RUSSIAN ELEGY
December 4, 2019 | Bohemian National Hall
Misha Keylin, violin
Zlatomir Fung, cello
Pavel Nersessian, piano
Illustrated talk by Stephen Johnson
Lyadov - Three Pieces, Op. 57
Glinka - Trio Pathétique
Tchaikovsky - Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50
PROGRAM NOTES
Anatoly Lyadov
(1855–1914)
Three Pieces, Op. 57
Prelude
Valse
Mazurka
The case of Anatoly Lyadov is one of the saddest stories of unfulfilled promise in music. His talents as a composer were recognized early – and not just by his teachers at the St Petersburg Conservatory. He even managed to impress Modest Mussorgsky, one of the most original (and hyper-critical) figures in Russian music, and before long Lyadov was accepted by the hugely influential nationalist group ‘The Five’ – or ‘The Mighty Handful’ – as one of their own. They weren’t mistaken about his gifts: one has only to listen to his short but hauntingly atmospheric tone poems Baba Yaga, Kikimoraand The Enchanted Lake to realize what a fine musical imagination he possessed. But he lacked staying power. Acute self-criticism was a major inhibiting factor, and Lyadov soon acquired a reputation for unreliability, which naturally put off potential commissioners. From 1878, teaching at the St Petersburg Conservatory provided further distraction, then in 1884 he married into money, and the resulting lack of professional pressure made him even less productive. It is also said that in later years he became rather too dependent on alcoholic consolation. In 1910, the great impresario Serge Diaghilev approached Lyadov for a ballet score, based on the old Russian legend of the Firebird, for the new Ballets Russes season in Paris. It could have been a crucial international breakthrough for Lyadov, but for some unknown reason he failed to provide the music, and instead the commission – and the subsequent career breakthrough – went to a then little-known youngster named Igor Stravinsky.
It was during his long summer holidays at his country estate near Novgorod that Lyadov wrote his Three Pieces, Op. 57. All that is known is that they were composed between 1900 and 1905, at the same time as he was progressing slowly and intermittently towards the completion of Baba Yaga (begun back in 1891). Clearly Chopin is the model here, but the music is fresh and melodically very appealing, with echoes of Chopin’s use of ‘inner voices’ in the piano textures – this certainly isn’t simple tune plus accompaniment. Lyadov was capable of being highly adventurous, but here he seems to dwell on a kind of idealized old-world grace and refined sentiment. But there’s a melancholic tone too – perhaps he sensed that, before long, even the possibility of such enchantment would pass away.
Mikhail Glinka
(1804–57)
Trio pathétique
Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Vivacissimo
Largo
Allegro con spirito
The first Russian composer to gain international recognition, Mikhail Glinka was a sacred figure for the Russian nationalists, and for generations after them. His role in establishing a Russian musical voice cannot be underestimated. He demonstrated triumphantly that while Western classical music could be a useful model, the heart should look closer to home. ‘I should like to unite in legitimate bonds the Russian popular song with the good old Western fugue’, he wrote. ‘We are the people’s service to arrange such a marriage.’
Glinka’s operas Ruslan and Lyudmila and A Life for the Tsar turned out to be crucial in the creation of a folk-based Russian style (though not all the elements were, strictly speaking, Russian), and both became such national treasures that, despite its highly inconvenient subject matter, A Life for the Tsar remained core repertory throughout the Soviet Communist era – though its title was judiciously changed to Ivan Susanin. Glinka’s Patriotic Song, apparently written for a national anthem contest in 1833, did in fact become the official Russian anthem in 1993, until it was ousted by the old Soviet anthem in 2000.
Western fugues may have been acceptable to the nationalists, but another Western musical product, chamber music, was highly suspect. This, surely, was music written for cultured aristocratic or haut bourgeois salons, not for ‘the people’ who, it was felt, demanded something more direct, less fastidious or fearful of making a powerful emotional impact. When Alexander Borodin announced in 1877 to the father figure of the Russian ‘Five’, Mily Balakirev, that he was working on a string quartet, Balakirev rebuked him sternly for wasting his time on such irrelevant frippery. Glinka too turned against chamber music after the success of A Life for the Tsar in 1836, but before that he was much more open to this more refined, intimate way of thinking, and his Trio pathétique, composed in 1832, is a remarkable achievement in this fertile field. The great elegiac Russian piano trios that followed, from Tchaikovsky through to Shostakovich, in a sense all follow in its footsteps.
That the Trio pathétique should be so successful as a standard-forces piano trio (violin, cello, and piano) is all the more striking when one considers that it was originally conceived for clarinet, bassoon, and piano. The thought that this combination might try the listener’s patience quicker than piano and solo strings may be one of the reasons Glinka opted to keep the Trio pathétique relatively short, but the content is far from modest. Especially impressive is the deeply felt Largo third movement. It is here that we truly understand the significance of the quotation, in French, with which Glinka headed the score: ‘I have known love only through the unhappiness it causes.’ Whether Glinka had a specific doomed affair in mind isn’t clear, but the intensity of the music suggests that he did. The first movement and Scherzo prepare the way expertly for this emotional ‘confession’, after which the finale provides cathartic release. After the success of A Life for the Tsar Glinka seems to have forgotten the Trio, and it wasn’t published until 1878, twenty-one years after its composer’s death. But it wasn’t long before long it was canonized as a seminal work in the development of Russian chamber music.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(1840–93)
Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50
Pezzo elegiaco
Tema con varizioni –
Variazione finale e coda
Glinka’s profoundly elegiac Trio pathétique was published in 1878; Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A minor, ‘In memory of a great artist’, was begun three years later. Surely the inference is obvious: Tchaikovsky was deeply impressed by Glinka’s rediscovered youthful masterpiece and soon set about creating a similarly dark-hued trio himself. In fact the story is rather more complicated. In 1880, Tchaikovsky’s patron and confidante Nadezhda von Meck had written to him asking for a piano trio for her own private performance, but the composer had refused bluntly:
‘Forgive me, dear friend; I would do anything to give you pleasure, but this is beyond me ... I simply cannot endure the combination of piano with violin or cello. To my mind the timbre of these instruments will not blend ... it is torture for me to have to listen to a string trio or a sonata of any kind for piano and strings.’
But Tchaikovsky’s judgments, like his moods, could undergo violent swings. A year later he had begun to write a piece for precisely this ‘unendurable’ combination, apparently purely at his own prompting:
‘Whether I shall finish it and whether it will come out successfully I do not know, but I would like very much to bring what I have begun to a successful conclusion ... I won’t hide from you the great effort of will required to set down my musical ideas in this new and unusual form. But I should like to overcome all these difficulties…’
The death of Tchaikovsky’s great friend and mentor the composer Nikolai Rubinstein earlier in 1881 was clearly a formative stimulus. Tchaikovsky’s sense of loss left a deep imprint not only on the music’s character but also on its highly unusual form. But what was it that convinced him that the piano trio might be a good medium to express his sense of loss? It is very likely that Glinka’s Trio pathétique showed him the way – is there even an echo of it in the title of Tchaikovsky’s grief-haunted final symphony, the ‘Pathétique’? Even after he’d completed the Piano Trio Tchaikovsky was racked by doubts: ‘I am afraid’, he wrote to Nadezhda von Meck, ‘having written all my life for orchestra, and only taken late in life to chamber music, I may have failed to adapt the instrumental combinations to my musical thoughts.’ But posterity has not tended to agree with him. It is after all possible that in choosing a medium he found particularly challenging, Tchaikovsky may have provided his imagination with an extra stimulus: that his struggles with the combination of the three instruments was the grit in the oyster that produced the pearl.
The form of the Trio is, as flagged above, highly unusual, but this is no mere abstract architectural consideration. A two-movement structure is rare enough in Romantic chamber music, but the way it emphasizes the message of emotional devastation makes it feel stunningly inevitable. The substantial first movement is impassioned, dramatic, and committed to the dark minor mode. Its ending, with the transformation of the beautiful opening cello melody into a funereal march theme, is powerfully effective. Then comes a complete surprise: an even longer variation movement, taking in many moods and character-shifts, but – for most of its length – prevailingly major-key, upbeat, its theme almost as winningly innocent as that of the Variations on a Rococo Theme, composed in 1877. Are these happy memories an increasingly ardent evocation of all the wonderful things that have been lost with Rubinstein’s death? The effect is heightened when the final variation swerves from the affirmative home major key back into the blackness of A minor. This leads eventually to a broken return of the Trio’s passionately lamenting opening theme on strings, while the piano recalls the famous bleak Funeral March from Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata. For all Tchaikovsky’s grumbling, is it possible to imagine this music for any other combination than violin, cello, and piano?