Nine years before making the fatal blunder of marrying Antonina Milyukova, the young 28-year-old author Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was on the verge of making the same mistake, organizing for himself a rehearsal of the disaster of his own life. Fortunately, on the occasion it was the fiancée herself who thwarted the plans, by the simple means of abandoning her fiancé to marry another.
A prima donna
It was 1868 when Tchaikovsky met the Belgian soprano Désirée Artôt, five years his senior, who was then on tour in Russia as part of an Italian lyric company. They met at a palace party and seemingly became infatuated with each other. Something more Artôt on Piotr Ilich than this one on her, because in the course of the friendly relationship prior to the vital decision it was Désirée who was sending the daily letters and invitations, while Piotr Ilich thought that it was better to see each other only once in a while.
A life together...
By the end of 1868, however, they both began to think seriously about marriage. But Désirée's mother, who was traveling with the artist and had an eagle eye, did not take long before she learned of the composer's sexual preferences. She did not approve of the liaison and convinced her daughter that it was not good for her career to become engaged to a novice composer. For his part, Tchaikovsky, unlike nine years later, began to glimpse that engagement to a prima donna was not the best way to prevent the steady advance of rumors and gossip.
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| Désirée Artôt (1835 - 1907) |
The decision was postponed. They arranged to meet in the summer of 1869, in Paris. But the meeting did not take place. In September of that year, on the way to Paris from Warsaw where the company had gone after leaving Russia, Désirée married a Spanish baritone, seven years her junior and a member of the lyric company. Tchaikovsky learned of this through third parties. As he would later say, she was the only woman he ever loved. The Romanza in F minor is dedicated to her.
Romanza in F minor, opus 5
Composed in November 1868, the short piano piece will be added to the young composer's creative corpus, which by that time included a cantata, an overture, a symphonic poem, a symphony, and two operas. Years later, Tchaikovsky would destroy the symphonic poem and the two operas, and renounce the cantata, the overture, and the symphony. But the Romanza in F minor will remain unscathed to such a phenomenal degree of self-criticism. Today, with its sentimental melody and simple three-part structure, it is one of the Russian composer's most performed solo piano works.
The performance is by Iranian-born American pianist Sara Daneshpour.
