4 Songs

The sun has set    Op.73 No.4 (1893)

At the ball Op.38 No.3 (1878)

The fires in the room were already out Op. 63 No. 5 (1887)

Cradle Song Op.16 No.1 (1872)

The nearest Tchaikovsky came to writing a song cycle was in his very last completed work, the 6 Songs Op.73 to words sent to him by an unknown young poet called Danil Rathaus in 1892. Though not great poetry, it clearly appealed to the composer of the Pathétique for the theme of night-time loneliness common to most of them. The one expression of unmixed happiness is The sun has set in which Tchaikovsky recaptures something of the spirit of the not yet disillusioned Tatyana in Eugene Onegin. The waltz song At the Ball could almost have been written for Onegin after he has seen Tatyana in a new light at the Gremins’ ball in the same opera. Another nocturnal inspiration, set under the birch trees this time, The fires in the room were already out is perhaps the most intimately lyrical of all Tchaikovsky’s songs,    the short but expressive nightingale postlude all the more effective for the economy of the piano part up to that point. Cradle Song, dedicated to Nadezhda Rimsky-Korsakov before the birth of her first child in 1873, is not only beautifully written for the piano but also an indication, unlike Wolf’s Lied vom Winde, that you are more likely to get an answer from the wind if you ask it nicely.