Romeo and Juliet (Fantasy Overture) - Pyotr Tchaikovsky

• Report rights infringement
• published: 24 Nov 2013
• views: 2486

Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, (1840-1893), born in Votkinsk, Russia was the most popular Russian composer of all time. His music has always had great appeal for the general public in virtue of its tuneful, open-hearted melodies, impressive harmonies, and colorful, picturesque orchestration, all of which evoke a profound emotional response. His works includes 7 symphonies, 11 operas, 3 ballets, 5 suites, 3 piano concertos, a violin concerto, 11 overtures, 4 cantatas, 20 choral works, 3 string quartets, a string sextet, and more than 100 songs and piano pieces. Tchaikovsky was born into a family of five brothers and one sister. He began taking piano lessons at age four and showed remarkable talent, eventually surpassing his own teacher's abilities. By age nine, he exhibited severe nervous problems, not least because of his overly sensitive nature. The following year, he entered the prestigious Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, a boarding institution for young boys, where he spent nine years. He proved a diligent and successful student who was popular among his peers. At age 17 Tchaikovsky came under the influence of the Italian singing instructor Luigi Piccioli, the first person to appreciate his musical talents, and thereafter Tchaikovsky developed a lifelong passion for Italian music. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni proved another revelation that deeply affected his musical taste. In the summer of 1861 he traveled outside Russia for the first time, visiting Germany, France, and England, and in October of that year he began attending music classes offered by the recently founded Russian Musical Society. When St. Petersburg Conservatory opened the following fall, Tchaikovsky was among its first students. After making the decision to dedicate his life to music, he resigned from the Ministry of Justice, where he had been employed as a clerk. He spent nearly three years at St. Petersburg Conservatory, studying harmony and counterpoint with musical theorist Nikolay Zaremba and composition and instrumentation with pianist, composer and conductor Anton Rubinstein. After graduating in December 1866, the composer relocated to Moscow, accepting a professorship of harmony at the new conservatory, and shortly afterward turned out his First Symphony. His opera The Voyevoda came in 1867-1868 and he began another, The Oprichnik, in 1870, completing it two years later. Other works were appearing during this time, as well, including the First String Quartet (1871), the Second Symphony (1873), and the ballet Swan Lake (1875). In 1876, Tchaikovsky traveled to Paris with his brother, Modest, and then visited Bayreuth, where he met Franz Liszt. By 1877, Tchaikovsky was an established composer. This was the year of Swan Lake's premiere and the time he began work on the Fourth Symphony. In the summer of 1877 Tchaikovsky married Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova, an obsessed admirer but their disastrous union lasted just months. Near the end of that year, Nadezhda von Meck, a woman he would never meet, became his patron and frequent correspondent. Further excursions abroad came in the 1880s, along with a spate of successful compositions, including the Serenade for Strings (1881), 1812 Overture (1882), and the Fifth Symphony (1888). In both 1888 and 1889, Tchaikovsky went on successful European tours as a conductor, meeting Johannes Brahms, Edvard Grieg, Antonín Dvořák, Charles-François Gounod, and other notable musical figures. Sleeping Beauty was premiered in 1890, and The Nutcracker in 1892, both with great success. He then wrote his Sixth Symphony, Pathétique, in 1893, and it was successfully premiered in October, that year. For most of the 20th century, critics were profoundly unjust in their severe pronouncements regarding Tchaikovsky's life and music. During his lifetime, Russian musicians attacked his style as insufficiently nationalistic. In the Soviet Union, however, he became an official icon, of whom no adverse criticism was tolerated; by the same token, no in-depth studies were made of his personality. But in Europe and North America, Tchaikovsky often was judged on the basis of his sexuality, and his music was interpreted as the manifestation of his deviance. His life was portrayed as an incessant emotional turmoil, his character as morbid, hysterical, or guilt-ridden, and his works were proclaimed vulgar, sentimental, and even pathological. This interpretation was the result of a fallacy that over the course of decades projected the current perception of homosexuality onto the past. Romeo and Juliet (Fantasy Overture) Performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra Eugene Ormandy, Conductor