Méditation and Scherzo

(from Souvenir d’un lieu cher, Op.42)

The “dear place” to which Tchaikovsky dedicated his Souvenir d’un lieu cher was Brailovo, the Ukraine estate of the composer’s benefactor Nadezhda von Meck. On the run in Western Europe in the aftermath of the inevitable and immediate breakdown of his marriage to Antonina Milyukova, Tchaikovsky had settled long enough at Clarens in Switzerland to write the Violin Concerto in D major and, indeed, to replace the Andante he first wrote with one“more in keeping with the complexity of the other two movements of the concerto…The first one,” he told Nadezhda von Meck in April 1878, “will form a separate piece which I will put with two other violin pieces I have in mind.” He found the opportunity to do that a month later when, on his return to Russia, he was invited to spend a couple of weeks at Brailovo. Living in solitary splendour in Nadezhda’s “enchanted castle” - she was in Moscow at the time - he wrote a Scherzo and a Mélodie , added the title Méditation to the original Andante, and left the manuscript of all three pieces for his patron to find on her return to Brailovo later in the summer.

If the D minor Méditation, the first movement of Souvenir d’un lieu cher, is not of the same elevated quality as the G minor Canzonetta which replaces it in the final version of the Violin Concerto, it is written in much the same lyrical spirit. Its construction is actually more developed than that of the Canzonetta,which has no comparable middle section, and the return of the main theme on the violin in counterpoint with an elaborate right-hand piano part - a line given to clarinet in Glazunov’s orchestration of the piece - is a particularly engaging inspiration. The Scherzo, which Nadezhda greeted as “a wistful joke,” is a kind of tarantella with, as she duly noted, “a melodious and elegant” trio section.