Tchaikovsky's October: Autumn Song — this piece began as a magazine serial. In 1876 the Saint Petersburg monthly Nouvellist commissioned one piece a month for a year, each attached to a month and each printed with a few lines of Russian verse chosen by the editor; October's came from Aleksey Tolstoy and is about falling leaves. The set was later bound as The Seasons. Fifty-six bars and three minutes, one melody said three times, lower each time. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
A monthly deadline, with the editor's poem attached
In 1876 Nikolay Bernard, who published the Saint Petersburg monthly Nouvellist, commissioned Tchaikovsky to write twelve piano pieces, one to appear in each month's issue, each tied to a month of the year.
Bernard, not Tchaikovsky, chose the titles and the poems. Each piece was printed under a few lines by a Russian poet — October's are four lines by Aleksey Tolstoy: autumn, our poor garden is coming down, and the yellowed leaves are flying in the wind. The title Autumn Song came from the editor too.
So the set did not begin with an idea; it began with a deadline. The story goes that Tchaikovsky had a servant remind him when each instalment was due and wrote it quickly once he sat down — a story that has been passed along without support from anything he wrote himself.
The twelve were later collected as The Seasons. The opus number is written differently in different editions — Op. 37a and Op. 37 bis mean the same set, a difference in nineteenth-century publishers' habits rather than two different works.
Of the twelve, October and June's Barcarolle are the two most often played on their own.
The same sentence three times, lower each time
The theme is there from the first bar and it has no intention of changing — the piece says one thing throughout. The right hand carries a melody that keeps stepping downward, the left holds it up with mid-register chords a beat at a time, and the two stay close together so the sound sits in the middle, neither bright nor dark.
After 0:53 comes the second telling, with the left hand sinking to C-sharp 2, the lowest note in the piece; the bottom thickens and the same melody sounds heavier.
1:44 is the quietest point: bar 34 holds seven notes in the whole bar, with nine and thirteen either side. The music almost stops and only a few notes remain, at a distance.
After 2:36 comes the last telling, the density falling to an average of thirteen and stepping steadily down; the final bar has three notes left.
It makes very good background, but its mood is specific — not empty comfort music, but the kind of quiet that has something to say. Three minutes, no loud passage, no fast runs. Good for an autumn afternoon, rain, or company that does not interrupt.
Fifty-six bars, and a threefold gap between thickest and thinnest
Fifty-six bars and nine hundred and sixteen sounding notes, with fourteen grace notes besides, in 4/4 and D minor, with no repeats. The score carries thirteen dynamics, five hairpins and fifty pedal spans — a high pedal density, close to one per bar.
Bar counts run between three and twenty-five, averaging sixteen point four. Bars 17 to 24 are the thickest group, averaging twenty point one, and also the widest in range, reaching down to C-sharp 2 and up to A-sharp 5.
Bar 34's seven notes make it the thinnest bar in the piece, with bars 32, 42 and 53 at nine, eight and nine as the other clear troughs — those four are the pauses between phrases.
The last bar holds three notes. The range is C-sharp 2 to A-sharp 5, three and a half octaves — narrow, and the reason it sounds so concentrated. The shortest note lasts 0.031 seconds.
The difficulty is making three tellings differ
First, the right hand has to keep singing. The melody steps downward all the way and easily goes slack; every phrase needs a direction pushing through it, especially on the descending notes.
Second, the left hand must not cover the tune. Its chords sit close to the melody and overlap it in register, and a little too much weight buries the line above.
Third, the three statements should differ. The score does not say how, but three identical tellings make this a very long three minutes.
Fourth, the pauses. The gaps at bars 32, 34, 42 and 53 are the breathing of the piece; do not fill them and do not shorten them.
Fifth, the pedal. Fifty spans is dense, but the harmony keeps moving here and a full pedal smears it; changing rather more often than the marks suggest is usually cleaner.
The tempo is 76 to the quarter. No metronome mark is printed in this source, where bar 1 carries only Andante doloroso e molto cantabile with a playback value of 80, and the other encoding in the corpus prints none either; the figure comes from the conventional band for the marking — Andante runs 76 to 108, and the qualifiers doloroso and molto cantabile take it to the slow end. The recording runs 2 minutes 59.
We rate this 3 out of 5.
Eleven more from the same set
The Seasons has twelve pieces. Besides this one, June's Barcarolle is the most often played alone; January's By the Fireside, March's Song of the Lark and December's Christmas all stand up on their own too. Only this one has been made so far, and the other eleven will follow.
Tchaikovsky appears here for the first time on this channel. If you like quiet piano pieces with a definite mood, it also has Satie's three Gymnopédies and Chopin's Prelude in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4.
