Jessica Duchen
Critic, playwright and author
‘What a treat to write Building a Library on a piece as popular as Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet.
I found unimagined treasures to listen to, though wondered if certain conductors had ever looked at the score!’
manuscript and orchestrated it, providing an all-too-tantalising taste of what might have been.
A letter from Tchaikovsky to Modest in 1878 shows an enthusiasm for the opera that he had never really expressed about the overture. ‘This shall be my definitive work,’ he wrote. ‘It’s odd how until now I hadn’t seen how I was truly destined to set this drama to music. Nothing could be better suited to my musical character. No kings, no marches, and none of the encumbrances of grand opera – just love, love, love. And how delightful the secondary characters are: the nurse, Lorenzo, Tybalt, Mercutio… From being children full of innocent love, Romeo and Juliet have become people, loving and suffering, caught up in tragic, desperate love. I want to set about this as soon as possible.’
He never did. Whether this was because he was too busy, or because the topic of star-cross’d love had become personally painful or even dangerous to him, we can only speculate. Instead, the third and final version of the overture resulted in 1880, a whole decade after the second; he reworked material in the last 80 bars, including a restructure of the coda and 34 completely new bars. It went on to win the Glinka Prize in 1884 (which came with a useful 500 rubles), and though it was not performed until two years after that – in
Tblisi, Georgia – its success ever since speaks for itself.
The second tragic revelation? That the world is disappointingly full of conductors who don’t appear to know their dynamic markings, let alone that the first tempo indication, Andante non tanto quasi moderato, does not mean ‘funereally slow’. Listening to dozens of recordings so that you don’t have to, I’ve encountered some good conductors let down by under-par playing, others swamped by superorchestras on autopilot, many in which everyone sounds simply bored, various accounts wrecked by swimming-pool sound quality and, in the jagged chords of the final bars, remarkably few that actually play them as written. There are only two or three recordings that I regret leaving out of the final selection. Choosing the winning interpretations should surely not have been this easy.
Turn the page to discover the finest recordings of Tchaikovsky’s fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet