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Glinka composed his Valse-Fantaisie at a time when he was attracted to Yekaterina Yermolaevna Kern. The work is dedicated to her.
The Valse was written in the summer of 1839 as a piece of piano music. In the spring of 1845 in Paris, Glinka created an orchestral version of his own work. Neither of these still exist. In 1856 the last version of Valse-Fantaisie appeared, which the composer concluded just under a year before his death. In was in this version that the work became most widely known.
In Valse-Fantaisie, Glinka turns to a genre of dance music that was highly popular at the time. However, the composer succeeded in transforming a short piece of applied music into an expansive symphonic poem that contains an incredibly rich range of human emotions. This work by Glinka was to be the seed from which Russian lyrical and psychological symphony music would subsequently grow in the future.
It is a documented fact that Leo Tolstoy had Glinka’s waltz in mind when writing Natasha Rostova’s ball scene. The literary parallel was an unusual one – after all, Natasha had already been dancing for thirty years before the Valse-Fantaisie was written.
Shchedrin composed his Canticle Marking One Millennium of Christianity in Russia in 1987. The basis of this purely instrumental work was an Old Russian pilgrims’ canticle celebrating the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God that is attributed to Ivan the Terrible.
Shchedrin interpreted the ancient refrain very freely. Using a modern symphony orchestra he attempted to convey the world of the Old Russian monodia, diametrically contrasting with the music of the 20th century. Old Russian songs are peaceful, unhurried and tranquil, an effect that is achieved thanks to the smooth momentary motion and the rhythm of the refrain, unbroken and uninterrupted. It reflects a typical Russian landscape – plain, limitless and uninhabited. The composer was able to convey all of this through orchestral means. Apropos, there is a small vocal element in the score – male voices echo the cellos at the start and end of the work with closed mouths.
Shchedrin’s Canticle visually demonstrates the unbroken line of Russian music, dating back into the remote past. Perhaps this is all but invisible today, but it will, in all probability, see a revival in the future.
Pavel Velikanov
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky admitted in a letter in 1889 that “I really want to write some grandiose symphony that would be … the crowning glory of my creative career…” Fate was to be generous enough to ensure that this wish of the composer would come true in the literal sense: a few days after the premiere of the Sixth Symphony in St Petersburg (16 October 1893 under the composer’s baton) Tchaikovsky died.
“Something strange is happening with this symphony!” the composer wrote one week before his sudden death which stunned all. “It’s not that I don’t like it, rather it bewilders me somewhat. As for me myself, I am more proud of it than any other of my works.” And Tchaikovsky’s famous words from another letter: “Without any exaggeration I have put my entire soul into this symphony…” The composer was not wrong – at just the second performance of the symphony, alas already after Tchaikovsky’s death, on 6 November 1893 under the baton of Eduard Nápravník, the work earned the praise it deserved.
“A tragic document of the age” was how Boris Asafiev referred to the symphony. This piercing lyrical confession burns with its bitter truth: human life is not threatened by perfidious and vengeful destiny or fatum – as it is in Tchaikovsky’s preceding Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. Death is rooted in life, which, with all its tense collisions, leads to one inevitable conclusion – departure into nothingness. But memorials like the Sixth Symphony remain with us for all eternity.
Iosif Raiskin
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