Music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Operas

Operas

Tchaikovsky completed ten operas, although one (Undina) is mostly lost and another (Vakula the Smith) exists in two significantly different versions. He also began or considered writing at least 20 others; he once declared that to refrain from writing operas was a heroism he did not possess. (In fact, one project Tchaikovsky had planned before his death was an opera based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, for which he had written an overture-fantasia much earlier in his career; a duet intended potentially for this opera was completed by his friend Sergei Taneyev and published posthumously.) Nevertheless, this need to plan or compose an opera was a constant preoccupation.

According to musicologist Gerald Abraham, the operas on the whole embody an enormous mass of music far too beautiful and interesting to be ignored. Moreover, he maintains, Tchaikovsky's search for operatic subjects, along with his views on their nature and treatment and his own work on librettos, throw considerable light on his creative personality. Nevertheless, according to musicologist Francis Maes, most of Tchaikovsky's operas failed for three reasons. First, the composer could not get good librettos, despite continued requests to some of Russia's leading playwrights and his brother Modest. Second, he was no Verdi, Puccini or Leoncavalo. While he could write music that was often beautiful and sometimes very moving, it was generally not as arresting dramatically as anything those three provided. Third, and perhaps most sadly, Tchaikovsky's enthusiasm for opera writing did not match his theatrical sense. Apparently either unaware of this deficiency or unable to curb his excitement long enough to take a cold, hard look at the true stage-worthiness of a libretto, he seemed destined to repeat his failures.

Tchaikovsky broke this pattern twice. Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades were both strong stories, worthy of setting to music. Their author, Alexander Pushkin, was, if nothing else, a master storyteller. He was also a keep observer of human nature and his wry, penetrating observations of the human condition could be chilling and heart-breaking in the extreme. Moreover, both stories were a perfect match for the composer's talents. Tchaikovsky matched Pushkin's irony and detachment in Eugene Onegin, falling back on a series of musical conventions that, in turn, echoed the literary codes the author used in his "novel in verse." More traditional writers, such as Brown, also suggest that a passion and sympathy by the composer for the heroine, Tatiyana, heightened by parallels in the story to events in his own life, may have influenced the quality of music he supplied for Onegin.

With The Queen of Spades, Modest's transposition of the story's timeline in the libretto to the 18th century was a boon for Tchaikovsky, whose favorite composer (and the one he most liked to emulate) was Mozart. The change allowed him to compose, in addition to impassioned love music, a number of 18th century pastiches depicting various social milieus. Also, as the supernatural gradually takes possession of the characters, Tchaikovsky matches it with equally ghostly music. He had already experimented in this vein in the transformation scene of The Sleeping Beauty showing an adeptness for orchestrating a strange, even unnerving sound world of dark fantasy. He would do so again in Act One of The Nutcracker, capturing what artist, critic and historian Alexandre Benois would call a "world of captivating nightmares" and "a mixture of strange truth and convincing invention."

• The Voyevoda (Воевода – The Voivode, Op. 3, 1867–1868)

Full score destroyed by composer, but posthumously reconstructed from sketches and orchestral parts. Not related to the much later symphonic ballad The Voyevoda, Op. 78.

• Undina (Ундина or Undine, 1869)

Not completed. Only a march sequence from this opera saw the light of day, as the second movement of his Symphony No. 2 in C minor and a few other segments are occasionally heard as concert pieces. Interestingly, while Tchaikovsky revised the Second symphony twice in his lifetime, he did not alter the second movement (taken from the Undina material) during either revision. The rest of the score of Undina was destroyed by the composer.

• The Oprichnik (Опричник), 1870–1872

Premiere April 24, 1874, Saint Petersburg

• Vakula the Smith (Кузнец Вакула or Kuznets Vakula), Op. 14, 1874;

Revised later as Cherevichki, premiere December 6, 1876, Saint Petersburg

• Eugene Onegin (Евгений Онегин or Yevgeny Onegin), Op. 24, 1877–1878

Premiere March 29 1879 at the Moscow Conservatory

• The Maid of Orleans (Орлеанская дева or Orleanskaya deva), 1878–1879

Premiere February 25, 1881, Saint Petersburg

• Mazepa (or Mazeppa) (Мазепа), 1881–1883

Premiere February 15 1884, Moscow

• Cherevichki (Черевички; revision of Vakula the Smith) 1885

Premiere January 31, 1887, Moscow)

• The Enchantress (or The Sorceress, Чародейка or Charodeyka), 1885–1887

Premiere November 1 1887, Saint Petersburg

• The Queen of Spades (Пиковая дама or Pikovaya dama), Op. 68, 1890

Premiere December 19 1890, Saint Petersburg

• Iolanta (Иоланта or Iolanthe), Op. 69, 1891

First performance: Mariinsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg, 1892. Originally performed on a double-bill with The Nutcracker

(Note: A "Chorus of Insects" was composed for the projected opera Mandragora of 1870).