Can I Sip on Your Tchaikovsky?

There is hardly a more venerated composer in Russia than Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Which doesn’t stop irreverent domestic jokers from using his name in situations much more mundane than a classic music recital. If you hear someone saying: “How about some Tchaikovsky?” (“Может, Чайков­ского?”) he is not inviting you to listen to an excerpt from Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake. He is simply offering you a cup of tea. For the composer’s eminent family name – Чайковский – contains the word чай (tea).

The idiom was not in use during Tchaikovsky’s lifetime. But now, in informal banter and in the right context, “Let’s have some Tchaikovsky” means only “Let’s have some tea.” To which Tchaikovsky’s contemporary and colleague, Modest Mussorgsky, might well have replied with the famous proverb: “Чай не водка–много не выпьешь.” (“You can’t drink as much tea as you can vodka.”) The two composers certainly had their differences, and, in terms of beverages, Mussorgsky, as is plain to see from Ilya Repin’s famous portrait of him (which we have somewhat irreverently pasted into our cartoon, below), was known to prefer vodka to “tchaikovsky.”

Little could the great composer have imagined: in our time some inventive foreign distillers have launched a new premium vodka brand named after Pyotr Ilyich. It’s a wonder Tchaikovsky’s heirs have not sued the vodka-makers for abusing his name. Or, if copyright laws are not applicable to 19th century composers, at least for selling this otherwise quite ordinary vodka at exhorbitant prices.

Of course, Tchaikovsky does not stand alone in having his name “abused” by his countrymen a century removed. In the 1970s, when a short course in music history was required in all secondary schools, students compiled a whole short story based on funny connotations in the names of some composers, domestic and foreign: “Вышел на Дворжак, кругом один Мусоргский, выпил Чайковского, в животе–Пучини.” (“I went out in the courtyard [Dvorak], there was trash [Mussorgsky] all over the place, drank some tea [Tchaikovsky], and had gas [Puccini] in my stomach.”) The last is from the phrase, у меня пучит живот (I have a mess in my stomach).

Ignoramuses amongst the New Rich know about Tchaikovsky as a beverage, and some may even have heard he wrote some music. That they have no clue about which music he wrote is the subject of a fresh new joke making the rounds here:

A New Russian is bragging about his recent visit to the Moscow conservatory:

“You know, братан (brother), my wife told me I gotta become more cultured. So we’ve just been at a concert of classical music and heard some Tchaikovsky. I kinda liked him.”

“Oh, cool! And who is this Tchaikovsky?”

“Shame on you! He wrote the music for our mobile phones.”

Since the language of music is international, some English and Russian musical idioms often sound virtually the same. E.g. to call the tune: задавать тон; to strike a chord: задеть струну. Yet, if you want to say in a business context, “we will play it by ear,” don’t use the Russian подбирать на слух. Although it is proper for the musical context, it is limited to that. For the wider meaning use another musical idiom: играть с листа (to sightread). A musician who plays с листа is someone who can play a piece well at the first sitting, never having seen the music before.

Music indeed adds charm to our language. Compare the plain он действует мне на нервы (he is getting on my nerves) with the elegant он играет у меня на нервах (he is playing on my nerves). When you are pleasantly surprised by something that was obviously well-prepared in advance, you can say: в кустах случайно оказался рояль (and then, by chance, there was a piano in the bushes). Indeed, a piano doesn’t belong in the bushes unless somebody had taken the trouble to put it there well in advance.

Of course, musical idioms have long invaded the political lexicon (and have direct equivalents in English). For example: The press smear campaign against Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov was оркестрирована (orchestrated) by the Kremlin. First TV channel anchor Sergei Dorenko играл первую скрипку (played the first violin) and was believed to be saying on air whatever his master, Boris Berezovsky (a major shareholder in the TV channel), wanted him to. But then, Кто платит, тот и заказывает музыку (“He who pays, calls the tune”).

The anti-Luzhkovian campaign was indeed разыграна как по нотам (“played by the notes,” well-orchestrated), so much so that Luzhkov’s ratings plummeted, forcing him to abandon his run for the presidency. After Luzhkov’s party, Fatherland, did poorly in the December 1999 parliamentary elections, you could tell from Luzhkov’s face that he was настроен на минорный лад (“tuned to a minor chord,” looking and feeling down). This contrasted with the much younger Vladimir Putin who, after Yeltsin made him acting president of Russia, ended 1999 на мажорной ноте (“on a major note,” upbeat). After his election, Putin became a true человек-оркестр (“man-orchestra”), which means a man who is very active and can do a lot of different things at once – we saw him skiing, co-piloting a Sukhoi-27 fighter, on board a nuclear submarine, practicing judo, etc. In fact, he was doing it all smoothly and rapidly, в ритме вальса (“in waltz rhythm,” i.e. to do something quickly – a good phrase to use when you are giving someone an order).

You may have heard of the now famous episode when Yeltsin forced first-vice-premier Sergei Stepashin to switch his seat at a cabinet meeting and move closer to the “tsar,” leading some to cite a proverbial quote from a fable of Ivan Krylov: “А вы, друзья, как ни садитесь, всё в музыканты не годитесь.” (“No matter where you sit, friends, you’re poor musicians anyway.”) And poor musicians, as we know, often играют мимо нот (“miss the notes”). So Stepashin was fired by Yeltsin... in the rhythm of a waltz.

Perhaps one of Luzhkov’s great strengths while mayor is that his government has never suffered from this sort of “musical chairs.” And, despite his need to abbreviate his presidential ambitions, he probably has a long political life – at least regionally – ahead of him. First, he leads a rather healthy lifestyle and drinks only “tchaikovsky.” Second, he can continue to count on votes from Muscovites, as long as he makes sure there is no “mussorgsky” in their “dvoraks.”