(II) The break with Moscow.

Tchaikovsky left western Europe for Kamenka on 9/21 April 1878, worked on these pieces for a month, then travelled during the summer, briefly to Moscow, then to friends and relatives. Unlike earlier summer holidays, which produced big works such as Vakula and Swan Lake, this one brought forth only bits and pieces. Rubinstein reproached him for withdrawing his services to the World Exhibition in Paris (where at summer's end he would perform Tchaikovsky's music), while Anatoly devised a complex settlement with Antonina – before she vanished for a time, and with her the best chance Tchaikovsky ever had for a divorce.

As autumn approached he was fretful about returning to work. Writing to Meck from 4/16 to 13/25 September Tchaikovsky made a litany of complaints which persuaded both of them that he must give up teaching. He must live in the country or abroad; the newspapers were attacking Rubinstein and amorous affairs between professors and students at the conservatory, including unprintable ones; even passengers in Tchaikovsky's train were gossiping about his private life. But most of all he craved freedom – a resonant word which Meck affirmed in her response – and predicted, if it be denied, the onset of misanthropy and an aversion to composition. Ostensibly sincere, his complaints seem designed to assure Meck's continued support. When it came he moved decisively, unwilling to stay, as he had agreed, until the end of term. Back from Paris, Rubinstein toasted Tchaikovsky for the prestige he brought to the Moscow Conservatory. But it was too late: Tchaikovsky's last day as a professor was 6/18 October 1878.

The nomadic life for which he had expressed a desire was now his. Some 20 months of the next six years he spent outside Russia, and easily as much wandering within its borders, alighting from place to place for a few weeks at a time. That his departure from the conservatory eased the irritations of obligatory labour is beyond question; that freedom made him a better composer is not so clear. The fluency of inspiration he had enjoyed in his youth would henceforth revisit but occasionally. The disruptions of travel were partly to blame, as were family emergencies not of his making. But freedom and travel did not manifestly hasten his recuperation. In fact, Tchaikovsky's new freedom broaches the hackneyed question of whether great art is linked with anguish in the artist. In light of Onegin and the Fourth Symphony this would seem to be true. Upon reflection it becomes a glib and problematical assumption.

Some things stayed the same in Tchaikovsky's compositions between 1878 and 1885. In opera he continued to cope with a theatrical instinct which sanctioned fundamental lapses in dramatic sense and featured musical externals ever more expert and lavish. His solo songs, notably those of op.47 (1880), continued to offer commentaries on his life – in this case a painful encounter with Antonina – while projecting a nonchalant public face. His programmatic festival overture 1812 (1880) and the Manfred symphony (1885) continued to juxtapose music of great beauty with noise and fray. Of these, 1812, apart from the cannon which make it popular and festive, warrants attention for quoting a liturgical melody (the opening theme) and the national anthems of Russia and France. The brassy statements of ‘La Marseillaise’ are another mask for personal memory, echoing Litolff's Ouvertüre zu Maximilian Robespierre, a favourite work of Tchaikovsky when he was a student.

The focus of new composition in these years was the orchestral suite, which became a musical commentary on the composer's freedom. In April 1884, writing to Meck, Tchaikovsky affirmed that his sympathy for the suite originated in the freedom it offered him from the constraints of tradition, convention and rules. As a personal expression, the suite may represent an artistic rebellion comparable to Tchaikovsky's rebellion against the conservatory, or simply the admission that he had yet to recover from the shocks of 1877. A certain motleyness and the eschewal of personal confession mark the suites and provide a point of departure for critique. Yet the expectation that Tchaikovsky's music always engaged the emotions is itself biassed, disallowing him any penchant for experimentation or for expressing the beautiful, the charming, or the piquant without angst.

In the First Suite Tchaikovsky seemed to be groping to define the genre. The controlling conception is not clear, as the music projects connectivity and discourse in certain movements, and beauty for its own sake in others. In the opening movement, an ‘Introduzione e fuga’ linked by its title to the Sixth Suite (1871) of Franz Lachner, Tchaikovsky separates the introduction from the fugue proper by a fugal exposition whose motif is then combined with the opening theme. This anticipation of the fugue and the integration of themes suggest purely musical discourse, and establish a premise early in the suite in conflict with those discrete movements whose appeal is more to charm than logic. His quotation of the fugue subject at the end of the last movement, a Schumannesque gesture of unification which operates above or across the separate movements, compounds the confusion. The abandoned titles of the fourth movement, ‘March of the Lilliputians’ and the Gavotte, ‘Dance of the Giants’, suggest initial associations of grotesquerie with the new genre. Brass fanfares reminiscent of the motto of the Fourth Symphony in the introduction and the scherzo may be fatalistic personal touches.

For all this mix of features, a new genre was emerging in the distinctive concertante elements, contrasts between the movements, simple formal patterns, the exploitation of the characteristic, and the emphasis on what Russians would call prelest' – the charming, the pleasing – not least in capricious rhythms.

Tchaikovsky's experiment with freedom continued in his next instrumental work, the Second Piano Concerto (1879). Its expansive first movement, with tripartite exposition and lengthy cadenzas, is followed by a striking Andante. Here the piano is joined by solo violin and cello to form a concertino grouping in the manner of a concerto grosso. A rondo concludes the work.

The dedication of the Second Concerto to Nikolay Rubinstein betrayed powerful unspoken sentiments. In it Tchaikovsky seemed to make amends for his abrupt departure from the conservatory the year before, to thank his former colleague for his long advocacy, and to effect a true reconciliation after their differences over the First Piano Concerto in 1874. Homage to Rubinstein, whose interpretation of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was considered superior to those of Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner, may have moved Tchaikovsky to make his concerto an answer to Beethoven. A slow movement unique in conception and eloquence heads the list of reconceived likenesses with Beethoven's Concerto in G, which extend in the first movement to subsidiary themes in the same keys as Beethoven, a prominent new theme in the development, and the unexpected importance of C major (in Beethoven as the ‘wrong’ initial key of the finale, in Tchaikovsky for its emphasis in the first movement). Little doubt of his purpose remains at the close of the slow movement when Tchaikovsky refers openly to the analogous location in Beethoven's Fourth (at bar 286ff). He affirmed his esteem for Rubinstein by rejecting Ziloti's later attempts to mutilate the slow movement. The concertino had to stay, as it was somehow associated with Rubinstein: when he died in March 1881, about a month after the score of the concerto was published, Tchaikovsky apostrophized his memory in a trio for precisely the instruments of this concertino.

Before Rubinstein's death Tchaikovsky had reverted to order and limitation in the Serenade for Strings (1880). A string quintet in texture, it neutralized orchestral colour as an element of form. In contrast to the freely associative coherence of the First Suite, the Serenade holds together by as closely knit a motivic network as Tchaikovsky ever wrote, based on the descending melodic tetrachord at the beginning and on ascending scales, first at bar eight of the Sonatina, which are transformed in the waltz theme of the second movement and the introduction of the third. He also invokes now familiar strategies: the Serenade is an essay in Western/Russian rapprochement which favours Russian at the end, in that the Pezzo in forma di sonatina lacks a formal transition and development, which Tchaikovsky pointedly restores in the finale, reconciling his Russian tune with Western pattern and practice. To progress from an ‘imperfect’ first movement to a ‘perfect’ last one recalls Beethoven again, as does the finale's elegant introduction, which effectively elides the last two movements. Tchaikovsky could have drawn this idea from a number of Beethovenian models – ‘La Malinconia’ of op.18 no.6, op.95, or his final use of this device in op.135.

Rubinstein's memorial, the Piano Trio ‘To the Memory of a Great Artist’ (1882), combined experiment and conformity in a different way. With no clue except the dedication, the listener senses the music to be topical. Tchaikovsky showed an easy command of sonata-allegro in the first movement, but after a conventional beginning the theme and variations runs to the fanciful. Figural variations and a fugue mix with intonations of the music box, the waltz, the bayan and the mazurka – as if these were personal recollections of Rubinstein. To stem the flood of memory he set apart the weighty final variation, and reprised the opening theme of the first movement as a funeral march at the end.

The Second and Third Suites are musical perorations on freedom. Tchaikovsky wrote the Second between July and October 1883, after four months of enforced residence in Paris during which he helped his niece Tanya Davïdova, morphine addicted, pregnant and unwed, through detoxification and childbirth. These circumstances, of which Modest omits mention in The Life, may explain the work's eccentric expression, unusual demands of ensemble and scoring (including four accordions), striking image (a touching ‘Rêves d'enfant’, which may refer to Tanya's newborn) and blatant contrasts. These components can produce an impression of strangeness, randomness, even vulgarity. The pleasing expression of one movement may not survive juxtaposition with the next – the Scherzo burlesque followed by the ‘Rêves d'enfant’ followed by a Dargomïzhskian ‘Wild Dance’. As the reception of the Second Suite has shown, freedom so unrestrained promotes disinterest and confusion in the listener. This work represents Tchaikovsky's inspiration at its most wilful, its furthest remove from the integral logic of Western models.

By contrast, the Third Suite, drawing on devices used in the Serenade for Strings and the Piano Trio, illustrates the virtues of discipline without abandoning the generic markers of the suite. It is still a miscellany of movements which depend for their effect more on charm than argument. Tchaikovsky continues to avoid the rhetoric of Western music, but favours motivic consistency and colour. The juxtapositions of style in the Second Suite yield here to consistency and intermovement likenesses of pattern and metre, which increase in excitement from movement to movement in anticipation of the finale.

The finale takes its form from the last movement of the Piano Trio: a conventional beginning leads to fanciful variations, and then to an apotheosis set off from the rest of the movement. It draws its expressive arch from the Serenade for Strings, proceeding from a Western perspective to a Russian one. As this happens, the fanciful variations are no less vivid than they were in the Trio, but their connotations are unmistakable even in the absence of verbal clues. By the fourth variation Tchaikovsky has abandoned the Western cliché of consistent figuration over the bass of his theme; by variation seven he has neutralized its original character, in variation eight made a bow to Glinka, and in variation nine adopted the Russian changing background manner. The national identity achieved, he specifies his goal more precisely as courtly and monarchical in variation ten, music for a classical ballerina's solo, and in the apotheosis, variation 12, a polonaise full of pomp and ceremony.

It is tempting to attribute the reception of this vastly successful work to its auspicious première at St Petersburg in January 1885, conducted by Hans von Bülow, and performances by Tchaikovsky himself from St Petersburg to New York. That success, however, may find its origins in Tchaikovsky's curbing the extreme freedoms of its predecessor, in his leavening of novelty with control and accessibility.

The Concert Fantasia for piano and orchestra op.56 (1884) is an offspring of the Third Suite in that themes conceived for that work are used in its second movement, ‘Contrasts’. It is Tchaikovsky's last essay in suite-like freedom. Its point is virtuosity, echoing a time when audiences (to paraphrase Laroche) were less concerned about what was played than how. Tchaikovsky takes his themes beyond their potential for elaboration. The solo cadenza is raised to a higher power in the first movement, where it trumps a development section with what could be, in the virtuoso frame of reference, a fantasia on the principal motif of Vasco da Gama's ‘O paradis!’ from Meyerbeer's L'Africaine.

For Tchaikovsky the need to be planning or composing an opera was constant. In this period he wrote Orleanskaya deva (‘The Maid of Orleans’, 1878–9, first performed in 1881), on the life of Joan of Arc, and Mazepa (‘Mazeppa’, 1881–3, first performed in 1884), an episode in the life of that Cossack hetman. In addition, Yevgeny Onegin was first produced in 1879, by students of the Moscow Conservatory, and staged in St Petersburg in 1884.

In The Maid of Orleans Joan is summoned by an angelic choir to battle for Charles VII, a profligate and cowardly monarch. In combat her mercy towards an enemy knight turns to love. At Charles's coronation, Joan's father turns everyone against her by accusing her of Satanic powers. Banished, Joan exchanges endearments with her lover, he is slain, and she burnt at the stake.

After consulting many sources Tchaikovsky versified this scenario himself, drawing mainly from Schiller, whose idealism is mitigated by prosaic historical fact and operatic convention. Tchaikovsky's portrayal of Charles (who is valiant in Schiller) raises doubt about the wisdom of Joan's allegiance, while ambiguity over the nature of her passion annuls the credibility of the opera's love interest. In Schiller Joan must resist earthly love. In Tchaikovsky she faces no such imperative; she is simply empowered by her virginal purity. When later, Isolde-like, she raises her sword to kill Lionel (who becomes her lover) but forbears when moonlight illuminates his face, her loss of free agency is no more willed than that of Wagner's heroine when her glance meets Tristan's. This precludes any guilt and any justification for her denunciation, and reduces her love, in the absence of Wagner's elaborate philosophizing, to an empty dramatic device. No personal passion or conflict in Joan (who says nothing in her own defence) offsets the grandiose elements of Tchaikovsky's conception, leaving the libretto devoid of the attribute he would later extol as ‘intimate character’.

The choice of topic raises questions. Tchaikovsky's fascination with Joan reached back to childhood, but his denunciation of grand opera (to Taneyev on 2/14 January 1878) – decrying its massive stage effects and mocking the feelings of high and mighty characters – is inconsistent with this project. Explanations advanced for his choice based on the composer's affinity with Schiller's androgynous Joan are probably too limiting; more persuasive is Tchaikovsky's need for reassessment at this juncture of his life, and finding in Joan the outsider ‘the liberating artistic vehicle through which he might create such a reassessment’ (Kearney, E1998). In this light the opera is less an essay in sexuality than a study in the complexity of human nature and the ambivalence of human relationships.

The Maid of Orleans is a hybrid. The historical subject with religious components, big choral scenes, and elaborate ballet all point to Paris, as do certain particulars (Joan's father is a curmudgeon like Marcel in Les Huguenots, and the coronation at which a parent defames a child proclaimed as divine derives from Le prophète). Tchaikovsky uses Russian precedents to cleanse preposterous and cynical elements from the French prototype: Joan, like Musorgsky's Boris, is flawed but sincere, and the opera's religious element is meant to be taken seriously. Unlike the assassins in Les Huguenots, the people in The Maid are socially aware, even if susceptible to malign influence.

The best music in The Maid of Orleans overcomes the libretto and Tchaikovsky's practice of composing text and music in tandem. Joan's farewell to the forests, the prayer which precedes it, the engaging Dance of the Jesters, the fleeting duet of Charles and Agnes, the effective orchestral introductions, continued in Mazeppa – all these command the listener's attention amid verbose passages which betray the composer's fatigue, remarked in letters, or which illustrate his preoccupation with narrative coherence in a genre which thrives on the lyric elaboration of simple emotions.

Tchaikovsky's initial enthusiasm for this opera was muted by the trials of publication, difficult rehearsals, censorship (the problem of an archbishop on stage), and obligatory modifications. Critics savaged it after the first performance on 13/25 February 1881, and its run was cut short the next autumn by the absence of a singer for the title role. It was nevertheless Tchaikovsky's first opera to be produced abroad (in Prague in July 1882). He recognized the need for revisions, but never made them.

Mazeppa was different. Set to a ready-made libretto, it was less tinkered with in relation to its sources than The Maid of Orleans. The wizened Mazeppa, treacherous after many battles, has fallen in love with his goddaughter Maria, and she with him. This scandalizes Maria's parents and Andrey, a young Cossack sore with love for her. Maria's father Kochubey denounces Mazeppa as a traitor to Peter the Great, but Peter, unconvinced, delivers him back to Mazeppa, who sees to his torture and execution. At the Battle of Poltava, represented in the opera by a symphonic picture, Mazeppa does in fact turn against Peter. Fleeing in defeat, he encounters Maria, driven to madness by her father's execution, and Andrey, whom he wounds in a fight. Witless, Maria sings Andrey a lullaby as he dies.

Despite the pairing of old man and young woman, the obligatory Russian genre scenes, and the occasional overblown ensemble, Mazeppa is one of Tchaikovsky's great creations. A new eloquence in the orchestra is partly responsible. Horrors of the narrative notwithstanding, Tchaikovsky's characterization is consistently noble and cantabile, whether in Mazeppa's apostrophes to Maria, or Kochubey's meditations before his death, or the refrain Maria's mother sings as she urges her to intercede with Mazeppa to prevent Kochubey's execution. The shattering effect of Maria's lullaby is unprecedented in earlier Tchaikovsky. Here calm and quiet magnify the tragedy, a device not lost on Stravinsky at the end of The Rake's Progress. Mazeppa succeeded in Moscow, stalled in St Petersburg after bad performances and a hostile press, and surprised the composer by the brilliant outcome of a production in Tbilisi in 1885.

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il'yich, §4: Marriage & its aftermath, 1877–85