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Break into Classical Music with Tchaikovsky

November 6th, 2009 | 7:11 am est | Blair Sanderson

“I grew up in a quiet spot and was saturated from earliest childhood with the wonderful beauty of Russian popular song.”

– Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky

Getting Off to a Good Start

Unless you were fortunate enough to grow up in a household that listened to a lot of classical music, you might feel that it is quite hard to pick up casually and must require extraordinary intellectual effort. Of course, knowledge of any kind of music doesn’t come automatically, and you have to put some time and effort into listening to classical music to get rewards from it, just as you would with rock, blues, jazz, country, and so on. Yet there are other challenges that can make classical music seem particularly daunting. First, listening to anything and everything randomly, either online or at a music library, may bring about confusion, because of the sheer quantity of classical music that exists and the variety of styles and periods it’s associated with, from Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque to Classical, Romantic, and Modern. It’s easy to get lost. Second, you can squander a fortune on buying classical music, even out of the mid-line and budget bins, especially without knowing what’s worth hearing more than once. Third, if you lack a trusted guide, you may begin to feel overwhelmed by all the choices and quit out of frustration. If you aren’t lucky enough to have ready access to the best recordings, vast disposable income, or a knowledgeable teacher or friend to make suggestions, where on earth do you begin? To whom should you turn in your time of greatest need?

Meet Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky (1840 -1893), one of the great Russian composers from the Romantic period, a perennial favorite among classical fans, and possibly the best pathfinder to classical music. Although he demonstrated talent in childhood and received music lessons early, Tchaikovsky began his professional career as a composer relatively late in life, starting out as a lawyer, but changing goals in his twenties to become a professor of music in Moscow. He achieved an artistic breakthrough with the premiere in 1877 of his ballet The Swan Lake, and proved to the public that he had a phenomenal grasp of melody, dance forms, and orchestral colors. He went on to even greater successes, and despite suffering severe doubts over his music and bouts of nearly suicidal depression over his homosexuality, he persevered and was acknowledged as a great composer in his lifetime. Tchaikovsky died ten days after the premiere of his Symphony No. 6 in B minor, “Pathétique,” which many regard as the ne plus ultra of his intensely personal expression.

Tchaikovsky is quite approachable from the start because his music is instantly memorable, and it’s easy to appreciate because of its expressive directness. You don’t need to understand the finer points of music theory to know that Tchaikovsky’s music is usually quite dramatic, exciting, moving, and abundantly tuneful, and much of it is brilliantly orchestrated. It also helps that Tchaikovsky composed pieces in all the available forms of his time, so it’s just as easy to find operas, concertos, symphonies, suites, and other large scale works as it is to find short character pieces, songs, and waltzes in his catalog. Beginners will also find it useful to know that Tchaikovsky is one of the most prolifically recorded composers in history, so there’s really no shortage of albums of his work. Ultimately, there are many paths to take with Tchaikovsky, and all of them will lead you deeper into classical music.

Accessibility and Memorability

Anyone entering the wide field of classical music should begin with learning tunes they’ll remember on one or two hearings. Almost everyone knows something by Tchaikovsky, even if it’s just a snippet of music they’ve heard in a film or on television. Once you have a firm grasp of a Tchaikovsky melody, it’s easy to comprehend the other parts of a composition as music that highlights it and makes it more dramatic, varies the theme in some interesting ways, or offers contrasting material to create tension or movement. Much of Tchaikovsky’s music is constructed around long, song-like melodies, and while he used all the developmental techniques and formal structures that he inherited from the Classical era of Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven, his melodies are the soul of virtually everything he wrote. Knowing this pretty much makes everything else fall into place.