Posted in: Classical by clavier on March 12, 2009 | 0 Comments
“If you harbor a deadly grudge and seek revenge there is a way to obtain it which will baffle the most astute criminologist,” a musician once said. “Send your intended victim a recording of the Pathetique from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. If he doesn’t die soon after listening to it, someone close to him will, specifically a member of his family or a friend.
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Many musicians believe that some musical compositions court sinister coincidence. Among them were the noted conductors, Arturo Toscanini and Walter Damrosch.
The Pathetique has a somber history. Maestro Toscanini declared it to be the most sorrowful of all symphonic music and explained: “In its adagio lamentation it is the wail of a soul in torment. Perhaps the soul or Peter Ilyich Tchakovsky is eternally imprisoned therein for it was the swan song of this greatest of all Russian composers.”
Born in 1840, educated at the Technological Institute of St. Petersburg, Tchaikovsky’s life was a tragic, thwarted one.
In 1877 he married but soon afterward separated from his wife. He attempted to commit suicide by walking into an icy river and standing there chest-deep, thinking he would catch pneumonia and die quietly without scandal.
He survived and later took a house in the village of Klin, where he isolated himself. He wrote six symphonies, seven symphonic poems and more than a hundred lyric songs.
Of them all it was the Sixth Symphony into which he fully poured his tortured soul. In it he composed, according to the eminent American critic, James G. Huneker, “a page torn from Ecclesiastes, the cosmos in crepe.”
Tchaikovsky’s sudden death in the autumn of 1893 startled the world. There were rumors that he committed suicide. It was believed that he died of cholera.
Whatever the cause of his death, it occurred shortly after he had conducted an orchestra in the premiere of his Sixth Symphony. Among those in the audience on the night of his premiere were his nephew and a talented young musician, Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Three days after the concert the nephew committed suicide and the series of sinister coincidences associated with the Pathetique began.
From then on whenever it was played someone in the audience or one of the musicians met a sudden, unexpected end. It wasn’t long before many musicians came to dread the Sixth Symphony and a number refused to play or listen to it.
Many years passed after Tchaikovsky’s death. In 1935, in Detroit, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who had by now an accomplished musician, was brilliantly conducting a symphony orchestra. There was a strange excitement in the air which he somehow transmitted to the audience. Each composition played received a tremendous ovation.
