Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed his Orchestral Suite No. 2 in C major, Op. 53, in 1883. It was premiered on February 16, 1884 at a Russian Musical Society concert in Moscow, conducted by Max Erdmannsdörfer. The piece was well enough received to be repeated a week later. It is dedicated to his brother Anatoly's wife, Praskovya Vladimirovna Tchaikovskaya.
Structure
The suite is written in five movements.
Instrumentation
The music is scored for the following:
Woodwinds
Piccolo
3 Flutes
2 Oboes
2 Clarinets (B-flat and A) 2 Bassoons
Brass
4 Horns in F
2 Trumpets (D and F) 3 Trombones Tuba
Percussion
Timpani
Triangle
Glockenspiel
Cymbals
Bass drum
Miscellaneous
4 Accordions (ad lib)
Strings
Violins
Violas
Cellos
Double basses
Harp
Overview
Composition
Tchaikovsky spent the late spring and early summer of 1883 with his brother Anatoly after spending some hectic months before that writing first his opera Mazeppa, then a march and the cantata Moscow for the coronation of Alexander III as tsar. Anatoly, now contentedly married and recently a father, had rented a house at Podushkino, near Moscow. Tchaikovsky found the house's location to be attractive and he often roamed the surrounding woods, picking mushrooms. He spent three months at Podushkino, two of them correcting proofs to Mazeppa but also finding time to sketch out his Second Orchestral Suite.
When Tchaikovsky left Podushkino on September 13 to visit his sister Alexandra at her estate at Kamenka in Ukraine, his priority was to finish this suite. He spent two and a half months at Kamenka. The first five weeks of that time, six hours a day, were spent finishing the composition of and scoring the suite. He had explained to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck at the beginning of September that if the work were not completed by the beginning of the winter concert season, he would not be able to find out how the work sounded during his time in Moscow. He was most anxious to do so, he explained, "because I have used some new orchestral combinations which interest me greatly." The fact that he took more than five weeks to complete orchestrating the work, despite his sometimes working six hours a day on it, shows the great care he took over this operation.
Tchaikovsky finished the suite on October 25. Max Erdmannsdörfer conducted the work the following February in Moscow. However, if the composer's eagerness to hear the work were still present, he likely satisfied it during rehearsal. The tensions of supervising the Moscow premiere of Mazeppa, which took place the night before the suite's first performance, had tried him severely, and he left for the West to recover before the suite had been played. Erdmannsdörfer was offended by the composer's inability to wait one extra day before leaving.
Reception
The critics were unanimous in their praise for the Suite. They referred to its verve, its deftness of instrumentation, its ingenuity of structure and its wealth of melodic invention.
Analysis
Texture rather than form was Tchaikovsky's concern when composing the Second Orchestral Suite, making it very different from its predecessor. One interesting point about the opening movement, Jeu de sons (Play of sounds), according to scholars is that the names of Tchaikovsky's brother Anatoly, his wife and daughter are encrypted in this movement. The cipher system the composer used is similar to one later employed by Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. In this system, the seven notes of the diatonic scale are matched with letters of the alphabet by assigning each letter in order of pitch, starting with every eighth letter until all letters have been used. The resulting theme is not characteristic of Tchaikovsky, reinforcing the idea that the composer worked more often by calculation than he did by inspiration. Unfortunately, working out of this theme in counterpoint which occupies so much of this movement makes it no more appealing for listening than its counterpart in the First Orchestral Suite.