Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto had its premiere performance not in the composer’s native Russia (where, naturally, most of his work was first heard), but in the distant U.S., a country that the composer himself would not visit for nearly twenty years. And thereby hangs a tale:

Nikolay Rubinstein, director of the Moscow Conservatory from its founding in 1866 to his death in 1881, was a younger brother of Tchaikovsky’s teacher Anton Rubinstein, then quite well known as a composer. Both Rubinstein brothers thought very highly of the young Tchaikovsky, and Nikolay actually the conducted the premieres of a great many of his works: the first four symphonies, Eugene Onegin, Romeo and Juliet, Marche Slave, the Capriccio italien, and the Rococo Variations. Tchaikovsky certainly planned his first piano concerto especially for Nikolay, intending that he should receive the dedication and play the solo part in the first performance.

It was not to be. On Christmas Eve of 1874, Tchaikovsky took the manuscript to Rubinstein to ask him about some technical details of the keyboard writing. He played through the first movement and received only stony silence. With mounting apprehension, Tchaikovsky played through to the end and turned to ask him, “Well?” As Tchaikovsky described it later, Rubinstein broke out in a torrent of abuse, saying that the concerto was fragmented, vulgar, clumsy, and imitative. “I was not just astounded but outraged by the whole scene. I am no longer a boy trying his hand at composition and I no longer need lessons from anyone, especially when they are offered so harshly and in such a spirit of hostility.” Rubinstein, attempting to pour oil on troubled waters, promised to play the piece—if Tchaikovsky reworked it in accordance with his demands. The composer’s response: “I shall not alter a single note; I shall publish the work exactly as it is.”

Rubinstein eventually became a firm champion of the Concerto, but in the meantime the composer dedicated it to Hans von Bülow, the distinguished German pianist and conductor who had written an important early review praising Tchaikovsky’s music. (Tchaikovsky evidently asked him to premiere it as far from Russia as possible, in case it should fail utterly.) Von Bülow happily accepted the dedication and prepared to premiere the piece at one of a series of concerts he gave in Boston late in 1875 with the orchestra of the Harvard Musical Association, a pickup ensemble that gave regular orchestral concerts in the years before the founding of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The distinguished Boston composer George W. Chadwick, then just about to turn twenty-one, heard the performance and recalled in a memoir years later, “They had not rehearsed much and the trombones got in wrong in the ‘tutti’ in the middle of the first movement, whereupon Bülow sang out in a perfectly audible voice, ‘The brass may go to hell.’ This was the first Tchaikovsky piece [I] ever heard and I thought it the greatest ever, but it rather mystified some of our local scribes [critics], who could not have dreamed how many times they would have to hear it in the future.”

The Tchaikovsky Concerto has long since become so popular that we forget how striking a work it is. Its famous introductory section is patronized on the grounds that it has nothing to do with the rest of the work; but Tchaikovsky’s biographer David Brown has demonstrated that the opening section in fact provides a veritable anthology of harmonic progressions and melodic fragments that reappear in many guises throughout the concerto. Tchaikovsky surely did not calculate all these relationships in rational or mathematical ways. It is more likely that his mind was whirling with these gestures and that they coalesced in various ways satisfying to his inner ear. They are, in any case, quite subtle, but they set the stage suitably for the main body of the movement.

The Concerto shows remarkable originality in its treatment of the “concerto problem,” the opposition and coordination of soloist and orchestra. Tchaikovsky finds imaginative solutions to the formal demands, too—even though he never believed that he had sufficient mastery of form, despite that fact that he regularly outshone his Russian colleagues precisely in the matter of musical architecture.

The popularity of the Concerto begins precisely with the unusual introductory theme, a well-loved tune, made even more popular in the early 1940s when it was converted into a Tin Pan Alley tune called “Tonight we love” by denaturing the meter from 3/4 to 4/4. It is, surprisingly, in the relative major of D-flat, not the home key of B-flat minor. The main theme that follows is a Ukrainian folk song, but Tchaikovsky is not so much concerned with investigating Russian folklore as he is interested here in the dramatic opposition of soloist and orchestra.

The second theme is a poignant Tchaikovskyan melody with a gently rocking accompaniment familiar from his earlier Romeo and Juliet. This happens to begin with the notes D-flat and A. David Brown argues that the concerto as a whole recalls the composer’s deep affection for the soprano Désirée Artôt, to whom Tchaikovsky was engaged in the winter of 1868–69, before she suddenly married another singer. Several musical references suggest that he still thought of Artôt, evidently the only woman that he ever loved, very warmly some five years after the end of their relationship. One clue, Brown maintains, is the prominence of the pitches D-flat and A, which in German would be called Des and A, as in DESirée Artôt. (This kind of use of one’s initials spelled out in musical pitches is something Tchaikovsky might well have learned from the music of Schumann, who employed the device often and whose music Tchaikovsky admired.)

The second movement combines elements of both a slow movement and a scherzo. The slow part features a flute melody with a reply by the soloist. The faster portion quotes a French song, “Il faut s’amuser” (“One must amuse oneself, dance, and laugh”); this song was in the repertory of Artôt and makes a particularly clear reference to her, since otherwise the tune has little overt connection with the other themes in the score.

For his finale, Tchaikovsky concentrates on the effective alternation of his materials, the first theme another Ukrainian folk song, and the second a tranquil string melody. He connects these by having the string melody enter over the soloist’s development of the first theme, but for the most part this finale aims at virtuosic excitement, and hits its mark. —© Steven Ledbetter