Context and overview of Tchaikovsky's major works

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Best loved today for his seemingly infinite gift of melody, Tchaikovsky was also an innovator. While it is easy to take the invention of his three ballets and his two greatest operas for granted, he took bold steps forward in every sphere he touched, including symphonic, chamber and choral music.

A truly Russian school of music was still taking shape when Tchaikovsky became one of the first students at the new St Petersburg Conservatory in the 1850s. The early 19th-century composer Mikhail Glinka had established folksong in opera as a yardstick. Everything that followed in Russian music, Tchaikovsky later declared, came from Glinka, ‘as the oak is in the acorn’.

Tchaikovsky is often presented as a conservative steeped in the traditions of western music. Yet in his early maturity he sought out the leading light of Russian musical nationalism, Mily Balakirev. He was to follow nationalist precepts in his early operas The Oprichnik  and The Voyevoda.

Fantasy and a note of more personal lyricism soon came to the forefront. Tchaikovsky’s vocal writing blossomed in Eugene Onegin, providing a very individual alternative to the inflections of Russian speech captured by Musorgsky in Boris Godunov (an opera Tchaikovsky loathed).

Having started by following Glinka’s clear and natural art of orchestration, Tchaikovsky also became more daring in using unusual combinations of instruments. It is hardly surprising if the piquant orchestral ensembles of The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker pointed the way forward to a composer as radical as Igor Stravinsky in The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring.

Tchaikovsky’s thoughts on writing for the stage fluctuated with his fortunes. Composing Eugene Onegin in 1877, he went his own way, breathing lyrical life into real human characters and rejecting the puppets of grand opera. Yet in the works which followed – The Maid of Orleans, Mazeppa and The Enchantress – he waved a manifesto of opera for a wider audience.

Whether he was writing for himself or to order, Tchaikovsky always needed a key scene which could fire his imagination. For Onegin, it was the long monologue in which Tatyana, the impressionable teenage heroine of Russian poet Pushkin’s verse novel, writes an impulsive love-letter to the hero. In The Queen of Spades of 1890, it was the visit paid by the outsider, Hermann, to an ancient Countess to extract her secret of three winning cards, frightening her to death.

Between Onegin and the more lavishly-padded Queen of Spades, Tchaikovsky rose to fame as the Tsar’s court composer. His ballets underwent a change of status, too.  While Swan Lake in 1876 brought sweeping symphonic music into the world of dance, it was shoddily staged at Moscow’s Bolshoy Theatre. Thirteen years later The Sleeping Beauty met with the full splendour of St Petersburg’s ‘imperial style’.

Nearly three hours long, the full score of The Sleeping Beauty is Tchaikovsky’s richest. The Nutcracker had to be more compact, originally staged as part of a double-bill with the fairy-tale opera Iolanta. Yet in both ballets, Tchaikovsky achieves an unearthly perfection comparable to the late works of his idol Mozart.

David Nice

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