by Bart de Vries

BROKEN MARRIAGES

BY BART DE VRIES The two main compositions on our musicians’ stands this month both belong to the canon of western classical music, but stem from different cultural backgrounds. What they have in common is that they were conceived while the marriages of their composers, Tchaikovsky and Debussy, were under a great deal of pressure. Does this shine through in the music?

When he started composing his violin concerto in 1878, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) was staying in Clarens, Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva, to recover from a depression. His nervous breakdown was caused by the sheer hopelessness of his marriage to Antonina Miliukova, one of his students, whom he had wedded only a year before as a barely disguised coverup for his homosexuality. While in Clarens, Tchaikovsky developed a relationship with the violinist Iosif Kotek, a student of the famous Joseph Joachim and of Tchaikovsky himself. The question is whether the turbulence in his life, leaving behind his wife (never to return to her) and spending time with his beau, found its way into his violin concerto. There is no written source that either confirms or rejects the idea unequivocally, but it is tempting to hear all the associated emotions in the concerto, from the profound depths of depression to the elated joy of love, to the calm resignation to one’s fate. The more straightforward theory is that the concerto was inspired by Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole (most audible in the first movement), a version for violin and piano of which the lovers had apparently been playing during Kotek’s visit. Either way, after a difficult reception it went on to become one of the icons of the violin repertoire.

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) had decamped to his family-in-law in Burgundy in 1903, when he started work on La Mer, three symphonic sketches for orchestra. Less than a year later, in 1904, while still working on the piece, his marriage to Marie-Rose Texier started to unravel. In the summer of that year he left her for good, immediately after which he travelled with his new ‘amante’, Emma Bardac, to the island of Jersey and the Normandian seaside resort of Pourville. On 30 October 1905, fifteen days after La Mer’s premiere in Paris,their daughter Claude-Emma was born out of wedlock. Just like Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, La Mer was conceived against an emotional backdrop as choppy and tempestuous as the sea itself. Although one might expect this to be reflected in the composition, received opinion is that the composition is more indebted to the visual arts, in particular works by the sea painters William Turner and James Whistler and the Japanese painter and illustrator Hokusai.

Whilst the form and harmonic language of Tchaikovsky’s composition are still rather conventional, Debussy’s La Mer is ahead of its time. “Changes of meter and tempo, the elliptical way in which motives are presented, the constant ambiguity, the unexpected dynamic explosions and the new ways of using the orchestra,” as a French musicologist described the piece, left the audience disoriented. But over time, professionals and amateurs alike came to appreciate the work for what it is: a masterpiece full of colour, elasticity and energy.

As diverse as the two works are, pairing La Mer with Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto makes for a happy marriage, at least for one evening.