6 Songs Op.73 (1893)

We sat together

Night

On this moonlit night

The sun has set

Amid sombre days

Ah, once again alone

The nearest Tchaikovsky came to writing a song cycle was in his very last completed work, the Six Songs Op.73 to words sent to him out of the blue by an unknown young poet called Daniil Rathaus in 1892. Though not great verse, it clearly appealed to the composer of the Pathétique for the theme of loneliness that recurs in much of it. The gloom is not unrelieved – there are opportunities for emotional contrast and Tchaikovsky takes full advantage of them – but the overall impression is one of melancholy, which is conveyed mainly by the drooping semitones of the first two songs and the last.

The short introduction to We sat together opens with a chromatically sinking three-note theme which is repeated in the piano part throughout the first stanza and variants of which echo in both the stormy second and the despairing third stanzas. In Night the motif is not only expanded in the piano part but also incorporated in the brooding vocal line. The first contrast comes with On this moonlit night where, above the emphatic downward inflections of the left-hand octaves in the piano part, the voice rises impulsively upwards. The sad reflection of the closing lines does not dampen the ardour of the piano postlude. Also harmonised in major keys, the next two songs are similarly ecstatic and similarly positive in the operatic thrust of their respective vocal lines, in spite of a memory of the falling semitones at the end of Amid sombre days. The sighing semitones make a definitive return, over repeated minor triads, at the start of the last song where, reflected in the anguished vocal line, they persist to the very end. The difference between Ah, once again alone and None but the lonely heart, an early Tchaikovky song to which it bears a passing resemblance, is that loneliness in this case is terminal.