The Petersburg romansy, shaded with Gypsy idiom, lost their hothouse tenderness when they boldly crossed the threshold from the fashionable salons to real life. And yet, they became the delight of the broad masses of Russian music lovers, the Russian pop music of its time. The comfortably sentimental and sad or sensually passionate formulas of the romansy appeared more than once—reworked and ennobled—in Tchaikovsky’s music.
Musicians sometimes joke that Tchaikovsky wrote three symphonies—the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth. In fact, his first three symphonies are rarely performed in the West or in Russia. But it is in the early symphonies that young Tchaikovsky’s imperial inclinations manifest themselves most vividly.
Elevated by Tchaikovsky’s genius, the whole variety of musical sounds from his St. Petersburg lives on in these first three symphonies: the sorrowful marches, the aristocratic, sultry waltzes, the romansy of its salons and suburbs, the ballet scenes and arias from its imperial stages, music of its folk festivities, fairs, and holidays.
The finales of Tchaikovsky’s early symphonies are without exception anthems, imperial apotheoses. A Russian folk song is heard in the finale of the First Symphony; in the finale of the Second, there is a Ukrainian folk song; and a polonaise is introduced in the last movement of the Third Symphony. At the time, Poland and the Ukraine belonged to the Russian Empire. Tchaikovsky’s integration of those themes into the framework of his symphonies, Petersburgian in form and content, signifies his support of the unification of various nations under the aegis of the Russian tsar, whose titles included Tsar of Kiev, of Poland, of Georgia, Lord of Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia, and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Livonia, Karelia, Bulgaria, Lord and Sovereign of the countries of Iveria, Kabardinia and the provinces of Armenia, Lord of Turkestan, etc. Tchaikovsky also exploited the emotional and symbolic possibilities of the Russian anthem, “God Save the Tsar,” to the fullest extent. It is included, with all its psychological and political overtones, in two of Tchaikovsky’s popular orchestral works: Slavonic March (1876) and the 1812 Overture (1880).
Tchaikovsky wrote Slavonic March in support of one of the most cherished ideas of imperial Russia—Pan-Slavism. Like an overwhelming majority of educated Russians, Tchaikovsky fervently hoped for the unification of all the Slavic people of southeastern Europe under Russia. When in 1876 little Serbia arose against Turkish hegemony, the atmosphere in Russia—where everyone seemed to root for the brave Serbs—became so electric that the performance of Slavonic March with its Serbian folk melodies inevitably elicited outbursts of patriotism and noisy political demonstrations. Tchaikovsky, who liked to conduct this work himself, was enormously pleased. His satisfaction with the propagandistic role of his music was profound and probably the most sincere of all Russian composers; it was certainly more sincere than the later cases of Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
The 1812 Overture sang the glory of the greatest military and political victory of the ruling Romanov dynasty, in the Patriotic War against Napoleon. This dramatic and triumphant composition became (like Slavonic March) a warhorse in the West, but in the Soviet Union it was not performed in its original version for over seventy years. Instead, the Soviets provided a doctored version. The Soviet composer Shebalin performed a musical vivisection, removing the imperial anthem. A similar fate befell the Slavonic March.
Also deliberately forgotten were Tchaikovsky’s sacred works for chorus (whose existence is due to Alexander III’s personal commission), as well as his Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom and the Vesper Service. When Balanchine was preparing his Tchaikovsky festival at the New York City Ballet in 1981,1 reminded him about the composer’s sacred music. Balanchine, a deeply devout man and a fanatic admirer of Tchaikovsky, was very interested and asked me to bring him a recording of the liturgy. He returned the record to me with a curt, “It’s no Bach.”
As is known from his letters and diaries, Tchaikovsky’s attitude toward religion was ambivalent. But he considered composing sacred music as an act of loyalty and patriotism, a gift on the altar of the fatherland, so it became one of the important aspects of the imperial theme in Tchaikovsky’s work.
