Music About Fireworks, Day 3 – 1812 Overture by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

This week’s theme is…Music About Fireworks!  Is there anything more festive than colorful, explosive fireworks?  For centuries we have been celebrating with fireworks, and for just as long they have been inspiring equally colorful and explosive music.  This week we learn about some examples of this.

Music About Fireworks, Day 3 – 1812 Overture by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

If there is one non-musician who inspired more works than any other in European classical music, it is surely Jesus Christ.  But a close second just might be Napoleon Bonaparte.  The 12 year campaign of wars which bears his name, fueled by his megalomaniacal thirst for power, is estimated to have killed as many people (both military and civilian) as the German Holocaust (to be fair, those are the high estimates).  The face of European politics and military strategy was forever changed.  For more than a decade the foreign policy of European nations centered almost entirely around the issue of containing its effects.  All from this one, small man who had shrewdly seized power in France amidst the turbulent and disoriented aftermath of the French Revolution, keeping his true intentions secret until it was too late.  In spite of all this, Napoleon seems to be regarded as a figure of intrigue and fascination rather than a moral monster.  Ripe for debate I suppose.  But long story short, he made a big splash, no one despot exercising as much influence over the politics and militaries of the European continent since Alexander the Great or until Adolf Hitler.  And the depth of his ambitions, for better or worse, was felt deeply in European music.  I don’t think there was a composer alive during his lifetime or during the century following his military campaigns who did not respond creatively in some way to the effects of his legacy (see this post, this post, this post, this post and this post).

I suspect that few people know the origin of what is the most famous work based on the Napoleonic Wars, the one that more people have heard, or at least heard of, than any of the rest.  In America at least, when we hear the year “1812″, we tend to think of the war of the same name.  Of course, that doesn’t mean we know anything about it or why it was fought; maybe some of us know that it was the war that helped Andrew Jackson rise in his military and, eventually, political career.  Truth be told, it’s not the most romantic war story, its causes flowing from a murky blend of British militarism and trade laws.  Interestingly, some historians see it as an extension of the Napoleonic Wars on the other side of the pond.  I’m sure I’m not the only American to have heard of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and think “Hmm, someone wrote a piece of music about the War of 1812.  I wonder why…”  As it turns out, that’s a little bit of pure, selfish American myopia because, wouldn’t you know it, there was other notable military and political history being made elsewhere in the world during that time.  I know.  I can’t believe it either!

If you mention the year “1812” to a Russian, they will have a very strong association.  I imagine it’s a little bit like asking a Texan about the Alamo.  1812 was the year of Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia, and the beginning of the end for his entire campaign.  As Hitler would find out a century and a half later, you really have to want Russia bad, and that’s probably not bad enough.  Modern history seems to teach us that there is really no amount of careful planning sufficient to execute a successful invasion of the nation.  Russia has relied on her vast geographical proportions as a means of defense for centuries, and both Napoleon and Hitler found out the hard way what an advantage it is.

At first, the advantage appeared to be Napoleon’s.  The centerpiece of the Russian campaign was the Battle of Borodino, the single bloodiest day in the entire history of the Napoleonic Wars with 70,000 casualties, a full 5,000 more than would be suffered 3 years hence at the Battle of Waterloo which saw Napoleon’s ultimate defeat.  While his forces technically won a victory at Borodino, it is often described by historians as a Pyrrhic one since after this the French army began to sense more and more acutely the challenge of having stretched their supply lines so thin.  Napoleon led his army to Moscow which was taken without combat.  It had been mostly deserted and then ordered to be burned to the ground by a shrewd Russian aristocrat, Count Rostopchin, in order to deny quarter to French troops and force them to face the elements.  

Count Rostopchin who ordered the tactical burning of Moscow in response to Napoleon’s invastion

The great Moscow Fire of 1812

 

In light of this, and the dawning realization that the Russian people could retreat further and further into the vast nation (just consider how far away Moscow is from the center of Russia) Napoleon realized that his forces must turn back in order to preserve the integrity of their resources, even though the French Army was literally decimated by the time it reached safety in Poland.

Can you imagine what Napoleon’s retreat must have done to bolster national pride in Russia?  It remained a patriotic touchstone for the Russian people to the extent that it was still celebrated at least 70 years later.  Immediately after the failed Russian Campaign, the reigning Tsar, Alexander I, declared his intention to build a new cathedral in thanksgiving for divine protection.  Finally, in 1880, the magnificent Cathedral of Christ the Saviour neared its completion, scheduled to coincide with a national exhibition of Russian arts and sciences.  

Tchaikovsky’s friend Nikolai Rubinstein suggested that he write a festival overture to accompany all of the hullabaloo.  Tchaikovsky accepted the challenge and in a mere six weeks knocked out the garish, noisy, solemn festival overture that we all know and love today.  It quickly became, and remains, Tchaikovsky’s greatest hit.  It made him a fortune, although he composed it without pleasure or artistic conviction.

True to Tchaikovsky’s symphonic manner (see this post), the overture combines episodes of his well-wrought contrapuntal writing and development with liberal doses of folk song, both French and Russian.  The 1812 Overture is a synopsis of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign.  It begins with a melody from Eastern Orthodox Prayer, O Lord, Save The People, which represents the Russian people filling their churches and praying earnestly upon the beginning of Napoleon’s invasion.  Other songs that make an appearance are a Russian folk song called At the Gate, At My Gate and anachronistic national anthems from both France, The Marseillaise, and Russia, God Save the Tsar.  They are anachronistic because, owing either to not having been written yet or having been abolished during that time, neither tune served as national anthem for their respective nation during the year of 1812.  But Tchaikovsky was not the only one to make that mistake: Robert Schumann used The Marseillaise in his song The Two Grenadiers to illustrate the homesickness of two Napoleonic soldiers, returning from captivity in Russia after the failed campaign of 1812 incidentally.  But they serve to evoke strong associations of both nations for listeners, so the choices were effective, whether mistaken or not.  

 

The distinctive performance logistics, involving both live artillery and peeling cathedral bells (from the new cathedral), were intended by Tchaikovsky to put the cacophonous festival piece over the top, and are still beloved and zany elements of its authentic performance, making it a favorite for patriotic celebrations all over the world:

While Jesus Christ provided the spiritual nourishment of Christian Europe and became immortalized through countless sacred compositions, Napoleon Bonaparte has also become immortalized through the music of countless European composers, although for different reasons.  The acute influence of his intrusive military campaigns put all the nations of the continent on the defensive for more than a turbulent decade with Europeans of all walks of life struggling to make sense of his legacy.  Even almost a century later Tchaikovsky, born 25 years after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, felt his influence and set into music the impact of his ambitions in what became and has remained his most famous work.

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Music About Trees, Day 5 – Symphony No. 4 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

This week’s theme is…Music about Trees!  Trees are noble, beautiful, helpful when we need them, and otherwise on the periphery of human drama.  Still, they are always there, forming our landscape, and providing poetic inspiration for artists and musicians.

Music About Trees, Day 5 – Symphony No. 4 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky frequently found himself between a rock and a hard place.  The tension which haunted the awkward space he inhabited, for his whole career really, was the result of two incongruent drives that he constantly sought to satisfy, for he was tenacious, and thoroughly convinced there was a way to reconcile them both, in spite of his frequent bouts of depression and professional discouragement.  He must have been animated by some kind of inner drive to be true to both of these ill-fitting influences; had he not found it somewhere, he would most certainly have given up along the way, and before gracing the world’s ears with towering masterpieces which do, at least semi-successfully, reconcile the conflicting forces that he constantly channeled into his music.

These two streams, which merge in Tchaikovsky’s artistry as they do in no other Russian composer, are the usually parallel lines of the Russian folk tradition, which found a vibrant if messy expression in the works of Balakirev’s Mighty Five (see this post for more about that story) and the academic tradition that guided the sterile but perfect curricula of the young and proud music conservatories which had been recently planted in so many of Russia’s major cultural centers and proceeded to churn out rigorously trained composers who wrote dry but flawless music.  In grand academic tradition, many of these composers would succeed their professors, perpetuating the environments which had nurtured them and with which they had developed a high degree of comfort.  For a particularly good composer of this stripe, see this post.  Mostly their names, and music, are forgotten, but they served the function of infusing Russian musicianship with the rigor, discipline and precision of the great musical traditions from the Western continent, which tended to be lacking in the music of Balakirev’s Five (until Rimsky-Korsakov got all wrapped up in his professorship, but that’s another story).

So the two parallel lines proceeded across their seemingly endless paths in Russia, each holding important qualities which the other lacked.  Proponents of the respective lines were suspicious of the other, and so they did not truly cross until a somewhat tormented genius made it his mission to find their intersection, although he may not have expressed it in quite that way.  That is more or less what drove his artistry, and the process over which it played out was sometimes tortured, often discouraging, and also fruitful.  It was also almost successful, although many may question whether complete success is even possible.  Simply put, the genius is Tchaikovsky, and he came closer than anyone else to discovering the ideal point of intersection between the two lines.  Tchaikovsky’s most successful hybrids are a celebration of formal rigor and clear orchestration, but emanate an unmistakable Russian-ness that transcends the stuffy academics.

The clear development of Tchaikovsky’s ability to reconcile the academic sensibility with the nationalistic flavor of the Russian folk can be seen clearly in his six symphonies, composed over the course of about 30 years, roughly the second half of his life.  The first symphony was completed shortly after the young and budding composer accepted a teaching post at the Moscow Conservatory, and the sixth symphony premiered just over a week before his untimely death.  The musical worlds of those outer poles are as distant as can be, and the terrain traversed between them can be seen to unfold gradually over the course of the middle four.  Tchaikovsky’s final three symphonies, numbers 4, 5 and 6, are seen to be his mature masterworks of the genre with the first three representing attractive, if youthful, essays in which vigorous Russian tunes meet a sometimes stiff textbook sonata form.  But the first three also express a naive vigour that was often praised by Mighty Five.  The delightful Second Symphony quotes a different Russian folk tune in every single movement.  None of Tchaikovsky’s other symphonies quote folk music to this extent, but the character and nature of the first three symphonies feels much more in line with this sensibility.  And the later symphonies sometimes quote folk songs too, but their scope is somehow different, steeped in an autiobiographical emotionalism that imbued the later symphonies with a tragic and compelling darkness.

The Fourth Symphony is a turning point.  Starting with this work, Tchaikovsky’s symphonic writing began to assume a new grandeur, significance and scale, and an emotional intensity simply not heard in the first three symphonies.  Many historians and critics look to the sprawling and powerful first movement as a monument of symphonic form, not only for Russian music, but for Western music in general.  It quotes no folk songs and develops its material with a passionate intensity that indicated a new level of Tchaikovsky’s powers.  And the slow, melancholy canzona that follows fits the opening movement well.  I must admit that I am less convinced by the final two movements.  I don’t think they match the gravity of the first two.  The pizzicato scherzo is entirely too plucky and optimistic to accompany the outpouring of personal tragedy which pervade the earlier movements.

The brassy finale, I think, is in between worlds.  It seeks to balance the grand symphonic struggle so effectively embodied in the first movement and the charming Russian folksy quality of his first three symphonies, and ends up doing neither exactly.  The bold first bars fire the opening salvo of an epic struggle, but quickly introduce a Russian folk song, the only one quoted in the symphony, “In the Meadow Stood a Little Birch Tree”, against the busy string texture derived from the opening.  Throughout the movement the Birch Tree is stated and developed in all sorts of different ways, constantly interworked and repeated alongside the heroic motive of the opening.  We even get a taste of the foreboding, fatalistic motive that opens the first movement at a particularly climactic moment.

I think the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is a final glimmering of the somewhat naive, folk-ish quality of the earlier three symphonies.  It almost struggles, it seems to me at least, to combine the sparkly Russian folk song quality that animated his earlier symphonies with the heroic struggle that guides the last three, and I’ve never been convinced that it does so entirely successfully.  Sure, it’s a rousing and, sometimes, satisfying conclusion to the symphony (I’ve found that this depends on who is playing and conducting), but it doesn’t quite seem to fit the gravity of the first and second movements.  It doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants to be.

That’s my take anyway, and I know there are others out there.  This symphony, and this finale, are beloved by many.  And I have nothing but admiration for Tchaikovsky’s struggle in collecting the musical influences of his motherland and seeking to balance all of them, academic, nationalistic, and autobiographical.  He was surely up to that task, and that is why we still listen, even if it was not entirely successful all of the time.  Listen to the glittering finale of the Fourth Symphony, which features the Russian folk song “In the Meadow Stood a Birch Tree”, here:

 

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“New” Music, Day 3 – The New Doll by Pyotr Iyich Tchaikovsky

This week’s theme is…“New” Music!  Today I often find that the label “New” is applied to music that is self-consciously experimental, unconventional, or cutting edge in some way, although technically any music that has been recently created is new.  But then I suppose you have to answer the question “how recently created does something have to be to be called new?”, and that can end up in some seriously shameless naval-gazing!  The truth is that every piece of music was new at some point.  Beyond that, some music is based on the theme of newness.  This week we explore some such examples.

“New” Music, Day 3 – The New Doll by Pyotr Iyich Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky is composer best known for his large-scale works scored for orchestra, most especially his ballets, symphonies and solo concertos.  Everyone can sing some part of The Nutcracker (ballet), possible Swan Lake (also a ballet), and maybe even Sleeping Beauty (still another ballet – the Waltz from that one became famous after it was used as the basis of the famous song in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty).  I bet most professional musicians have a favorite symphony of his – numbers 1, 2, & 3 are charming and numbers 4, 5, & 6 are undisputed masterworks – and there’s major respect for his first piano concerto and violin concerto too.

The operas are not as well-known as the ballets and symphonies, although his greatest opera, Eugene Onegin, is still staged in major opera houses.  I confess I am completely unfamiliar with any of Tchaikovsky’s operas; that’s actually rather unforgivable given how much of his time and effort went into creating them.  I guess I have a project ahead of me…

That his orchestral works are so famous is understandable and justified.  Anyone familiar with them is aware of the massive emotional impact of his orchestral writing, the depth of sonority, and the remarkable competence of his orchestration.  Playing violin in his Sixth Symphony in graduate school is an experience I won’t soon forget.  We were sitting in an unconventional arrangement: the 2nd violins were seated where the cellos are usually placed, and the violas and cellos were on the inside.

The usual arrangement of string sections in contemporary orchestral seating – imagine the second violins where the cellos and basses are and everything else pushed to the inside

 From what I understand this arrangement was more common a couple centuries ago, but gradually gave way to the standard arrangement we usually see today, with first violins and cellos on the outside, and second violins and violas on the inside.  Anyway, there were episodes of rehearsing and performing that symphony during which I was astonished by the color, presence, and magnitude of the sound that rose from the orchestra.  It really felt like Tchaikovsky had some penetrating insight into the way that orchestral instruments work and was able to use them in an optimal manner, a manner in which they intruments were not fighting to be heard, but rather worked and sounded together very easily.  This is a rare and wonderful gift.  I once read an interview with a composer in which he said a major priority for him was to constantly strive to understand how instruments physically work the best and so write so they were able to speak easily, according to their nature.  He said that in comparing Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky he could tell that Prokofiev did not really know how the instruments physically responded the best whereas Tchaikovsky did.  And that’s not to say that Prokofiev’s music is bad; indeed, it is at times astounding in its intricacy and momentous effect.  But after playing in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and experiencing how easily and constantly the air was filled with sounds of deep color and resonance, I understand what that interviewee was talking about.

While orchestration is Tchaikovsky’s undisputed strength (and there are many areas of strength in his music), one weakness that I see pointed out rather often is his deficiency of development.  Development refers to the manipulation of the materials set out at the beginning of any temporal work of art.  Good developers do a lot with a little.  Poor developers do a little with a lot.  Or maybe a little with a little.  Like good orchestration, good development is a rare skill.  The best developer in the history of music, most historians would say, was Beethoven.  It is inspiring how much mileage he could draw from very simple materials.  The first movement of his famous Fifth Symphony is a great example.

 

If you listen to the middle part of that piece, from 3:04 until 4:30 (a mere minute a half that feels as momentous as a half an hour – I simply can’t imagine how many times Beethoven must have reworked that stretch of the symphony), you will hear the uber-famous “bum-bum-bum-BUM” motive taken apart, rearranged, manipulated, and generally put through its paces in an unimaginable number of ways.  And it always sounds fresh and inventive, even though the transformations are always based on that very short little motive.  There is also a pervasive and continuous momentum that feels dramatic and constantly causes the movement to seem directed toward some destination, which is to say that it never feels aimless or lost.  And even the famous coda of this movement, which goes on and on, topping itself again and again, is like another development section – he just couldn’t stop developing that motive!  Beethoven was able to create those amazing development sections again and again in his music and all other composers are now measured against him as the gold standard of development.  Everyone stacks up on that scale to varying degrees of success.  As far as development goes, Tchaikovsky, most would admit, is on the weaker side.  His melodies, deeply Russian, lyrical, and highly emotional are top-notch, and deeply affecting.  But the melodies are not really developed all that much.  It was something he acknowledged himself and worked very hard improve.  But his ultimate solutions, those present in his later symphonies for example, more represent a reconciling of his forms to the nature of his material so that it felt alright to play the theme over and over again, but more in new clothing than, than achieving true skill at development.  Still, if you are willing to forgive this about Tchaikovsky’s great works, there is plenty to enjoy.

But, there is another sort of musical creation for which the handicap for development may be seen as an asset: the character piece.  Character pieces were a thoroughly Romantic invention: usually a set of short works that all sought to illustrate an extramusical idea, picture, or some other inspiration.  And usually for solo piano.  Tchaikovsky is not known for his solo piano music, but it’s there.  And there’s a few collections of these character pieces.  One such collection is his Opus 39 set, 24 Easy Pieces for Children.  It is written as a sort of homage to a similar set by Robert Schumann, which includes this one.  These are short, easy pieces for young pianists to play.  And the lack of development just ain’t a problem because once the beautiful theme is laid out, that’s all she wrote!  Here’s a great example, piece number 6, The New Doll:

 

 

Isn’t that charming?  A delightful, floating, balletic dance of a tune that perfectly encapsulates the delight of a young girl receiving a new doll.  It paints a brief picture and then stops, no development necessary.  Incidentally, there’s kind of a “doll trio” within those 24 pieces; number 7 is The Sick Doll, a plaintive lament, and number 8 is Doll’s Funeral, which is like a miniature, lighter version of the great funeral dirge from Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata:

 

 

Tchaikovsky was neurotic and often depressed; even in this benign little collection of children’s character pieces he has to kill and bury the doll after a debilitating illness!
The 24 Easy Pieces, Opus 39 were composed during the late 1870s, probably as a carefree diversion while he labored over his more significant masterworks of the time, including the Fourth Symphony (his first truly significant contribution to the symphonic tradition), the First Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, and the opera Eugene Onegin.  And I’m certainly not suggesting that trifles like this be elevated to the artistic status of those towering works, but perhaps this delightful piece, and others like it, which benefit from so many of Tchaikovsky’s strengths with regard to melodic invention, has found a clever way to sidestep his weaknesses.

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