SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY PRESENTS
“TCHAIKOVSKY SPECTACULAR”

August 30, 2025

TCHAIKOVSKY      Three Excerpts from Eugene Onegin
      Polonaise
      Waltz
      Ecossaise

TCHAIKOVSKY      Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture 

CHOPIN                 Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11
      Allegro maestoso
      Romance: Larghetto
      Rondo: Vivace

TCHAIKOVSKY      1812 Overture (Ouverture solennelle), Op. 49

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Three Excerpts from Eugene Onegin
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk
Died November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg

            Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin came from a crucial moment in his life, and in fact that opera helped shape his life. In May 1877 Tchaikovsky read Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin (1833) and sketched a libretto for an opera based on it. Pushkin’s novel tells of the innocent country girl Tatiana who is smitten with the handsome fop Onegin; she pours out her passion and hopes in a letter to him, only to have the arrogant young man dismiss her out of hand the next day. Onegin is gone for several years and returns to find the country girl Tatiana now a beautiful woman married to a prince in St. Petersburg; he confronts her and pours out the love he now feels for her. Tatiana still feels that passion but has sufficient command of herself to dismiss him, and the opera concludes as she walks out on Onegin.

            It was while Tchaikovsky was sketching the scene in which Tatiana writes the letter to Onegin confessing her love that he himself received a letter with a fateful confession of love. One of his former students, a young woman he could not remember, wrote him a similar letter, confessing her love for him and proposing marriage. Tchaikovsky at first turned her away as gently as he could, but – struck by the parallels with the opera and by Onegin’s heartless dismissal of Tatiana’s declaration – he came to feel that he should not make the same mistake. And so he made a much more serious one, agreeing to marry the young woman. Their marriage in July 1877 was a disaster, and Tchaikovsky quickly abandoned his wife and collapsed emotionally. In the shattered aftermath of his marriage he fled to Western Europe, where he completed the opera.

            Eugene Onegin offers ample opportunity for social gatherings and the opulent dances that Tchaikovsky loved, and this concert offers three of these. The Polonaise comes from the beginning of the Third (and final) Act. The setting is the elegant St. Petersburg home of Prince Gremin (husband of Tatiana), and the Polonaise begins the magnificent ball at which the confrontation between Tatiana and Onegin will occur. Blazing trumpet fanfares open the Polonaise, which quickly begins to dance along tightly-dotted rhythms. The music, full of energy and dash (it is invariably described as “swaggering”), rushes straight into its central episode, with delicate writing for woodwinds and a soaring cello melody. Gradually the music picks up energy, resumes the opening dance, and drives straight to the resounding final chords.

            The Waltz comes from an earlier ball, the dance that celebrates Tatiana’s birthday at the beginning of Act II. The Waltz begins quietly: a soft timpani roll and hints of a waltz-tune prepare us for the moment when that waltz breaks out. The long middle section is calmer before the waltz returns in all its splendor.

            The Ecossaise comes from the ball at Prince Gremin’s palace in Act III – it takes place almost immediately after the Polonaise. An ecossaise was originally a country dance, danced by couples and perhaps of Scottish origin. Tchaikovsky takes up that form here to write a brief (two-minute) dance, full of charm and almost bubbling over with energy – it goes like a rocket.

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Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture
PETER ILYCH TCHAIKOVSKY

            The fateful story of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers has attracted a range of composers, from Bellini to Berlioz, from Gounod to Prokofiev. Perhaps it was inevitable that so dramatic a story should appeal to the young Tchaikovsky, struggling to find his way as a composer. In the summer of 1869, shortly after Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony had been savaged by critics, composer Mily Balakirev suggested that Shakespeare’s play might make a fitting subject for an orchestral work. Balakirev suggested an outline for the piece and even contributed part of a theme. Intrigued, Tchaikovsky set to work on October 7 of that year and had the score in first draft by November 27. It would (eventually) be his first real success.

            Tchaikovsky based his work on three separate themes, each meant to portray one of the forces in the play. The chorale-like opening passage suggests the pivotal figure of Friar Laurence, alone in his cell. At the Allegro giusto, the music leaps ahead with a dark and thrusting idea that reflects the violent struggles between the Montague and Capulet families. And this in turn gives way to the most famous part of this composition, the soaring love music of the young Romeo and Juliet themselves. But Tchaikovsky tries to treat this music symphonically rather than letting it simply become tone-painting. The themes develop in a sonata form-like structure: they alternate, collide, contrast and finally drive to the great cataclysm of the end. While the themes may represent specific characters, listeners should be careful not to search too literally for a depiction of the events of Shakespeare’s play. Instead, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet should be understood as abstract music-drama, inspired by Shakespeare’s tale but not bound by the need for exact musical depiction. This may explain Tchaikovsky’s curious choice of subtitle: he called this a “Fantasy-Overture after Shakespeare.” The music drives to a shattering climax, falls back to remember the lovers one last time, and ends dramatically.

            The first performance, in Moscow on March 16, 1870, was not a great success, and – under Balakirev’s guidance – Tchaikovsky revised the work several times over the next decade before he reached a final version in 1880; this may explain why it is one of his few works without an opus number. While early audiences may not have reacted positively, Romeo and Juliet soon became a popular favorite, so much so that when Tchaikovsky made a tour of the United States in 1891 to conduct his own music, he included Romeo and Juliet on every program.

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Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11
FREDERIC CHOPIN
Born February 22, 1810, Zelazowa Wola
Died October 17, 1849, Paris

            Chopin’s extraordinary musical gifts were evident early, and as a young man he wished to perform in public. Because the solo piano recital had not yet been invented, that meant playing as a soloist with an orchestra, and Chopin began to compose works for piano and orchestra: he wrote the Piano Concerto in E minor between April and August 1830, when he was only 20. Chopin was the soloist at the premiere in Warsaw on October 11, 1830, and twenty-three days later he left Poland, never to return. He played the Concerto in E minor in Munich and several times in his first years in Paris after taking up residence there. And then he never played it again.

            There were reasons for Chopin’s lack of interest in the piano concerto. He disliked big public concerts, and the concerto involved certain musical elements that he found uncomfortable: sonata form and virtuosity for its own sake. His two concertos, products of his extreme youth, offer attractive music and have become very popular, but they represent a musical direction Chopin chose not to pursue.

            The Concerto in E minor is in conventional concerto form (a sonata-form first movement, a lyric slow movement, and a brilliant rondo-finale), full of wonderful melodies and tremendous writing for the piano. Yet Chopin carefully avoids the contrasts that lie at the heart of the concerto (and sonata form): contrasts between soloist and orchestra, between themes within movements, and between different tonalities. In the piano concerto Mozart had found a nearly ideal form for his best music, one that allowed him to fuse his own piano-playing with the musical argument at the heart of sonata form and to create a form that allowed a rich interplay of soloist and orchestra, of theme, and of tonality. The young Chopin was not interested in writing that kind of concerto. In both his concertos, the musical interest is in the piano, while the orchestra functions as discrete accompanist, useful to introduce themes and to make an occasional grand sound, but subordinate musically. (Significantly, Chopin made and performed an arrangement of this concerto for solo piano, eliminating the orchestra altogether.)

            Chopin’s First Piano Concerto has an imposing beginning. The orchestra – more specifically, the first violin section – lays out all three main themes before the pianist makes a dramatic entrance, but thereafter the pianist dominates the musical enterprise. There is plenty of fire here (passages are marked con forza, appassionato, con fuoco and agitato), and these alternate with moments marked espressivo, dolce, legatissimo and tranquillo. It is an indication of Chopin’s lack of interest in purely virtuoso writing that there is no cadenza in this concerto.

            Chopin marks the slow movement Romanze, a term that suggests music of an expressive character, and in a letter to a friend Chopin described this music in a way that makes this abundantly clear: “I have not tried to display power in this movement; it is a quiet and melancholy romance. Its effect is meant to be like that of gently gazing upon a place that awakens a thousand sweet memories, like a reverie in a beautiful moonlit night in spring. That is also why the accompaniment is to be played with mutes.” The Romanze leads without pause into the final movement, a rondo marked Vivace. Chopin casts this movement in the form of a krakowiak, an old Polish dance that came – as its name suggests – from the region of Krakow. The original dance was in duple time and based on syncopated rhythms, and here Chopin transforms a native dance into an animated – and very pleasing – conclusion to his concerto.

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1812 Overture (Ouverture solennelle), Op. 49
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

            When Tchaikovsky was asked in 1880 to write a piece of music for the All-Russian Art and Industrial Exhibition in Moscow, he chose one of the most heroic subjects in Russian history: the defeat of Napoleon. The overture he composed is not great music, and he knew it. To his benefactress Madame von Meck he wrote: “The overture will be very noisy. I wrote it without much warmth or enthusiasm; and therefore it has not great artistic value.” Countless music critics since then have agreed, but that has not stopped the 1812 Overture from becoming one of the most popular pieces ever written. Its climax, full of ringing bells and booming cannons, has become a highlight of summer concerts around the world and will probably remain an audience favorite as long as there are audiences.

            The music itself commemorates Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow following the Battle of Borodino on September 7, 1812. Tchaikovsky builds this musical tale of war between the Russians and French on melodies from each of those countries. The overture opens with the old Russian hymn God, Preserve Thy People, and soon a Tsarist hymn is heard in the winds. The French are – inevitably – depicted by the Marseillaise. At the climax of the piece, the Marseillaise and the Russian tunes fight it out, the French national anthem is blown to shreds, the Russian tunes are shouted out triumphantly (Tchaikovsky presents them simultaneously), and the music rushes to its thunderous close, accompanied in some performances by fireworks, cannons, smoke, costumed soldiers and all the pageantry suitable to such a musical occasion.

            The 1812 Overture may not be subtle music, but it does generate excitement and it does dramatically capture a moment of national victory. It is worth noting that in 1942, with the Nazi army on Russian soil, Dmitri Shostakovich used exactly this same musical scheme in his “Leningrad” Symphony, where Russian music does battle with the music of an invader from Western Europe (this time Germany) and once again emerges victorious.

      -Program notes by Eric Bromberger