PART III

Hermeneutics of Russian Music: Four Cruxes

CHAPTER 11

Chaikovsky and the Human: A Centennial Essay

CONSERVATIVE AND CONVENTIONAL

An Italian orphan girl is brought up as the ward of an English baronet on his country estate. Another ward of the manor, a young man training for the ministry, loves her. She toys somewhat cruelly with him but loves her guardian’s nephew, a careless young officer who toys with her in turn, and who at his uncle’s instance is courting a haughty beauty far above the orphan girl’s station. The well-born couple’s engagement is announced, and the orphan girl is devastated. The officer, perceiving that his fiancée is annoyed by the orphan girl’s attentions to him, callously suggests that his uncle marry her off to the young preacher. The preacher, knowing how this plan will upset his beloved, sends her a desperate disclaimer that only mystifies and alarms her. The baronet, oblivious of her feelings, broaches the idea of a double wedding, expecting her to be delighted. Instead, of course, she is crushed. The officer, having mollified his bride and secured her agreement, asks the orphan girl to meet him alone, intending to explain the situation. The bride teases her viciously about her unrequited love, driving her into a jealous frenzy. On her way to her appointment with the officer she goes to a certain cabinet and draws out a dagger, intending to kill him. When she arrives at the appointed place, however, she finds him lying dead, the victim of a sudden seizure. She hurries back to the manor, informs everyone of what she has found, and faints away. The preacher picks her up to revive her, finds the unused dagger in her pocket, and quietly replaces it. The orphan girl runs off and hides herself on a neighboring farm, where the preacher eventually finds her. He tells her that he alone knows her secret, that she could never have gone through with the murder, that she is innocent and safe. In gratitude, she marries the man who loves her, who, having at last acceded to a vicarage, has now gained all his heart’s desires. But she soon expires in childbirth. As the author of the tale puts it, “the delicate plant had been too deeply bruised, and in the struggle to put forth a blossom it died.”

The author is George Eliot. The tale is “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story,” the second of the three novellas in Eliot’s first book, Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). But for a fatal glass of water, or a dose of mysterious cholera-simulating poison, or something, the story would very likely have been turned into an opera by Pyotr Ilyich Chaikovsky in collaboration with his brother Modest. To his friend Hermann Laroche, Chaikovsky pronounced Eliot’s tale “perfect for opera”¹ and even, shortly before his death, sketched a fragmentary scenario, which survives in his archive.² On the way to Mr Gilfil the composer rejected two proffered librettos from Modest, both adapted from translations by the romantic poet Vasiliy Zhukovsky. Nal and Damayanti, after the Hindu Ma-habharata, went on from Chaikovsky to Arensky. Undina, after La Motte Fouqué’s water nymph tale, on which subject Chaikovsky had already written and burned an opera, went on to Rachmaninoff, who sent it back to Modest, where it stayed. Both times the composing Chaikovsky complained to the literary Chaikovsky that the subject was “too far from life” and that he wanted something more like Cavalleria rusticana.³

Is “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story” like Cavalleria rusticana? That depends on how you look at it. It is not nearly as much like Mascagni’s opera as Pushkin’s poem “The Gypsies,” the basis of Rachmaninoff’s maiden opera, briefly discussed in the previous chapter, which deliberately played up the resemblance to what was then the hottest new operatic property.⁴ In Eliot’s story the jealous murder is only a fleeting wish, not a deed. On the other hand, Eliot’s tale, like the play by Giovanni Verga on which Mascagni drew, has a resolutely, indeed emphatically prosaic setting, not a romantic gypsy locale like Pushkin’s. Yet Pushkin hovers in the background to Chaikovsky’s choice nevertheless. Far more conspicuous than any affinity for Cavalleria rusticana are the correspondences in “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story” to Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin and his novella The Queen of Spades—and, even more specifically, to Chaikovsky’s operatic treatments of them.

Several plot similarities surely caught Chaikovsky’s eye. The relationship between the officer and the orphan girl closely parallels that between Onegin and Tatyana in Pushkin’s novel. The officer is characterized as an Oneginish rake: “To find oneself adored by a little, graceful, dark-eyed, sweet-singing woman, whom no one need despise, is an agreeable sensation, comparable to smoking the finest Latakia.”⁵ There are even a couple of passages in which the rake tries to console the smitten girl with the offhand promise of a brother’s love, as in Onegin’s answer to Tatyana’s letter, the central set piece of scene 3 in Chaikovsky’s opera (or, as in Chaikovsky’s answer to Antonina Milyukova’s letter, the central set piece in the drama of his life).⁶ More striking yet is the fairly lengthy scene in which the distraught orphan girl is put to bed by the kind but uncomprehending housekeeper, as Tatyana is put to bed by Fillipyevna, her old nanny; and then both girls, unable to sleep, get out of bed and spend the night at the window (though Eliot’s heroine, unlike Pushkin’s, feels no hope and writes no letter). These surface resemblances, though they may have arrested the composer’s attention, are minor. The major correspondences are two: one structural, the other attitudinal.

Caterina Sarti (known familiarly as Tina), Eliot’s orphan girl, is Italian; and, being Italian, she sings. Eliot’s story has a pervasive soundtrack of vocal music. It is more than a decorative fixture, also more than a fixer of local or period color. It defines social relations. In a kind of Upstairs, Downstairs routine, we first hear Tina, seated at the harpsichord at the behest of her guardian, Sir Christopher Cheverel, regaling a party—the very party at which the officer is being seen off in pursuit of his bride—with

Sir Christopher’s favourite airs by Gluck and Paesiello [sic], whose operas, for the happiness of that generation, were then to be heard on the London stage. It happened this evening that the sentiment of these airs, “Che farò senza Eurydice?” and “Ho perduto il bel sembiante” [from Paisiello’s Amor vendicato (1786)] in both of which the singer pours out his yearning after his lost love, came very close to Caterina’s own feeling. But her emotion, instead of being a hindrance to her singing, gave her additional power. (P. 96)

A couple of chapters later, we hear Sir Christopher’s housekeeper ask his gardener, as they sit with the other servants before the fire, to regale them with what the author describes as “a remarkably staccato rendering of ‘Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch,’“ a Scottish song by Neil Gow, the great fiddler, urging him on with the remark that “I’d rether hear a good old sung like that, nor all the fine ‘talian toodlin’“ (pp. 107-8). Already we must suspect that these two, and the other servants, will show Tina a greater sympathy and understanding than those ostensibly closer to her.

At the other end of the tale music serves again as emotional outlet, when, to pass “the long feverish moments before twelve o’clock,” when she is to meet with Captain Wybrow, the officer, Tina rushes to the harpsichord: “Handel’s ‘Messiah’ stood open on the desk, at the chorus ‘All we like sheep,’ and Caterina threw herself at once into the impetuous intricacies of that magnificent fugue. In her happiest moments she could never have played it so well; for now all the passion that made her misery was hurled by a convulsive effort into her music” (p. 154).

And finally, music is the healing force that revives Tina’s wounded spirit sufficiently, if not to save her, then at least to enable her to recognize and respond to the preacher’s—that is, Maynard Gilfil’s—claim on her heart. A minor character named Ozzy, Gilfil’s nephew, carelessly strikes a note on the harpsichord with his riding whip about a week after the catastrophe. It is the first musical tone Tina has heard since the fateful day.

The vibration rushed through Caterina like an electric shock: it seemed as if at that instant a new soul were entering into her, and filling her with a deeper, more significant life. She looked round, rose from the sofa, and walked to the harpsichord. In a moment her fingers were wandering with their old sweet method among the keys, and her soul was floating in its true familiar element of delicious sound. . . . Presently there were low liquid notes blending themselves with the harder tones of the instrument, and gradually the pure voice swelled into predominance. . . . Caterina was singing the very air from the Orfeo which we heard her singing so many months ago at the beginning of her sorrows. It was Che faro, Sir Christopher’s favourite, and its notes seemed to carry on their wings all the tenderest memories of her life, when Cheverel Manor was still an untroubled home. The long happy days of childhood and girlhood recovered all their rightful predominance over the short interval of sin and sorrow.

She paused, and burst into tears—the first tears she had shed since she had been at [Gilfil’s sister’s home]. Maynard could not help hurrying towards her, putting his arm round her, and leaning down to kiss her hair. She nestled to him, and put up her little mouth to be kissed.

The delicate-tendrilled plant must have something to cling to. The soul that was born anew to music was born anew to love. (P. 183)

These are very Chaikovskian situations and effects. Both Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades have scenes of girlish singing that, while seeming at first no more than decorative, acquire crucial musical and dramatic significance later on. In Eugene Onegin it is the duet for Tatyana and her sister Olga (to the words of an early verse of Pushkin’s), at the opera’s very outset, which contains Tatyana’s leitmotif (already featured in the orchestral prelude) and which establishes the “realistic” period idiom—the idiom of the domestic romance (bitovoy romans)—that will define the opera’s setting and also resonate in the music of all the principals through its characteristic contour (or morpheme, corresponding to what Boris Asafyev would later call intonatsiya) outlining the interval of a minor sixth. That interval is now known in Russia as the “Lensky sixth,” after that character’s famous act 2 aria, “Kuda, kuda vï udalilis’“ (“Whither, ah whither are ye fled”; see example 11.1), but it also permeates Tatyana’s part (her letter scene in particular), the reminiscences of genre music linking her most private and “spontaneous” emotions at once touchingly and ironically to the conventions of thought and behavior that govern them.⁷ And Chaikovsky gives us his version of Eliot’s Upstairs, Downstairs routine when he follows the opening domestic romance with the two folk songs sung by serfs—one “drawn out” (protyazhnaya), the other a dance (plyasováya) that inspires Olga to emulate the peasants’ unaffected spirit and despise a bit her overly reflective sister.

EXAMPLE 11.1. Lensky’s aria (Chaikovsky, Eugene Onegin, act 2, scene 2)

(What has the breaking day in store for me?)

In The Queen of Spades, which the Chaikovsky brothers deliberately set back in time from the early nineteenth century of Eugene Onegin to the late eighteenth of “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story,” a genre duet in period style (on verses by Zhukovsky) opens the second act, sung by the female protagonist, Lisa, and her confidante, Pauline. Pauline, asked to sing again, complies with an unaccountably gruesome song (on verses by Konstantin Batyushkov) about a doomed maiden. That song then takes its place in the network of sinister doubles that stalk this most haunted of all operas when Gherman, the obsessed young officer, surprises Lisa later in the scene, his entreaties to her uncannily replaying the “intonations” of Pauline’s song, thus forecasting Lisa’s doom (example 11.2).

Predictably, then, Chaikovsky’s scenario incorporated or adapted most of the musical moments in “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story.” In fact, having somewhat schematically enhanced their symmetry, he structured the whole scenario around them. Act 1 was to contain the two arias, newly composed by Chaikovsky, presumably in an adapted period style such as he had employed in his Pushkin operas. The climax of act 2 was to be the highly compressed and intensified scene of attempted murder, which in Chaikovsky’s version takes place in the presence of the entire household and is organized around a reprise of the second aria from act 1, during which Tina “gets so carried away, that to everyone’s astonishment (somewhat as in [Scribe’s and Legouvé’s] Adrienne Lecouvreur) she really attacks the Captain, unexpectedly seizing a dagger and hurling herself at him, but just as she comes running the Captain emits a shriek and dies.”⁸ Act 3 is organized around a reprise of the first aria, initiated by Gilfil in an effort to bring Tina around. “She listens attentively, begins singing, then weeps, regains her composure, and all ends auspiciously though with a tinge of melancholy. She does not become Gilfil’s bride but does give him reason to hope she might yet come to love him.”⁹

EXAMPLE 11.2. Chaikovsky, The Queen of Spades

Thus the next opera Chaikovsky might have written, had he lived, would have maintained and possibly intensified his familiar reliance, as much a structural as a dramaturgical reliance, on genre set pieces and their reprises. Like so much else about Chaikovsky’s style and modus operandi, these devices are often looked upon as naive or hackneyed. Indeed they are conservative and conventional. Everything about Chaikovsky, from his political views to his social deportment and attitudes to his musical tastes, was conservative and conventional, which is one of the many reasons why of all the great composers of the nineteenth century Chaikovsky has always been the easiest one for twentieth-century people to condescend to—in a conventional sort of way.

A similar attitudinal conservatism and conventionality informs a great deal of Victorian literature, which of course is why it appealed so strongly to Chaikovsky. The narrative strategy in “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story” actually the-matizes the celebration of convention and its uses, reminding one of similar thematizations in Chaikovsky. The dramatic events recounted earlier in straightforward chronological order are actually nested in the story within a very complex series of flashbacks, so that the reader’s attitudes toward the plot are never naive but are constantly subjected to manipulation by the author. The novella’s first sentence begins, “When old Mr Gilfil died, thirty years ago, there was general sorrow in Shepperton.” Gradually, at first through a collage of picturesque anecdotes and dialect sound bites, we learn of his long, quiet, solitary career as a country pastor, of his quaint, somewhat absent ways, of his routined and repetitious modus vivendi, his “caustic tongue, and bucolic tastes, and sparing habits.” But also we learn of his calm satisfactions—dog, hearth, pipe, gin—and of the undemonstrative kindness and the unshowing probity that made his parishioners hold him in respect and even in affection, though they seldom thought of the old bachelor, especially in his last reclusive years.

Only then do we learn, at first by following his housekeeper into a locked room in Mr Gilfil’s house, that he had not always been a bachelor and that there was a corresponding “secret chamber in his heart, where he had long turned the key on early hopes and early sorrows, shutting up for ever all the passion and the poetry of his life” (p. 84). The story we know at last commences, but it too is narrated with many flashbacks and detours, and an epilogue returns us to Mr Gilfil’s old age, giving us one last look at “the dear old Vicar,” who, “though he had something of the knotted whimsical character of the poor lopped oak, had yet been sketched out by nature as a noble tree” (p. 186).

What do we think of, if we are thinking Chaikovsky? We think of Mme Larina and her wistful al fresco ruminations at the very beginning of the operatic Eugene Onegin, set as a recitative conversation with Fillipyevna in counterpoint against the opera’s first set piece, the idiom-defining domestic romance sung by her daughters within the house, offstage. It is a commentary on the old romance itself, turning this quite unprecedented quartet or double duet for women’s voices (a tour de force, incidentally, of art-concealing contrapuntal artistry) into a simultaneous text and gloss—an explicit meditation on one of the novel’s paramount themes, the relationship between life and literature, between spontaneous feeling and mediating convention, between—if a bit of once-modish language may be excused—signifiers and signifieds. These are just the aspects of Pushkin that literary people fancy inaccessible to music, or at least to Chaikovsky; but that is another mark of the condescension we so easily feel toward this astonishing genius—a condescension that will richly repay examination for what it can tell us about ourselves.

The Larina/Fillipyevna side of the opening quartet culminates in a maxim Pushkin had adapted from his contemporary Chateaubriand: Privïchka svïsshe nam dana, zamena schastiyu ona (“Habit is given to us from above as substitute for happiness”). It could serve equally well as a motto for Eugene Onegin or for “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story.” Its importance to Chaikovsky can be gauged from the prominence and the placement he gave it. And as long as we are so used to reading Chaikovsky’s compositional choices autobiographically, we cannot pass over the proximity of Eugene Onegin to the central tragedy of the composer’s life, his bootless marriage, and the way “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story,” too, concerns one central dramatic event that irrevocably marks and distorts a life, turning a noble tree into a poor lopped oak. Chaikovsky did tend in certain self-pitying moments to look back on his life that way, or so certain oft-quoted letters would seem to indicate, and one could certainly make the familiar claim that he was drawn to Eliot’s tale out of a sense of emotional kinship—or “identification,” to use the standard terminology of hack criticism—with the title character.

QU’EST-CE QUE LE CLASSICISME?

The question remains, and will always remain, how critically significant such an observation is. It is of course a familiar question, one of the cursed questions of modern criticism, associated most conspicuously with another Eliot, the one with initials for a nom de plume, who was always after us to ignore “the man who suffers” in our pursuit and veneration of “the mind which creates.”¹⁰ But how could such a behest be heeded in the case of the composer of a Symphonie pathétique, an explicitly designated “symphony of suffering,” who wrote in a famous letter elicited by his patron that his composing was “a musical cleansing of the soul, which boils over with an accumulation that naturally seeks its outlet in tones, just as a lyric poet will express himself in verse”?¹¹ If Eliot proclaimed that “it is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting,”¹² and if Chaikovsky proclaimed that his personal emotions were in fact the sole subject of his work, then the only conclusion available to critics obedient to Eliot’s authority—and for a long time that meant virtually everybody—was that Chaikovsky’s work was in no way remarkable or interesting.

That is why many of us would like to see a bit of immanent criticism applied at long last to Chaikovsky, however passe such a practice may otherwise be deemed in today’s critical climate. I have been surreptitiously doing just that in my comments about genres and conventions—codes tacitly, which is to say impersonally, agreed to in advance by the producers and the receivers of a work of art. It holds for the setting in Eugene Onegin of Chateaubriand’s maxim about the virtues of habit, which is to say salubriously conventional behavior. Chaikovsky set it off as a sudden little canon, a genre set piece in miniature (example 11.3). Here the simple contrapuntal form represents its meaning—that is, becomes significant—according to a time-honored code: “Es ist der alte Bund,” as Bach had put it, fugally, many years before. It is the old constraint: if feeling is to be significantly expressed, it must be mediated through significant forms—that is, forms that function as conventional signifying codes. And that presupposes their intelligibility, which of course implies predefinition. If, as has been claimed, and as I agree, Chaikovsky is the great “poet of everyday life,” and a “genius of emotion,” it is because he knew how to channel life and emotion with great power and precision through coded forms.

Chaikovsky’s reliance on conventions and established genres implied a certain attitude toward his audience, one that he never hesitated to make explicit. Let us return for a moment to Cavalleria rusticana, the opera he held up as a model to his brother against the fantasy or mystical subjects Modest kept pressing on him. His caution that an opera subject not stray too “far from life” is often interpreted as evidence of the composer’s need, a need often presented as infantile, to “identify” personally with his subjects. But compare his characterization, given in an interview with a St. Petersburg reporter in November 1892, of Mascagni, and the secret of the Italian newcomer’s success:

People are wrong to think that this young man’s colossal, fabulous success is the result of clever publicity. No matter how much you publicize the work of a nonexistent or ephemeral talent, you’ll accomplish nothing. There is just no way of forcing the whole European public to simply croak in fanatical delight. Mascagni, it’s clear, is not only very gifted but also very smart. He realizes that nowadays the spirit of realism, the harmonization of art and the true-to-life, is everywhere in the air, that Wotans, Brünnhildes, and Fafners do not in fact excite any real sympathy on the part of the listener, that human beings with their passions and woes are more intelligible and tangible to us than the gods and demigods of Valhalla. Judging by his choice of subject, Mascagni operates not by force of instinct but by force of an astute perception of the needs of the contemporary listener. Accordingly, he does not behave like some Italian composers who try to look as much as possible like Germans and who seem ashamed of being the children of their fatherland. Instead, he illustrates his chosen life dramas with true Italian suppleness and charm, and the result is a work of near-irresistible fascination and appeal for the public.¹³

EXAMPLE 11.3. Larina and Filippyevna, duettino (Chaikovsky, Eugene Onegin, act 1, scene 1)

How very bourgeois, we are apt to think; or, if we are true Slavists, how very Alexander III! To the avowed conventionality we have already noted, Chaikovsky now adds a calculated bid for audience appeal of a kind that we have long been taught to despise as pandering. This, too, is echoed in the “Gilfil” scenario, when Chaikovsky pointedly invokes Adrienne Lecouvreur, a proven crowd-pleaser, as object of deliberate emulation. In the St. Petersburg interview, Chaikovsky lists his personal pantheon of contemporary composers—one that so jars with our inherited notions of canon as to make Chaikovsky’s notoriously equivocal canonical status seem only inevitable and fair. He writes Brahms off altogether, along with Goldmark, Bruckner, the young Richard Strauss, and Moritz Moszkowski (“who works, despite his Slavic name, in Germany”), and unreservedly praises Saint-Saëns, Delibes, Massenet, Grieg, Svendsen, Dvořak, and in the latter’s train Zdeněk Fibich, Karel Bendl, Karel Kovařovic, and Josef Bohuslav Foerster. Who are these people? With a couple of exceptions this seems a roll call of third-raters. Chaikovsky seems to be asking to be included in their number, and we have by and large been ready, nay eager, to oblige. Within his own—Russian—artistic milieu, Chaikovsky seems by his own confession the very personification of what historians of Russia like to call the Era of Small Deeds.

Of course the chief god in the Chaikovskian canon is a composer of undisputed canonicity, indeed the very touchstone of musical greatness. But Chaikovsky’s worshipful attitude toward Mozart is usually dismissed as a sentimental mistake, based on what is presumed to have been a superficial acquaintance,¹⁴ on a par with his nostalgic and disreputable pastiche evocations of that nineteenth-century fairyland known as “the eighteenth century.” The New Grove Dictionary pronounces Chaikovsky’s Mozartianas, and his “neoclassical” tendency generally, to be inauthentic, even “inglorious,” and compares it invidiously with the neoclassicism of Stravinsky: “For whereas the latter, in his neo-classical works, subjected styles from the past to his Russian flair for creative caricature as a means of further self-discovery, Tchaikovsky turned to the 18th century as a means of escape from himself.”¹⁵

And yet, if we open the same New Grove Dictionary to Daniel Heartz’s very sophisticated article entitled “Classical,” we do not find the usual bromides about autonomy or equilibrium or purity or sobriety. Instead we find a historically grounded emphasis on high technical skill and on universality of appeal, the latter construed in terms of cosmopolitanism, in terms of mastery of all genres, and, most significantly, in terms of a pair of attitudes educed from the influential writings of the French critic Henri Peyre. The first is “happiness in remaining within certain conventions or at least not straying too far from them—conventions that were bound to please and aid the public”; and the other, closely related, defines “the ‘classical’ artist, regardless of the field or period,” as one who “worked in complicity with his public, attempting to fulfil its expectations, and was not afraid to be pleasing or to submit to society’s conditions.”¹⁶

These are precisely the attitudes we have noted in Chaikovsky—the very attitudes, ironically enough, that have, along with so much else, led to his misprizing. How is it that “classical” attitudes, attitudes describing what is by definition a standard of excellence, should have become tinged with opprobrium? More particularly, am I proposing that we regard Chaikovsky as a “classical” artist?

I am not. The term “classical,” in all its music-historical and music-critical usages, has long been a prime candidate or target for deconstruction, if not for destruction outright; and I aim to contribute herewith, to the best of my ability, to that long overdue project. I hasten to point out, though, that the attributes Peyre and Heartz cite as “classical” are indeed attributes Chaikovsky shared with Mozart and with Mozart’s contemporaries, and, more generally, with the aristocratic musical culture of the eighteenth century; and that, consequently, Chaikovsky’s kinship with the Viennese master runs deeper than mere pious veneration or stylistic parody. And I would also contend that the line from Mozart to Chaikovsky is, both for reasons implicit in the Heartz/Peyre formulations and for reasons having to do more generally with politics and history, a more direct line than the one that connects Mozart and his contemporaries with the composers more commonly perceived, within the purview of conventional music history, as their successors. In fundamental ways that go far beyond matters of “style” or “form,” and that amount to the very opposite of “escape from himself,” Chaikovsky was very much a Mozart-ean composer.

But hardly a “classical” one; for neither was Mozart. The term is an anachronism. It was born for music in the nineteenth century in the heat of aesthetic battle, and it only cooled into the familiar, purportedly neutral style-critical category in our own century. The qualities that Henri Peyre calls “classical” are that only in contrast to the so-called “romantic.” Both terms, but particularly the “classical,” which was not used in the period of its current application, are intelligible today only in their artificially constructed binary relationship. But the qualities Chaikovsky shared with Mozart can be constructed in other dialectical contexts as well.

Historically the most applicable or appropriate opposition is that between Zivilisation and Kultur, the binarism that midwifed the birth both of romanticism and, in the early nineteenth century, of German artistic self-consciousness as well. In this pair the former term, “Zivilisation,” stood for the culture of the prerevolutionary European aristocracy and the values of the Enlightenment. It necessarily implied what Daniel Heartz calls the artist’s “easy relationship with the expectations of the consumer.”¹⁷ Kultur was the specifically romantic and specifically Germanic discourse of Innigkeit, the discourse of “self-discovery,” to put it in New Agey, New Groveim terms. It celebrated the idiosyncratically personal and the artist’s unique subjectivity, presupposing a producer-oriented musical ecosystem that quickly coalesced into a cult around the heroic personality of Beethoven the great symphonist. The discourse of Kultur radically dichotomized the qualities of Geist and Sinnlichkeit, spirituality and sensuality, the former being associated with pure, disinterested artistry and the genres of “absolute” and “universal” instrumental music in which the Germans claimed supremacy; whereas the latter was associated with “civilized”—that is, French—manners and with music that served the base ambitions of performers and the frivolous appetites of spectators, the epitomizing genre for Russians, as we have seen, being the Italian opera.¹⁸

All at once the public was the enemy. The worst thing an artist could now do, under the dispensation of Kultur, was the very thing Haydn and Mozart most wanted to do and were so successful at doing: namely, “to please.” Schumann, the exemplary Kultur critic, wrote darkly of “the poisoned flowers”—which we might translate suitably as “les fleurs du mal”—that tempted and threatened artists: “the applause of the vulgar crowd and the fixed gaze of sentimental women.”¹⁹

The vulgar, the sentimental, and the feminine—put them all together and they spell Chaikovsky, as viewed through a Teutonizing, which is to say, a “universalizing,” lens. For it has certainly been the triumph of the Germanic outlook that, propagated at first through the proliferation of Germanic conservatories throughout Europe and America, and then through the establishment of the academic discipline of musicology on the German university model, what had been constructed at first as a national code of values has indeed been universalized in the discourse of what we call “classical” music.

And that is precisely why the word “classical” is so ambiguous, so disingenuous, and so useless for music history. Like “romantic,” it is code for a set of values; but unlike “romantic” (and like, say, “authentic”), it is loaded with a contemporary freight of connotation that is wholly unrelated, even opposed, to historical reality. Heartz, among many others by now, has noted that the composers we now call “classical” were in fact described as “romantic” by their younger literary contemporaries such as E.T.A. Hoffmann. “But this means little,” writes Heartz, “because anything they perceived as imaginative, deeply moving, and colourful, including the music of Haydn and Mozart, automatically became ‘romantic.’“²⁰

On the contrary, I would say it means a great deal, because it gives us a model by which we can understand the later assimilation of Haydn, and especially Mozart, to the anachronistic paradigm of “classicism.”

What Hoffmann and his contemporaries actually accomplished was the assimilation of Mozart and Haydn to the mythology (or the “invented tradition,” as the phrase lately goes among culture historians)²¹ associated with the Beethoven cult. In one of its aspects the meaning of that tradition or asserted mainstream remained constant, while in another it underwent a radical change. The constant factor was its specific identification with Germany, vouchsafing the musical supremacy of the Kulturnation. The radical change, which actually resulted in a split within the German national culture, was the shift from regarding the Viennese trinity of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven as the beginning of an artistic tendency that continued into the present—that being the position that originated with Hoffmann and reached its peak with Wagner and the “New German school”—and the view that cast the Viennese trinity as the protagonists of a Golden Age—of purity, of autonomy, of “absoluteness”—from which German music had subsequently declined, that being the position associated with Brahms and Hanslick, thence with most conventional academic historiography.²² That is the discourse on which our notion of “the classical period,” and of the Haydn-Mozart idiom as “the classical style,” depends.

Chaikovsky obviously has no part of that. As long as we apply the word “classical” to the composer with whom he preeminently identified (an application, be it said, that considerably distorts Mozart by exaggerating the importance of his late symphonies), Chaikovsky’s claim of kinship with Mozart will remain suspect and inadmissible. To redefine the word “classical,” following Peyre and Heartz, to denote the congeries of aesthetic and social attitudes to which the discourse of romanticism was a reaction, is merely polemical; and it has the undesirable side effect of obscuring the survival of those attitudes into the nineteenth century and beyond. Better to scuttle the loaded modifier and concentrate on the attitudes themselves.

“GIVE US BEAUTY, ONLY BEAUTY!”

When this is done, the congruence of Chaikovsky’s aesthetic with the discourse identified by Heartz and Peyre is virtually self-evident, and largely explains what seem not only his own quirky personal predilections, but those of many other Russians. Like most other Russians, Chaikovsky felt a powerful aversion to Wagner, while never denying Wagner’s greatness (a concession, as we shall see, that cost him little). Despite his aversion, he attended the première Bayreuth Ring in 1876 and actually covered it in a series of quite respectful articles for the Moscow newspaper Russkiye vedomosti. To his brother Modest, however, he wrote later in exasperation that “the conglomeration of the most complex and recherché harmonies, the colorlessness of everything being sung onstage, the interminable dialogues, the pitch-darkness in the theater, the lack of any interest in the poetry or the story—all this simply exhausts the nerves.” Music had no business doing that, he insisted. “Before,” he wrote, Mozart no doubt foremost in his mind, “music strove to delight people—now they are tormented and exhausted.” This remark has been interpreted to characterize Chaikovsky’s romanticism vis-à-vis Wagner’s incipient modernism.²³ Wagner’s, however, was the romantic attitude, educed directly out of the Beethoven cult. (Compare the weeping Berlioz’s retort, in the old story, to the neighbor at the Beethoven concert who inquired why he did not leave: “Madame, do you think I am here to enjoy myself?”) Chaikovsky was true to the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, or to what he took to be the Franco-Italian aesthetic of enjoyment. In either case, it was a preromantic discourse to which he steadfastly adhered.

And that is why he couldn’t stand Wagner’s supposed antipode, either. Toward the music of Brahms, despite some outwardly cordial social encounters with its author late in life, Chaikovsky never made the slightest pretense of respect. Alongside many generalized manifestations of annoyance and boredom, he left a couple of pricelessly revealing observations about Brahms, one technical, the other aesthetic. The technical remark, made in private correspondence with his patron, was prompted by Brahms’s Violin Concerto, which Mme von Meck, who also hated it, had sent him to inspect. According to Chaikovsky, Brahms “never expresses anything, or if he does, he fails to do it fully [nikogda niche go ne vïskazïvayet, a yesli vïskazïvayet, to ne doskazïvayet]. His music is made up of little fragments of something or other, artfully glued together.”²⁴ The aesthetic pronouncement may be pieced together from a pair of letters to that very important friend of Chaikovsky’s later years, the Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich.

Isn’t Brahms, in essence, just a caricature of Beethoven? Aren’t his pretensions to profundity, strength, and power detestable, when the content he pours into those Beethovenian forms is so pitiful and insignificant?²⁵ [But no,] one cannot call Brahms’s music weak and insignificant. His style is always lofty; he never chases after external effect, nor is he ever banal. He is all seriousness and nobility of purpose, but the chief thing—beauty—is missing.”²⁶

These are extraordinarily telling statements. The first of them turns on its head, as if recasting from the opposite perspective, the most commonly registered objection to Chaikovsky’s own symphonic style. And more than that, it homes in unerringly on what recent “objective” historiography has pinpointed as the essential crux of nineteenth-century compositional practice.

As Carl Dahlhaus so influentially defined it, that problem was “the relationship between monumentality and sophisticated thematic manipulation,” or, more specifically, the “principle of evolving a monumental and ‘teleological’ form from an inconspicuous motive, which does not even appear as a theme at first, but only attains the function of a theme gradually and unexpectedly by virtue of the consequences drawn from it.”²⁷ Dahlhaus is describing the process of “artfully gluing together little fragments of something or other” so as to achieve an impression of “profundity, strength, and power”—a method of which Chaikovsky, while never granting its premises or its desirability, immediately recognized in Brahms the supreme master.

In the traditional mythology of the symphony, the Beethovenian ideal became a problem for “romantic” composers because of their uncontrollable lyric impulse, an impulse that seduced them away from the serious spiritual tasks set by their predecessor, toward the decorative and the sensual—in a single word, the feminine. Chaikovsky, of course, has always been a major offender. After reproducing the familiar program of the Fourth Symphony (a program Chaikovsky never published but educed out of Beethoven’s Fifth and the Symphonie fantastique for the solitary benefit of the woman who paid his bills), Alfred Einstein offered these reprimands: “As Tchaikovsky let himself be led in his creative work by melodramatic and sentimental programs such as this, he seldom succeeded in a complete mastery of form. And as he was a neurotic, yielding unreservedly to his lyric, melancholy, and emotional ebullitions, he marked most distinctly a last phase of Romanticism—exhibitionism of feeling.”²⁸

Dahlhaus, though he characteristically confined himself to what he thought of as technical matters, was hardly less severe about the same symphony’s “stylistic pretensions.” About the main theme of the first movement, he noted that it

is hardly suitable, at least by Beethovenian standards, for establishing a symphonic movement spanning hundreds of measures. The fact that this theme reaches an ecstatic fortissimo in a development section emerging directly from the exposition has little or no bearing on its weaknesses as the mainspring of a symphonic movement [i.e., Chaikovsky’s mere success, like the bumblebee’s at flying, does not override the theoretical inevitability of his failure]. . . . According to the rule established by Beethoven, the principal theme of a symphonic movement had a dual function: when broken down into particles, it served as material for the development section; when reconstituted, it served as the development’s triumphant goal and destination. Tchaikovsky has spread this dual function over two different themes: an andante motive, which, though capable of serving as the climax of a development section, is not itself amenable to development, and a moderato motive, which can be drawn into a thematic process but is incapable of appearing as the main theme except at exposed locations protected by the andante motive. To put it bluntly, the grand style fundamental to the genre has been split into a monumentality that remains a decorative façade unsupported by the internal form of the movement, and an internal form that is lyrical in character and can be dramatized only by applying a thick layer of pathos.²⁹

Is this the same Dahlhaus, one has to wonder, who in another context protested that “no-one had a burden to bear because Beethoven wielded authority in music”?³⁰

Two points demand immediate elaboration. The first is that Chaikovsky, egregiously though his music may have failed to match the asserted Beethovenian standard, is not alone in this or even unusual. The whole history of the nineteenth-century symphony is traditionally narrated, even within the German jurisdiction, and not only by Dahlhaus, as a devolution, with Brahms the miraculous, saving exception. The New Grove entry on the nineteenth-century symphony, by Nicholas Temperley, laments Schubert’s “ill-concealed preference for melody” and holds “the chief source of weakness in the symphonies of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Tchaikovsky” to be the difficulty they all encountered in trying “to discipline the lyrical urge,” with the result that in the period from Beethoven to Brahms “even the most skilful technician was hard put to it to conceal his lack of genuine interest in the ‘symphonic’ aspect of his work.”³¹

The other point, of course, is that the traditional narrative of the nineteenth-century symphony takes one contemporary viewpoint and represents it as a universal ideal. That there were other contemporary viewpoints, perhaps representing other traditions and ideals, is evident from the disparaging passages already cited from Chaikovsky’s letters on Brahms, whose shortcomings and whose reputation, it is only sporting to point out for the sake of symmetry, represented in Chaikovsky’s view the decline of German musical culture.³² These passages suggest that Chaikovsky’s deviations from the Beethovenian, or at least the Dahlhausian, straight-and-narrow were perhaps conditioned less by a lack of symphonic aptitude or interest than by the wish to “express something fully.”

A hint as to the source of Chaikovsky’s views, and the tradition in which he might more profitably be placed, comes, most unexpectedly, in the same New Grove article by Temperley, even as it continues its lament:

Mozart, in his E-flat and G minor symphonies, nos. 39 and 40, had left examples which, however tightly constructed, still made their chief effect by an almost continuous outpouring of spontaneous melody, enriched by inventive touches of harmony and orchestration. As the public accustomed itself to the complexities of Mozart’s idiom, its rich lyricism, rather than its architectural strength, appealed most strongly to a Romantic generation; and it was this that was imitated and extended, sometimes to the detriment of structural factors.³³

Leaving aside the fruitless task of deciding what was advance and what decline, let us welcome the suggestion, resonant as it is with many of our previous observations, that in the history of the symphony, too, there may have been a Mozartean tradition that bypassed the Beethovenian on its way into the nineteenth century, and that Chaikovsky may have been one of its legitimate heirs.

The other main idea that emerges from Chaikovsky’s remarks on Brahms, what I have called the aesthetic point, is even more pregnant. It consists in the radical dichotomization of beauty, on the one hand, and a whole discourse of profundity/strength/loftiness/seriousness/power—in a word, of greatness— on the other. As before, the distinction was perceived at the time in national terms, and so we had best translate our operative term into German: das Erhabene. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche, newly aflame with Wagner-mania, reserved his greatest scorn for those who evaluate music “according to the category of beauty,” for that was a standard proper not to an art of sounds in motion (or anything else in motion) but only to the static visual arts. Named and derided in this connection was Otto Jahn, whose biography of Mozart was a bible to Chaikovsky; conspicuously unnamed, of course, was the arch-recusant Hanslick, who had had the effrontery, as late as 1854, to author an entire tract “On Musical Beauty” (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen), still notorious for its transgressions against the nineteenth-century grain.³⁴

These transgressions arose out of a stubborn adherence—from the German national perspective an outmoded and treasonable adherence—to the ideology of the Enlightenment, which is to say the ideology of Zivilisation, which is really to say the ideology of the hated French. The result, Nietzsche asserted, in a phrase that has acquired a chilling resonance, was an entartete Kunst, a “degenerate art.” “Let us but observe these patrons of music at close range, as they really are, indefatigably crying: ‘Beauty! beauty!’“ the philosopher taunts. “Do they really bear the stamp of nature’s darling children who are fostered and nourished at the breast of the beautiful, or are they not rather seeking a mendacious cloak for their own coarseness, an aesthetical pretext for their own insensitive sobriety?”³⁵

Once again we are dealing with a discourse—the discourse of “great music”—that began as a particular (and an extreme) national and philosophical outlook, but that has been so triumphant in music history and criticism (thence disseminated through “music appreciation”), becoming in the process of its triumph so thoroughly decontextualized and universalized, that it has tended to become invisible qua discourse. It reached an epitome of sorts in a longish testamentary book by Alfred Einstein, one of the founding fathers of American academic musicology, who was also for many years a practicing newspaper critic in Germany. We already know something of his opinion of Chaikovsky. This book, a veritable primer of pop romanticism, is called Greatness in Music, and Chaikovsky is subjected in it to the usual pro forma abuse, passim. The word “beauty” appears in this book only once, and when it does, it is held at arm’s length in scare-quotes, the literary equivalent of tweezers. This single mention is found in the penultimate paragraph of Einstein’s three-hundred-page treatise, in which the author purported to enunciate at last “the solution to our problem,” that is, the problem of defining greatness. “The most impressive building in New York,” Einstein wrote, “is Radio City. Is it ‘beautiful’? Certainly not in a traditional sense, because it does not trouble itself about tradition and ‘beauty.’ It has the power and the security of a natural object.”³⁶

That power and security is indeed the condition to which the “serious” German music of the nineteenth century aspired. It all went back to the eighteenth-century revival of the ancient discourse of the Sublime (one way of translating das Erhabene), which was defined in explicit opposition to the more recent and familiar concept of the Beautiful. For Edmund Burke they presented “a remarkable contrast.” What is beautiful is “comparatively small,” as well as smooth, polished, light, and delicate. The sublime is, well, great. And what is to be perceived as great must be not only big but rugged, negligent, dark, gloomy, solid, massive. “They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure,” Burke concluded.³⁷ “Before, music strove to delight people—now they are tormented and exhausted,” Chaikovsky complained.

The history of music in the nineteenth century—especially the Dahlhausian nineteenth century, which lasted until the First World War—could be written in terms of this contrast: in terms, that is, of the encroachment of the sublime upon the traditional domain of the beautiful, of the “great” upon the pleasant. In such a history Wagner would assume the familiar role of Hegelian protagonist; but Chaikovsky’s role would be much enlarged over conventional histo-riographical accounts, for he would now be cast as the Great Recusant, the chief resister, forever faithful to the Mozartean premise that “music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the hearer, or in other words must never cease to be music.”³⁸ By contrast, the natural objects to which Alfred Einstein still made latter-day obeisance—and preeminently the mountains with which romantic artists and poets and philosophers were perennially obsessed—achieve their security, and are able to wield their uncanny power over our imaginations, precisely because they are unconcerned to please us. For this reason, Beethoven, whose Ninth Symphony was the first of the musical mountains, was reproached by his younger contemporary Louis Spohr, exactly as Chaikovsky reproached his older contemporary Brahms, for lacking a sense of beauty.³⁹

Chaikovsky’s own commitment to beauty—even to the mere joli—and all that the word implied could be as militant as anyone’s rejection.⁴⁰ We have evidence of that commitment both from the outside and from the inside. From without, there is the outraged Musorgsky’s report to Vladimir Stasov, the correspondent most dependable to share his outrage, on meeting his mincing Moscow counterpart, who presumed to preach to him what he, Musorgsky, regarded as the hypocritical “religion of absolute beauty,” a religion that, Musorgsky presumed, only masked an altogether worldly “aim of winning a name and some public acclaim.” “Give us musical beauty—only musical beauty!” (Podaite Muzïkal’nuyu krasotu—odnu muzïkal’nuyu krasotu!) Musorgsky has his Chaikovsky ranting, paraphrasing Nietzsche’s derision of Jahn and Hanslick almost word for word⁴¹—and this in the very next letter after the one in which he had made (also to Stasov, of course) his most militant profession of “realist” faith: “the artistic representation only of beauty” (khudozhestvennoye izobrazheniye odnoy krasofi), he had written, “is churlish childishness—art in its infancy.”⁴²

From within, there is Chaikovsky’s no less militant profession to his most dependable confidant. “What a joy it is to be an artist!” he wrote to Mme von Meck. “In this sorry age we are living through, art and art alone can distract us from hard reality. Sitting at the piano in my cottage [at Kamenka, his sister’s Ukrainian estate], I am totally isolated from all the tormenting questions that weigh upon us all. Perhaps this is selfish of me, but each serves the common good in his own way and art, in my opinion, is a human necessity. Outside of my own musical sphere I am in any case incapable of being of service to my fellow man.”⁴³

And hence his craving, so suspect in Musorgskian eyes, to meet his fellow man’s expectations. Of a work in progress he wrote to his brother that, although it was going slowly and painfully, “it seems likely to be successful. I am almost certain that [it] will please.”⁴⁴ He knew no other measure of fulfillment as a composer than that: “Something told me,” he wrote after a particularly successful première, that his work “was going to please the audience, even touch it to the quick. I was both overjoyed and afraid. But what happened exceeded my expectations by far. Such a triumph I had never experienced; I saw that the audience was aroused en masse and beholden to me. These moments are the best adornments of an artist’s life. For their sake, living and toiling are worth the while.”⁴⁵

Later in the same letter Chaikovsky expresses a familiar ambivalence: “I wanted to go away and hide somewhere; a longing for freedom, quiet, solitude gained the upper hand over the satisfaction of my artistic self-esteem.” It was his wonted “misanthropy,” as he loved to call it, his need to withdraw. But whatever the causes of these alienated feelings, and whatever their strength, as an artist Chaikovsky was a thoroughly social being. His idea of art was based on service—a sense of social connectedness and obligation (not unmixed, naturally, with dreams of social conquest) to which, insofar as he was conscious of having one, he willingly subordinated his purely artistic conscience. Thus while, as the product of a conservatory education, he inevitably shared the prejudice, imparted to him by his revered and forceful teacher, Rubinstein, that “the symphonic and chamber varieties of music stand much higher than the operatic,”⁴⁶ he nevertheless persisted as an operatic composer and ultimately came to identify himself primarily as such. For, as he put it to his patron (in a passage that, as one can imagine, was well publicized in the Soviet literature), “opera and only opera brings you close to people, allies you with a real public, makes you the property not merely of separate little circles but—with luck—of the whole nation.”⁴⁷

Again, of course, there was ambivalence; only two weeks later Chaikovsky was contrasting himself with a familiar negative counterpart, and again one may observe a fascinating amalgam of irony and self-irony: “To restrain oneself from writing operas is heroism of a sort, and in our time there is such a hero: Brahms. . . . Brahms is worthy of respect and admiration. Unfortunately, his creative gift is meager and does not measure up to the scope of his aspirations. Nevertheless, he is a hero. I lack that heroism, and the stage, with all its tawdriness, attracts me withal.”⁴⁸

EXEMPLARY—BUT OF WHAT?

Brahms’s “heroism,” it is all too easy to note, was a heroism to which few aspired before the nineteenth century, and Mozart least of all. If Beethoven achieved it in greater measure, it was not so much that he aspired to such a thing but that, as Fidelio taught him, his talent suffered a limitation.

Yet once again Chaikovsky had put a prophetic finger on the very nub of the problem—our problem with him, and his with us. For no composer ever conformed less to, or more staunchly resisted, the myth of the artist hero—the surrogate or advance guard for the myth of the heroic German nation—that steadily gained in momentum and in prestige as the nineteenth century wore on, and which reached its dubious triumph in the artistically maladapted twentieth century. As the discourse of romanticism achieved its maximalized expression in what we now look back on as the modernist period, the dichotomies we have so far encountered, all of them variations on the same theme, took on an even more radical aspect. What had formerly been expressible as a cleavage between national schools, or between the cultivation of the beautiful and the cultivation of the sublime, or between the aesthetic of enjoyment and that of contemplation, or between the aesthetic of pleasure and that of disinterestedness, or between the discourse of enlightenment and that of transcendence, or of utility vs. autonomy, or of convention vs. originality, social accommodation vs. social alienation, opera vs. symphony, motley vs. wholeness, melody vs. motive—all this eventually came down to a gross discrimination between the serious and the popular, or even more grossly and peremptorily, into that between art and entertainment.

Chaikovsky, needless to say, comes down in every case on the wrong side of this ideological divide, which is at bottom one between an idea of art oriented toward its audience, hence centered on social reception, public meaning, and human intercourse, and an idea of art oriented at once toward its makers—hence centered on private, hidden, or ineffable meanings—and, finally, toward their product, hence centered on idealized or “absolute” notions of ontology and structure. These last were crystallized in a fictive concept of classicism to which, in a final if paradoxical move, the vastly heterogeneous art of the nineteenth century was cast in retrospect as a fictive conceptual antithesis.

Hence the image of “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle”— Chaikovsky, the exemplary nineteenth-century musician—which I cite in French after Vladimir Fédorov, the Russian-born, Paris-based doyen of music librarians, who submitted a paper with that title for publication in Acta Musicologica, the organ of the International Musicological Society, to serve as the basis for a session of the society’s Colloquium on Nineteenth-Century Music, held at the French town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Versailles, in September 1970, of which a transcript was later published in the same journal.⁴⁹ This conference, which in Fédorov’s own rather disgusted words “went haywire” (ist schief gegangen),⁵⁰ was revealing indeed—not for its insights on Chaikovsky, about whom nothing much of relevance was said, but for the light it shed on the musical and musicological mentality of its own time, and on Chaikovsky’s status as cultural touchstone.

Even Fédorov’s original paper, though it displayed a certain bravado in bringing Chaikovsky up for musicological discussion, approached him with palpable squeamishness. It was clear that to discuss Chaikovsky as an emblematic nineteenth-century figure was to put the nineteenth century on trial.⁵¹ An enormous emphasis was placed on the “hysteria” and psychopathology of man and times alike. The composer was portrayed as not just musically sensitive, but as “maladivement sensible à la musique”; he had “un sensibilité musicale presque morbide”; he submitted to music and to musical influences “avec peu de discernement.”⁵² He was a credible candidate for “exemplary” composer thanks chiefly to the catholicity of his range. Because he had tried his hand at virtually every contemporary genre, every genre could be sampled through him in a representative nineteenth-century guise. And yet the quality of that representation was explicitly, fastidiously, even histrionically placed beyond the bounds of discussion.⁵³

The essence of Fédorov’s argument for treating Chaikovsky as a synecdoche for the music of his century was that his “language” and his “idea of music” were “purely post-Beethovenian,” a notion that depended heavily on the mythology of classicism. “Would it not be perfectly ridiculous,” Fédorov suggested, “to try and say what he had to say with the balance and the sobriety of classical form?” For Chaikovsky, Fédorov maintained, music “is in no wise a pure music that plays with sounds, themes, structures.” Rather,

it serves above all to transmit, and to transmit as directly and clearly as possible, his state of mind, his emotions, his psychology, his thoughts, his philosophy. Man—Chaikovsky himself or any one of his fellows, it matters not—is his central musical preoccupation. This man is locked in perpetual combat with an implacable “fatum” that prevents him from achieving full self-realization, from being happy, from loving freely, from communing with his fellow creatures, from rejoicing in things as they are, from taking easy pleasure in the beauty of this world.⁵⁴

It follows, then, that his music, and especially his symphonic music, “is biographical, psychological, programmatic above all.”⁵⁵

What we are dealing with, in short, is what the French call un bête d’aveu, “a confessing animal,” and I am surprised that M. Fédorov did not summon the term himself to describe the man whom elsewhere he will describe as “the most lachrymose composer of his century.”⁵⁶ Yet here one notes a familiar paradox. If Chaikovsky was indeed the most lachrymose composer of his century—or the most confessional, or the most (or indeed the least) anything—then he is no longer representative of it, hence not exemplary after all, unless one is looking not for the typical but for the stereotypical.

Which of course turned out to be the case. Having first accepted, or constructed, a stereotype of the nineteenth-century artist, formed evidently in the image of quasi-confessional and faux-confessional writers like Alfred de Musset (whose Confession dun Enfant du Siècle of 1836 is probably more often cited as the “exemplary” romantic artwork than any other), Fédorov assimilated Chaikovsky to the prefabricated image, thus establishing him by fiat as an artist whose only subject was himself.⁵⁷

In order to turn him into a synecdoche, however, Chaikovsky himself had to be synecdochically rendered: reduced to his last three symphonies; or actually to only two of the three; or rather, as we have seen, to the subtitle of one and a letter about the other, the most famous letter he ever wrote.⁵⁸ For the sake of conformity to the prefabricated image the greater part of Chaikovsky’s output had to be ignored, and the whole of his correspondence had to be read in light of the one favored text. In fine, in order for Chaikovsky to become the exemplary nineteenth-century composer it was first necessary for him to disappear, leaving a tabula rasa on which each participant in the ensuing symposium could inscribe whatever fantasies and prejudices he pleased about the nineteenth century, and about Russia.

Thus what mainly distinguished that event was the ease with which the symposiasts found it possible to ignore everything Fédorov had said. Boris Yarustovsky, representing Soviet opinion, insisted that Chaikovsky was a good Russian and a progressive (“for a genius, one way or another, always serves the future”).⁵⁹ An American musicologist wanted to transfer the “exemplary” title to Dvořak, as the representative of a “more varied and universal” (because slightly more westerly or Germanic?) musical language.⁶⁰ An Italian participant wanted to view Chaikovsky as an anticipation of the fin de siècle, decidedly an end precisely because (pace the Russians) his music betrays no presentiment of crisis.

And inevitably, as the most comprehensive crux of aesthetic prejudices about the nineteenth century, the “problem” of kitsch was raised aggressively, and refused to go away. Without actually naming Chaikovsky as a kitsch composer, the Belgian “music sociologist” Robert Wangermée held him responsible for the proliferation of musical kitsch in the twentieth century (even as his importance was otherwise characteristically denigrated for having “exerted practically no influence on the composers of the twentieth century—at least on those who are mentioned in the history books”). Precisely for this reason, Wangermée suggested, “it might indeed be useful to say that Chaikovsky is the exemplary musician of the nineteenth century.”⁶¹

In so arguing, however, Chaikovsky’s most sneering accuser displayed the fatal lack of historical perspective that is so typical of Whiggish historiography. He failed to consider the history of his own position.⁶²

Kitsch, in Wangermée’s formulation, denotes a type of music that mimics high art while remaining in actuality a form of applied or functional art. The operative category, then, is function or its absence, and so the distinction between art and kitsch depends in turn on the Kantian definition of the aesthetic as that which lacks function but has purpose.⁶³

Wangermée cast the ancient split as one between la musique de création and la musique de consommation: creators’ music vs. consumers’ music. The former is self-referential, disinterested, and autonomous. Its loyalty is to the perpetual development of its own resources, a heroic task that requires the sacrifice of public appeal.⁶⁴ The latter courts public and material success, requiring the sacrifice of musical “evolution” or progress.⁶⁵ “The evolutionary level of the language that kitsch most willingly utilizes is that of Chaikovsky,” Wangermée asserted, and that is why “it is no exaggeration to say that Chaikovsky is the spiritual father of that form of musical kitsch most peculiar to the twentieth century.” But Chaikovsky, he then added, exchanging the Darwinist posture for a more frankly political one, “was himself not very audacious by century’s end.”

Such a composer, finally, cannot be called a creator, for he produces only musique de consommation. Such music, Wangermée declared in an especially dated passage (and one that came with particularly bad grace from a “sociologist”), “does not interest musicologists at all: it’s just a music that constantly repeats itself, but which is not destined to last; it is created for the present, not for the future.”⁶⁶ It could only have been because his music so patently defied this prediction of ephemerality that Chaikovsky, as a nineteenth-century composer, had to be exempted from the twentieth-century category for which Wangermée held him responsible.

And yet it is obvious that Wangermée’s “twentieth-century” critique is founded wholly on nineteenth-century premises. His jeremiad is an only slightly updated replay of Nietzsche’s old attack on beauty, the updating consisting chiefly in the fashionable Darwinist-cum-positivist insistence on the need for the language of music to evolve in perpetuity, whatever the cost to the consumer—an emphasis particularly fashionable in the period that was coming to an end around 1970, the era of Darmstadt and the so-called negative dialectic. But Darwin and Auguste Comte, the sources of M. Wangermée’s philosophy, were as nineteenth-century thinkers every bit as “exemplary” as Wagner and Nietzsche.

The fundamental error, then, shared equally by Fédorov, Wangermée, and virtually every participant in the ill-fated conference, was to mistake their nineteenth-century critique of an eighteenth-century aesthetic for a twentieth-century critique of a nineteenth-century aesthetic. That misapprehension, coupled with a tendentious sampling of his output, is what made Chaikovsky for them, as for most of us, an “exemplary” nineteenth-century artist, when all the while he was in effect the last of the great eighteenth-century composers.

IN THE MARGINS

Vladimir Fédorov seemed to sense that this was the case, but managed (literally) to marginalize the unwelcome thought. After describing Chaikovsky’s symphonic output, with its “exemplary” lyricalizing, dramatizing, and sub-jectivizing of an exemplary “classical” genre, he let drop a curious aside: “There remain, in the margins, his suites, the Capriccio [italien], the Serenade [for strings] and so on; plus a few pastiches. Chaikovsky gives the impression here of all at once remembering that there are other kinds of music besides his, and in certain cases, other kinds than those of his century.”⁶⁷

But why in the margins? Simply because they do not match the stereotype? And what can it mean to say that a sizable group of compositions by Chaikovsky represents a kind of music other than “his”? There is, on the contrary, good reason to regard these works—all of them written, as it happens, in a midcareer clump between 1878 and 1884—as a watershed in his creative development and, concomitantly, as indications of personal and artistic maturation. Indeed, if we decide, experimentally, so to regard them—to make the suites, say, rather than the symphonies, our lens through which to view the composer—we shall see another pattern emerge, another model, another sort of musicien type.

If we accord central importance to the suites, moreover, we shall be acting in accordance with the composer’s own strongly held views. For all their insignificance in the eyes of today’s commentators, Chaikovsky held these works to be among his most essential and characteristic achievements. The three quotations cited earlier as evidence of the central Chaikovskian aesthetic—the untimely aesthetic of the beautiful and the pleasing—were strategically selected to support this claim. They refer, respectively, to each of the three orchestral suites in turn.⁶⁸

Except as a string of extracts from a stage work, the orchestral suite is not often considered to be a proper nineteenth-century genre. As a form “in the margins,” as Fédorov says, it is often associated with marginal composers; or rather, it often serves historians as a means of marginalizing them. Thus, the New Grove Dictionary all too typically notes that “during the last decades of the century, composers of peripheral countries (especially northern ones) found the suite a congenial form for music of an exotic or nationalistic flavour.”⁶⁹ Chaikovsky’s name, it need hardly be added, is prominent in the list that follows.

Yet, so far from the “peripheries,” the nineteenth-century orchestral suite originated in Germany, evidently in the wake of the Bach-Gesellschaft edition.⁷⁰ Two specialists quickly emerged: Franz Lachner (1803-90), who wrote seven orchestral suites between 1861 and 1881, and Joachim Raff (1822-82), who wrote four between 1863 and 1877. The other main pre-Chaikovskian practitioner was Massenet, one of Chaikovsky’s favorites, who beginning in 1865 had written five suites of characteristic pieces for orchestra before Chaikovsky wrote his first, and who composed two more, in 1879 and 1881.

The first wave of suite writing, in the 1850s, had concentrated on the keyboard, and mainly consisted of outright imitations of the Bachian dance forms. One of the earliest such works was by Chaikovsky’s teacher, Anton Rubinstein.⁷¹ Yet even at the outset, “imitation” was not quite the right word: the cultivation of the “olden style” prompted a great deal of pseudo-modal harmonic piquanterie that could scarcely have been less plainly anachronistic to its practitioners than it is to us now, just as the “folk” style of the period was a knowing, sophisticated invention whose bona fides did not at all depend upon actual resemblance to the putative model.⁷² It was the pretext it offered for sophisticated harmonic and (in the case of orchestral pieces) timbral invention that justified the “suite caracteristique” and ensured its popularity. It was above all an epicurean genre.

In this lay the essential difference between the late nineteenth-century orchestral suite and the contemporary symphony, which it often closely resembled both in the number of its movements and in their sequence. By the time Chaikovsky began composing orchestral suites, the retrospective was only one in a range of typical or potential components, along with national song and dance, character pieces, marches, and, especially, what might be termed “scherzoids”, items of calculated grotesquery. Not even “sonata forms” were excluded, although they were not predictably placed in the initial position.

What was predictable was fancy harmony, bedight, highly textured orchestration, antic rhythm, and formal idiosyncrasy. Creating unusual hybrids and variations on the basic types was one of the pleasures of the genre for composers, and Chaikovsky (like Fabergé, the imperial jeweler) particularly excelled at creating irresistibly useless “objets de fantaisie.” Indeed, he wrote to Mme von Meck that the main attraction of the suite for him as a genre was “the freedom it offers the author not to be bound by any traditions, conventional techniques, or established rules.”⁷³ It was, or could be, imaginative play of a kind not explicitly celebrated since the end of the eighteenth century, when the notion of music as affording “a simple original pleasure” like “the smell of a rose, or the flavor of a pineapple” was one of the means by which the ancient doctrine of art as imitation of nature was dethroned.⁷⁴ That aesthetic, as far in its sensualism from the romantic concept of “absolute music” as it was in its autonomism from the old imitation theory, lived on sub rosa through the whole romantic century, and Chaikovsky’s suites show him, despite his present reputation as a confessionalist, to have been one of its most avid cultivators.

Chaikovsky’s first contribution to this epicurean and, it could seem, frivolous genre was the very next major composition he embarked upon after confiding to Mme von Meck his very striking thoughts, already cited, about the best way he as an artist could serve his fellow creatures.⁷⁵ What might look trivial from one ideological perspective—from that committed to the sublime—appeared nothing short of restorative from another. The consoling distraction the composer experienced in the act of creation could be passed along directly to the consumer. Once again the composer identified with his social peers and their human interests rather than flaunting his own disinterested (zwecklos) or alienated circumstances.

The decision to put together a suite “in Lachner’s manner” actually followed the composition of the Scherzo, which eventually became the fifth of its six movements, and which the composer at first must have envisioned as the kernel of a new symphony.⁷⁶ What prompted the switch to a suite may well have been the character of the music that emerged, full of special orchestral effects, string-wind hockets, rhythmic contrasts and superimpositions (hemiolas, “three-over-twos”), sequences of accented chromatic auxiliaries over pedals, and other conspicuous patterning devices. But Chaikovsky’s scherzos had been conforming to that mold for some time. The one in the Third Symphony (1875) is just as much a pièce caracteristique—a hocketing moto perpetuo requiring a virtuosic execution and full of harmonic spice, including several complete descending whole-tone scales à la Glinka (that is, à la Ruslan) in the bass. (The second movement of the five-movement symphony, a parody Ländler marked “alla tedesca,” which Chaikovsky regarded as a second scherzo, corresponds to another characteristic suite-movement type.) And the scherzo in the Fourth Symphony is of course Chaikovsky’s most famous (and determined) orchestral tour de force. The way he shoe-horned a description of it into the symphony’s “confessional” program, as outlined for Mme von Meck at her request, is telling:

The third movement does not express definite feelings. These are, rather, capricious arabesques, fugitive images that pass through one’s mind when one has had a little wine to drink and is feeling the first effects of intoxication. At heart one is neither merry nor sad. One’s mind is a blank: the imagination has free rein, and it has come up with these strange and inexplicable designs. . . . Among them all at once you recognize a tipsy peasant and a street song . . . then somewhere in the distance a military parade goes by. These are the completely unrelated images that pass through one’s head as one is about to fall asleep. They have nothing in common with reality; they are strange, wild, and incoherent.⁷⁷

The program, in short, is the absence of a program, that is to say of para-phrasable content, in favor of “pure imaginative play” or capricious imagery or even sheer sensory frisson. (And note that the imagery is presented as metonymic: a strain of folkish melody conjures up a peasant; a bit of brass music conjures up soldiers.) But what is presented as the exceptional movement—the consoling distraction, perhaps—in the symphony would constitute the rule in the suite, and therein lies the generic difference.

The opening movement of the First Suite, the first item conceived specifically as part of a suite, did indeed follow the Lachnerian neobaroque model: it is a prelude (or, as Chaikovsky actually put it, an Introduzione) and fugue in D minor.⁷⁸ The prelude opens with what sounds in fact like the beginning of a fugue: an unaccompanied line for the bassoons in a snaking chromatic manner that evokes the Bachian pathos style (typified by the all-chromatic B-minor fugue subject from the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Chaikovsky’s probable model). It will indeed eventually be developed in a fugato, but first it is juxtaposed with a striking contrast of imagery: a fluttering accompaniment figure in muted strings that unmistakably evokes the image of a pirouette or an entrechat, hence, metonymically, a ballerina (example 11.4). The counterpoint of the archaic and the balletic is suggestive indeed. We will come back to it.

Neobaroque stylization returns in the last movement, a gavotte, which, like many of its nineteenth-century fellows, has four beats to the bar and lacks the two-quarter pickup that was its chief eighteenth-century identifying mark. The fugue subject is reprised at the end (brilliantly, in D major) to package the whole confection in a single box. Otherwise the contents of the box are characteristically variegated yet elegantly balanced: besides the scherzo there is an intermezzo (andantino semplice) to supply an internal point of rest; a marche miniature for the treble instruments alone (the lowest note being the A below middle C), punctuated by high-pitched percussion (triangle, glockenspiel);⁷⁹ and, in second place, a movement entitled divertimento that is actually a waltz, added as an afterthought when Chaikovsky realized, upon sending the suite off to the publisher, that all its movements were in duple meter.⁸⁰ From then on, waltz movements would be de rigueur (but then they were hardly less so in Chaikovsky’s symphonies).

Although an addendum, the divertimento in Chaikovsky’s first orchestral suite is in a way its most typical movement. By the time he wrote it the composer had a fully clarified idea of what suite-composition meant to him. It meant the cultivation of the rare, the refined, and the exquisite. From this point of view the quintessential moment in the first suite is the “variation”—the word should retain its balletic connotation as well as its classicizing one—for a trio of flutes in triplets against a pair of bassoons in duplets that so strikingly anticipates the “Danse des mirlitons” Chaikovsky would later write for the actual ballet stage. Taken as a whole, the first suite set the pattern that would apply to them all: an interpenetrating mélange of neobaroque styliza-tion, contemporary dance music, pièces caracteristiques, and scherzoids. It was tacitly dedicated to Mme von Meck, whose tastes, the composer wrote, the suite was calculated to gratify.

EXAMPLE 11.4. Chaikovsky, Suite no. 1, beginning of Introduzione (solo bassoon and strings con sordini)

The high point of genre interpenetration and imaginative disport came in the Second Suite, Op. 53, originally subtitled “Suite caracteristique.” A major work by any standard of measurement (forty minutes’ running time, an augmented orchestra), it was the main creative product of the year 1883, and the composition to which Chaikovsky referred in the letter expressing to Modest his confident expectation of “pleasing.” It is in its way one of Chaikovsky’s emblematic works, not least because of its fascinating first movement, of which the title must not be divulged until Vladimir Fédorov’s essay has been quoted one last time. Characterizing his “Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle,” Fédorov asserted that music, for a such a self-absorbed and self-exhibiting artist, could “in no wise” be “a pure music that plays with sounds, themes, structures.” In the original French, he said, “en aucune façon elle n’est pour lui une musique pure qui joue avec les sons, les thèmes, les structures.”⁸¹

The long first movement of Chaikovsky’s second orchestral suite is entitled “Jeu de sons.” (Is there any comparable work from the period that so thematizes its emancipation from expressive content?) In fact, the piece is an ironic, even satirical, play of structures. An introduction and allegro, it is the one movement from the Chaikovsky suites that makes obvious sonata-form gestures, but it continually mocks its own formal proclivities even as it revels in composerly virtuosity. The development section is an elaborate fugue on the first theme from the exposition. The recapitulation is achieved by, as it were, doubling the fugue, introducing the second theme in counterpoint with the first.

That second theme, incidentally, is of a pronounced folklike character. It fits right into its original formal slot, since folklike lyrical “subsidiary” themes were by the 1880s a symphonic cliché. But it is grotesquely out of place on its academically contrapuntal reappearance, the more so for being scored with deliberate ungainliness for the bass instruments. Another burlesque touch is the detaching of the codas, to exposition and recapitulation alike, by means of abrupt percussion wallops, stunned pauses, and resumption at a new tempo. At the very end the tender lullaby music of the introduction unexpectedly resurfaces, casting the whole piece retroactively into an absurdly disproportionate ternary form—or is it Chaikovsky’s version of a French overture?

These juxtapositions of incompatible formal and expressive gestures are the very substance of the music. When Shostakovich does something of the sort, we call the result “Gogolian.” The term fits Chaikovsky’s second suite at least as well. And yet the disjunctions do not in any way impel or suggest a fabular paraphrase.⁸² They are juxtapositions of qualities—of flavors, one might say—rather than of actions or events. In the second movement, the obligatory waltz (here an evanescent orchestral fantasy of the valse oubliée type), a structural transition is accomplished, uniquely, through a “play of timbres” alone. To describe the music as deviant or un-Chaikovskian for that reason is no more justified than it would be so to describe the equally singular Pathetic Symphony.

The slow fourth movement, “Rêves d’enfant,” is the suite’s center of gravity. It presents the contrast of wakeful consciousness and dream through a contrast of A-minor lullaby and fantastical pointillism in the magical key of the tritone antipode, E minor, colored by fleeting hints of what nowadays we sometimes call “tonal octatonicism” (the embellishment of a diminished-seventh chord with passing tones to produce a scale of alternating tones and semitones). This exquisitely realized composition is one of Chaikovsky’s palpable masterpieces—if, that is, the idea may be entertained of a masterpiece of instrumental color, orchestral texture, and harmonic contrivance. Such an idea was certainly thinkable one hundred years ago, when Alexandre Benois founded the whole Mir iskusstva (“World of Art”) aesthetic on perceptions he gratefully apprehended as coming to him from Chaikovsky, in whose music—not just the ballets and operas, but in “whatever Chaikovsky I heard, wherever I could, at concerts and at home performances”—he discovered not only that aristocratic retrospectivism (he called it “passé-ism”) that could, he thought, lead Russian art out of its cul-de-sac of bourgeois utilitarianism, but also “that mixture of strange actuality and compelling invention,” that “world of captivating nightmares that exists behind our backs and remains forever inaccessible,” that “genuine Hofmannesquerie” (podlinnaya gofmanov-shchina) that informs Chaikovsky’s suites to an extent perhaps unequaled in the whole realm of instrumental music, and that is epitomized above all, perhaps in “Rêves d’enfant.”⁸³

Today such values are far less likely to receive endorsement. For Chaikovsky’s most recent British biographer the suites, which cannot be easily read as confessional (a mode Benois would in any case have dismissed as utilitarian), are for that reason “among the most explicit reflections” of a “creative trough” brought on by the stresses of homosexual guilt and the disastrous attempt to deal with it through marriage, which had left Chaikovsky “emotionally withdrawn, even impaired,” facing “a barrier between him and his own music.” Although a certain originality is granted to a few movements, including “Rêves d’enfant” (which receives a modicum of praise for anticipating the style of Benjamin Britten), the general verdict is tautological: because the suites deviate from type (that is, from the habits of the “Musicien Type”), “the result is always second-rate Tchaikovsky.”⁸⁴

Yet color, texture, and contrivance were for Chaikovsky first-rate values. Indeed, “colorlessness” was the evil that he feared most in egalitarian philosophies such as “nihilism” or, what he took to be its synonym, “communism.”⁸⁵ It is only when the store Chaikovsky set by color is appreciated that his brand of “nationalism” becomes comprehensible. Again, the second orchestral suite furnishes indispensable instruction.

Russian folk character, in two fastidiously differentiated manifestations, informs the “Scherzo burlesque,” the third movement of the suite. Again it is a matter of “strange, wild, and incoherent” juxtapositions that in their avoidance of linearity—of “German transitions”—manage to evade the tendency of “kinetic-syntactic” structures (like that of Balakirev’s Second Overture on Russian Themes, discussed in chapter 8) to “connote” a program or a story. Urban street music, in the guise of an accordion quartet witlessly working their tonic and dominant buttons, is countered in the de facto “trio” by the most meticulous and true-to-life facsimile Chaikovsky ever fashioned of rural peasant singing, one that extended, in the manner of what was then the avant-garde fringe of musical ethnography, to the reproduction not only of a melody but of its heterophonic performance practice, or what was then known as “folk harmonization” (example 11.5). Whether directly or through the work of these new ethnographers,⁸⁶ Chaikovsky was aware of the practice. In a letter written a few months before beginning work on the suite, he informed his publisher that “peasants never sing a song (except for the intoning phrase [zapev]) in real unison, but always with subordinate voices that form simple chord combinations.”⁸⁷

EXAMPLE 11.5. Chaikovsky, Suite no. 2, Scherzo burlesque, m. 206

A notation survives among the sketches for the suite, dated 3 July 1883, containing two songs Chaikovsky took down from the duet-singing of his servant Alyosha Sofronov and a laundry woman who was working that day in his house. From this evidence it has been plausibly supposed that Chaikovsky took down the scherzo melody, harmonization and all, from something he chanced to overhear.⁸⁸ It is a found object. And it is altogether appropriate that such a rough-hewn artifact should have gone into the suite, where it provided another eccentric color or flavor to set beside the accordions. Within Chaikovsky’s stylistic range, only that genre was hospitable to the “false” unisons and cadential occurses that the composer displays here with such relish, and which, though he quoted more Russian folk melodies than any compatriot save Rimsky-Korsakov, are not to be found in any of his other works. In seeming paradox, and with unerring taste, the canny composer saw how appositely the unrefined peasant style could harmonize, as a condiment, with the rare, the recherché, and the epicurean.

Flavor, relish, condiment, taste . . . were one looking for the perfect put-down, one could sum it all up in Brecht’s trusty pejorative, culinary.⁸⁹ With it, Brecht meant to reduce all art that was disengaged from social activism to the level of complacent, socially regressive, voluptuary aestheticism. But this was just another surfacing, and a particularly hawkish one, of the old heroic discourse of transcendence. Brecht stands here in the old Teutonic line, with Beethoven, Nietzsche, Wagner, and all those other audience-tormentors who saw art as an agency of world transformation.

Chaikovsky stood proudly in the other line, the line that sees art as an agency of world enhancement. He explicitly celebrated the “culinary,” or, as he put it, the “tasty” (vkusnoye) in art. Here, too, he could claim Mozart—his Mozart—as a forebear. The set of arrangements for orchestra called Mozartiana, Op. 61 (1887), unofficially but not inappropriately known as his “Suite no. 4,” commemorates a Mozart who shared Chaikovsky’s taste for delectable, often retrospective parody. Apart from the sentimental “Preghiera” (third movement), based on Liszt’s 1862 piano transcription (“A la Chapelle Sixtine”) of Ave verum corpus, K. 618, Chaikovsky’s selection emphasized Mozart the keyboard confectioner. The mock-fugal Gigue (K. 574), and the purplish Minuet (K. 576b), finely (over)spiced and (over)laden caricatures of obsolete genres, serve as the opening pair of movements, while the finale is one of Mozart’s jokiest pieces, the Variations K. 455 on “Unser dummer Pöbel meint” (or “Les hommes pieusement”) from Gluck’s Die Pilger von Mekka (or La rencontre imprévue), bumpkinry of the urbanest sort. A series of inspired “wrong” chords in the fourth variation (the first harmonized bass note perpetually reidentified—now as root, now as fifth, now as third—and inflected, finally missed) show Mozart deploying matchless wit and craft for no other purpose than pour amuser, flattering the taste and discernment (yes, the breeding) of his hearers, as a host might flatter a guest with a choice wine (example 11.6). That, for Chaikovsky, was precisely the point and the “lesson” of this music, as he testified both in word (an author’s note calling the connoisseur’s attention to Mozart’s brilliant detail work) and, by adding his own piquant details of orchestral color to Mozart’s, in compositional deed.

Was such an art disengaged? Complacent? Was its practitioner “apolitical” (as well as asexual)?⁹⁰ He was neither, of course; but his politics was a politics of affirmation rather than the kind of politics we have been conditioned by the artistic discourse of late, late romanticism to regard as politics, namely the politics of alienation, contention, and resistance. The politics of aristocracy is as much a politics as any other, and Chaikovsky—the maturest Chaikovsky, at any rate—was the preeminent aristocratic musician of the nineteenth century. He was the last of the court composers, and his work was the very last great musical flowering of European court art—all of which is only to restate more straightforwardly the characterization (“in effect the last great eighteenth-century composer”) with which the present discussion of the orchestral suites was somewhat coyly broached.

THE IMPERIAL STYLE

He was all this because he lived in the one surviving absolutist state in Europe—in effect, the last great eighteenth-century state—and worked, like hardly another composer of his time, under virtually eighteenth-century conditions. He was the beneficiary of patronage beginning in 1876 and spent the last five years of his life, from 1888, as Russia’s uncrowned composer laureate, receiving a crown stipend and enjoying the freedom of the Tsarist musical establishment in a fashion that put him altogether beyond rivalry. This meant particularly that he became a virtual composer-in-residence at the Russian Imperial Theaters, forging in direct collaboration with the Mariyinsky conductor Eduard Nápravník, with the ballet master Marius Petipa, with the Intendant Ivan Alexandrovich Vsevolozhsky, and in indirect collaboration with Tsar Alexander III himself, a personal friend, what George Balanchine has aptly christened the Russian Imperial style⁹¹—a style that had an enormous impact, it should be emphasized again, on the artists, poets, and musicians of the so-called Silver Age, a time that witnessed a massive recrudescence of aristocratic taste. Had Chaikovsky lived a normal span of years, which would have taken his lifetime virtually up to the revolution (and let us not forget that his elder brother Ippolit managed to outlive Lenin), he would surely have been one of that brilliant period’s guiding geniuses—as in a way, through his acknowledged influence on Benois, he already indirectly was.

EXAMPLE 11.6. Mozart, Variations K. 455, fourth variation

The beginnings of the imperial style, and its first culmination, can be located precisely in the orchestral suites. The letter (quoted earlier) in which an ecstatic Chaikovsky described to Mme von Meck his greatest public triumph, concerned the première of the Third Suite, Op. 55, which took place under the most prestigious circumstances imaginable: a subscription concert of the court-sponsored Imperial Russian Musical Society, guest conducted by Hans von Biilow. This suite was in a strangely direct way bound up with Chaikovsky’s feelings about his country, about the Russian autocracy, and about the person of the sovereign—feelings that were intense, reciprocated, and symbiotic.

Chaikovsky had many friends and acquaintances within the Tsar’s close circle, had executed his first commission on Alexander’s behalf long before the beginning of his reign (with his early Festival Overture on the Danish national anthem, Op. 15, composed in 1866 on the occasion of the crown prince’s wedding to the daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark), and furnished both the official march and the official cantata for his coronation in 1883.⁹² He met the Tsar face to face when summoned to the royal residence at Gatchina in March 1884 to receive the Vladimir Cross, a high civil honor. The immediate occasion was the double première of the patriotic opera Mazepa, over which the St. Petersburg Mariyinsky and the Moscow Bolshoy had fought, and which had had simultaneous productions at both main state houses, introduced three days apart. The Tsar personally ordered from Nàpravník, the Mariyinsky conductor, a new production of Eugene Onegin, to be mounted not at the Mariyinsky but at the Bolshoy Kamenniy Teatr, the “Great Stone Theater” where since the 1840s the Imperial Italian Opera, the very nerve center of Russian aristocratic arts patronage, had enjoyed an absolute hegemony. Alexander wanted to demonstrate his commitment to nurturing native talent, and Chaikovsky’s was the native talent to be nurtured before all others.

Dazzled by the sovereign’s attention, Chaikovsky wrote to Mme von Meck that he left Gatchina feeling “a great rush of energy, burning with impatience to undertake some great new task.”⁹³ He began working on the third orchestral suite in April. Although the suite is made up of familiar ingredients—waltz, scherzo, character pieces—their ordering is somewhat unusual. The first movement is an Elégie; the ensuing waltz is a “Valse mélancolique.” The scherzo that follows is mainly quiet, ghostly, a little macabre, with a virtually pointillistic trio highlighting what sounds like a distant drum and bugle corps. Except for the scherzo’s final chord, a calculated shock, the first three movements all end in whispers.

And all three are counterbalanced, indeed overrun, by the fourth movement, an enormous set of symphonic variations that Chaikovsky, during his brief and belated career as celebrity conductor, frequently performed as an independent concert piece. It begins with the customary retrospective nod. The theme is square-cut, ternary, “classical.” The first few variations are full of allusions, beginning with an appropriation of Haydn’s filigree technique, as in the “Surprise” Symphony or (more to the point) the “Emperor” Quartet. The third variation, for flutes, clarinets, and bassoons, is an homage to Mozart’s serenades. The fourth is a jocular Dies Irae, by then (ten years after his friend Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre) a standard objet de fantaisie. Next comes the fugue without which a suite is not a suite, followed by a gigue.

Beginning with the seventh, the variations are of the “character” type, and for a while the movement is a veritable culinary extravaganza à la russe: peasant song, church chant, competitive dance. But then Leopold Auer steps figuratively into the pit for the obligatory violin cadenza, and the music begins to converge on imagery not merely of “Russia” but specifically of the Russian imperial court. The genial Variation 10, a 3/8 waltz for the violin soloist marked “un poco rubato,” is a play on the various meanings of “variation.” Here it is a ballerina’s solo turn that is evoked, culminating in a series of jetés straight out of the second act of Swan Lake (example 11.7). The danseur noble then enters to partner the ballerina for the impassioned Variation 11, their pas de deux, its harmonies given extra poignancy by being played entirely over a tonic pedal that, at the very end, is nudged down through the flat submediant, the quintessential Chaikovskian passion-flower, to the dominant.

And just as the variations movement counterbalances its three predecessors in the suite, so the final variation, a “great rush of energy” in three-quarter time marked moderato maestoso e brillante, counterbalances and overruns the eleven that have preceded it in the set. Ending with five blazing pages marked sempre fortississimo, it is the music that, as the composer had foretold (or as “something” had foretold to him), lifted its first audience—an audience representing the cream of St. Petersburg society—to its feet. It could not fail, for it is a magnificent polonaise.

EXAMPLE 11.7. Chaikovsky, Suite no. 3, fourth movement (Tema con variazioni), no. 10, m. 23

Four days after the première, Chaikovsky was asked to attend the Tsar’s command production of Onegin on its fifteenth showing, at which time he once again received the sovereign’s personal compliments. These honors brought forth in the favored artist a veritable ecstasy of dynastic patriotism, something that has little to do with nationalism as we currently understand the term, although it did find outlet, both verbally and artistically, in ardent manifestations of love for the fatherland and its institutions.

An especially strong verbal manifestation came in a gently reproving letter to Mme von Meck, written a few weeks after the events just recounted. What begins as an innocent paean to the “incomparable” Russian winter landscape, offered in response to his patron’s equally innocent complaint about Russian mud, quickly modulates—through a transitional paragraph that begins, “it seems to me, my dear, that in general you look too sullenly and despairingly upon Russia”—into a startling explosion of political bile, in which Chaikovsky heaps scorn on institutions of representative government, on legal principle, on any limitations upon autocratic rule. “In any event” he concludes,

I am convinced that the well-being of large political entities depends not on principles and theories but on the chance accession of individuals, whether by birth or by other causes, to the head of government. In a word, only a human being can serve humanity, not whatever principle he may embody. The question now is whether we have such a human being, on whom we may rest our hopes. My answer is: yes, and that human being is our sovereign.⁹⁴

“It’s not that I have gone over to the ultraconservative camp,” Chaikovsky hastened to assure his conventionally liberal-minded correspondent, but in fact his bilious little tract could just as well have been authored (indeed, probably was largely authored, if indirectly) by his old jurisprudence schoolmate Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, the editor of the reactionary newspaper Grazhdanin (The Citizen), which, like Chaikovsky, received subsidies from the Tsar. One of the most valuable achievements of Alexander Poznansky’s recent biography of Chaikovsky has been its much fuller illumination of the composer’s relationship with this particular friend (known to all biographers for his role in helping the composer through the dreadful aftermath of his wedding).⁹⁵ As a personality as well as a public figure, Meshchersky is greatly pertinent to the evaluation of the composer’s career with regard to various noteworthy issues, including that of homosexuality and its social consequences. An openly practicing homosexual to an extent that Chaikovsky never contemplated becoming, Meshchersky was actively protected by the Tsar from persecution, and relied on that protection. (The significance of this parallel for evaluating the persistent allegation that Chaikovsky, discovered in a pederastic liaison, was forced to commit suicide at the behest of the Tsar, working through an honor court of jurisprudence-school alumni, will be obvious.)⁹⁶ Clearly, the Tsar’s patronage was especially important to those of his protégés whose private lives might otherwise inspire odium or make them vulnerable to personal threat, and bound such protégés all the more ardently to their sovereign and all that he stood for.⁹⁷

An equally strong manifestation of Chaikovsky’s dynastic patriotism, and a far more eloquent one, was the third orchestral suite. To understand how this was so, it is necessary to know something about the very special history of the polonaise in Russia.

Throughout its history the polonaise was preemininently a courtly phenomenon, perhaps the most elevated of all court ballroom genres for the way it straddled the line between dance and processional. Its three spacious, strutting beats were characteristically subdivided by two and four, the resulting patterns of eighths and sixteenths often being organized in quasi-military tattoo or fanfare figures (example 11.8). Military, or ceremonial, or just plain noble associations were as strong or stronger than the genre’s national origin in establishing its signification for art music, especially in Russia with its exceptionally strong and durable court traditions. Thus by the time the polonaise was used by Glinka, at the beginning of the second act in his opera A Life for the Tsar (1836; example 11.9a), to characterize the Poles (or rather, the Polish nobility) in opposition to the Russians (or rather, the Russian peasantry), it had already served Glinka’s older contemporary Alexey Verstovsky, in the entr’acte to act 3 of his opera Askold’s Grave (1835; example 11.9b), to set the scene at the palace of the Kievan (that is, Russian) Prince Vïshata.

EXAMPLE 11.8. Chopin, Polonaise Op. 40, no. 1 (1838)

The polonaise was established as a type—that is, a topos—in Russian art music by Osip (Iosif) Antonovich Kozlovsky (1757-1831), a Polish nobleman who served as an officer in the Russian army and who, following the Russo-Turkish wars, came to St. Petersburg in the entourage of Prince Gri-goriy Alexandrovich Potyomkin, the chief minister to the Empress Catherine the Great. Kozlovsky’s great specialty was polonaise writing; indeed, he seemed to be able to turn anything he touched into polonaises, including themes from popular quintets by Pleyel, even Mozart arias.⁹⁸ His signal contribution to the history of Russian music was the triumphal polonaise, a cantatalike choral panegyric in which he collaborated with the leading court poets of the day, especially Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin, who authored the text for the most famous of these works, entitled “Thunder of Victory, Resound!” (Grom pobedï, razdavaisya!), first performed at a fête given by Prince Potyomkin on 28 April 1791 to celebrate the conclusion of the war (example 11.10a).⁹⁹

EXAMPLE 11.9

a. Glinka, A Life for the Tsar, act 2, no. 5: Pol’skiy (Polonaise)

b. Verstovsky, Askold’s Grave, act 3: Entr’acte and Maidens’ Chorus (no. 10)

This item achieved tremendous popularity, especially after the partitions of 1793 and 1795, when Russia joined Prussia and Austria in swallowing up the land of the polonaise. The victory that thundered through Kozlowski’s martial strains now included victory over Poland, and the old Polish aristocratic dance now symbolized Russia’s ascendancy. This “occidentalist” irony helped spawn a host of imitations that made Kozlowski’s polonaise the prototype of an indigenous Russian genre, and tied the parade-ceremonial polonaise “irrevocably to the theme of [Russian] patriotism.”¹⁰⁰ Between 1791 and 1833— the date of Bozhe, tsarya khrani!—Kozlovsky’s polonaise served as the Russian state’s quasi-official anthem for ceremonial occasions.

The culminating choral refrain, “Slav’sya sim, Yekaterina!” (Be glorified by this, O Catherine), is known to all Russian operagoers, because Chaikovsky appropriated it (to a corrupted version of the music that he evidently drew from oral tradition) at the climax of act 2 in The Queen of Spades, to accompany Catherine’s near-appearance (example 11.10b).¹⁰¹

This striking specific allusion—one of many in The Queen of Spades, that masterpiece of surrealism—should not, however, be allowed to occlude the generic resonance that polonaises had not only in the work of Chaikovsky but, partly through him, in the work of other Russian composers as well. It often replaced the march where a specific overtone of official pomp was wanted. Thus the familiar “Procession of the Nobles” (Shestviye knyazey) in Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera-ballet Mlada is cast as a polonaise, minimally disguised by pseudo-archaic wr-Slav “modality” (example 11.11a), just as the opening choral pageant in the introduction to Borodin’s Prince Igor, though it ostensibly portrays a twelfth-century ceremony, is also tacitly (and inevitably) a polonaise (example 11.11b). Freestanding orchestral polonaises were frequently the response to official commemorative commissions, for instance Lyadov’s pair of polonaises, in memory of Pushkin (C major, Op. 49, 1899) and Anton Rubinstein (D major, Op. 55, 1902), both composed to accompany the unveiling of monuments.

EXAMPLE 11.10

a. Koztowski, Grom pobedï, razdavaisya! (Polonaise-quadriglia), refrain

(Be glorified by this, O Catherine, be glorified, thou tender mother of ours!)

b. Chaikovsky, The Queen of Spades, act 2, no. 15, culminating chorus

Chaikovsky’s “imperial” style was virtually defined by the polonaise. Perhaps, in light of the chorus in The Queen of Spades, it could go without saying that Chaikovsky’s earlier portrayal of Catherine the Great’s court in his opera Vakula the Smith after Gogol (1874; revised as Cherevichki in 1885) was effected by means of a choral polonaise: it was virtually an automatic association, mandated on this occasion by Yakov Polonsky’s libretto, which had been commissioned by the Russian court itself, and which Chaikovsky set as one of the entrants in a prize contest.¹⁰² (It is definitely worth mentioning, though, that Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, Christmas Eve, on the same Gogol story, loudly though it advertised its divergence from Chaikovsky’s treatment in favor of the literary original, nevertheless followed Chaikovsky in this ineluctable convention although Gogol had not called for it.) Even Eugene Onegin, that most intimate of operas, has its one moment of pomp, and that moment (the beginning of act 3) is a polonaise (example 11.12).

That brilliant polonaise, of course, is paired conceptually with another dance in Eugene Onegin, the modest waltz that introduces act 2 (example 11.13). The pairing underscores the social trajectory of the drama, from the milieu of the dowdy rural landowners personified by Mme Larina (Tatyana’s mother), to whom Onegin feels superior, to that of the high urban aristocracy, personified by Prince Gremin (her husband), by whom he is outclassed. In a more abstracted way, the same trajectory is described by the Third Suite, in which the “Valse mélancholique,” with its tinge of subjective malaise, is relieved by the synergetic festivity of the final polonaise, a festivity no longer disturbed, as the festive finale of the Fourth Symphony is disturbed, by By-ronic ruminations. The figurative court pageantry in the suite provides the consolation that the peasant holiday had failed to deliver in the symphony, because it was the dynastic state, as embodied in the bravura polonaise, rather than mere ethnicity, as embodied in the symphony’s folk dance variations, that represented an authentic Russian sobornosf, a truly sustaining human collectivity.¹⁰³

EXAMPLE 11.11

a. Rimsky-Korsakov, Mlada (1892), act 2, scene 3, Shestviye knyazey (“Procession of the Nobles”)

EXAMPLE 11.12. Chaikovsky, Eugene Onegin, act 3, scene 1 (no. 19)

EXAMPLE 11.13. Chaikovsky, Eugene Onegin, act 2, scene 1 (no. 13b)

MOZART REDUX

So Chaikovsky believed. Or so he fervently wished to believe, and fashioned his imperial style to bolster his faith, expressing it in a manner that once again allied him with his adored Mozart—allied him more closely, more significantly, and more artfully, I would contend, than any contemporary could claim.

Surely the most illuminating recent study of Mozart is Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s. In Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, a study of Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, she has decisively laid to rest the myth of classicism to which Mozart had been assimilated in the nineteenth century. She accomplished this feat by showing that Mozart’s music—far from an embodiment of idealized contentless form, an autonomous structure from which (according to one influential definition) “is excluded every sort of music that undertakes to lead the listener’s feeling in too definite, too individual a manner”¹⁰⁴—actually guides the listener’s associations at every point through a series of well-defined, socially established semiotic conventions, of which the chief ingredient is the dance. She gives more than enough examples, moreover, to substantiate the claim that these codes governed not only the composition and reception of opera, where there is always a component that may, if desired, be classified (and marginalized) as “extramusical,” but the composition and reception of “abstract” instrumental music as well, proving in fine that there is nothing abstract about it. The impulse to abstraction or “absolutism,” she contends and proves, was something that came into music as a by-product of romanticism, with its impulse toward transcendence, and was read back on the music of the so-called classical period in the process of its canonization — which is to say (in stronger terms than Allanbrook might approve) its hijacking in support of the Germanic myth of the hero-composer.¹⁰⁵ That was a myth Mozart never had to reject, for he never knew it. Chaikovsky knew it and rejected it.

Why dance? Because the purpose of music for Mozart, as for Chaikovsky, was, in Allanbrook’s words, “to move an audience through representations of its own humanity.”¹⁰⁶ The metaphorical (or, more properly, metonymical) use of rhythmic gesture derived from the ritualized movement of social dance represented human behavior at its most expressive and fully realized, and did it in the most direct and corporeal way possible. “In the dancer,” as Allanbrook writes, “movement and affect become one.”¹⁰⁷ The assumption underlying this premise, of course, is that humans are at their most human not au naturel, and not as individuals, but as members of groups—all right, classes—whose feelings and actions are mediated through social convention.

It is an aristocratic assumption, to which, as we have had ample opportunity to observe, Chaikovsky, a privileged member of perhaps the most hierarchical society that existed in late nineteenth-century Europe, assented in every conceivable way. As he put it to Mme von Meck, not only classes but class warfare was the natural and necessary scheme of things: “All of life, after all, is a struggle for existence, and if we allow that this struggle may cease to be,—then life, too, will cease to be, leaving only meaningless proliferation.”¹⁰⁸ And, as we have seen, he valued in the Russian autocracy a society that was organically human from the top all the way down, rather than one organized according to some abstract political principle.

We have already had a number of indications that Chaikovsky sought in his music to represent the dance of life. In this he knew, or rather felt, that he was Mozart’s follower. Thanks to Allanbrook’s brilliant exposition, we may extend and corroborate the insight in very particular ways. Drawing on many historical witnesses, Allanbrook was able to work out a scheme correlating the social dances of the eighteenth century according to a social scale, roughly classified as high, low, and “of medium character.” The highest was the courtly minuet, the lowest was the rustic contredanse. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, these two dances inhabited wholly different social realms, and their social connotations were well enough remembered in Mozart’s day so that his Don Giovanni (the title character, that is, in what was not by coincidence Chaikovsky’s favorite opera) could engineer a sort of social anarchy by ordering that the two be played simultaneously—together with a “Teitsch,” a speedier, hence even more loutish variety of contredanse—in the famous mélange of three orchestras in the act 1 finale of the opera named for him.

By century’s end, enough social mixture had taken place so that the minuet and the contredanse were commonly danced on the same social occasions. They were, in fact, the vastly preponderant genres of social dance by Mozart’s time. Not at all coincidentally, they were the two dances that survived, frequently as a pair, in the so-called classical symphony—the minuet, as everybody knows, slotted in by name, the contredanse often informing the rondo (or Kehraus) finale. In Allanbrook’s work they become a useful antithesis for analyzing the social and expressive dialectic of the Mozartean style.

A similar pair, as we have seen, governs the Chaikovskian dialectic. What is not so obvious is its specific relationship to the Mozartean. The evolution of the contredanse, through the Deutsche Tanz or Teitsch, into the waltz is traced by Allanbrook, who notes how in the second movement of Mozart’s C-major Quintet, K. 515, “the waltz’s exuberance serves as a foil for the serpentine minuet.”¹⁰⁹ The waltz is the “lower” member of Chaikovsky’s pair, too; and its “higher” counterpart, the polonaise, has some striking affinities with its courtly predecessor—that is, with the statelier varieties of the minuet, exemplified in the Don Giovanni montage—as regards metrical structure, affect, and social meaning. Both are broadly beaten dances in triple time, the breadth of the beat reflecting exaltation in both the affective and social domains. The minuet, no less than the polonaise, easily accommodated the military topos.¹¹⁰ The tempo relation between the Chaikovskian waltz and the Chaikovskian polonaise is roughly that between the Mozartean contredanse or Teitsch and the courtly Mozartean minuet. Indeed, so close are the two stately dances in rhythmic character that whenever, in the course of one of his Catherine-the-Great divertissements, Chaikovsky meant to write a minuet (e.g., Zlatogor’s “Kak tï mila, prekrasna!” [no. 14d] in the second act of The Queen of Spades, or “His Highness’s” [Svetleyshiy s] “Blagopoluchno li vi sovershili put’?” [no. 21] in the second act of Cherevichki) he instinctively gave it a polonaiselike stamp that could only have strengthened its social and affective import in his hearers’ ears (example 11.14).

But of course the whole point of Allanbrook’s study, and the emerging point of this one, is that social dances do not merely portray themselves in art-music contexts but provide a vocabulary of topoi that can signify in a more generalized or figurative way. Nor is the purpose of the dance-derived topoi, or of the rhythmic gestures associated with them, confined to mere celebration of the social order, however important such a purpose may have eventually become to Chaikovsky, if not to Mozart.¹¹¹ When dance functions as social indicator, as it does so emphatically in Eugene Onegin, it is not merely denotative but also connotative, symbolizing not only social milieus but also mores and their attendant constraints. The act 3 polonaise metonymically represents the noblesse that will oblige Tatyana to refuse the entreaties of the man she loves, the same man who had disdained her in her waltzing days. It telegraphs the end of the story—an end that leaves no one, except possibly old Prince Gremin, happy.

So the waltz/polonaise antithesis in Eugene Onegin embodies moral conflict, and represents it to the audience, through the trope of metonymy, in terms of a social environment in which the audience and the composer are co-participants. It is an attempt, as Allanbrook put it of the Mozartean method, “to move an audience through representations of its own humanity.” In Chaikovsky’s time such a method was known as realism. “It seems to me,” Chaikovsky wrote in 1891 to an official of the Imperial Theaters, “that I am truly gifted with the ability truthfully, sincerely, and simply to express the feelings, moods, and images suggested by a text. In this sense I am a realist and fundamentally a Russian.”¹¹² Now we know how the trick was done, and from whom (not a Russian) Chaikovsky had learned it.

EXAMPLE 11.14

a. Chaikovsky, The Queen of Spades, act 2, no. 14d

EXAMPLE 11.15. Chaikovsky, Suite no. 3, fourth movement (Tema con variazioni), no. 12: Finale. Polacca

Nor was a text a necessity for Chaikovsky’s metonymical realism to work its effects, any more than it was for Mozart’s. The supreme embodiment of the waltz/polonaise antithesis in Chaikovsky, and the most generalized and figurative, occurs in a work we have as yet considered only through the distorting lens of Germanocentric criticism. In order fully to appreciate its semi-otic properties, it would be well to place it in conjunction with a work already described. Example 11.15 reproduces the characteristic fanfares that signal the arrival of the culminating polonaise in the third orchestral suite; and example 11.16 will remind the reader of the most famous fanfare Chaikovsky ever wrote.

Fatum! The dread motto theme from the Fourth Symphony, composed concurrently with Eugene Onegin in 1877-78, turns out to be yet another unadvertised polonaise. It is easy enough to see how the attributes of the genre might be appropriated for such a purpose: first of all the military topos, connoting bellicosity, hostility, implacability; then, too, the idea of grandiosity and invincible power, derived from political awe; and finally, perhaps, the idea of impersonality, dwarfing individual concerns, as the collectivity of the dominion dwarfs the individual subject.

EXAMPLE 11.16. Chaikovsky, Symphony no. 4, first movement, beginning

That subject, of course, is represented by the first theme (example 11.17), explicitly designated as being in movimento di valse but notated in compound meter (9/8) so that three waltz measures are in effect coordinated with one measure of the polonaise just as three measures of Teitsch are coordinated with the Don Giovanni minuet. This rhythmic relationship is essential to the dramaturgy of the symphony’s first movement, which is expressed in terms of the rhythm, so to speak, of the genre opposition. What is first expressed as a radical contrast becomes a superimposition during the development section, with its three terrifying collisions of subject theme and Fatum theme (mm. 253, 263, 278; example 11.18). The submission of waltz to polonaise—of subject to fate—is palpably denoted in the coda, when the waltz is reprised for the last time in a triple augmentation—that is, at the speed of the polonaise, one measure of the former now corresponding exactly to one measure of the latter, and therefore no longer a waltz at all (example 11.19).

The fate theme, then, inspires, or expresses, a sublime terror; but unlike the romantic sublime, which depends on a perception of uncanniness, of removal from ordinary human experience, the Chaikovskian sublime depends, as always, on concrete imagery explicitly derived from shared human experience.

But of course there is a major difference between the polonaise in the Fourth Symphony and the other Chaikovskian polonaises that we have sampled. The difference, quite simply and obviously, is one of affect. Where the usual polonaise affect is triumphant and celebratory, this one is alarming. It expresses not joyous community but fearful alienation. And if the polonaise in the Third Suite is read as affirming the composer’s allegiance to the Tsarist state, which the polonaise is said to represent, what are we to make of the apparent political contradiction here?

But there is a contradiction only if we imagine the composer as being, unlike the rest of us, a wholly changeless entity (and only if we imagine musical signification as a wholly fixed and static, quasi-lexical convention). If we regard the polonaise in the Fourth Symphony as being, like the polonaise in Eugene Onegin, an emblem of social mores and the constraints they impose, then the traditional biographical reading of the movement receives newly concrete support; for Chaikovsky had, in marrying, bowed to social constraints—that is, to internalized social pressures—with disastrous results. He had good reason to feel temporarily alienated from society, and good reason to embody such feelings artistically in a threatening polonaise, even as he could later celebrate his happy rétour à la vie, under the aegis of his benevolent sovereign, with a triumphant re-embracing of the same topos. The use of the imperial—or imperious—dance genre makes both the menace and the triumph legible, and that remains the point.

EXAMPLE 11.17. Chaikovsky, Symphony no. 4, first movement, Moderato con anima (= in movimento di valse)

If Chaikovsky described the symphony theme as representing not the destructive pressure of social norms but simply blind, indifferent Fate, he was not only following an established musical convention (for who could hear a unison fanfare at the beginning of a symphony and not think of Beethoven’s Fifth?) but also being true in all likelihood to his subjective perception of what threatened him, regarding Fate, as Freud famously put it, “as a substitute for the parental agency,” that is, for what, casually following Freud, we all now call the superego, the locus of what we may anyhow, without fear of anachronism, call internalized social pressure.¹¹³

It’s something we all carry around with us, at least if we are a part of Chaikovsky’s potential audience. And so the “biographical” reading of the symphony, as Chaikovsky surely intended, is in fact collectively autobiographical. It creates community, if only a community of anxiety. So that must be why stern Tolstoy so valued Chaikovsky as an artist, even if there was “something not quite clear about him” as a man.¹¹⁴ And that is why this symphony and this composer, though we may read at length about their faults in any textbook but a Russian one, have never left the repertory and continue to annoy the conscience of those who guard the canon.

EXAMPLE 11.18. Chaikovsky, Symphony no. 4, first movement, the three collisions

EXAMPLE 11.19. Chaikovsky, Symphony no. 4, first movement, m. 404

EXAMPLE 11.20. Chaikovsky, The Queen of Spades

a. Act 1, no. 3

(Af last God has sent us a lovely sunny day!)

By the time we reach Chaikovsky’s brief last period, the one ushered in by The Queen of Spades, the deployment of rhythmic gesture has become so virtuosic that it can encompass irony, and through irony, terror. The same polonaise rhythms that celebrate the crown in the opera’s second act make many unadvertised appearances in the elaborate network of foils and doubles that stalk Gherman, the maniacal protagonist, and turn the opera into an early landmark of Russian symbolism. The whole central action of the first scene—beginning with the chorus of promenaders admiring the brilliant weather (another polonaise metonymy; example 11.20a) but continuing through the fatal encounter of Gherman, Lisa, and the Countess—is played against a steady throb of polonaise pulsations. So is the unbearably suspenseful scene in the Countess’s boudoir, directly before her lethal confrontation with Gherman, in which the ticking time-bomb of an ostinato (example 11.20b) is derived directly from the climactic Kozlovsky quotation (“Be glorified, O Catherine!”) in the ballroom scene, as the countess, falling asleep, makes invidious comparison of balls recent and long past. The last unadvertised polonaise is the one that informs the game room chorus at the beginning of the last scene (example 11.20c), in which a final reprise of the Countess’s reprise of the Kozlovsky motif heralds Gherman’s entrance for what will be his own lethal encounter with Fatum.

b. Act 2, no. 16, m. 247 (“The Countess falls asleep”)

c. Act 3, no. 24, m. 24

(Tomsky [to Prince Yeletsky]: Rely on me!

Chorus: Ah! Hermann! Why so late, pal? Where’ve you come from?)

The hallucinatory atmosphere of The Queen of Spades invades the Pathetic Symphony at several strategic points, of which one again evokes the rhythmic gesture of the polonaise. The middle section of that uncanny lyrisches Intermezzo that forms the second theme group in the first movement is accompanied by unmistakable polonaise figures—unmistakable even with four beats to the bar (example 11.21a). Prokofiev did not mistake them, and recalled them in the explicitly labeled common-time polonaise he composed for the Andrey-meets-Natasha ballroom scene in War and Peace (example 11.21b). In both cases the distorted yet familiar rhythmic gesture enables the audience to experience along with the characters—the lovers in War and Peace, the subject-persona in the Pathetic Symphony—a calculated atmosphere of unreality, which is to say of a reality made strange by powerful emotion.

IF THE culminating argument in this chapter, which relies so enthusiastically on Allanbrook’s study of Mozart, seems to cast Chaikovsky in a special receptive relationship to the Viennese master he worshiped, it has been a purposeful hyperbole. It would be fairer, perhaps, to say that Chaikovsky was the eager recipient of, and participant in, a tradition that goes back to or passes through Mozart in a way that the Germanic tradition, reverently though its claim of descent from the “classical masters” has been ratified in conventional historiography, does not. It is the Franco-Italianate line that included Rossini, Bizet, Auber, Adam, and Chaikovsky, with Verdi, was its preeminent late nineteenth-century representative.¹¹⁵ It is the line of which the prime theater of operation remained literally the theater, and which drew its musical imagery not from visions of transcendence but from the stock of daily life. It made a virtue of eclecticism, was therefore acutely conscious of style and tone as semiosis, but remained nonchalantly transparent to models and sources and attached relatively little importance to the fashioning of a personal style. (We have seen this in Chaikovsky’s willing—and openly avowed—emulation even of so relatively undistinguished a contemporary as Lachner.) It remained loyal to the idea of the beautiful as the pleasing, including the sensuously pleasing. It sought community with its audience, and respected its audience’s humanity.

EXAMPLE 11.21

a. Chaikovsky, Symphony no. 6, first movement, m. 101

b. Prokofiev, War and Peace, act 1, scene 2, figure 51

In this company Chaikovsky was the foremost symphonist, but his view of the symphony, like Mozart’s, remained true to the theater—though just how true we will probably continue to underestimate until Chaikovsky meets his Allanbrook. And he passed the view along to Mahler, who enthusiastically conducted Eugene Onegin, and whose idea of the symphony as Welttheater owed a crucial debt to Chaikovsky, for which reason Mahler, too, long paid a critical price for his unabashed eclecticism and for his alleged “mannerisms” and vulgarity.¹¹⁶

Owing to the ideological dichotomies of the nineteenth century and their largely unconscious internalization in twentieth-century criticism and historiography, Chaikovsky’s Mozartean inheritance, like some kind of fallen aristocratic pedigree, is now looked upon askance as “popular” or, worse, “commercial.” ¹¹⁷ There is truth in that judgment: the aesthetics and the practices of Mozart’s day were in some conspicuous and important ways closer to those of our contemporary pop culture than to those of what we now call “classical music.”¹¹⁸ But as consciousness of that kinship has been repressed, so recognition of its survivals has been stigmatized. To the extent that Chaikovsky is viewed as an heir to the legitimate “classical” (which is to say, the invented preromantic) tradition, he can be viewed only as its debaser, easily marginalized on the basis of nationality or sexuality (and recent research has exposed the links between the two marginalizing strategems).¹¹⁹

Sergey Diaghilev, for whom Chaikovsky was a great composer but an un-exportable commodity, spoke with feeling on one occasion about the decline of the Russian aristocracy. “The end of a way of life is at hand. Isolated, boarded-up estates, palaces horrible in their dying magnificence, strangely inhabited by today’s pleasant, average folk who could never bear the burden of yesterday’s splendors.”¹²⁰ That is how one tends, in benevolent moods, to look down upon Chaikovsky even now: as a pleasant, average sort trying impertinently to do a hero’s work. Why do we condescend to him? Because like Mozart he would not condescend to us.

¹ “Otlichno mozhno bïlo bï napisat’ operu”; see G. A. Larosh, “Na pamyat’ o P. I. Chai-kovskom,” in E. Bortnikova et al., ed., Vospominaniya o P’. /. Chaikovskom, 4th ed. (Leningrad: Muzika, 1980), p. 352.

² Covering the second and third acts only, it is printed in Muzïkal’noye naslediye Chaikovskogo (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1958), p. 153.

³ See his letters to Vladimir Davïdov (11 April 1893) and to Modest (17 April 1893), in P. Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 17 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1981), pp. 79, 85.

⁴ See Geoffrey Norris, “Rakhmaninov’s Student Opera,” Musical Quarterly 59 (1973): 441-48.

⁵ George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. Thomas A. Noble (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 114. Further page references to this source will be made in the text.

⁶ “If you will be satisfied with a quiet, calm love, rather the love of a brother, then I make you my proposal,” as his widow recalled his words. See Antonina Chaikovskaya, “Vospominaniya vdovï P. I. Chaikovskogo,” Russkaya muzïkal’naya gazeta 42 (1913): 918; quoted in Alexander Poznansky, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991), p. 212. More than likely the composer was deliberately paraphrasing his character’s words (unless his widow was doing the paraphrasing in retrospect).

⁷ See R. Taruskin, “Yevgeny Onegin,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, vol. 4, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 1193-94.

⁸ Muzïkal’noye naslediye Chaikovskogo, pp. 153-54.

⁹ Ibid., p. 154. It is not quite clear whether this was in fact to be the end of the opera.

¹⁰ See T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 41. The word significant is italicized above in homage to Eliot’s insistent habit in that essay.

¹¹ To Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, 1 March/17 February 1878; Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 7 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1962), p. 124.”

¹² “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” p. 43.

¹³ G[rigoriy Anatol’yevich] B[lokh], “Beseda c Chaikovskim,” Peterburgskaya zhizn’, no. 2 (1892); in P. I. Chaikovsky, Muzïkal’no-kriticheskiye stat’i, 4th ed. (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1986), p. 319. Italics added.

¹⁴ “Čajkovskij affirme avoir adoré ce dernier [Mozart] toute sa vie, mais, le Don Juan excepté, il ne le connaît alors que superficiellement” (Vladimir Fédorov, “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” Acta Musicologica 42 [1970]: 63).

¹⁵ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 18, pp. 619, 615.

¹⁶ Ibid., vol. 4, p. 450; the source of Peyre’s formulations is his book Qu’est-ce que le Classicisme? (Paris, 1935).

¹⁷ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 4, p. 450.

¹⁸ See the discussion of Vladimir Odoyevsky’s opera criticism in the previous chapter, pp. 215-17.

¹⁹ Review of trios by Alexander Fesca, in R. Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Heinrich Simon, vol. 3 (Leipzig, n.d.), p. 115; quoted in Sanna Pederson, “On the Task of the Music Historian: The Myth of the Symphony after Beethoven,” Repercussions 2, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 20.

²⁰ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 4, p. 451. See also, inter alia, Leo Treitler, “Mozart and the Idea of Absolute Music,” in Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 176-214.

²¹ See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

²² For extensive substantiation of the influence of this mythology on historical writing into our own day, see the quotations from Lang, Einstein, Arnold Whittall, and Nicholas Temperley in Pederson, “On the Task of the Music Historian,” pp. 6-9.

²³ See Poznansky, Tchaikovsky, p. 181, from which the translation of Chaikovsky’s letter has been adapted.

²⁴ Letter dated Rome, 18 February/1 March 1880; Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 9 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1962), p. 56.

²⁵ 21 September 1888; ibid., vol. 14 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1974), p. 542.

²⁶ 2 October 1888; A. A. Orlova, comp. and ed., P. I. Chaikovskiy o muzïke, o zhizni, o sebe (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1976), p. 218.

²⁷ Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 156, 154.

²⁸ Music in the Romantic Era (New York: Norton, 1947), p. 316.

²⁹ Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 266.

³⁰ Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 9.

³¹ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 18, p. 456.

³² See, inter alia, his letter to von Meck from Vienna, 26 November/8 December 1877; P. I. Chaikovsky, Perepiska s N. F. fon-Mekk, vol. 1 (Moscow: Academia, 1934), p. 99.

³³ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 18, p. 455.

³⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1868), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 100.

³⁵ Ibid., p. 120.

³⁶ Alfred Einstein, Greatness in Music, trans. César Searchinger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1976), p. 287.

³⁷ Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, in Peter le Huray and James Day, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 70-71.

³⁸ Letter to his father, 26 September 1781; Mozart’s Letters, trans. Emily Anderson, ed. Eric Blom (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 182.

³⁹ See Louis Spohr’s Autobiography, translated from the German (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865), vol. 1, 189.

⁴⁰ On the importance of le joli (as well as on “the tasty” [vkusnoye]) see Chaikovsky’s 1880 letter to Mme von Meck about Carmen in Orlova, P. I. Chaikovskiy o muzïke, o zhizni, o sebe, pp. 125-26.

⁴¹ Letter of 26 December 1872; M. P. Musorgsky, Literaturnoye naslediye, ed. A. A. Orlova and M. S. Pekelis, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1971), pp. 142-43. This is the letter in which Musorgsky showed his contempt for Chaikovsky by referring to him as “Sadïk-Pasha,” the pseudonym of the Polish writer and adventurer Michal Czajkowski (1804-86), much reviled in Russia as a Crimean War turncoat—i.e., a bad Russian.

⁴² Letter of 18 October 1872; ibid., p. 141.

⁴³ 30 April 1878; Perepiska s N. F. fon-Mekk, vol. 1, p. 315. The allusions “this sorry age” and “hard reality” are oblique references to the trial of the revolutionary Vera Zasulich, who had made an attempt on the life of Fyodor Trepov, the governor of the St. Petersburg district, and to its outcome (that is, her acquittal), which to Chaikovsky signaled the breakdown of public morality in the name of futile liberalism. “What a pity for our poor, kind sovereign,” he had written on 13 April, “who so sincerely desires what is good and who meets with such killing disappointments and setbacks” (ibid., 299).

⁴⁴ To Modest Chaikovsky, 26 September 1883; Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 12 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1970), pp. 243-44.

⁴⁵ To Mme von Meck, 18 January 1885; ibid., vol. 13 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1971), p. 25.

⁴⁶ To Mme von Meck, 1879; P. I. Chaikovskiy o muzïke, o zhizni, o sebe, p. 117.

⁴⁷ To Mme von Meck, 27 September 1885; Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Liter-aturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 13, p. 159.

⁴⁸ To Mme von Meck, 11 October 1885; ibid., p. 171.

⁴⁹ Fédorov, “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” pp. 59-70; and Georg Knepler (chair) et al., “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” in “Actes du Colloque de Saint-Germain-en-Laye: Etudes sur la Musique du XIX^e siècle,” Acta Musicologica 43 (1971): 205-35.

⁵⁰ Knepler et al., “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” p. 235.

⁵¹ Fédorov, “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” p. 60.

⁵² Ibid., pp. 60, 62, 62n.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 64.

⁵⁴ Ibid., pp. 66, 64-65; italics added in translation.

⁵⁵ “Sa musique symphonique est avant tout biographique, psychologique, à programme” (ibid., p. 65).

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 69.

⁵⁷ For an explicit statement to this effect, see Fédorov’s introductory remarks in Knepler et al., “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” p. 206; and yet at the same time, in the spirit of the “objective” musicology of that period, Fédorov insisted that “Chaikovsky’s personality be deliberately left as far as possible in the shade.”

⁵⁸ See n. 11. For the most recent complete translation of the letter see “To My Best Friend” : Correspondence between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck 1876-1878, trans. Galina von Meck, ed. Edward Garden and Nigel Gotteri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 183-88.

⁵⁹ Knepler et al., “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” pp. 212-13. For a different sort—an earlier and purer sort—of Soviet Chaikovsky criticism, see Boleslav Pshibïshevsky (Przybyszewski), “O Chaikovskom: Kompozitor i èpokha,” Sovetskoye iskusstvo, no. 42 (1933); reprinted as the introduction to the first volume of the Chaikovsky-von Meck correspondence (P. I. Chaikovsky, Perepiska s N. F. fon-Mekk, vol. 1 [Moscow and Leningrad: Academia, 1934], pp. vii-xviii). The essential vulgar-Marxist move is the transformation of Chaikovsky’s obsession with fate, still regarded as his central theme, into a class obsession: “Of patrician origin and education, ... he is distinctly aware of the doom that awaits his estate, the inevitable destruction of his class, and experiences it as implacable fate. . . . ‘Fatum,’ the pessimistic consciousness of doom, is the leitmotif of all his best works” (pp. ix-x). Of course the last three symphonies remain the prime exhibits (p. xiii: “He had the courage to look historical truth in the eye and sing himself and his class a formidable requiem: the ‘Pathetic’ Symphony”). Chaikovsky is linked with Tolstoy as genius tragedian of a doomed social class. It was a form of rehabilitation—or, rather, a concession to both artists’ invincible popularity. Unlike the weaker members of his class, the rationalization went, who tried to save themselves with a cheap seigneurial show of liberalism (deshoveri kim bar skim liberal nichaniyem), Chaikovsky faced up to his class fate with courage; his work possesses the “life-affirmation” required by socialist realism and can inspire rather than mortify the Soviet audience: “For the new class draws from the tragedy of the departed not despondency but new strength towards its own self-fulfillment” (p. xvii).

⁶⁰ Knepler et al., “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” p. 215.

⁶¹ Ibid., pp. 222, 224.

⁶² Prefiguring Dahlhaus’s better-known attempt, Wangermée tried, in keeping with his “sociological” approach, to assimilate Fédorov’s catchphrase, “musicien type,” to a famous heuristic model of Max Weber’s: the Idealtypus, or “ideal type.” But where Dahlhaus correctly understood the notion as a complex or a cluster of characteristics (comparable to the Wittgenstein model of “family resemblance,” first posited with reference to the notional class of games) that shows up in actual cases only in part, but which may be used as a reference category to demonstrate the relatedness of phenomena that may not actually have any elements in common, Wangermée used the term as a mere synonym for “prototype” or “stereotype.” Not surprisingly, therefore, he dismissed it as “peu operante . . . pour expliquer une réalité artistique dans toute sa complexité” (Knepler et al., “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” p. 224). For Dahlhaus’s most explicit formulation of the concept see his Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), especially the conclusion (pp. 120-23); for a critique see Philip Gossett, “Carl Dahlhaus and the ‘Ideal Type,’ “ 19th-century Music 13 (1989-90): 49-56.

⁶³ Or, in Kant’s original wording, that which lacks an external end (Zweck) but has “purposiveness” (Zweckmässigkeit). See the Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), p. 73.

⁶⁴ Knepler et al., “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” p. 223.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 223.

⁶⁷ Fédorov, “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” p. 68.

⁶⁸ That is, Opp. 43 (1878-79), 53 (1883), and 55 (1884). Mozartiana, Op. 61 (1887), though now commonly designated Suite no. 4, was not so designated by the composer; indeed, during his lifetime the very absence of a Suite no. 4 from his catalog furnished the pretext for the punning sobriquet “Fourth Suite” (chetvyortaya syuita), coined by his brother Modest, and later on every St. Petersburg gossip’s lips. It referred to the retinue (svita) of young male relations and friends— “Modest’s gang,” as Nina Berberova put it—with whom Chaikovsky spent his time on his late visits to St. Petersburg, and who “all more or less lived off him.” See Chaikovsky’s letter to Vladimir Naprávnik from Paris, 15/3 June 1893, Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 17, p. 109; also Nina Berberova, “Looking Back at Tchaikovsky,” Yale Review 80, no. 3 (July 1992): 70; and cf. Poznansky, Tchaikovsky, chap. 27 (“The ‘Fourth Suite’”).

⁶⁹ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 18, p. 349.

⁷⁰ See the discussion, by Robert Pascall, in The New Oxford History of Music, vol. 9, ed. Gerald Abraham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 560-72, esp. pp. 562-64. This is the only even moderately extended discussion of the nineteenth-century suite in the standard literature; the word “suite” is absent even from the index in such other period surveys as Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, and Leon Plantinga, Romantic Music (New York: Norton, 1984).

⁷¹ Op. 38 (1855): Prelude, Minuet, Gigue, Sarabande, Gavotte, Passacaille, Allemande, Courante, Passepied, Bourrée.

⁷² See ‘“Little Star’: An Étude in the Folk Style,” in R. Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 38-70.

⁷³ 16 April 1884; Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 12, p. 352. He went on, “It’s only a pity that there is no Russian word that could replace the word syuita, which sounds terrible in Russian. I have thought a great deal about this and cannot come up with anything.”

⁷⁴ The quoted phrases come from Thomas Twining, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, Translated, with Notes on the Translation, and on the Original; and Two Dissertations, on Poetical, and Musical, Imitation, 2d ed. (London, 1812), p. 66.

⁷⁵ See n. 43. The only items Chaikovsky composed wholly during the four months that intervened between the letter of 30 April 1878 and the composition of the First Suite, begun on 15/27 August, were the Album for Children (24 Easy Pieces for Piano, Op. 39) and the functional Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Op. 41. The Piano Sonata in G, Op. 37, in progress at the time of the letter, was completed on 26 July/7 August.

⁷⁶ See his letter to von Meck, 25 August 1878; Perepiska s N. F. fon-Mekk, vol. 1, p. 421.

⁷⁷ Letter from Florence, 17 February/1 March 1878; Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturnïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 7 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1962), p. 126.

⁷⁸ Five of Lachner’s seven orchestral suites have fugues as either first movement (nos. 2 and 6) or finale (nos. 1, 4, and 7).

⁷⁹ The original plan was to call this movement the “March of the Lilliputians” and the gavotte the “Dance of the Giants.” See the composer’s letter to his brother Modest, 13 November 1878, quoted in Modeste Tchaikovsky, The Life and Letters of Tchaikovsky, ed. Rosa Newmarch (New York: Vienna House, 1973), p. 324.

⁸⁰ See his letter to Pyotr Ivanovich Jurgenson, 9 August 1879; P. I. Chaikovsky, Perepiska s P. I. Yurgensonom, vol. 1 (Moscow and Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1938), p. 109.

⁸¹ Fédorov, “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” p. 65.

⁸² If this observation is accepted as correct, Chaikovsky’s “scherzoids” and suite-grotesques would seem to offer a counterexample to the familiar claim made by musical narcologists (Carolyn Abbate, for example, or Anthony Newcomb) that “we, as listeners, create patterns of events in time that will make sense of musical discontinuities; any tear in the musical fabric creates a space into which the constructed story must rush, heading off the vertigo of threatened meaninglessness” (Andrew Dell’Antonio, Richard Hill, and Mitchell Morris, “Classic and Romantic Instrumental Music and Narrative” [report of a colloquium held at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, 27-28 May 1988], Current Musicology 48 [1991]: 44).

⁸³ A. N. Benua, Moí vospominaniya (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), vol. 1, p. 654.

⁸⁴ David Brown, “Tchaikovsky,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 18, p. 619, and Tchaikovsky: The Years of Wandering 1878-1885 (New York: Norton, 1986), pp. 12, 230. Although, as noted, the suites are not easily read as confessional, Brown nevertheless manages in the later publication so to read them, or at least to hint at the existence in the suites of the sort of “private, hidden, or ineffable meanings” that entitle them to consideration as musique de création—which must be why the suites fare a bit better in the biography than they do in the New Grove article. (In both the First Suite and the Second, Brown suggests that the thematic content embodies abstruse references in cipher to names and places of concurrent biographical significance: see Tchaikovsky: The Years of Wandering, pp. 62-63, 241-42.)

⁸⁵ See his letter to Mme von Meck of 16 April 1883: “What you say about communism is absolutely true. A more senseless utopia, anything more contrary to human nature, is inconceivable. And how dull and unbearably colorless life would surely be were this material equality ever to gain ascendency” (Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturrïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 12, pp. 123-24). The Soviet editors note, out of concern for their readers, that “Chaikovsky was not sufficiently discerning in political or social matters,” but the bromide that artists are by nature “unpolitical” or politically “naive” is not confined to the Soviet Union; cf. Fédorov: “Je doute fort d’autre part que C. ait été réellement sensible aux événements politiques et sociaux russes de son temps ou que ces événements aient eu un influence directe sur son oeuvre” (Knepler et al., “Čajkovskij, Musicien Type du XIX^e siècle?” p. 213). Directe is the necessary precaution or amulet that turns falsifiable assertion into impregnable truism.

⁸⁶ E.g., Yuliy Melgunov’s collection, entitled Russkiye pesni, neposredstvenno s golosov naroda (“Russian Songs Direct from the Voices of the People”), of which the first volume had appeared in 1879 (Moscow: Lissner and Roman), just in time for a couple of its items to be incorporated into Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina.

⁸⁷ To P. I. Jurgenson, 2 February 1883; Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturrïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 12, p. 47.

⁸⁸ Boleslav Isaakovich Rabinovich, P. I. Chaikovskiy i narodnaya pesnya (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1963), p. 16; the notations (the second polyphonic) are reproduced on p. 139.

⁸⁹ See Bertolt Brecht, “Uber die Verwendung von Musik fur ein episches Theater,” trans, (as “On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre”) in John Willett, ed., Brecht on Theater (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 84-90; the passage about “culinary” music is on p. 89.

⁹⁰ Treatment of Chaikovsky as asexual (a defense against horror of his sexual deviance, as the “apolitical” assumption is a defense against horror of his—or Stravinsky’s; see chapter 13— unpalatable political loyalties) is particularly rife among his British biographers, beginning with Edward Garden, who informs his readers that, as a homosexual, Chaikovsky was “unable to feel sexually aroused” (Tchaikovsky [London: Dent, 1973], p. 17).

⁹¹ See Solomon Volkov, Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky: Interviews with George Balanchine (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 127.

⁹² Chaikovsky also made a special arrangement of the final “Glory” (Slav’sya) chorus from Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, with a segue into Lvov’s official Tsarist hymn (Bozhe, tsarya khrani!) for a total of three coronation commissions.

⁹³ Letter of 13 March 1884; Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturrïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 12, p. 336.

⁹⁴ 5 March 1885; ibid., vol. 13, pp. 44-45.

⁹⁵ See Poznansky, Tchaikovsky, esp. pp. 365-67, 481-83.

⁹⁶ For a summary of the debate surrounding the circumstances of Chaikovsky’s death, and a consideration of its cultural significance, see R. Taruskin, “Pathetic Symphonist: Chaikovsky, Russia, Sexuality and the Study of Music,” New Republic 212, no. 6 (6 February 1995): 26-40.

⁹⁷ Indeed, it was precisely the relative tolerance for homosexuality, among other forms of libertinage, in aristocratic circles that accounts for the intense identification with the patrician class and the reactionary politics that is so noticeable among known nineteenth-century Russian homosexual men; see Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 56-57, for a discussion and a list that includes Chaikovsky’s own one-time lover, the poet Alexey Apukhtin. The related aristocratic, or once-aristocratic, preference for decorative and sensual art, which looms so large in the present characterization of Chaikovsky, is another trait often associated with a gay sensibility.

⁹⁸ An orchestral polonaise by Kozlovsky after Mozart’s terzetto “Mandina amabile” (K. 480) is recorded on Melodiya Stereo 33 C 10-12743-4 (1981).

⁹⁹ The piece is headed “Polonaise quadriglia et choeur,” the quadrilles being instrumental interpolations between reprises of the polonaise, illustrating sounds of battle, the Turks, and the liberated territories (a “Moldavienne”). See “Recueil d’airs choisis, Français, Russes, Italiens, et Polonaises avec Choeurs et sans Choeurs, composés par Joseph Koslovskÿ Amateur, a St. Petersbourg” (MS without siglum in the library of the University of California at Berkeley), part 4 (Polonaises), no. 1. “Grom pobedï, razdavaisya” minus the interpolated quadrilles (and 3/8 “allemandes” or deutsche Tänze, precursors of the waltz), is included in Semyon Lvovich Ginzburg, ed., Istoriya russkoy muzïki v notnïkh obraztsakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1968), pp. 428-33.

¹⁰⁰ A. M. Sokolova, “O. A. Kozlovskiy,” Istoriya russkoy muzïki v desyati tomakh, vol. 4 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1986), p. 98.

¹⁰¹ She is greeted by those onstage, but could not actually appear to the audience, owing to a regulation forbidding the appearance of members of the Romanov dynasty as theatrical characters; since the Revolution a well-bedizened extra usually makes an entrance as the curtain falls.

¹⁰² For a consideration of that libretto and its political significance, see R. Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue, pp. 342-47.

¹⁰³ A similar progression, from modest waltz to resplendent polonaise, can be read in the Third Symphony (1875), the work that gives perhaps the earliest intimation of Chaikovsky’s imperial style. It can be read most easily in Balanchine’s inspired decapitated version, which—as “Diamonds,” the final act of the triptych Jewels (1967)—has become better known within the world of ballet than the score alone has ever been to concert audiences. Without the weighty, motivically intricate first movement, the remaining four stand revealed as Chaikovsky’s true first suite (or “Suite no. 0,” perhaps, a la Bruckner), and its waltz-polonaise dialectic would become a Chaikovskian paradigm.

¹⁰⁴ Friedrich Blume, Classic and Romantic Music, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 10; quoted in Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 381.

¹⁰⁵ See Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, most explicitly in the introduction and the afterword (pp. 1-9, 326-28, and the notes on pp. 329-31 and 380-81).

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 16.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid.

¹⁰⁸ 16 April 1883; Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturrïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 12, p. 124.

¹⁰⁹ Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, pp. 63-66; the quoted phrase is on p. 66, describing an example given on pp. 36-37.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 35-36.

¹¹¹ Yet as Allanbrook wisely insists, Mozart’s acceptance of, and reliance on, received conventions do ultimately disclose a conservative social attitude. Figaro, she writes (p. 194), “filled with joy and wit, and yet a certain resignation, is not a revolutionary’s manual, nor a facile witness to an aphorism about true friendship knowing no bounds. Mozart had no desire to obliterate class distinctions, because for him the way to the most important truths lay through the surface of things as they are.”

¹¹² To Vladimir Petrovich Pogozhov, 6 January 1891; Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy; Literaturrïye proizvedeniya i perepiska, vol. 16a (Moscow: Muzïka, 1978), p. 17. Italics original.

¹¹³ Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 73.

¹¹⁴ Tolstoy to his wife, 26 or 27 October 1893; quoted in Poznansky, Tchaikovsky, p. 605.

¹¹⁵ To assess Chaikovsky’s relationship to Verdi in a way that is especially relevant to the present discussion, compare his early symphonic poem Fatum, and its cannibalization in the last act of his opera The Oprichnik, with the overture to La Forza del destino, of which Chaikovsky, as a twenty-two-year-old conservatory pupil, attended the première production along with the rest of artistic and polite St. Petersburg (see example 10.1 in chapter 10).

¹¹⁶ The Chaikovskian stylistic resonances in Mahler’s First Symphony are all that are usually recognized by critics and historians today, and they are noted, with eyes averted, as something to be excused in a young composer. But the dramatic—or dramatized—structure of Mahler’s Second Symphony (especially of the opening Totenfeier), which would henceforth define the Mahlerian, is hardly thinkable without the precedent of Chaikovsky’s Fourth and Sixth Symphonies.

¹¹⁷ More sophisticated or self-conscious historians, like Dahlhaus or his ideological mentor, August Halm, have deliberately revived the dichotomies. See August Halm, Von zwei Kulturen der Musik (Munich: Georg Müller Verlag, 1913; 3d ed., Stuttgart: Klett, 1947); Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, chapters 1 and 2; the best critique remains Pederson’s “On the Task of the Music Historian: The Myth of the Symphony after Beethoven,” but also see Stephen Blum, “In Defense of Close Reading and Close Listening,” Current Musicology 53 (1993): 41-54.

¹¹⁸ See R. Taruskin, “A Mozart Wholly Ours,” Musical America 110, no. 3 (May 1990): 3241; reprinted with an update in R. Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 273-91.

¹¹⁹ Taruskin, “Pathetic Symphonist,” contains a summary.

¹²⁰ “V chas itogov,” Vesï 2, no. 4 (April 1905): 45-46.