Editing Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (section)

====Pastiche (Passé-ism)====
In works like the "Serenade for Strings" and the ''Variations on a Rococo Theme'', Tchaikovsky showed he was highly gifted at writing in a style of 18th-century European [[pastiche]]. Tchaikovsky graduated from imitation to full-scale evocation in the ballet ''The Sleeping Beauty'' and the opera ''The Queen of Spades''. This practice, which Alexandre Benois calls "passé-ism", lends an air of timelessness and immediacy, making the past seem as though it were the present.<ref>Volkov, 124.</ref> On a practical level, Tchaikovsky was drawn to past styles because he felt he might find the solution to certain structural problems within them. His Rococo pastiches also may have offered escape into a musical world purer than his own, into which he felt himself irresistibly drawn. (In this sense, Tchaikovsky operated in the opposite manner to [[Igor Stravinsky]], who turned to [[Neoclassicism (music)|Neoclassicism]] partly as a form of compositional self-discovery.) Tchaikovsky's attraction to ballet might have allowed a similar refuge into a fairy-tale world, where he could freely write dance music within a tradition of French elegance.<ref>Brown, ''New Grove'' vol. 18, pp. 613, 615.</ref>