Tchaikovsky's just a cheap sentimentalist? Not so, writes Arminta Wallace. He's the man who carried classical harmonies and a simplicity of melodic line into the dark heart of romantic sensibility.
Is Tchaikovsky ever going to be rehabilitated? Over the past couple of decades - since glasnost grew into something more substantial than a twinkle in Mikhail Gorbachev's eye - Russian music has, pretty much, come in from the cold. Gone are the days when a blast of the sleigh ride from Lieutenant Kije on Christmas telly was the only Prokofiev you were ever likely to hear: now we're all up to speed on Shostakovich string quartets and The Rite of Spring and even, for goodness' sake, Boris Godunov.
But poor old Tchaikovsky is still saddled with a disastrous critical double whammy. His most popular music is either saccharine-sweet fluff or bombastic kitsch: the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, say, or the 1812 Overture, with its subtle accompaniment of live artillery. It's as if we had chosen to remember Mozart by only ever listening to his Masonic music, or the opera he wrote when he was six.
On the one hand, we get more performances of Tchaikovsky's violin concerto, and the first piano concerto, than you can shake a stick at. On the other, you'd never guess - from a study of the most-often-performed pieces by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - that he was, above all, a composer of opera.
In truth, Tchaikovsky devoted more of his working life to opera than to any other musical form, including ballet. His nine operas are stunningly varied in style and subject matter, from the episodic, almost cartoon-style structure of Eugene Onegin to the grandiose set-pieces of Orleanskaya Deva (The Maid of Orleans). Cherevichki exudes a fairytale charm, with comic scenes involving a tetchy but essentially good-humoured Devil, while Mazepa must have one of the strangest, saddest endings in the operatic canon - a long, long lullaby sung by the demented heroine as, cradling the head of a dying man whom she has mistaken for a child, she stares, unseeing, into the audience. Tough stuff for the theatre-going classes? Maybe: but "one of Tchaikovsky's best operas", according to the Viking Guide to Opera.
So why does Mazepa never get an outing? As for Cherevichki, its absence from the operatic mainstream is inexplicable, as a magical production at Wexford Festival in 1993 proved. Even Eugene Onegin, though far and away Tchaikovsky's best-known dramatic work, doesn't exactly suffer from over-exposure either on stage or on CD, while The Queen of Spades, to be given by Opera Ireland at the Gaiety this week, hasn't been heard in Dublin for 30 years.
It's difficult to explain why the Western musical world has turned its back on Tchaikovsky the tunesmith. Part of the answer may lie in a morbid fascination with Tchaikovsky the man (aka Tchaikovsky the hysterical hypochondriac, Tchaikovsky who was homosexual but never, ever gay). This is the Tchaikovsky whose bills were paid for years by a woman he never met - though he did sometimes arrange to walk beneath her window so that she could get a look at him. The Tchaikovsky whose marriage, to a young music student who was even more unstable than he was, ended with him attempting suicide and her locked up for life. The Tchaikovsy who, with cholera raging through Moscow in 1893, downed a glass of unboiled water with the words: "One can't go tiptoeing about in fear of death forever". He was dead within four days.
It makes a terrific movie, this lurid life - in fact, Ken Russell's OTT extravaganza, The Devils, all young boys and naked frolicking in the snow, has added another layer of sleaze to the Tchaikovsky myth - but it doesn't sit neatly with the notion of Tchaikovsky the craftsman, let alone Tchaikovsky the calmly analytical innovator.
Yet as Cambridge academic Marina Frolova-Walker said in a recent Guardian article, Tchaikovsky was both. "Every morning he would sit down to a fresh sheet of manuscript paper and work for hours. His sketches show the care he took over technical problems - the construction of themes, the articulation of form, the clarity of orchestration. Even the emotional experience that Tchaikovsky's music affords us can be traced back to his consummate artistry. Having made a careful study of Beethoven and Wagner, Tchaikovsky developed a special mastery of dramatic pacing, calculating the ebb and flow of the music for maximum effect . .."
Frolova-Walker takes British critics, in particular, to task for their persistent labelling of Tchaikovsky as a neurotic who simply set to music the feverish visions inside his head.
It is a critical viewpoint which, one might argue, began during the composer's lifetime. Tchaikovsky seems to have been subject to more than his fair share of critical vilification which, in retrospect, was not merely unjust but peculiarly vitriolic in tone.
Nicholas Rubinstein, brother of composer Anton and head of the Moscow Conservatory, declared the first piano concerto to be unplayable - and, worse, unfixable. German critic Eduard Hanslick wrote of the violin concerto that "the violin is no longer played: it is yanked about, it is torn asunder, it is beaten black and blue . . . we see wild and vulgar faces, we hear curses, we smell bad brandy . . . Tchaikovsky's violin concerto brings to us for the first time the horrid idea that there may be music that stinks in the ear".
Poor old Tchaikovsky. To the end of his life he could recite that review word for word.
Time has proved Hanslick and Rubinstein wrong on the concertos - but the operas, for the most part, are still awaiting reasoned rather than unreasonable critical assessment.
Which is why Opera Ireland's forthcoming production of The Queen of Spades is such a mouthwatering prospect. Ostensibly a study of one man's obsession with winning at cards, the piece has been described - by the US critic Richard Taruskin in the New Grove Dictionary of Music Online - as "a masterpiece not of realism but of surrealism" which reveals Tchaikovsky's "mastery of the grotesque and its chilling correlation with aberrant psychology". For the Viking Opera Guide, the opera's most striking feature is the "savage stylistic dichotomy between the sombre, sometimes menacing music prompted by the remorseless obsession of the main character, and the cheerful music of the elegant society within which events are set."
Ah, yes: the neo-classical bits. They turn up again and again in Tchaikovsky's music, and are especially startling in the operas, where their visual impact re-inforces the musical change of gear. Cherevichki starts out as a conventional village drama, and ends up at the Russian court in St Petersburg in a swirl of stately gavottes. Eugene Onegin features a ballroom scene with a grand polonaise; The Queen of Spades has a masked ball.
Conventional criticism has always pooh-poohed Tchaikovsky's fondness for what it calls "18th-century pastiche", but Richard Taruskin sees it, not as an intrusive and somewhat vulgar decoration, but an essential ingredient of Tchaikovsky's musical make-up. Writing about Cherevichki, he notes that though critics usually praise the opera's "Russian-ness", the use of a peasant idiom and Ukrainian folk tunes were dictated by the subject matter and not some sudden nationalistic impulse on Tchaikovsky's part.
"More interesting by far," Taruskin continues, "is precisely what Western writers tend to write off or deplore - the neo-classical St Petersburg music in Act Three, one of many '18th century' confections which found their culmination in the Sleeping Beauty ballet and The Queen of Spades and which represent one of the truly idiosyncratic components of T's musical voice."
The Tchaikovsky who carried classical harmonies and a Mozartean simplicity of melodic line into the dark heart of romantic sensibility? Now we're talking. No. Maybe now - at last - we're listening.
Opera Ireland's production of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades is at theGaiety Theatre on November 17th, 19th, 21st and 23rd