OU on the BBC: Discovering Tchaikovsky - Discovering Romeo and Juliet

Production team publicity shot

Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet fantasy-overture is one of the composer’s greatest and most enduring popular successes: it has the biggest and best love tune, one of music’s fiercest battles, and the most exhilarating cymbal music of all time. It is also - against all the odds - his first unqualified masterpiece.

At 29, Tchaikovsky had written only three other pieces of orchestral music - all of them miserable failures. So he was still very much a student composer when Mily Balakirev (self-appointed father figure to Russian composers) persuaded him to write an orchestral work on Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers.

Balakirev outlined the form, planned the keys and even suggested some of the actual music. After the premiere, he convinced Tchaikovsky to revise it.

A year later Tchaikovsky had produced a score that is an unqualified triumph, announcing the arrival of composer of genius, and bearing all the unique Tchaikovsky hallmarks.

The work’s success in this form transformed Tchaikovsky’s tendency to crippling self-doubt into more useful self-criticism, and marks the start of a legendary 30 year composing career.

In this programme Charles Hazlewood explores both versions of the score, allowing us to follow the final transformation of Tchaikovsky from aspiring composer into fully fledged classical master.

Comparison of these two scores gives a unique insight into his compositional process - how he developed themes and ideas; how he painstakingly revised his music; which ideas he rejected and which he chose to keep.

But the central thrust of the programme is Charles’ unpacking of the final version of Romeo and Juliet which guides us through both its detail and its architecture, and explores how the composer transformed descriptive “programme music” within textbook “classical form”.

The programme ends with a complete performance of the final version of Romeo and Juliet.

First broadcast: Saturday 27 Jan 2007 on BBC FOUR