English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The concerto: a soloist facing the tutti, baroque and romantic 0:00 The sound example I'm going to offer you now will allow us to kill, not two birds with one stone, but quite a large number of birds. This is, I'll tell you right away, the second movement, the central movement, since there are three movements in the work in question, which is titled Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. I'll take the opportunity to open a little parenthesis on genres and forms in music.
0:32 Let's focus for now on this genre, the Concerto. It's very precise: in the classical repertoire, what's called a Concerto — I'm not talking about a concert, I mean a Concerto — is the fact that we hear a solo instrument against a backdrop of orchestra, since we use a lot of Italian terms in music as you know, a solo opposed to a tutti. Tutti is the orchestra, all together. So it can be a Concerto for piano and orchestra, for violin and orchestra, for flute and orchestra.
1:07 The most numerous are, as you'd expect, Concertos for these major — it's not a value judgment — and more popular instruments, the piano and the violin.
2:01 But there are a huge number of Concertos for flute, for oboe — someone like Mozart had a voracious hunger for every differentiated timbre. Timbres are the material differences in music, whereby the timbre of the guitar differs from the timbre of the violin, which differs from the timbre of the horn, the oboe, or the clarinet. That's a bit the material side of music, timbre. Mozart, who was on the lookout for every possible and unimaginable timbre, even wrote Concertos — which no one else has done — for glass harmonica, for barrel organ.
2:42 Right? And I'll skip over the ones for horn, for oboe, for bassoon. So, that's what a Concerto is. There's a soloist performing, with as a backdrop that marvel which took centuries to perfect: the orchestra. An orchestra that took time to develop. In Bach's day, in the Baroque era, the orchestra was often reduced to a string ensemble. When I say reduced, that's not a value judgment. You can create a masterpiece with a very small ensemble. Bach is the only one to have written works for solo violin — what's more thankless than a solo violin — that fill a musical space that others don't reach with 80 instruments and 200 choristers.
3:21 That's what's distinctive about the Concerto. There's an orchestra a bit like a prima ballerina performing in front of lots of little tutus, so to speak, who serve as a kind of foil for her. And it's quite exhilarating, when you're a soloist, to use the orchestra as a springboard to develop everything you have to say.
3:54 So, you see where the word Concerto comes from. As the saying goes, concertation is better than conflict. This is where I'll introduce, within the Concerto genre, different styles. You see, now I'm distinguishing genre from style. There's the Concerto of the Baroque era, in Bach for example, which is an emblematic illustration. It's a Concerto that is what's called in classical music "concertante," that is, where the different soloists — since there can be several, there can be a Concerto for piano, violin and flute, what's called a triple Concerto.
4:26 This was very common in Bach's time. And this genre of the multi-soloist Concerto reaches its peak in the admirable set known in Bach's work as the Brandenburg Concertos. They're called that because it was a commission from the Margrave of Brandenburg. Brandenburg is Prussia, around Berlin. There, you see, the soloists converse among themselves like friends, like companions, or like decent folk. And from time to time, the orchestra comes in like a tutti to flesh out their remarks a bit. As if three friends chatting in a drawing room suddenly opened their windows onto the hum of the city, which comes now and then to serve as their backdrop.
5:29 Up until the French Revolution, and even beyond it, when we move to what's called Baroque music of the Ancien Régime in any case — what's common to all the music of the Ancien Régime is that it was an era where there was a place for everything and everything in its place. The Ancien Régime. And then when we move on to the great Romantic concerto, where the solo part is much more developed, because instruments had begun to inspire a kind of cult on top of virtuosity, there's an extraordinary advance in instrumental mechanisms.
6:25 There, unlike the concertante side of a conversation among decent people, there's an almost conflictual opposition, in any case a very dramatized one, between the flamboyant soloist and the orchestra. Almost a conflict, wouldn't you say, in some sense?
Russians and Americans: dance, rhythm and great spaces 7:07 I move on to Tchaikovsky, who comes in, like the whole Russian school. The Russians arrived late to the classical repertoire. They have an extremely rich popular music, still today. You know they're a people of dancers. The Russians and the Spanish are the two peoples most invested in dance, in all of European culture. And I'll remind you that Russia is the Asian edge of Europe.
7:37 Spain is the African edge of Europe. It's no coincidence that it's at these limits, at the edges of extra-Europeanness, that we find the most dance-oriented peoples. It's no coincidence that the rhythmic element is so pronounced in Russian music, almost as much as in American music. Let me open a parenthesis to make an unexpected connection between Russians and Americans, at least on that point. I'll remind you that the greatest Western film composers are all of Russian or Slavic origin. Perhaps every film buff knows Dimitri Tiomkin, who wrote the scores for Rio Bravo, for Fort Alamo, for an incredible number of Westerns.
8:22 I'll remind you all the same that the man who created, at the dawn of jazz, an opera for African-Americans dedicated to their culture — I'm thinking of the admirable Porgy and Bess, by George Gershwin — was a Russian Jew. There's a reason for that, not only extrinsic but intrinsic.
9:05 It's that in both cases, Russia as well as the United States, we're dealing, compared to old Europe, with vast spaces. We're not in the hedgerowed countryside of Poitou or Normandy, or in the admirable rolling landscapes of Tuscany. With Russia and the United States, it's the Midwest or the Russian steppe, infinite spaces. And so that infinite space has to be carved up, like this, by the trot of a horse. And that's what produces the rhythmic obsession found both in Russian music and in American music.
Tchaikovsky, bad taste and Stravinsky's judgment 9:49 So here I'll linger a bit on Tchaikovsky, because someone might reproach me — you're going from Mozart to Tchaikovsky, that's not serious. Mozart is immense, there's not a single lapse of taste. It's the last echoes of the Ancien Régime, whereas you move on to a musician who doesn't shy away from vulgarity and bad taste, as the Russians often do, for that matter. Yes, yes, yes — like the Americans.
10:20 Bad taste, you see? Another new parallel. Peoples who arrived late to the classical repertoire and who take risks in matters of taste that the old Europeans don't take. And as a result, that can produce some rubbish. But when it succeeds, it produces truly unprecedented works, the like of which hadn't been heard before. And that's the case with Tchaikovsky. Well, there are those who adore Tchaikovsky because he's very popular to begin with — who doesn't know The Nutcracker? In every era, there have been advertisements that used a passage from The Nutcracker, which gets played every Christmas, for children the world over.
10:52 The Russians have a genius for music that appeals to childhood, to the childhood of the world. Look at Peter and the Wolf. Peter and the Wolf is Prokofiev.
11:22 They're big children, no doubt. Another thing in common with the Americans, who are also said to be big children. All of that is in Tchaikovsky. So, someone who's not a great connoisseur will love Tchaikovsky. Someone who's a half-connoisseur will despise Tchaikovsky. And someone who's a truly great connoisseur is wild about Tchaikovsky. Because when you say to musicians who seem most opposed to lapses of taste — I'm thinking of Stravinsky, who is a neo-classicist in many ways and who opens the door to avant-garde music, contemporary music, with The Rite of Spring, which is to the history of classical music what Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is to the history of painting.
12:07 It's a break that creates an irreversible separation between the old way of painting and the new. Since it's said that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon inaugurates Cubism. And even beyond that, the same is true of The Rite of Spring. At its Paris premiere it caused a scandal, such an uproar in the hall that Florent Schmitt, one of the musicians of the time, an admirer of Stravinsky, uttered this famous line, shouting at the ladies — I say ladies, you'll see why — who were in the boxes and were saying, my God, what is this music, it's dreadful, it's savage music.
12:41 Florent Schmitt reportedly shouted, "Shut up, you tarts of the 16th arrondissement!" You can picture the atmosphere at the premiere of The Rite of Spring.
Fugue, sonata form, and listening to the slow movement 13:13 Well, to Stravinsky — hardly suspected of conformism or bad taste — people said, but surely you don't like Tchaikovsky, after all he's not very Russian, borrowing so much from German music, and so on, and he'd say, it's precisely because he's the most secretly Russian that people understand nothing about him, Tchaikovsky. So, I propose we listen to the slow movement, the middle movement of Tchaikovsky's concerto. Let me be a bit more precise now. The fugue form has a single theme — Frère Jacques, Frère — and it continues that way to the end, it's the same theme repeated incessantly, in a canon as simple as Frère Jacques, without changing it, and in a Bach-style fugue, of course, with a great deal of development and ornamentation.
13:49 From beginning to end, it's a single theme that bears the whole weight of the fugue, like the arch of a bridge, if you will. Whereas sonata form comprises several movements — in fact it inherited this from what used to be called the suite, a dance suite: a gavotte, a gigue, a minuet — sonata form inherits from that. But there are three movements. Two fast movements, at the beginning and the end — first movement fast, third movement fast — and in the middle, a slow movement where one pauses, a more inward reflection, before leaving the audience on a cheerful, light note with the finale, which is meant to dispel the mists that may have gathered during the reverie of the second movement.
14:26 And the melancholy that often goes along with slowness. What am I getting at? I imagine that before I opened this door, you were sleeping. But those sleeps we get only too rarely, marvelous sleeps. You know, there are sleeps like that, from which you wake as from a happy dream, where you've slept well, where you've rested the body and the mind, where I assume you're not suddenly bothered by what time it is because you have to rush off to work. No, no, no. You have all the time in the world, you wake up, you can't believe you're still in bed and that you slept so well.
14:59 And all of a sudden, I put on Tchaikovsky for you, Concerto No. 1, second movement.
