The Brilliant Comet of 1812

I have written extensively in this blog on monumental, devilish music. The truth is, those grandiose, demanding music is not my routine company—at least most of the time not. My appreciation for music goes so far for chamber music. I consider chamber music my favorite type of performance and music arrangement of all times. Chamber music requires the reverberations of all members in the team, hence if executed well, creating an unusual sense of harmony and intimacy. I still believe that music is primarily a space that we reconcile with disharmony and search for the harmony that would most likely be attained through the musical dimension, not any way through the reality. Chamber music invents such an ideal model for us.

I have been very attracted to Tchaikovsky in the recent months, including his 5th, 6th, and various ballet suites as well as their piano transcriptions. Today here I pay homage to Tchaikovsky’s piano trio in a minor, Op.50.

This piano trio is slightly longer than usual ones—it lasts for about 45 minutes. Within such extraordinary length, the trio’s structure is fragmented, loose, and unconventional in the style of no clear margins between movements. The unstructureness of the trio’s structure is largely due to the distinct 11 variations of a theme. Those 11 variations constitute multiple forms of music: cantibile (Var. 2/4/5/7), waltze (Var. 6), fuga (Var. 8), triste (Var. 9), mazurka (Var. 10). The variation coda is akin to a triumphant march. The final movement ends with a funeral march.

To master the variety of tempos and music forms here is enough a challenge that tricks a musician—I’m talking specifically about the mazurka in Var. 10. Fortunately, I have no trouble playing the mazurkas. Yet, for a handful of piano players, mazurka is where one trips and gets defeated.

Forget about the overall technical demands of this trio. The emotional elasticity is equivalent to that of an epic, such as a Russian novel—Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, War & Peace, to list a few. When we first are introduced to the music, we learn the complex backdrop of the forthcoming events, then the twists and turns of people, and at last when the tale ends, we realize the main characters are transformed, transfigured, or metamorphosized into something that we could not identify any more with the beginning.

Such is the epic finale for this trio, “Andante con moto—lugubre.” Oh, how I love this movement. This movement signals the narrative feature of the trio. What I mean is, if this movement is taken out alone without the support of the first movement and the 2nd movement (the variations movement), the finale will be bizzarely illogical. A chamber music group could usually single out a movement in a work and piece it together with something utterly irrelevant. In the case of the Tchaikovsky trio, to perform any movement alone without addressing the rest is an incoherency so salient even to a music-phobic ear. The finale reverberates the opening theme of the entire trio and expresses the ending remarks of an Odyssey, where conclusions are not easily reached, characters pay prizes for their desires, and regrets perpetuate.

The final mvt breaks in with an explosive statement through one of the simplest chords ever—an a-minor chord. Only after repeated twice, the a-minor chords moves to the d-minor chord. The same pattern repeats 3 times before landing in a d-minor 11th chord.

7th-chords descends chromatically: a#-a-g#-g-f#-f-e.

Funeral march in the final mvt: the narration of an epic tale has finished, and the tone of the tale has been made abundantly clear.

Finishing today’s writing, I realize how much more I enjoy writing about music than playing the music.