3 Songs from Op.16 (1872)

Cradle Song

Wait!

O Sing that Song

Given his incomparable gift for melody, his harmonic sensitivity and his instinctive understanding of the voice, Tchaikovsky should be one of the greatest of all song composers. If, in the hundred or so songs he wrote between 1869 and 1893, he rarely achieved that kind of mastery the reason might be found in the piano parts - not, in most cases, because they are casually written but, on the contrary, because they tend to be overelaborate in their context. One of the songs in which he finds the ideal balance, however, is the Cradle Song dedicated to Nadezhda Rimsky-Korsakov before the birth of her first child in 1873. Although it is interesting enough in keyboard terms for the composer to have made a transcription for piano solo, it is a much better song than a piano piece. The distinction in colour between voice and piano intensifies the unease in the relationship between the simple lullaby melody and the complex rocking rhythms and sighing chromaticisms of an accompaniment that so effectively reflects the strangeness of the text.

Wait!, dedicated to Nadezhda’s husband Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, could not have made a piano piece. It is written with exemplary modesty for the piano, which abandons its discretion only in its melodiously expressive interventions after the second and third stanzas. O Sing that Song did, on the other hand, make a piano piece. Again the song is better, in this case because of the climactic interweaving of vocal and piano lines at the end.