Raiders of the lost Tchaikovsky

By Richard O Jones

Staff Writer

Sunday, January 28, 2007

OXFORD — The Oxford Chamber Orchestra is poised to make musical history next week by performing the world premiere of a newly discovered work by the master Russian composer Pyotr Ill'yich Tchaikovsky.

Although it lacks armed bandits or secret societies, the story of its discovery by Brazilian flutist James Strauss rings of an Indiana Jones adventure or "The Da Vinci Code."

In 1998, Strauss was but 23 years old, just out of college when he began his studies with Jean-Pierre Rampal, widely considered to be one of the leading flute players of the 20th century.

One day, Rampal told Strauss of the existence of a flute concerto by Tchaikovsky.

He was in St. Petersburg in the 1960s and after a concert someone mentioned to him that Tchaikovsky had written a flute concerto. He saw barely a glimpse of the score, and he wasn't allowed to have a copy or even examine it closely.

So Strauss set out to find it.

In his early research, Strauss saw a letter Tchaikovsky had written to a cellist friend, "I have the concert for flute ready in my mind and it will be for the flute of Taffenel," referring to the French flutist Paul Taffenel, the most famous flute player of the day.

The letter was dated Oct. 7, 1893. Tchaikovsky died three weeks later, but it confirmed that Tchaikovsky was at least working on a flute concerto before he died.

In 1999, Strauss moved to Finland and decided to take advantage of the proximity to St. Petersburg, a five-hour train ride away. Strauss found his way to the house where Tchaikovsky died. It was a run-down neighborhood and the house, in spite of its historical value, was occupied by squatters.

Strauss asked the squatters about Tchaikovsky's papers, if the family knew anyone who had any documents that had belonged to him.

"They knew of a guy who had some manuscripts who lived not too far from the house, near the St. Petersburg McDonald's," Strauss said.

"It was a very weird house," he said. "The person showed me a lot of papers and sheet music."

There was one sheet in particular that caught Strauss' eye. It was unsigned, but the title was written in the Western alphabet: "Concertstück dle flet." They wouldn't let him photograph it, but said that he could make a copy by hand — for a price.

Strauss phoned Finland and told his wife to sell his flute and send him the money immediately via Western Union. He went back to the house with a brick of $20 bills, $6,000 in all, and he buyed the single sheet of paper.
"It hurt a lot to sell the flute," Strauss said. "It was only one sheet of paper, and I went back to Finland wondering if I was crazy.

"But Rampal told me that if you are a true artist, you must take a risk with your life. And so I took the risk."

When he got back to Finland, he chased down another rumor that there was a Finnish flute player by the name of Theodor Wateerstra who had played in the orchestra at a theater in St. Petersburg during Tchaikovsky's time.

The search led him to a second-hand music store that had a big stack of Wateerstra's papers. Among them was a manuscript with the same title, "Concertstück dle flet," this time in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. It, too, was incomplete, but Strauss found it to be an elaboration of the one-page manuscript he had found in St. Petersburg.

"It was something that (Tchaikovsky) wrote when he was still a student, but a more recent copy than the paper I spent $6,000 on," Strauss said.

With these two incomplete manuscripts now in hand, Strauss visited the Russian town of Klin where the official Tchaikovsky archives are located, and there he found proof that the two fragments did contain notations by Tchaikovsky: A manuscript written in the composers own hand with the "Concertstück dle flet," again in the Western alphabet, the very same manuscript that Rampal had caught a brief glimpse of in the 1960s.

"It was a very short excerpt of the same piece," Strauss said. "I had spent four years searching for this final proof, but now I had some big work on my hands because I only had excerpts, not a full composition. So I took the first piece as a model to put together the other parts of the puzzle."

Every concerto needs a cadenza, said Ricardo Averbach, music professor at Miami University and director of the Oxford Chamber Orchestra. It's a chance for the soloist to "show off." To fill that gap, Strauss placed a flute solo from Tchaikovsky's opera "Maid of Orleans," the story of Joan of Arc.

"It fit perfectly," he said. "It was just a coincidence, but it felt right."

Because he was also missing a second movement for "Concertstück dle flet," he went back to Taffanel, the French flutist for whom Tchaikovsky was writing the concerto.

"When Tchaikovsky visited Paris, Taffenel played two short pieces for him," Strauss said, an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin" and a piece titled "Chanson sans Paroles," or "Song Without Words."

"These were not originally written for the flute, but Taffanel made a transcription for them for flute and piano," Strauss said.

Finally, to fill in the gaps and make the concerto flow better, Strauss himself composed some eight or nine stanzas of transitional music, but says that anyone would be hard pressed to pick those out of the score.

Averbach, a native of Brazil, took a trip to Rio de Janeiro last year to meet with Ricardo Tacuchian, the president of the Brazilian Academy of Music. Because they both had busy schedules, Tacuchian asked if Averbach minded if it would be OK to meet at the same time with a young flute player for whom he had written a concerto.

That young flute player was Strauss, who told Averbach of his Tchaikovsky work.

"I invited him on the spot to come here," Averbach said.

Because some of Strauss' reconstruction of "Concertstück dle flet" contains source material not original to Tchaikovsky's notes, a symposium will be held in conjunction with the premiere next week to determine if this piece should be included in the Tchaikovsky canon.

The forum is from 1 to

3 p.m. Tuesday and 10 a.m. to noon Wednesday.

"All Tchaikovsky left behind were the five measures that James found in the archives," Averbach said. "It was not enough to fill an entire piece, so James added more to make it more legitimate.

"Our forum is to discuss the validity of the process and evaluate how much of James' discoveries was written for the 'Concertstück.' Some musicologists are arguing that if it were by Tchaikovsky, we would already have heard of it — but they are saying that without looking at the manuscript or hearing the music."

"It's not unprecedented that a new piece of music by a great composer can come to light," said Miami ethnomusicologist and symposium panelist Thomas Garcia, also a native of Brazil.

Garcia cited manuscripts by C.P. Bach that were lost in Germany and turned up in the Russian city of Kiev. Also, Mozart's famous "Requiem" was left unfinished and reconstructed by others after his death, but now everyone accepts it as a work of Mozart.

"We're not saying it's Tchaikovsky and we're not saying it's not," Garcia said. "We're saying, 'Let's discuss it. If you think it's not Tchaikovsky, come and tell us why. You might be right.' "


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