'The refined product of a great artist'
- Tchaikovsky's Iolanta
By Hugo Shirley
In late 1890 Tchaikovsky received a commission from Vsevolozhsky, Director of
the Imperial Theatres in St. Petersburg, for a double bill: a two-act ballet and
a one-act opera. The ballet was The Nutcracker whose music for dancing
confectionary and malevolent rodents represents many people's first encounter
with the composer. A Christmas staple for most ballet companies, sections of the
score were used in Disney's Fantasia (1940) and the famous March was transformed
by B. Bumble and the Stingers into 'Nut Rocker', which topped the UK singles
charts in 1962. Given the popularity and wide dissemination of The Nutcracker,
it is hard for us to imagine that it was the ballet's companion piece, the
delicate and seldom-performed Iolanta, that was the better received at the
premiere in December 1892. Ironically, since the opera's plot revolves around
its heroine's blindness, Tchaikovsky complained that the ballet was hampered by
a production that, if anything, was too visually sumptuous.
Dumas père's version of E.T.A Hoffmann's Nussknacker und Mausekönig formed
the basis for the ballet scenario while Tchaikovsky's brother Modest, fresh from
his successful adaptation of Pushkin's The Queen of Spades, was the natural
choice to fashion a libretto for Iolanta from Henrik Hertz's play, King René's
Daughter. Written in 1845, this play was probably the most popular work by the
Danish author. Having been translated into most European languages, it achieved
widespread popularity across the continent, not least in Victorian England,
where the now forgotten composer Henry Smart published a 'Cantata for female
voices and piano accompaniment' based on it in 1871. The play had enough
residual popularity in the 1880s to appear in The Russian Messenger, in a
translation by Fyodor Miller, and it was there that Tchaikovsky happened upon it
in 1883; he also saw it staged at Moscow's Maly Theatre in the spring of 1888.
At the time of the opera's premiere, the composer remembered how 'this subject
enchanted me because of its poetical quality, originality, and abundance of
lyrical moments. That was when I promised myself that some time I would set it
to music. Because of a variety of obstacles it was only last year that I was
able to carry out this resolve.'
Additional obstacles - internal and external, compositional and
circumstantial - served further to prolong the actual process of writing the
opera. Having received the joint commission, Tchaikovsky started on The
Nutcracker with little enthusiasm, writing bluntly to his brother Anatoly in
March 1891 that 'the main thing is to get rid of the ballet; as to the opera I
am so fascinated by it that if I could have two weeks of peace I would be sure
to finish it on schedule.' A few weeks later, though, he wrote to Modest that he
had 'been making vigorous but vain efforts to work. Nothing came out but muck
and Nutcracker and King René's Daughter turned into feverish nightmares.'
However, even though he complained of being 'in such a state of mind that I have
started to hate King René's Daughter,' he continued: 'I feel I can make a
masterpiece out of [it], but not in these circumstances.' He had planned,
unrealistically, to go on with the composition of the ballet while in Berlin and
Paris en route to an American tour which he was to undertake in the late spring.
While Tchaikovsky suffered from his usual homesickness, this was compounded by
the fact that just before he set sail he read in a newspaper of the death of his
sister Sasha.
Already behind schedule, he resolved to put back the premiere of the double
bill to the 1892-93 season and was in a far better state of mind returning to
his old house in Maidanovo after the successful tour. There he finished the
sketch of Nutcracker on 6th July 1891 and moved on to the opera, starting, as
had become customary for him, with the emotional core of the work - in this case
the extended duet between Iolanta and Vaudémont. Although this was a passage
which he felt his brother had adapted with particular skill, doubts again crept
in regarding the quality of what he was producing. He wrote to Modest that 'the
music could have been magnificent! But it seems to me that my composition at
that point is not up to standard. What is disgusting is that I have started to
repeat myself and a lot of this scene reminds me of The Enchantress!' The candid
exchange of opinion that characterises Tchaikovsky's correspondence gives us an
insight into the process of composition but has, in the case of Iolanta, also
provided supposedly authoritative corroboration of an over-riding negative view
of the opera. And despite its initial success, the composer himself seems not to
have believed that the work turned out as it should have. It is telling that
when it was to be performed with Rachmaninov's one-act Aleko¸ the younger
composer noted how 'timidly and modestly, as if he were afraid I might refuse,
he asked me if I would consent to have my work produced with one of his operas'.
In his previous two operas, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades,
Tchaikovsky portrayed a world closer to his own with the all-too-familiar 'dehumanizing
pressures of a metropolitan society', as David Brown puts it. Composing the
final scene of The Queen of Spades in Florence in March 1890, he confided to his
diary how he 'wept terribly when Hermann breathed his last'. Iolanta was never
likely to provoke a similarly intense emotional response and the gentle,
fairy-tale atmosphere of the work presented Tchaikovsky with new compositional
challenges. The first of these was to conjure up the world of restricted beauty
of the opening. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote in his memoirs that this scene was
'composed upside down: music suitable for strings had been given to woodwind,
and vice-versa… the introduction, for instance, scored for some unknown reason
for wind alone.' This negative assessment was no doubt coloured by the fact that
Rimsky-Korsakov's own opera-ballet Mlada had recently flopped at the Mariinsky
and, unlike Iolanta, enjoyed neither the approval of the Tsar nor the advocacy
of Medea and Nikolai Figner who, after great success as Lisa and Hermann in The
Queen of Spades, created the roles of Iolanta and Vaudémont. Rimsky-Korsakov
obtusely ignored the fact that the scoring of the Introduction for low woodwind
is an obvious and effective evocation of the darkness of Iolanta's world. One
biographer has even gone so far as to see the Introduction as an inversion and
parody of Wagner's Prelude to Tristan and Isolde, an opera Tchaikovsky had heard
in Berlin in late 1882. However, the mysterious garden of the first scene could
actually be seen as more closely resembling the isolated Montsalvat of Parsifal,
where the knights of the Grail inhabit a world shielded from the destructive
power of female sexuality.
In her own isolated realm, Iolanta leads a charmed life of beauty. Unlike the
water-nymph heroines of Undine (in the operas by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Lortzing,
and Tchaikovsky's second, lost opera) and Rusalka (Dvorák's opera based partly
on Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid), she is human but is similarly
excluded from living a full life. Uncomfortably for this day and age, it is her
blindness that is characterised as preventing her from being human and the
King's well-meaning desire to keep her ignorant of her condition is only
strengthened by a father's natural concern to maintain a daughter's purity and
innocence. He seems to know that, like the creatures of fairy tales who have to
renounce their magic powers or immortality in exchange for humanity, Iolanta's
cure will remove her forever from the safe, aestheticized world he has created
for her, exposing her to harsh reality. Still set within the lightless confines
of her internalised world, Tchaikovsky masterfully portrays in Iolanta's first
aria feelings of emptiness and the stirring of some unknown desire - an appetite
not satisfied by the diet of well-meaning pity she receives from her entourage.
This opening darkness turns to despair in the King's noble aria, whose strongly
rising melodic line must have provided a satisfying counterpoint to the
descending-scale theme of The Nutcracker's grand Pas de deux. The arrival of the
Moorish doctor, Ibn-Hakia, marks the first step towards Iolanta's recovery. One
of a series of operatic doctors and mystics, Ibn-Hakia is distinguished by not
being a quack. While, for example, Dulcamara in Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore
flogs off wine as a magic love potion, this is a doctor and man of the world who
is genuine in his desire to help. Accordingly, Tchaikovsky gives him music that,
although gently filled with the colours of the East, avoids cheap orientalism
and is characterised by genuine nobility. Ibn-Hakia's diagnosis that Iolanta's
condition is partly psychosomatic leads to a straightforward series of
associations by which we can deduce that it is the latent power of Iolanta's
love, the only thing that can produce the necessary desire central to
Ibn-Haika's treatment, that will bring about her cure.
With their formulaic and diametrically opposed romantic ideals, Robert and
Vaudémont stumble into the action unawares as further agents of Iolanta's
recovery. They appear initially as something of an odd couple and seem almost to
be treated by Tchaikovsky in comedic terms. Yet although shortly after he
finished scoring the opera Tchaikovsky confessed to his friend Fedotov that
'medieval dukes and knights and ladies captivate my imagination but not my
heart', he is expert in creating for these two knights musical languages that
movingly reflect their different views of love. The opening, sensuous surge of
Robert's aria, filled with visual imagery of his dark-eyed, voluptuous Mathilde,
is followed by Vaudémont's heartfelt and chaste riposte - added at a later
stage at the request of Nikolai Figner. This leads into Iolanta and Vaudémont's
duet: starting tenderly and tentatively, it is soon shot through with the Fifth
Symphony's 'Fate' motif, leaving little doubt as to the opera's outcome. A flaw,
then, in Modest's libretto might be that dramatically speaking the path to
Iolanta's cure is too unhindered and that the compressed format of a one-act
opera demands too much in the way of rushed tying-up of the narrative strands.
However, Tchaikovsky's mastery is always evident in those 'lyrical moments' that
abound - the very moments that had attracted him to the play on the first
reading.
Although some of the scoring looks forward to the Pathétique and the voices
are, in a nod to Wagnerian techniques, occasionally subordinated to the
orchestral writing, it is probably too much to describe Iolanta as representing
a conscious 'late style' in Tchaikovsky's operatic output. Yet the opera has had
several champions, not least Gustav Mahler who conducted it in Hamburg just
sixteen days after the St. Petersburg premiere. In April 1900 Mahler brought
Iolanta to the Imperial Opera in Vienna, shortly after his appointment there as
Director. With customary zeal he drilled his singers to produce a performance as
dramatically convincing as possible and insisted, for example, that his Iolanta
be blindfolded throughout the rehearsals. Although the performances were more a
succès d'estime than a run-away triumph, they made a favourable impression on
the influential critic Eduard Hanslick. With an insight for once uncoloured by
Vienna's furious musical infighting, he wrote perceptively of the heroine as
'more a musical soul than a dramatic character' and described the opera as 'the
refined product of a great artist rather than a masterpiece or an effective
stage piece'. Few will argue that Iolanta packs a dramatic punch on a par with
its heavy-weight predecessors, but it remains a hauntingly beautiful and
affecting operatic swan song.
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