PROGRAM NOTES
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840–1893)
The Tempest; Fantasy-overture, Op.18
Tchaikovsky’s The Tempest is a symphonic response to Shakespeare’s late romance. In that play, Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, has been deposed by his brother and exiled to a desert island with his young daughter Miranda. Prospero uses sorcery to create a tempest that wrecks a ship carrying his brother, as well as the King of Naples and his son Ferdinand. Prospero’s plan is to regain what is rightfully his; only perhaps incidentally, this will allow Miranda to fall in love with Ferdinand. Prospero is aided in this by spirits under his command: Ariel, a spirit of air, and Caliban, an earthy monster. When his plan comes to fruition, Prospero, in a gesture long (though probably fancifully) held to be Shakespeare’s own farewell to the stage, renounces his ‘rough magic’.
Tchaikovsky’s The Tempest, the second in his series of large-scale symphonic poems (even where designated ‘fantasy overture’), was composed in 1873, which is to say between the Second and Third Symphonies. The internationalist Tchaikovsky was happy to compose abstract works in the symphonic tradition, but was also drawn to the Lisztian symphonic poem, which could take the events and shape of a play or novel to give composers a formal map, or program, and guide for dramatic and colourful effects.
Tchaikovsky on more than one occasion worked to programs provided by someone else: the composer Mili Balakirev gave him the one for Romeo and Juliet, including key changes and descriptions of how the
music should sound, and for The Tempest the program was provided by the critic Vladimir Stasov. Tchaikovsky toyed with leaving out the tempest itself and calling the work Miranda, but ultimately worked to Stasov’s design.
The piece begins with an evocation of the sea. A magisterial chorale represents Prospero. Ariel, spirit of the air, obeying Prospero, raises a storm of whirling strings, winds and emphatic brass. The ship is wrecked, bringing Ferdinand to the enchanted isle. The first timid feelings of love between Miranda and Ferdinand are expressed in a characteristic theme. Ariel reappears, and Caliban has contrasting music. The lovers succumb to their passion with the love theme reaching ecstatic heights. Prospero deprives himself of his magic power and leaves the island, and we hear the calm sea as at the start.
Gordon Kerry © 2010/13
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Romeo and Juliet; Fantasy-overture
In the late 19th century, Russian composers debated whether to cultivate a purely ‘national’ sound or to import the formal innovations of contemporary western European music. Nationalist feeling centred on the group of composers known in English as ‘The Mighty Handful’, whose leader was Mili Balakirev; in the opposite corner was the internationalist Tchaikovsky.
Tchaikovsky had once been quite friendly with Balakirev and in 1869 agreed to compose a work to a plan devised by Balakirev. For the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, Balakirev provided not only a ‘program’ (a sequence of events from Shakespeare’s play which Tchaikovsky’s work would depict) but a formal design of key relations, tempo changes and the like. Late in 1869
Tchaikovsky sent Balakirev his sketches for the work. Balakirev responded in a letter to Tchaikovsky that this was ‘your first composition which draws itself to one in its total beauty’. This conclusion is a little strange when we read what went before: the opening theme, in Balakirev’s view, ‘does not paint fittingly the character of Friar Laurence’ … [It requires an] ‘ancient Catholic character, resembling Orthodoxy, while your theme has … the character of a Haydn string quartet, the genius of burgher music, awakening a strong thirst for beer’. And when he hears the big tune with which Tchaikovsky depicts the lovers, Balakirev imagines that Tchaikovsky is ‘lying in the bath and that Artiha Padilla herself is rubbing your tummy with the hot fragrant suds …’. (‘Artiha Padilla’ refers to Désirée Artôt, a Belgian mezzo-soprano whom Tchaikovsky, despite being gay, in 1868 planned to marry.)
Russian attitudes to homosexuality (among the upper classes) were more liberal than in Victorian Britain, but Tchaikovsky had some sense of what ‘forbidden love’ means. His brother Modest wrote of the composer’s ‘luminous and sublime’ love for his school friend Sergei Kirev, noting that without it ‘the music of Romeo and Juliet, of The Tempest, of Francesca da Rimini is not entirely comprehensible’. Moreover at precisely the time Tchaikovsky was writing Romeo and Juliet he was involved with a music student named Eduard Sack, who committed suicide in 1873. Tchaikovsky later wrote ‘It seems that I have never loved anyone so strongly as him … and his memory is sacred to me.’
Tchaikovsky begins by evoking Friar Laurence, whose disastrous intervention is an attempt ‘to turn your households’ rancour to pure love’. Much-feared Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick noted that Romeo and Juliet is ‘on such a grand scale that it is practically
expanded into the format of the “symphonic poem” as used by Liszt’. After the slow introduction, there are two major subjects or themes: the first evokes the ‘ancient grudge’ between the houses of Montague and Capulet. The contrasting second subject is the lovers’ melody, which Tchaikovsky is careful not to fully elaborate on its first appearance—reflecting the initial frustration of the lovers’ passion. These themes are conventionally developed and recapitulated before the work’s final pages, which may depict the funeral march of the lovers and ‘glooming peace’ which descends on the two houses.
Gordon
Kerry © 2007
SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953)
Romeo and Juliet, selections from Suites 1 and 2, Op.64a and 64b
Montagues and Capulets (Suite 2 No.1)
Juliet the Young Girl (Suite 2 No.2)
Masks (Suite 1 No.5)
Romeo and Juliet (Suite 1 No.6)
Death of Tybalt (Suite 1 No.7)
Dance (Suite 2 No.4)
Romeo and Juliet Before Parting (Suite 2 No.5)
Dance of the Antilles Girls (Suite 2 No.6)
Romeo at Juliet’s Grave (Suite 2 No.7)
Between 1932 and 1936 Prokofiev spent increasingly long periods back in the USSR, which he had left to further his career abroad in 1918. By 1936 he and his family had settled again in Moscow, though on the ‘understanding’ that Prokofiev would still be at liberty to pursue his international career. Opinions vary as to why the composer chose to return at the height of Stalin’s Great
Terror: to some he was simply a political naïve who had no conception of the reality of daily life in Stalin’s Russia; to others it was evidence that Prokofiev knew that his only serious rival within Russia, Shostakovich, was under a cloud, while in Europe and the USA, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky had the Russian émigré composer market sewn up. We do know that Prokofiev had been given to understand that, should he not make his home permanently in Russia, he would be less welcome as a visitor in the future; he had also been offered a large number of very attractive commissions, one of which was to make a ballet of Romeo and Juliet.
Aware that the Soviet system had created a vast new, but largely inexperienced, audience for classical music, he said in an interview with Isvestia in 1934 that what the USSR needed was
‘light serious’—or ‘serious light’—music; it is by no means easy to find the term which suits it. Above all, it must be tuneful, simply and comprehensively tuneful, and must not be repetitious or stamped with triviality.
Sadly, many of his first attempts to write for the new Soviet man and woman were derided as ‘simplistic’ or, at the same time, ‘formalist’ (Soviet-speak for ‘nasty and modern’). Indeed, within two years he wrote in a speech (which he fortunately never delivered or published) that ‘Soviet art, despite its enormous breadth, is declining in quality [because] the official directive concerning the struggle against formalism has been carried out too zealously.’ Certain works, however, achieved the ideal of ‘lightserious’ music. Peter and the Wolf and the score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film of Alexander Nevsky ensured a precarious period of grace for the composer at the end of the 1930s and these have remained in the repertoire in- and outside of Russia ever since.
The greatest among these is Romeo and Juliet, yet it had a difficult and protracted birth. Leningrad’s Kirov Theatre rejected the initial proposal because of the story’s tragic ending but Prokofiev’s friend, theatre director Sergei Radlov, suggested a happy conclusion in which the lovers avoid death. This, he argued, would make it ‘a play about the struggle for the right to love by young, strong progressive people battling against feudal traditions and feudal outlooks on marriage’ and thus a perfect piece of optimistic Socialist Realism. There is general, though restrained, rejoicing. As research by scholar Simon Morrison in his book The People’s Artist has shown, the happy ending was also attractive to Prokofiev for religious reasons. With his wife, he had begun practising Christian Science in the 1920s and accepted that good ‘will necessarily triumph over the finite and temporary phenomenon of evil’; the new version of Romeo and Juliet would demonstrate that as a kind of parable. There remained people to convince, however.
Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre had taken over the commission for the work, planning to premiere it in the 1935–6 season; while the haggling over the ending went on the premiere was rescheduled for the following year. Play-throughs of the score in Moscow had failed to enthuse bureaucrats, dancers or audiences, but according to Prokofiev, it was one comment— ‘your comment doesn’t express any real joy at the end’—that led him to reconsider and find a way to express it in music that could be choreographed. In the meantime, however, the artistic directorate of the Bolshoi fell foul of Stalin’s purges, and the artistic director was arrested and shot. The ballet was quietly shelved. At the same time, works Prokofiev composed for the celebrations of Pushkin’s centenary and the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution failed to find favour.
The premiere of Romeo and Juliet, eventually but successfully, was given in Brno, in the then Czechoslovakia in 1938, at which time the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad offered to give the Russian premiere in January 1940. There was what Morrison calls a considerable amount of ‘vandalism’ by the Kirov people—unbeknown to the composer until the actual Leningrad performance. Choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky made some unauthorised wholesale changes to the scenario and score, and then bullied Prokofiev into making further cuts and additions. Then there were the dancers, who were, as Galina Ulanova, who danced Juliet, later observed, ‘a little afraid’ of the music; its strangeness meant that they ‘couldn’t hear that love [of Romeo and Juliet] in his music then’. The composer was actually very accommodating, subtly changing orchestrations to be heard more clearly by the dancers on stage, for instance, and he reported to a friend that ‘after 15 curtain calls’ at the Leningrad premiere, some of the dancers felt the work ‘might be acceptable after all’. Fortunately, the regime felt that the work was acceptable after all, too (shortly afterwards Stalin issued a memo approving a performance in Moscow), and it ushered in a period of favour and popularity, producing works like the Flute (or Violin) Sonata in D and the Fifth Symphony.
The dancers’ initial bafflement seems odd now. Musicologist Stephen Walsh calls the ballet a ‘brilliant fusion of postImperial romanticism and scuttling, unpredictable Prokofievism’. The score is notable for its clarity of orchestration— not that this precludes moments of great opulence, such as the pile-up of sonority which opens Act III and presages the tragic events about to unfold, or the multi divisi strings which give the young lovers a halo of rich sound. But quite simply, the score offers clear contrasts between the implacable march of tragic fate in those passages built on repeated ostinato
figures and the more rhapsodic soaring passages associated with love, and the worlds of public life and private intimacy.
Prokofiev’s characterisation is masterful. There are numerous set-pieces such as the Dance and Masks which provide a sometimes bustling, sometimes menacing backdrop to the unfolding love story. The parting of the young lovers is given a full and impassioned treatment which features themes associated with each. In contrast to music of such heartbreaking intensity, this selection concludes with the uncompromisingly brutal music which accompanies Romeo’s furious killing of Tybalt in revenge for the death of his friend Mercutio.
Gordon Kerry © 2005/10
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Young Artist in Association
Katy Abbott
Composer in Residence
Naomi Dodd
Cybec Young Composer in Residence
Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO
First Nations Creative Chair
Artistic Ambassadors
Xian Zhang
Tan Dun
Lu Siqing
The MSO relies on your ongoing philanthropic support to sustain our artists, and support access, education, community engagement and more. We invite our supporters to get close to the MSO through a range of special events.
The MSO welcomes your support at any level. Donations of $2 and over are tax deductible, and supporters are recognised as follows:
$500+ (Overture)
$1,000+ (Player)
$2,500+ (Associate)
$5,000+ (Principal)
$10,000+ (Maestro)
$20,000+ (Impresario)
$50,000+ (Virtuoso)
$100,000+ (Platinum)
PRINCIPAL PARTNER
Thank you to our Partners
PREMIER PARTNER
MAJOR PARTNERS
VENUE PARTNER
INTERNATIONAL LAW FIRM PARTNER
GOVERNMENT PARTNERS
EDUCATION PARTNERS
ORCHESTRAL TRAINING PARTNER
SUPPORTING PARTNERS
Quest Southbank Ernst & Young
MEDIA AND BROADCAST PARTNERS
TRUSTS AND FOUNDATIONS
East meets West Program Supporters
PROGRAM SUPPORTERS
Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in Melbourne
SUPPORTING PARTNERS
Ministry of Culture and Tourism China
CONSORTIUM PARTNERS
PRESTIGIOUS PARTNER
SUPPORTERS
Flora & Frank Leith Trust, Sidney Myer MSO Trust Fund
