medea Figner, it furnished them with one of Tchaikovsky's most inspired love duets, though Iolanta is even-handed in its distribution of stirring set-pieces and its selective scoring - beginning with a woodwind-only Prelude - pursues an innovative line launched by The Queen of Spades.

Nevertheless the two-act ballet with which Iolanta shared a double-bill at the 1892 premiere, The Nutcracker, has stolen all the limelight, and rightly so: Tchaikovsky invested a slim scenario drawn from E T A Hoffmann's bizarre tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King with all the magic he could muster, excelling in the Act One narrative scenes where the Christmas tree in a comfortable German mansion grows to enormous size, heroine Clara helps the Nutcracker and his toy armies in their battles with the mice and the Nutcracker is transformed into a handsome prince who spirits Clara away to his kingdom of sweets.

The symphonic writing here, symmetrically mirrored by the grand Pas de Deux in Act Two, was something Tchaikovsky had developed in his first full-length ballet, Swan Lake, to heighten the dramatic impact of a prince's love for a swan princess. Although Swan Lake received a disastrous premiere in 1877, it made a comeback with distinguished new choreography two years after Tchaikovsky's death and rivals its balletic companions in popularity.

Even so The Sleeping Beauty (1888-9) represents an advance in its sophisticated orchestration and has been seen by many admirers, Igor Stravinsky included, as Tchaikovsky's masterpiece. Here Tchaikovsky maintains a perfect balance between the high drama of the storyline, in which the forces of good and evil in the shape of the Lilac fairy and the wicked Carabosse battle it out for the salvation of Princess Aurora, and a string of bewitching divertissments. The final homage to the newly reawaken princess and her prince reaches unparalleled heights of balletic charm in the dances for the fairy-tale characters. Like Mozart, Tchaikovsky achieved an extraordinary lightness of being in many of his late scores, and none is more generously graced with sublime inspirations than The Sleeping Beauty.

Notes © BBC/David Nice

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