Not a word, O my friend Op.6 No.2 (1869)

Does the day reign Op.47 No.6 (1880)

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. He found a true balance, however, in Not a Word, O my Friend, from his first set of songs, where the dramatic potenital of the piano is held in reserve for the heightened emotion of the middle section. If the piano part of Does the day reign is at all overwrought it is in the extended postlude: in the song itself the surging accompaniment and the ecstatic vocal line are in finely calculcated equilibirum.