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Break into Classical Music with Tchaikovsky

November 6th, 2009 | 7:11 am est | Blair Sanderson

“I grew up in a quiet spot and was saturated from earliest childhood with the wonderful beauty of Russian popular song.”

– Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky

 
Getting Off to a Good Start

Unless you were fortunate enough to grow up in a household that listened to a lot of classical music, you might feel that it is quite hard to pick up casually and must require extraordinary intellectual effort. Of course, knowledge of any kind of music doesn’t come automatically, and you have to put some time and effort into listening to classical music to get rewards from it, just as you would with rock, blues, jazz, country, and so on. Yet there are other challenges that can make classical music seem particularly daunting. First, listening to anything and everything randomly, either online or at a music library, may bring about confusion, because of the sheer quantity of classical music that exists and the variety of styles and periods it’s associated with, from Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque to Classical, Romantic, and Modern. It’s easy to get lost. Second, you can squander a fortune on buying classical music, even out of the mid-line and budget bins, especially without knowing what’s worth hearing more than once. Third, if you lack a trusted guide, you may begin to feel overwhelmed by all the choices and quit out of frustration. If you aren’t lucky enough to have ready access to the best recordings, vast disposable income, or a knowledgeable teacher or friend to make suggestions, where on earth do you begin? To whom should you turn in your time of greatest need?

Meet Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky (1840 -1893), one of the great Russian composers from the Romantic period, a perennial favorite among classical fans, and possibly the best pathfinder to classical music. Although he demonstrated talent in childhood and received music lessons early, Tchaikovsky began his professional career as a composer relatively late in life, starting out as a lawyer, but changing goals in his twenties to become a professor of music in Moscow. He achieved an artistic breakthrough with the premiere in 1877 of his ballet The Swan Lake, and proved to the public that he had a phenomenal grasp of melody, dance forms, and orchestral colors. He went on to even greater successes, and despite suffering severe doubts over his music and bouts of nearly suicidal depression over his homosexuality, he persevered and was acknowledged as a great composer in his lifetime. Tchaikovsky died ten days after the premiere of his Symphony No. 6 in B minor, “Pathétique,” which many regard as the ne plus ultra of his intensely personal expression.

Tchaikovsky is quite approachable from the start because his music is instantly memorable, and it’s easy to appreciate because of its expressive directness. You don’t need to understand the finer points of music theory to know that Tchaikovsky’s music is usually quite dramatic, exciting, moving, and abundantly tuneful, and much of it is brilliantly orchestrated. It also helps that Tchaikovsky composed pieces in all the available forms of his time, so it’s just as easy to find operas, concertos, symphonies, suites, and other large scale works as it is to find short character pieces, songs, and waltzes in his catalog. Beginners will also find it useful to know that Tchaikovsky is one of the most prolifically recorded composers in history, so there’s really no shortage of albums of his work. Ultimately, there are many paths to take with Tchaikovsky, and all of them will lead you deeper into classical music.

Accessibility and Memorability

Anyone entering the wide field of classical music should begin with learning tunes they’ll remember on one or two hearings. Almost everyone knows something by Tchaikovsky, even if it’s just a snippet of music they’ve heard in a film or on television. Once you have a firm grasp of a Tchaikovsky melody, it’s easy to comprehend the other parts of a composition as music that highlights it and makes it more dramatic, varies the theme in some interesting ways, or offers contrasting material to create tension or movement. Much of Tchaikovsky’s music is constructed around long, song-like melodies, and while he used all the developmental techniques and formal structures that he inherited from the Classical era of Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven, his melodies are the soul of virtually everything he wrote. Knowing this pretty much makes everything else fall into place.

Below are some samples of the best loved melodies in Tchaikovsky’s ouevre.

Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano - Piano Concerto No. 1: I. Allegro ma non troppo

Herbert von Karajan, conductor - Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture: Love Scene

Utrecht String Quartet - String Quartet No. 1 in D major, Op. 11: 2. Andante cantabile

Valery Gergiev, conductor - The Nutcracker: Act 2, Pas de deux

Valery Gergiev, conductor - Eugen Onegin: Valse

Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano - The Seasons: June (Barcarole)

A Comprehensive Approach

Tchaikovsky wrote in virtually all the forms of his day, so there are many ways to learn about the varieties of classical music from his examples. Even though he is considered a late Romantic master, Tchaikovsky’s favorite period was the Classical era, and his idol was Mozart. Bearing this in mind, we can see that Tchaikovsky closely followed western musical tradition, and he composed concertos, symphonies, suites, and chamber music that fit the basic molds of familiar classical forms. But he was a child of his own time, so he also composed in the new Romantic forms as well, such as tone poems, programmatic overtures, and character pieces. Of course, Tchaikovsky achieved his greatest fame as a composer of ballets, and The Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker are definitive masterpieces.

Mstislav Rostropovich, conductor - The Swan Lake, suite
1. Scène
2. Valse
3. Danse des cygnes
4. Scène
5. Danse hongroise
6. Scène finale

Mstislav Rostropovich, conductor - The Sleeping Beauty, suite
1. Introduction
2. Pas d’action (Rose Adagio)
3. Pas de caractère
4. Panorama
5. Valse

Mstislav Rostropovich, conductor - The Nutcracker, suite
1. Ouverture miniature
2. Marche
3. Danse de la Fée-Dragée
4. Danse russe (Trépak)
5. Danse arabe
6. Danse chinoise
7. Danse des mirlitons
8. Valse des fleurs

Like the violin concertos of Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major was his only full-length concerto for the instrument. It is enormously popular and regarded as one of the top vehicles for virtuosi.

Joshua Bell, violin - Violin Concerto in D major
1. Allegro moderato
2. Canzonetta
3. Finale. Allegro vivacissimo

Of Tchaikovsky’s six symphonies, the last three are the most frequently performed and essential listening for anyone interested in his music. (The first three symphonies are charmers, but they are best heard after gaining a better understanding of the mature masterpieces.)

Herbert von Karajan, conductor - Symphony No. 4 in F minor
1. Andante sostenuto
2. Andantino
3. Scherzo
4. Allegro con fuoco

Herbert von Karajan, conductor - Symphony No. 5 in E minor
1. Andante - Allegro con anima
2. Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza
3. Valse. Allegro moderato
4. Finale: Andante maestoso

Herbert von Karajan, conductor - Symphony No. 6 in B minor, “Pathétique”
1. Adagio
2. Allegro con grazia
3. Allegro molto vivace
4. Finale: Adagio lamentoso

There are several other works which have ensured Tchaikovsky’s reputation and pleased audiences for over a century. Some of these are regularly found as excerpts on greatest hits compilations, but be sure to accept only complete performances.

Arthur Fiedler, conductor - Capriccio Italien

Valery Gergiev, conductor – Slavonic March

Valery Gergiev, conductor -1812 Festival Overture

Fionnuala Hunt, conductor - Serenade for strings
1. Pezzo in forma di sonatine
2. Valse
3. Elegia
4. Finale

Raphael Ensemble - Souvenir de Florence
1. Allegro con spirito
2. Adagio cantabile con moto
3. Allegretto moderato
4. Allegro vivace

Tchaikovsky’s operas, choral music, and songs are somewhat less familiar in the west than his instrumental pieces, largely because some acquaintance with the Russian language is needed for appreciation, and some of this music wasn’t widely available on recordings in the United States until the last decades of the 20th century.

Olga Borodina, mezzo-soprano - Eugen Onegin: Act 1, Scene 1
Scene
Aria

Dmitri Hvorostovsky, baritone - The Queen of Spades: Act 1, Scene 1, Ballad

Corydon Singers - Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom: Our Father

Dmitri Hvorostovsky, baritone - None But the Lonely Heart

Widespread Availability

As one of the most popular composers of all time, Tchaikovsky receives a great amount of attention in the concert hall and in recording studios. Some might say too much. At a time when fewer and fewer new recordings of undiscovered and underperformed music are being made, mainly because of the financial risk, a disproportionate number of CDs and SACDs are devoted to Tchaikovsky’s best known compositions, and released without much thought to redundancy. Experienced listeners may feel that this is overkill, and certainly the frequency of reissues of Tchaikovsky’s most famous music may signal a lack of imagination on the part of the major labels.

But beginners who don’t have much or any classical background should feel relieved that so much is available. They will have no trouble finding any of Tchaikovsky’s major works, and even his most obscure music has found its way to disc. Because Tchaikovsky’s music is immediately accessible, highly tuneful, stylistically varied, and widely available, newcomers should start here and explore as much of it as possible. From there, it should be easy to branch out toward Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries – Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Antonin Dvorak, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, Sergey Rachmaninov – and eventually get to know many more composers who came before and after them. It’s possible to acquire a considerable amount of musical knowledge from concentrating on just one master, and because Tchaikovsky is quite possibly the most user-friendly of them all, his music is an excellent choice for all beginners. Indeed, if you have enjoyed the samples here, you’ve already begun to appreciate some of the best that classical music has to offer.

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