From Chant to Flamenco

PETER Ilyich Tchaikovsky-as composer of the Pathétique and, of the bravura 1812 Overture, with its pomp, patriotism, and pounding cannon-represents to many the sometimes overblown Romantic movement in nineteenth-century Russia. But there is much more to his music-reflecting as it does his inner torments, his conflicts over his homosexuality which led him into an impossible marriage, and his yearning search for God and the transcendent. This last meant much more to him than the critics reckon. In a letter to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, he wrote: “There is nothing like entering an ancient church, standing in the semi-darkness, lost in deep contemplation searching for an answer to the wherefore, when, whither, and why.”

In his Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Tchaikovsky celebrated this search. The voice speaking to us through him is the Russian Orthodox liturgy. After the break between East and West, when the Latin Mass moved with the currents of Western music, the Orthodox musical tradition remained close to its roots in the Jerusalem Temple, at which the early Christians worshiped until its destruction in A.D. 70. The “echoes” or “tones” of the Hebraic ritual survived in Russia, and for a time in Spain, where they had been taken by Jews who migrated, beginning in the time of Solomon, on the ships of Hiram of Tyre.

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Ralph de Toledano

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PETER Ilyich Tchaikovsky-as composer of the Pathétique and, of the bravura 1812 Overture, with its pomp, patriotism, and pounding cannon-represents to many the sometimes overblown Romantic movement in nineteenth-century Russia. But there is much more to his music-reflecting as it does his inner torments, his conflicts over his homosexuality which led him into an impossible marriage, and his yearning search for God and the transcendent. This last meant much more to him than the critics reckon. In a letter to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, he wrote: “There is nothing like entering an ancient church, standing in the semi-darkness, lost in deep contemplation searching for an answer to the wherefore, when, whither, and why.”

In his Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Tchaikovsky celebrated this search. The voice speaking to us through him is the Russian Orthodox liturgy. After the break between East and West, when the Latin Mass moved with the currents of Western music, the Orthodox musical tradition remained close to its roots in the Jerusalem Temple, at which the early Christians worshiped until its destruction in A.D. 70. The “echoes” or “tones” of the Hebraic ritual survived in Russia, and for a time in Spain, where they had been taken by Jews who migrated, beginning in the time of Solomon, on the ships of Hiram of Tyre.