TCHAIKOVSKY, Pyotr Il'yich (1840-1893)
1.	Fantasy Overture Romeo & Juliet	19:35
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64
2.	Andante - Allegro con anima	15:29
3.	Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza	13:56
4.	Valse; Allegro moderato	6:08
5.	Finale; Andante maestoso - Allegro vivace	12:05

Overture to Romeo and Juliet

Tchaikovsky’s "Romeo and Juliet" was born a masterpiece against tremendous odds. First "Romeo" represents Tchaikovsky’s first great work, and only a fourth attempt at orchestral writing, after three miserable failures. {Even the most rabid Tchaikovsky addicts can find no words of kindness for his early tone poem "Fatum."}

He was an inexperienced and uncertain young man, who even after two revisions, was never convinced of the worth within his "Romeo and Juliet". Indeed, it is his only popular composition which lacks any opus number.

Secondly, Tchaikovsky scorned programe music: Music written to depict a specific story or picture. Yet "Romeo and Juliet" is magnificently suited to these purposes. It not only pictures characters and events of Shakepeare’s play, but also flawlessly captured the moods of furor, love and passion in an inexplicably Shakespearean way. Even Verdi’s superb "Othello" and "Falstaff" fall short of such Shakespearean ambiance.

Tchaikovsky was a late bloomer, both as a musician and personality. Born to an upper middle class family, he had a good, broadly cultural education. He studied law, as with everything, casually, and ended up a minor clerk at the ministry of Justice - well into his twenties. Music he knew but not well. Most of what he knew was salon music, and he occasionally defiled manuscript paper with parlour dances and the like. {These early bagatelles contain no hint of talent - not the slightest!} He was an indifferent student, lazy and something of a Bohemian during most of his early life - more given to tavern life than to art.

Then, quite suddenly and for no reason, in 1861, Tchaikovsky contracted a severe case of Music. He entered the new St. Petersburg Conservatory, studying harmony, counterpoint and composition with one Nicolas Zaremba. Zaremba, a Pole by nationality and a lawyer by profession had studied composition in Berlin. Being a strict Germanic classicist, and a lawyer to boot, Zaremba demanded strict, a-systematic acquisition of basics. In this, he found Tchaikovsky "slovenly." They clashed on many things - not least, because Zaremba idolized Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann, but dismissed all 18th century music. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, idolized Mozart, but scorned Beethoven as "an unfriendly God to be feared rather than loved." The irony lay in the fact that Tchaikovsky emerged from the Conservatory as the technically best-equipped composer amongst his contemporary Russians. {Rimsky-Korsakov once dismissed Tchaikovsky’s work as that of, "A mere child of the Conservatory."} Tchaikovsky in his curious love-hate relationship with the "Mighty Five" group - Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky - referred to them as the "St. Petersburg amateurs."

Yet it was Balakirev who urged Tchaikovsky to write a tone poem on "Romeo and Juliet" even setting out the plan in considerable detail. Tchaikovsky complied and quickly. The score was completed in November 1869, and at the premiere given in Moscow under Nicolai Rubenstein on March 4th 1870. Only then was a score sent to Balakirev, perhaps suspecting disapproval. That he got. Balakirev found the introduction too much like Haydn, and not "ancient" or "Catholic" enough to suggest Friar Laurence. The love music he found "delightful" the big fugal allegro too obscure and the ending weak. {In all fairness, it should be noted that Balakirev was in each case correct in his criticism.}

Anxious to please, Tchaikovsky radically rewrote the score. An entirely new introduction was composed, much of the fugal strife music cut and polished, and a larger, grander and more effective epilogue added. {The original epilogue was short and ends abruptly - or rather, just hits one loud unconvincing chord and stops.} Before Printing Tchaikovsky made a few minor adjustments, but what we know as "Romeo and Juliet" is essentially the second version.

It was for this work that Tchaikovsky invented a new form, the Overture-Fantasy. What we have is a basic sonata-form, a kind of symphony in one movement but with pictorial emphasis. The layout is basic. A large formal introduction (Friar Laurence), followed by a sonata-allegro of two thematic sets {the first of the family fury and battles, the second of the love music,} stated, developed and restated in abbreviated form, leading directly into another large formal episode, the elegiac epilogue. {Richard Strauss used much the same plan for his "Death and Transfiguration", and of course, Tchaikovsky used it for "Francesca de Rimini."} Intended to represent the final death and funeral of the lovers, the epilogue constitutes a variation on the Love Theme, slowed and in a minor key. Even Balakirev was happy with the result - if never it’s composer.

Symphony No 5 in E minor Op. 64

Asked how one likes Tchaikovsky the proper answer is likely, "Which one?" Although little cited, Tchaikovsky was a composer with many sides to his style, he could be the open popularist as in the "1812 Overture" the experimental intellectual as in the "Manfred" and "Pathetique" Symphonies, the composer of music for children in "Nutcracker" for home use by dilettantes in the piano music and songs or for blinding virtuosity in the Concertos. He could as easily play the wild Romantic of the Fourth Symphony and "Romeo and Juliet" as reserved classicist of the Serenade for Strings or the most formal of his Symphonies, the Fifth.

Tchaikovsky wrote his Fifth Symphony in June of 1888, an especially cordial year in his life. He had settled into a comfortable home life and for the first time was being cheered on sight in opera houses and concert halls and had even conquered his nervous fear of conducting. He was in demand around Europe and even in America and known to the whole of the music world. His brother Modest put it well, "The Tchaikovsky of 1885 seemed a new man compared to the nervous society-hating Tchaikovsky o 1878." He could meet conductors such as the famous Nikisch in rehearsals, fellow composers such as Grieg (whom he liked very much), and even the dreaded Brahms whose music he disliked. But his diary mentions that, "Brahms took great pains to be nice to me," and when Brahms found nice things to say about the Fifth Symphony, Tchaikovsky took great pleasure. He felt he had conquered Germany.

Perhaps because of his ambitions or acceptance by the classicists of Germany, the Fifth Symphony exists as the most purely symphonic in form and the least suite like of his six or seven if one counts the unnumbered "Manfred" Symphony, written between the Fourth and Fifth. Emotionally the Fifth is pure Tchaikovsky. But the emotional element is fitted into the composer’s most perfect acceptance of the Beethoven models for traditional forms. The exceptions are the use of a recurring theme from the introduction in other movements and the substitution of a waltz instead of the expected scherzo (or minuet). Tchaikovsky also uses a rather classical orchestra; only two trumpets, and with no percussion other than timpani - a great contrast to the percussion heavy Fourth and Sixth Symphonies. The Fifth Symphony although it has its moment, is the least noisy of all his orchestral music.

Tchaikovsky apparently intended to write another programe symphony when he began. At any rate, he sent such a programe of the first movement to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck with the comment that; "I am working with good results for half the symphony is now orchestrated." The motto introduction was to represent, "complete resignation before Fate." The main fast movement which follows was "One; murmurs, doubts, complaints and reproaches against XXX… and Two; Shall I throw myself into the embraces of faith?" {Tchaikovsky’s diary and letters usually employ "XXX," "Z" or merely "That" as euphemisms for his homosexuality.} The "fate" theme reappears at the peak of the second movement as a coda of the waltz third movement and now {shifted to E major from E minor} as introduction, coda and triumphant outbursts for full brass at the center of the final.

Such things were not at all common uncommon in Tchaikovsky’s music. But, there are also elements at work of thoughtful construction of the sort one expects in Brahms. The use of the sonata-form for instance shows enormous strength and security. There are also details of thematic unity, which are too constant to be accidental. This is certainly no place for technical vivisection yet one example seems in order. Nearly all the themes share the same skeletal outline. One hears a brief phrase that ends with a drop in pitch and then a second mirror repeat only a wee bit higher. Then comes one longer phrase, which rises from the highest pitch thus far only to descend a scale-wise line. (Try it on the Fate theme, the horn solo, which begins the slow movement - and the clarinet solo just after the horn solo.) One hears it all over the place in assorted forms as a kind of binder for the whole. Here was a composer confident of his power even when he claimed otherwise in his letters.

Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere at St. Petersburg in November 1888 and shortly afterwards in Moscow and Prague where it proved a good success, but he became increasingly doubtful of the symphony’s worth. "There is something repellant about it…. , a manufacturedness…." He was never to try such a structured style again as he thought it hampered immediate appeal to the audience. Any hint of falsehood he wrote, "the public instinctively recognizes."

Along with such doubts, Tchaikovsky also had his humorous moments. He was not above pranks. As honoured guest of the Hamburg Philharmonic Society on his 1880 German tour, he first encountered one Theodore Ave-Lallement. Ave-Lallement, the 80 year old chairman of the Society took the composer to task. While considering Tchaikovsky a major talent he abhorred the composer’s lack of taste in orchestration.

This he attributed to Tchaikovsky’s birth and upbringing in a barbarous country. "He implored me with tears in his eyes," wrote the amused composer, "to settle in Germany." Because the old boy had made such a fuss about classical restrain, Tchaikovsky dedicated the Fifth Symphony to Ave-Lallement - a man for whom he cared not a fig. And thus Tchaikovsky imortalised the old conservative who achieved nothing else in his life besides the homage of this barbarian’s masterpiece.