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He was first of all a practical musician, not an idealist. "One must always work," he wrote, "and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he isn't in the mood. I have learned to master myself and am glad I've not followed in the footsteps of those Russian colleagues who have no self-confidence and no patience, and who throw in the sponge at the slightest difficulty. That is why, in spite of their great gifts, they produce so little and in such a desultory way." Yet today we hear the vast amount of music Tchaikovsky wrote as unmistakably Russian, despite its strongly European, formal underpinnings. Our perception of him as not only a Russian composer, but the Russian composer, rests primarily on his special brand of melodic writing. As Harold Schonberg has observed in his book THE GREAT COMPOSERS, "He had what many of The Five lacked -- a sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody. . . . It was a particularly Russian kind of melody, plangent, introspective, often as emotional as a scream from a window on a dark night." It rarely happens in music, but in the case of Tchaikovsky the music was the man --nervous, fretful, morose, manically affirmative and pessimistic, energetic, frightened, possessed. He had learned through great discipline to keep his neuroses in check in public, and on the surface seemed an amiable, if aloof, personality. But this was an act. Underneath the exterior calm raged enormous insecurities and frustrations, which he confided to his diary but to few even of his closest friends. There is one telling entry from 1891, written on Tchaikovsky's arrival in New York City, where he was to be the premier guest at the opening of Carnegie Hall. After checking into his hotel, he told his diary, "I made myself at home. First of all, I wept rather long." In another entry, written in Paris, he confesses that "every new acquaintance, every fresh meeting with somebody unknown, has always been for me a source of suffering. [It is the result of] a shyness that has increased to a mania, possibly from a complete lack of any need for human society, possibly also from the inability, without an effort, to say things about oneself that one doesn't think." From our vantage point today, Tchaikovsky may not be Russia's greatest composer, but few would deny that he is her most popular. It is remarkable that he achieved what he did given the self-absorption behind his work. As Schonberg so succinctly puts it, "Rimsky-Korsakov spread out his arms to embrace Russian antiquity and folklore. . . . Mussorgsky spread out his arms to embrace the entire Russian people. Tchaikovsky spread out his arms to embrace -- himself." |
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