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Music of the Heart - Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky

© John McManamy

"Make no mistake, this is the ultimate depression opus. Even the waltz movement has a melancholy air about it."

Only Puccini could write music as emotionally heart-rending, but even this master of sad songs never came close to composing a symphonic suicide note. Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky did just that. On October 28, 1893, he premiered his Sixth (Pathetique) Symphony to a lukewarm St Petersburg audience. Nine days later, he was dead. Officially, he contracted cholera as a result of drinking unfiltered water. Unofficially, back in Czarist Russia, this would have equated to swallowing a bucket of razor blades.

The musical snobs trash Tchaikovsky as a mawkish sentimentalist, a shameless crowd pleaser not deserving of the company of Beethoven and Mozart, but these people must have stone where their arteries converge, for there are places in the musical heart that only Tchaikovsky has dared enter and touch.

Like many kids, my first exposure to classical music was through Tchaikovsky, and for this reason alone I am eternally grateful (and also most willing to defend his honor in a bare knuckle contest with any Mahler fan). Never mind that it was the likes of the Nutcracker and the 1812 that hooked me at first. It wasn't long after that I found the Pathetique and kept it as his gift to me, a mind-blowing, heart-wrenching opus that isn't afraid to blast at the heavens and cry like a baby all in the same breath.

Make no mistake, this is the ultimate depression opus. Even the waltz movement has a melancholy air about it.

Tchaikovsky's life is the stuff of Hollywood drama - a stormy relationship with his mentor, the great pianist Anton Rubenstein, his homosexuality, one suicide attempt, his ill-advised marriage to an admirer that led to a nervous breakdown, and his mysterious relationship with his benefactor, Madame Von Meck, who stipulated they never personally meet.

His fellow composer, Edvard Grieg, said of him: "He is melancholic almost to the point of madness. He is a beautiful and good person, but an unhappy person."

On a tour of the US, two years before his death, Tchaikovsky wrote: "I feel that something within me has gone to pieces." At age 51, he was prematurely aging, his hair white and thinning, his gait replaced by a shuffle. Yet soon after, he threw himself into his greatest work with a speed and energy that astonished even him. The first movement, an emotional roller coaster of the complexity of the London Underground, was mapped out in less than four days.

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