When I was a teenager I thought I had all the answers about classical music.  It was all quite simple then. Palestrina, Victoria, Byrd, Purcell, Monteverdi, J.S.Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Bellini, Chopin, Berlioz, Verdi, Brahms, Debussy, Mahler, Elgar, Bartok and Stravinsky were the great guys. Actually, in the way of teenagers, they were more than great guys, they were my gods. I used to have plaster busts of Bach, Beethoven, Bellini, Rossini and Verdi in my room like others of my age had posters of rock bands, racing cars and football stars. Well, I was a funny lad, or so I was told (often). Now that I’m very much not a teenager any more, I haven’t changed my mind about the greatness of any of these composers but I’m a lot less condemning about some of the others, the ones not mentioned above.  Now, of course, as Oscar Wilde said: “I am not young enough to know everything.”

I thought of this the other day while listening to the complete ballet score of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty. Now, confession time, in the glory days of youth, I refused to entertain any warm feelings about the music of Tchaikovsky. I considered him nothing more than a tunesmith who got tangled up and lost whenever he tried to write anything more than a song or a dance tune. As a lad, my piano teacher made me play the waltz from The Sleeping Beauty and, how annoying young people can be, I tried to repress feelings of pleasure in that great but admittedly over-played melody. I admitted, reluctantly, that the 1812 Overture was exciting especially when the cannons competed with those tolling bells and the old Tsarist national anthem. Exciting but vulgar, I used to say with all the wisdom of ignorance and, how radical was this, I said I much preferred the Soviet Union’s national anthem (actually I still do). I was pleasantly surprised recently when I read recently that Tchaikovsky said much the same thing about what he considered was merely a pot-boiler written for the money.  Then there was the opening to THAT piano concerto – his Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor – the one that comes up first on Google if you type in Piano Concerto No. 1 without mentioning any composer. Well, like the 1812 Overture, I thought the opening was thrilling but I hated to admit it. I preferred to sneer and to quote my own ‘witticism’ that Tchaikovsky was the ‘Metro Goldwyn Meyer of Classical Music.’

I think that last remark hit on the ‘problem’ of Tchaikovsky and explained why, to stupid teenagers like myself, we often underestimated the composer’s originality. So much of his music was lifted and copied by Hollywood that we have to retrain our ears to imagine what it would have sounded like before MGM and Tin Pan Alley, loving those styles as we do.

That is exactly what I’ve been trying to do on my self-imposed journey through the history of Western classical music, something I’ve often discussed on these pages. Fifteen years ago, I decided to try an experiment to ‘cleanse’ my ears of the historical memory that often stands between us and the composers original conception so I started listening to music ‘from the beginning’ again, well the year 1100, and worked my way forward chronologically excluding anything written after the date I was currently studying.

This week, I leave 1889 for 1890, and one of the many aural revelations over this period has been my appreciation of, yes, Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893) whose music, through my ‘cleansed’ ears, sounds astonishingly ‘modern’  and, yes,  daring. Nothing more so than that thrilling opening to Piano Concerto No. 1. I have now embraced the full joy of his melodic gift, maybe unsurpassed, but also the brilliance of his orchestration now that I can appreciate his unique orchestral sound even if I can also now hear the influence of two admired but lesser composers, Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 – 1921) and Joseph Joachim Raff (1822 – 1882) . His best music is brightly coloured with daringly unexpected combinations of instruments, thematically emotional, always interesting rhythmically with cleverly hidden counter melodies that are as skillful as any of the greatest 19th Century composers.

This isn’t a complete conversion on my behalf. I still find him the great composer who, when trying to be a ‘great classical composer’, wrote some of the most boring music in the entire classical repertoire. The problem is when he tries to write what was in his time, the traditional and approved classical style: symphonies and concertos in Sonata Form with those painfully repetitive development sections. If you don’t understand these terms but just think of the middle bits of most symphonies from Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven onwards and, when you come to the first three symphonies of Tchaikovsky you will hear what I mean. Most 19th Century composers took Beethoven as their benchmark and, mostly for ill, tried to emulate his style. It unstuck Tchaikovsky whenever he tried to go there – something that happened when he felt under-regarded as a composer. His problem was trying to squeeze his very memorable melodies into cell-like themes that could be developed harmonically to build a symphonic movement of substance. This is why, say the middle sections of his overture-fantasy,  Romeo and Juliet sound so repetitive and, yes, annoying – especially as the main themes are so glorious. When it comes to, say, the outer movements of his Symphony No. 3 in D major, I just cannot bring myself to sit listening patiently to all that painfully laboured ‘classical’ style. Yes, I’m sorry, but when Tchaikovsky tries to sound like Beethoven, I’d rather start counting sheep in a field. The redeeming feature of this symphony is the unpretentious little waltz movement that shows his real genius for melody, rhythm and for miniature form – the style that would make him a great ballet composer.

I’m now in 1890, just three years away from Tchaikovsky’s much discussed death. Did he commit suicide or was it typhoid caught from a glass of infected water? I don’t know, so I’m not going to discuss it. I do think though that homophobia has more than a little to do with why people like to think that his life had to end badly and in despair. We like to condemn ‘different’ people to painful and solitary deaths. For all the pain and anxiety in his music, there is as much joy and romantic fervour and so I’m convinced that the poor man had as much fun in his life as he also experienced pain and sadness  and you can hear all of that in his music. He was, I guess, a human being like all of us but one who could reach, in his music, those powerful emotions that we all share but which, like when I was that smart-ass teenager, we don’t always like to acknowledge.

Getting to know the music for The Sleeping Beauty, I now put it with Tchaikovsky’s very greatest music and believe that it stands up on its own as music even without the dancing. It is full of the composer’s unique qualities and has very few of his irritating mannerisms. In the end it is what we all crave, beauty itself.

As I add Tchaikovsky to the pantheon of great composers (just under those mentioned above), I would recommend that, if you haven’t already, you should get to know his opera Eugene Onegin, his ballet The Sleeping Beauty and, of course, the Symphony No. 6 in B minor, the Pathetique. No matter how often they’re played, they will never lose their power to delight, to thrill, to punch us in the stomach and to make us cry.

So here’s the wonderful Parorama movement from The Sleeping Beauty where, Tchaikovsky achieves that pure beauty inherited from his great god Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It’s followed by the piece that should correct anyone who still thinks Johann Strauss Jnr. was the World’s greatest writer of waltzes.  No more respect, then,  for Piotr Ilyich than this performance by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under the conductor Mariss Jansons from the Vienna 2012 New Year Concert.

Wow, I feel better after this apology for my misspent youth.

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This week I have come to the end of the year 1875 in my journey through the history of classical music – a year that turned out to be full of popular classics that have mostly held their place in the repertoire. I’ve already written about two of the most famous: Tchaikovsky’s startlingly fresh and adventurous first Piano Concerto and Bizet’s ever new opera Carmen. The year also saw the creation of Grieg’s music for Ibsen’s poetic drama Peer Gynt,  Ponchielli’s robustly romantic opera La Gioconda with is ballet music, The Dance Of The Hours, which you know even if you don’t realize it, Delibes’ second great ballet hit, Sylvia with its famous Pizzicato movement that you also know believe me. 1875 also saw the premier of the comic opera, Trial By Jury, Gilbert and Sullivan’s first successful collaboration and three symphonies that I listened to with differing enthusiasms. Tchaikovsky’s Third, it bored me years ago and, sorry about this, it still bores me today even though I can hear in the two little middle movements the emerging genius of the three great ballet scores. There was also the now largely forgotten but once celebrated composer Joachim Raff’s Seventh which was not dearly as dull as the Tchaikovsky and which even if over long and more than a little over-confident of the composer’s abilities, is an atmospheric and mostly absorbing portrait of the Raff’s childhood home around the beautiful Zurich Lake in Switzerland. The last of the three symphonies this year is by the young and thrillingly optimistic Antonin Dvorak, his Sixth and, by far, the most interesting wok of the three. Coming to early Dvorak as i have been doing recently, I am continually surprized by the strength of his work even as a relatively young man. This symphony, not his greatest, of course, is full of energy, enthusiasm, a real sense of drama and popular communication and, as in so many of this man’s compositions, full of wonderful uplifting melody. It is a young man’s work and deserves a place on the top table of popular classical music.

So that else was written in 1875 and what would I take with me, if i could only take one piece. Well, many of the pieces discussed above, I know so well, I don’t really need to hear again. The Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto came back to me as a surprizingly impressive piece, one to put with the half dozen great pieces by this man, Carmen is wonderful, great theatre and full of great and very sexy tunes and La Gioconda fits into that select bracket of pieces that I love passionately for a mix of biographical and extra-musical reasons (more of this later in another blog). I can take or leave the Grieg  whilst being newly impressed by how his maybe over-played tunes work so well when included in Ibsen’s now seldom performed drama, I am newly thrilled by Delibes’ ballet Sylvia after watching a video recording of a vibrant production from Paris – it was a pleasant surprize to hear the alto saxophone in one of its earliest outings in a symphony orchestra. As for Raff, I have followed his work with special interest through this period as my joker card always wondering how he was once spoken of in the same breath as Wagner and Brahms. I have enjoyed many of his pieces over the years and impress on you that they are more interesting than you might think but, sad to admit, he deserves his place in the canon of music’s also ran. Gilbert and Sullivan are not really my “thing” but it was lovely to hear the beginning of their witty relationship.

In the end, none of these pieces qualify for the ultimate test – the piece that should sit on your shelf representing the year 1875. This has to go to Brahms and his String Quartet No. 3, written two years after his first two published quartets and probably the twenty third quartet that he wrote, so he claims, before destroying all the others on his way to mastering this most difficult of forms and writing a work tha deserves to stand next in line to the masterpieces of Beethoven and Schubert. In this quartet, and the earlier two, Brahms consolidates his knowledge of past masters, in these pages you can hear his tributes to Handel, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, along with Mendelssohn and Schumann but you can also hear how music was progressing, towards Mahler, Schoenberg and beyond. It is a major work on the road to the 20th Century but also his last great step before writing the first of his masterly symphonies. I can’t wait to listen once more to his first symphony but that, my firends, has to wait until 1876.

Here is the quixotic third movement of the Third Quartet played by the Jerusalem Quartet but you really should find the whole piece and absorb it:

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When I was a teenager I fought hard to hate the music of Tchaikovsky who was then, maybe he still is, the world’s most popular classical music composer. I suspect I was not entirely free from adolescent arrogance at that time but I found a long line of sneery comments to deflate the composer’s most enthusiastic fans amongst my school mates. It was sometimes difficult though because, love him or hate him, the man just knew how to write really good tunes. I used to argue of course that that was the problem with Tchaikovsky, he wrote great melodies but then didn’t know what to do with them so he just kept repeating them time and time again through a series of not always very interesting harmonic modulations. Well, I haven’t totally changed my mind there but even at my most unforgiving I couldn’t resist showing off with a pianist friend when I found a copy of the two piano arrangement of his most famous work, the Piano Concerto No. 1. Luckily for the little show-off that I was, my friend was happy enough to play the orchestral part whilst I played the genius by stumbling accurately enough with all those chords in the famous opening. We decided maybe to stop whilst we were  ahead so we never learnt the whole piece – brilliant as that would have been naturally, well,  at least in the opinion of some of our least musical friends.

Maybe it was that pure theatrical chutzpah that embarrassed me but also drew me to this music when I was still worried about such things.  So I was a secret admirer of this piece and a few others by the great Russian too – the Sixth Symphony, of course, but also, when wanting to hear some very loud music indeed, I would play the sensational Antal Dorati recording of the 1812 Overture whilst particularly relishing the canon shots.

That was then but now, after fifteen years of listening to classical music in a long project where I have been working my way chronologically from the year 1100, I have just reached the year 1875 and I celebrated the new year  this week with my first listen to the No. 1 in twenty years and it was a wonderful thing to hear it with historically tuned ears. OK, that rather relentless habit of constantly repeated melodic fragments still grates after a bit but, wow! You really do have to be a total cynic or at least a bombastic teenager to resist the glory not only of those melodies but the thrilling brightly coloured orchestral writing and the sheer excitement of the piano part. I also clocked for the first time that the great, nay, magnificent opening section isn’t a stand alone moment even though the tune never reappears (for once!). It defines the harmony within telling us what it is subliminally and it gives the whole concerto a unity that my sneering ears missed all those years ago.

It would have been very different if when I was 17, I could have had the pianistic genius of the young Yevgeny Kissin who instead of sneering about this ferociously difficult concerto, found himself performing it with the World’s greatest orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by the biggest name in classical music at that time, the terrifying Herbert von Karajan. Kissin was the beginning of his career and Karajan at the end – he would die a year later. They came together for a New Year’s Eve concert in 1988 and more than a little fire was ignited along with some very forgiveable missed notes.

Listen to them playing the concerto’s first movement with that most famous of all introductions but before that, after some mercifully brief words from Karajan’s daughter in German, listen to the older Yevgeny Kissin describe that most moving of meetings.

Then, if you can, try to resist the music itself:

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