October, from The Seasons

It’s probably true that love—requited or not, spiritual or physical, openly confessed or nurtured in secret—has been the single most productive source of creative inspiration. In some eras, entire genres emerged to treat the emotions, ambitions, joys and frustrations of love. Further, one of the additional lines of development, going well back into the Middle Ages, has been a powerful strain of sacrifice for love. This tradition helped fuel new genres attached to chivalry and courtly love. Because secular or folk music was less zealously guarded and preserved than sacred works, very little evidence survives from before about 1300 to reveal this development. Nevertheless, circumstantial evidence attests to a substantial number of itinerant musicians who could craft poems, usually set to music, in Europe’s vernacular languages. Typically known as trouvères or troubadours, these individuals were critical to the later emergence of madrigal and monodic song (solo melody with simple accompaniment), both of which eventually fed into opera—the genre of love par excellence.



While fully engaged with Swan Lake, Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) received a commission to compose a dozen piano pieces—one for each month of the year. The project originated with Nikolai Bernard, publisher of a Saint Petersburg music journal. In truth, Tchaikovsky was not always particularly inspired when writing music on commission. But financial pressures motivated him to accept Bernard’s idea. He wrote two pieces initially in late 1875 so Bernard could have material for the first two installments (January and February 1876). The remaining ten movements seem to have been written together in a burst of creativity early in 1876 as work on Swan Lake concluded. For their publication, Bernard gave each piano piece a subtitle such as “January: At the Hearth,” or “July: Song of the Reaper,” as well as a poetic epigraph. For “October: Autumn Song,” a short text by Aleksei Tolstoy was appended:

Autumn, our poor garden is all falling down,
The yellowed leaves are flying in the wind.

Tchaikovsky’s tempo/character indications reveal the desired mood of pathos in this lovely work, marked Andante dolorosa e molto cantabile. The melody and accompaniment texture is enlivened by inner-voice counterpoint as the main theme migrates from treble to bass. In addition, Tchaikovsky wrings the utmost sentimentality from rich suspensions, undulating chromatic lines, and restrained dynamics that fade away to silence at the end. Later composers have made arrangements of the entire collection, and among the most colorful is Toru Takemitsu’s version of Autumn Song for clarinet and string quartet. Takemitsu, an accomplished and sensitive composer in his own right, deftly parses Tchaikovsky’s melody between clarinet and violin. The contrast between wind and string timbres gives greater depth to the moments of polyphony that Tchaikovsky was eager to create.

(c) Jason Stell