Why do many musicologists and music critics hate Tchaikovsky?
When I was in college my music history teacher was fond of remarking, whenever we were listening to a work of Tchaikovsky, about how ‘difficult this transitional passage was’ or how this ‘modulation was rather clumsy’. Of course, as students listening to these ‘masterpieces’ of Romanticism, none of us dared contradict the professor, but I hazard the guess that none of us really ‘heard’ what he was referring to either. I have returned to that repertoire on a number of occasions, particularly the last of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, the ‘Pathetique’ which is one of my favorite symphonic works of all time. One issue that Tchaikovsky faced as a Russian composer of the Romantic period was his lack of enthusiastic involvement in the Russian Nationalist School. While this was not an ‘official’ organization, his contemporaries were very consciously turning away from the use of the formal western classical traditions in favor of forging a clearly ‘Russian’ voice in classical music. This is exempli
