Tchaikovsky - His Life and Music (guidebook).pdf - Czajkowski - życie i muzyka - darek795

Great Masters:

Tchaikovsky  His Life and

Music

Professor Robert Greenberg

T HE T EACHING C OMPANY ®

Robert Greenberg, Ph.D.

San Francisco Conservatory of Music

Robert Greenberg has composed over forty works for a wide variety of

instrumental and vocal ensembles. Recent performances of Greenberg’s work

have taken place in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, England,

Ireland, Italy, Greece, and The Netherlands, where his Child’s Play for string

quartet was performed at the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam in 1993.

Professor Greenberg holds degrees from Princeton University and the

University of California at Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in music

composition in 1984. His principal teachers were Edward Cone, Claudio Spies,

Andrew Imbrie, and Olly Wilson.

Professor Greenberg’s awards include three Nicola De Lorenzo prizes in

composition, three Meet the Composer grants, and commissions from the

Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Alexander String

Quartet, XTET, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the

Dancer’s Stage Ballet Company.

He is currently on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music,

where he is Chair of the Department of Music History and Literature and

Director of Curriculum of the Adult Extension Division.

Professor Greenberg is creator, host, and lecturer for the San Francisco

Symphony’s Discovery Series. The Discovery Series is a special subscription

series in which participants attend four 3-hour lectures over the course of the

concert season on topics that are geared to the repertoire under performance.

Professor Greenberg has taught and lectured extensively across North American

and Europe, speaking to such corporations and musical institutions as Arthur

Andersen and Andersen Consulting, Diamond Technologies, Canadian Pacific,

Strategos Institute, Lincoln Center, the Van Cliburn Foundation, the University

of California/Haas School of Business Executive Seminar, the Commonwealth

Club of San Francisco, and others. His work as a teacher and lecturer has been

profiled in the Wall Street Journal , Inc . magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle ,

and the Times of London. He is an artistic codirector and board member of

COMPOSER, INC. His music is published by Fallen Leaf Press and

CPP/Belwin and is recorded on the Innova Label.

Professor Greenberg has recorded 256 lectures for The Teaching Company,

including the forty-eight–lecture super-course How to Listen to and Understand

Great Music .

Table of Contents

Great Masters:

Tchaikovsky  His Life and Music

Professor Biography ........................................................................................... i

Course Scope ...................................................................................................... 1

Lecture One Introduction and Early Life....................................... 3

Lecture Two A Career in Music ..................................................... 6

Lecture Three The First Masterworks ............................................ 10

Lecture Four Maturity .................................................................. 13

Lecture Five Three Women: Tatyana, Antonina, and

Nadezhda ................................................................ 16

Lecture Six “My Great Friend” .................................................. 18

Lecture Seven “A Free Man”.......................................................... 21

Lecture Eight The Last Years, or Don’t Drink the Water.............. 24

Vocal Text ......................................................................................................... 28

Timeline ............................................................................................................ 29

Glossary ............................................................................................................ 30

Biographical Notes ........................................................................................... 32

Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 34

Great Masters:

Tchaikovsky  His Life and Music

Scope:

When Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony (the so-called Pathétique) was premiered

on October 28, 1893, the composer was at the height of his powers. He had

attained a degree of fame and popularity rarely accorded a living artist. But a

few days later, on November 4, 1893, he lay dying. The facts of his death were

kept from the world for a century by his countrymen. The apparent truth was

that this musical idol had been forced to commit suicide lest he disgrace himself

and his associates by public exposure of his homosexuality.

To know Tchaikovsky’s music, we must be familiar with the details of his life,

because his music, as his Sixth Symphony so abundantly demonstrates, is so

often an intimate confession, a mirror of a personal life tormented by doubt and

sexual anxiety.

Tchaikovsky was an unusually sensitive child, with an abnormal dependency on

his mother and an obsessive love of music. As a child of a nineteenth-century

upper-class Russian family, however, Tchaikovsky’s musical talent was not

particularly encouraged. His parents had him educated for the more “suitable”

profession of the civil service at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St.

Petersburg. It was at school that Tchaikovsky discovered his homosexuality. It

was also while still a schoolboy that Tchaikovsky lost his mother to cholera. Her

death was a shattering experience for the fourteen-year-old Tchaikovsky, and it

found its poignant expression in his later music.

After Tchaikovsky graduated from the School of Jurisprudence, he was

employed as a government clerk but not for long. His obsession with music

eventually won out and he entered the newly founded St. Petersburg

Conservatory. He graduated in 1866 at the age of twenty-six and joined the

teaching faculty at the likewise newly established Moscow Conservatory. In

1868, his First Symphony was premiered. It already possesses the hallmark of

Tchaikovsky’s musical style: formal classical construction coupled with

Romantic expression. For the rest of his career, Tchaikovsky would successfully

tread a fine line between Russian emotional excess and Germanic intellectual

control. He was the only composer in Russia at that time who could combine the

best of Western European technique with his own Russian heritage.

Despite his growing musical success, Tchaikovsky remained prey to self-doubt

about his compositional abilities, to bouts of severe depression, and to anxiety

that his homosexuality would be publicly exposed. His sense of alienation,

brought on by his homosexuality, seems to have turned him inward to a world

of self-expression that he might not otherwise have discovered had he felt less

isolated.

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