The real Tchaikovsky
The real Tchaikovsky: Before passing away in 1893, Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky gave the world some truly magnificent pieces of music, including The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, and Violin Concerto. But there is reason to believe that some of Tchaikovsky’s music, as we now know it, is not quite what the Russian composer had written.
“Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, with its grand opening chords, is one of the most recognizable and popular pieces in the classical music repertoire. Yet the piano’s famous opening chords are not, in fact, what Tchaikovsky wrote at all,” pianist Kirill Gerstein writes for The New York Review of Books. In 1875, Tchaikovsky published the first version of the concerto, and later slightly amended the piece “while leaving both the musical material and the overall structure intact,” and published this amended version in 1879. For 14 years — until his death — Tchaikovsky continued to perform the amended version, but a third version was published posthumously, and it is believed that the changes made to the original work were not approved by the composer before his passing. A cloud of uncertainty hovers above the issue, but one of Tchaikovsky’s students, Alexander Siloti, is considered the culprit in the unauthorized changes to the composer’s work. Gerstein says the alterations Siloti allegedly made take away from the “genuine musical character” of the piece, and adds more “superficial brilliance” than anything else. “I do find that in all the cases where there is a discrepancy, what the composer wrote is more suitable and fitting to the musical content, to the general poetry of the piece,” he tells The New York Times.