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Festival March

Торжественный марш

Piano piece by Karel Král, arranged for orchestra (1867).

History

Commissioned in connection with a Slavonic exhibition at Moscow University in May 1867. Nikolai Kashkin recalled that "At the end of the [18]60s in Moscow, an ethnographic exhibition was organised for many visiting Slavic deputies from abroad; among the deputies were Palacký, Rieger and others. Festivities were organised for the visitors at the university, in which a number of learned and artistic Muscovites took part. From the Musical Society and Conservatory, three of us attended: N. G. Rubinstein, Petr Il'ich, and myself.

A week and a half before, the professor of the university, the long-dead K. K. Hertz (a former inspector of scientific classes at the conservatory and lecturer on aesthetics) brought along a Festival March, written by a Moscow amateur musician, Czech by birth, to greet the Slav deputies. The March was written for piano, and the author himself had decided not to score it for orchestra, but K. K. Hertz approached Petr Il'ich with a request to do this for the sake of our dear guests. Petr Il'ich did not refuse, but argued that it would take too long. However, K. K. Hertz persisted, remarking that there was plenty of time for copying out the parts and for rehearsals. By the end of the exchanges, as in similar cases, Petr Il'ich yielded, and he placated K. K. Hertz by agreeing to listen to one of his 45-minute lectures on aesthetics. But at the end of the lecture, K. K. Hertz, to his great astonishment, found the full score of the March prepared and left for him, and Petr Il'ich himself was not even in the Conservatory" [1].

From: The Tchaikovsky Handbook, vol. 1 (2002), p. 354
Copyright © 2002 Alexander Poznansky and Brett Langston

Notes:

1. Nikolai Kashkin, Воспоминания о П. И. Чайковском (1896), p. 27 [back]