Tchaikovsky & Dvořák

Get more acquainted

• Program Notes by James Manishen, Artistic Operations Associate

• Born in 1865, Alexander Glazunov was a leading Russian composer of the generation after Tchaikovsky. The elder composer took a great interest in Glazunov’s career, and helped to publicize his music. They socialized regularly in Saint Petersburg, and Glazunov presented many inscribed copies of his works to the older composer.

• Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet in D, Op.11 is by far the composer’s best known chamber work. In part because it encapsulates one of classical music’s greatest hits, the poignant Andante cantabile. The main theme is based on a folk song that Tchaikovsky reportedly heard a gardener sing while visiting his sister in the Ukraine two years earlier. The contrasting section is Tchaikovsky’s own inspiration. According to the composer’s diary, it moved the great Russian author Leo Tolstoy to tears.

• “He is the greatest master of counterpoint in Russia; I am not even sure there is his equal in the West,” was Tchaikovsky’s verdict on his protégé, champion and friend Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev. Taneyev became the most trusted musician among Tchaikovsky’s friends. The two developed a friendship that would last until Tchaikovsky’s death.

• Arranged by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky himself, the composer’s Nocturne for cello and string orchestra is based on the piano piece of the same name in C sharp minor, No. 4, Op 19. The arrangement was probably written in Paris in 1888 for his friend, the Russian cellist Anatoly Brandukov.

• Tchaikovsky was introduced to Antonin Dvořák during his visits to Prague in 1888, and the two men found much to admire in each other’s music. That year Dvořák gave a copy of his Symphony No. 2 with a warm inscription to Tchaikovsky, which is still preserved in the House-Museum at Klin. Two days later, Tchaikovsky repaid the compliment by presenting Dvořák with a photograph of himself bearing the following inscription: “To my dear and deeply esteemed friend Anton Dvořák from a sincere admirer, P. Tchaikovsky.”