Early Tchaikovsky Operas. Mistakes of Genius
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Abstract
The article is dedicated to the phenomenon of Tchaikovsky’s early operas. It analyses the cause of artistic failures of the operas composed during the Moscow period – The Voyevoda, Undina, The Oprichnik, and Vakula the Smith, – which preceded the creation of the opera Eugene Onegin, the first pinnacle of the composer’s music for theatre.
The main cause of the “mistakes” of the intuition of the Russian genius is explained by psychological prerequisites. The perception of this area of creative activity as the priority one was produced by the imprinting phenomena related to the childhood and adolescent imprinting of the first vivid opera impressions in the memory of the future composer. They also formed in Tchaikovsky’s mind the attitude to opera as the ‘most democratic genre’ and the ‘richest musical form…’
This psychological attitude explains the extraordinary importance that the composer himself attached to working with the opera genre. Hence arises a constant desire to compose operas rather than symphonic works, to which he was undoubtedly more inclined naturally, and which, as a result, he wrote with great success. This is the cause for the paradoxical errors of artistic intuition of such an indisputable genius as Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
On the example of the first four opera experiments, the most problematic aspects of working with the genre are considered: firstly, the creation of vocal parts with an inexpressive non-individualised melodic intonations, and secondly, the vulnerability of the interrelation of vocal and orchestral parts with the priority of the latter.
The path from The Voyevoda to Eugene Onegin is a gradual rather slow movement by trial and error to the first opera pinnacle and, what is extremely important to emphasise, the discovery, as a result, of the opera genre which most of all corresponded to the author’s individuality.
Keywords: operas by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, operas of the Moscow period, creative process, creative thinking, creative intuition, phenomenon of imprinting.
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