With Tchaikovsky’s arrival on the musical scene, Russia had finally produced a composer who had it all:  brilliant technique, outstanding melodic gifts, and a strong Russian national identity.  These exceptional gifts enabled the young composer to turn the form of the concerto, which had previously been perceived as German in both style and origin, into something authentically Russian.   

Yet this synthesis did not come about without disagreements and even a major confrontation between Tchaikovsky and one of his closest friends.  Nikolai Rubinstein, the founding director of the Moscow Conservatory where Tchaikovsky taught, had some very harsh words for the concerto when Tchaikovsky first played it through for him.  As Tchaikovsky related the incident (at which two other colleagues were also present) to his benefactress and confidante-by-correspondence, Mme von Meck:

I played the first movement. Not a single word, not a single comment!  If only you could have known how foolish, how intolerable is the position of a man when he offers his friend food he has prepared, and his friend eats it and says nothing.  Say something, if only to tear it to pieces with constructive criticism—but for God’s sake, just one kind word, even if not of praise! … Rubinstein’s eloquent silence had tremendous significance.  It was as though he was saying to me:  “My friend, can I talk about details when the very essence of the thing disgusts me?”  I fortified my patience, and played on to the end. Again silence. I got up and asked, “Well?” It was then that there began to flow from Nikolay Grigoryevich’s mouth a stream of words, quiet at first, but subsequently assuming more and more the tone of Jove the Thunderer.  It appeared that my concerto was worthless, that it was unplayable, that passages were trite, awkward, and so clumsy that it was impossible to put them right, that as composition it was bad and tawdry, that I had filched this bit from here and that bit from there, that there were only two or three pages that could be retained, and that the rest would have to be scrapped or completely revised.  “Take this, for instance—whatever is it?” (at this he plays the passage concerned, caricaturing it).  “And this?  Is this really possible?”—and so on, and so on.  I can’t convey to you the most significant thing—that is, the tone in which all this was delivered. In a word, any outsider who chanced to come into the room might have thought that I was an imbecile, an untalented scribbler who understood nothing, who had come to an eminent musician to pester him with his rubbish…

I was not only stunned, I was mortified by the whole scene….I left the room silently and went upstairs. I could say nothing because of my agitation and anger. Rubinstein soon appeared and, noticing my distraught state, drew me aside into a distant room.  There he told me again that the concerto was impossible, and after pointing out to me a lot of places that required radical change, he said that if by such-and-such a date I would revise the concerto in accordance with his demands, then he would bestow upon me the honor of playing my piece in a concert of his.  “I won’t change a single note,” I replied, “and I’ll publish it just as it is now!”  And so I did!

Tchaikovsky had more immediate luck with his concerto outside Russia.  It was taken on by no less an artist than Hans von Bülow, who, throughout his long career, had been closely associated with some of the greatest composers of the time, such as Liszt, Wagner, and Brahms.  The German pianist, who went on an American tour in 1875, gave the world premiere of the concerto in Boston in October of that year.  Less than a year later, Rubinstein, who had finally warmed to the work, conducted the Moscow premiere with Tchaikovsky’s student, the 18-year-old Sergei Taneyev at the piano.  He subsequently learned the solo part himself, and became one of the concerto’s most celebrated champions until his untimely death in 1881.

We have to admit that this concerto does possess a few features that could perturb a professor of music in 1874.  It opens with a lengthy passage outside the main key, in a 3/4 meter that will soon be replaced by 4/4, never to return.  But there are some secret motivic links that connect this introduction to the main section of the first movement.  Another hidden message lies in the prominent use of the notes D-flat and A (in German “Des” – “A”), which appear to stand for DESirée Artôt, a Belgian singer to whom Tchaikovsky had once proposed marriage.  But of course, Rubinstein could not have known any of this.

Each of the concerto’s three movements incorporates a folksong. The first movement includes a melody that Tchaikovsky had taken down at his sister’s country estate, apparently from a Ukrainian kobzar, one of many blind itinerant singer-musicians.  In the “Prestissimo” middle section of the second movement, we hear a French “chansonette,” “Il faut s’amuser and rire” [Let’s have fun and laugh] that was popular in Russia at the time (Tchaikovsky biographer David Brown wrote:  “It is said to have been a favourite in Artôt’s repertoire.”)  Finally, the last movement begins with another Ukrainian tune.  In different ways, all three movements are based on the contrast between these playful folk themes and the lyrical materials that surround them.  It is perhaps this mixture of styles—now light, now sentimental, now “pathétique”—that is the most unique feature of the concerto.  Although it may have seemed “disconcerting” at first (no pun intended), this very diversity, and the boldness with which Tchaikovsky leaps from one mood to the next, help make this work sound fresh and youthful, even after thousands and thousands of performances around the world.

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