Authors
Denise Clarke1; 1 University of Birmingham, UK Discussion
Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet is a problematic work. It has received very little interest in both the concert halls and scholarly literature, due to it being overlooked and compared with his Romeo and Juliet. However, as a deeply personal/autobiographical piece that is much more than just a mere musical representation of the play, ‘Tchaikovsky’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ presents us with a unique opportunity to explore, not only Tchaikovsky’s incorporation of the programmatic elements of Shakespeare’s play, but also his biography. The themes of madness, misogynistic rejection, and fate would have most likely greatly appealed to Tchaikovsky on a personal level, due to his own life experiences with his mental health, failed marriage and homosexuality, and the beliefs he had in his own ‘Fate’.
In particular, there seems to be no general consensus on how to interpret the major secondary theme, resulting in assumptions that do not do justice to Tchaikovsky’s intentions. When considering Hamlet was the last of the three to be composed, one could easily suggest that the secondary theme be interpreted as a love theme, with Tchaikovsky attempting to follow the pattern similarly used in both Romeo and Juliet and the Tempest. However, Tchaikovsky was able to represent certain biographical issues through the lens of Shakespeare’s play by tasking the unusual major secondary theme with representing an ideal of love that could never be achieved.
By exploring the significance of this uniquely complex major secondary theme, this paper aims to shed some light on what has been a greatly misinterpreted multidimensional work. 
