Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture / The Tempest, Op. 18 / Romeo & Juliet - Fantasy Overture / Marche slave, Op. 31

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Tchaikovsky completed his fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet shortly before his 30th birthday and with it laid the foundations for his international reputation as a composer. Based on Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name, it owed its inspiration - curiously enough - to a suggestion by Mily Balakirev, the leader of the group of St. Petersburg composers known as the "Mighty Handful", who generally wrote off their Moscow colleague as a "badly brought-up academic" with "westernized" views. According to an entry in his diary for 1886, Tchaikovsky was "certainly no lover of Shakespeare", yet he was immediately captivated by this tragic tale of two lovers struggling to find happiness in a hostile world.

The work was sketched out in full by November 1869. Balakirev examined its main themes and criticized both the introduction (Friar Laurence) and the allegro theme that depicts the struggle for supremacy between the Capulets and Montagues. The love theme, on the other hand, met with his approval: "I play it very often, and I want very much to kiss you for it. Here is tenderness and the sweetness of love." That the work was close to Tchaikovsky's heart is clear from the fact that he twice revised it, once during the summer of 1870 and again during the autumn of 1880. The music critic Vladimir Stasov felt that in writing Romeo and Juliet Tchaikovsky had caught to perfection the spirit of the Mighty Handful: "Until now you were five," he exclaimed euphorically; "now you are six." But the composer also had to contend with harsh criticism, with Eduard Hanslick, for example, complaining after a performance in Vienna in 1876: "Is all this supposed to represent Romeo and Juliet? we exclaim in our disappointment at the end of the overture. Take at random any Adagio by Mozart or Beethoven and you'll find in it a more apt illustration of Shakespeare's tragedy." But such polemics could not halt the triumphant progress of a work in which the composer's artistic personality first finds its fullest expression.

In 1872 Tchaikovsky was still in favour with the Mighty Handful. Although the situation was not to last, the group was so taken by his Second Symphony that "they nearly tore me to pieces," he told his brother Modest. And it was in the wake of this mood of elation that Stasov encouraged Tchaikovsky to write a second Shakespearean overture "as a worthy pendant to Romeo and Juliet". His choice fell on The Tempest. Dispossessed by his brother, Prospero lives on an enchanted isle together with his daughter Miranda, the "ayrie spirit" Ariel and his slave Caliban. One day his brother sails past the island and Prospero conjures up a storm that causes the ship to founder. Among the voyagers cast ashore are a prince, Ferdinand, who falls in love with Miranda and marries her. Prospero finally regains his dukedom and, renouncing his magic, leaves the island for ever.

"I think this would be something well suited to your muse," Stasov wrote in the context of the love scenes, and these episodes certainly inspired Tchaikovsky to produce some of his finest music. He sketched out the whole work within a matter of days in August 1873, completing it, by his own admission, "without the least effort - just as though I were under the influence of some supernatural force". It was to this work that he later owed his association with his patron Nadezhda von Meck and, as a result, was able to secure his material existence. Artistically, too, the overture was a huge success. Admittedly, the critic Herman Laroche - often held out as the "Russian Hanslick" - complained that it came perilously close to the "evils of programme music", but it was precisely this that earned it the approval of the members of the Mighty Handful. Stasov, its dedicatee, was captivated: "In both love scenes, what passion, what languor, what beauty! I know nothing to compare with it. The wild, uncouth Caliban, the wonderful flights of Ariel - these are creations of the first order!"

In writing these two works, Tchaikovsky succeeded in creating two magisterial symphonic poems in his own distinctive musical idiom. They were followed in 1876 by a further piece with a programmatical content: the Slavonic March (also known as the Marche slave). Commissioned by the Russian Music Society, it was written for a benefit concert for the Red Cross. The background to the work was the war between Serbia and Turkey which in Russia in 1875-76 produced a wave of sympathy for the downtrodden Slavs. A sense of solidarity prompted the Russians to offer humanitarian aid and in 1877 the country even entered the war against the Turkish aggressors.

The Slavonic March proved spectacularly successful at its first performance in Moscow in November 1876 and immediately had to be repeated. This probably had more to do with the Russian public's general enthusiasm for the idea of Panslavism than with the artistic aspirations of a piece that draws for its musical substance on two authentic Serbian songs and quotes the Tsarist national anthem in its patriotic peroration as a token of Russia's faith in a victorious outcome to the war. Nadezhda von Meck thought highly of the work's nationalist message and dubbed its composer "the pride of Russia". "I have no words adequate to describe the feeling that assailed me as I listened to it," she wrote after hearing the work for the first time; "it was such bliss that tears came to my eyes."

Four years later Tchaikovsky was invited to write another ceremonial piece to mark a patriotic event, in this case the forthcoming inauguration of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. "There is nothing less to my liking than composing for the sake of some festivity or other," he told Nadezhda von Meck in the autumn of 1880. Even so, it took him only a few weeks to complete a sizeable score, the Ouverture solennelle "1812".

Programmatically speaking, the work takes as its starting point Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812, an escapade that ended in a catastrophic defeat for the French. It begins by depicting a state of perfect peace, but the population gradually falls prey to fear and unease, as the Marseillaise interposes its fanfare-like strains, announcing the arrival of the French troops. The Russian people fight back. As in the Slavonic March, the work climaxes in a statement of the Tsarist national anthem, here accompanied by cannon fire and pealing bells as a glorious symbol of victory.

"The overture will be very loud and noisy," Tchaikovsky told Nadezhda von Meck, "but I wrote it with no warm feeling of love, and therefore there will probably be no artistic merit to it." It is impossible to tell from the available sources what impression the work made at its first performance in Moscow in August 1882. We do know, however, that Tchaikovsky himself conducted a performance in 1890, suggesting that in the final analysis he trusted his own intuitive assessment of the work as expressed in a letter to his publisher: "I simply do not know whether my overture ('1812') is good or bad, but it's probably the former ..."
(Bernd Wiechert)