World Premiere: December 18, 1880
Most Recent HSO Performance: February 11, 2024
Instrumentation: 3 flutes with 3rd flute doubling piccolo, 3 oboes with 3rd oboe doubling English Horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 cornets, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, tambourine, triangle, cymbal, bass drum, harp, strings
Duration: 15’

Capriccio Italien, Op. 45 (1880)

For nearly a decade after his disastrous marriage in 1877, Tchaikovsky was filled with self-recrimination and doubts about his ability to compose anything more. He managed to finish the Violin Concerto during the spring of 1878 but then had to wait more than three years for someone to perform it, and did not undertake another large composition until the Manfred Symphony in 1885. He traveled frequently and far during those years for diversion, and in November 1879 set off for Rome. Despite spending the holiday in Rome and taking part in the riotous festivities of Carnival (Tchaikovsky recorded that this “wild folly” did not suit him very well), the sensitive composer still complained that “a worm gnaws continually in secret at my heart. I cannot sleep. My God, what an incomprehensible and complicated mechanism the human organism is! We shall never solve the various phenomena of our spiritual and material existence!”

Though Tchaikovsky was never long parted from his residual melancholy, his spirits were temporarily brightened by some of the local tunes he heard in Rome, and he decided to write an orchestral piece incorporating several of them. As introduction to the work, he used a bugle call sounded every evening from the barracks of the Royal Italian Cuirassiers, which was adjacent to the Hotel Costanzi, where he was staying. He sketched the Capriccio Italien in a week, but then did not return to the score until he was back in Russia in the spring; the orchestration was completed in mid-May at his summer home in Kamenka. 

The Capriccio Italien opens with the trumpet fanfare of the Royal Cuirassiers, which gives way to a dolorous melody intoned above an insistent accompanimental motive. There follows a swaying tune given first by the oboes in sweet parallel intervals and later by the full orchestra in tintinnabulous splendor. A brisk folk dance comes next, then a reprise of the dolorous melody, and finally a whirling tarantella. This “bundle of Italian folk tunes,” as Edwin Evans called the Capriccio Italien, ends with one of the most rousing displays of orchestral color in all of Romantic music.

©2023 Dr. Richard E. Rodda