Page 217 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

In truth, it was not his conservatory job in Moscow that supported Tchai- kovsky during most of his mature years, but rather a private arrangement with an eccentric patroness, Madame Nadezhda von Meck (Figure 12.7).
This wealthy, music-loving widow furnished him with an annual in-
come of 6,000 rubles (about $40,000 U.S. today) on the condition that she and the composer never meet—a requirement not always easily fulfilled, because the two sometimes resided at the same summer es- tate. In addition to this annuity, in 1881, Tsar Alexander III awarded Tchaikovsky an annual pension of 3,000 rubles in recognition of his importance to Russian cultural life. Now a man of independent means, Tchaikovsky traveled extensively in Western Europe, and even to America. He enjoyed the freedom that so many artists find necessary to creative activity.
Tchaikovsky’s creative output touched every genre of nineteenth- century classical music, including opera, song, string quartet, piano sonata, concerto, and symphony. But today concertgoers know Tchaikovsky best for his program music and ballets. For example, his programmatic The 1812 Overture (1882), which commemorates the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812, is heard in the United States on the Fourth of July, with Tchaikovsky’s musical pyrotechnics usually accompanied by fireworks in the night sky. By the end of the nineteenth century, Tchaikovsky was the world’s most popular orchestral composer, the “big name” brought from Europe to America when star appeal was needed to add luster to the opening of Carnegie Hall in 1891. He died suddenly in 1893, at the age of fifty-three, after drinking unboiled water during an epidemic of cholera.
Tchaikovsky’s Ballets
Ballet, like opera, calls to mind “high-end” culture. Indeed, the origins of bal- let are tied to the history of opera, for ballet emerged from a hybrid of the two genres performed at the French royal court of Louis XIV (who reigned 1643– 1715). Throughout the eighteenth century, no opera was complete without a ballet or two to provide a pleasant diversion. By the early nineteenth century, however, this dance spectacle had separated from opera and moved on stage as the independent genre we know today. A ballet is thus a dramatic dance in which the characters, using various stylized steps and pantomime, tell a story. While ballet first developed in France, during the nineteenth century it gained great popularity, and indeed an adopted homeland, in Russia. Even today, the terms Russian and ballerina seem inextricably linked.
Early in his career, Tchaikovsky realized that ballet required precisely the compositional skills that he possessed. Unlike Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, Tchaikovsky was not a “developer”—he was not good at building intricate the- matic relationships over long spans of time. Instead, his gift was to create one striking melody and mood after another—to create one vivid scene and then move on to the next. And this is precisely what ballet music requires—not mo- tivic manipulation or contrapuntal intricacy, but short bursts of tuneful melody and pulsating rhythm, all intended to capture the emotional essence of the scene. Short is the operative word here; because dancing in a ballet is exhaust- ing, neither the principals nor the corps de ballet hold center stage for more than
Figure 12.7
Nadezhda von Meck was the widow of an engineer who made a fortune constructing the first railroads in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s. She used her money, in part, to support com- posers such as Tchaikovsky and, later, Claude Debussy.
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