Leon Botstein (Conductor): Tchaikovsky is one of the most interesting and 1)enigmatic figures. His music is immensely popular, and it seems to all of its audiences as if it's about emotion. It's about intense emotion. Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, 2)Nutcracker, Pathetique. It's so 3)externally present. Every sort of intensity of feeling, 4)pathetic feeling, depression, 5)exultation, happiness, desire, frustration. It is an extremely 6)frenzied, intense emotionally present form of music.
Jukka-Pekka Saraste (Conductor): The 7)Czar was a kind of ballet, and of course he wanted Tchaikovsky to write for his ballet and supported and sponsored these things. But interestingly enough, Tchaikovsky became famous in America because of his ballets, because of Bella Sheen and all these great Russian 8)choregraphers: first they came to America. And of course, they picked Tchaikovsky's music and these great ballets immediately.
William Littler (Critic): But those ballets are so beloved, and the music is more responsible even than the 9)choreography for their success, that some people don't realize there's a huge body of additional Tchaikovsky. But I don't think by any means the ballets overshadow the 10)symphonies. At least not the fourth, the fifth and the sixth symphonies. They don't overshadow the b-11)flat 12)minor piano 13)concerto. There are many Tchaikovsky hits. If you have one of those anthology of master pieces that the record companies 14)churn out with some regularity, you'll find a lot of Tchaikovsky in it, and it's not just ballet.
Leon: He came from a modest 15)gentry. But he was sent, for example, to the school for the civil service of the Russian Czars, and the school of jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, and he grew up with all of the futures of intellectuals, civil servants, and aristocrats of the reigning 16)monarchy. So he was, in that sense, privileged, although poor. For an aristocrat, he was relatively poor. He was always in debt, for example, and later in life he needed 17)patronage.
Jukka-Pekka: He represented the European culture in St. Petersburg. And the tension between the Europeans and the Nationalists was exactly the tension between these two cultures in Russia. So, he represented something that the Czar family wanted St. Petersburg to be. They wanted it to be a European capital with a lot of communication, connection to the European culture, and of course European music. And Tchaikovsky wanted to follow that idea. And that was quite unsexy at the time when the Nationalists wanted to bring the real Russian culture into St. Petersburg.
Tchaikovsky, during his lifetime, was extremely popular in Russia and abroad. His greatest gift was his ability to write flowing, 18)infectious 19)melodies.
William: He wrote to his brotherconstantly, and you... the letters of Tchaikovsky are one of the most remarkably 20)revelatory series of documents we have in music. That somebody with so talent, so much genius one might argue, was filled with so much doubt about his own ability. And you find that very much in the music. There is a kind of yearning 21)melancholy at the root of Tchaikovsky's music that seems to come from his own life experience. And no triumph seemed to last forever for him. It was only the prelude to the next period of depression. And as a result, it's a very characteristic music. You would never confuse Tchaikovsky with Beethoven. Beethoven knew there was going to be a sunny tomorrow. Tchaikovsky knew there wasn't.
