Oklahoma City Philharmonic, CLASSICS 7: May 22, 2010
TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-93)
Polonaise from Eugene Onegin (1877-78)
SIBELIUS (1865-1957)
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor, Op. 47 (1902-04; rev. 1905)
Allegro moderato
Adagio di molto
Allegro ma non troppo
TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-93)
Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1877)
Andante sostenuto—Moderato con anima
Andantino in modo di canzona
Scherzo. Pizzicato ostinato: Allegro
Finale: Allegro con fuoco
Polonaise from Eugene Onegin
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born: April 25 (old style)/May 7 (new style), 1840 at Votkinsk, in the district of Viatka, Russia, about seven hundred miles east-northeast of Moscow
Died: October 25 (old style)/November 6 (new style), 1893 in Saint Petersburg
Work composed: The opera Eugene Onegin was composed from May 1877 through January 1878
Work premiered: The Polonaise was first heard as part of the premiere of Eugene Onegin on March 17 (old style)/29 (new style), 1879 in a student production of the Moscow Conservatory at the Malïy Theatre in Moscow.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings
An impassioned reader, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky enjoyed close familiarity with the literary classics of both Russia and Western Europe. Great books served as the inspiration for many of his instrumental compositions, including writings by Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Hamlet), Dante (Francesca da Rimini), Byron (Manfred), and Ostrovsky (The Storm), and some his operas also boast distinguished literary lineage, including Snegurochka (after Ostrovsky), Vakula the Smith (after Gogol), The Maid of Orleans (after Schiller), and most remarkably his three operas after Pushkin: Eugene Onegin, Mazeppa, and The Queen of Spades.
Pushkin’s narrative poem Eugene Onegin (written in 1831), as expanded into a libretto by Tchaikovsky and a colleague, offers of one of those plots that make opera what it is. We meet two sisters. One is engaged to a passionate fellow, while the other has a crush on the passionate fellow’s foppish friend, Eugene Onegin. Onegin rejects her but nurtures an interest in the first sister (his friend’s girlfriend), as a result of which his friend challenges him to a duel and is thereby killed. Onegin flees abroad, but years later he returns to Russia, where at a ball he meets the elegant wife of a prince. She turns out to be the sister he once rejected. He realizes he does love her after all, and he tries to pry her away from the noble life she has found; but although she acknowledges that she still loves Onegin, she has chosen her path and dismisses him.
The Polonaise we hear in this concert is the opening music of the opera’s third and final act, which takes place during the ball at an aristocratic mansion in St. Petersburg. The polonaise was a dance of Polish origins that, after the 18th century, was widely embraced as a subject by concert composers outside Poland. Always in triple time and sporting the characteristic accompanimental rhythm of bum bum-da bum bum bum bum, it progressed from its folkish beginnings to gain a reputation for high-minded elegance and ceremonial spirit, which is precisely the role Tchaikovsky’s Polonaise serves in his opera.
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor, Op. 47 (1902-04; rev. 1905)
Jean Sibelius
Born: December 8, 1865 in Tavestehus (Hämeenlinna), Finland
Died: September 20, 1957 in Järvenpää, Finland
Work composed September 1902 through the beginning of 1904; today it is nearly always presented in the revision Sibelius effected in 1905.
Work premiered: February 8, 1904, in Helsinki, with the composer conducting the Helsingfors Philharmonic and soloist Victor Novácek.
Orchestration: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings, in addition to the solo violin
Asked to use the words “Sibelius” and “violin” together in a sentence, most music lovers would automatically add the word “concerto” to the mix. It’s inevitable, really: Jean Sibelius’ D-minor Violin Concerto towers as an icy summit in the instrument’s literature. But Sibelius and the violin are connected in other ways, too. He aspired to become a violin virtuoso himself but unfortunately fixed on that goal too late for it to be feasible. When he embarked on violin lessons he was 14 years old. By that age many virtuosos-in-training are already seasoned players, and the provincial instruction available to Sibelius, combined with his tendency towards stage fright, limited his progress. Still, he became accomplished enough to play in the Vienna Conservatory’s orchestra when he was a student there, in 1890-91, and he even auditioned (unsuccessfully) for a chair in the Vienna Philharmonic.
Sibelius enriched his instrument’s repertoire by a quite a few works apart from the Concerto. He worked on a second violin concerto in 1915 but abandoned it far from completion, recycling his sketches into his Sixth Symphony. He composed numerous works for violin and piano, including a Sonata (1889) and a Sonatina (Op. 80, 1915), as well as many items grouped into collections of short movements. Sibelius would complete his final composition in 1927 and in his final three decades limited his musical creativity to tinkering with extant pieces and making stabs at works that would never come to fruition. Shortly before he gave up composing Sibelius was engaged one last time with the violin, although the Suite for Violin and Orchestra he projected at that time remained a fragmented draft. 
None of these works rivals the Violin Concerto in combining Sibelius’ unique musical language with the capabilities of the solo instrument. This, in effect, was the central challenge confronting the composer. Already in such works as his first two symphonies and his Lemminkäinen tone poems he had defined his dark, sober sound, and these were not characteristics that would easily be melded with the more extroverted, even flashy tradition that surrounded most violin concertos of the 19th century. Sibelius was not natively drawn towards composing concertos at all, and this would prove to be the only one, for any instrument, that he would see through to completion. Still, a concerto needed to have a certain degree of flashiness or else a soloist could hardly be expected to perform it. Sibelius solved this problem by creating what some historians have viewed as “a deepening of the tradition.” The musicologist James Hepokoski finds in this work “a virtuoso concerto simultaneously affirmed and transcended by a thoroughgoing seriousness of purpose and ‘surplus’ density of compositional pondering.”
The section of a traditional concerto most at odds with Sibelius’ predilection for profundity would be the first-movement cadenza, in which soloists are given the most opportunities to demonstrate their technical prowess. Sibelius meets the challenge head-on: he provides a solo cadenza but instead of presenting it as a sort of pendant to the proceedings he gives it immense structural importance, moving it to the middle of the movement and essentially making it fill the role of a development section. (A second cadenza, playing a more traditional function, originally stood at the end of the movement, but Sibelius eliminated it when he tightened the concerto in his 1905 revision.) Also non-traditional is the lack of real dialogue in this concerto, the sort of back-and-forth conversation between soloist and orchestra that we are accustomed to hearing in the concertos of, say, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms.
The vast breadth of the opening movement is mirrored in the still beauty of the slow movement, melancholy in a way that perhaps recalls Tchaikovsky. Although this concerto is not a prime example of Sibelius’ occasional penchant for folk inspiration, the finale does seem to be a dance of some sort. The musical analyst Donald Francis Tovey called it “a polonaise for polar bears,” a description so perfect that few program annotators can resist quoting it—certainly not yours truly.
Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36
Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky
Work composed: March through December 1877
Work premiered: February 10 (old style)/22 (new style), 1878, at a concert of the Russian Musical Society in Moscow, with Nikolai Rubinstein conducting
Dedication: “To my best friend,” by which Tchaikovsky meant Mme. Nadezhda von Meck
Instrumentation: Three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, and strings.
Tchaikovsky got involved with his mysterious patron Nadezhda von Meck (see sidebar) and began composing his Fourth Symphony practically at the same time, and the two “projects” were greatly intermeshed in his mind. In letters to von Meck he often referred to it as “our symphony,” sometimes even as “your symphony.” By May 1877 he completed the lion’s share of work on the new piece. “I should like to dedicate it to you,” he wrote that month, “because I believe you would find in it an echo of your most intimate thoughts and emotions.”
Then another bizarre thing happened. Tchaikovsky got married on the spur of the moment, and the explanation for this rash act is open to a broad range of speculation. Perhaps it had to do with anxiety about his quite overt homosexuality; perhaps it was an exploit of filial devotion to an 81-year-old father who viewed marriage as the principal goal of a man’s life. Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest, who frequently worried that Pyotr’s sexual flings might cast light on his own more closeted homosexuality, maintained that the bride, Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova, a former pupil of Tchaikovsky’s, flung herself on his brother and threatened to kill herself if he didn’t marry her—a tale that modern scholars largely discount. In any case, two weeks after the wedding Tchaikovsky fled in panic and spent the summer at his sister’s estate in Ukraine, estranged from Antonina. In September he returned to his bride in Moscow to try to make another go of it, but this time the effort lasted only 11 days. At that point, Tchaikovsky fell ill, fled to St. Petersburg, had a nervous breakdown, remained unconscious for two weeks, and woke up to a life that would not henceforth include Antonina, though they never divorced. 
During this misadventure, the Fourth Symphony was put on hold. Only in the latter half of 1877 did Tchaikovsky return to edit and orchestrate what he had composed between February and May. “Our symphony progresses,” he wrote to von Meck on August 24. “The first movement will give me a great deal of trouble with respect to orchestration. It is very long and complicated: at the same time I consider it the best movement. The three remaining movements are very simple, and it will be easy and pleasant to orchestrate them.”
Tchaikovsky’s comment is apt: the center of gravity is indeed placed on the first movement, and the other three stand as shorter, less imposing pendants. When von Meck begged him to reveal the meaning behind the music, Tchaikovsky broke his rule of not revealing his secret programs and penned a rather detailed description in prose of the opening movement:
The introduction is the seed of the whole symphony, undoubtedly the central theme. This is Fate, i.e., that fateful force which prevents the impulse towards happiness from entirely achieving its goal, forever on jealous guard lest peace and well-being should ever be attained in complete and unclouded form, hanging above us like the Sword of Damocles, constantly and unremittingly poisoning the soul. Its force is invisible, and can never be overcome. Our only choice is to surrender to it, and to languish fruitlessly. …
When all seems lost, there appears a sweet and gentle daydream. Some blissful, radiant human image hurries by and beckons us away. … How good this feels! How distant now seems the obsessive first theme of the Allegro. …
No! These were dreams, and fate wakes us from them. Thus all life is an unbroken alternation of harsh reality with fleeting dreams and visions of happiness … There is no escape. … We can only drift upon this sea until it engulfs and submerges us in its depths. That, roughly, is the program of he first movement.
And so he continues, at length, for each of the ensuing movements: the second, “another phase of depression,” “that melancholy feeling that comes in the evenings when, weary from your labor, you sit alone, and take a book—but it falls from your hand”; the third, comprising “the elusive images that can rush past in the imagination when you have drunk a little wine and experience the first stage of intoxication”; the fourth, “a picture of festive merriment of the people.” Even if we recognize that Tchaikovsky penned these words after he had essentially completed the symphony, we may find something authentic and convincing in his program, given the emotional roller coaster he had ridden in the preceding months.
Earlier versions of these notes appeared in the programs of the New York Philharmonic and are reprinted with permission; © New York Philharmonic.
James M. Keller is Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. From 1990-2000 he wrote about music on staff at The New Yorker, and in 1999 he received the prestigious ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award for his feature writing in Chamber Music magazine, which he serves as Contributing Editor.