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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520305465 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/10/2019 |
| Edition description: | Second Edition, New edition |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Decadence TCHAIKOVSKY AT THE EDGE
ON MARCH 24, 1905, IMPRESARIO SERGEY DIAGHILEV (1872–1929) delivered a speech called "V chas itogov" (At the Hour of Summing-Up) at a dinner of "fine dishes" held in his honor at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow. Thirty guests toasted his service as editor of the journal Mir iskusstva (The World of Art), which had just folded, and his exhibition of eighteenth-century portraits at the Tauride Palace in Saint Petersburg. The speech was elegiac. Diaghilev referenced the "Bloody Sunday" uprising of January 1905 and the ongoing Russo-Japanese War while reflecting on the supposed end of Russian aristocratic life:
The end of life here is obvious. Nailed-shut great houses, palaces made horrible in their dying magnificence, are today strangely inhabited by meek mediocrities unburdened by past rituals. Here people aren't just living out their days, but an entire way of life. And so I have become completely convinced that we are living at a terrible time of fracture: we are doomed to die so as to give rise to a new culture that will take from us all that remains of our tired wisdom. History tells us this and aesthetics confirms it. Having plunged into the depths of the history of painting, and having made myself immune to accusations of extreme artistic radicalism, I can now boldly and confidently say that I'm not mistaken in my conviction that we are witnesses to a grand historical summation and conclusion in the name of a new and unknown culture that we are creating but that will clear us away.
These particular comments were preceded by a description of the portraits of "great and plain men" that he had uncovered during his tours of the Russian interior and that seemed to close a glorious book on the past. The artists of the silver age had swept in Symbolism, neoprimitivism, and other isms along with apocalyptic presentiments. World War I, the revolution, and the civil war were soon to come. Meanwhile, Diaghilev would shift his sphere of operations from Saint Petersburg to Paris, where he would redefine modernism as the artistic director of the Ballets Russes. He would also begin to collect Russian antiquities, including rare books, from the shuttered houses of the pre-Soviet, imperial past.
The malaise was not his alone, of course, nor was his self-indulgent decadence. It features in the paintings of Konstantin Somov (1869–1939), a founding member of the Mir iskusstva circle, which are characterized by Symbolist historian Avril Pyman as "ruinous artificial landscapes" and "fêtes galantes, ironically perceived." His art possesses "an almost demonic atmosphere of deathly sportiveness, automatized eroticism." The Symbolists captured an existence that seemed increasingly fragmented and unsettled, beset by malevolent forces, and prone to supernatural incursions. Dramatist and novelist Fyodor Sologub (1863–1927) spoke of humans as pawns in a "devil's game," the marionettes of "fate's amusement," in reimagining theater as a form of a surrender to cosmic powers.
One composer who captured this malaise was Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840–93). He gained almost cultlike status among the Symbolists in the final years of his cholera-abbreviated life. Revered in his time, he was described in the Symbolist journal Vesï (Libra) as a modernist seer and polestar of Zukunftsmusik, the music of the future. Given Tchaikovsky's French Classical allegiances, Musique de l'avenir might have been more appropriate. But the German term, borrowed from Richard Wagner, was fairly applied to his final opera, Iolanta, first performed on a double bill with The Nutcracker in 1892.
Iolanta is based on a Danish rather than a Russian work of literature, albeit with a setting far from Scandinavia: Henrik Hertz's 1845 play Kong Renés Datter (King René's Daughter). The transposition is hardly exact: the place of the action remains more or less the same (a castle high in the mountains of fifteenth-century southern France), but the opera involves complicated audio-visual games ancillary to Hertz's conception. In the opening garden scene, the innocent heroine, despite being thought blind (but never called blind) by the people minding her, somehow manages to sight-sing an aria from a score. Her caring, erudite, but rather oppressive father wants her cured of her condition, but the physician he recruits for the task fails. In Tchaikovsky's conception the physician offers little besides talk about "the two worlds of the flesh and the spirit," the setting involving an ostinato, a sustained, two-minute-long crescendo, and a pile of Eastern mystical musical clichés. The right fellow, a Burgundian knight, comes along, and the power of his love seems to restore Iolanta's sight, but this happens at sunset.
Iolanta is, among other things, about innocence (diatonicism) and experience (chromaticism). For the representation of the latter, Tchaikovsky turned to Wagner, and his subversive handling of Wagner makes it seem that the terms have been reversed: experience is overrated; the innocent are the more profound. The brief overture to Iolanta is an upside-down, woodwind-dominated paraphrase of the opening of the Tristan und Isolde prelude. (One of the characters in Hertz's play, not Tchaikovsky's opera, is called Tristan.) Far from a deferential Russian homage to Wagner, however, it amounts to an undeferential critique. Tchaikovsky uses the borrowing to represent how those with sight perceive, negatively, those without. The sourly discordant overture represents groping in the dark — but this is as much Wagner's groping in the dark as Iolanta's. She will demonstrate that she possesses the things that her father and the other people pitying her will never have: insight and spiritual vision. And in his final opera, Tchaikovsky demonstrates these qualities of himself contra his German antipode.
The Nutcracker, although inescapably associated with Christmas in the West, has a broader political (real political, not just music political) aspect in Russia. Damien Mahiet compares the second act (the dances in the Land of the Sweets) to a ballet des nations and interprets the entire ballet as a celebration of the Franco-Russian Alliance under Tsar Alexander III. It also bears a deeply personal dimension. Tchaikovsky completed The Nutcracker after the death of his sister and freighted the score with acoustic memories. The "Chinese" dance has nothing to do with China but everything to do with the whistle on the teakettle in the kitchen. Roland John Wiley hears refrains of the panikhida, the Russian Orthodox service for the departed, in the score, suggesting nostalgia in its truest sense: painful rather than bittersweet. In his essay "Tchaikovsky and the Russian 'Silver Age,'?" musicologist Arkadi Klimovitsky connects the magic-lantern "phantasmagoria" of the "Waltz of the Snowflakes" with the tone painting of the Impressionists and the blizzard images in poems by Alexander Blok, Andrey Belïy, and even Anna Akhmatova. The dance taxed the choreographers of the ballet (Marius Petipa and his disciple Lev Ivanov) as did the asymmetrical rhythmic patterns in The Sleeping Beauty. Ultimately, the "Waltz of the Snowflakes" is not only a waltz but also a chaconne of eight variations over a repeated harmonic sequence. These two dances are coded: the waltz associated with desire, the chaconne with fate.
By this point in his career, Tchaikovsky was an imperial composer ensconced in the comfortable but stagnant world of Tsar Alexander III. Yet he continued to innovate, turning in a protosurrealist direction. Timbre and texture become compositional determinants in his final works; shifting colors and patterns make new musical worlds appear. Declaring an allegiance to Mozart, Tchaikovsky anticipated Debussy. Despite living a generally contented life, Tchaikovsky mulled his fate — as did others in his circle. He composed a symphonic poem on the topic in his youth (Fatum, 1868) and wrote his Fourth Symphony in 1878 with fate as its program, as revealed in a letter sent to his reclusive patron, Nadezhda von Mekk, and dedicatee of the score. Von Mekk's passion for music, and for Tchaikovsky, was eccentric and transactional: she nurtured Tchaikovsky's talent for fourteen years at a personal expense of 6,000 rubles a year. He in turn nurtured her, composing, more often than not, in the pathétique (pathos-laden) idiom she preferred. For von Mekk, music was intimate, both with a lowercase m, music as such, and an uppercase M, music as sonotropic, imbued with fantasies about the spirit world beyond. Von Mekk spoke of music as a realm of mystical vastness, and in Tchaikovsky's compositions she found "the greatest, the highest of emotions given to human nature." "So, if you like, Pyotr Ilyich, call me a fantasist, prone to outlandishness, but don't laugh; it would only be amusing if it weren't so sincerely based," she wrote to him. "You have written music that transports people into a world of emotions, strivings, and desires inaccessible in life." Ultimately, she regarded "the musician-human as the highest creation of nature."
Tchaikovsky discreetly, "secretly," dedicated three of his works to his patron, beginning with the Fourth Symphony. The next work Tchaikovsky dedicated to von Mekk was the first of his orchestral suites, in six movements, which he claimed followed the example of the forgotten German composer Franz Lachner. The styles and genres in Tchaikovsky's suite predate Lachner, however, and have been alternately associated with Bach and court dance. An exception is the introduction to the first-movement fugue. The music is fear inducing, the texture shattered by menacing, militaristic trumpet fanfares — just like those in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony. Last came the three pieces for violin and piano, titled Souvenir d'un lieu cher (Memory of a Beloved Place), in which Tchaikovsky inscribed "to B," as in "Brailov," one of von Mekk's fabulous estates.
The first movement of Souvenir, "Meditation," anticipates the opening salon scene in Tchaikovsky's opera Pikovaya dama (The Queen of Spades),which dates from 1890, the year von Mekk ended her financial support of the composer (frankly, he no longer needed it). The succinct plot comes from an 1833 story of gambling, betrayal, murder, and suicide by Alexander Pushkin, but the musical inspiration for the character in the plot most associated with fate, the countess, might have come from von Mekk. Fate is central to the opera, which is also, like Diaghilev's speech, a work about decay and decline, summings-up and conclusions. More than the phantasmagoria of The Nutcracker and Iolanta (for which a Symbolist argument has been made)and more than the fate- and even death-based instrumental scores, The Queen of Spades fascinated the Symbolists, for it mixed and matched times and places to play out their obsessions with fortune and fate, dream and reality, death and rebirth. It was one of the works that converted Mir iskusstva artists from literature and painting to opera and ballet.
Sometime after the premiere of The Queen of Spades on December 7, 1890, at Saint Petersburg's Mariyinsky Theater, a downcast Tchaikovsky, upset about "various defects" in the production, ran into Diaghilev, the artist Alexandre Benois, and the writer Dmitri Filosofov on the street. Behind him he heard three lads (they were students at the time) singing the opening duet of act 1, scene 2, "without a single wrong note or error." Tchaikovsky turned around to greet his fans, and "after that, all four of them maintained a close relationship until Pyotr Ilyich's death." The opera had enjoyed a successful premiere, at least with the public, but it was critiqued in the press for perceived deficiencies in the libretto and unevenness in the music, to the composer's chagrin. The Mir iskusstva crowd, though, was amazed by it, as even this trifling anecdote indicates, and embraced the opera as a prototype for Symbolism. Transposing the plot of Pushkin's story from the time of Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801–25) or Nicholas I (r. 1825–55) back to that of Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96) was in keeping with Symbolism's "cult of the past." Benois claimed the opera "drove [him] crazy." Its temporal distortions, the shifting and crisscrossing of perspectives among the characters as well as between the scenes, made it especially haunting and Hoffmannesque, in Benois's opinion. Klimovitsky describes the influence of The Queen of Spades on Alexander Blok's poem "Pesnya sud'bï" (The Song of Fate, 1908) and Andrey Belïy's fantastical novel Petersburg (1913), a streamof-consciousness portent of revolution set in Russia's imperial capital, represented as a place of muttering sidewalks, yellow-on-yellow snow and sleet, murders of chattering crows, and zigzagging drunken thoughts accompanied by the metric ticking of a time bomb.
The idea that Tchaikovsky anticipated the experimentalism of the Symbolists and Surrealists runs counter to his supposed conservatism: his reverence for the music of eighteenth-century composers, reliance on the number format in his opera, general adherence to the diatonic system, and predilection for German augmented sixth chords. Twentieth-century musicologists constructed Tchaikovsky as a "classical" composer, reducing the specific circumstances of his life to clichés about suffering homosexuals. Such stereotypes have been dismantled in recent years, but the music — including The Queen of Spades — still suffers them, because Tchaikovsky's life remains tethered to his art.
Alexander Poznansky has led the charge in revising the revisionist histories. He has published, both in English and in Russian, a collection of reminiscences, a documents-based assessment of the circumstances surrounding Tchaikovsky's death, numerous articles and reviews, and two thick biographies, the thicker published in Saint Petersburg in 2009. He coauthored the massive two-volume The Tchaikovsky Handbook: A Guide to the Man and His Music, which includes a thematic catalog of works, photographs, and letters; a new translation of Tchaikovsky's autobiography; plus a genealogy and a bibliography. Poznansky also masterminded an indispensable online research guide. His work has provided a much-needed corrective, albeit less to Soviet accounts of Tchaikovsky's life than to those by the late British musicologist David Brown. Unlike Poznansky, whose biographies rest on the sources that document Tchaikovsky's life, Brown simply listened to the music, relying only on the scores. Tchaikovsky's life — his humanity — was thus reduced to the notes he wrote and the fantasies they engendered in the mind of one particular listener.
Poznansky, in contrast, consulted thousands of documents, including Tchaikovsky's occasionally self-effacing letters and journal entries. His brother's memoirs fill in the picture along with a selection of reviews and critical pieces; the letters of his publisher, relatives, and Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich; and the recollections of the people with whom Tchaikovsky attended the School of Jurisprudence and lectured at the Moscow Conservatoire. Men tended to write effusive letters to one another during the period, and neither the verbal conventions nor the rhetorical style conveys any sexual content. The unexpurgated letters nonetheless make plain that Tchaikovsky loved men and was sexually attracted to them. He wrote the following, for instance, about his relationship with Iosif Kotek, the celebrated violinist who helped him compose his D-Major Violin Concerto: "When he caresses me with his hand, when he lies with his head inclined on my breast, and I run my hand through his hair and secretly kiss it, when for hours on end I hold his hand in mine and grow faint in my battle with the impulse to fall at his feet and to kiss them — these little feet — passion rages within me with such unimaginable strength, my voice trembles like that of a youth, and I talk nonsense."
Tchaikovsky wrote this letter to his brother Modest in 1877, when he was thirty-seven years old. That same year he entered into a calamitously ill-advised marriage to a female admirer, Antonina Milyukova. The episode inspired an irresponsible film by Kenneth Russell, The Music Lovers (1970), in which a perspiring Tchaikovsky is seen swilling vodka in the nuptial train carriage, resisting his lustful bride in abject terror. Its Soviet antipode, the lavish and chaste Tchaikovsky (1969), features a different sort of train scene — a dreamscape in which the composer chats with his patron Nadezhda von Mekk as the birch trees whizz by. The two of them agree that his emotional life must be sublimated in service of his art.
The affection Tchaikovsky showed for Milyukova when they wed in 1877 did in fact turn to revulsion, prompting the composer to thoughts of suicide born of sheer desperation. The closest he came to taking his own life involved wading waist deep into the icy waters of the River Moskva. Had he contracted pneumonia, as he briefly hoped he would, the Symbolist and Surrealist movements in music might have been delayed along with some much-needed reforms in ballet. The symbol of his survival is his opera Eugene Onegin (1878), on the immortal text by Pushkin. The heroine Tatyana impulsively declares her love for Onegin, an inauthentic, indifferent individual. Rebuffed, she turns forever inward, cold to the touch. The plot is propelled by filigreed salon-song melodies and the geometric forms of ballroom dances; their musical interaction highlights the discord between Tatyana's personal feelings and her useless aristocratic obligations. That does not mean that Eugene Onegin reflects merely Tchaikovsky's own suffering. Even if Romantic aesthetics endorsed the transformation of life into art, Tchaikovsky's music may not simply be read as a cipher for his psyche.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement"
by .
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