Violin Concerto in D major - Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Allegro moderato: Canzonetta: Allegro vivacissimo

The whole of Tchaikovsky's life seems to have been full of unusual incidents. For instance, he was supported for fourteen years by Nadejda von Meck, the widow of a rich railroad engineer. He saw her twice but they never spoke. Madame von Meck wrote to Tchaikovsky, "There was a time when I was very anxious to make your personal acquaintance: but now the more you fascinate me the more I fear your acquaintanceship; I prefer to think of you from afar, to hear you speak in your music and to share your feelings through it". At the same time as this strange relationship started, Tchaikovsky received a love-letter from one of his pupils at the Moscow Conservatoire, Antonina lvanovana Miliukova. He went to see her but confessed that all he could feel for her was "sympathy and gratitude". Fearing that his indifference would prove fatal to her and in a mistaken surge of chivalry, he proposed. They were married in Moscow in 1877 but after only a few months of living together, Tchaikovsky persuaded his brother, Anatol, to send him a fake telegram giving him the excuse to flee the matrimonial home. He arrived in St. Petersburg in a state bordering on insanity, had a nervous breakdown and was taken away to Switzerland and Italy to recuperate.

It was at this time that von Meck induced him to accept an annuity of six hundred pounds thus freeing him from all financial worry and enabling him to devote his entire time to creative work. The standard (Hollywood perhaps?) view of a composer is as a penniless, misunderstood and starving wretch living in a garret. How different for Tchaikovsky who was fortunate to be granted a further life pension, this time from the Czar of all Russia, in 1887 when he returned to his native land. He was now relatively a rich man and conscious of the esteem in which his music was held internationally. Of course, riches and praise do not always soothe the inner conflict. On the evening of 1st November 1893, Tchaikovsky dined with friends, went to the theatre and sat drinking until two in the morning. The next day he complained of indigestion and insomnia, drinking only a glass of unboiled water. That glass of water has been responsible for some flights of fancy. It has been suggested that the composer deliberately took contaminated water in order to commit suicide before details of his homosexuality were published! Whatever the truth, he did die, seemingly of cholera, 5 days later.

The Violin Concerto was written in a couple of months during the Spring of 1878 although Tchaikovsky was unhappy enough with the second movement to write a new one before its first public performance. Though it was dedicated to Leopold Auer, the principal violin professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, he was loath to grapple with the enormous technical difficulties and the first performance was eventually given by Adolf Brodsky, the composer's colleague at the Moscow Conservatoire. As so often proves the case, the critics were practically unanimous in their condemnation. Edward Hanslick, renowned (in retrospect) for getting it wrong, wrote, "There are (lascivious) pictures that stink in the eye. Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto brings us for the first time the horrid idea that there may be music that stinks in the ear". How wrong can you be?

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