Émile Reutling: Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, ca. 1888
The Seasons was commissioned by Nikolay Bernard, the editor of the St Petersburg music magazine Nuvellist. Each month in 1876 (starting in November 1895), Tchaikovsky had to contribute ‘a season’, and a source of ready and steady music, as an assignment like this was easy. It was so easy, in fact, that Tchaikovsky reminded his staff to tell him when the next one was due, and he would sit down and write something quickly.
Yunchan Lim
The work has a simplicity and charm that speaks to both the lightness of the assignment and to Tchaikovsky’s ability to write for an amateur audience. There are a few technical challenges for his readers to achieve, and the work forms a satisfactory whole. Tchaikovsky referred to them as ‘musical pancakes’, i.e., something to be tossed off and easily consumed.
In his notes for the recording, Lim reads an element of melancholy that was never in the original conception of the work. He sees the first movement (January: By the Fireside) as relatively despairing: the fire is dying out, the old man’s cigarette smoke curls in the remaining light. He’s overwhelmed with memories and sobs about his lost past.
When you contrast this reading with the notes added by the journal editor to each piece, written as a little poetic epigraph, we’ll see that this is far from the original concept for the works:
January: At the Fireside
A little corner of peaceful bliss, the night dressed in twilight; the little fire is dying in the fireplace, and the candle has burned out (quoting Pushkin).
No looks back in regrets, but rather a quiet close of day, sitting in peace as everything around prepares for sleep.
For Lim, the happy movements are happy memories, and the mournful movements are times of anticipated death, rejection, and dejection. Everyone seems to be weeping, or sobbing, or just standing there with tears running down their faces. It’s a rather incomprehensible take on Russian melancholia.
When you consider the commercial nature of the commission, it’s not really possible that Tchaikovsky, in writing for a widespread amateur audience, would deliberately write something that was so fatalistic.
Lim ties the story to yet another of Tchaikovsky’s habits of falling in love with the wrong woman at the wrong time. I think, however, that this highly personal reading is looking at the wrong music. The Seasons does exactly what the label says: it celebrates the life around Tchaikovsky: he goes to the fairs, he sees the flowers come up in the spring, hears the songs of the first, and provides his readers with lovely miniatures of the work of St Petersburg.
This work more often appears in orchestral versions or in single movement, but there have been a number of recordings of the piano version.
Lim’s playing is exquisite, but the overlaying of melancholy goes beyond the composer’s intention to a reading that isn’t really justified by the content.
Tchaikovsky: The Seasons
Yunchan Lim, piano
Decca 0028948710218
Release date: 22 August 2025
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