St Petersburg полностью

In 1877 Russia, inspired by Pan-Slavic slogans, declared war on Turkey. Tchaikovsky, along with almost the entire Petersburg intelligentsia, followed with avid interest the actions of the Russian troops, headed by Alexander III and his sons. As never before, the composer had the sense of being an organic part, emotionally and creatively, of the great empire. For some time, the usually extremely self-centered Tchaikovsky even forgot his own, sometimes quite dramatic troubles. “It’s shameful to shed tears for oneself,” he confessed in a letter, “when the country is shedding blood in the name of a common cause.”69

But in a strange way, the Fourth Symphony, which Tchaikovsky wrote during the Russo-Turkish War, turned out to be a first step away from his earlier imperial interpretation of that genre. In the Fourth the protagonist steps beyond the limits of the ritual relations of society and state. We know of a letter from Tchaikovsky to his benefactress, Nadezhda von Meck, in which he devotes a long passage to the hidden program of the Fourth, describing it as an attempt of man to avoid his fate. In the composer’s melodramatic explanation, a “fateful force” hangs over the autobiographical hero “which does not allow his desire for happiness to reach its goal.”

In the finale of the Fourth Symphony, Tchaikovsky puts the lone individual in conflict with society for the first time. Here this conflict is still resolved by subordinating the personal to the collective. Tchaikovsky comments, “If you can’t find reason for happiness in yourself, look to other people. Go out among the people…. Feel the joy of others. Life is possible, after all.”70 But in the Fifth Symphony, written eleven years later (1888), such a compromise between hero and society is no longer possible. And in the finale the alienated protagonist must observe a pompous triumphal parade from the side. (This musical philosophical idea was used with tremendous effect by Shostakovich in the finale of his Fifth Symphony, in the tragic year 1937.)

The Sixth Symphony (Pathétique), written not long before Tchaikovsky’s death, depicts the tragic confrontation of the individual and fate and mourns his final, total destruction. This most popular of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies is perhaps his most pessimistic work. I find in it a distant conceptual echo with Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.

In the first movement of the Pathétique Tchaikovsky quotes the funeral chorale of the Russian Orthodox service, “Rest among the saints.” In conversations with close friends Tchaikovsky readily admitted that the symphony presents the story of his life, in which the last movement plays the part of De Profundis, a prayer for the dead. But even the very first listeners, who knew nothing about its hidden program, guessed that the Pathétique might be the composer’s artistic farewell to this world. After the last rehearsal of the symphony, conducted by Tchaikovsky, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, a talented poet and fervent admirer of the composer, ran into the green room weeping and exclaiming, “What have you done, it’s a requiem, a requiem!”

On October 16, 1893, the Pathétique was premiered in a charged atmosphere of the white-columned Assembly of the Nobility. Prolonged ovation greeted the appearance of the rather short but slender, elegant Tchaikovsky at the podium. The composer’s handsome face, with still dark eyebrows and mustache framed by silvery hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard, was pale as usual, but his cheeks were flushed with excitement.

Tchaikovsky began conducting with the baton held tightly in his fist, again in his usual way. But when the final sounds of the symphony had died away and Tchaikovsky slowly lowered the baton, there was dead silence in the audience. Instead of applause, stifled sobs came from various parts of the hall. The audience was stunned and Tchaikovsky stood there, silent, motionless, his head bowed.

“The symphony is life for Tchaikovsky,” Asafyev once noted. In Asafyev’s flowery description the Pathétique “captures the very instant of the soul’s parting from the body, the instant of the life force radiating into space, into eternity.”71 This is the opinion of Tchaikovsky’s younger contemporary, who knew many of his friends well; so we can be certain that the Petersburg elite read Tchaikovsky’s last work as a tragic novel with a sorrowful epilogue. And inevitably next to Tchaikovsky’s name arose that of Dostoyevsky. In a typical passage, another contemporary wrote of the composer and the writer, “With a hidden passion they both stop at moments of horror, total spiritual collapse, and finding acute sweetness in the cold trepidation of the heart before the abyss, they both force the reader or the listener to experience these feelings, too.”72