Tchaikovsky and Madame von Meck
Linda
I happened to listen to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony Pathetique (悲怆交响曲) the other day when I took a long dull trip. I felt a sudden touch in my mind. The familiar melody almost brought tears into my eyes. So I made up my mind to discuss with Hongen’s reader on this difficult topic. You know, it’s not so easy for me to write music English.
It’s well known that Tchaikovsky is the composer of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. Maybe he is not so great as another musician, Beethoven, but I like his music the best. I can hum his most moving Ariose Andante, the second movement of his famous String Quartet, No.1. I can play his bright Four Little Swan in the piano. I like his Italy Capriccio very much.
Yes, his music is a little melancholy, but it’s the melancholy that is in keeping with my own melancholy temperament. In a word, his music can enter directly into my mind and can touch me very successfully.
But now, what I want to say is not his music but the unusual relationship between Tchaikovsky and Madame von Meck, the most amazing romance in music history. Madame von Meck was a widow with a brood of children and a wealthy estate. They could be mother-and-son in their age and the bond that held them together was his music.
It’s said that they never met face to face in their lifetimes, although at times they lived but a few roads away from each other. He even walked to the village for the mail and passed her house, heard the sound of her children’s voices in those days. Both of them don’t like their musical relationship be superseded by something too realistic, too material to make a further friendship possible.
What was between them was an intimacy of correspondence. She knew of his physical appearance only through the photo he sent her, but she knew his most intimate and deepest thoughts. With shrewd tact and womanly kindness, she had won his complete trust. She always soothed the musical genius, listened to his complaints and gave him the courage to continue in his hours of despair.
But after she received the piano arrangement of the Fourth Symphony, she couldn’t help but made a full concession to him. ‘I love you more than anyone else; I value you above everything in the world. If this bothers you, forgive me. I have spoken out. The reason is … your symphony’. They named the Fourth Symphony as Our Symphony.
Their unusual intimacy of correspondence lasted for 13 years. But when he was close to the pinnacle of success and received an invitation to conduct a concert tour in six of the leading cities of America, he received a letter from her in a tone she had never used before. She told him in a curt and businesslike manner that their relationship should come to an end.
He became a nation-wide idol in United States: Matrons, millionaires, educators, journalists and coachmen all bowed to him in obsequious homage. But this was all empty glory to him. He would have gladly exchanged all of it for a single word from Madame von Meck. He hoped against hope that she would surely send him another letter, explaining every thing. Day after day he waited for that letter –but it never came. He had aged rapidly in those several months.
He still continued his working on a new symphony, Symphony Pathetique, his sixth one. This was the most wonderful work of his. It was a funeral dirge, a farewell song to a dead friendship. Its melodies were so beautiful that they would bring tears to the audience’s eyes.
The great musical genius died in agony after he completed his sixth symphony. It became his funeral dirge too. A strange life ended in a strange way.
Genius is the wealth that the God gives to human being. But I can’t make clear why the life of a genius would be so miserable like that.
