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Saturday 25 December 2010
Tune of the Day: December (Christmas)
Merry Christmas from flutetunes.com!
This is the last piece in Tchaikovsky's musical cycle The Seasons. Composed in 1876, this set of twelve short character pieces for piano used to enjoy enormous popularity.
The twelfth piece, subtitled “Christmas”, is a charming salon waltz, whose music could be right out of Tchaikovsky's ballets. In the first edition of The Seasons the piece is accompanied by a short epigraph by Russian poet Vasily Zhukovsky:
Once upon a Christmas night
The girls were telling fortunes:
Taking their slippers off their feet
And throwing them out of the gate.
The epigraph, however, was chosen by the publisher, not by Tchaikovsky.