Dumka in C minor Op.59

Tchaikovsky wrote perhaps as many as a hundred piano pieces. If few of them are consistently well written for the piano and few of them fully characteristic - still fewer both of those things at once - that is no reason to ignore them. While a thorough examination of the repertoire would uncover a handful of embarrassing failures and lapses of taste, some highly accomplished pieces are to be found there too, together with one work, the Piano Sonata in G major, as ambitious in scale as anything by Schumann or Brahms.

The Dumka in C minor is one of those few works which are both characteristic and well written for the piano. It is true that, as it was written for a French publisher and dedicated to Antoine Marmontel, virtuoso pianist and professor at the Paris Conservatoire, it is not entirely typical. At the same time this “Russian Rustic Scene,” as the subtitle has it, does draw on Russian folk song for its material. The opening theme might be an actual example Tchaikovsky heard on his sister’s estate at Kamenka in the Ukraine, where the dumka originated. Certainly it has much in common with the familiar Andante cantabile melody, which was collected at Kamenka, in the First String Quartet. After repeating the opening theme, repeating it in a decorated version and developing it a little, Tchaikovsky abandons dumka melancholy and introduces a vigorous Russian dance. There is a more intimate episode, beautifully written for the keyboard, but the general tendency is to compound the virtuosity, which is brilliantly and extravagantly done, until the return of the dumka melody and a suddenly decisive ending.

Although Dumka was published shortly after it was written in 1886, there is no record of a public performance until just after the composer’s death seven years later.