Casse-noisette Ouvertures

Description

After the triumph of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky and Petipa set to work in 1891 on the composition of a new ballet based on a story by Hoffmann dear to his brother Modest: The Nutcracker. The fantastical tone of the original was softened by Alexandre Dumas’s adaptation, which provides the ballet’s framework – Act II, set in Confiturenbourg, a pretext for a brilliant divertissement in which Tchaikovsky unleashes all the enchantments of his orchestra, delighted Petipa, who preferred the Sugar Plum Fairy to the unsettling Drosselmeyer. Tchaikovsky took time to get into his subject, fully occupied with finishing his opera Iolanta. A trip to Paris, from which he brought back a celesta that would be used to portray the Sugar Plum Fairy, another to New York, then, on his return and in two weeks, the piano score was completed, at first regarded with disdain by its author. It would only take shape with the orchestra, passing from black and white to color, from notes to sounds, from narrative to dream. The contrast between the two acts is striking: the dark tale, where the children must face the Christmas phantasmagoria (the broken nutcracker, the battle with the rats), is followed by the candy-pink divertissement in Confiturenbourg, with the Sugar Plum Fairy. Tchaikovsky’s orchestral imagination remains as striking as ever: a true musical psychoanalysis of the fairy tale. If Balakirev and Glinka brilliantly celebrated a fake Spain, Tchaikovsky returned from Italy in 1880 with two sunny and happy musical landscapes, a string sextet in memory of Florence, and a sumptuous Capriccio italien depicting the Roman festivities in a profusion of colors and exotic melodies. The work is fragile; if the tempo and style are not maintained (the great violin phrase with its sway is its key moment), it sinks into cliché. Shakespeare inspired Tchaikovsky three times. In the summer of 1873, at Stassov’s insistence, he decided to draw from The Tempest not a stage work but a symphonic poem: a dark and evocative orchestra for the maelstrom unleashed by Prospero, a cantabile for the cellos telling the passion of Fernando and Miranda, a vast, serene symphony for the magician’s departure over a calmed sea. Theater is always doubled there by a book of sound images, which Nikolai Rubinstein leafed through for the first time on December 19, 1873. By contrast, there are no landscapes in Hamlet, but a tightly woven dramatic narrative, inherited from the breakdown his brother Modest made in view of incidental music intended for Lucien Guitry. The project was abandoned, but the power of characterization Tchaikovsky achieves, both for the characters and the places (the atmosphere of Elsinore is pervasive), nourishes his most singular symphonic poem. The St. Petersburg audience gave a lukewarm welcome to its premiere on November 12, 1888. And Romeo and Juliet? Tchaikovsky long considered turning Shakespeare’s drama into an opera. In 1869, on Balakirev’s advice, he noted down the themes associated with the two lovers, drafting the first version of a symphonic poem that he would complete sixteen years later. What became one of his author’s most famous works should be seen as the sketch of an opera whose ambition remained in the composer’s mind long after its premiere in Tiflis on April 9, 1886. Juliet’s song, the responses in the form of a Russian lament from her nurse, Romeo’s ardent, conquering theme, the clamor of brawls and the sexual frenzy of a swollen orchestra make it clear: Tchaikovsky indeed wrote a lyric drama without voices. Finally, do not be surprised by the absence, from this anthology, of his most complex and dark symphonic poem, Francesca da Rimini, which appears in a previous volume of our collection (No. 55, alongside Symphonies Nos. 4, 5 and 6). (Jean-Charles Hoffelé)