2011-2012 Demirjian Classical Connections Series Concert Four: April 13, 2012 Profile: Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Program: “Last Testament, Revisited” In 16 years of Classical Connections — 47

programs in all — we’ve explored 70 different

works: alphabetically from John Adams’s

Harmonielehre to Wagner’s Faust Overture,

and chronologically from Bach’s St. Matthew

Passion to Michael Daugherty’s Gee’s Bend.

It’s an amazing list of works. ✸ In all those

years, all those programs, all those pieces,

there’s one thing we’ve never done. ✸ We’ve

never repeated a program. Until now. ✸

Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony got the

Classical Connections treatment 14 years ago. If ever there were a piece worth revisiting, this

is it. It’s great music that we all love. And it’s got a mysterious backstory full of intrigue,

gossip, and innuendo. ✸ Some of you were probably there on March 21, 1998 when we first

looked into this amazing symphony. Many of you have joined

the Classical Connections family since then. It’s nice to keep

adding new works to the CC repertoire list. But I think it’s also

good to revisit pieces from time to time, especially ones like the

Pathétique, which have so much for us to enjoy and explore. ✸

For those who vividly recall every detail of our 1998 concert,

don’t worry! This won’t be an exact repeat. I’ve got new insights

to share, and we’ll spend more time focusing on Tchaikovsky’s music and less

time nosing around in his personal life. ✸ One of the great joys of my life as a

conductor is doing great pieces for the first time. Another is revisiting

“old friends”. That goes for Classical Connections,

too. So “Tchaikovsky’s Testament” from 1998

becomes “Tchaikovsky’s Testament, Revisited”!

Tchaikovsky Listener’s Guide

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P R O G R A M

DEMIRJIANCLASSICAL CONNECTIONS

Friday, April 13, 20128:00 p.m. Schuster Center

Q&A after the concert

Neal Gittleman conductor, host Joshua Nemith piano

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1906-1975)

- Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker, op 71 -

- from Piano Pieces, op 72 - Waltz in Five Beats

Waltz-Bluette

INTERMISSION

- Symphony No. 6 in B minor, op 74, Pathétique -

Adagio — Allegro non troppo Allegro con grazia

Allegro molto vivace Adagio lamentoso

Series Sponsor Dr. Charles & Patricia Demirjian

Series Media Sponsor Dayton City Paper

Official Automobile The Bob Ross Dealerships

Official Hotel Dayton Marriott

Season Media Sponsor WDTN-TV2

Season Media Partner Classical WDPR 88.1

Concert Broadcast on Saturday, September 8, 2012 at 10:00 a.m. classical connections listener's guide

© neal gittleman, 2011

It’s one of the great whodunits of music history. Tchaikovsky pours his heart into his final symphony then dies six days after a less-than-triumphant premiere. The family says he died of cholera, but suspicions linger.

Call the CSI team!

The Pathétique was an important, deeply personal work to Tchaikovsky. Just a week into composing it he wrote to his nephew: “I got an idea for my new symphony, this time a program-symphony, but with a program that is to remain a mystery for everyone. … The program is subjective down to its innermost core. … You will understand how much it fills me with happiness to be convinced that my time is not yet over, but that I can still work.”

Don’t make too much of “my time is not yet over”. Tchaikovsky wasn’t depressed when he wrote the Sixth Symphony. His letters of the time describe his happy, excited (perhaps even manic) state of mind. But the symphony’s mood is dark and troubled. After finishing the Pathétique, Tchaikovsky was asked by a nobleman to compose a Requiem for a recently deceased friend. He declined, writing: “my last symphony, which was just finished, is permeated, especially in the finale, by a mood that comes close to that of a Requiem. … I’m afraid of repeating myself when I immediately begin composing a work that is similar in its character and its nature.”

Somber ending notwithstanding, the Pathétique was not a farewell to life. That common misconception comes, perhaps, from a misreading of the symphony’s subtitle. The Russian word means “passionate” or “emotional”, not “pitiful”. The symphony is certainly passionate, and it’s filled with a wide range of emotions: sadness, anger, melancholy, but also joy, love, excitement. Piotr Ilyich’s life was full of psychological and physical complaints, but in the fall of 1893 he wasn’t particularly depressed or particularly ill. His desk was filled with sketches for a Seventh Symphony and a Third Piano Concerto, plus several other new works.

Then Tchaikovsky suddenly died. And he died a painful, gruesome death: diarrhea, vomiting, chest pains, muscle cramps, delirium, renal failure.

His brother Modest announced that Piotr Ilyich had died of cholera, probably contracted several days earlier when he drank a glass of unboiled water while lunching at a St. Petersburg restaurant. Modest’s explanation was accepted, but there are holes in the story. Summer cholera epidemics were common in late 19th-century St. Petersburg, but 1893’s strain hadn’t been too virulent and by November the epidemic had all but run its course. The upscale restaurant where Tchaikovsky and Modest dined that day would not have served a

B Y N E A L G I T T L E M A N

CSI: St. Petersburg

Brother Modest

TCHAIKOVSKY

“Last Testament, Revisited”

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famous customer unboiled water. The timeline of Tchaikovsky’s symptoms doesn’t jive with the date of the supposedly fateful luncheon. Some of Piotr Ilyich’s symptoms don’t fit the cholera diagnosis. Most significantly, the customary pre- and post-mortem health precautions for cholera were not observed.

If not cholera, then what?

Maybe arsenic poisoning, which is 100 percent congruent with the timing and detail of Tchaikovsky’s symptoms. How he ingested arsenic is where things get creepy.

According to theory, a prince had written (but not yet sent) a letter to the Tsar accusing Tchaikovsky of “busying himself too much” with the prince’s young nephew. A group of Tchaikovsky’s classmates from the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence convened a “court of honor” and convinced the composer that the only way to avoid the letter being sent and the ensuing public scandal was suicide. They supplied the arsenic. Tchaikovsky returned home in an excited state and poured himself a glass of water from the tap. When Modest said that the water had to be boiled, Piotr Ilyich said “Who cares about that?” then drank (presumably washing down the arsenic). His symptoms began within hours. Curious how the unboiled glass of water appears in both stories!

The CSI team would exhume Tchaikovsky’s body and test the skeleton for traces of arsenic. Three words: ain’t gonna happen.

Was the Pathétique Symphony intentionally Tchaikovsky's swan song?

Absent a definitive forensic answer, it’s tempting to parse the sounds of the Sixth Symphony for clues to Tchaikovsky’s mental state.

If you’re inclined to the cholera theory, you’ll hear all the soaring romance of the Pathétique as proof that Tchaikovsky was at the peak of his musical powers, with everything to live for. If you prefer the arsenic theory, you’ll hear the awesome power of fate poised to strike down an emotionally troubled artist.

What do I hear?

I hear one of the most beautiful, most perfect, most emotionally compelling pieces of music ever written. That’s all I need to know! ✸Tchaikovsky's death mask

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A Tchaikovsky Timeline

1840 May 7, born in Kamsko-Votkinsk to mining engineer Il’ya Petrovich

Tchaikovsky and the former Alexandra Andreyevna Assier.

1845 First piano lessons.

1849 Begins composing, though his

first serious piece, a piano sonata, is still three years off.

1850 Enters St. Petersburg School of

Jurisprudence, obeying his parents’ desires for a conventional career.

1862 Enrolls in the St. Petersburg

Conservatory as a member of its inaugural class.

1876 Begins a 14-year correspondence

with wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck, who becomes his patron.

1877 Marries Conservatory student

Antonina Milyukova. Marriage ends after nine weeks. Tchaikovsky

suffers a nervous breakdown.

1892 The Nutcracker ballet premieres,

paired with Tchaikovsky’s one-act opera Iolanta.

1893 October 24, dies under suspicious circumstances in St. Petersburg, one week after the premiere of

his Symphony No. 6.

1840 England’s Queen Victoria marries

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Birth of French artists

Monet, Renoir, and Rodin.

1845 U.S. Naval Academy opens.

1849 Zachary Taylor becomes 12th

U.S. President. Armand Fizeau measures the speed of light.

1850 President Taylor dies 4 months into his term and is succeeded

by Millard Fillmore.

1862 Abraham Lincoln

signs the Emancipation Proclamation.

1876 National Baseball League

founded. Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone.

1877 Congress names Rutherford B. Hayes 19th U.S. President over Samuel Tilden. Thomas Edison

invents the phonograph.

1892 Grover Cleveland elected U.S.

President. Monet paints Rouen Cathedral — again and again.

1893 Hawaii becomes a U.S. territory.

Henry Ford builds his first automobile. Dvorák premieres his

New World Symphony.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is about as traditional as a composer gets. For many, his music is the pinnacle of romanticism, the ultimate in the traditional musical canon. Nothing bold, nothing unconventional, nothing experimental.

Nothing doing!

Tchaikovsky wasn’t a revolutionary like Richard Wagner, an innovator like Franz Liszt, or a visionary like Arnold Schoenberg. But he wasn’t as straightlaced as we imagine, either.

Take the second movement of the Sixth Symphony. It’s a waltz. But it’s no ordinary waltz. There are five beats in each bar instead of the three (or six) you’d expect. Tchaikovsky had experimented with five-beat dances before. There’s one in Act III of Sleeping Beauty (the Sapphire Fairy Variation) and he wrote a “Waltz in Five Beats” for piano while working on the Pathétique. Clearly he liked something about the irregular five-beat meter!

Another example of Piotr Ilyich the innovator is in that most familiar of Tchaikovsky pieces, The Nutcracker. Everyone knows the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy, with the gentle bell-like sound

of the celesta. You can’t get more traditional than that! But Nutcracker has the first-ever use of the celesta in the orchestra.

Tchaikovsky heard one in Paris in 1891, and it solved his problem of how to depict the Sugar-Plum Fairy in music.

Back to the Pathétique for a third example of Tchaikovsky the experimenter. And I don’t just mean finishing the symphony with a slow movement. The big innovation in Tchaikovsky’s last symphony is the way he scored the main melody of the finale, panning the tune from one side of the stage to the other as if someone were rapidly turning the balance knob on a stereo all the way to the right for one note, then all the way to the left for the next.

Sound crazy? Wait ‘til we demonstrate this special effect to you at our concert! You might not suddenly rank Tchaikovsky up there with Wilbur and Orville in terms of invention, but I think you’ll see that Piotr Ilyich wasn’t as much of an old fogy as you might have thought!

Tchaikovsky in the Laboratory