Welcome to Big Tent. Live events.
Our new lockdown live online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the humanities cultural programme.
One of the founding stones for the Future. Stephen A. Schwartzmann Centre for the Humanities.
My name is Wes Williams and I'm professor of French Literature here at Oxford.
And I'm also the knowledge exchange champion Torch, the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities.
The Big Tent Live event series is our way of bringing together once a week researchers and students,
performers and practitioners from across the humanities disciplines and indeed from across the world.
We will explore important subjects and ask challenging questions about areas such as the environment,
medical, humanities, ethics and A.I., the public, the private and the common good.
And we will celebrate storytelling, music, performance and identity and also community.
We're bringing you this event programme online to complement social distancing with creative community connexion.
We hope that you're all safe and well during this difficult time. Everyone is welcome in our big tent.
So please make yourself metaphorically as well as literally at home this evening as we explore the work,
the legacy and the questions raised by one of classical music's most popular, but also enigmatic figures whose birthday it happens to be today.
Today, seventh of May marks one hundred 80th anniversary of the birth of Pyotr Ilyich Czajkowski, Russia's most famous 19th century composer.
And as I mentioned, one of those popular classical composers of all places and old times.
To discuss, choke off his life and work, we have with us two experts in the field, Leah Broad and Philip Bullock.
I'll embarrass them both by saying a little more about them.
They work and why we thought it would be good to bring them together this evening before we start.
Before that, I'd like to remind you that if you would like to put forward any questions to us,
because during the event tonight, please put them in the comments box on YouTube.
We encourage you to submit these earliest possible so that we have time to answer as many as possible in the Q&A,
which will follow this additional discussion. In other words, in about half an hour.
Now onto our excellent speakers tonight. It's an honour to host and to welcome Dr. Lee abroad and Professor Philip Bloch.
Live Abroad is a junior research fellow at Christchurch Univ, Oxford University of Oxford.
And a BBC HRC new generation thinker. She specialises in Nordic and British 20th century music and has publications in Music and Letters Journal.
The Royal Musical Association. Tempo Music and the Moving Image.
And 19th Century Music Revue.
Philip Bullock is professor of Russian literature and music at the University of Oxford and fellow and tutor in Russian at Wadham College.
He's also the current director of Torch. And in that role, you will have seen him playing the role that I'm playing today.
His publications include a study of the Russian author Andrei Platonov, and two works focussed on the traveller,
polyglot poet and inspirational friend of some of Europe's leading musicians, from Elga Sebelius and Janacek, namely Rosa.
A new March 1st wrote a new march and Russian music in late 19th and early 20th century England.
And then the correspondence of John, some alias and Rosa New March 19, 06 to 1939.
Phillips most recent study, published in the critical Life series from Reaction Books, is the biography Pyotr Czajkowski.
I think it's clear why we've asked them to come together today to talk.
And this evening lay out and Philip will trace how Czajkowski became such a revered figure.
Ask what it means to to think of him as a Russian composer and more broadly to think
about nationalism and music and explore the challenges of writing musical lives.
Musical biography. So I'll now disappear for your screens for a good while and hand over to Lee to begin the conversation over to Yulia.
Thank you. Thanks, Les. Thank you. And hi, Philip.
It's really good to be with you virtually to have this conversation to celebrate Tchaikovsky's birthday.
So, you know, let's start out with the sort of the broad brush strokes.
Czajkowski is as well, as mentioned, one of the most popular classical composers around.
His pieces are very widely known. He'll always be making it into the classic AFAM Hall of Fame.
So how is it that Tchaikovsky became really the most famous Russian composer of his day?
It's a really good question because really he shouldn't have become a composer at all when he was in 1840.
There was no such profession available in the Russian empire. There was plenty of music making.
There were aristocrats and gentry, gentry families who made music in their houses, in the capitals and in the countryside.
And this bunch of folk music, you couldn't train to be a composer. There weren't any schools or conservatories.
And so Tchaikovsky had a wonderful home education.
He grew up speaking French as well as Russian and was destined for a career in the imperial administration.
And so he goes off to the School of Jurisprudence in Petersburg to try to be a lawyer.
And you might be wondering what changed.
Well, 1859 changed and the establishment of the Russian musical society, which began to put musical life in Russia on a more professional footing.
And along with that came conservatories, first in Pittsburgh and then in Moscow.
And Tchaikovsky went off to study at St. Petersburg Conservatory.
He graduated from it and his first cohort and then went off to become Professor Moscow Conservatory.
And thereafter, he is the central figure in Russian musical life.
He teaches at the Moscow Conservatory, as I said, until 1877 thereafter.
He has important administrative role in lots of the key state institutions when it comes to music making.
And he becomes Russia's court composer. He has a very close relationship with the Romanov dynasty.
He enjoys an imperial pension from making 84, I think.
And he gets commissions for the money and ski theatre. And his works are staged in all of them, the leading ballet and opera houses.
And so he comes to represent Russia musically at the time until his death in 1893.
And indeed, after that, his funeral in 1893 was along with Tolstoy's funeral in 1910,
the biggest public event in the Russian empire witnessed by many.
He was mourned by the whole by whole nation at the time.
And so that's that's really this extraordinary story from a country with no formal musical institutions to one where music was actually central.
And he was the figurehead a little bit, perhaps like some of the stories which shaped Sebelius,
the composer whom you've worked on, and someone who becomes the musical embodiment of his nation.
It's a really key point in its development. Yeah. It must have been quite surreal to be kind of lionised in that way during their lifetime,
because that's not really something that happens to an awful lot of composers. But to achieve that level of fame and certainly, you know,
knowing that everything you write might one day become over by somebody like us must be quite strange feeling.
I think to always be under that kind of level of public scrutiny, really even during his own lifetime,
isn't Tchaikovsky was actually rather a shy person and didn't like the fame
and didn't really like the social obligations that came with his public role.
He was very proud, very patriotic, very keen to be the musical symbol of imperial Russia.
But he didn't like the consequences of that. And he left us about 6000 letters and very extraordinary rich, very literate documents.
And he was always aware that these would be read later.
And I think he carefully constructed his persona both in his own life and certainly in the light of posterity.
So how how would you describe Tchaikovsky's personality? Just just do a little a little flavour of who he was as a person.
Gosh, I mean, he he he can be very funny, very bawdy at times.
The recent publication of his letters to his publisher contains a vast amount of profanity, which I think is a shock for a lot of us.
He was very literate. In fact, when he was a young man, it was really thought he might have a literary career rather than a musical one.
He wrote poetry in French, in Russian.
And he's he's a very, very fluid writer who's capable of giving great detail to his personal experiences to describe his inner emotions.
He was very naturally at home in the world. He read George Eliot. He read Dickens.
He read Tolstoy. And just to escape again. Yes. He was a very fluent person.
We also know he was a very loyal friends to his close friends and capable of great personal intimacy.
We also know, of course, that his private life we may come off in due course was something that did give him some anxiety.
And we can we can trace that. He was also a beloved uncle in his family to his nieces, nephews and a very loyal sibling to his number of siblings.
Let us throw a great deal of light on the domestic life of the Russian gentry in the 19th century and useful from that point of view as well.
So he's got these influences coming from all over the place.
Right. You mentioned Dickens, Eliot, Tolstoy, French writers as well.
But he is very much thought of as a Russian composer.
So what does it kind of mean to call Tchaikovsky a Russian composer?
Because that comes with an awful lot of connotations and baggage around nationalism and how that manifests itself in music.
You're quite you're quite right.
He was certainly proud to call himself a Russian composer and felt that he embodied the Russian people, the Russian state.
Often the Russian empire as well.
His close relationship with the imperial family meant that he was very aware of how his music could serve the cause of of Russian culture,
both within the Russian empire itself and internationally, because alongside his renown within Russia,
he was a fame, a famous figure in Europe and North America in his own lifetime.
So for sure, a Russian composer. But I think he was also very sceptical about being a nationalist in many ways.
He trained at the Petersburg Conservatory.
His teacher was Anton Rubinstein, who believed absolutely a messy primacy of the Austrian German symphonic tradition.
And Tchaikovsky inherited many of those assumptions as well. Look at the works he wrote.
He wrote symphonies, string quartettes, piano sonatas, concertos.
He worked in the mainstream Western European films that had been so refined over
the 18th and early 19th century and aligned himself very much with that school.
So it's important to see him as Russian, but in dialogue with European traditions.
He adored Busways music. It did. Mozart's rather sceptical about Volgin.
But he was always up to date with what was going on in Europe. He spent a lot of time in in France.
He conducted throughout Europe and North America. Those were exposed to developments in those countries.
The final thing I think I'd want to say is we want to juxtapose him with the people who really have the reputation for being a nationalist,
says the Mughal cheque, which got a mighty handful. So black.
Yes, but IDM, Mussorgsky, Cooey, Rudzki Kosaka of those people and Tchaikovsky was a times quite close to them, but generally rather sceptical.
He thought they were a bit unruly, badly educated, spontaneous, brilliant and talented, but really not very disciplined.
And he was quite the opposite. He was extraordinarily disciplined, hard working.
And he applied all of the lessons of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and gave him a Russian inflexion.
So I think we have to be careful about what it means to talk about him as a Russian,
because it's a Russian ness that's always in dialogue and shaped by parallels with what's going on in France and Germany.
And I think that was a predicament that many so-called nationalists faced at the time.
Greig in no way. Sebelius in films that they're always positioning themselves Visa v other traditions.
And I think that's that's what the meat mixing makes some very interesting. Absolutely.
No. This sort of sense of working both in their own centre, but kind of sort of perceived as peripheral.
But only when you were in Germany or Austria.
But actually, when you look at them from their own countries, they're the centre and everyone else is looking out.
And suddenly the dynamics have to change quite significantly. So let's take a bit more of an international perspective then.
So how does Czajkowski, as a Russian composer, become so popular in the UK?
Because he really is a very, very popular figure in the UK still.
Yes. And this happened actually in his lifetime after 1877, 1878, when he gives up teaching at the Moscow Conservatory.
He embarks on a peripatetic career, spending large amounts of time in Western Europe, composing, thinking, shopping.
He was quite a dandy who loved going around the Paris stores and buying shirts, ties and providing shoes.
And in these European trips, he often conducts his own works.
And that was a really good calling card for a composer to be had to conduct
your own repertoire to turn up with the schools and play the full symphony,
the Fifth Symphony, the Sixth Symphony, either the Symphonic Works, 1812 Overture,
all of these things was a really good way to get your music known yourself.
He visited England several times. He came first in 1888,
and the most triumphant visit was in 1893 when he was awarded an honorary doctorate from
Cambridge and performed Francesca dreamily with the Cambridge University Orchestra.
It's a rather daunting work now for any orchestra. So imagine that student thinking can go ahead.
Yeah. I hate to think. And he was well-received in Britain.
There was a kind of broader Russum mania at this at this period.
So genius novels, Tolstoy's novels, Dusty the eskies novels were translated and read very enthusiastically.
And we can trace that back to the Crimean War. So after the defeat of Russia in 1855 by by France and Britain,
both France and Britain actually embark on a very long period of trying to get to know that former enemy and also their imperial rival.
Because remember, Russia is a very fast empire whose territories are impinging upon British, India and Persia.
And so Russia becomes an object of fascination and Tchaikovsky's music gets caught up in that.
So he's visiting. He's conducting. There's a broader interest in.
Music and I think we counsels downplay the role of individuals here.
So the conductor of the problems, Henry Wood, was married to a Russian Olga.
And it's a bit reductive to say it was just because of that.
But would love Russian music programme, the loss of this in Queens, school proms, concerts.
And so already from 1897, we see a loss of Tchaikovsky is the most popular Russian composer in the repertoire.
One enough would like to perform there and become popular. And in the first season of the Patriotic Symphony is performed three times alone.
And the Battiste features multiple times in every season for the next decades, along with lots of other works by Tchaikovsky.
There was a Russian light every week in the problems in those early years, and it's really a mania.
And his music is pretty ubiquitous. And whilst lots of people love this and it's very popular with paying audiences, Codal,
the British composers get very grumpy because they're really keen to see their work at the problems and instead hears this sort of upstart,
beardie Russian with his hot-Headed music who's sort of swaying the heads of
impressionable audiences with all of this rather exotic new fangled music,
at least for the story of British composers throughout the 20th century, just being slightly annoyed that somebody else's music is being played well.
So let's come to the people who then haven't been celebrating Tchaikovsky quite as enthusiastically, as you mentioned before, about his sexuality.
And this has been a somewhat contentious issue. So how has his sexuality shaped Czajkowski, its reception?
Yes. Well, I think the important thing is a lifetime it was acknowledged and his own social circles,
it was an open secret amongst the Russian artistic intelligentsia, cultural world and indeed the imperial family.
One of the remarkable things about 19th century Russia is quite how many of the Grand Dukes of the Roman dynasty
were themselves gay by their exclusively or through bisexuality or through being married and having a private life,
which was a homosexual one. Tchaikovsky is certainly part of this.
The gay demi mones of 19th century Russia.
His schoolmates say are pushing a rather fine but minor poet was actually a rather flamboyant out gay man in 19th century Petersburg.
And take us. He's not that he's much more cautious, much more coy about his private life.
But it was it was well-known and it didn't pose any problem for his public reputation in large measure.
And as his music gained popularity in the West, that is not known.
His music appears as Russian music, as Tchaikovsky's music.
But after his death in 1993, rumours do begin to circulate about.
About his private life. And they begin to appear in print in coded form.
People stop talking about it. It's effeminate qualities or it's deviancy or it's perversion or is melancholy.
There's a whole sort of medicalized language of sexuality which begins to surround the critical reception of his music.
And I think we can't underestimate the impact of the Oscar Wilde trials in 1895 in Britain.
And so when Wilde goes on trial and his personal life is revealed in all its glory detail on the pages of the British press,
Tchaikovsky gets sort of his reputation, gets caught up in dance and people begin to rethink his music.
It becomes very, very freighted with a rather critical set of discourses about its perverseness, its decadence, its neurosis.
And that persists throughout the 20th century. It reaches its high point or low points, depending on your taste.
In 1970, when Ken Russell makes his completely extraordinary film, The Music Makers, which is one of those pieces of art, are so bad that good,
which which is, I think, more to do with British fascination with sex lives of composers and artists than anything to do with Tchaikovsky.
So I think we have to separate out Ken Russell from Tchaikovsky here and throughout the 20th century was a lot of negative thinking about Tchaikovsky.
So we put this paradoxical situation in which his music has always been popular.
It's never had a critical down a popular down time with audiences.
It's always been in the repertoire. But in critical terms, it was not liked.
It was not written about it was seen as overblown over romantic, neurotic hyperbole, hyper individualistic and linked to his sexuality.
And it was really only in the late 80s, the 1990s, when we began to rethink a lot of those premises,
know some brilliant foundational work done by American and emigre Russian scholars who told us to hear things in another way.
And it's an ongoing process. It's still rather difficult in contemporary Russia to to raise the importance of talking about Tchaikovsky's sexuality.
Not an appropriate way, not in a reductive way, but just in an open and honest way to acknowledge the fact of his his biography.
And we could perhaps just go back in time to think about the pathetic symphony and why his private life became so actualised.
He performs his wonderful symphony, the Sixth Symphony, the parties he can Petersburg in October 1893, and he dies nine days later of cholera.
And the symphony is retrospectively seen as a as a prophecy of his own death, his own mortality, and then becomes reinterpreted as a suicide note.
There are very spurious claims about what led to his death, none of which really stuck out very much.
And so his his works get reinterpreted in this way.
I find that enormously unhelpful. Which is great for mythmaking and biographies, but it's really not very helpful particularly.
But fortunately,
public have good ears and sensible minds and they know to read the right books and to cut through all the mystery making and the myself wolfie.
I'm thinking more broadly about this.
I think it's interesting to think about Tchaikovsky's reception in the context of late 19th century Europe on Nordic culture.
This is the world of Ipsen and female emancipation.
It's the word of Strindberg and these extraordinary dramas about the sexual drive with people of the psychological underworld of bourgeois society.
Even someone like Derald Sebelius, you know, sort of Boulard, craggy, Finnish masculine modernity is I.
Kinkade's union.
You know, it's much, much better than mine to since this Sunday's Seattle assassination was with intimacy, sexuality, eroticism and privacy.
So I think there's a really. Yeah. And something I think sebaceous is so embroiled within that.
Well, and he's also so heavily influenced by Czajkowski. I mean, the first time I have Vegas is by symphony.
I thought it was a Tchaikovsky piece. I didn't know I was sat there going, like, never heard this Czajkowski before.
What what's going on here? It was Sebelius, but so much sort of wrapped up with all these sort of fantasy Eckler ideas about sexuality.
And those are the pieces that don't necessarily get associated with Sebelius so much anymore.
You know, his songs, some of them are incredibly erotic. His 1913 pantomime, Skyrim ish.
That's very, very rarely performed anymore. But it's it's about sex.
It's considered in its head when it's performed in its own time, incredibly erotic.
It has all these kind of connotations of decadence, exactly the same as you're talking about with Czajkowski.
And then you have the symphonies tend to have a somewhat different reception.
But I think with both of these composers, they have these fascinating lives.
And as you say, it does sometimes get mapped onto the music. And you've written a biography of Czajkowski.
So, you know these sort of pitfalls as much as anyone. But how useful do you find it to talk about biography?
When we talk about music. Gosh, I mean, how long have we got?
Right. So that's the easy question. Oh, that's a softball one that I think actually one of the nicest reviews of my book when it came out,
talked about the undertow of scepticism that I had about life, writing and biography when it came to Czajkowski.
And I was really pleased that because I loved writing the book, but I also I struggled.
I began my academic career as a formalist. I wanted to set aside biography, social context.
I was interested in politics in form. And I say this is still strong, possibly,
which is absolutely fascinated by the nuts and bolts of how works of art function as little machines and objects.
I think in writing the life, I was keen to foreground that aspect of Tchaikovsky.
Just the sheer inventive brilliance of the works on the technical level and the legacy that they left for Mahler,
for Sebelius or Elga, for for Stravinsky, for Britain, for a whole host of 20th century.
But you're right, I couldn't get round the life. And I enjoy digging into the life and getting to know a little bit of the personality.
And I think I felt a great importance of telling the story truthfully, accurately, in a non sensational way.
And I'm not feeling that I wanted to overdo it. But also not feeling that I should be shy about talking about the complexity of his personal life.
We have to admit that this is a composer who married very rashly and unwisely in
order to silence some of the brewing public discussion of his personal life,
who left his life very quickly, abandoned her, no less,
paid her substantial alimony for the rest of the rest of his life and who left out his private life.
Like many well-born, aristocratic, wealthy gay men in the 19th century, through the sex trade, by visiting sex workers in Paris and Vienna.
And what needs to be upfront about that? ASMs and to talk about the past also because talking about the past is also about talking about the presence.
And this is a subject that is still controversial in some circles and in some countries.
And I think it's important to lay that down.
But to go back to question the balance of biography for understanding the music itself, then I think I remain in many ways a bit of a sceptic.
And here is where we really need Tchaikovsky in the room to have an argument with me,
because he really did actually feel the music was about the outpouring of emotion, that music was about character, it's about personality.
It was strongly linked to what he felt, what he had experienced.
So we I might differ from the subjects of my biography in my own take here.
But I think we do have to be cautious just because of the complexity of the compositional process.
It's one thing to have an idea.
It's another thing to work it out, to sit down and then orchestrate it and then correct the proofs and then to see it's into performance.
I think there's a very long gestation for these works and they may often have a biographical impetus,
but the actual process, when the creative mind takes over the technical skill,
Tchaikovsky's extraordinary technical facility that he had learnt as a student at the Petersberg Conservatoire,
honed as a professor at the Moscow Conservatoire,
where he taught generations of students the same things that he'd learnt and that he learnt by listening to other works.
That, for me, is a really fascinating question of how biography is turned by some extraordinary alchemy of creativity into something
which has its own life and leaves its imprint on the imagination of its listeners and its later interpreters.
So I'm I'm cautious and sceptical, but I think that's never a bad thing for a scholar.
The aim to be right. And also, when you say, you know, compose compositions, that outpouring of emotion,
there's a big difference between talking about emotional connexion and emotional
conveyance in a piece compared to this is a piece about what happened last Thursday.
This is the emotion I was feeling at the time and reading very directly connecting life events through, you know, somebody whose child has just died.
Therefore,
they were terribly sad because competition can be a number of things that doesn't necessarily have to be a sort of directly correlated thing.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And a concrete example would be an opera like you're gaining in you again, which he writes in 1877 78,
set against the backdrop of his disastrous marriage, and he reads the story biographically.
So in an outline that the novel on which the opera is based and novels by Alexander Pushkin involves
a young heroine who meets you again and pulls out her love for him in an unguarded letter,
and he spends her advances and regrets it for the rest of his life.
And it's easy to see that as a biographical autobiographical key, because at this moment,
Tchaikovsky received a letter from Antonina Moluccas, a young students and.
He didn't want to behave like the fictional the Nagan did, so rather than turning down and saying we can't marry Ms.
Don't send outpourings of emotion to men you've never met before, he decided to marry her so we can read it biographically.
But for me, the most brilliant part of the new and other bits, Czajkowski, Czajkowski, is something that isn't him.
So there's a whole plot in which Tatiana goes off and marries dreaming.
There's a fat general who has no life in Pushkin's novel other than just to be a plot device.
And what happens in opera? Greyman is invented as a character.
He has the most beautiful aria in which he sings of the redeeming potential of love in the life of an individual.
Greyman in the opera is an older man, a battle war general who's who is suddenly rejuvenated by meeting this beautiful young woman,
a society whose deaths a great, charming individual, a great moral force in his life.
And Tchaikovsky pulls into this music. Emotions that he himself probably never felt.
But that doesn't mean the emotions aren't real.
And that, for me, is as if the alchemy of music to make us feel things that we ourselves have never felt.
And that space is where artists can go to imagine things that they themselves have never left through.
And I suppose that that's for me, the real interest in the biography is to use it as a key to understand certain things,
but then to go to those spaces and a composer, a writer's output which are wholly imaginative, wholly inventive, wholly speculative,
and the strange way in which sometimes works of art feels so much more real than real life itself.
And I think probably Tchaikovsky, I might have found some common ground in that view.
So for you, which are the Czajkowski pieces that really rip you?
What? What's your thought of listening left for Czajkowski work?
Gosh. Well, because what a responsibility. I can shake the whole affects of of of our viewers out there.
Well, I adore and again, I go back to it time and time again and sometimes I worry anew.
Must perhaps feel the same when you're working on a work piece of music that you love.
Will working on it, writing about analysing, destroy some of the magic, will it take the charm away?
And in fact, the number of times I've gone away and written about it or thought about it,
I've constantly found new things delighting the light, delightful things, all quirks or corners that I've never seen before.
And I think that's a gorgeous entry point into the sincerity of Tchaikovsky's world, the intimacy and emotional truth that's there.
But probably I should use this opportunity to try and get people away from the Hall of Fame and
what they're likely to listen to and to know and to advocate for the things they don't know.
So for me, the revelation last year was being asked to do a proms talk about the second symphony,
the little Russian, which is a magical work, which I knew too little.
Even having written the book, a work which is the very opposite of emotionally intense,
pathological, neurotic, emotionally lacerating Czajkowski, it's formally ambitious.
It's dance like radiant and sunlit.
It's a kind of neoclassical work long before neoclassicism sort of hit the musical world.
So I think that will work. I'd really advocate, advocate for I think the string quartettes are masterpieces.
If you think of Russian string quartettes, you probably think of the 20th century and Shostakovich.
So I'd suggest the three three string quartettes.
Extraordinary creative insights into his inner world in the 18 seventies. The thing I probably would say most of all, though, is other songs.
And again, you know, with Sebelius, we don't know those songs enough. They are that gorgeous.
I began my work on Tchaikovsky by writing about his songs because I came into him by to thinking about poetry and the poets like he said.
So I. There are multiple hundreds. Some very famous none.
But The Lonely Heart is a repertoire piece and always has been. But there are one hundred more that people could dip into.
And if people might see that as inspiration to Lonesome Russian to read not just Tolstoy and Dusty, Dusty and insignia,
but some Pushkin and some of them, some Alexia Tolstoy and some of the 19th century poets Finnessey Fiete, then.
Then I will be more than happy reboarded and Tchaikovsky would too. So yeah, that would be my top tip.
All right. Well, I mean, I think that's a perfect point to Segway, to questions, actually,
because I think we can end on listening recommendations and maybe some of our viewers will have to listen to some of those pieces themselves.
Who knows? I doubt that one. I think when you are talking about the near.
Influences the that aid the female. Oh, I love that piece so incredibly, it's such a good piece.
Really? Yes. Yes. I mean, we think of Sebelius and Tchaikovsky as these Russian composers, this Finnish composers,
these northern voices full of long summer days and short, dark, miserable winters.
But in fact, they both love this city. They both love the.
Tchaikovsky's favourite opera was Carmen and Sebelius composed the Second Symphony in Italy.
And I think I think the southernness, the lights, the joy of both countries in the region.
So we we better we better let him in. I mean, I'm here.
I'm here. I don't want to interrupt, but there are actually a lot of terrific questions emerging here,
some of which, as we've discovered over the last four weeks, actually,
you've already answered as you go along that this sort of symbiotic thing in the aether that tells
people what you either what you're going to say or tells you what they're going to say in tone.
I wanted to start with a very practical one, which is how we got the date. Right.
Apparently, April the 25th is another candidate for Tchaikovsky's birthday.
Very good. This is to do with a glitch in the calendar. So until 1917, Russia used the Julian calendar, which was in the 19th century.
Twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar and in the end, the twenty twenty century, thirteen days.
So we have to celebrate all Russian events in two ways. And we called new style and old style.
And Russians knew how to double date all their letters. But it causes a real headache when when doing Russian history in Russian events.
And I have to say, I had a qualm when I realised I was up for this thing.
Am I right about the birth date? But, you know, like the queen. He gets to. Very good.
OK. We've had quite early on. A little good luck and many thanks from the Tchaikovsky Society in Germany.
And I thought that might lead us to think it good part of a good deal of what you were talking about with Tchaikovsky's reputation abroad.
And I wondered about Germany in particular, whether there's a story to tell there,
which either intersects with sort of layers of understanding of Czajkowski being taken up by other composers over the course of the late 19th,
20th century or and or, you know, up to you to decide which one to go with.
The notion of decadent music, which was Tchaikovsky,
one of the decadent composers at the point of National Socialist kind of description of that or I mean, do to.
Which of those would you like to think about Tchaikovsky in Germany as opposed to, let's say, in England?
Yeah, it's a terrific question and greetings to my esteemed colleagues from the Tchaikovsky because Shaft and any others interested in this question.
Tchaikovsky spends a lot of time in Germany and in Austria conducting and travelling.
He comeback's in Berlin, in Leipzig, in Vienna, in Hamburg.
He has a rather testy relationship with some German composers. He meets Brahms, but there's not much love lost between them.
And he admires Brahms, his technique, but he thinks he's a little bit soulless and lacking in human warmth.
I could use a mix. So the premiere as a violin concerto in Vienna is infamous.
I think that's a work of southern Italian charm with his gorgeous second movement of Russian folk song intonations.
And it's balanced and proportionate. Yet Hanslick, he was the leading critic in Vienna, said This is music that stinks.
And we can see there the emergence of this deck, this discourse of decadence that was already sort of beginning to gain some traction in the cities.
And the paradox. He's he's a Russian composer who's trained in the German style by Rubinstein,
who appreciates form and structure and who's interested in Beethoven, who reveres Mozart, above all.
And yet whose music is often heard prejudicially as archetypal Russian, primitively Russian by on reflective unattentive German German critics.
And there's just one more interesting anecdote,
is that when he goes to Hamburg and forms that he is a really interesting encounter with German critic who says
you need to come and spend some time in Germany and then you'll really like to be a really good composer.
And what does he do?
He writes The Fifth Symphony and the Fifth Symphony is the most well proportioned, balanced, structured, well-behaved of all of the symphonies.
It's full of nods to Beethoven, full of echoes, I hear of Brahms as music.
And he dedicated it to this German critic and commentator as a sort of, well,
I can out German you, but I can leave it sort of the Russian soul, if you like.
And one last loss is that there are some extraordinary performances by foot Vengo
in the 30s of Tchaikovsky's music banging this period of National Socialism.
And they are extraordinary, lacerating,
intense things that there's a really interesting question to unpack that I'm not the person to do about Tchaikovsky under National Socialism.
So. It's a finding my interlocutor for that question.
But there's a sort of similar story with Sebelius in a way that I was gonna ask you how long in those centres.
That then always being seen as an outsider was being seen as somehow national or foreign or from elsewhere.
Yeah. And, you know, at the start of subagencies career, you know,
he was a Finnish nationalist and he was very much involved with the Finnish nationalist movement.
But that's really in the sort of late 19th, very early 20th century.
And then by the sort of first in 1910 onwards, he's really starting to be a bit frustrated by this nationalist label.
And he sort of expresses himself quite a bit of frustration that he feels that it's
kind of holding him back and he wants to be seen as this international composer.
He's also a composer who has a very chequered history in the Third Reich.
He's incredibly popular. Hitler brought him a medal, which he doesn't go on doesn't go and get.
But nonetheless, I think has an incredibly powerful impact on how he's received throughout the rest of the 20th century.
The music critic Theodore Adorno writes this really vitriolic piece of writing
about Sebelius and how he's just an incredibly sort of damaging composer.
And this comes out of the context that he's being very celebrated in the Third Reich so that I can definitely
impacts on the way that Sebelius is sort of thought about and what happens to his sort of popularity,
certainly in critical terms in the UK after the Second World War.
Thank you. I'm going back to the Russian question one last time.
One of the listeners asked, what do you think Sebelius authority Czajkowski would have made of the current situation?
I don't know whether the question means lockdown or what they mean in contemporary Russia.
Again, perhaps one of you could take a look at that and the other one could take contemporary Russia out.
What would you. In fact, there's quite a few. What would you do now?
Questions. And the first one would be, how would he respond to the current situation?
Gosh, who knows, it's a really, really tricky one. Certainly, Tchaikovsky's music is a is quite a problematic topic in contemporary Russia.
But for those who don't know, several years ago,
the Russian parliament passed legislation outlawing the propaganda of non-traditional family relations at widely referred to as the anti-gay law.
And that means that it's impossible to talk about homosexuality in an open, informed and scholarly way.
Technically, in contexts which minors. So under 18.
But it's put a real lid on the whole public discussion and adds to this discourse, which sees homosexuals.
She's going to Western imports, a kind of disease of capitalist societies out there whilst Russia defends traditions of marriage,
religion and the old fashioned norms. You could imagine that your country's most celebrated musical icon becomes a really, really difficult question.
First attempt to make a film about his life that have stalled because of the inability to come up with a public discourse of talking about this.
So heaven as what he would what he would say.
Now, on the other hand, I think we should think seriously about how he negotiated his relationship with the imperial family in the 19th century.
Tchaikovsky was not a political liberal. He was a bit of a political naive and a bit of an idealist and not very worldly when it came to politics.
But he helped knobbed with members of the Imperial Family.
He happily took an imperial. He took commissions from the Imperial Opera Houses.
He was not on the side of the political radicals who were lobbying in the late 19th century for reform.
And whilst he became a beneficiary of the autocracy, the imperial system,
we have to remember that the second half of the 19th century was one which witnessed the assassination of Alexander,
the second in 1881, the year after Tchaikovsky's death.
It would witness the assassination of Alexander, the third, the age of political radicalism was then he was he was not on that side of things.
So it's a really interesting counterfactual because this was a man who negotiated a tricky personal life with a repressive,
autocratic, autocratic political regime. So, you know, making you will lock down then later that you want to play a kind of factual lockdown.
What would he suddenly find? I don't know about Czajkowski, but Sebelius would have been having a whisky.
Absolutely. If we haven't stopped drinking all.
I did want to come in and say one of the things that's prepared me for lockdown is having read a lot of 19th century Russian literature,
all of which takes place on Country Estates Month. The only way to get anywhere is on a carriage, which gets stuck in the ruts.
And so, you know, scholars of Russian literature quite used to existential boredom and long amounts of time trapped in in at home.
So I think Chekhov is an extremely good preparation for waiting for something to happen.
Perhaps one more question about the contemporary context of Tchaikovsky's life.
And before we then move on to a range of questions about now in the future. You've talked both of you,
about the question of his sexuality and the degree to which actually what might seem surprise to some people that perhaps
there was a greater degree of being out and being open in that particular moment in the 19th century than there is today.
And we don't just have a progression. We're all getting free our story, because that doesn't work as well.
But I wondered about that or a number of questions have wondered about the status
of women in the Czajkowski story because one can focus on his relations with men.
But there were also important women in his life. And indeed.
Yeah. Could you talk a bit about the women in take off his life and maybe also the degree to which they might have had some role,
some power in his creative life, not just his personal life? Yeah, gosh, terrific question.
We've completely failed to mention in our discussion the pivotal figure of Nagios to fund Mack the great woman in coasties life.
So as we've already mentioned, he he makes this rash decision to marry and leaves his wife very quickly and is faced with this real
predicament of what to do because he's no longer earning an income as a professor at the Moscow Conservatory.
He's an independent artist. He's struggling to pay the financial costs and into his wife, into his wife, Sara,
into his life walks now for MEC, except she doesn't because they never meet.
She offers to give him an annual income which will free him of the obligation to teach.
She underwrites many of his expenses. She pays for concerts in Paris of his works.
She is his patron and sponsor almost until the end of his life.
And their relationship is played out in a very rich set of long, intense and very emotionally open.
Says that they share over their long relationship.
And they they bump into each other a couple of times by accident and scuttle off embarrassed.
And the intimacy of the letters is conditioned by the lack of a personal relationship.
Fascinating relationship. And on his side, because it allows an intimacy that I don't think he actually has with any other person in his life.
He's very fluent as a writer. He's good with words. And the freedom of long letters, I think, is something he enjoys.
Did he ever enjoys with any other person in his life, much like he could be good company, a relaxed individual.
And she, too, I think, likes the intimacy with a creative artist.
And she could construct an idealised image of him through letters, just as he could present the version of himself that he wanted her to see.
So testicle relationship on a very central one emotionally to them, to them both.
And it's an extreme form of patronage because very often patrons want that patronage to be made public.
So in a of of perhaps converting financial capital into social status and social capital.
But this is a private patronage that a very few number of people know about.
And it's one of the documents that gives us most detail about Tchaikovsky's working practises, his aesthetic views, his political views.
He is entirely silent about the details, his private life with her.
Probably not justice for me. Right. Well, but he never talks intimately about.
About that. But that was very well them for them both. OK.
Thank you. Again, it's always interesting to discover in history what, if you like,
what roles women could find themselves in relation to artistic practise and clearly amuses one patron at another.
And I'm wondering whether Lear with Scibelli, if there's a set of untold stories there as well.
Always is the story. I mean, I'm asking from ignorance.
Here is the story of Sebelius, his relationship to Muse's patrons, other women in his artistic practise already known.
Clear. So the big figure in Sebelius is life is his wife.
I know. And I mean without her. We wouldn't have Sebelius, honestly, she keeps him from himself.
He would have gone off the rails so many times, I think. Had it not been for her.
And it's her who sort of like keeps kerbing his alcoholism. She puts up with an awful lot, honestly.
But between the two of them, they obviously she Sebelius cared about her immensely.
They had a very loving relationship and certainly sort of for the time.
You know, she a very companion, a companion.
You can't say that word today. Come on now, Beau. Well, you know what I read.
And I think. But what's particularly interesting.
So women very often tend to get written out of the story because they are sometimes working in the background as patrons.
So Paul met, for example.
I mean, she as you say, he she gives him Czajkowski the salary, which is so important for Czajkowski to actually be able to write.
And then I think we shouldn't also forget the particulars. We come into the 20th century.
There are awful lot of women in creative roles themselves. Yes. You know, thinking of any number of British composers in the early 20th century,
we've got Rebecca Clark matter how boring or within you can sort of list them endlessly.
The women really have been brought back to my roles in the kind of creative life of the early 20th century.
Leaping back in there to reinforce that if we write our history of music entirely through composers,
we are going to struggle until a certain moment in history to find many women in that story.
If we rethink music as a form of social practise and think about its audiences and its actors and singers, we get a much more intrusive history.
And in Tchaikovsky's case, the plot for a new decade was suggested to him by a singer, Loverro Schuyler, who said, Why didn't you read this novel?
To make a great opera? And he worked very closely with singers.
All the roles and his operas and his operas are all centred around strong, imaginative, powerful women.
And they're not just fictional creations. They aren't the result of his relationships with the leading divas in the Russian theatre.
And here I should give full credit to my graduate student, Maggie Furnier, who's writing on Russian operas in particular about this.
So that's that's not my title.
Again, in I sort of biography of The Life of Something, one of the recent forms of biography up in the biography of a book,
let's say, or the biography of a particular piece of music or a particular opera,
precisely in order to enable us to not just think about the man involved or the or the sort of authorial creator,
but the many ways in which a piece of work, a piece of art comes into being.
And it's just paint. I don't to think the last 10 minutes or so, I tend to think about maybe one last question about the original content,
which has to do with this collaboration question. We've talked about Jeffco key in relation to his private life.
One question to ask. Was he ever embroiled in what you might call an artistic feud, if you like,
separable from the private life with other composers, artists, writers and so on?
Will he ever do? Yeah. Did he make his his way through arguing in the way that we know some people do?
Oh, great question, actually. Not not very much.
He was for a good part of his early career.
Also a music critic, which he did largely to earn money because he earned a pittance as a as a young faculty member at the Moscow Conservatory.
And he was also a total spendthrift and profligate. So he he needed income.
And those are very interesting about musical life in Moscow in 1861, in 70s.
Tell as much about his views.
We know that privately he has some quite sharp views about the nationalist composers, as I've mentioned in his correspondence with John Mack.
He expresses some really quite top views about them. But in correspondence with them, he tended to be much more supportive.
And in fact, he often went into print to support his will, not enemies, but people who he disagreed with when they were in trouble.
He is a great one for using his cultural capital, too,
as a form of patronage to use the weight of his name to defend the arts and Russian music at a time of their emergence.
They are still on quite fragile footing.
I think great diplomats and politician who understands that sort of doing a dirty deed in public might make a good copy,
but it's not really going to get you the institutional support you need from the Imperial Exchequer.
So I can't think of that. He's too much of a tactful society figure and a good operator actually behind the scenes.
But maybe I'm overlooking something. I've got to kind of I wouldn't go back to the birthday question for a moment.
And just because it's a very nice question to come in, which is how would Czajkowski have celebrated his own birthday?
Would it have been cake? Would have been someone rebelliousness whisky? What would he have wanted for his own birthday?
What might we offer him as a present? Great question.
I mean, the celebrations I know about tend to be from when he's on the summer estates.
His sister Sasha had married. You have diabetes and they lived on the estate of coming across a large amount of the time.
And he loved spending time with his nieces and nephews, particularly his young nephew,
Vladimir Bob, who then plays a very important role in the party since then, much later on.
He loved playing whist.
He his diaries give brilliant accounts of of gin rummy and drinking tea and hanging out on the country estate, playing the piano.
So I think that's probably what he would have wanted to do, was spend it with him.
He loved his extended family and his siblings. And I think I don't think he would have welcomed the society party and champagne and speeches.
He was really very sorry about all of that. So my hint is cake and tea and some of that on the side.
OK. And I don't want to overdo Sebelius was gloominess. Would he have would he have celebrated his birthday?
And if so, how? Depends if it's early in his life.
Absolutely. But as he hits his fifties, he's like, but they don't exist.
I'm not getting older anyway. No, no, no, it's okay.
He I think he is very flattered by that sort of big attention that he increasingly gets throughout his life.
But probably he just wanted a quiet birthday by the end of it all, I suspect.
Okay. There's also a number of questions coming in, clearly from musicians.
And we should spend a little time thinking about the music itself, perhaps from a completely.
I'm going to be one person asks, could you say something about his compositional technique?
Take off in particular, perhaps to use a woodwind? And what what makes him interesting from that point of view that's open to either of you?
What a preposterous delay at some point. Who's a bona fide a musicologist?
Really important questions. I think the the the view has changed.
So for a long time,
Tchaikovsky was deemed as someone who was trying to write in these Western European forms and give them a kind of Russian inflexion, but failing.
So those are important.
20TH century music historian called Dollhouse, who very much treats Sebelius, is at Tchaikovsky's orchestral practise in this way.
Too much repetition, too much a tendency to take a theme repeated.
It's a very it's a little bit and then move up a tone and padding because was also very aware of padding.
He writes in a correspondence with a colleague about his tendency to what he calls hopefully Serzh.
And I think for a long time, musicologists were wedded to a kind of very basic Vinen vision of what was good musical for mutant satiric development.
So that was sort of enhanced by all that sort of Schoenberg and 20th century stuff.
I think we now much more responsive to other ways of making musical form, about repetition, about block, about structure.
We've learnt to hear see Stravinsky's really crucial in this points.
I'm thinking of Stravinsky as having learnt from from from from Tchaikovsky in this regard.
So I now think we hear that kind of heterogeneous sounds of Tchaikovsky in a much more positive light.
I also love his intrusion of incongruous material into the symphonic form.
I love that. That's what Mahler does when you listen to moderate sort of folk tunes, Zindler Dance's waltzes,
brass band music, all colliding and shaking up in a in an upper blended form.
And he always did that. And he was really good at taking us from waltzes to fake motifs to Sylvan moods.
And I think he was the progenitor of that. That very sort of digested is the wrong word.
But it's a very deliberate juxtaposition of incongruity, which I hear is a sort of harbinger of modernity, woodwinds.
Absolutely. I'm a ex oboist, so I'm really glad of that question.
He was an expert orchestrator and he would always have that instant correspondence with conductors.
And they say, you can't write like that. It's too high. You can't play pianissimo above the Stav on the core Anglais at this point.
And then a week later, they'd say, You'll write the play. I got it right. And it really works.
So he often knew his orchestra better because he studied Berlioz.
You studied Schubert. He studied Bognor. He studied the schools of composers.
I think translated much of what he saw and heard. And so that's a great question. Leo, you're the you're the real expert.
I don't know about that. No, I was just thinking when you were talking about the way that Tchaikovsky kind of interjects
with this material in the symphonic structure and you maybe think how important,
how important programmatic system is to Czajkowski. Right.
He writes his gorgeous programatic pieces. He's a ballet composer.
And one of the sort of techniques that you have to have as a theatrical composer is being able to change direction, change mood incredibly quickly.
And he's so good at bringing that into his symphonies or otherwise unpragmatic works.
OK, I'm the ignoramus there. What's programatic music? Programmatic music is music that has a.
An idea that is associated with it. It doesn't even necessarily have to be a particular poem or sort of storyline, but it has an associated idea.
The idea match is changes over time, but it has a particular idea.
Usually a title.
I think I'm interested in that phrase because again, one of the question isn't that we've used in this discussion the notion of the alchemy of music.
And it seemed to me you might but programatic over here and alchemy over there as opposites.
But you're suggesting that maybe they needn't be, that that alchemy can happen through the programatic.
Is that right? If not, let's go.
I think a programme is never a reductive key to a work. There are some works which have a sort of programme to them.
So Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. You're kind of invited to hear the warring of the Montagues in the capital.
You're invited to a Friar Lawrence praying Francesca Emeny.
We were invited to hear the writhing souls in hell,
but it doesn't get you very far as a musical listener to the programme is a kind of key into the room.
But what you do and how you move around it, how the performer interprets it is is really crucial.
And then there are hidden programmes.
We know that there were programmatic inspirations to the fools, the face of the six sixpences, but we can't deduce them retrospectively.
And even if we could. It doesn't stop you hearing it in a new way.
So the alchemy is the compositional one, but it's also our interpretive alchemy that we can bring to the life performance.
Well, no. I was just gonna say it definitely doesn't even have to be prescribed by a composer of this programme.
That's right, because it's a very long history of hearing narratively, sceptically.
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for example, has been heard in terms of kind of like a battle between different forces, sort of ideas about fate.
And that's very much a kind of a programmatic reading, reading a narrative, reading a poem, reading meaning really into a work of music.
And I think that's so important to why we care about music at all.
It makes us feel things that makes us want to be sort of wrapped up in a story of a composition.
Thank you. We're nearly running out of time, but I just want two more quick questions about kind of the now, if you like.
So Sasha on Twitter from New York, I think says it's sort of a now, but it's a recent.
Now, why was Czajkowski music looked down on in the 20th century? There was that moment when it was sort of.
Why was that? And do you think that that's Norbury remain?
Or do we not need to worry about that snobbery anymore?
That might be more of a question for Lear insofar as your work on 20th century stuff, but we can start with Philip and then moved Labourites.
I think it was his excessive popularity with audiences. I mean, it was suspect in the eyes of serious critics.
And there's a whole discourse in the 20th century of it. All right. My music and I don't care if you listen to it or not.
So that goes back to the concepts that Schoenberg organised in Vienna, which was deliberately scandalous and provocative.
And plenty of other people said that. And he gets sort of associated with a middlebrow mass culture.
Hollywood soundtracks Rahmah the same fate. Absolutely.
Brief encounter is the worst thing that happened to Rachmaninoff's music. And I think we've learnt to be less worried by that.
I think musicologists have learnt to be happier with kind of dirty listening,
which allows us to hear the narrative and programme and to hear both imaginatively and, you know, your phrase, the music itself.
You get rapped over the knuckles by a first year of music. You technically never allowed to say that in music, yet you stay up.
I think it is that question of the middlebrow, but I'm really upset.
Context, extra contextual listening, dirty listening, imaginative listening and running with that as an absolutely respectable academic practise.
I mean, there. No, I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't really be writing if I didn't enjoy this.
I like that as a phrase, though, right? I might call a paper dirty lipstick.
But I think. Yeah, absolutely. There is this sort of discussions around sort of modern music and this idea of, you know,
it being sort of important to write very difficult music that's hard to come to.
And kind of coming back to what I was saying about the previous and the way he's received in the Third Reich.
I don't think we should underestimate the importance of the Second World War and kind of popular music as it's seen,
and the sort of appropriations of particular composers in post-war narratives about modern music,
because it almost becomes a moral imperative to write difficult music that can't be appropriated for mass use.
And so composers who are very popular, like Czajkowski, sort of catch the brunt of that.
I think we've moved on in those sort of ways of thinking.
I think Philip's absolutely right. Personally, I do love to write about composers whose music is very popular.
So personally, I think I think I'm not too bothered about the snobbery now, but I love to analyse the snobbery.
OK.
Last question then, which I follow very nicely from what you've just been saying there, which is it's the last of our counterfactuals, if you like.
If you were around for his birthday now, which contemporary composer you think he would be most happy listening to?
Who which contemporary composer writing now, which Witkowski enjoy the music of?
For me to go first, Philip, for you. Yeah. While Philip Hammond is, you've got a good answer.
Brent Khattab a KOVA because her instrumentation is luscious.
It is just absolutely sumptuous. If you don't know how Concerto for Cello and Orchestra drop everything you do, you listen to this piece of music.
The second movement breaks my heart. And that is, I think, something I hear a little Czajkowski kind of influences.
And it's I would 100 percent go for it to bring Tabaco back. Thank you.
Philip, you want to add to that or should we riffing off our earlier conversations as well?
I'm thinking of a composer from the European notes.
He was fascinating by celebrity and spectra, illness and love and its emotions and a great opera composer.
But symphonic silence there has to be Gaia Saariaho. So that brings us back to Finland, where everything begins.
Thank you. I yeah, I think we should wrap up now because we've hit on sort of two minutes past six mark.
But I'd like to thank our two brilliant because Philip and Lear for a wonderful session this evening
and a big thank you to to all the viewers at home for watching your comments and questions on YouTube,
on Twitter and so on. So one more time. Thank you, Philip.
Thank you, Liane. Thank you everyone else.
Please join us for next week's Big Tent Live event, this time on Wednesday.
So change your diaries. Change the clock. Not by the Gregorian or Julian calendar, but to a Wednesday.
Wednesday, 13th of May at five p.m., where we'll be in discussion with the author Marza Mangosta Motza as part of our Women's Week theme.
Next week, we'll be in conversation discussing extraordinary book, The Shadow King,
which is an exploration of female power and what it means to be a woman at war.
We hope you'll be able to join us again.
Then you have all given your time, your thoughts, your questions and your engagement as we come together online again.
This series would also not be possible without the support, as it were, backstage from so many people, including the torch team.
But once again, thank you, everyone, for joining us. And goodbye for now.