The final decades of the 19th century heralded the end of musical Romanticism throughout Europe, and it was much ballyhooed in Czarist Russia where the largely-German motifs, forms, and orchestrations were rapidly yielding to a new nationalistic school of music.
Not without a fight however, and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony stands as a final bastion — or a last gasp — of the central-European idiom that had dominated classical composition since the final days of Beethoven and Schubert.
We’ll look at Tchaikovsky’s last major work this Sunday. Then we’ll skip over to Italy to see what Giuseppe Verdi was doing at around the same time.
6:00 p.m. on WFIT 89.5 FM, streaming at WFIT.org, or ask your smart speaker to play WFIT.org.
