Romeo and Juliet. Annie Liebovitz.
Last week we got into the distinguishing differences between the music of the Romantic era and the Classical era. This week we are going to dive headfirst into perhaps the most Romantic of Romantics, Pyotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky.
But first, just as I informed you the brief scoop on Schumann was that he was insane, here's the brief scoop on Tchaikovsky: Tchaikovsky was gay. In fact, he was the gayest man who ever lived. He was the King Kong of gayness. The Mount Everest of gayness. In fact, if gayness had mass, Tchaikovsky could have single-handedly halted and reversed the 15 billion year cosmic expansion of the universe; distant stars would be blue-shifted instead of red-shifted. That fairly well sums up the thrust of any biography you will ever read about Tchaikovsky.
Pyotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsy.
Unfortunately for him, he was also deeply guilty and closeted at a time when the closet was mandatory; he married a kooky fan, and his marriage failed and turned into a stalker melodrama. The best informed speculation as to why his marriage failed so abysmally frequently alludes to the massness of the gayness. There's a wonderful film for those inclined to do further research, The Music Lovers (1970) by Ken Russell. From IMDB, Ken Russell describes his whole film with this one sentence: "It's the story of the marriage between a homosexual and a nymphomaniac." The part of Tchaikovsky was ably performed by Richard Chamberlain, who, in preparation for the demanding role, turned gay in real life, an act of devotion to the art akin to Deniro getting fat for Raging Bull or Peter Sellers getting a nosejob for Being There.
I should leave it here, but I'm doing final editing on this, and I couldn't resist doing one last Google. See, I wondered, since Tchaikovsky's orientation was so unavoidable in modern discussions of him, I wondered what they dealt with him and his music in the past. Well, it turns out we don't have to look too hard. The Encyclopedia Britannica is subscription only, but the 1911 version of it is in the public domain and available on-line. So I looked up the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Tchaikovsky:
His marriage was only a brief and misguided incident. Tschaikovsky married Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova on the 6th of July 1877, but the marriage rapidly developed into a catastrophe, through no fault of hers but simply through his own abnormality of temperament; [Bolding mine] and it resulted in separation in October. He had become taciturn to moroseness, and finally quitted Moscow and his friends for St Petersburg. There he fell ill, and an attempt to commit suicide by standing chin-high in the river in a frost (whereby he hoped to catch his death from exposure) was only frustrated by his brother's tender care.
Since we're going to hear Romeo and Juliet in a moment, you may be curious who Tchaikovsky's Romeo or Juliet was. According to his brother, Modest, who wrote a biography of Pyotr, the emotional inspiration for Romeo and Juliet came from his unrequited love for a friend from his school days, Vladimir Gerard. Through Google book search, I found Gerard's own description of Tchaikovsky, as quoted in the book Tchaikovsky Through Others' Eyes, pp 16-17:
His gentleness and tact in his relationships with all his fellow students made Pyotr Ilyich everybodys darling. I do not remember him ever having any serious quarrel or enmity with anyone. During our first years at the school we were more or less strangers to one another. In the final forms of the junior course, however, we were already beginning to grow closer; for a time we shared the same desk. Our real friendship took off in the senior course, and in particular in the first form. At this time I kept a diary in which l would pour out my enthusiastic feeling of first love for a certain lady and, I recall, at the same time, thank fate for granting me, alongside this love. such an ideal friendship.
Besides an inexplicable mutual sympathy; we were bound together by a love of the theater. One time Pyotr Ilyich took me to a performance of [Rossinisl Guillaume Tell at the Italian Opera. Tamberlik, De Bassini, and Bemardi sang. The impression was so powerful that from that day on I became a passionate lover of opera and often attended performances together with my friend. Moreover, we both loved French theater, which was generally in vogue among the students of the school. At that time the Milthailovsky Theater (before its renovation) had a balcony of fifty-two seats. We were not allowed to sit in the regular theater seats, and it might happen, especially at benefit recitals by favorite performers, that all fifty-two places in the balcony were occupied by students of the school.
Although Pyotr llyich’s fame as a musician was eclipsed by the fame of the poet Apukhtin, in whom we saw a future Pushkin, his talent nevertheless attracted attention, but none of his fellow students ever had an inkling of the future composers fame. I remember clearly how after choir practice in the White Hall, when Lomaltin had left, Pyotr Ilyich would sit down at the harmonium and improvise on themes suggested to him. One could give him any melody and he would play endless variations on it. For the most part, the themes for these improvisations came from the new operas we had just heard. As a student, Pyotr Ilyich was capable, but only moderately diligent and very absent-minded, and later, as a civil servant, he failed to distinguish himself in either a good or bad sense.
Both of us loved social affairs. l recall how for the sake of meeting the pretty sister of one of our schoolmates, we both went to some length to get invitations to a ball at the Zalivkina boarding school, and how our efforts were crowned by success and we both danced zealously. [...]
As a straight man, and a reckless one at that, let me assure you that listening to Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture will not make you gay. Unless you want it to, maybe. If it does, please report back to us on that. Still, why are we covering this particular piece? Certainly, the love theme from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet is so famous it's a stock joke. From Wikipedia:
Used in movies and TV
The Overture's love theme had been used in many TV shows and movies such as The Jazz Singer (1927), Wayne's World, Animaniacs, Freakazoid, Pinky and the Brain, Road Rovers, Taz-Mania, Tiny Toons, Scrubs, Seeing Double, The Ren and Stimpy Show, South Park, Clueless, A Christmas Story, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Moonraker, Spongebob Squarepants, Pushing Daisies, Sesame Street etc. Excerpts from the score were used in the 2005 ballet Anna Karenina, choreographed by Boris Eifman.
Despite all the abuse it takes, Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet is a masterpiece of Romantic program music music when heard complete and in context, which most people never have. It's not comedic, nor is it garishly mushy. It tells its story perfectly in a musical language that we are all very familiar with from film-score styles of the nineteen-thirties and forties. Tchaikovsky is the most accessible of all Romantic composers. And one of the most emotional. Even if you have heard this before, you may not have heard it really deconstructed.
Because this is program music, I'm going to have to assume the role of a story-teller, for a moment. The sounds of R&J represent the characters and scenes of the story of Shakespeare's romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet.
Dumbo's Much-Abridged Remedial Version of Romeo and Juliet
To review, Romeo and Juliet is the story of two fourteen year olds in Verona, Italy: Romeo of the Montagues, and Juliet of the Capulets, members of opposing families in an off and on city-wide family feud.
Romeo and his friends crash a Capulet ball. Here, Romeo first meets Juliet, and falls in love at first sight. He and his friends are discovered and ejected from the ball. Not one to give up easily, he sneaks to her house and addresses her at her balcony, proclaiming his love for her, and she reciprocates. In love together, they want to be married, but because of the feud, they must be crafty and seek the help of Friar Lawrence, who agrees and secretly marries them. Friar Lawrence hopes that once the marriage becomes public, it will end the long-running Capulet/Montague feud.
As Romeo goes to tell his friends about his marriage, a Montague/Capulet gang fight breaks out on the street. Romeo, caught up in it, kills Juliet's beloved cousin, Tybalt. Romeo must leave town immediately or be executed for dueling. But first he sneaks back to Juliet's house to climb up the balcony and spend the night, consummating his marriage to his wife. Then he leaves Verona.
The Capulet family, not knowing that Juliet is already married, rush to marry her to a family friend, Paris. Juliet unable to tell them she's married to Romeo, seeks Friar Lawrence's help. He gives her a potion that will make her appear dead. When she awakens, Friar Lawrence will reunite her with Romeo in the family crypt and then they may escape.
Juliet drinks the potion, but Romeo doesn't get the news that it's a ruse. Rushing to the crypt, he finds her apparently dead. He kills Juliet's "fiancee," Paris in a sword fight, and then, to join her in death, he drinks a potion of real poison, and falls dead beside her. (There are now two dead bodies and one live one that looks dead in the crypt, if you're keeping count.)
Juliet awakens, refreshed, eager to find Romeo, but is astonished to find him dead. Realizing what has happened, and unable to live without him, she stabs herself through the heart with his dagger.
The Montagues and Capulets together descend to the crypt and find the bodies. Realizing what has happened and how much both their families have lost, they publicly end their feud. THE END.
In a live concert, before the music begins, it is assumed that you know all of the above, either from cultural osmosis or from reading the program. But the music itself can't really line by line represent all of that. It's just a Sonata-allegro form movement based on impressions of the play. In particular, there are musical programmatic themes for the following:
- Friar Lawrence and the church, represented by the long introduction and its somber, religious-sounding theme.
- The Capulet/Montague feud, which is the first theme of the exposition, and is used extensively in the development section. If this theme sounds like a sword fight scene from a forties adventure movie, it's because it was the inspiration for MGM composers like Max Steiner and Erich Korngold, for example Korngold's music in this scene from Captain Blood, or this famous scene from Robin Hood. (And one of these days we'll do a diary on Korngold, cross our fingers...)
- Romeo and Juliet's love, the second theme of the exposition. It appears only three times in the whole twenty minute overture, but it's emotional stature is dramatically different each time. The melody we are most familiar with as the "Love Theme" makes its first appearance in the exposition, light and sweet and sentimental, carried first by the english horn (a deep oboe, really -- a "masculine"-voiced woodwind), and then by the flute (a "feminine"-voiced woodwind). When it returns later for the recapitulation, it will be very different, restated by full orchestra with enormous drama, filled with passion and ultimately tragedy, the sound of something good crushed.
If you studied Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in high school, you know it has a multitude of literary themes and it is hard to pick one out above the others. However, Tchaikovsky appears to have plucked out, the the theme of The World vs. Love. I started to type Love Vs. The World, but I realized that implies a bit more evenness in the battle. Tchaikovsky's R&J is a tragedy, the defeat of Love.
I regret there isn't better fidelity on Youtube because this is one of those pieces that benefit from first class speakers and quality recordings, especially for the deep bass-string lines. Get the full version on Itunes if you can. It's a sensory experience.
Before we begin our nifty graphic:
Romeo and Juliet Overture by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, performed by the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein conducting.
Introduction (0:00 to 5:15)
The first five minutes of this twenty minute work are slow and solemn with a religious-sounding theme symbolizing Friar Lawrence. The Friar Lawrence theme restrains strongly passionate music, romantic and violent, which tries to emerge, shutting it down but raising the tension, like a pressure-cooker ready to blow. The entire work may be a Sonata-allegro movement in B minor, but the Introduction is unusual in that it's in F-sharp minor, the dominant of the coming B minor exposition. Tchaikovsky makes some unusual choices of key in this piece for what is a Sonata-allegro form work.
First theme: The Capulet/Montague Feud (5:15)
The introduction segues into a violent B minor theme, staccato (choppy) and accented with irregular strikings of the timpani (drums, etc.), evocative of sword-fighting. At 5:40, it transforms into a fugato (multiple competing layers of the same theme). As I mentioned before, notice how familiar this music sounds. I have never heard it used in a film, but it sounds like the film-music for a fight scene. And then, at the end, the fight dies down, fades away with a grumble, making way for the second theme.
Second theme: Romeo and Juliet's Love (7:27)
The music seems ready to settle into a calmer D minor or the relative major, D major, when it takes a sudden twist down to D-flat major, a modulation (key change) this work is notorious for. Only a half-step away, perhaps, but it transforms the music and takes away some of the venomous mood.
The Love Theme makes its first appearance, played solo by the english horn, an instrument which is neither English nor a horn, but a deeper-voiced type of oboe. The deeper voice represents the voice of Romeo expounding his love in the balcony scene.
At 7:48, a short theme introduces itself, softly in the strings, somewhat pillowy. I'll call it the Pillowy Theme, just to keep things simple. It is calm and angelic, and we'll hear it again, used differently, in the recapitulation.
It gives way to the Love theme again at 8:31, but now stated by a solo flute, Juliet's response to Romeo from the balcony. This is that famous eighteen seconds of the entire work that are plucked out and abused as a joke. But it is beautiful, no?
At 8:49, we hear a new part of the theme, one I'll call the Yearning Theme, tense and shifting, but the flute returns (9:15) with the one last statement of the Love theme again, accompanied with brass. The harps and strings then trail us off and help bring a warm, angelic close to the exposition, with a last word from the english horn.
The first video runs out, here, so we have to go to the second video to begin the development section.
The Development (0:34 of second video)
The Feud theme returns in a whirling form. In a series of changes, the Feud theme is interrupted by a more vigorous form of the Friar Lawrence theme. The two themes compete. At 2:02, a timpani-filled crescendo based on Friar Lawrence begins, before settling back to B minor and the recapitulation.
Recapitulation Feud Theme (2:36)
The Feud theme is back with full orchestra, an increasing sense of agitation in the orchestration.
Recapitulation, second theme (2:57)
As the Feud theme retreats, we hear the second theme group begin with what I labeled the Pillowy theme, played by woodwinds. But where it was comforting and angelic the first time, now there is something wrong with it. If you listen, the strings, very softly in the background, accompany it with a rapid, agitated boiling, denying its message.
At 3:30, the Love theme returns, but now it is stated loudly, confidently, by full orchestra, the brass joining in. The Yearning theme (3:48), full of passion, moves us forward towards the climax of the work, the final full statement of the Love theme (4:12).
The orchestration breaks up. The cellos make three soft but worried attempts to resume the love theme. At 4:52, the full orchestra, as if having regathered its strength, with great labor tries to restate the Love theme one last time, but it is interrupted by the violent return of the Feud theme (5:06).
The Feud theme asserts itself. Then the Friar theme. Feud theme again. Friar theme again. The tempo accelerates as the two themes compete, the music reaching towards a violent climax (6:04). It ends tragically, the rest of the orchestra falling silent as the drums and lower brass announcing the tragic finality of the struggle. They too fade away, to prepare for the dirge-like coda in B minor.
Coda (6:25)
At first, all you hear is a soft beat on the kettle drum, a beating heart sound. The strings try to take up a wounded-sounding theme based on the Love theme, one that has been vertically-inverted -- the low notes high, the high notes low.
A hybrid theme emerges (7:17), one that has the religious sound of the Friar theme (the woodwinds emulating a pipe organ), but with some characteristics of the Love theme.
At 8:15, the first five notes of a transformed Love theme are used to usher us out of the work. At 9:15, three final cadences from the timpani bring us to a conclusion.
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