by David M. Zajic and Jason Love
Russian Funeral
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Composed: 1936
Premiered: March 8, 1936
Unlike Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and Elgar’s Cello Concerto, both the last major works of their composers, the Russian Funeral is among Benjamin Britten’s earliest works. Britten was a pacifist, and many of his works deal with the horror of war. Russian Funeral, subtitled War and Death, was written in late February 1936, and was first performed at a concert of the London Labour Choral Union on March 8 under the direction of Alan Bush.
The work is in ABA form and is scored for brass and percussion. The outer sections are a somber march representing Death. The march theme is based on a Russian proletariat folksong that was sung at the funeral of demonstrators killed by the Tsar’s police on January 9, 1905*, “Bloody Sunday.” Shostakovich used the same melody in his Symphony No. 11, commemorating the same event. The middle section consists of a contrapuntal mixture of military trumpet calls, representing War.
Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E minor, op. 85
Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
Composed: 1918-1919
Premiered: October 26, 1919
Edward Elgar came to prominence as a composer relatively late in his life, and at a time when both his style of music and the culture that inspired it were about to grow out of favor. Elgar’s works of the 1890s reflected the confidence and ceremony of the British Empire. By the early 1910s, Elgar began to feel that composers such as Stravinsky, Bartók and Schoenberg were making his more conservative music irrelevant. World War I (1914-1918) had a devastating impact on all who lived through it, showing that the seemingly permanent institutions of society are extremely fragile in the face of mechanized warfare. After 1913 Elgar completed only four more major works, although he lived for another two decades. All four works were written during 1918-19, and three are chamber music. The fourth is the Cello Concerto in E minor. Like the chamber music from the same years, the Cello Concerto is more tightly organized than Elgar’s earlier works, making more economical use of the musical material. It also shares their sense of intense melancholy.
Elgar wrote the concerto with the collaboration of cellist Felix Salmond during the summer of 1919. The first performance, which took place at Queen’s Hall, London, with Salmond as soloist and Elgar conducting the London Symphony, was a disaster. The orchestra was terribly unprepared because Albert Coates, the conductor of the rest of the program, spent most of Elgar’s rehearsal time on Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy. This disrespectful treatment reflected a general indifference to Elgar’s music. The concert attracted only a half-full hall, and the concerto’s reception was lukewarm. Now, however, the work is firmly fixed in the standard repertoire of cello concerti.
Elgar referred to his Cello Concerto "a man's attitude to life," and the work's prevailing attitude appears autumnal. The concerto's first movement begins with a short pathos-filled cadenza that appears and reappears in three of the work's four movements. The cello solo in the first movement eschews the heroic role it might have taken in Elgar's earlier work; instead, it conveys a sense of loss.
Connected to the first movement without pause, the Allegro molto that follows gives ample opportunity for a display of the soloist's technical prowess - it is almost a study in the perpetual motion of swiftly-moving scales - but its brilliance is only fleeting. The second movement quickly gives way to the third where silences and syncopations give this elegiac song-without-words its sense of longing and searching.
The tension of the third movement is left dangling on an unfinished harmony. The downbeat of the finale resolves it. After a variation of the cadenza that began the concerto, the fourth movement rushes into what at first appears to be a typical concerto finale: a triumphant (if hard-won) "answer" to the problems posed in the earlier movements. But the fast, assertive music instead gradually relents into ever-slowing melancholy, dissipating finally into a tender quotation of the third movement. The soloist's short cadenza makes its most impassioned appearance before the concerto - and Elgar's compositional career - draws to a swift close.
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, op. 74
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Composed: 1893
Premiered: October 16, 1893*
In 19th Century Russia, the concept of the professional composer was almost unheard of. The most famous composers had day jobs. Glinka was a landowning nobleman, Rimsky-Korsakov a naval officer, Borodin a chemistry professor, and Balakirev a mathematician. Initially, Tchaikovsky seemed to be set on the same path. He attended the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, an elite institution designed to produce high-level government employees. In 1861 Tchaikovsky went to work as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice. However, in 1862 Anton Rubinstein founded the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, and Tchaikovsky was among the first class of students. He graduated in 1866 and went to Moscow to teach music theory at the newly founded Mocow Conservatory. Tchaikovsky composed and taught in Moscow until 1878, when the patronage of Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a railroad tycoon, allowed him to leave the conservatory and focus on composing and, later, conducting. Von Meck’s support for Tchaikovsky came with the condition that they never meet in person. However, they shared a regular correspondence that provided enormous emotional support to Tchaikovsky.
When von Meck suddenly ended the relationship, financial and epistolary, in 1890 Tchaikovsky was bewildered and heartbroken. However by the 1890s, the composer was already world-famous and no longer in need of a patron. Recent successes included The Nutcracker and the operas The Queen of Spades and Yolanta. During the autumn of 1892 Tchaikovsky worked on a symphony in E-flat major, but abandoned the project, fearing that he had lost his creative inspiration, and was merely composing to keep busy. After a concert tour that included an ecstatic reception in Odessa, Tchaikovsky began work on his sixth symphony in February 1893. He worked rapidly, and became convinced that this symphony was the greatest music he had yet written. Initially he called the work the Program Symphony because he had written it to a specific extra-musical story, but he made a great point of never telling anyone what the program was about. Tchaikovsky wrote to his nephew, Vladimir Davidov, “the program will remain a mystery to everyone – let them guess.” The symphony is dedicated to Davidov, leading to the speculation that the program concerns Tchaikovsky’s unrequited love for his nephew. Tchaikovsky completed the orchestration in August, and the first performance took place in St. Petersburg on October 16 with the composer conducting. The reaction from performers and audience was lukewarm, however this may have reflected confusion at the unusual structure rather than disapproval of the music. With unusual confidence, Tchaikovsky maintained his belief in the worth of the symphony, and turned his attention to preparations for the work’s publication, in particular the title. Program Symphony was abandoned, because, as Tchaikovksy said to his brother Modeste, “what kind of program symphony is it when I don’t want to give away the program?” Modeste suggested Tragic and Pathétique, and Tchaikovsky selected the latter. By pathétique Tchaikovsky did not mean miserably inadequate, as in the English cognate pathetic. Rather the word is a Russian borrowing from French, meaning full of passion or emotional.
The first movement opens with a slow introduction. The melody in the bassoon becomes, in a faster tempo, the first theme. The second theme, introduced by violins and celli, is one of Tchaikovsky’s most famous melodies, described by conductor Edward Downes as “a memory of happiness in a time of pain.” The second movement is a limping waltz with five rather than three beats to the bar. Critic Eduard Hanslick suggested repairing the movement into 6/8 time to avoid annoying listeners and performers. This misses the point. As it stands, the music suggests one under great stress, making a concerted effort to appear joyful. The third movement is an energetic march with a rousing conclusion that has occasionally confused audiences into believing that the symphony is over. (At a concert in Sydney last August conductor Alexander Lazarev sarcastically overreacted to audience applause after the third movement by instructing the orchestra to rise for a bow. Many in the audience took it as a cue to leave, and the finale was played to a partly empty hall.) Having a slow movement as a finale is an unusual choice. This emotionally intense adagio lamentoso seems to represent a descent into depression and death.
Tchaikovsky did not live to see the acceptance of his sixth symphony as a masterpiece. He died on October 25. Depending on which source you believe, he either died of cholera or committed suicide on the order of a “court of honor” to avoid a scandal over a homosexual liaison with an aristocrat. Either way it doesn’t appear that Tchaikovsky intended the sixth symphony as a premonition of his death. During its composition, he was in good health, only 53 years old, and his diaries show an unusual (for him) lack of preoccupation with death. Ironically, a work that renewed Tchaikovsky’s self-confidence as a composer was to be his last major composition.
*During the 19th century, the Old Russian (Julian) calendar was 12 days behind the Gregorian calendar. In this essay, I have used Old Russian dates for events taking place in Russia before 1918.
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