Posted on 10/24/2007 2:55:24 PM PDT by Borges
Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky's ''Nutcracker'' will be performed on stages from small towns to the New York City Ballet this month -- and in ''literally hundreds of productions around the world,'' according to Jeffrey Milarsky, music director and conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra. That, along with the ''1812 Overture,'' ''Swan Lake'' and certain other works, means that Tchaikovsky, as Milarsky says, ''is played more than any composer.'' Yet where Milarsky and other members of the classical music establishment herald a revival of esteem for Tchaikovsky during recent years, Milton Babbitt, 86, a giant of the serialism movement in modern composing, has a problem with him. ''He said Brahms was an untalented bastard -- that's a quote,'' Babbitt says. ''But I've learned a lot from Brahms, whereas I can't say that about Tchaikovsky.'' Richard Einhorn, 50, whose compositions have been performed from Lincoln Center to the Netherlands, makes even less effort to disguise his antipathy: ''Tchaikovsky has as much to do with real classical music as the Three Tenors have to do with real opera. Most contemporary composers I know haven't listened to Tchaikovsky since the third grade, when they were forced to watch 'Fantasia' and gagged.''
Babbitt and Einhorn echo earlier derogations of his work as too sentimental (the Victorians) or insufficiently Russian (a group of composers who were Tchaikovsky's late-19th-century contemporaries), but the emergent issue now is a question that could throw what the critic Terry Teachout calls ''the Tchaikovsky wars'' into Armageddon. Is Tchaikovsky's music gay?
(Excerpt) Read more at query.nytimes.com ...
Classical music ping.
Thanks for the ping!
Classical Music Ping List ping!
If you want on or off this list, let me know via FR e-mail.
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sitetest
Enjoyed it.
It’s brilliantly scored for a full orchestra by one of the great orchestrators. Why whould you transcribe it to the small confines of a military band? Are you just thinking about the ‘triumphant’ music at the end?
I agree. I'm forever hearing Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff trashed. It gets tiresome.
Brahms has a pretty high rep amongst contemporary composers and musicologists I don’t hear him getting trashed all that much.
Perhaps things have changed for the better and he’s finally getting his just recognition. I used to hear the same stuff about him that I heard about Rachmaninoff: “He never broke any new ground...”
Why whould you transcribe it to the small confines of a military band?The 1812 Overture lends itself very nicely to military concert bands. My unit had 62 musicians, plus an artillery unit joined us at the outdoor concert every Independence Day for the 1812 Overture and played their part with great gusto!
I adore both composers, but Brahms is definitely far more profound intellectually, IMHO. He is, if you like, saying something musically where Tchaikovsky is describing something. That isn't always true but as a general rule it works.
Publius and I had a discussion once about this - at one point much of intellectual Europe was divided into the Wagner camp and the Brahms camp for a similar reason and to a degree still is. That describes much more than musical taste; it encompasses philosophy and quite a bit of politics as well. I'm pinging him for comment.
Thanks again for posting.
Leni
Here’s a site my kids love!
http://www.classicsforkids.com/
Thanks for posting the article. Very interesting!
I’ve always loved Brahms, especially his four symphonies - masterpieces all.
It has to do with German ideas about form and harmony. These scholars and composers got a very rigorous, almost mathematical, education and it’s conditioned how they think and feel about music.
Tchaikovsky's last 3 symphonies are masterpieces, even if he occasionally mangles sonata format.
Several things are noteworthy about the 6th. The title, "Pathetique", is a French mistranslation of the Russian pateticheski, which means "passionate".
I once heard a recording by a Russian orchestra where something amazing happened in the first movement. Where the slow dark introduction yields to the first subject, the strings played that first line as though it were a question, and a rather specific question: "Why is this happening to me?" I could hear it clearly, and it brought on cold chills.
The finale's opening lament on the strings is amazing because if you play the first and second violin lines separately, you can't hear the tune. Only when you play them together can you hear it. How did he write that?
Tchaikovsky picked up where Delibes left off in ballet score writing. His 3 major ballets are magnificent even if you are just listening to them.
If you want Tckaikovsky in a purely classical vein, listen to his first string quartet (D major, Op. 11). It's as tight as any quartet by Haydn. (But stay away from the E-flat minor quartet, which never should have been published.)
What makes Brahms so much better appreciated is that he was a merciless self-critic. He only published 3 string quartets, but admitted to destroying 20 and using the scores to paper his room. He only published a piece if he thought it was good enough to bear his name, and it shows. Every one of his symphonies, concerti and chamber works is standard in the repertory. Even his songs, if not as well known as Schubert's, are worthy of being heard. (Some, like the Op. 91 songs for contralto with piano and viola accompaniment, are masterpieces.)
The whole Brahms-Wagner thing came about as a result of Europe's reaction to the romantic spirit. Following the revolutionary advances of Beethoven, the music that followed "composted", if you want to search for a word. Mendelssohn wrote some fine romantic works, while Schumann and Chopin became the German and French poets of the piano.
Wagner decided to completely rework the concept of opera, even insisting on calling it "music drama" to avoid pointing to a maligned form. (If you check the late operas of Verdi and Saint-Saens, you'll see just how thoroughly Wagner reworked the genre.) His sources were typically romantic, with the accent on the German people's great cultural heritage via myth. But the precision of sonata format was not for him.
Brahms gets tagged as "neoclasical", but in chamber music he was a revolutionary. As a musical historian, he was one of the few people in Vienna who was familiar with Palestrina and Gesualdo, even if he had no knowledge of genuine Renaissance or Baroque performance practice due to the distance of time. But he wrote a lot of good music in the forms created by Haydn and earlier composers.
Brahms was a great admirer of Wagner, and one of his prized possessions was an autographed score of Wagner's Die Meistersinger. It was Bruckner that Brahms abhored.
The Brahms-versus-Wagner argument permeated what came later. Schoenberg admired both composers and saw his atonalism as the logical progression of Wagnerian thought. Orff threw it all out and went back to pure rhythm and a kind of primitivism. ("Carmina Burana" is Latin and medieval German rap music on a grand scale.) Berg and Webern adapted the Wagner-Schoenberg traits but opted for Brahmsian brevity, while Bartok and Kodaly tried a different blend of components. Modern composers like Zimmerli -- I helped commission his Piano Trio #2 in G -- have no shame in opting for a Brahmsian approach.
Once Wagnerism mixed with German philosophy, it eventually led to Hitler. The Israelis are still very sensitive about that.
I already hear my kids (3 and 5) humming symphonies, etc. I'm looking forward to sharing this site with them!
You’re welcome! You are going to LOVE me! Ha!
Try these, too.
http://www.dsokids.com/2001/rooms/musicroom.asp
http://ourfathershouse.biz/shopsite_sc/store/html/page31.html (Check the Music Masters CD’s)
They may like these:
http://www.magicmaestromusic.com/lessons.html
http://www.carnegiehall.org/article/explore_and_learn/art_listening_adventures_dvorak.html
Here’s another great one for lessons:
http://www.sfskids.org/templates/instorchframe.asp?pageid=3
and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/orchestras/guide/
I’ve got more links if you are interested. :0)
We’re homeschooling and I haven’t had a chance to work on the materials for classical music education/appreciation yet, so these links really help.
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