Piano Concerto No. 3 (Tchaikovsky)

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Tchaikovsky in 1893, as painted by Nikolai Kuznetzov.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. post. 75, proved one of the more troublesome of its composer's musical progeny. Birthed as a symphony, then discarded, it returned as a three-movement concerto, only to become a single-movement Allegro brilliante when published posthumously.

Controversy remains, despite the composer's stated intentions, as to what form this concerto would have taken had Tchaikovsky lived to complete it to his satisfaction. The question is further heightened by (1) the quality of material in the two movements Tchaikovsky discarded and (2) whether this material was worth the efforts of his former student and fellow-composer Sergey Taneyev in resurrecting it after Tchaikovsky's death—albeit as a separate but related composition, under a separate opus number.

Most pianists who have performed this work have played the single-movement Allegro brilliante. More recently, the three-movement version has received increased attention.

The music also served as the basis for the ballet Allegro Brillante, as imagined and choreographed by George Balanchine in 1956 for the New York City Ballet.

[edit] From Symphony to Concerto

Tchaikovsky's first mention of using the sketches of his abandoned Symphony in E flat as the basis for a piano concerto came early in April 1893^[1]. He began work on July 5, completing the first movement eight days later. Though he worked quickly, Tchaikovsky did not find the job a pleasant one—a note on the manuscript reads, "The end, God be thanked!" He did not score this movement until autumn^[2].

In June Tchaikovsky was in London to conduct a performance of his Fourth Symphony. There he ran into his friend, the French pianist Louis Diémer, whom he had met in Paris five years earlier during a festival of Tchaikovsky's chamber works. Diémer had performed Tchaikovsky's Concert Fantasia in G major, Op. 56, in a two-piano arrangement with the composer at the second piano^[3]. One of the major French pianists at his time, Diémer's students at the Paris Conservatoire would include such distinguished pianists and musicians as Robert Casadesus, Alfred Cortot and Vincent d'Indy^[4]. Sometime during their reaquaintance, Tchaikovsky might have mentioned the concerto upon which he had been working. Regardless, he decided to dedicate the work to Diémer.

Louis Diémer, French pianist and friend of Tchaikovsky. The composer dedicated the Third Piano Concerto to him.

After finishing the Pathétique symphony, Tchaikovsky turned once again to the concerto, only to experience another wave of doubt. He confided to pianist Alexander Siloti, “As music it hasn’t come out badly—but it’s pretty ungrateful." He wrote to Polish pianist and composer Sigismund Stojowski on October 6, 1893, "As I wrote to you, my new Symphony is finished. I am now working on the scoring of my new (third) concerto for our dear Dièmer. When you see him, please tell him that when I proceeded to work on it, I realized that this concerto is of depressing and threatening length. Consequently I decided to leave only part one which in itself will constitute an entire concerto. The work will only improve the more since the last two parts were not worth very much^[5]."

The choice of a single-movement Allegro de concert or Concertstück would have been in line with French piano-and-orchestra works of the period such as Gabriel Fauré's Ballade, César Franck's symphonic poem Les Djinns and Variations symphoniques—several of these works premiered by Diémer. There was also a growing trend toward similar works by Russian composers. This included Mili Balakirev's First Piano Concerto, Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov's sole foray in this genre, and currently lesser-known works as the Allegro de concert in A major by Felix Blumenfeld (best known today as the teacher of pianist Vladimir Horowitz) and the Fantasie russe in B minor by Eduard Nápravník. Tchaikovsky was especially fond of the Nápravník piece and even conducted it. Siloti and Taneyev also performed it^[6].

Once Tchaikovsky finished scoring the Allegro brilliante in October 1893, Tchaikovsky asked Taneyev to look it over. Taneyev, on whom Tchaikovsky relied for techhical advice pianistically, found the solo part lacking in virtuosity. Tchaikovsky had told Siloti that if Taneyev shared his low opinion of the concerto, he would destroy it. The composer did not carry out this threat, however. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest assured Siloti that while Tchaikovsky in no way questioned Taneyev’s verdict, he also had promised the concerto to Dièmer and wanted to show the score to him. In fact, on what would be his final visit to Moscow in October 1893, Tchaikovsky showed the concerto once again to Taneyev^[7].

Less than a month later, Tchaikovsky was dead.

Taneyev gave the first performance of the concerto in Saint Petersburg on January 7, 1895, conducted by Eduard Nápravník.

[edit] The Concerto as it Exists Now

Sergey Taneyev—friend, former student and advisor to Tchaikovsky on pianistic matters, who premiered the Third Piano Concerto in 1895.

The composer might have counted on Diémer as well as Taneyev to help decide the final form the concerto would take—whether to leave it as one movement or three—or whether the piece would make it to the concert hall. Tchaikovsky had invariably sought comments and suggestions for his concertos and concerto-like works from their intended dedicatees. The commentary Tchaikovsky received, and his reaction, may have been mixed, but his pattern of seeking such advice was consistent. Whatever information Diémer might have shared, as well as any further input from Taneyev, could have potentially reshaped or modified the piece considerably, perhaps for the better.

One undebatable point that Tchaikovsky biographer David Brown and other detractors of the Third Concerto seem to evade is that the work cannot be judged as a totally finished composition. Tchaikovsky had not sent the piece to Jurgenson for publication; and even if it appeared complete enough to Taneyev to warrant publication, there is no telling how Tchaikovsky would have changed or elaborated on the music had he lived longer.

Though the Third Concerto is a considerably more complete shape than the Mahler Tenth Symphony or the Bartók Viola Concerto, it really belongs in their same category of musical what-ifs and considered accordingly.

Tchaikovsky might have tailored the solo part, with its myriad cascades of runs and scales throughout the work and the prominence of trills in the cadenza, especially for Diémer. Diémer was known by French audiences as "the king of the scale and the trill^[8]." One of Diémer's students, Lazare Lévy, who himself would become an influence on the French musical scene, wrote about his teacher, "The astonishing precision of his playing, his legendary trills, the sobriety of his style, made him the excellent pianist we all admired^[9]." With comments such as this in mind, it could be hard for an informed listener to hear a soloist play the Third Concerto without having its intended dedicate come to mind.

As for the composition on the whole, music writer Eric Blom comments, "Except for the cadenza, the whole piece is an admirably knit symphonic first movement, and even that purely virtuosic feature, [the solo part,] inserted no doubt as an afterthought, is structurally as satisfactory as possible, though as a feat of pianistic writing it suffers from the same kind of inflation as the cadenza in the B flat minor Concerto and hastens to a climax by that kind of more and more closely telescoped thematic features which is one of Tchaikovsky's most obvious theatrical effects.^[10]."

Blom concludes, "Why this concerto should never be performed passes comprehension, except perhaps that pianists feel that if they play Tchaikovsky, they must at all costs do the B flat minor over and over again. But surely anybody not wedded exclusively to that work—and monogamy is no virtue in concert-goers—would enjoy hearing No. 3 for once in a way and as a curiosity with the other two reconstructed movements, and more frequently by itself as a particularly attractive concert piece^[11]."

(Continue from here to Andante and Finale, Op. 79.)

[edit] Bibliography

• Blom, Eric, ed. Abraham, Gerald, Music of Tchaikovsky (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1946)
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Years of Wandering (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986)
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992)
• Hanson, Lawrence and Elisabeth, Tchaikovsky: The Man Behind the Music (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company)
• Poznansky, Alexander, Tchaikovsky's Last Days (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
• Poznansky, Alexander Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991)
• Poznansky, Alexander. Tchaikovsky Through Others' Eyes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)
• Schonberg, Harold C., The Great Pianists (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, 1963)
• Soifertis, Evgeny, Liner notes for Hyperion compact disc CDA67511 (London: Hyperion Records Ltd., 1993)
• Warrack, John, Tchaikovsky (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973)
• Warrack, John, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969)

[edit] External links

• Tchaikovsky-Research.net article on Piano Concerto No. 3
• Tchaikovsky-Research article on Symphony in E-flat
• Tchaikovsky-Research.net home page
• Piano Concerto No. 3 was available at the International Music Score Library Project.

[edit] Notes