(VI) Songs.

Our understanding of Tchaikovsky's 103 songs is lodged between condescension in English-language criticism and praise in a much more lively Russian scholarship, which views them in a different frame of reference. That difference is between judging how music divines and elevates the meaning of a poem, and how the intonational properties of words are vivified by music. The Russian preoccupation with speech intonations is deep rooted and culturally based, yet prone to disregard in the West in manifestations less extreme than those of Dargomïzhsky and Musorgsky. Tchaikovsky also warrants consideration in this critical arena, even though he believed that people do not sing the same way they talk, and song accordingly should be allowed the occasional misaccent, to say nothing of a substantial lyric component. His belief espouses musical realism in its way.

As in other genres, Tchaikovsky brought Western and Russian together in the art song. While his range of topics is Schubertian, his prototypical song is modelled on Robert Schumann: a preference for ardent, often gloomy love lyrics in the first person; a willingness to modify the poet's text, especially to reprise initial verses at the end; a tendency to involve the piano prominently in the expression of a song with introductions and postludes, extended in Tchaikovsky by rich textures and passionate outbursts during the vocal part. The Russian element lies in the basic conception – the urban romance of Glinka, Alyab'yev and others – which Tchaikovsky enriched and refined beyond any limits his predecessors might have imagined.

An appreciation of Tchaikovsky's songs turns on these distinctions. He was surely aware of their recurrent sentiment and formal mannerism, and no less indifferent to the artistic consequences of repeating himself than Schubert was in writing hundreds of 16-bar lyrics identical in form. The Western concern with musical connotations of poetical meaning, sanctioned by a century of scrutinizing lieder, deflects attention from the interaction of prosody and musical motif, an issue about which Tchaikovsky, in later years, made his concern explicit. The dismissal of the urban romance as a degraded social and musical cliché denies the legitimacy of its heterogeneous origins in folk music, gypsy songs, social dances, mock Asian elements and operatic idioms. Yet this mix was Tchaikovsky's inheritance, and he drew upon it unabashedly.

The tendency to anthologize Tchaikovsky's songs has blunted investigation of his choice and grouping of poems, joining forces with our innocence of his motivations to obscure the possibility that groups of songs may originally have been published as coherent entities. Little has been said about the musical and textual integration of the songs within a group, and nothing about the possibility that the texts may be glosses on events in the composer's life. The op.6 poems, set in the wake of the Artôt affair, read as if addressed to her. Similarly, the op.16 songs may be the composer's response to the death of Eduard Zak, linked in this purpose to the piano pieces of op.21 by the quotation of the Dies irae in the last song of the group.

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