Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 5 and other of his works (Part 1)

There are said to be two modes of music – dance and song – and that universally music tends either towards the dance or else towards the song. (I believe I first discovered this distinction written in Ezra Pound’s writings who has made the observation?) In Tchaikovsky’s orchestral works we very often see the dance and its variant, the march, in very strong colours and in contention together for much of the time. These two modes, the song and the dance, are used by Tchaikovsky as discrete entities to be played off against one another.

Whenever Tchaikovsky is seriously solemn, when he is out to impress upon us a severe gravity, often a solemn grief, he seems to be never far away from a stoical powerful march tune. In the third movement of The Pathetique for instance; an almost military fast tempo march proclaims that short-lived rallying of nerve and resolution which precedes a gloom and despair all too final in the final movement. In hindsight, after hearing a rendition, it has felt to have been so fitting as to have been altogether inevitable.

In a number of prominent places in his 5th Symphony however; in the ballets; in the finale to the 1812; in the Caprice Italien; in Francesca da Rimini and and in Romeo and Juliet; appear passages of outright stomping marches, and also much music which trespasses on the borders of march, intermingled and wafted hints coming in here and there of brass and drums in 4/4 time. Each of these compositions carries within it its serious sombre moments, a severe march time, but somehow shows off very little extrovert pomp and circumstance; since Tchaikovsky uses marches not as calls to physical prowess or battle, nor like Berlioz whose bursts are vibrant in triumphant exuberance. Tchaikovsky uses march and march time ever integrally as a means to denote inner strife and conflict; these being dramatised and so brought to our awareness as being agonised over.

Tchaikovsky never appears to have been much of an occasional composer (1812, and maybe The Caprice Italian excepted) perhaps because he never sought to place himself at the service of civic authority, as like a Walton or a Sousa does.

It is possibly this turning inside-out of inner feelings of pain and distress, so that they show on the outside as like Job’s boils; which Tchaikovsky so characteristically couples with, and plays off against, many exquisitely delightful lyrical rills and fragile forays normally in the woodwind and often in the strings; which makes Tchaikovsky’s music ‘work’ and so to have become lasting, popular, yet nonetheless great.

These rills and forays represent the lighter side of his orchestral music; and they tend to stay very much within the domain of dance; even in his more sombre works; wherein tone and mood are able to range and change; his carefree lyric joy for all its sweetness redounds incongruously upon the sterner more martial of his statements (usually of (attempts at) fortitude in adversity) and magnifies these grimmer moments exponentially, as salt into a wound, revealing a deep deep desperation.

Yet his style is not like a Mahler’s, who tends to integrate mutual interdependencies fused into a unity in his particular stock-in-trade of bittersweetness. Tchaikovsky divides up his mods and so separates them moreso; so that one listening may very often discern quite easily and say : This passage is sweet, and That one is bitter. Thus there is ever a foreboding about Tchaikovsky whenever his unalloyed nimble joy is in one’s ears, that the mood is not to be a constant delight as is say in Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but rather one feels one hears a musical statement of Shelley’s maxim “Rarely comest thou; spirit of delight.”

I guess that as well as with the march, Tchaikovsky was never far away from the waltz; the great high society ballroom dance style, a kind of informal and gracious march? Yet even with the waltz listening to Tchaikovsky we are nosing our ways towards the song spectrum in his music; and especially in the ballets. You might recall that Disney managed to make a song out of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ ballet’s ‘The Garland Waltz’ which in Disney’s movie of The Sleeping Beauty was sung a with a lyric of ‘Once upon a Dream’. Like many of Tchaikovsky’s greatest waltzes, when listening to the sweep and ease of ‘The Garland Waltz’ one feels, as if one is virtually being ‘swept away’ by that lavish swish and sway and by its grand ‘uptake’ of oneself into the soul of a musical gorgeousness. This power in the music to beguile and, as it were, to put before the mind’s eye a rich sense of the glitterballs and the chandeliers, the champagne and the evening wear; is due in large part to its splendid orchestration, using its vivacious variations, and poised formal dramatic expression.

‘Waltz of the Flowers’ from ‘The Nutcracker’ and that waltz from the introduction to ‘Swan Lake’ are two delightfully raunchy confectioneries; offerings of great pleasure to listeners; in fact they are able in one’s weaker moments, to give one an impression that one’s cares might be temporarily set aside, and so dissolved, like dew into thin air, by their inundation of fantasy and sparkle.

I guess that the great Imperial Russian balls and other socialite occasions really did do splendour excellently well. Politically we see this splendour most excellently in Moussorgsky’s most well-known and most frequently heard works, wherein there is never any lack of stateliness and of deep dramatic poetry. Perhaps epitomised by that most Russian of operas, Moussorgsky’s ‘Boris Godunov’ in Russia by the Russians is hailed and proclaimed The definitive Great Russian Opera. In his own individual way, Moussorgsky as alongside Tchaikovsky in bearing the musical clout to really grab you and to make you feel in your flesh the high rhetorical sententiousness of Imperial Russia and its high society

I have written elsewhere in regard to Wagner about how he seems to have pre-empted Phil Spector and created his own version of Spector’s ‘wall of sound’ brand of music. Wagner seems to have wanted to produce on a listener an effect of an obliteration of a listener’s ‘stray and to-spare consciousness’ whilst his music was playing in a hall or on a player; seeking after an almost Primitive Baptist-like musical ‘total immersion’ for listeners.

Similarly when one is listening to Moussorgsky, in many, maybe most of his more famous pieces, and the case is often the same with Tchaikovsky, with his waltzes in particular; their ‘absorption’ skills can conjure up in us an experience of being flooded, overmastered-almost, a sense of having been stood under a high torrent, an effusive falls or cataract, issuing powerful dramatic sound. One is drawn-in, absorbed out of oneself, attracted magnetically, into a mingled engagement with these works. There is called to mind that Wedding Guest in Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’ who is stopped by ‘a scrawny hand’ and spellbound by the sailor’s eye, so as that he ‘cannot choose but hear’ his ensuing story.

To be continued..

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