Visiting Rome in February 1880, at the height of Carnival celebrations, Tchaikovsky found himself intoxicated by “the wild ravings of the crowd, the masquerade, the illuminations.” Despite ill health and a vague sense of discontent, he sketched a work that would express his enchantment with the Italian sights and sounds—the dazzle of the music and revelry he heard in the streets during that most spirited time of year. “I have already completed the sketches for an Italian Fantasia on folk tunes,” he wrote to his friend and patron Nadezhda von Meck. “It will be very effective, thanks to the delightful tunes that I have succeeded in assembling partly from anthologies, partly through my own ears on the streets.” The Capriccio italien was completed upon the composer’s return to Russia and received its premiere in Moscow in early December 1880. It was repeated “by popular demand” in a second performance later that month.
Coming on the heels of Tchaikovsky’s traumatic marriage, separation, and alleged suicide attempt—some of the torment of which is heard in his Fourth Symphony and in the opera Eugene Onegin—the Capriccio italien is a remarkably charming and soft-hearted piece. Tchaikovsky had an ability to place his personal emotional traumas aside and continue working. There is nevertheless a sort of resigned quality about the Capriccio, a sort of forced cheer amidst the fulsome vigor and intoxication of the Carnival-like themes.
Apparently the composer’s Roman lodgings were near the barracks of the Royal Cuirassiers, whose bugle-calls he managed to imitate in the opening trumpet fanfare. After a gentle introduction, the melancholy first theme is heard in the strings; the mood brightens with the entrance of the folk tunes; the work concludes with a vigorous tarantella-style dance.
—Paul J. Horsley
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