Progetto Martha Argerich

italiano

Works

Piotr Ilic Ciajkovskij

 

Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky’s output of music for voice and piano is practically unknown outside the Slavic countries. Nevertheless, it is not at all marginal to the Russian composer’s work as a whole: it includes more than 100 songs, most of them of an amorous, sentimental nature, written over a very substantial period. Tchaikovsky composed the first of them – “Moy gyeny, moy angel, moy drug” (“My genie, my angel, my friend), a profoundly Russian ballad in C minor to a text by Afanasy Afanasievich – between 1855 and 1860, but it was first published, posthumously, only in 1940, in the journal Sovietskaya Muzika. The first real collection of songs for voice and piano dates from 1869 and was published by Jurgenson as Op. 6. “Ochevo?” (“Why?”), Op. 6 No. 5, is based on the Russian version of Heinrich Heine’s “Warum sind die Rosen so blass?” (“Why are the roses so pale?”), whereas “Nyet, tol’ka tot, kto znal svidanya” (“No, only he who knows yearning”), Op. 6 No. 6, again in the Russian tradition, makes use of Goethe’s celebrated poem, “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt”, from Wilhelm Meister. The Six Songs, Op. 38, written in 1878, appeared in print early in 1879. “O yesli b ti magia” (“O, if I could for only an instant”), the fourth piece in the collection, is an Allegro agitato in D Major on a text by Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy (a distant relative of the more famous Lev), a poet much loved by Tchaikovsky for his simple sentimentality. The Russian composer’s output of songs ends with the Six Songs, Op. 73, written in 1893 to texts by the young Russian poet Danil Maximovich Ratgaus, who had sent Tchaikovsky his poems by post, hoping that they would interest him. Tchaikovsky responded with a collection of six intensely pathos-filled pieces, among which the final “Snova, kak preshde, adin” (“Alone again, as before”) stands out for its sorrowful, melancholy nature.

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Sryed shumnova bala op. 38 n. 3
Moy gyeny, moy angel, moy drug
Nyet, tol’ka tot, kto znal op. 6 n. 6
Snova kak preshde adin op. 73 n. 4

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