Themes, dancing and drama

PETER ILICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)

Tchaikovsky was the son of a mining engineer and was born in Kamsko-Votkinsk,Viatka Province on April 25 (Julian)/May 7 (Gregorian), 1840.

    Always very close to his family, Tchaikovsky wrote a parlor entertainment for his sister Alexandra's children, entitled "The Ballet of the Swans". This ca. 1871 sketchwork contained thematic material that was later to be incorporated into the score of Swan Lake. The composer's interest in creating a score for ballet seems to have begun in 1870, when the Moscow Theaters accepted a libretto based on Cinderella for production. His "Swans" may have been a flexing of the compositional muscle toward the genre. Tchaikovsky did compose a few pieces of music for it, but his full-evening Cinderella was never completed. The fragments may have surfaced in other works.

    In 1875, Tchaikovsky was paid 800 rubles by the Moscow Theaters to compose a ballet on knightly themes with a libretto by Begichev, the manager of the Bolshoi. Work began in August of that year and was largely complete by April 1896. The score was sophisticated and symphonistic; it was not as easily approached as the more dansant scores of Ludwig Minkus and Cesare Pugni and was soon in tatters from the attentions of the old-fashioned choreographer Julius Reisinger, whose stock-in-trade seems to have been copying ballets from Paul Taglioni, brother of the creator of La Sylphide.

    A popularly-held legend about Reisinger and ballerina Pelagia Karpakova interpolating numbers by Pugni seems to be refuted by recent work that uncovered Tchaikovsky's insistence that the whole evening's music be his. The composer even went so far as to write a pas de deux to replace music for one written especially for the ballerina by Minkus and choreographed for her by Marius Petipa. This pas de deux is now known as the Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, with choreography by George Balanchine.

The composer began his long-term, long-distance relationship with his patroness Nadezhda von Meck shortly after the Swan Lake score was completed. Their realtionship will be covered in articles on Sleeping Beauty to which she is more related than to this work.

    Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the great theater reformer, had been in negotiations with Tchaikovsky since 1886 to revive at least a portion of the early score and these negotiations led first to the score for Sleeping Beauty, and then to The Nutcracker. The stories of the composition of these two works will be found under their own headings. For a thumbnail summary of the activity surrounding the 1895 revision of the score, see "Productions" under this heading.

    Tchaikovsky's life had been characterized by wide mood swings and his death on October 25th/November 6th 1893 in St. Petersburg has long been attributed to self-induced cholera during a depression following the mild reception of his Symphony #6 in b (Pathetique) Op. 74. It has lately been alleged, on strong evidence, to have been the result of suicide by arsenic poisoning ordered by his college fraternity(!) brought on by the threat of exposure of a homosexual romance with a member of the Imperial Household.

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