Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Born in Kamsko-Votkinsk in the Vyatka province of Russia on 7 May 1840, Tchaikovsky’s father was a mining engineer, his mother of French extraction. He began to study the piano at five, benefiting also from the musical instruction of his elder brother’s French governess. In 1848 the family moved to the imperial capital, St Petersburg, where Pyotr was enrolled at the School of Jurisprudence. He overcame his grief at his mother’s death in 1854 by composing and performing, although music was to remain a diversion from his job—as a clerk at the Ministry of Justice—until he enrolled as a full-time student at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1863.

His First Symphony was warmly received at its St Petersburg premiere in 1868 and he completed an opera on a melodrama by Ostrovsky, which he later destroyed. Swan Lake, the first of Tchaikovsky’s three great ballet scores, was written in 1876 for Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. Between 1869 and the year of his death Tchaikovsky composed over 100 songs, cast mainly in the impassioned Romance style and textually preoccupied with the frustration and despair associated with love—conditions that characterised his personal relationships.

Tchaikovsky’s hasty decision to marry an almost unknown admirer in 1877 proved a disaster, his homosexuality combining strongly with his sense of entrapment. By now he had completed his Fourth Symphony, was about to finish his opera Eugene Onegin, and had attracted the considerable financial and moral support of Nadezhda von Meck, an affluent widow. She helped him through his personal crisis and in 1878 he returned to composition with the Violin Concerto, although his work remained inhibited until the completion in 1885 of the Byron-inspired Manfred Symphony.

During the late 1880s and early 1890s, Tchaikovsky produced many of his greatest pieces, including the ballets The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, the Fifth Symphony, the string sextet Souvenir de Florence and the operas The Queen of Spades and Iolanta. Tchaikovsky claimed that his Sixth Symphony represented his best work; the mood of crushing despair heard in all but the work’s third movement reflected the composer’s troubled state of mind. He died on 6 November 1893, nine days after its premiere.
Composer profile © Andrew Stewart

Symphony No 6 in B ninor Op 74 ‘Pathétique’ (1893)
When 19th-century composers wrote minor-key symphonies, they generally followed the ‘darkness-to-light’ model set by Ludwig van Beethoven; even if the finale ended in a dark minor key (like Johannes Brahms’ Fourth Symphony) it would normally be a fast, passionate movement, more defiant than tragic. The quiet, despairing ending of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony was unprecedented. This Symphony is the record of a deeply personal experience, expressed with a power that leaves one in no doubt either of Tchaikovsky’s musical mastery or the intensity of his feelings, but it is certainly not music for people who are embarrassed by the expression of strong emotions.

a new symphony but soon put it aside, feeling that something was wrong. He realised that he had been writing out of habit, without any deep commitment, and it was an altogether different sort of symphony that he needed to compose. The sketches were recycled into his Third Piano Concerto, and by the following February the new work was well underway. He completed the orchestration in August and immediately wrote to his brother Anatoly: ‘I’m very proud of the Symphony, and I think it’s the best of my works’ (From a letter to Anatoly Tchaikovsky, dated 12 (Old Style [O.S.]) / 24 (New Style [N.S.]) August 1893). He conducted the first performance on 28 October 1893 in St Petersburg. The response was polite, but apparently not enthusiastic. Tchaikovsky, who was usually extremely sensitive to audiences’ reactions, was not upset on this occasion: ‘It’s not that it displeased, but it produced some bewilderment. As far as I myself am concerned, I take more pride in it than in any other of my works’ (From a letter to Pyotr Jurgenson, Tchaikovsky’s publisher, dated 18 / 30 October 1893), he wrote to his publisher.

When composing it, Tchaikovsky had admitted that it was a symphony ‘with a programme, but with a programme of a kind which remains an enigma to all—let them guess it who can’ (From a letter to Vladimir Davydov, Tchaikovsky’s nephew (son of his sister, Aleksandra), who bore a strong resemblance to the composer. Dated 11 / 23 February 1893). We cannot know exactly what Tchaikovsky had in mind; he never wanted to ‘explain’ his music in any other terms, and when the work was performed it was simply billed as: Sixth Symphony, B minor. On the morning after the first performance, about to send the score for engraving, Tchaikovsky could not make up his mind whether to give it a title at all. He didn’t like the idea of either ‘Tragic Symphony’ or ‘Programme Symphony’, and it was his brother Modest who suggested a title in French: ‘Pathétique’. It sounds odd in English, with its suggestion of weakness or inadequacy. In French or in Russian (‘Pateticheskaya’) the word is more serious, implying the expression of deep feeling and suffering.

The first movement of the ‘Pathétique’, from its opening bassoon crawling up from the depths to its hushed ending, includes a wide variety of musical images. As always in Tchaikovsky, it is the lyrical idea that propels the music; and the economy of texture, rhythmic vitality and clarity of instrumentation ensure that these images strike the listener with immediate force. It is a drama of contrasts, of personal passion struggling against hostile forces.

There is lightness and some sort of happiness in the two inner movements, though it is not untroubled. The second movement is calm and urbane, redolent of the world of Tchaikovsky’s ballets. It sounds like a waltz, although it is not written in a triple-time waltz metre but with a strangely unsettled five beats to the bar. The following march is as brilliant and thrilling as anything Tchaikovsky wrote, but for all its frantic activity, there is a deliberate lack of melodic focus: it takes a long time for the march rhythms and orchestral ferment to settle down and reveal an actual tune. In both these inner movements, there appears the figure of a downward scale which is heard so often in Tchaikovsky’s music, and which he associated with Fate. Tchaikovsky believed that the power of Fate ruled his life, and once grimly described it as ‘the fatal force which prevents our hopes of happiness from being realised, and which watches jealously to see that our bliss and happiness are never complete and unclouded—it is inescapable and it can never be overcome’ (From a letter to Nadezhda von Meck, dated 17 February / 1 March 1878. Nadezhda von Meck was a patroness, and close friend and financial supporter of Tchaikovsky, and their correspondence lasted almost fourteen years, comprising hundreds of letters. However, the two of them never actually met in person, even when von Meck’s son, Nikolay, married Tchaikovsky’s niece, Anna Davydova, elder sister of the aforementioned Vladimir Davydov).

This descending ‘Fate’ figure shapes both themes of the Finale. On its first appearance, the second of these themes begins consolingly in the major mode and rises to a climax of passionate protest—perhaps a last desperate attempt to find love and happiness. On its reappearance, it sinks lower and lower, ebbing away into darkness and silence.

Five days after conducting the ‘Pathétique’, Tchaikovsky was taken ill, and he died four days later. The official version of events was that he drank a glass of unboiled water, always a rash thing to do in St Petersburg at this time, and contracted cholera. There were vague rumours of suicide, and in the 1970s a strange story emerged from Russia, passed down over 80 years by word of mouth, that Tchaikovsky had been summoned to a ‘court of honour’ composed of ex-students of the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, where he had studied as a young man. This court, apparently, presented Tchaikovsky with the grim alternatives of public exposure of an affair he had been having with a young nobleman, followed by disgrace and probable criminal proceedings, or suicide. For all its implausibilities and the absence of any corroborating evidence, it’s a story to grab on to for those who would like to hear the Sixth Symphony as a premonition of a conveniently dramatic ending to an unhappy life.

Whatever the truth of the events surrounding Tchaikovsky’s death, though, there is no evidence at all of suicidal thoughts during the time he planned and composed the Sixth Symphony. The obvious pride he took in it suggests, on the contrary, a rare period when his art was able to compensate for the loneliness of his life, when the perfect musical expression of his own character allowed him greater peace of mind than he had enjoyed for many years. All the same, it is hard to hear the bleak ending of the Symphony without wondering whether he was right about Fate.
Programme note © Andrew Huth

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
Modest Mussorgsky was born in Karevo, the youngest son of a wealthy landowner. His mother gave him his first piano lessons at the age of six, and his musical talent was encouraged at the Cadet School of the Guards in St Petersburg, where he began to compose (despite having no technical training).

In 1857 he met Balakirev, whom he persuaded to teach him, and shortly afterwards he began composing in earnest. The following year Mussorgsky suffered an emotional crisis and resigned his army commission, but returned soon afterwards to his studies. He was, however, plagued by nervous tension, and this, combined with a crisis at the family home after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, stalled his development quite severely. By 1863, though, he was finding his true voice, and he began to write an opera (never completed) based on Flaubert’s Salammbô. At this time he was working as a civil servant and living in a commune with five other young men passionate about art and philosophy, where he established his artistic ideals.

In 1865 his mother died; this probably caused his first bout of alcoholism. His first major work, Night on Bare Mountain, was composed in 1867, the same year his government position was declared ‘supernumary’, a form of de facto redundancy. Despite the associated loss of earnings, his artistic life developed decisively when he was referred to the kuchka (The Five), a group of Russian composers centred around Mily Balakirev. Soon afterwards, fired by the ideas discussed in his new artistic circle, he began his opera Boris Godunov, which he first completed in 1869 whilst working at the Forestry Department, and continued to revise for several years. He started work on another major work, Khovanshchina, a little while later.

The first production of Boris Godunov in 1874 would prove to be the peak of Mussorgsky’s career. The Balakirev circle had begun to disintegrate and he drifted away from his old friends. In a letter to Vladimir Stasov he described how bitterly he felt, writing that ‘the Mighty Handful has degenerated into soulless traitors’. Around the same time Mussorgsky’s friend Victor Hartmann (whose exhibition would inspire Pictures) died and his roommate Golenischev-Kutuzov moved away. For a time he maintained his creative output but now divested of many of his former friends, Mussorgsky resumed drinking heavily. By 1880 he was forced to leave government employ and became destitute. Despite financial support from a few remaining friends, he lapsed still further, desperately declaring to one there was ‘nothing left but begging’. He was eventually hospitalised in February 1881 after suffering a bout of alcoholic epilepsy. During a brief respite, around the date of his 42nd birthday, Repin painted his famous portrait of the composer, but within two weeks of the sitting, Mussorgsky would be dead.
Composer profile © Andrew Stewart

Prelude to ‘Khovanshchina’ (1874, orch. Rimsky-Korsakov 1883)
A late starter who died far too young, Mussorgsky’s list of works features several projects that were never properly started, soon abandoned or left incomplete. The biggest and most important of these is the opera Khovanshchina. It is an immensely powerful work, but also infuriating for its waywardness and aching gaps at vital parts of the structure.

The year 1874 was a high point for Mussorgsky. In February, shortly before his 35th birthday, his first completed opera Boris Godunov was staged at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg; in June, he composed his piano work Pictures at an Exhibition and in November, the song cycle Sunless. The success of Boris Godunov spurred him to press on with the composition of another historical opera, this time dealing with the conflicts in Russian society at the end of the 17th century when Tsar Peter the Great was about to take absolute power. Its unwieldy title, Khovanshchina, refers to the intrigues of the powerful Khovansky family, whose private militias are confronted with the rock of religious fundamentalism, and with the modernising tendencies of Tsar Peter and his allies.

Unfortunately, it was also around this time that Mussorgsky began to indulge in the uncontrolled drinking bouts that would kill him at the age of 42, leaving Khovanshchina incomplete and almost none of the music orchestrated. After Mussorgsky’s death, his friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov prepared a performing edition of the score, filling in the gaps as best he could, orchestrating the music in his own subtle manner (very different from Mussorgsky’s rough-edged but effective style) and smoothing out much of what he considered to be Mussorgsky’s harshnesses in melody and harmony. Another edition, restoring some of the music cut by Rimsky-Korsakov, was commissioned from Shostakovich in 1958 for a film version of the opera.

The Prelude, however, is substantially the same in both rival versions. It was one of the earliest pieces to be composed (as a piano score) in September 1874. Act One of the opera is set in Moscow’s Red Square, and the Prelude is an evocation of dawn breaking over the Moscow River. It is built out of a folk-like melody, expressively extended and decorated, with the sinister tolling of bells hinting at grim events to follow.
Programme note © Andrew Huth

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