Eduard hanslick tchaikovsky biography

Tchaikovsky had seized upon the idea of composing a concerto for violin after hearing others he liked, particularly the energetic, five-movement Symphonie espagnole (a violin concerto in all but name) by the French composer Edouard Lalo. He worked intensively on the project, and at first, its progress seemed smooth. He chose the great violinist Leopold Auer as the concerto’s dedicatee and to play the premiere, and planned to convey the completed manuscript to the virtuoso via their mutual student, Josif Kotek. “How lovingly [Kotek] busies himself with my concerto,” Tchaikovsky told his brother Anatoly while composing it. “…He plays it marvelously.”

Because of his agonized confusion over his own sexual identity, Tchaikovsky’s ardent admiration of Kotek has been the subject of scholarly speculation, and we can only imagine the composer’s distress when the young Kotek refused the manuscript outright. The fault was probably Leopold Auer’s: Having seen the work in progress, Auer had expressed his misgivings with harshness, pronouncing the concerto “unplayable,” a judgment that Kotek would have been unwise to ignore.

Finding an alternate soloist for the concerto hardly lifted the cloud hanging over it. Reviewing the premiere performance in Vienna on December 4, 1881, Eduard Hanslick—the dean of the Viennese music critics and one of the era’s most influential tastemakers—lambasted it as “music that stinks to the ear,” one of the most infamous phrases in the annals of music history. With hindsight it’s easy to dismiss such invective, but it tormented Tchaikovsky, who reportedly re-read Hanslick’s review until he had committed it to memory.

Hanslick’s outburst is all the more shocking in light of the characteristically singing melodies in which this concerto abounds. Its first movement, an allegro moderato in D major, is all graceful lyricism—seemingly an affectionate description of the scenic charms of Cl

‘The violin is no longer played; it is pulled, torn, shredded,’ wrote the critic Eduard Hanslick about Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, savagely dismissing it as ‘music that stinks’. It was a review that stung Tchaikovsky so deeply that he could recite it by heart.

That premiere had been delayed for over three years. Leopold Auer, the original dedicatee, had found some of the writing ‘quite unviolinistic’ and prevaricated, intending to revise the solo part, until Tchaikovsky eventually withdrew the edition. It was Adolf Brodsky who gave the first performance, with an under-rehearsed Vienna Philharmonic in 1881.

See also:

1. Forgotten Romantic Violin Concertos

2. The 50 greatest Tchaikovsky recordings

3. Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 6: a quick guide to essential recordings

For all the anguish in getting it performed, composition was remarkably trouble-free. Tchaikovsky’s disastrous marriage to Antonina Milyukova in 1877, a headstrong decision to stifle rumours about his homosexuality, led to a failed suicide attempt. Tchaikovsky escaped to Italy and Switzerland. In March 1878 he was recuperating in Clarens, on the shores of Lake Geneva, in accommodation funded by his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck. He was visited by the young violinist Yosif Kotek, a former pupil and almost certainly a former lover. In letters, Tchaikovsky referred to him as ‘Kotik’, literally ‘Kitten’. Kotek had brought some recently published scores from Berlin, including Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, which captivated the composer. He admired its ‘freshness, lightness, piquant rhythms and admirably harmonised melodies’ and resolved to compose his own violin concerto.

‘Since this morning, I have been gripped by the mysterious fire of inspiration!’ he wrote to von Meck. ‘In such a phase of spiritual life composition completely loses the character of work; it is pure enjoyment.’

Tchaikovsky (right) with violinist