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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Russian: Пётр Ильич Чайкoвский, Pjotr Il’ič Čajkovskij; listen (help·info))[1] ( May 7 [O.S. April 25] 1840 – November 6 [O.S. October 25] 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic era. While not part of the nationalistic music group known as "The Five", Tchaikovsky wrote music which was distinctly Russian: plangent, introspective, often modal-sounding.
Contents[hide]
1 Life
1.1 Childhood and early manhood
1.2 Tchaikovsky and the Five
1.3 Homosexuality, marriage and Dostoyevsky
1.4 Timely benefactress
1.5 Later career
1.6 Death
1.7 Tchaikovsky's life in media
2 Music
3 Musical style
3.1 Arch romantic
3.2 Melody and tone color
3.3 Imperial style
3.4 Nightmares, whimsy, delicate fantasy
3.5 "Passé-ism"
4 Musical form
4.1 Melody versus form
4.2 Russian versus Western
4.3 Symphonic hybrid
4.4 Tchaikovsky's solution
5 Media
6 See also
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links
//

Life

Childhood and early manhood
Pyotr Tchaikovsky was born on April 25, 1840 (Julian calendar) or May 7 (Gregorian calendar) in Votkinsk, a small town in present-day Udmurtia (at the time the Vyatka Guberniya of Imperial Russia). He was the son of a mining engineer in the government mines and the second of his three wives, Alexandra, a Russian woman of French ancestry. He was the older brother (by some ten years) of the dramatist, librettist, and translator Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Musically precocious, Pyotr began piano lessons at age five with a local woman, Mariya Palchikova, and within three years could read music as well as his teacher. In 1850, his father was appointed director of the St Petersburg Technological Institute. There, the young Tchaikovsky obtained an education at the School of Jurisprudence. Though music was not considered a high priority on the curriculum, Tchaikovsky was taken with classmates on regular visits to the theater and the opera. He was very taken with the works of Rossini, Bellini, Verdi and Mozart. The only music instruction he received at school was some piano tuition from Franz Becker, a piano manufacturer who made occasional visits as a token music teacher.

Tchaikovsky as bureaucrat.
Tchaikovsky's mother died of cholera in 1854. The 14-year-old Tchaikovsky took the news hard; for two years, he could not write about his loss. He reacted by turning to music. Within a month of her death, he was making his first serious efforts at composition, a waltz in her memory.
Tchaikovsky's father indulged his interest in music, funding studies with Rudolph Kündinger, a well-known piano teacher from Nuremberg, beginning in 1855. But when Tchaikovsky's father consulted Kündinger about prospects for a musical career for his son, Kündinger wrote that nothing suggested a potential composer or even a fine performer. Tchaikovsky was told to finish his course work, then try for a post in the Ministry of Justice.
Tchaikovsky graduated on May 25, 1859 with the rank of titular counselor, the lowest rung of the civil service ladder. On June 15, he was appointed to the Ministry of Justice. Six months later the Ministry made him a junior assistant to his department and a senior assistant two months after that, where he remained.
In 1861, Tchaikovsky learned of music classes being held by the Russian Musical Society (RMS) by accident. According to Tchaikovsky's friend Nikolay Kashkin, Tchaikovsky enjoyed a friendly rivalry with a music-loving cousin, an officer in the Horse Grenadiers. This cousin boasted one day that he could make the transition from one key to any other in no more than three chords. Tchaikovsky took up this challenge and lost, then learned his cousin had learned it from Nikolai Zaremba's RMS class in music theory.
Tchaikovsky promptly began studies with Zaremba. The following year, when Zaremba joined the faculty of the new St Petersburg Conservatory, Tchaikovsky followed his teacher and enrolled, but still did not give up his post at the ministry, until his father consented to support him. From 1862 to 1865, Tchaikovsky studied harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Zaremba, and instrumentation and composition under the director and founder of the Conservatory, Anton Rubinstein, who was impressed by Tchaikovsky's talent.
After graduating, Tchaikovsky was approached by Anton Rubinstein's younger brother Nikolai to become professor of harmony, composition, and the history of music. Tchaikovsky gladly accepted the position, as his father had retired and lost his property.

Tchaikovsky and the Five
See also: Tchaikovsky and the Five
As Tchaikovsky studied with Zaremba, the critic Vladimir Stasov and the composer Mily Balakirev formed a nationalistic school of music, recruiting what would be known as The Mighty Handful (better known in English as "The Five") in St. Petersburg. As he became Anton Rubinstein's best known student, Tchaikovsky was associated by The Five with the conservative opposition. However, when Rubinstein exited the St. Petersburg musical scene in 1867, Tchaikovsky entered into a working relationship with Balakirev, resulting in the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet.
Tchaikovsky remained ambivalent about The Five's music and goals, and his relationship with its members was cordial but never close. Tchaikovsky enjoyed close relations with Alexander Glazunov, Anatol Lyadov and, at least on the surface, the elder Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Homosexuality, marriage and Dostoyevsky
See also: Tchaikovsky's personal life
Tchaikovsky's homosexuality, as well as its importance to his life and music, has been known to the West for at least 75 years. Suppressed in Russia by the Soviets, it has only recently become widely known in post-Soviet Russia. Evidence that Tchaikovsky was homosexual is drawn from his letters and diaries, as well as the letters of his brother, Modest, who was also a homosexual.[2]
More controversial is how comfortable Tchaikovsky might have been with his sexual nature. Alexander Poznansky surmises that the composer "eventually came to see his sexual peculiarities as an insurmountable and even natural part of his personality ... without experiencing any serious psychological damage."[3] On the other hand, the British musicologist and scholar Henry Zajaczkowski's research "along psychoanalytical lines" points instead to "a severe unconscious inhibition by the composer of his sexual feelings":
One consequence of it may be sexual overindulgence as a kind of false solution: the individual thereby persuades himself that he does accept his sexual impulses. Complementing this and, also, as a psychological defense mechanism, would be precisely the idolization by Tchaikovsky of many of the young men of his circle [the self-styled "Fourth Suite"], to which Poznansky himself draws attention. If the composer's response to possible sexual objects was either to use and discard them or to idolize them, it shows that he was unable to form an integrated, secure relationship with another man. That, surely, was [Tchaikovsky's] tragedy.[4]

Tchaikovsky with his wife Antonina Miliukova.
One of his conservatory students, Antonina Miliukova, began writing him passionate letters around the time that he had made up his mind to "marry whoever will have me." He hastily married her on July 18, 1877. Within days, while still on their honeymoon, he deeply regretted his decision. Two weeks after the wedding the composer supposedly attempted suicide by putting himself into the freezing Moscow River. Once recovered from the effects of that, he fled to St Petersburg --his mind verging on a nervous breakdown.
Tchaikovsky's marital debacle forced him to face the truth concerning his sexuality. He wrote to his brother Anatoly that there was "nothing more futile than wanting to be anything other than what I am by nature."[5]
Moreover, the mental and emotional strain the composer suffered from his abortive marriage may have enhanced rather than endangered his creativity. Despite some interruptions, the six months between Tchaikovsky's engagement to Antonina and his "rest cure" in Clarens, Switzerland, following his marriage saw him complete two of his finest works, the Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onegin.
Because of the intense emotional directness now manifest in Tchaikovsky's music, starting with the Fourth Symphony, in Russia the composer's name started being placed alongside that of the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A typical passage about the two reads, "With a hidden passion they both stop at moments of horror, total spiritual collapse, and finding acute sweetness in the cold trepidation of the heart before the abyss, they both force the reader to experience those feelings, too."[6]
Beginning with the Fourth, Tchaikovsky's younger contemporaries equated his symphonies with Dostoyevsky's psychological novels. This was because they heard, for the first time in Russian music, an ambivalent, suffering personality at the heart of these works. They felt that like Dostoyevsky's characters, Tchaikovsky's hero persisted in exploring the meaning of life while trapped in a fatal love-death-faith triangle in the Dostoyevskian fashion.

Timely benefactress

Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky's patroness and confidante from 1877 to 1890.
One who was especially taken with Tchaikovsky's music was Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy widow of a Russian railway tycoon. Von Meck had commissioned some minor works from Tchaikovsky and begun an ongoing correspondence just before his marital episode. Tchaikovsky in turn had asked her for loans to cover his marital and living expenses. Now von Meck suggested paying Tchaikovsky an annual subsidy of 6,000 rubles, in monthly installments, to avoid any embarrassment of asking for future loans. This would also allow Tchaikovsky to resign from the Moscow Conservatory in October 1878 and concentrate primarily on composition.
Von Meck and Tchaikovsky's correspondence would grow to over 1,200 letters between 1877 and 1890. The details of these letters are extraordinary for two people who would never even meet, let alone become lovers. Tchaikovsky was also prepared to be more openly and abundantly confiding to his patroness about some of his attitudes to life and about his creative processes than to any other person.
However, after 13 years she ended the relationship unexpectedly, claiming bankruptcy. During this period, Tchaikovsky had already achieved success throughout Europe and the United States by 1891. Von Meck's claim of financial ruin is disregarded by some who believe that she ended her patronage of Tchaikovsky because she supposedly discovered the composer's homosexuality. The two later became related by marriage — one of her sons, Nikolay, married Tchaikovsky's niece Anna Davydova.

Later career
After a year away from his post following his marriage and its aftermath, Tchaikovsky returned to Moscow Conservatory in the fall of 1879. Shortly into that term, however, he resigned. Tchaikovsky eventually settled at his sister's estate in Kamenka, just outside Kiev. Even with this base, he travelled incessantly. With the assurance of a regular income from von Meck, he took advantage of open-ended wandering around Europe and rural Russia. He did not stay long in any one place, lived mainly solitary and avoided social contact whenever possible. During these rootless years, Tchaikovsky's reputation as a composer grew rapidly outside Russia.
In 1880, during the commemoration of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow, Dostoyevsky gave a famous speech on Pushkin, in which he called for the Russian "to become brother to all men, uniman, if you will."[7] While Dostoyevsky had been a fervent nationalist, like Tchaikovsky he also had a trait that Osip Mandelstam would call "a longing for world culture."[7] The conclusion he gave in his speech on the "European" essence of Pushkin's work was that the poet had given a prophetic call to Russia for "universal unity" with the West[7] Reaction to this speech was unprecedented, with acclaim for Dostoyevsky's message spreading quickly throughout Russia.
The benefit of the uniman speech for Tchaikovsky was overwhelming. Before it, Alexandre Benois writes in his memoirs, "it was considered obligatory [in progressive musical circles] to treat Tchaikovsky as a renegade, a master overly dependent on the West."[7] He drew a cult following among the young intelligentsia of St. Petersburg, including Benois, Leon Bakst and Sergei Diaghilev.

Tchaikovsky at Cambridge, 1893.
In 1885 Tsar Alexander III conferred upon Tchaikovsky the Order of St. Vladimir (fourth class). This gave the composer the right of hereditary nobility. That year, Tchaikovsky resettled in Russia — at first in Maidanovo, near Klin; then Frolovskoye, also near Klin, in 1888; and finally in Klin itself in 1891. After Tchaikovsky's death, his brother Modest and his nephew Vladimir "Bob" Davydov converted this house into a museum in the composer's honor.
Tchaikovsky took to orchestral conducting after filling in at a performance in Moscow of his opera The Enchantress (Russian: Чародейка) (1885-7). Overcoming a life-long stage fright, his confidence gradually increased to the extent that he regularly took to conducting his pieces.
Tchaikovsky visited America in 1891 in a triumphant tour to conduct performances of his works. On May 5, he conducted the New York Music Society's orchestra in a performance of Marche Slave on the opening night of New York's Carnegie Hall. That evening was followed by subsequent performances of his Third Suite on May 7, and the a cappella choruses Pater Noster and Legend on May 8. The U.S. tour also included performances of his First Piano Concerto and Serenade for Strings.
In 1893, Cambridge University awarded Tchaikovsky an honorary Doctor of Music degree. Other composers similarly honored on the same occasion included Camille Saint-Saëns, Max Bruch, Arrigo Boito and Edvard Grieg (who was unable to attend personally, due to illness).

Death

Tchaikovsky's tomb at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery
See also: Death of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky died nine days after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, on November 6, 1893.
Most biographers of Tchaikovsky's life have considered his death to have been caused by cholera, most probably contracted through drinking contaminated water several days earlier. In recent decades, however, theories have been advanced that his death was a suicide. According to one variation of the theory, a sentence of suicide was imposed in a "court of honor" by Tchaikovsky's fellow alumni of the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, as a censure of the composer's homosexuality.

Tchaikovsky's life in media
Tchaikovsky's life is the subject of Ken Russell's fictionalized motion picture The Music Lovers (1970). Two other motion pictures were based on his life - the low-budget, fictionalized Song of My Heart, released in 1948, and the 1972 Russian-language "Tchaikovsky", which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
In November 1993 the BBC aired a documentary entitled Pride or Prejudice, which investigated various theories regarding Tchaikovsky's death. The English composer Michael Finnissy composed a short opera, Shameful Vice, about Tchaikovsky's last days and death.

Music
See also: List of compositions by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky wrote several works well known among the general classical public—Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture and Marche Slave. These, along with two of his concertos and three of his latter symphonies, are probably his most familiar works, thanks in part to Tchaikovsky's considerable gift for melody, along with the emotional accessibility of his music.

Original cast of Tchaikovsky's ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, St Petersburg, 1890
Tchaikovsky is well known for his ballets, although it was only in his last years, with his last two ballets, that his contemporaries came to really appreciate his finer qualities as ballet music composer. His final ballet, The Nutcracker, has become among the most popular ballets performed, primarily around Christmas time. He also completed ten operas, although one of these is mostly lost and another exists in two significantly different versions. In the West his most famous operas are Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades.
Tchaikovsky's earlier symphonies are generally optimistic works of nationalistic character. The later symphonies are more intensely dramatic, with the Fourth a breakthrough work; there Tchaikovsky found the symphonic method that matched his temperament to his talents. The most famous of these, the Sixth, is especially interpreted by many as a declaration of despair. These two symphonies, along with the Fifth, are recognized as highly original examples of symphonic form and are frequently performed.
In the ten years between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, Tchaikovsky also wrote four orchestral suites. He originally intended to designate the Third Suite a symphony - but, as he told Taneyev, "... the title is of no importance".[8] Tchaikovsky used the suites to experiment with new instrumental combinations.
Among Tchaikovsky's concertos, his First Piano Concerto is now the best known and among the most frequently played piano concerti. The same holds true for his Violin Concerto, but he wrote two other works for piano and orchestra and left another unfinished at his death. In addition, Tchaikovsky composed two concertante works for cello and orchestra — the Variations on a Rococo theme and Pezzo capriccioso.

Musical style

“Love led the two of us unto one death” (Dante, Inferno V.108). Illustration of Francesca da Rimini by Gustave Dore.

Arch romantic
Tchaikovsky demonstrated the Romantic ideals of color, emotional expressiveness, and dramatic intensity. He fused many elements of his style into a single symphonic experience — his love of dance and folk music, his feelings of the Russian countryside and people, and his sense of Fate.
Tchaikovsky was also typically Romantic in his choice of subject matter in his operas and symphonic poems. He leaned toward doomed lovers and heroines — Romeo and Juliet, Francesca and Paolo (Francesca da Rimini), Tatiana (Eugene Onegin), even the title character from his abandoned opera Undina.
Sometimes, as in his final opera, Iolanta, and in his final tone poem, The Voyevode, the love music could outshine the rest of the composition. This could happen especially in Tchaikovsky's choices of opera subjects. He could become interested in an otherwise sub-standard story if a heroine or love scene caught his attention.

Melody and tone color
Tchaikovsky stood out from many of his contemporaries in his great fund of melody and quality of that melody—sweet and at times bittersweet in tone, sensuous in the undulations of the melodic line, and lush in texture. Some of those melodies have proved popular enough for Tin Pan Alley song composers to re-use.
Tchaikovsky's melodic line is expressively full and provides a clear periodic structure. That structure can be obscured by the sheer expansiveness of the musical phrase, as well as by its sequential extension. The love theme in Romeo and Juliet is an example. The theme starts as an eight-bar phrase, the second half a free sequence of the first. This sequence establishes a principle of growth which is used on the theme's recurrence to expand freely and unpredictably.

Imperial style
Tchaikovsky's musical cosmopolitanism made him especially adept in writing in an "Imperial style" favored by Tsar Alexander III and the Russian upper classes, as opposed to the "Russian" harmonies of Mussorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Imperial style, the historian Orlando Figis writes, was symbolized by the polonaise. Imported into Russia by the Polish composer Jozef Kozlowski near the end of the 18th century, the polonaise "became the supreme courtly form and the most brilliant of all the ballroom genres."[9] The polonaise also came to symbolize the European brilliance of 18th-century Petersburg itself. Pushkin and Tchaikovsky both use this dance for Tatiana's climactic entry in the ball scene of Eugene Onegin. Leo Tolstoy also uses it at the climax of the ball in War and Peace, where the Emperor makes his appearance and Natasha dances with Andrei.

Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, painted by Adolph Northen in the 19th century
Tchaikovsky's writing in Imperial style echoed a theme traditional in Russian culture and first sounded by Pushkin. This theme was glorification of the Russian empire and the victories of Russian arms. The rapid expansion of the empire following the defeat of Napoleon, the ethnic variety of its peoples and the capital's growing appetite for conquests was reflected especially in Russian music.
Tchaikovsky made full use of the emotional and symbolic possibilities of the Russian anthem "God Save the Tsar" in several commemorative works — including two of his most popular compositions, the Marche Slave and the 1812 Overture. Tchaikovsky wrote Marche Slave in support of one of the most cherished ideas of imperial Russia — Pan-Slavism. When Serbia rebelled against Turkish rule in 1876, the atmosphere in Russia toward the Serbs became so electric that performances of the Marche Slave, with its Serbian folk melodies, inevitably elicited outbursts of patriotism. This was something the equally patriotic composer did not mind one bit. The 1812 Overture likewise glorified the greatest military and political victory of the Romanov dynasty, in the Patriotic War against Napoleon.

Nightmares, whimsy, delicate fantasy
In The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky conjures a "world of captivating nightmares" of E.T.A. Hoffmann, as Alexandre Benois phrases it, "a mixture of strange truth and convincing invention."[10] Another glimpse of this world comes earlier, with the movement titled "Rêves d'enfant" (A Child's Dream) from the Second Suite for orchestra. After a strange, unnerving section of music with no apparent harmonic foundation, the music eventually reverts to the peaceful state in which it started.
Tchaikovsky also had a lighter side. He could be whimsical, such as in the "Chacteristic Dances" that make up most of Act Two of The Nutcracker and, several years earlier, the "Marche miniature" (originally titled "March of the Lilliputians") from the First Suite. He could also be good-natured, almost tongue-in-cheek, such as in the scherzo and gavotte which follow the "Marche miniature" in the First Suite and the "Danse baroque" which concludes the Second Suite. Then there are moments of delicate, almost ethereal fantasy, as in the scherzo of the Manfred Symphony, subtitled "The Alpine Fairy appears before Manfred in a rainbow."

"Reclining upon a bed was a princess of radiant beauty." Illustration by Gustave Dore.[11]

"Passé-ism"
In The Sleeping Beauty and The Queen of Spades, Tchaikovsky reconstructs the imperial grandeur of the 18th-Century world. Tchaikovsky sets The Sleeping Beauty in the realm of Louis XIV, a nostalgic tribute to the French influence of 18th-century Russian music and culture. This was dictated at least in part by the source of the story, Charles Perrault's fairy tale La Belle au bois Dormant, and in part by the head of the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, who wrote the libretto and approached Tchaikovsky for the music. He wrote the composer, "I want to stage it in the style of Louis XIV, allowing the musical fantasy to run high and melodies to be written in the spirit of Lully, Bach, Rameau and such-like. If this idea is to your liking, why shouldn't you undertake to compose the music?"[12]
The key phrase here is "to be written in the spirit of..."—not "to be written in the style of...." As Benois emphasizes, Tchaikovsky had a powerful talent for letting his imagination enter into the spirit of a past era, allowing him to write in a vein that brought that era to life as though it were happening in the present. Benois calls this quality "passé-ism."[13]
"Passé-ism" is also fully in effect in the opera The Queen of Spades, based on the Pushkin story. In the opera Tchaikovsky evokes the St. Petersburg of Catherine the Great — an era where the Russian capital was fully integrated with, and played a major role in, the culture of Europe. Infusing the opera with rococo elements (Tchaikovsky himself describes the ballroom scenes as a "slavish imitation" of 18th-century style), he uses the story's layers of ghostly fantasy to conjure up a dream world of the past.

Musical form

Melody versus form
Western musical form, as developed primarily by Germanic composers, was analytical and architectural; it simply was not designed to handle the personal emotions Tchaikovsky wished to express. Nor was this challenge Tchaikovsky's. The Romantics in general were never natural symphonists because music was to them primarily evocative and biographical—generally autobiographical.
With Tchaikovsky, however, the challenge was not simply emotion in music, but intensity of emotion, beginning with the Fourth Symphony. In his first three symphonies Tchaikovsky had striven to stay within strict Western form. The turbulent changes in the composer's personal life, including his marital crisis, now led him to write music so strongly personal and expressive that structural matters could not stay as they had been.
There was a melodic change. Here, Tchaikovsky's gift could be more freely deployed than it had previously. Paradoxically, Tchaikovsky's asset was also his greatest enemy in terms of form. A melody is complete on its own terms. Because of this completeness, it stands apart from other themes meant not only to contrast, but more importantly to interact and build upon one another naturally. This dominance of one melody can ruin the balance and proportion Western classical composers considered the proper beauties of sonata form.
In a second change, as the Fourth Symphony shows, the symphony had become a human document—dramatic, autobiographical, concerned not with everyday things but with things psychological. This was because Tchaikovsky's creative impulses had become unprecedentedly personal, urgent, capable of enormous expressive forcefulness, even violence.
Tchaikovsky described this new element to von Meck:
You ask me if this symphony [the Fourth] has a definite programme. Usually when asked this question about a symphonic piece, I reply: none. And indeed it is difficult to answer such a question. How can one express those inexpressible sensations which pass through one when writing an instrumental work without a definite subject? It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which is full to the brim and which, true to its essential nature, pours itself out in sound, just as the lyric poet expresses himself in verse. The difference is that music possesses incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for the articulation of the thousand different moments of the soul's moods.....[14]

Russian versus Western
The European principles Tchaikovsky learned, and the forms of organizing musical material, also seemed to work in opposition to his native instincts. Mikhail Glinka's Kamarinskaya, which Tchaikovsky called the acorn from which the oak of Russian classical music grew, is an example of the musical positives and negatives with which Tchaikovsky had to deal.
Glinka uses the principle from folk song of unfolding around a thematic constant—or actually two constants, since he uses two folk songs. Glinka varies the background material surrounding these songs more than the songs themselves. The music does not evolve or progress toward an all-embracing point, as it would in Western music. Instead of becoming an organic creation where the themes interact, contrast, change, and grow, it repeats itself constantly, albeit with changing backgrounds, remaining static instead of moving forward.
Using Western principles that would have the music moving in a constant discourse or argument with music that could stay intrinsically, even stubbornly static, would seem a paradox. Russian working methods would seem totally unsuitable for building large-scale, evolving Western-style structures due to the nature of Russian music's reflectiveness.

Symphonic hybrid
By using a scheme introduced by Franz Liszt, a modular rotation in sequences of thirds, along with a loose symphonic-poem type of structure, "The Five" avoided Western laws of modulation in sonata form.
The symphonic poem would, ironically, become Tchaikovsky's solution as well, though he would stay much closer than the Five to Western tonality. Using the principles of the symphonic poem, Tchaikovsky could combine large-scale orchestral writing with emotions and instrumental colors toward which he gravitated naturally.
With the range and intensity of emotions, the symphony's whole nature was changed and widened. The result was a symphonic hybrid, a cross between the primarily architectural form of the symphony and the primarily "literary" or "poetic" form of the symphonic poem.

Tchaikovsky's solution
The compromise Tchaikovsky makes with sonata form is as follows:
In each of his symphonies except the First, he begins with a slow introduction. A first subject or melody is introduced and repeated with new orchestration and emotional emphasis. A second, more lyrical subject follows, then a more vigorous, contrasting one; Tchaikovsky treats each of these new themes similarly to the first.
What follows is an ingenious episodic treatment of three contrasting melodies, since these melodies, being self-sufficient, cannot act upon each other in an organic, evolutionary progress. It is basically a static mechanism, as in Russian folk music. Tchaikovsky falls back on a number of musical devices, with expectation for the next entry of a melody—ostinato figures, dramatic pedal points, sequences. Even with this repetitiveness, there is not a lack of ingenuity in the development sections of Russian symphonic works when it comes to manipulating musical material.
This ingenuity can seem a game played according to a well-learned method, not of a stage-by-stage musical argument moving logically toward its conclusion. In this sense, there may be considerable truth in Mussorgsky's dictum: "The German, when he thinks, will first examine and explore, then make his conclusion: our [Russian] brother will first make his conclusion, then amuse himself with examination and exploration."[15]

Media
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHYwVfN3wY4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBeUxXSNiFc&feature=related


this is the nutcracker ballet...yupyup..great dancers,great scenes..i like the flower one best....

christmas coming..i hope to watch the nutcracker during christmas...but so ex...lor...

try to save...money..if i can haha..don't laugh li ern!

posted by iRiS2U @ 11:57 PM