Famous People
Music of the Heart - Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
His depression was responsible for his final work - and for making sure no others would follow.
Only Puccini could write music as emotionally heart-rending, but even this master of sad songs never came close to composing a symphonic suicide note. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky did just that. On October 28, 1893, he premiered his Sixth (Pathetique) Symphony to a lukewarm St Petersburg audience. Nine days later, he was dead. Officially, he contracted cholera as a result of drinking unfiltered water. Unofficially, back in Czarist Russia, this would have equated to swallowing poison.
The musical snobs trash Tchaikovsky as a mawkish sentimentalist, a shameless crowd pleaser not deserving of the company of Beethoven and Mozart, but these people must have stone where their arteries converge, for there are places in the musical heart that only Tchaikovsky has dared enter and touch.
Like many kids, my first exposure to classical music was through Tchaikovsky, and for this reason alone I am eternally grateful (and also most willing to defend his honor in a bare knuckle contest with any Mahler fan). Never mind that it was the likes of the Nutcracker and the 1812 that hooked me at first. It wasn't long after that I found the Pathetique and kept it as his gift to me, a mind-blowing, heart-wrenching opus that isn't afraid to blast at the heavens and cry like a baby all in the same breath.
Make no mistake, this is the ultimate depression opus. Even the waltz movement has a melancholy air about it.
Tchaikovsky's life is the stuff of Hollywood drama - a stormy relationship with his mentor, the great pianist Anton Rubenstein, his homosexuality, one suicide attempt, his ill-advised marriage to an admirer that led to a nervous breakdown, and his mysterious relationship with his benefactor, Madame Von Meck, who stipulated they never personally meet.
His fellow composer, Edvard Grieg, said of him: "He is melancholic almost to the point of madness. He is a beautiful and good person, but an unhappy person."
On a tour of the US, two years before his death, Tchaikovsky wrote: "I feel that something within me has gone to pieces." At age 51, he was prematurely aging, his hair white and thinning, his gait replaced by a shuffle. Yet soon after, he threw himself into his greatest work with a speed and energy that astonished even him. The first movement, an emotional roller coaster of the complexity of the London Underground, was mapped out in less than four days.
"You can't imagine what bliss I feel," he dared write, unaware that he was composing his symphonic suicide note.
A lone bassoon tentatively starts off the piece, coming across as the shy person afraid to speak up at a support group. Like considerate colleagues, the other instruments complete what the bassoon is trying to say and add their own conversational elements. Soon everyone in the room is talking or shouting, then everything dies down to a brittle hush. Unexpectedly, comes the kind of free-flowing music you find figure skaters gliding to, and this time the bassoon is in his element, merrily singing away. Close your eyes and you can imagine Oksana Baiul swirling through her free-skate program.
That is, until the voice of God sweeps away everything in its path and the emotional roller coaster begins in earnest. Timpani and tuba sound the call, and trombones knock the stars out of the sky like so many doomed skittles. Then - abracadabra! - there's that ice-skating music again, only this time far more lush, but ultimately doomed to extinction, to be replaced by a restrained fanfare that ends in a whimper.
Then, of all things, we have a 5/4 waltz for the second movement and a march in the third that the non-initiated mistake for the finale. But there will be no whizz-crash-bang to mark a triumphant conclusion to this symphony. This is his suicide note, remember? Instead we have a dirge. Adagio lamentoso, reads the score to the last movement.
And nine days later, the composer is contemplating his glass of unfiltered water, about to lift it to his lips. Some have speculated that a homosexual scandal may have been the cause of his suicide. But Tchaikovsky needed no assist from the outside world. He had a long history of depression, documented in his diaries and correspondence. He had already attempted suicide once.
And finally, there is Exhibit A, his finest work. His swan song from this world, his personal gift to me.
Published early 2000s, reviewed Feb 12, 2008
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