Experiencing Tchaikovsky by David Schroeder

Author:David Schroeder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Symphony as Opera

During the two years following his Third Symphony Tchaikovsky underwent some life-changing experiences, and his music reflected these changes in the strongest possible ways. A large part of the difference between the Fourth Symphony and the previous one has to do with the dramatic effect a symphony should have on an audience in touching the human spirit at the deepest possible level, and he gave much thought to this when he started the Fourth near the beginning of 1877. The drama clearly should arise from within himself, and the more he endowed the works with this, the more an audience could respond. Aside from three earlier symphonies, he had by now thoroughly established himself as a composer of symphonic poems, with notable successes including the Shakespeare-inspired Romeo and Juliet (1869) and The Tempest (1873); most recently he had written Francesca da Rimini (1876), a fantasia based on Dante’s Inferno. Especially after Francesca he may have seen the symphony moving more in the direction of symphonic poems, and by now a long tradition existed of treating symphonies that way, starting with Beethoven’s Sixth, and progressing through Berlioz and Liszt. His greatest German contemporary as a symphonist, Johannes Brahms, proceeded along the lines of the German classical tradition, and he not only held no fascination for Tchaikovsky, but even evoked contempt, with what Tchaikovsky considered “pretentions to profundity.” That did not stop him from enjoying Brahms’s company when the two of them met in Hamburg, even getting drunk with him (he called him “a potbellied boozer”). Tchaikovsky sometimes regretted not being able to fashion his symphonies more on the classical mold, but when it came right down to it, that type of formal rigor did not suit his expressive purposes, since something very different prompted his symphonic language.

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