Song of the Old Grandfather

Tchaikovsky composed his Children's Album, Op. 39 in 1878 — a cycle of twenty-four short character pieces written for his nephew Vladimir Davydov, dedicated to him on the album's title page. The cycle stands beside Schumann's Op. 68 in the canonical mid-grade Romantic teaching repertoire and is in some ways more accessible — more modally Russian, less harmonically German.

Song of the Old Grandfather is in B♭ major and tests cantabile right-hand playing over a steady chordal accompaniment. The right hand carries a long lyrical melody with a folk-flavoured shape; the left hand provides a quiet chordal pulse that must support without weighing the line down. The piece sits comfortably under the hands; the technical demand is tonal — the touch needs to be warm and the dynamics carefully graded.

Two pitfalls. First, the chordal accompaniment can become mechanical — practise the left hand alone and shape it with a small dynamic curve before re-adding the right hand. Second, the folk-flavoured melodic shape tempts excessive rubato; Tchaikovsky's writing rewards a steady pulse and a small tonal lift at each phrase peak rather than a free-rhythm reading.

The complete Op. 39 is on IMSLP in clean public-domain editions. Hearing the surrounding pieces in the album makes the dramatic logic of the Old Grandfather immediately legible — the cycle is a sequence of vignettes that play off each other.