For all Tchaikovsky’s heart-on-sleeve Romanticism and intimately revealing correspondence with his patron and confidante, Nadezhda von Meck, much about the man and his music remains enigmatic. The composer’s characteristically ecstatic effusions masked an inner life racked by anguish and self-doubt. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, he produced a string of sunny and extroverted works, including the brilliant Violin Concerto, the tub-thumping 1812 Overture, and the incandescent Serenade for Strings. Yet the same period saw the composition of the Fourth Symphony, with its portentous “fate” motif, and the opera Eugene Onegin, whose tragic overtones mirrored Tchaikovsky’s unhappy marriage. By the time he appeared at the opening of Carnegie Hall in 1891, he was one of the most celebrated musicians in the world. Two years later, shortly after conducting the first performance of his “Pathétique” Symphony, he died under mysterious circumstances.
Tchaikovsky was in the throes of composing his first ballet, Swan Lake, when he received an unusual request toward the end of 1875: The editor of a monthly music magazine in St. Petersburg, no doubt seeking to boost circulation, asked him to write a dozen short character pieces to be published serially over the coming year. Busy as he was, Tchaikovsky evidently decided that the commission was worth his while and set to work at once; all 12 movements of The Seasons were finished by the time he left to cover the premiere of Wagner’s Ring cycle in Bayreuth that summer as a critic for a Moscow newspaper. Following on the heels of the First Piano Concerto, The Seasons suite was one of several programmatic works Tchaikovsky produced around that time, including the symphonic fantasias Romeo and Juliet and Francesca da Rimini.
The Seasons is among Tchaikovsky’s finest contributions to the distinctively Romantic genre of the character piece. The first movement swiftly transports the listener to Robert Schumann’s sound world, with its delicately nuanced harmonies and yearning, almost obsessive reiteration of a falling five-note figure in the middle section. (In 1878, Tchaikovsky would pay homage to Schumann more explicitly in a set of 24 easy piano pieces titled Album pour enfants.)
Like most of the other 11 pieces, “At the Fireside” is in simple A-B-A song form, but despite the work’s uncomplicated emotional appeal, there is nothing simple about the means Tchaikovsky uses to achieve it. Throughout the remainder of the numbers, his music is stylistically sophisticated and highly varied, from the Slavic melancholy of the “Song of the Lark,” with its chirruping grace notes, to the gay Christmas waltz that brings the year to a close. Tchaikovsky shows his mastery of tone painting in such touches as the pearly arpeggios of “White Nights,” like twilight reflected on water, and the slashing rhythms of “The Reaper’s Song,” in which one can almost hear the swing of the scythe.
Highly strung and relentlessly driven, Scriabin shattered the mold of musical Romanticism much as Liszt had done. As both composer and pianist, he combined a wide-ranging intellect and a tendency to mystical idealism with an exceptional sensitivity to tonal nuance. In addition to his formidably challenging piano works, he is best known for the luxuriantly orchestrated Poem of Ecstasy and the ballet Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, which illustrated his theory of the synesthetic equivalence between colors and musical keys.
The Fourth Sonata departs from the Lisztian idiom of Scriabin’s earlier piano works. Its two highly compressed movements take less than half as long to play as the four-movement Third Sonata, anticipating the single-span structures of his later works. The tenderly ruminative Andante in F-sharp major segues seamlessly into the tempestuous Prestissimo volando (“flying as fast as possible”) by way of three widely spaced B-major chords. The sonata’s emotional trajectory is outlined in a prose poem that Scriabin admittedly “put together after the fact, based on the music.” The opening image of a distant star twinkling softly through “gentle mists” is transformed into an emblem of “deep, mad yearning” as the music soars to a rapturous love-death climax, ultimately drowning in a “sea of light.”
Prokofiev spent much of his life balancing precariously between two extremes, his music being regarded as too advanced by some and too conservative by others. He rose to fame before World War I as a leader of the Russian avant-garde on the strength of such driving, acerbically dissonant works as the Scythian Suite—his answer to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring—and the Second Piano Concerto, both written when he was in his early 20s. Prokofiev tapped a more poetic vein during the war with smaller-scale works like the delicately impressionistic Visions fugitives for solo piano. At the same time, he anticipated the clear-textured neoclassicism of the 1920s in his effervescent “Classical” Symphony, which he described as the kind of music Haydn would have written if he had lived in the early 20th century.
Like the Sixth and Eighth sonatas, the Seventh was born of the traumatic upheavals of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Distracted by other major projects, including his operatic version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the ballet Cinderella, Prokofiev labored over the score for more than three years as the Nazi Wehrmacht besieged Leningrad and the Soviet Union mobilized for total war. Along with other honored Soviet artists, Prokofiev spent much of the war safely sequestered in sanctuaries in the Soviet hinterland. A few of the works he composed during this period, such as the lighthearted Flute (or Violin) Sonata in D Major of 1943, reflect his insulation from the conflict. Not so the Seventh Piano Sonata. Sviatoslav Richter, who premiered the sonata in Moscow on January 18, 1943, observed that “with this work we are brutally plunged into the anxiously threatening atmosphere of a world that has lost its balance. Chaos and uncertainty reign.”
Both the sonata’s turbulence and its emotional intensity are signposted in the tempo markings of the three movements: inquieto (“troubled, restless”), caloroso (“warm”), and precipitato (“headlong, rushed”). The Allegro inquieto, a macabre dance of death, contains some of most dissonant and aggressively percussive music Prokofiev ever wrote; even the slightly fantastical lyricism of the quiet interludes is more unsettling than comforting. The Andante caloroso, with its yearning cantabile theme swaddled in softly pulsating chords, is as gentle as the first movement is bombastic. The music surges to an anguished climax, characterized by slashing dissonances and bravura passagework, before collapsing in exhaustion. For a finale, Prokofiev gives us a short, breathlessly propulsive toccata with a distinctly jazzy feel in both its harmonies and its irregular 7/8 meter.
—Harry Haskell