Tchaikovsky’s Hot Takes: Composer as Critic

Pre-concert talk with composer Matthew Aucoin, music critic Michael Brodeur, and host Nadia Sirota Tchaikovsky spent a portion of his 20s and 30s (1867 to 1878) moonlighting as a music critic in Moscow.   Nadia Sirota, violist and creator of the Peabody Award-winning podcast Meet the Composer, hosts a panel with composer and MacArthur Fellow Matthew Aucoin, and music critic and author Michael Brodeur to discuss Tchaikovsky’s sometimes-harsh criticism of his contemporaries such as Brahms, Schumann and Wagner. Touching on hustle culture in the late 19th century, the panel will discuss the nuance and ethics of composers working as music critics.    Featuring excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s criticism, such as:   Brahms has not fulfilled the obligations which Schumann laid upon him and upon all musical Germany personified in him. He is merely one of those routinier composers in which the German school has been so rich. He writes fluently, skillfully, correctly, but without a spark of independent genius; contenting himself with endless trifling with empty musical ideas, long since become stale, and borrowed chiefly from Mendelssohn. The event will open with a brief performance by a member of the BSO.