Marriage of minds

‘Made in Heaven’: the contrasts and complements linking Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky in two-way reciprocality form a felicitous marriage of true minds perfect for the week of wall-to-wall broadcasting on Radio Three covering (sometimes more than once) every note the two Russian masters composed.

First, the contrasts: Tchaikovsky the emotional, passionate, subjective, confessional, pouring his heart all down his sleeve, supreme in inflammatory melody, harmony, orchestration, personally present in his every utterance, whether by direct ‘programme’ (however withheld, the general tenor of the story is never in doubt) or by identification with character and situation (Tatiana’s uncalled-for declaration of love in Eugene Onegin; the tragic or ultimately radiant outcome in the two great fairytale ballets), or just by sheer pressure of personality in even the slightest song or morceau de salon. Stravinsky the tight, mean with the notes, feelings, repressing and mocking the opportunity to involve, identify, indulge; the logician, geometrician, constructor of ‘objects in sound’, fiercely denying his creations any justification beyond this bald definition; the absence of juice, flow, weeping and yearning; the x-ray precision and eschewal of kindly padding in his every texture.

Complements, however, are just as striking, if often paradoxical. Both composers are consummate craftsmen, practising their trade with professional pride; no highfalutin cant about Art, no false shame about needing and demanding the Money. They don’t wait on the muse, but roll up their sleeves and get on with the job. This robust attitude is epitomised in their shared admiration for the 18th century (wherein both would, perhaps, have been more at home) — Tchaikovsky’s almost religious veneration of Mozart, Stravinsky’s more generalised ‘neo-classic’ take on most European music from 17th-century Italy to pre-Romantic Vienna, decidedly including Bach, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven ‘before the rot set in’, as well as Mozart.