PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Born May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia
Died November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg, Russia
Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy
Last performed by the Wichita Symphony on October 28 and 29, 2006, Daniel Hege, conducting.
In mid-19th-century Russia, it was not customary for one to set about being a professional composer. During Tchaikovsky’s youth, musical training was informal and often with foreign teachers. No music conservatories yet existed in Russia. Even among those musically inclined, young men trained for other professional careers. Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval officer, Borodin a chemist, and Balakirev, a mathematician. Tchaikovsky, like Musorgsky, studied for a civil service career. Finally, in 1863 Tchaikovsky entered the newly opened music conservatory established in St. Petersburg by Anton Rubenstein and announced his intent to become a composer.
Like any other young, struggling composer, Tchaikovsky’s earliest compositional efforts did not meet with success. Mostly imitative of German music, his earliest works bore the stamp of a student composer with some promise. Tchaikovsky’s inclination to “eat, drink, and be merry” also contributed to a lack of focus, and numerous flirtatious affairs were often distractions.
After one failed relationship with a French soprano, Desireé Artôt, and a lack of progress on an opera based on the Undine story, Tchaikovsky, by his admission, was utterly burned out. A pep talk from his mentor Mili Balakirev helped get him back on track. Balakirev recommended that Tchaikovsky try writing a piece based on Romeo and Juliet. Balakirev went so far as to map out a harmonic structure for the music and suggested the opening four bars as he would have written them.
The result in 1870 was Tchaikovsky’s first great work written in his mature compositional voice. Balakirev thought Tchaikovsky rushed the work to performance, and the premiere on March 16, 1870, was received coolly. Further exchanges between the two led to revisions in 1872, and Tchaikovsky returned to the score again in 1886 to make final revisions that put the work in the form we know today.
Romeo and Juliet belongs to a 19th-century genre of independent concert hall overtures composed without attachment to a play. (Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture that we’ll hear next month is another example.) Tchaikovsky’s overture is somewhat more extended – hence the fantasy elements – but merges the free fantasy form with the traditional sonata form often used for large musical structures. It is not a literal re-telling of Shakespeare’s play, but the music identifies with the play’s events, characters, and feelings.
The Overture opens with a lengthy, solemn introduction in which the primary material introduced is a chorale theme said to represent Friar Lawrence. The main exposition commences with an allegro describing the feud between the Montagues and Capulets. Short melodic ideas leap and parry while syncopated punctuations evoke sword thrusts. After the music quiets, Tchaikovsky introduces one of the most familiar love themes in all music. The theme is heard first in the English horn and violas. The strings extend the mood with a secondary idea built on the repetition of two-measure fragments. This type of periodicity was a characteristic of Tchaikovsky’s mature compositional style. Perhaps rooted in dance, this repetitive aspect would be prominent in the later ballets. Following the string passage, the flutes and oboes continue the love music.
A development section combines the fight music’s energy with the chorale from the introduction, which now takes on a more foreboding quality with its orchestration first in the horns and then the trumpets. Tchaikovsky works his ideas in mounting tension until a full-fledged restatement of the fight theme announces the recapitulation, which is not a literal repeat of the exposition. Most notable is the fuller orchestration, first of the fight music augmented by the entire brass, and the return of the love music with an apotheosis in the strings. Further working out of the fight music brings the piece to its climax and a coda, which casts death as “mere oblivion” and anticipates the conclusion of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony. We hear a reference to the love music and final chords in the full orchestra to conclude the work.
The orchestration consists of piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.
Notes by Don Reinhold © 2022
