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Tchaikovsky, Pytr Il'ich : Les saisons - 12 Morceaux caracteristiques No.5 "Les nuits de mai" G-Dur

Work Overview

Music ID : 22154
Instrumentation:Piano Solo 
Genre:pieces
Total Playing Time:4 min 00 sec
Copyright:Public Domain

Commentary (1)

Author : Yamamoto, Akihisa

Last Updated: June 25, 2019
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Note: This article is automatically translated from the original Japanese text. The author of the original work did not supervise this translation.

What a wonderful night! What peace, embracing all!

Let us give thanks to this northern homeland!

From the kingdom of ice, from the kingdom of blizzards and snow,

Comes such a fresh and clear May of our homeland.

The epigraph is from Afanasy Fet's "Still a May Night" (1857).

Summer in St. Petersburg is the season of white nights. In the high-latitude northern capital of the empire, the sun hardly sets, and bright hours continue even late into the night.

However, even in St. Petersburg, May does not bring white nights. It remains a mystery why Bernhard chose such a title for a May piece. Considering that the epigraph (which also has no relation to white nights) begins with the exclamation "What a wonderful night!", it might be suggested that the term "white nights" should evoke not the never-setting sun, but rather the brightness liberated from winter (see also Ichiyanagi's opinion on page 120 of the aforementioned book).

At the beginning of the main section of the ternary form, the G major arpeggios played softly possess an ambitious structure in that the hemiola, typically found in the middle of a piece, renders the meter irregular (hemiola refers to the division of two measures in a triple meter piece into a 2+2+2 rhythmic pattern instead of the usual 3+3). Furthermore, the overall bar structure is not symmetrical, and the dynamics in the main section remain at p and pp, giving a somewhat fragile and unstable impression. The middle section is in 2/4 time, a fast-paced part marked Allegro giocoso, where a simple melody with a descending motif soars over an arpeggiated accompaniment.