Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 23

Tchaikovsky played the first draft of his Piano Concerto No. 1 for Nikolai Rubinstein on Christmas Eve, 1874, expecting encouragement. What he received was a twenty-minute verbal demolition. Rubinstein — director of the Moscow Conservatory, Tchaikovsky's boss, and one of the most powerful figures in Russian music — declared the concerto worthless, unplayable, vulgar, and stolen from various unnamed sources. Tchaikovsky sat in silence through the entire tirade. Then he walked out, went home, and changed nothing. Not a note. He redirected the dedication from Rubinstein to Hans von Bülow, a German conductor who would premiere it in Boston — Boston, Massachusetts, not Moscow — to thunderous applause in October 1875.

Rubinstein eventually came around. Within a few years, he was performing the concerto himself, apparently having decided that the most popular piano concerto of the nineteenth century was playable after all. Tchaikovsky noted this reversal with dry satisfaction and did not remove the dedication to von Bülow.

The opening is one of the most recognizable passages in all of classical music: sweeping French horn chords over crashing piano octaves, a melody so grand it sounds like the beginning of a story that will take all night to tell. Here's the trick nobody notices until a theory professor points it out: that famous opening melody never returns. It appears once, in the introduction, and then vanishes entirely from the rest of the concerto. Tchaikovsky built the most memorable front door in music and then constructed the rest of the house in a completely different architectural style. It shouldn't work. It does.

Billy Joel learned piano by listening to this concerto. Van Cliburn won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 by playing it, at the height of the Cold War, in front of Soviet judges who gave an American first prize because the music was too good to politicize. A piece that Rubinstein called worthless on Christmas Eve became the sound of cultural diplomacy between superpowers. Tchaikovsky, who spent his life feeling inadequate, would have been astonished. And then he would have found something else to worry about.

Recording: Wikimedia Commons recording “Tchaikovsky, Concerto No.1 in B-flat minor Op.23, I. Allegro”. CC0. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ATchaikovsky%2C_Concerto_No.1_in_B-flat_minor_Op.23%2C_I._Allegro.ogg