This violin concerto was the best thing to come of a very bad marriage. In May 1877, Tchaikovsky received a letter from Antonina Milyukova, a former student he couldn’t remember, who said she was madly in love with him. Earlier that year, Tchaikovsky had entered into an extraordinary relationship, conducted entirely by correspondence, with Nadezhda von Meck, and he found this combination of intellectual intimacy and physical distance ideal. In order to keep his homosexuality from the public, he impulsively seized on the convenient, though unpromising, idea of marriage to a woman he didn’t even know. On June 1, Tchaikovsky visited Antonina Milyukova for the first time; a day or two later, he proposed. The marriage lasted less than three months, but it must have seemed a lifetime.
On October 13, Anatoly, one of the composer’s younger twin brothers, took Tchaikovsky on an extended trip to Europe. His thoughts quickly turned to composing, confirming what he wrote to Nadezhda von Meck during the very worst days: “My heart is full. It thirsts to pour itself out in music.” He returned to composition cautiously, beginning with the works that had been interrupted by the unfortunate encounter with Antonina: He completed the Fourth Symphony in January 1878 and finished Eugene Onegin the next month.
By March, he had recovered his old strength. He settled briefly in Clarens, Switzerland, and there, in the span of 11 days, he sketched a new work—a violin concerto in D major; he completed the scoring two weeks later. When he returned to Russia in late April, there were still lingering difficulties, but the worst year of his life was over.
The Violin Concerto was launched by a visit to Clarens from Tchaikovsky’s student and friend—and possible lover—the violinist Yosif Kotek, who arrived at Tchaikovsky’s door with a suitcase full of music. (Kotek had been a witness at Tchaikovsky’s wedding.) The next day they played through Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, and Tchaikovsky was immediately taken with the idea of writing a large work for violin and orchestra. He liked the way that Lalo “does not strive after profundity, but carefully avoids routine, seeks out new forms, and thinks more about musical beauty than about observing established traditions, as do the Germans.” He plunged in at once, and found to his delight that music came to him easily. Each day, Kotek offered advice on violinistic matters, and he learned the score page by page as Tchaikovsky wrote it. On April 1, when the work was completely sketched, they played through the concerto for Anatoly’s twin brother, Modest. Both Yosif and Modest thought the slow movement was weak. Four days later, Tchaikovsky wrote a new one, immediately began scoring the work, and unveiled the finished product on April 11. Clearly, he was back on track.
New problems awaited Tchaikovsky, however. Although the concerto was dedicated to the great violinist Leopold Auer and the premiere was already advertised for the following March 22, Auer stunned the composer by dismissing the piece as unplayable. Tchaikovsky was deeply wounded, and the premiere was postponed indefinitely. “Coming from such an authority,” Tchaikovsky said, Auer’s rejection “had the effect of casting this unfortunate child of my imagination into the limbo of the hopelessly forgotten.”
Two years passed. Then one day, Tchaikovsky’s publisher informed him that Adolf Brodsky, a young violinist, had learned the concerto and persuaded Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic to play it in concert. That performance, in December 1881, was no doubt horrible, as the orchestra, under-rehearsed and reading from parts chock full of mistakes, played quietly throughout to avert disaster. Reviewing the concerto, the often ill-tempered critic Eduard Hanslick wrote that, for the first time, he realized that there was music “whose stink one can hear.” Tchaikovsky never got over that review, and, for the rest of his life, it is said, he could quote it by heart. Although Hanslick stood by his opinion, Auer later admitted that the concerto was merely difficult, not unplayable, and he taught it to his students, including Mischa Elman and Jascha Heifetz, who both played it in Chicago.
Even Auer had to admit that Hanslick’s comment “did credit neither to his good judgment nor to his reputation as a critic.” “The concerto has made its way in the world,” he wrote years later, after it had, in fact, become one of Tchaikovsky’s most beloved works, “and, after all, that is the most important thing. It is impossible to please everybody.”
When Victor Hartmann died at the age of 39, little did he know that the pictures he left behind—the legacy of an undistinguished career as artist and architect—would live on. The idea for an exhibition of Hartmann’s work came from Vladimir Stassov, the influential critic who organized a show in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1874. But it was Modest Mussorgsky, so shocked at the unexpected death of his dear friend, who set out to make something of this loss.
Stassov’s memorial show gave Mussorgsky the idea for a suite of piano pieces that depicted the composer “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly, in order to come closer to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly, thinking of his departed friend.” Mussorgsky chose 11 of Hartmann’s works for his set of piano pieces, working feverishly that spring, and by June 22, 1874, Pictures from an Exhibition was finished. There’s no record of a public performance of Pictures in Mussorgsky’s lifetime. It was left to Rimsky-Korsakov, the musical executor of Mussorgsky’s estate, to edit the manuscript and bring Pictures to the light of day.
The thought of orchestrating Pictures evidently never occurred to Mussorgsky. But it has intrigued musicians ever since his death, and over the years several have tried their hand at turning Mussorgsky’s black-and-white pieces into full color. The earliest was that of Rimsky-Korsakov’s student, Mikhail Tushmalov, conducted (and most likely improved) by the teacher himself. (The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first performances, in 1920, were of this version.) In 1915, Sir Henry Wood, an eminent British conductor, produced a version that was popular until Maurice Ravel unveiled his orchestration in 1922. Ravel was already sensitive to Mussorgsky’s style from his collaboration with Igor Stravinsky on an edition of Khovanshchina in 1913, and, since most of his own orchestral works started out as piano scores, the process of transcription was second nature to him. Ravel remained as faithful as possible to the original; only in the final Great Gate of Kiev did he add a few notes of his own to Mussorgsky’s.
Mussorgsky referred to Pictures as “an album series,” implying a random, ad hoc collection of miniatures, but the score is a coherently designed whole, organized around a recurring theme and judiciously paced to progress from short pieces to a longer, majestic finale. We don’t know when Mussorgsky settled on the overall layout of his picture series, but a letter he wrote to Stassov suggests that he had worked on at least the first five in order, and apparently had the entire set in mind when he started. Mussorgsky begins with a promenade, which takes him into the gallery and later accompanies him as he walks around the room, reflecting a change in mood from one picture to another.
A word about our title. Pictures at an Exhibition has long been the traditional English title for this score, but Pictures from an Exhibition is a more accurate translation of Mussorgsky’s original title in Russian, Kartinki s vïstavki, and now the preferred treatment by The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the industry standard.
—Phillip Huscher