Featured Book: Tchaikovsky by David Brown (cont'd)

Status of copy at Case Memorial Library
Mr. Brown writes about Romeo and Juliet: "Tchaikovsky … composed Romeo and Juliet as a sonata structure. It may seem odd that a composer, when turning a stage play into a musical organism, should cast it in a form where the preordained course of musical events is unlikely to have any plausible parallel to the narrative sequence of the play. But the point of music by itself (i.e. not as in opera, where it is tethered to a text …) is that it can concentrate single-mindedly on the essence of the play. More precisely, it can focus, on the one hand, on the prime players whose characters and emotional responses create the play's train of events and, on the other, it can suggest … the context in which they act and react. In fact, though music may conjure certain of the landmark events … we learn little from Tchaikovsky's music of Shakespeare's actual plot except that its outcome is catastrophic. Instead, Tchaikovsky encapsulates the two conflicting forces of the play (the love of Romeo and Juliet on the one hand, and the bitter mutual hostility of their families on the other) in two savagely contrasting kinds of music. …" (p. 51).