I believe many, like myself, might have returned to Tchaikovsky
in later life to rediscover and appreciate his music that much
more after first encountering him in our youth. Those first experiences
were when his melodies appealed immediately to our relatively
untrained ears and when the passions of the music seemed to relate
to our more raw, more immature emotions. Afterwards we moved
on to discover what we may have thought, then, to be more sophisticated,
more challenging material. Christopher Nupen says something similar,
in his introductory notes to his films: “… in my
infinite stupidity I looked down my nose at the music of Pyotr
Ilyich Tchaikovsky, thus alienating myself from his magic ...
it was fashionable at the time … to be superior about Tchaikovsky’s
music … The pendulum, thank heavens, has begun to swing
again …”
Nupen’s films encourage us to look afresh at Tchaikovsky’s
tormented life. Through an unerringly apposite selection of readings
from Tchaikovsky’s letters and other writings his commentary
sharply focuses on the composer’s tormented life, his loneliness,
guilt and anguish and his feelings of alienation due to his homosexuality.
In the first film,
Tchaikovsky’s Women, Nupen covers
Tchaikovsky’s heightened sensitivity and his fraught relationships
with women beginning with his close, obsessive attachment to
his mother. This includes the famous story of how, when he was
a small boy, he clung to the wheels of his mother’s carriage
when she left him at his boarding school. Nupen, aided by Ashkenazy’s
sympathetic, emotionally-charged performances of well chosen
excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s
The Storm,
Romeo
and Juliet and
Francesca da Rimini, demonstrate how
the composer so closely empathized with the plight and anguish
of his heroines: Katerina, Juliet and Francesca respectively.
Cynthia Harvey, in dance, exquisitely expresses the anguish of
Katerina, Juliet and
Swan Lake’s Odette. Clara Bartha
sings Donna Anna, another suffering female, in Mozart’s
Don
Giovanni, a work that had a profound influence on Tchaikovsky.
The visuals in this first film are appropriately close and darkly
lit.
Tchaikovsky’s Women, climaxes with the composer’s
ill-fated marriage to Antonia Milyukova - how it was precipitated
by the strange coincidence of Milyukova’s pleading love
letters with the simultaneous composition of his opera
Eugene
Onegin and most particularly ‘Tatiana’s Letter
Scene’ in which the young heroine confesses her love for
Onegin. Soprano, Helen Field, nicely demonstrates Tatiana’s
shy passion yet inescapable compulsion.
The second film,
Fate, begins where
Tchaikovsky’s
Women ends. After the trauma of his marriage, another woman
entered his life. Nupen shows how Nadezhda von Meck became, in
effect, a surrogate mother. Strangely, they never met but shared
a growing intimacy in their correspondence. Her patronage relieved
him from financial worries and allowed him to concentrate on
composition. Interestingly Nupen illuminates something of von
Meck’s background in that she felt guilty about an affair
she had had; an affair which she felt contributed to her husband’s
death. The visuals in this second film are more restrictive concentrating
on portraits of the composer ageing through to 1893, the year
of his death, manuscripts and scores. There’s also extensive
film of Ashkenazy conducting excerpts from Symphonies 4, ‘Manfred’,
5 and 6. Nupen underlines how Tchaikovsky became increasingly
preoccupied with the idea of a malignant fate stalking his life.
More positively he thought much of his 4
th Symphony,
about Fate, declaring it to be for himself and von Meck. But
then he disparaged his 5
th Symphony, claiming it to
be far inferior to his 4
th. Nupen suggests, quite
reasonably, that Tchaikovsky was drawn to the concept of Byron’s
Manfred because
of its connotations of forbidden love: incest in Byron’s
case and homosexuality in Tchaikovsky’s.
Manfred is
epitomized by a dark and anguished theme and it is interesting
that, once again, Tchaikovsky reserves his most sympathetic and
appealing music for Byron’s misused heroine, Astarte. Most
anguished of all is the story of the difficult development of
the 6
th ‘Pathétique’ Symphony which
at length Tchaikovsky recognized to be his masterpiece. It was
to contain the frankest of his self-portraits and it was not
a little to do with an acceptance of his fate and the imminence
of death - a fate that was awaiting him just around the corner.
Revelatory films focusing exclusively on torment with no relief
to include coverage of the lighter works such as
Capriccio
Italien, Souvenir de Florence, Mozartiana or the
Rococo
Variations.
A frank and harrowing portrait of a misunderstood and, still,
a too little appreciated genius.
Ian Lace
Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Vladimir
Ashkenazy (conductor and solo pianist) 
[2
DVDs: 70:15 + 85:35] 
