Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 23

The horns play the opening. The strings then take the D♭ major melody while the piano plays large chords beneath it, so the soloist enters as an accompanist.

In a letter of 21 November/3 December 1874, Tchaikovsky told his brother Anatoly that he was immersed in a piano concerto. He wrote that he had to “compel piano passages to come into my head”.

The Allegro con spirito begins in B♭ minor with a short Ukrainian tune in clipped phrases, replacing the long string melody of the introduction. The piano and orchestra exchange the tune in quick alternation.

The Allegro’s tune came from a blind street singer whom Tchaikovsky heard in Ukraine. In a letter to Nadezhda von Meck in May 1879, he recalled the singer’s accompanying instrument and said he had used part of the melody in this concerto.

The concerto exists in three versions: Tchaikovsky’s original of 1875, a revised score printed in 1879 and a third edition of 1889. The 1889 text is the one usually played today.

On 5 January 1875 Tchaikovsky played the concerto to Nikolay Rubinstein and Nikolay Hubert. Rubinstein condemned it and asked for changes, which Tchaikovsky refused to make. Hans von Bülow later took the new work to Boston.

The development takes the earlier themes through new keys. Piano octaves cut across the orchestra, and short fragments of the first subject break into the more lyrical phrases. The melody of the introduction does not return in this section.

The autograph score was first dedicated to Sergey Taneyev. His name was struck out and Hans von Bülow’s written in its place. In June 1875 Bülow thanked Tchaikovsky for the dedication and wrote of the concerto’s “such unsurpassed originality, such nobility, such strength”.

The Allegro’s first tune returns in shortened form. Tchaikovsky then brings back the wind melody and rebuilds the earlier climax, this time towards B♭ major.

Bülow gave the première on 25 October 1875 at the Music Hall in Boston, with Benjamin Johnson Lang conducting. The audience received it enthusiastically, and he played it again five days later. Within weeks it had been heard in New York, Saint Petersburg and Moscow.

The orchestra stops for the long cadenza. The pianist brings earlier melodies into the solo writing and later recalls the wind theme quietly in B♭ minor.

Nikolay Rubinstein, who had sharply criticised the concerto in January 1875, played it in Moscow on 22 March 1878 and again in Paris that September, at the Trocadéro. In 1880 Tchaikovsky dedicated his Second Piano Concerto to him for his “magnificent” playing of the First.

After the cadenza the orchestra returns with the broad melody from the second group, now in B♭ major.

Piano and orchestra take up themes from the Allegro in a short, vigorous coda. The movement ends in B♭ major with a plagal cadence, the chord of E♭ major moving to B♭.

Over pizzicato strings, the flute plays the D♭ major melody in bars 5–⁠12. The piano takes over the tune in bars 13–⁠20.

Tchaikovsky had completed the concerto’s two-piano arrangement by 2 January 1875. Three days later he played the work to Nikolay Rubinstein and Nikolay Hubert. He finished the orchestration on 21 February.

The Prestissimo, a short scherzo in the middle of the slow movement, opens in F major with fast piano writing. The strings then take up a new tune in D major. The piano accompanies them.

The fast middle section borrows Il faut s’amuser, danser et rire (“one must have fun, dance and laugh”), a tune by Jean-⁠Baptiste-⁠Edouard Montaubry. Modest Tchaikovsky recalled singing it constantly with his brother Anatoly in the early 1870s. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky put the refrain into his Piano Concerto No. 1.

After the fast dance, the opening melody returns in D♭ major. The piano plays it with small ornaments, and the oboe continues it.

The coda is in D♭ major. Its last cadence is plagal, moving from G♭ major to D♭, and is marked ppp.

After a brief orchestral opening, the piano enters with a Ukrainian song, Go on, go on Ivan. The B♭ minor dance theme is built from short phrases with displaced accents.

The violins introduce a broad second theme in D♭ major, and the piano then takes it up. Its long notes follow the short phrases of the dance theme. The melody returns in B♭ major near the end of the movement.

In 1869 Tchaikovsky arranged the Russian folk song “I’m Coming to the Capital” for piano duet as No. 30 of his Fifty Russian Folksongs. A variant of its tune is thought to be the source of the finale’s broad violin melody.

The broad melody returns in E♭ major, a tone above its first appearance. Descending scales lead back to the piano’s B♭ minor dance.

In January 1889 Tchaikovsky told the pianist Aleksandr Ziloti that he had altered a passage in this finale, “der verfluchte Stelle”, the accursed place. “I think it will be shorter and better,” he wrote. He had composed the concerto fourteen years earlier.

The piano plays rapid octaves across the keyboard during the long preparation for B♭ major. The broad tune does not return until this passage ends.

On 13 January 1876 Bülow replied to Tchaikovsky’s thoughts of revising the concerto that “no changes are necessary,” apart from some extra piano notes in a few tutti, which he had already added himself. His one comment on the finale concerned the tempo of the “triumphal 2nd motif” before the last stretta.

The broad melody returns in B♭ major, played by piano and orchestra together. This violin tune first interrupted the dance, and it now carries the concerto’s closing pages.

The marking changes to Allegro vivo. Rapid piano figures lead into the final B♭ major chords, and the concerto closes on a dominant–tonic cadence.