Patrick Bade
Pyotr Tchaikovsky: 1840-1893

Patrick Bade | Pyotr Tchaikovsky 1840-1893 | 05.18.22

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- Well, we’re looking again at that portrait that I showed you last time of Tchaikovsky by Nikolai Kuznetsov. Tchaikovsky wearing a very intense and troubled expression. Well, the music of Tchaikovsky has played quite an important role on two occasions in my life, and the first occasion was in the early 1980s. I used to spend every summer in Bavaria and Austria, and with friends I was invited to a concert in this monastery, Kremsmunster, with its extraordinary 18th century observatory. And I must say I was not really looking forward to this concert, an amateur youth orchestra playing Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, and I thought, oh, this is going to be really awful. And before the concert I was introduced to the very young conductor, I suppose he must have been about 20 years old, and didn’t really click with him at all initially, so that didn’t really encourage me either. But there were two things that really stick in my memory about this concert. First was in the Beethoven there was a young pianist, poor girl, who got lost and there were some rather interesting harmonies for a couple of minutes while she was floundering around and trying to find her way back to the orchestra.

But more important was the performance in this concert of Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet Overture.” I think if I had to look back on my life and say what was the most exciting orchestral performance I’ve ever heard of anything, it would have to be this. It was incredible. I was on the edge of my seat. The young players played as if their lives depended on it. And we were at the front, so I had a very good view, and I could see the conductor, you know, as the music rose towards the great climactic love melody, he himself was so moved that the tears were just pouring down his face. So after the concert I met up with him, we had a meal, and I said to him straight away, “You have an extraordinary talent. You are going to have a great career.” And he did indeed. So Franz Welser-Most. He’s had a very extraordinary career not without its ups and downs.

At a very early age, maybe too early, he was the chief conductor of the London Philharmonic and then he fell victim to some rather nasty London musical politics and they coined a very nasty nickname for him, which I hope I’m not going to see in the comments at the end of this talk. But then after that it was plain sailing: Zurich, Vienna, Cleveland. So he is certainly one of the top conductors in the world today. Sadly, I don’t think he’s ever recorded this piece, so I’ve chosen another. Here he is, of course. And I should say we’ve remained very close friends ever since that for a good 40 years. But I’m going to play you another very high voltage, precisely that moment where we’re moving towards the big tune, and this is Sir Thomas Beecham.

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I hope you’re all on a high of unhealthy emotion after that. Now the other occasion when to Tchaikovsky’s music actually played quite a significant role for me was just over 10 years ago. And I think I’ve mentioned probably several times, some of you may have heard me say that I worked for a French record company called Malibran, named after the great romantic singer. And my role with that company, either I write the notes in English and they translate them to French, or the notes are written in French and I then translate them into English. And it must be about 12 or 13 years ago, I think, that somebody made a very extraordinary discovery in a junk shop in Lyon, a huge pile of 78 RPM records that had come from the archives of Radio Paris. Now what was interesting about this Radio Paris was the notorious collaborationist radio station run by the Germans. And the building of Radio Paris was one of the few buildings that was actually destroyed during the liberation of Paris with all its archives.

Some people said, ah, yes, yes, very convenient because that destroyed a lot of evidence of collaboration of prominent French people. After the war at the time of the so-called epuration, to have worked for Radio Paris was evidence of collaboration with the Germans. So it was thought that everything was gone, but these records in a junk shop, they’re in remarkable condition, incredible sound quality, actually, of concerts that were given in the de Theatre des Champs-Elysees, where I shall be tomorrow night for a concert, you can see it on right-hand side, in January 1944. Now these concerts were free. Anybody could go. Anybody who wasn’t wearing a yellow star, that is, of course. So the public were German military in their gray-green uniforms and there were ordinary Parisian citizens. And the musical quality was incredibly high. Now Paris, like London, has a large number of orchestras, or certainly had at this time, and they’re all of a certain level, but it’s the same problem in both cities that neither city really has a top world class orchestra like the Concertgebouw, like the Berlin Philharmonic, like the Cleveland Orchestra that Franzie now conducts. These are super orchestras.

So the only time in history of Paris when they’ve had an orchestra of that kind of level was actually under the Nazis because what they did was they went round all the orchestras in Paris and they cherry-picked the best players and they put it together to create the grand orchestra of Radio Paris. And distinguished conductors were invited to conduct. Furtwangler of course refused ‘cause he always refused to conduct in occupied countries. But Willem Mengelberg, who you see on the left, yes, he came regularly and he performed in Paris. Now I don’t know how familiar his name will will be to you, but in the 1920s and '30s, he was certainly one of the three or four greatest conductors in the world. He was on a level with Toscanini and Furtwangler. It was he who, of course, made the Concertgebouw into the great orchestra that it is. But his reputation, of course, was completely trashed at the end of the war of the Dutch. He was probably the most prominent Dutch cultural figure who is considered to be a collaborator. So, in fact, his last concerts ever were given in this theatre in June 1944 just after the Normandy landings.

The Dutch would never allow him to conduct again after the Second World War. But he’s a fascinating conductor. I’m always riveted by his recordings. So there are two things I want to say. I’m going to play you a little bit of what this concert, which was a concert on the 19th of January, 1944. And so this is Tchaikovsky’s “Sixth Symphony.” Of course, it’s a doom-laden work. You can eat the doom in this symphony with a ladle. Dennis is going to give you a talk about the “Fourth” and “Sixth Symphonies” of Tchaikovsky coming up shortly. And so I just think now, what was the audience thinking about? You’ve got this mixed audience of German military and French civilians sitting side by side, and they all knew really that the endgame had started. It was in this very week as this concert was taking place that the Russians were making their first land contact with Leningrad.

It was right at this time that the siege of Leningrad was being lifted. I’m interested, I would be fascinated to know who in the audience knew that. I think probably all the French members of the audience knew it because they had their secret radios and they were listening to the BBC and they were listening to Swiss Radio. Whether the German military knew that this was happening at precisely this time, I don’t know. But I think what everybody must have, with this portentous, doom-laden music, I’m sure it must have gone through the minds of many members of this audience, “Yes, will I still be alive at the end of this? What is going to happen in this year? This is the endgame. Will I survive to the end of this year?”

Now the other thing I want to say to you about this excerpt is the quality of the performance itself, which is… The only other performance on record that comes near it really for me is Furtwangler. Furtwangler and Mengelberg both very wayward conductors using a lot of rubato, robbed time that is. It’s not a very regular beat. And you listen to this little bit I’m going to play you and it’s incredible fluidity, rhythmic fluidity. And you just think, my God, how did these musicians keep together with this kind of constantly changing beat? I’ve often asked orchestral players when I’ve met them how this happens 'cause, you know, I think a great conductor can hold an orchestra together by a kind of hypnotism. But in Mengelberg’s case, it was also through a very authoritarian discipline. He was not actually liked very much by his orchestral players 'cause he really rehearsed them into the ground and he was an incredible perfectionist. But just listen to the result.

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Now, of course, that is a live performance, and at the end there’s quite a long moment of total, total silence. And then the applause starts and it builds and builds and build and there’s this incredible storm of applause at the end, and you think, yes, this is Nazi military and French civilians united in an extraordinary moment of emotion. And this fascinated me and this was what actually gave me the idea for writing a book about how people react to music in wartime. This is Tchaikovsky’s birthplace, which is quite near to Moscow and is now a museum. And you can see he obviously was born into quite comfortable circumstances. His father was a mining engineer. Here is a photograph. I suppose this is a very early example of a family photograph that would’ve been quite difficult to take, all those figures keeping still. He’s born in 1840. That’s Tchaikovsky, the little boy on the left-hand side. How old is he? Eight, nine years old.

So this is really a very early example of a family photograph. You can see he’s very attached to his mother. She was apparently a rather inhibited, unhappy, rather cold woman. He also had a French governess, all the children had this French governess, to whom he also became very attached, and she really opened his eyes at quite an early age to the wider world. So here he is as a very young man on the left, a little bit older on the right, trained initially as a lawyer and then really decided his vocation was music, and he went to the St. Petersburg Conservatoire to train, a change, to train. Now he’s had a very difficult private life mainly because of his homosexuality. Then as now, of course, this was a real no-no in Russia. I’m sure many of you have seen the rather sensationalist account of his private life, Ken Russell’s film “The Music Lovers,” and of his brief and disastrous marriage to a woman called Antonina.

This is, as you can see, a very uneasy looking wedding photograph on the left hand-side of the bride and groom. I think he probably thought, “Oh yes, if I get married "it will make a man of me "and I’ll be cured of my homosexuality.” She had written him a letter expressing her love and admiration for him, and he was very touched by this. Of course at the time he was working on his opera “Eugene Onegin,” and in that opera the heroine writes a letter to the hero, and this must have really struck a chord with him 'cause what he didn’t know was that she was actually a serial letter writer. She’d written lots of these letters to various different people. Of course, the marriage was a total disaster. He knew it within a couple of months and he tried to commit suicide by throwing himself into the River Neva in winter hoping he’d catch pneumonia.

But he didn’t. He survived. This is the other woman in his life. This is Madame von Meck, and it was just around the time of his marriage or shortly before that they began a correspondence that lasted for 20 years. She was one of the wealthiest women in Russia. Again, it was railways, which generated a lot of money. And she gave Tchaikovsky an annuity of 6,000 rubles. It was quite generous and it enabled him to live in security and devote himself to his composition. And she’s an extraordinary woman, really. This is her, again, you can see on the left, just to the left of the centre holding a child. You could say she had things pretty well worked out. She had an elderly husband, who you can see behind her here. She had a mean, moody, hunky young lover as her secretary. You could see him in the centre of this picture. And she also had Tchaikovsky for her intellectual, cultural, and spiritual relationship. You know, ideal situation. Every woman should have at least three men in her life with these different functions. And the extraordinary thing is that they never actually spoke to one another. They did cross paths twice by accident, but both decided that they wouldn’t stop and talk. They hurried on.

So it’s a very fascinating, very strange relationship. But his homosexuality became quite widely known. He’s thought to have been in love with his young nephew, Bob, who you see with Tchaikovsky here. And it may have been that the fact that the rumours were spreading and people were becoming aware of his homosexuality that caused Madame von Meck to actually break off her stipend and her correspondence with Tchaikovsky. Now there are some very silly people I’m sure not among any of my listeners today who dismiss Tchaikovsky as, his music, as film music. Well, there’s nothing wrong with film music. Film music can be wonderful. And Tchaikovsky certainly had a big influence on the sound of film scores in the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s and the '40s, and his music was used in quite a number of films, notably “The Great Lie.”

I do recommend this film to you if you haven’t seen it. Easy to see. You can see it on YouTube. I’ve seen this. It’s one of those comfort movies to me. Like “Casablanca,” I’m always happy to see it and I know it almost by heart. Of course the most wonderful feature of the film is the way that Bette Davis and Mary Astor spar off each other throughout this movie. The hero is nominally George Brent, but he’s really unimportant. He sort of disappears into the Brazilian jungle for most of the movie. The movie is really about the relationship between the two women. And Mary Astor plays a very temperamental concert pianist who never seems to play anything except Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto No. 1.”

She’s stumping her way through the opening bars of the first movement all the way through the movie. I’m sure the audience by the end of the movie they certainly knew that music very well indeed. And it’s a very striking performance. She actually won an Academy Award, and when she gave her acceptance speech, the two people she thanked were Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. But I’m not going to play you the soundtrack of that movie. I’m going to play you a very, again, a very high voltage, exciting performance. This is the great Emil Gilels, who was part of that group of really extraordinary Ukrainian Jewish musicians who came from Odesa. You think what was in the water supply there? So many of the greatest Russian pianists and musicians came from Odesa at this time.

Now it’s so popular today. It’s the ultimate romantic piano concerto, this idea of a piano concerto being a kind of duel between the heroic piano and the orchestra. They’re sort of fighting it out. And it’s so popular. It’s hard to think that people once found it difficult. But, of course, I said Tchaikovsky was born in 1840, same year as Monet, and saying, you know, Impressionism is the easiest art to like. Everybody loves Impressionism today, but in the 1870s, people really couldn’t understand it. And even such a sophisticated musician as Nikolai Rubinstein, you see him inset here. He was a great virtuoso pianist, brother of Anton who I talked about a couple of days ago. And Tchaikovsky wanted to dedicate the concerto to Rubinstein and played it to him. Rubinstein said, “This is absolute rubbish "and it’s absolutely unplayable.” I mean, he did come to change his mind later. But here’s a real barnstorming account of the opening with the great Emil Gilels.

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He wrote two more concertos, but neither of them have ever achieved the popularity of the first one. The only other concerto he wrote that has that kind of universal appeal is the “Violin Concerto” written a couple of years later at the end of the 1870s. Now this is a work, it’s one of the first pieces of music I ever got to know because when I was really quite a small child I was given the famous Heifitz version on 78 RPM records. Now I imagine there are probably people listening in of my age or maybe a bit older who will also have got to know the standard repertoire on 78. And the problem with that is, of course, that for the rest of your life you hear the breaks because you had to change the record every four minutes. So it’s a kind of odd sensation to be in the concert hall and listening to the Tchaikovsky “Violin Concerto” and bracing yourself for turning the record. But it was worse, for me, in this particular case because I never actually got to know the second movement 'til many, many years later because my Auntie Nelly had sat on it. And as you know, those records were extremely fragile and breakable.

Now I’m not going to play… I could play you the Heifitz 'cause, of course, it’s been reissued on CD and it’s wonderful, but I’m going to play you another very, very extraordinary and historically important version. This is Bronislav Huberman, a Polish violinist, great virtuoso. These days I suppose he’s more famous and more known for his defiance of the Nazis. I mean, he was chucked out in 1933, And Furtwangler rather naively thought, “Well, all I have to do is invite Huberman "and Yehudi Menuhin and Kreisler back again "and all will be forgiven. "We’ll just carry on as normal.” But Huberman understood, no, this was not possible and he sent Furtwangler a public letter with a ringing condemnation of Nazi policies. And then, of course, shortly after that in 1936 he set up the Palestine Orchestra, and through that he saved the lives of thousands of people. Now this recording was made in Berlin, so very shortly before the Nazi takeover, with William Steinberg. I suppose he would’ve been Wilhelm Steinberg at this point.

Both managed to escape, Steinberg somewhat later via the… He spent some time in the Judischer Kulturbund before managing to get to the States. This is a very beautiful performance. I really love it. And I’m not quite sure why Huberman, his critical reputation has been eclipsed by other violinists, but he’s tremendous. He’s, again, rather like Mengelberg, a rather wayward performer, but very exciting. And so this version on 78 came into the news, again it must have been about 10 years ago 'cause it was when I was preparing my book, that somebody claimed to have discovered Hitler’s private record collection with labels that showed that it came from Hitler’s record collection. And to everybody’s astonishment there it was, the Steinberg-Huberman version of the Tchaikovsky “Violin Concerto” in Hitler’s private collection. Well, here is the opening of the first movement.

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It’s a rather more portamento that’s swooning from one note to another than you’d be like to get today. Now Tchaikovsky is particularly associated with the ballet. He wrote three great ballet scores: “Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake,” and “The Nutcracker.” And he just is ballet for most people. And the moment you hear this music, it conjures up vision of exquisite dancers floating around the stage in tutus. So he really determined the kind of orchestral sound that we associate with the ballet. But again, it wasn’t an easy pitch to start with. “Swan Lake,” the first one, was not initially a great success, and many people criticised his music for being too symphonic and not easy to dance to. Well, I think we can all go for a little mental dance when I play you this.

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It’s surprising to think that Tchaikovsky actually devoted the great bulk of his creative efforts to writing operas. He wrote 11 in all 'cause only two of them have entered the standard international repertoire, “Eugene Onegin” and “The Queen of Spades.” He was trying various different genres of opera, and, in fact, the bulk of his 11 operas fall into the categories that were advocated by the mighty handful that I’ve talked about before, the nationalist composers, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin, who they were either writing these epic stories from Russian history or folkloric and fantastic fairytales. And Tchaikovsky composed both types of opera, but without great success. The two operas that did succeed are quite different.

In a way you could describe them as Russian verismo because they’re operas that deal with ordinary people and very real emotions of love and longing and rejection and jealousy, and so on. Most famous of all, of course, is “Eugene Onegin.” And I’m going to play you an excerpt from the letter scene, this fatal letter that Tatiana writes to Eugene Onegin. She’s fallen in love with him, and he casually rejects her and then regrets it later on. But it was this, of course, as I said earlier, that led Tchaikovsky to make the fatal mistake of proposing marriage himself. I’m going to play it you here not in a Russian version, but the Bulgarian soprano Ljuba Welitsch. It’s certainly a Slavic voice with a bit of an edge to it, but to me it’s a silvery edge and it’s a voice that, to my ears, conjures up her youthfulness and her freshness.

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Now I’m going to play you a great rarity and something that also a matter, I think, really of regret because Tchaikovsky wanted to write an opera on the theme of “Romeo and Juliet” and actually began work on it, but he seems to have been put off by the huge success of Gounod’s version of “Romeo et Juliette,” which was particularly great in Russia. And the image you’ve got here is of the handsome tenor Leonid Sobinov, and Romeo was one of his great roles. But Tchaikovsky did write a glorious love duet using that great scene that we’ve already heard at the beginning of this talk. And I’ve got a rare recording of this. It’s with Ivan Kozlovsky, who I’ve played you before. Wonderful tenor. I have to make an apology for soprano Elizaveta Shumskaya. She’s one of those typical Soviet sopranos of the Stalin period with the kind of voice that could actually strip paint at 100 metres. It’s pretty shrill stuff, but I hope you’ll survive.

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Now I hope my last two musical excerpts will be balm to your wounded ears after that 'cause I’m going to play you two very lovely singers with very lovely voices. Tchaikovsky was a great songwriter, and the two songs I’ve chosen are songs which I think must have had an extraordinarily personal meaning for him. “Was I Not A Tender Blade of Grass?” is a song, it’s the lament of a young woman who’s trapped in an unhappy marriage. She’s been forced to marry a man much older that she doesn’t love. And we’re going to hear this in a terrific performance, Inese Galante. This is actually, this is a live performance and I was there, it was in the Wigmore Hall, and along with that concert with Franzie, this would be, you know, amongst the half dozen most thrilling concerts that I’ve ever been to. The Latvian Jewish soprano Inese Galante sadly only really got out to the West of course after the fall of communism, but she still had a few good years singing in the West. And here she is in “Was I Not a Tender Blade of Grass?”

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But I’m going to finish with Tchaikovsky’s most famous song, and I’m sure this is a song that comes from very deep within him. It’s a setting of a poem by Goethe, “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt,” “Only those Who Know Longing Know How I Suffer.” And here you’re going to hear the voice of voices, the great Italo-American soprano of Rosa Ponselle. It’s a very monumental performance. I always feel if the Statue of Liberty could sing, she would sound a bit like this.

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Good, let’s see what you have to say.

Q&A and Comments

The young conductor in Germany, Myrna, that was Franz Welser-Most. He went on to be chief conductor of the Vienna State Opera and he’s now chief conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra in America. Barbara, “Wonderful monument there of Tchaikovskly, Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg.” Yes, and other composers. “LSO is a top orchestra.” Hmm, not sure about that. Yes, I mean, it’s pretty amazing that recording from 1944. There’s a great sense of presence in it. My book was called “Music Wars.”

Yes, does Romaine I think with… It’s a difficult issue, isn’t it? I struggle to appreciate music conducted by Karajan, who really was a believing Nazi as well as a very cynical person. Mengelberg, it’s a much more complicated story. It’s not black and white, and I think you would need to really go into it and find out more about him and what he did and what he didn’t do. It’s more of a sort of Furtwangler situation.

Q: “Any further comments about Ken Russell?” A: Well, not really. I think it’s fun entertainment, but not much to do with Tchaikovsky.

Yes, and again I think that comment by Toscanini about Strauss is really quite unfair. There’s a lot to say about Strauss. I mean, well, I have done it, of course. I’ve done a whole lecture on it. It’s, again, a very complicated situation and definitely not black and white. The English title is “The Great Lie.” “The Great Lie.”

“Gilels lived at Number One Tchaikovsky Street in St. Petersburg.” I didn’t know. That’s very nice. Yes, he did the months of the year piano pieces by Tchaikovsky. The name of the movie, as I said, is “The Great Lie.” It was Franz Welser-Most, spelled W-E-L-S-E-R and Most is M-O-S-T. This is Susan. She had a course in adventures in music listening. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yes, I have seen the movie about Bronislav Huberman. There’s another movie. Oh god, I wish I could just off the top of my head remember all the details. I mean, it’s such an interesting story. I was slightly disappointed in that movie whereas there’s a less ambitious movie about the first violinist, I think his name is, was it Grunschlag? I’ll get the details of that and give it to you next time 'cause that moved me incredibly. And then there is, of course, there is that very famous story about the Stradivarius that got stolen and was retrieved and is… And in fact I’ve got a… No, I have to stop and tell you this story because in fact Joshua Bell gave a concert to raise money for the making of that movie. Oh, it’s too long a story to tell now. I’ll tell it another time. Yes. Yes, the Huberman violin. And yeah, I’m glad that you’re still in love with Tchaikovsky, and I get very irritated with people who are dismissive of him.

Q: “Why do we say Eugene rather than Yevgeny?” A: Well, I don’t know. Onegin. Whatever language you prefer. I would say Eugene.

“He’s great, a tunesmith.” Wonderful. The Tatiana. Yes, thank you. It’s sung in German because that recording happens to be in German, I’m afraid. Thank you. Yes, Bronislav Huberman. Yes, it’s my friend Dorit Straus in New York, who’s the daughter of the first violinist, and she happened to bump into Joshua Bell in the New York underground system, and she noticed he had a violin case with him and she said she offered her seat to him because she could see it was an expensive violin. And they got talking and she said her father was a violinist. And when she told Joshua Bell who her father was, he whispered to her that he actually had the Huberman Stradivarius with him, bit risky I would think, on the New York metro. Brahms. Yes, that’s true. The little Huberman played to Brahms. Brahms was absolutely blown away by his playing.

Q: “Do I think that 'Romeo and Juliet’ "would be better in Italian?” A: Oh, I have to tell you this story about Vishnevskaya who, of course in Stalin’s time everything was sung in Russian, and it was only after Stalin died that they could start singing Italian operas in Italian rather than Russian. And I saw her interviewed on TV and the interviewer said, “What’s the difference between singing in Russian and Italian?” And she said, “Singing in Italian is like butter in the throat,” she said.

This is Nanette. “I believe very few young women had the choice of who they wanted to marry.” Yes, that’s probably the case. Ooh, you had the pleasure of knowing Rosa Ponselle in her later years. Well, lucky you. I’m deeply, deeply envious. I would love to have gone to dinner with Rosa Ponselle. Apparently she used to actually sing ‘til quite, quite late in her life to her guests. I don’t know who the pianist. That recording I played you is actually recorded at Villa Pace quite, quite late on. And some of those recordings she actually accompanies herself 'cause she’s quite a good pianist, but I don’t think it’s her playing on that particular recording.

Ooh, “Should private venues…” Hmm, I’m not sure. I really don’t know, and I think I don’t want to get into it. I think it’s a very difficult issue. Oh, thank you so much, Tema. And I want to say that Lockdown University has been the most greatest gift really for me over the last couple of years. I’ve absolutely loved it all. And thank you very much. Right.

Thank you, everybody. And so I’ll be with you again on Sunday with another favourite composer, Rachmaninoff.