Loading summary
Transcript16 lines
- [00:01]
A
The Newbery consort presents Revolution 10-5-7 in Chicago, Evanston and Milwaukee. Hear early American music from the 18th to 19th centuries from a wide variety of cultures, including Moravian sacred music, cotillion music, spirituals and more performed on early American instruments. The concert will also include an original composition for historic instruments and voices by bass baritone Jonathan Woody. See it live or watch the streaming version from June 1st to the 22nd. Online tickets available at newberryconsort.org. Hello and welcome to Sticky Notes, the classical music podcast. My name is Joshua Weilerstein. I'm a conductor and I'm the music director of the orchestra Nasiena Delille and the chief conductor of the Aalborg Symphony. This podcast is for anyone who loves classical music, works in the field, or is just getting ready to dive into this amazing world of incredible music. Before we get started, I want to thank all of my Patreon sponsors for making season 11 possible. If you'd like to support the show, please head over to patreon.com stickynotespodcast and if you are a fan of the show, please take a moment to give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. It is greatly appreciated. So I am in Boston this week with my alma mater, the New England Conservatory Philharmonia Orchestra. We are doing a really nice program with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the Walton Cello Concerto with Kyle Pinzen, who won the concerto competition for this year, and Pavel Haas's Study for Strings. It's always really special to be going back home in a way to NEC and to work with all these musicians, of course. Also my parents teach there, so it's kind of like a little family reunion and nice to bring my family there as well. This week we've got part two of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony and I did want to mention, since it was brought up, that I didn't mention the recording last time. This recording is with the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra with Claudio Abbato conducting. This is, I think, one of the greatest performances of this piece that has ever happened and I'm really happy to be sharing it with you. It is available on YouTube. Hope you enjoy part two. In a letter to Tchaikovsky's nephew, Vladimir Davydov, Tchaikovsky wrote, I'm very pleased with its content, but dissatisfied or rather not completely satisfied with the instrumentation. For some reason it's not coming out as I intended. To me, it would be typical and unsurprising if this symphony were torn to pieces or little appreciated for it wouldn't be the first time that it happened, but I Absolutely. Consider it to be the best and in particular, the most sincere of all of my creations. I love it as I have never loved any of my other musical offspring. I'm coming back to that word, sincere this week for part two on Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, because, as I said last time, it's the through line that makes Tchaikovsky's music so immediately arresting. You always know exactly where you stand with Tchaikovsky, since he always is speaking so honestly in his music. Well, I would say almost always. The last two movements of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony are two of the most fascinating movements in the whole Western classical repertoire. But the reason for their fascination, beyond being wonderful movements, is the order in which Tchaikovsky places them. In a typical symphony, the third movement would be a fast scherzo or a slow movement, depending on what the second movement had been. Since the second movement of this symphony had been a waltz, it would have been expected to hear the slow movement here with a fast last movement to send the audience home with some energy. But that is not what Tchaikovsky does with his sixth Symphony. Instead, we hear a thrilling, exhilarating scherzo followed by a devastating slow movement. This completely upended the form of the symphony and was pretty much revolutionary for its time. Why did Tchaikovsky do this? And why did this decision in part lead to massive controversy over his death, which took place just nine days after the premiere of the symphony? We're going to talk about all of that today on the show, including the myriad theories about Tchaikovsky's death. And then we'll discuss the third, and especially the fourth movements of this masterpiece in great detail, picking apart the nuances of these profoundly contrasting movements. All this and more is coming right up on Sticky Notes. First of all, I highly, highly recommend listening to part one of this show for first, unless you are a true expert on this symphony, let's tell the story of Tchaikovsky's death first, because it plays into the last moment of the symphony so heavily, and I want your ears to be clean of some of these theories before we get to it. As I said two weeks ago, Tchaikovsky died just nine days after the premiere of the symphony from cholera, after drinking a glass of unboiled water in the midst of a cholera epidemic. This was a surprisingly reckless decision from someone who was usually as fastidious as Tchaikovsky about health. While this was always the only explanation given for his death, at the first performance that took place after Tchaikovsky's death of this symphony, the audience seemed primed to hear the last movement as a suicide note. Over time, this grew into a kind of popular myth. That the last movement of Tchaikovsky's sixth was his suicide note. Interestingly, I just recently saw a documentary about another artist who died tragically young. Jeff Buckley. He died at the age of 31 after being dragged under a boat while swimming in the Wolf river in Memphis. Immediately it was theorized that he must have been drunk or under the influence of drugs. And to this day many people believe that to be the case, but it's not true. Buckley was sober at the time and it was just a horrible accident. And similarly with Tchaikovsky, there are a lot of theories about his death that have really become kind of hardened into fact, but a lot of them are myths. So here we go, we're going to talk about all of this now. Cholera in Russia at the time was considered to be a disease of the lower classes. So Tchaikovsky's death from it seemed scarcely possible to many of his friends and family. The great impresario Sergei Diaghilev said this. Various myths soon sprang up about the death of Tchaikovsky. Some said he caught cholera by drinking a glass of tap water at the restaurant liner. Certainly we used to see him eating there almost every day. But nobody at that time drank unboiled water. And it seemed inconceivable to us that Tchaikovsky should have done so. There are also conflicting stories about where Tchaikovsky drank the glass of unboiled water. But what seems clear is that it was a very surprising choice and one that it's true, hasn't ever really properly been explained. This again led to the idea that the symphony was a suicide note and that Tchaikovsky had intentionally drank the unboiled water in order to contract cholera. From there the theories get increasingly far fetched. Almost all of them deal with Tchaikovsky's homosexuality, which was illegal and severely punished during his lifetime in Russia. One of the theories goes that Tchaikovsky was ordered to commit suicide by none other than the Tsar. This theory comes fourth hand from the composer Alexander Glazanov. Another theory was that Tchaikovsky did indeed contact cholera, but from sex rather than from drinking unboiled water. And that he concocted the unboiled water story and staged it with his brother Modeste. The final and most well known, but I think the most far fetched theory is that Tchaikovsky seduced the nephew of a powerful duke who reported this to the Tsar. An old friend of Tchaikovsky's, wanting to avoid a scandal, collected together a group of Tchaikovsky's friends to convene a so called court of honor which decided that the best course of action was for Tchaikovsky to kill himself. All of these theories related to sexuality have been challenged and in many cases debunked. But the truth is, we don't know why Tchaikovsky would have willingly drank that glass of unboiled water. One other thing that I have read is that apparently some restaurants at the time served a mix of boiled and unboiled water because it took so long to serve. So it's possible that Tchaikovsky drank one of those glasses. I personally think the theories of suicide by court of honor, etc. Are ludicrous and are trying desperately to find a deeper interpretation of to a tragic movement of a symphony. But that's just my opinion. Now let's explore the last two movements of the piece, beginning with the spectacular third movement, one of the most thrilling in all of music. The third movement is in a form that Tchaikovsky liked a lot, a sonatina, a kind of simplified version of sonata form that has two themes and an exposition and a recapitulation, but no development section. This allows for a kind of generalized momentum that Tchaikovsky exploits to the maximum in this movement. Tchaikovsky starts the movement with chattering strings playing triplets, but with an accompaniment in eighth notes, creating a rhythmic incongruity that contributes to the bubbliness and scintillating energy of the beginning. We then hear the main theme of the movement. For the moment, it is in E minor, but that won't last long. It is started off by the oboe, and we quickly realize that we are hearing a march, albeit one with a very unusual accompaniment. It's a little bit like the march theme comes into being before our eyes. In the second iteration of the theme. It is played by the first violins while the triplets keep chattering away. But Tchaikovsky now adds another element, which is a true march rhythm in the low strings. Once again, like in the first movement, Tchaikovsky is doing a bit of development of his theme as it goes. And it creates that momentum and drive because things keep evolving. One question you might be asking as the first theme starts to transition to the second theme is just how difficult is this movement? Certainly sounds very difficult, but Tchaikovsky was as underrated as an orchestrator as he was as a craftsman. And so when one is playing this piece, one feels like it all just fits together and it all works. I had this experience conducting Zemlinski's the Mermaid last month in Aalborg in Denmark. Looking at the score, it seems extraordinarily complicated, but it's so skillfully written that all that is needed is some care over the balance and the piece really just works. It's similar here in the Tchaikovsky. It's not exactly Easy for the strings and winds to play all those chattering notes, but it's well written and idiomatic for all the instruments. So actually this is a movement that normally gets the least amount of rehearsal time when it's played by orchestras. To expand on the first theme, Tchaikovsky returns to his beloved scales, tying together this movement with what we've already heard in the first two movements. But far from forlorn, these are descending scales full of heroic energy.
- [13:21]
B
It.
- [13:47]
A
The triplets are still rampaging through the orchestra during these scales. And it's here where the audience starts to get the sense that this is not a normal light Scherzo, but that this movement is heading somewhere new in the trajectory of the piece. There's only been really one climactic moment in the piece so far, and it was a rip your heart out level of devastation climax marked largamente or broad. Here we seem to be approaching triumph with a reckless abandon. But Tchaikovsky says, just kidding, we're not ready yet. And with an ingenious combination of those triplets and eighth notes, we're into the second theme, where that original E minor fragment of theme played by the oboe is now played by the clarinets. In E major we're now at the second theme and it's a variant on the first, but it couldn't sound any more different in character. It's really the first time we feel joy in this symphony and we're about 25 minutes into it. We then hear an explicit reference to the first movement. After muscular chords in the strings, the winds ch. Chatter away in 16th notes. This reminds me heavily of this moment in the first movement. This is not a cyclical piece, but it's all built from the seeds of the first movement. After a huge build up, Tchaikovsky once again swerves to the side and with just a two bar transition that passes so fast it's easy to miss, Tchaikovsky takes us back to the beginning and to part two of his Sonatina form. But just because it's Sonatina form doesn't mean there isn't any variation here. Right where we expect to hear the second theme, Tchaikovsky brings things back down again and begins one of the most exciting build ups in any symphony. He takes the fragment of the theme Bum bum bum bum bum. And over rising scales, it starts to pop up all over the orchestra. If your heart doesn't start beating a bit faster while listening to this, well then you're listening to the wrong performance. I've stopped it right at that moment because Tchaikovsky is about to do three Things one, we're about to arrive at the second theme again. Two, the bass drum and cymbals are about to make their first and only appearance in the piece. And three, Tchaikovsky brings the second theme in with whirlwind, you guessed it, scales. Once again, everything is coming together, and we reach a moment of true muscular joy. I have to imagine that there are few feelings quite as exhilarating as conducting this moment. This is a bar by bar copy paste from the first section in terms of notes, but now it's fortissimo and with tons of orchestration changes that make it feel like completely new music. Those powerful, muscular chords that were originally played by the strings are now blasted out by the brass while the violins play the chattering 16ths. But again, within these copy pastes, Tchaikovsky adds something new, all in the name of building up even more energy. The muscular chords begin to spin out of control until the orchestra arrives on a pedal tone C, which is the fourth of G major. G major, not E major. It's not where you would expect, but it creates a surreal kind of drone that creates tremendous excitement. Though perhaps that excitement comes from the brass section enjoying every moment of this theme. And it results in yet another joyous version of the march. Here is a moment where there's a bit of controversy. Many conductors in what has almost become a tradition, hold back the tempo here, giving it a bit of extra weight. Now, I'll be honest, I hate this tradition because I think it goes completely against what Tchaikovsky has said set up in this movement. Remember, I mentioned that the only other big climax in the piece was a moment of broadening of tempo, opening up to a true lament. Well, here there is no broadening of the tempo marked by Tchaikovsky. Instead, it's the immense drive that is carrying us forward, pushing us through all the demons that this piece has uncovered. To me, slowing down here halts that momentum in its tracks and also creates a slightly artificial character to the music. I mentioned that Tchaikovsky is almost always honest and sincere. This is because, for me, Tchaikovsky's joyous music always seems to come at a tremendous cost and effort, like it's forcing itself out of him. But here it's streaming, overflowing. You don't dam up Niagara Falls, so why would you slow the momentum here? In the recording I've been using for this show with Claudio Abaro conducting the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, he doesn't slow down at all, giving the music the momentum that it deserves. And, by the way, the momentum that Tchaikovsky wrote into it. With one thrill after another, Tchaikovsky will take us to the end of the movement with long notes now soaring over the march theme. By the end of this movement, you should want to jump out of your seat with excitement,
- [24:20]
B
Sam.
- [24:50]
A
Now, invariably this movement gets storms of applause when it's over. Many in the audience probably think the piece is over. And why wouldn't they? Audiences expect big, loud endings to symphonies, and here Tchaikovsky has provided one. And also, it's practically impossible not to applaud at the end of this movement. The excitement here is not meant to be contained to a concert hall. It's infectious and overwhelming. But of course, here's the rub. What comes after this explosion of excitement is the true gut punch of this symphony. Here's the end of the third movement, followed by the beginning of the fourth. I don't know of a contrast so stark in all of symphonic music. Instantly, the joy and triumph of the third movement is snuffed out by that first chord. But this transition between triumph and tragedy has spawned through thousands of hours of debate amongst musicologists, audience members, orchestral players and conductors. Modern audience etiquette states that you don't applaud until the end of a piece. Conductors who are committed to this have tried any number of ways to force the audience to not applaud at the end of the third movement of this symphony in order to give a clean start to the fourth. I get it, I really do. But some of the methods are in interesting. Some hold their hands up theatrically at the audience, some have tried to literally turn around to try to stop the audience applauding, and some go completely ataka without a pause into the beginning of the fourth movement. The truth is that very few of these methods work except with an unbelievably well trained and frankly conservative audience. The worst is the Itaka method, since invariably what happens is a bunch of people do applaud and the beginning of the fourth movement is obscured anyway, while people shamefully stop applauding and snobs shush them. The key word in what I said before about audience etiquette is that this is modern audience etiquette. The convention of not clapping in between movements was starting to become something during Tchaikovsky's time. But it was. It was not enforced with the glares and the shushing of today. And in fact it was quite a bit more flexible. Composers would have expected the audience to applaud loud and exciting movements, and Tchaikovsky certainly would have expected applause after this movement. And in fact, I think it works incredibly well from an almost theatrical perspective. Tchaikovsky gives the people what they want with this third movement. And it's so energetic that the audience also feels a need to release something at the end of the movement. The applause does that, and most importantly, it clears the audience's palette so that when the fourth movement starts, we are emotionally ready for the experience we are about to have. So when I do this piece, I have no issue with applause, and I don't try to prevent allows me as well to take a moment to collect myself before plunging into the emotional depth of this last movement. This theme sounds like another one of Tchaikovsky's themes that uses scales. And it is, but it's in a very unusual format, something that I'll talk about on my Patreon exclusive mini episode this week. The way that Tchaikovsky constructs the theme is that no single group plays the entire theme. Instead, he puts it together note by note. This is impossible to explain without looking at a score, so that's why I'll show you on video. In my Patreon episode this week, the tempo marking is adagio, slow, lamentoso, lamenting. And Tchaikovsky, as I said, within a few seconds, has taken us into a completely new world. The strings alone are playing this theme at the beginning with just a single note answer. In the winds and horns, the brass and percussion are silent. So even though this movement begins forte loudly, it is quite a bit softer than the third movement. And yet the emotional impact is so much stronger. The music builds to an impassioned cry, followed by the winds taking over the theme and bringing us back down again to a point of stasis. But to get to that impassioned cry, Tchaikovsky speeds up the tempo, something that is often ignored by conductors. There is a fascinating recording of Tchaikovsky symphonies by the conductor Igor Markiewicz with the London Symphony, who seemed determined to do exactly what Tchaikovsky had written in the score, just to make a point. I don't love these recordings because they feel a little bit like the only point of the recording was to do what Tchaikovsky wrote without a lot of emotion. But they do show exactly the things that are often ignored by conductors, like this accelerando that slams right into the impassioned cry. I think it's incredibly effective. Here's how it sounds on the Markiewicz recording, Most conductors, even if they speed up, slow down, just into the climactic chord. But that's not what Tchaikovsky writes. And to me, it's more powerful if it feels just slightly out of control in this movement. And this brings me to one of my central points in this the subtlety of tempo and nuance that Tchaikovsky employs. After the winds bring us back down, Tchaikovsky restarts the main theme after a brief silence, but he says that it should be slightly faster than the opening. Tchaikovsky, if his intentions are followed, is unconsciously for us, intensifying the emotional impact of the music. The tempo change, he writes, is tiny, one click of the metronome faster, but if followed, it makes an emotional difference to the audience. For this second iteration of the theme, Tchaikovsky descends further into the depths of sadness. The bassoon, which started out as just an answer to the theme, now takes it over and plunges lower and lower and lower until it feels like there is nowhere left to go. By this point, the entire atmosphere in the concert hall has changed.
- [33:29]
B
Sam.
- [34:11]
A
The second theme will now emerge out of this darkness. First with two horns playing a syncopated rhythm that must be some sort of depiction of a heartbeat. Tchaikovsky follows this with a heartbreaking theme, once again built off of a scale that he marks with a curious con lenezza e devozione. The second part is easy to translate with devotion, but the first part, lenezza, is not a word that exists in Italian. Some think it was a copying error, and Tchaikovsky meant lentezza, or slowness. But I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense. I did some digging on this and found a Google forum where this trans translation was heatedly discussed. And here's one answer from a Chris Laneza is an interesting question, though very rare. Some sources quote it as an alternative to lenita, itself an exclusively literary word meaning meekness, sweetness, suavity. In the end, this is one of those mysteries that we'll never quite know the answer to. But I like the idea of me, meekness and sweetness, at least at the beginning of this theme, which starts from a whisper and peaks in a passionate cry of nostalgic and bittersweet pain. Very few composers could get away with repetitiveness in the way that Tchaikovsky does. He repeats this theme four times, but each time it gets more intense, thanks to him, bringing back now practically the whole orchestra that has been silent throughout the movement. And there are more still, subtle shifts of tempo each time. Tchaikovsky makes a crescendo. He tells the orchestra to move a bit and then to slow down again into the repeat of the theme. This speeding up and slowing down allows this music not to wallow. Instead, it is shifting mood, constantly giving it a feeling of instability that enormously heightens its impact.
- [36:33]
B
Sam.
- [36:59]
A
Finally, the emotional pressure that Tchaikovsky has created cannot be held in anymore. And with another speeding up of tempo, Tchaikovsky has The brass and timpani pound out that syncopated rhythm, no longer resembling a heartbeat and instead resembling something more like a hammer. Powerful scales that speed up into a whirlwind lead to an extraordinary moment.
- [37:27]
B
Sam.
- [38:04]
A
Yes. Everything stops on this C major chord. It's almost like a stage direction stop. And Tchaikovsky follows this with a brutal rendition of the B theme, which is cut off and then another, and then another, and then two gasps, four pauses in four bars, like the music can't catch its breath. And with a remorseless inevitability, the A theme returns again in the slightly faster tempo than that of the opening. Tchaikovsky even changes the tempo markings, saying andante walking non panto. Not too much. This is a sort of development section. But like in the first movement, this movement feels like it unfolds in one breath rather than having a clear structure. There are certain moments in Tchaikovsky, they just make you feel something, and this is one of them. That chord, it's like a signal. This is not going to end in happiness. This is the fate of this symphony, and this is the moment where you know, know for good it will build to a massive speeding up of tempo and music that practically defines the word agonizing. The entire Orchestra is marked FFF1 level louder than as loudly as possible, as the strings play a descending scale and the trombones rise through the texture as the terror inexorably heightens.
- [40:28]
B
Sam.
- [41:09]
A
Tchaikovsky now brings back the A theme in its fastest tempo yet, and under it he has stopped horns playing a raspy F. It's a moment of extraordinary rage in this movement, like the theme is trying to escape itself and keeps running into this wall of horn. At long last, the theme exhausts itself. And with a single stroke of a ghostly tam tam, the only note that instrument plays in the whole piece, we enter the coda. This is not a long movement, and it's actually surprising how short it is. And yet the impact is stunning. What follows the tam tam is a chorale played by the brass, which certainly has a valedictory character. Look, even though I think a lot of the theories around Tchaikovsky's death are ludicrous, I'm not surprised in the slightest that they've emerged, considering this music and Tchaikovsky's premature and slightly mysterious death. Even if Tchaikovsky was not speaking of his own death in this music, it. It certainly must be speaking about death in a kind of universal way. The symphony will end with what is unmistakably a funeral march. The material is the second theme. The theme that was played with sweetness and devotion before is now marked to be played strictly in time and with Sforzando's heavy emphasis on each downbeat. The basses play the heartbeat rhythm, but it is no longer gentle. It is relentless, and slowly the music descends and descends until only the cellos and basses are playing, and then finally only the basses. In a parallel to how the symphony began. It's a unforgettable ending, and really one that is unlike any other.
- [44:20]
B
Sam. It.
- [45:32]
A
No symphony ends this way in the 19th century Brahms Third Symphony, the other major symphony of the spirit period to end quietly ends in peace and calm and contentment. Mahler's ninth Symphony, which I think used Tchaikovsky's sixth as a model, does end quietly and in a slow movement, but with a profound and ecstatic kind of acceptance. Not this. It is bleak, unforgiving, and tragedy in its purest form. The audience often seems to come slowly out of a reverie as they begin to applaud, and I think even the most jaded orchestral player can't avoid being emotionally affected by this music. When I conduct a symphony, it often takes me hours to escape its mood, and that mood, honestly, comes just from the last movement. The first movement is very intense, yes, but it feels like it's intense within the normal framework of music. The middle movements are of course much lighter, but in the under 10 minute long last move movement, it feels as if we have watched a life pass before our eyes. I'll say it again, Tchaikovsky is drastically underrated as a composer, and I continue to think that he is not only a great composer, but truly one of the greatest ever. Not just for those melodies, but for his pure compositional ability. It's easy to write sad music. It's not easy to write something that communicates emotion this profoundly and with this much clarity. And I hope I've shown you just some of the subtlety involved in doing that on Tchaikovsky's part. I really hope you've enjoyed this two part look at Tchaikovsky 6, and thanks so much for listening today. We'll have some more exciting stuff from you in a couple of weeks, so don't miss our next episode. If you like what you heard today, please feel free to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It really helps the show gain more visibility. Please send any questions to stick to stickynotespodcastmail.com and if you'd like to support the podcast monetarily, just head over to patreon.com stickynotespodcast thanks and I'll talk to you again after a while.
- [47:50]
B
Sam.