(IV) Piano music.

The secondary status accorded his works for solo piano is curious in light of their advocacy by Nikolay Rubinstein and Hans von Bülow. Many factors locate the short works which constitute most of the repertory: a distinction between salon and concert, expedients of commerce, the shadow of larger compositions in other media, a tendency to excerpt and Tchaikovsky's open condescension about many of them. At the heart of the problem is that piano music did not fully engage Tchaikovsky's creative imagination, and that he did not develop a distinctive idiom for the instrument, as Chopin and Liszt had.

These criticisms do not invalidate the attractions of this repertory, which Tchaikovsky's contemporaries enjoyed and his publishers exploited with myriad arrangements. These include the ubiquitous ‘Chant sans paroles’ from op.2, the Souvenir de Hapsal, a town where the composer and Modest took refuge after holiday funds ran out in the summer of 1867. The Romance op.5, dedicated to Artôt, may refer to Artôt and Tchaikovsky in its principal themes, an operatic cantabile which echoes the lyric of Chopin's nocturnes blatantly juxtaposed with a Russian dance. Laroche observed that the two did not go well together, an unwitting affirmation of the composer's possible subtext, that the two persons did not go well together either. The Humoresque op.10 no.2, written in Nice in the winter of 1871–2, quotes a folktune of that locale in the middle section. The main theme – with its ambiguous tonic, saucy wrongnotedness, and metre-disorientating rhythms – was a natural choice for Stravinsky to appropriate for Le baiser de la fée. The theme and variations of op.19 is Tchaikovsky's first piano composition to exceed the dimensions of a miniature. All six pieces of op.21 are based on the same melody; the tragic tone of the Marche funèbre, which quotes the Dies irae, is attributable to the death of Eduard Zak, a 19-year-old youth of whom the composer had grown fond.

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il'yich, §3: First decade in Moscow, 1866–76

(V) Concertante works.

A concern about characteristic writing for the solo instrument marks Tchaikovsky's concertante works. He routinely solicited advice from virtuosos in this connection, with mixed results. When Nikolay Rubinstein exposed the flaws in the First Piano Concerto (on the Russian Christmas Eve, 1874) Tchaikovsky rebelled, changing little and rededicating that work to Bülow, who went on to play the first performance. When Fitzenhagen mutilated the solo part in the Variations on a Rococo Theme, Tchaikovsky acquiesced to added repeat signs, the relocation and in one instance the deletion of variations. These changes obscured the music's relationship to the 18th century, which was less one of emulation than of pastiche, Tchaikovsky's bow to Mozart's era expressed in his own rhythmic and chordal language.

In the First Piano Concerto Tchaikovsky redefined concertante in light of the soloist-dominated concertos of Chopin and Ries, partly by using the orchestra to the full extent of its expressive capability and by writing extended passages where the piano accompanies it. Balancing this, the persistently demanding solo part (which may owe something to Henry Litolff’s concerto symphonique), together with unexpected cadenzas which offer perorations in mid-pattern, make pianistic idiom crucial to maintaining the polarity of expressive weight between soloist and orchestra. Tchaikovsky shares this polarity with Liszt, but whereas Liszt eases the demand for architectural weight by connecting short movements of brightly contrasting themes, Tchaikovsky deploys his forces at full capacity to a sonata-allegro structure, engaging in a much more involved musical argument. As had become his way by 1874, he individualized the classical pattern with striking materials (the song of blind Ukrainian singers, a café waltz and a folksong) and with the celebrated first-movement introduction, which literally drops out of the work, but not before leaving its mark – in the distinctive inclusion of introductions to subsequent themes, in its key, which defines a tonal realm for lyrical themes throughout the concerto, and in its subjective affinity with the grand reprise of the lyric theme of the finale.

Tchaikovsky's concertante works for violin – the Sérénade mélancolique and the Valse-scherzo – are more modest, and resemble inner movements of larger works. Later, the Méditation from the Souvenir d'un lieu cher found its origin in that source, a rejected slow movement from the Violin Concerto.

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il'yich, §3: First decade in Moscow, 1866–76