Tchaikovsky: Influential Bridge Between Russia and the West
Born in 1840, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed some of the best-beloved and often-performed works in classical music. His ballet and orchestral works included The Nutcracker Suite, Swan Lake, and the 1812 Overture. He also composed many influential piano works, including his First Piano Concerto. Yet Tchaikovsky led a life which often seemed at odds with his social surroundings.
As a child of the middle class, his parents provided young Pyotr with a legal education, intending him for a career in civil service. At age 14, while attending the School of Jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg, Pyotr was shocked by news of the death of his mother from cholera. He wrote his first recorded composition, a waltz, to honor her memory.
During his legal studies, young Pyotr seems to have continued yearning for a musical rather than a legal career. For several years, Pyotr’s father Ilya paid for him to receive private piano lessons from a well-known teacher. However, when Ilya asked this teacher’s advice regarding a musical career for his son, the teacher is reported to have said that Pyotr did not show evidence of brilliance in either composition or piano performance. The father then insisted that Pyotr pursue the solid, if pedestrian, career that had been planned for him.
Obedient to his father’s wishes, Pyotr took his law degree and began his civil service career. Yet it lasted only a scant three years before he returned to music for good. He joined the newly-formed Saint Petersburg Conservatory and studied under Anton Rubenstein, who was impressed by his talent.
Even with the support of Rubenstein, however, Tchaikovsky found it challenging to fit in at the Conservatory. Rubenstein and the philosophy of the Conservatory was, in fact, musically quite conservative, dedicated to preserving what Rubenstein saw as the best of Western musical forms. Tchaikovsky, however, realized in composing his first major orchestral work, the Symphony No. 1 in G Minor, Winter Daydreams, that he would have trouble fitting his own musical expressions into Western forms as strictly as Rubenstein would have preferred. And, despite their mutual respect, Rubenstein and Tchaikovsky clashed repeatedly over the acceptability of this work.
Yet by having studied at a Conservatory dedicated to preserving Western musical forms, Tchaikovsky also found himself clashing with The Five, a group of influential young Russian composers who preferred to turn away from Western traditions. The Five, including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Modeste Mussorgsky, wanted to produce a distinctly Russian style of music and, rejecting the teachings of the Conservatory, rejected Tchaikovsky’s works as well.
Too individualistic for the conservative tastes of Rubenstein, too conservative and Westernized for the progressive Russian nationalist tastes of The Five, Tchaikovsky still seemed something of an outcast even while pursuing his long-dreamt-of musical career. Eventually, he accepted a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory which was formed by Anton Rubenstein’s brother, Nikolai Rubenstein, and there he stayed for over a decade.
Here Tchaikovsky composed his First Piano Concerto and intended to dedicate it to Nikolai Rubenstein. However, even this caused conflict, as Nikolai Rubenstein’s early reaction to the work was one of rejection. But Tchaikovsky, though hurt and angered by this, was through with changing his works to suit others. He would be true to his own musical vision and not a note would be changed. Eventually the work was premiered by another pianist, Hans von Bulow. And, in the long run, Nikolai Rubenstein came to appreciate the work and later accepted it unchanged.
Tchaikovsky had a restless and turmoil-filled personal life as well. His first love married another man unexpectedly. He later married hastily and disastrously. While he and his wife Antonina lived together for only a few short months and never had any children, they remained legally married for the rest of his life.
Tchaikovsky then took to traveling all over Europe and Russia, never settling in one place for very long. He was helped in this lifestyle by the patronage of a wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meck, who paid Tchaikovsky an annual stipend for many years that enabled him to resign from the Moscow Conservatory. She was also a source of deep and abiding friendship and emotional support as well, though by her own preference they never met in person. They exchanged more than a thousand letters over the years.
It was through his incessant travels that Tchaikovsky became a bridge between the music of Russia and of the West. Although Anton Rubenstein and others had brought Western forms to Russia, the reverse had not been true — until Tchaikovsky took his music to the West. His works were influential in the development of Western forms thereafter, particularly ballet. But any bridge, while highly valued, is always suspended between worlds — never fully a part of either side. Tchaikovsky, the man who never seemed to fit in anywhere, eventually spread his musical influence everywhere.
Tags: , ballet, composition, compositions of Tchaikovsky, Moscow Conservatory, music, music history, music of Tchaikovsky, piano, piano lessons, piano music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russia, Russian music, Saint Petersburg Conservatory, Tchaikovsky, The Five
