A pas de deux is a particular style of dance; however, the best ever written is by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky from The Nutcracker. While the Nutcracker is a performance tied to Christmas and jollity, Tchaikovsky wrote the ballet shortly after the passing of his sister, and was comforted in the parallels between the lead, Clara, and his late sister, Aleksandra. There are many ties to various movements from the ballet to the emotions he was engulfed in at the time, like Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies, Waltz of the Flowers, and of course, the Grand Pas De Deux, all thought to be intertwined with his memories of his sister. While both of the aforementioned works contain jubilation and a lightness about them, Pas De Deux is starkly contrasted with a sense of darkness, as it has been said that this piece specifically was dedicated to his grief and the journey that’s encapsulated by this movement, and it’s easy to see how.
The brilliance of this work is tied to the main melody that recurs throughout the length of the piece, and it’s simply a descending major scale. The entire first section of this piece alternates a descending G major scale, echoed by a descending E minor scale.
For all non-music people, GM and Em are relative keys, so the scale is merely shifted down a minor third, and none of the actual pitches need adjusting to give it that relationship.
Through copious amounts of psychological counseling I have experienced in my life and just short of bashing my head into a rock with the words carved onto its face so that they were abraded onto my skin, I have been unfortunate enough in my life to understand how grief is not and will never be linear. You hear about the five stages of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance), but what they don’t tell you is that it’s bullshit. There is no “order” to grief because you can surpass as many of them as you want as many times as you want, but you will always end up back at one of them before you know it. This is the genius of Pas De Deux. During the buildup, there is a fight between these joyful and melancholy sections that pull you in both directions. Sweet moments of acceptance, followed by echoed cries of the ugly parts of grief.
The best parts of this piece are the pre-climax and the true climax, both of which are structured similarly. For context, compared to wind band ensembles, the wind voices are paired down heavily in an orchestra to focalize the string voices, which don’t project as well, and many composers use their orchestration sparingly, and this is no exception. As a recovering orchestral player, as much as I love Tchaikovsky’s music, being tacet for the first 3 movements of his 1st symphony wasn’t ideal. However, this creates exhilarating moments of contrast when the harsher brass voices do come in, to add extreme levels of impact. The pre-climax features a cascading descending E harmonic minor scale with some added chromaticism at the end with a large impact back on the main theme in G major, but only a few times until the upper voices in both the woodwinds and strings go through this diminishing figure of smaller and smaller denominations, almost as if building to a sense of urgency when the brass enter in an ascending E harmonic minor arpeggio that runs from the lower voices up through the higher and ending on the G, again reemphasizing the tonic in a moment that I could only describe as the clouds parting in a moment of clarity and my body is ready to be taken from the Earth. In a moment of euphoria, where just for a moment, all of the pain I have carried with me is released. At this particular moment, the trumpet carries the main melody, where it is not followed by the minor alteration, arriving at a moment of true acceptance.
In moments of madness, few things tend to align, but when they do, it makes the world feel like you could see every pine needle on a tree from the spot you are standing. Truly, what an intoxicating feeling, even if it is the last feeling before the end, and how beautiful that is.
I could listen to this piece a thousand times, but continue to feel as if my still beating heart is trying to break out of my ribcage every time. Grief is funny like that. We often know it’s coming in one way or another, but even in its surprise, we still know it’s coming, and we have to be ready no matter what. Every time I start listening to it, I know exactly what’s ahead, but still it doesn’t change the way that I feel when it arrives. From the soft harp arpeggios at the beginning, a break but also a warning to the intensity to come, to the brass hits that to me represent every moment of pain that I have brought with me to this point in my life, to it all releasing at once.
This, unfortunately, is all a cover-up. I realized very recently that I am very bad at talking about my feelings, and as bad as I am at disclosing, I am that much better at hiding it.
To end one of the worst weeks of my life, I lost my best friend in an unexpected turn of events that I was even lucky to have received 3 hours' notice. My family got Jack when he was only 8 weeks old, and he lived to turn 13 in October but had to be laid to rest on December 13th. While losing a pet sucks and is difficult, I think it was the amount that he had seen me through in my life. He was there for me when my parents split, all of middle school, all of high school, the suicide attempt, lockdown, and he saw me through most of college. While I truly am heartbroken, it also reminded me how far I have made it in life, to have gone through all of that, and to be on the other side. So all of this talk about grief in music and the tragedy of loss is all a ruse and a wall to hide behind the fact that I can’t talk about how I feel. But maybe, I don’t have to, if for the rest of my life there is art that is filled with emotion like this, words don’t have to work.
One of my friends recently instilled in my head this mentality of “how lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard,” and with the end of marching band and my time at college coming to an end this year, I really tried to embody that mentality. Well, turns out, that same quote ended up on the card the veterinarian gave us when they put Jack down, so maybe someone out there is trying to tell me something, It’s a Wonderful Life style. Thanks, Clarence.
I have made it a running bit with some of my friends that my ideal way to die is to bleed out in the snow, alone on a mountain, to the Grand Pas de Deux. I think it’s because this piece is so devastatingly beautiful, it takes the ugly out of all of it. Grief and sadness are ugly and hideous, and they bring out the absolute worst in all of us, but on the mountain, they can be poetic. It can be beautiful, if not just for a moment, I can show the artistic side of grief and death. When the last few seconds are approaching, it is all okay, and it is calm, and it is magnificent.