A young student, having just met the elder Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, made a remark suggesting that composers wrote initially by inspiration. Tchaikovsky, he recalled, “made an impatient gesture with his hand and said with annoyance: ‘Ah, young man, don’t be trite! You can’t await inspiration,' according to musicology professor David Brown in “Tchaikovsky Remembered.”
“What is needed is work, work, and work. Inspiration is born only of work, and during work. Every morning I sit down to work. If from this nothing comes today, I’ll sit down tomorrow at the very same work. Thus, I write for one day, for two, for ten days, not despairing if nothing comes, for on the eleventh day, you will see, something will come.”
Inspiration is one of the great mysteries. The word derives from both Greek and Latin, and means literally the breathing in of either air or spirit. Certainly, Tchaikovsky was not talking about air when he was talking about inspiration. It was the entrance of the spirit—sometimes called God’s Spirit, sometimes called the Holy Spirit—into his mind and his heart. It usually came, as Tchaikovsky told the student, after much labor, but it sometimes appeared unbidden, an uninvited guest, driving him to the point of madness just as it drove Handel when he wrote the “Messiah,” and Beethoven when he wrote “Missa Solemnis.”
It first approached Tchaikovsky when he was very young. Brown writes that Tchaikovsky’s governess, Fanny Dürbach, recalled discovering him in the nursery one night, his eyes glistening. “When asked what was the matter, he replied: ‘O, the music!’ But there was no music to be heard at that moment. ‘Get rid of it for me! It’s here, here,’ said the boy, weeping and pointing to his head. ‘It won’t give me any peace!’”
It never gave Tchaikovsky any peace, but his struggles with it produced a wealth of inspired music, music of the spirit. It is infectious. It is an assurance far greater than reason can provide: That what is beautiful, what is good, what is truthful are the final realities, the rock for us to stand on. It is the message of the ages told by prophets and poets, painters and composers, of every time and every culture.
A few of his pieces seem to me especially inspired. Oddly enough, they are not among the most celebrated compositions, but they have filled this listener with wonder and sustained him in difficult times for more than half a century. Setting academics aside, I share them with the reader adding a few personal observations.
Russian Laborers
When Tchaikovsky was 31, he heard a peasant singing at his work. He sang a plaintive folksong, born of the soil, reflecting the ancient brooding soul of the Russian people.It can be heard in the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s first string quartet. A violin plays the melancholy phrases, simply harmonized and modestly developed. It is the song of Russia’s common laborers, whose spiritual depth, kindness, and piety the composer knew well. It tells us what the psalmist tells us: “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.”
At a concert of his music, Tchaikovsky, who was sitting next to the venerable Leo Tolstoy, saw that Russia’s greatest writer wept during this passage. “It was the highest honor of my life,” he wrote in his diary. And what a marvel it must have been for the composer to see the power of his music realized in the tears of the man he most admired.
Others were moved as well. The Moscow Gazette wrote that “after the music had ended the listeners sat silent, afraid to disturb its spell.”
Looking for Peace
When Tchaikovsky was 38, he suffered much inner turmoil because of a failed marriage, difficulties in business, and difficulties of conscience. He abdicated Moscow for the country, its beauty and its simple ways.
At Midlife
When Tchaikovsky was 40 years old, religion had begun to play a more profound, more significant role in his thoughts. He was deeply moved by Massenet’s oratorio “Marie-Magdeleine.”“I was so impressed by the way Massenet knew how to express the eternal purity of Christ, that I shed floods of tears. Wonderful tears! Hail the Frenchman who knew how to make them flow,“ he wrote to his younger brother Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky, a dramatist. ”Under its influence I have composed a song to the words of Alexei Tolstoy. The tune is inspired by Massenet.”
Tchaikovsky’s “tune,” the entire work, is indeed inspired. “I Bless You Forest” shows rapture entering the heart of a humble pilgrim. Forest, valleys, rivers, the great blue heavens—all God’s own handiwork—galvanizes his spirit and his love for humankind. “Oh, if only I could hold, you, brothers, friends, enemies, all of nature, in my embrace!”
He wrote to his friend and patron, Nadezhda von Meck, as translated by Galina von Meck in “To My Best Friend”: “I dearly love the vesper service. To stand in the half-darkness searching for an answer to the eternal questions … to be roused from reveries when the choir begins to sing—oh! I love it all tremendously.”
The opening movement of his Vesper Service, Op. 52 begins with Psalm 104: “Bless the Lord, oh my soul.” Tchaikovsky, in his setting of the text, uses the traditional Greek chant known to him from childhood, removing, however, its Byzantine austerity by gently smoothing the melodic contours, and harmonizing it in a warm, characteristically Russian manner. “It is in accord with the style of Russian church architecture and icon painting,” he wrote, again, to Modest.
