January: At the Fireside (Svyatki)

One Epiphany Eve,

The maidens were divining their fortunes:

Having cast off one shoe,

And thrown it outside the gate.

The epigraph is from Zhukovsky's 'Svetlana' (1813).

As with the 'Scherzo' for August, the parenthetical subtitle was added by Tchaikovsky himself.

While 'Svyatki' may be an unfamiliar term, it refers to a twelve-day festive period in the Russian calendar, from Christmas to the eve of Epiphany (December 25th to January 6th). The quoted poem depicts the fortune-telling rituals performed by village maidens specifically during this period.

However, what Tchaikovsky depicts in the music is not the simple round dance of village maidens, but rather sounds like a stylized, sophisticated waltz of the city.

The main section in E-flat major is characterized by a principal melody that gently ascends and then descends through sequences, possessing a light and cheerful quality. The Trio modulates to E major, where a calm section featuring a gentle descending motif exchanged between the outer voices is interspersed with a lively section beginning at forte. The short coda, while building up to forte momentarily, concludes gracefully at piano with restraint.

The translation of the poem was used with the kind permission of Ms. Fumiko Ichiyanagi, whose translation is published in Russian Seasonal Customs (『ロシアの歳時記』), edited by Narodo, Russian Folklore Society. We express our deep gratitude here. Russian Seasonal Customs is a book that compiles information on the Russian climate, people's lives, and folklore culture that Tchaikovsky lived in and loved, and it is a helpful resource for interpreting Russian music, which often incorporates uniquely Russian elements and sometimes requires a certain level of background knowledge for full comprehension.