(You can read the historical background in the previous post, here – and about the Glazunov Novelettes, here - and about Shostakovich's 11th Quartet in a future post. This post is about the lives of both Glazunov and Shostakovich during the years immediately before and after the Revolutions in 1917.)
Here is Market Square Concerts' Artistic Director Peter Sirotin to introduce the program (that's not Tchaikovsky with Peter, btw: it's Oscar the Office Assistant):
In this series of posts, given the historical background to the Revolution, I've chosen to examine the music in chronological order, beginning with the quartet that Tchaikovsky began working on around Christmastime in 1873. He finished it in early-January, 1874, dating the completed rough draft on January 18th, 1874 (by the Old Style calendar: that would be January 30th, according to the New Style Gregorian calendar adopted after the Revolution). He was 33 years old.
It's in four movements, with the first movement marked “Moderato assai” (very moderate) after a slow introduction; the second movement Scherzo is followed by the slow movement, marked “Andante ma non tanto” (basically a moderate “walking” tempo). The Finale is marked “Allegro con moto” (lively, with motion).
Here is a live performance by the legendary Borodin Quartet with the complete Tchaikovsky String Quartet No. 2 in F Major, Op. 22.
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Curiously, Tchaikovsky did not compose it “straight through” as you hear it. His brother Modest wrote in his collection of the composer's letters, “The sequence in which the movements were composed can be determined from the rough draft of the score: the first movement (without the introduction), the fourth movement, the third movement (first version), the second movement, followed by the introduction to the first movement, and a second version of the third movement.”
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| Tchaikovsky in January, 1874 |
A friend recalled that first performance: “I believe the host himself was not present, but his brother Anton [Rubinstein] was there... All the time the music was going on, Rubinstein listened with a lowering, discontented expression, and, at the end, declared with his customary brutal frankness that it is not at all in the style of chamber music; that he himself could not understand the work, etc. The rest of the audience [which consisted of only four invited guests], as well as the players, were charmed by it.”
The first public performance took place at one of the Russian Musical Society chamber programs and according to The Musical Leaflet, a kind of newsletter, it had “a well-deserved success.” The first performance in St. Petersburg did not take place until October 24th, after which Tchaikovsky wrote to Modest from Moscow, after complaining about studying Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov (“it may go to the devil, for all I care: it is the commonest, lowest parody of music”). A sentence later, he mentions “on Sunday, the Russian Quartet which brought out my Quartet in D [the 1st Quartet with the famous Andante cantabile] is playing here” though in the context, it's hard to tell if they're going to be playing his new F Major Quartet or not.
He continues: “I am glad my new quartet finds favor with you and Mlle Maloziomov [a former fellow-student and future piano teacher at the Moscow Conservatory]. It is my best work; not one of them has come to me so easily and fluently as this. I completed it as if it were in one sitting. I am surprised the public do not care for it, for I have always thought, among this class of works, it had the best chance of success.”
Keep in mind, at the time, he was dealing with the production of two operas, the recently completed Oprichnik (he was actually writing to his friends and telling them not to come see it) and the error-plagued Vakula the Smith.
Modest, in his notes, adds at this point “I can't understand why my brother can have inferred from my letter that the quartet was not a success. It must have pleased, since it was repeated at least once during the season. Cui spoke of it as a 'beautiful, talented, fluent work, which showed originality and invention.'” [Cui, as a composer was a member of the Mighty Handful or 'Russian Five' with Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and Borodin; as a critic, he had earlier that year savaged Tchaikovsky's new 2nd Symphony, the one we generally call “The Little Russian.”] Another critic, he continued, thought it showed “'marked progress.' The first movement displayed as much style as Beethoven's A Minor Quartet” [Op. 132].
Meanwhile, he had a new tone poem, the Shakespeare-inspired Tempest, given its world premiere. It pleased the usually displeased critics but it was the negative review from a close friend of his that really stung. In another letter to Anatol, he also informed him that he was hard at work on a piano concerto. This would be his famous Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor (not many music lovers are aware there is a 2nd and even fewer have ever heard the 3rd).
On Christmas Eve, a year after beginning work on the 2nd String Quartet, he took his new concerto to his former teacher and mentor (as well as former roommate), Nikolai Rubinstein (Anton's brother) for what became one of the most famous critiques in all of classical music.
To say that Rubinstein hated the work would be an understatement. To say he savaged the work was wounding enough, waiting in nerve-wracking silence until he let forth a torrent of abuse: the work was “worthless, absolutely unplayable; passages so broken, so disconnected, so unskillfully written, they could not be improved; the work itself was bad, trivial, common; only one or two pages worth anything, best destroyed...” And then he really let loose...
The upshot is, as it turns out, the concerto went on to become one of the most popular works Tchaikovsky ever wrote and certainly one of the most popular piano concertos in the repertoire. The only change Tchaikovsky made in the score was to erase the dedication to Rubinstein...
Though this has nothing to do with the Quartet, I thought it interesting to quote this letter, written to Modest, a would-be journalist and writer, about his own creative method, written less than two weeks later:
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“You complain that writing comes to you with difficulty, and that you have to search for every phrase. But do you really suppose anything can be accomplished without trouble and discipline? I often sit for hours, pen in hand, and have no idea how to begin my 'articles.' I think I shall never hammer anything out; and afterwards people praise the fluency and ease of the writing! Remember what pains Zaremba's exercises cost me [referring to his earliest composition lessons]. Do you forget how in the summer of '66 I worked my nerves to pieces over my First Symphony? And even now I often gnaw my nails to the quick, smoke any number of cigarettes, and pace up and down my room..., before I can evolve a particular motive or theme. At other times writing comes easily, thoughts seem to flow and chase each other as they go. All depends upon one's mood and condition of mind. But even when we are not disposed for it we must force ourselves to work. Otherwise nothing can be accomplished. You write of being out of spirits. Believe me, I am the same.”
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No wonder he felt so strongly toward his new string quartet, the one that came so effortlessly to him...
In one more letter – this one written in 1879 to his then patron, the very mysterious Mme von Meck – the composer is enjoying the creative after-glow following the completion of his newest opera, The Maid of Orleans. “I place it in the front rank of my works, although I see all its defects. It was a labor of love, an enjoyment, like [writing] Onyegin, the 4th Symphony, and the 2nd Quartet.”
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Since this work has one direct association with the Imperial family, being dedicated to a Grand Duke, let's take a brief detour into the life of the “Russian Royals.”
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| Tsar Alexander II |
To go back a bit farther (everything in Russian history requires “going back a bit farther”...), Tsar Alexander II's father Nicholas I was a strict military man with an iron will, as he was described. He came to the throne when Tsar Alexander I, the popular tsar during the Napoleonic Wars and the toast of Europe during the ensuing Congress of Vienna (he was also a fan of Beethoven and also figured in Tolstoy's novel, War and Peace), died “without issue” in 1825. The heir apparent, the late tsar's younger brother Konstantine, renounced the throne, leaving Nicholas the unexpected ruler of Russia. Nicholas, in turn, was met with opposition from liberal-minded members of the military and the aristocracy in the “Decembrist Uprising” which Nicholas forcefully put down, exiling most of its leaders and ranking members to Siberia where, curiously, they continued their liberal efforts among the common people around them. After Nicholas died in 1855 at the height of the disastrous Crimean War, his son Alexander II pardoned the Decembrists a year later.
Nicholas' thirty-year reign was characterized by a reactionary policy of "Official Nationality," proclaimed in 1833, based on “orthodoxy in religion, autocracy in government, and Russian nationalism.” But by comparison to his father, Alexander II was quite liberal even if the only thing we'd know about him was the abolition of serfdom in 1861 (how serfdom became ingrained in Russian culture would take way too much “going back” to explain), earning him the nickname “Tsar-Liberator.” While the ideals of the idea were lofty, the implementation of them and their impact on society was less successful.
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| Tsar Alexander II with his dog, Milord |
Alexander II reformed the corrupt judicial system, setting up elected local judges, abolished corporal punishment, promoted local self-government, imposed universal military service which ended certain aristocratic privileges, and promoted university education. He sold Alaska to the United States in 1867 mainly to keep it out of the hands of the British in Canada (pragmatically, it would be too expensive to defend in case of war), which helped give the United States greater freedom in its Pacific trade.
However, after a decade on the throne, his interest in liberal reforms began to wane. Though he encouraged nationalism in Finland, he brutally suppressed it in Poland (part of the Russian Empire since the days of his great-grandmother, Catherine the Great) which was then ruled under martial law for the next forty years.
And while all these liberal policies had run counter to the conservative aristocracy, it was the liberal element of the Russian people – who became known as the intelligentsia – perhaps aware that their much-hoped-for reforms were stalling, who tried three times to assassinate the tsar, the first time in 1866 by a revolutionary exhorting the People to revolt.
An artist named Viktor Hartmann designed a memorial to the tsar's escaping that “event” which later inspired Modest Mussorgsky to compose “The Great Gate of Kiev” in 1874, the same year Tchaikovsky had completed his 2nd String Quartet.
Finally, then, nihilists from a revolutionary group calling itself “The People's Will” succeeded in 1881. The first bomb exploded under the tsar's bullet-proof carriage (a gift of Napoleon III), but when he exited the carriage unhurt to see to the injured horses and his guards, a second revolutionary threw a bomb directly at the feet of the tsar who died as he was being taken back to the Winter Palace.
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| Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaievich (far right) & Family; his wife is seated in the center; his eldest son Nicholas (r.) stands behind him |
However, Grand Duke Constantine was more than just a music-loving aristocrat: he played the cello and his wife, originally a German princess, played the piano. So there may have been more to Tchaikovsky's dedication than mere political politeness.
As the next son of Nicholas I after Alexander II, the Grand Duke might have once been “heir apparent” if Tsar Alexander hadn't already had six sons by 1860. Still, like his brother, Grand-Duke Constantine was of a liberal mind and proved instrumental in implementing many of the tsar's reforms, especially in the Emancipation of the Serfs as well as the sale of Alaska. Appointed Governor-General of Poland in 1862, he was wounded when the bullet of a would-be nationalist assassin grazed his shoulder on his second day in Warsaw. He would soon run afoul of his nephew when he became Alexander III in 1881, but we'll leave that to the next post.
Grand Duke Constantine owned two lavish palaces in and around St. Petersburg, plus a country estate on the Gulf of Finland and another in the southern region of Crimea (a vacation destination for Russian “snowbirds”). In 1874, his eldest son, the Grand Duke Nicholas Constantinovich, who at 24 had a promising military career, became involved with a “notorious American woman, Fanny Lear” (one source describes her as a “courtesan”), and subsequently stole three large and valuable diamonds from an icon belonging to his mother. When the crime was discovered, he was “declared insane” and banished to the city of Tashkent in modern Uzbekistan, where he lived the rest of his life.
He died of pneumonia in January, 1918, according to official reports, though one site I found mentioned “dubious accounts” saying he was killed by bolshevik partisans: why is that “dubious” when the deposed tsar, Nicholas II, and his entire family, imprisoned by the Communists in Ekaterinburg, were executed on July 17th, 1918? Grand Duke Nicholas Constaninovich's eldest son, Artemy, would die during the Civil War the following year.
To be continued...
- Dick Strawser
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