Pjotr Tjajkovskij

Symfonier

Symphony No. 1 in G minor Op. 13 “Winter Daydreams”

1. Allegro tranquillo (‘Dreams of a Winter Journey’)
2. Adagio cantabile ma non tanto (‘Land of desolation, Land of mists’)
3. Scherzo: Allegro scherzando giocoso
4. Finale: Andante lugubre – Allegro maestoso

According to Tchaikovsky’s younger brother Modest, no other work caused the composer such labour and suffering as his First Symphony, which occupied him through much of 1866, the year of his 26th birthday. In January he had moved from St Petersburg to Moscow, where Nikolay Rubinstein, Director of the newly-opened Conservatory of Music, had engaged him as Professor of Harmony, thereby alleviating the financial hardship that had beset him since he resigned a minor post at the Ministry of Justice three years earlier to devote himself to music.

He lodged in Moscow with Rubinstein, and it was probably at his suggestion that Tchaikovsky began a more extended work than anything he had previously attempted. He had revised a student composition, an Overture in F major, which Rubinstein conducted at a concert in March and brought the composer his first public success. Much encouraged, he began sketches for a symphony right away, working by night as well as by day in addition to teaching, until physical exhaustion set in. He was further cast down by a belated and scathing review in St Petersburg of his graduation composition, a cantata on Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ (the text set by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony).

Very soon Tchaikovsky was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, forcing himself to continue working in spite of sleeplessness, persistent headaches, hallucinations and a recurring sense of dread that he would not live to finish the Symphony, all of which he mentioned in his letters. A doctor was called in and said his case was hopeless, which did not exactly help matters. In fact, most of the Symphony was written by the summer, when the composer showed it to Nikolay Rubinstein’s brother Anton, his former teacher at St Petersburg, who advised some revision before he would consider it for performance.

Back in Moscow, Tchaikovsky eventually went along with the suggestions made to him, but then the work was first performed in a strangely piecemeal fashion. The Scherzo movement alone was played at a Moscow concert in December, without much success (according to Modest), but this and the second movement were more favourably received when Nikolay conducted them at St Petersburg two months later. Another year went by before the Symphony was given in its entirety, at Moscow on 15 February 1868. Tchaikovsky then made more revisions and a few cuts before a first edition was published in 1874. The version now heard was not performed until 1886, and a corrected printed edition eventually appeared in 1888, 22 years after it was begun.

Tchaikovsky’s publisher, Jürgenson, had brought out the first Russian editions of some German symphonic classics in the early 1860s, and we know that the composer enjoyed playing through the symphonies by Mendelssohn and Schumann. His own first essay in the form owes something in style to both these models, as in the use he made of descriptive titles and in his method of reconciling the disciplines of symphonic form with his own romantic imagination and developing technique. After his later revision he wrote in a letter: ‘Despite its deficiencies I have a soft spot for it. It is a sin of my sweet youth’.

He also referred to it when writing to his longtime patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy widow of a railway engineer who virtually financed him for some 15 years out of admiration for his music, but on condition that they never met. ‘Although it is immature in many respects’, he told her, ‘it is essentially better and richer in content than many other, more mature works’. In giving it the title of Winter Daydreams he was no doubt copying Mendelssohn’s practice as well as seeking to define his own approach.

Tchaikovsky then bestowed separate titles on each of the first two movements. The opening Allegro tranquillo he called ‘Dreams of a Winter Journey’, but this seems to have no specific relevance to anything in the music, which is a sonata-type structure of two contrasting ideas. Both the main themes are introduced by the woodwind, the first by flute and bassoon playing two octaves apart, the second by a solo clarinet. In general it is the movement’s melodic charm and instrumental detail that is more engaging than the modest though skilfully adapted symphonic development.

The second movement he inscribed ‘Land of desolation, Land of mists’. It is certainly a mood-picture, a decidedly Russian landscape of the mind through which musical images are brought into focus. The implications of the subtitle are somewhat contradicted by an opening phrase now known to have come from Tchaikovsky’s earlier Overture on Ostrovsky’s drama, The Storm, where it had different emotional connotations. However, the folklike song of an oboe is extended and elaborated as it travels from one instrument to another, the varied orchestration and counterpoint doing duty for musical development.

The other movements have no more subtitles, we do not know why. The third movement Scherzo was more or less ready made, being taken over from a Piano Sonata in C sharp minor he wrote the year before, transposed to a new key and reworked to take more advantage of orchestral colour (the original keyboard work was subsequently published posthumously). Mendelssohn again comes to mind in the elegance of phrase and graceful manner, but it is the newly-written trio section in waltz-time that acquires a special significance as the progenitor of all the later and much-Ioved orchestral waltzes.

The finale, although again in sonata form with two subjects, derives most of its character from a single Russian folksong, which Tchaikovsky also later arranged as one of a published collection. Its melody provides the basis for both the slow introduction and the jaunty second theme of the movement, as well as serving to some extent in shaping the movement’s sturdy first subject. By way of development, Tchaikovsky here parades his contrapuntal skill in a fugal passage with entries in different keys, while generating an energetic rhythmic impetus that carries the movement through with a flourish.

Symphony No. 2 in C minor Op. 17 “Little Russian”

Revised 1879 Version
1. Andante sostenuto - Allegro vivo
2. Andantino marziale, quasi moderato
3. Scherzo and Trio: Allegro molto vivace
4. Finale: Moderato assai – Allegro vivo

After the trouble and tribulation caused him by the composition of his First Symphony, it was another six years before Tchaikovsky attempted a further work in a form he never found particularly congenial, though he did think he ought to try to master it. His Second Symphony was begun with this in mind, to improve on the faults of style he felt there were in the earlier work, especially as regards ‘symmetry of form’, as he put it in a letter, but it was so enthusiastically received at its Moscow première on 7 February 1873 that the Russian Musical Society changed its programmes in order to give a repeat performance two months later.

Its immediate appeal at the time was to some extent due to the composer’s use of melodic themes borrowed from Ukrainian folksong, which led to Nikolay Kashkin, a teacher and critic and friend of Tchaikovsky, calling it the ‘Little Russian’ Symphony (Little Russia being the common name for the Ukraine). The nickname stuck, to become virtually the work’s subtitle. Another distinction it has among Tchaikovsky’s seven Symphonies (counting Manfred with the numbered six) is in musical subject-matter that reflects a wholly unmorbid side of the composer’s personality.

He began it during a summer holiday, one of several spent with his married sister, Alexandra Davidova, and her family at Kamenka, their home in the Ukraine, which she encouraged her brother to look on as a second home for him too. He was then aged 32, and dividing his time between teaching as Professor of Harmony at the Moscow Conservatory headed by Nikolay Rubinstein (who conducted the Second Symphony’s première) and his own composition, most recently the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-overture, a String Quartet (No. 1 in D minor) and an opera, The Oprichnik, which he learned at the end of the year had been accepted for production at St. Petersburg.

By the time he returned to Moscow he was ‘so engrossed’ in the Symphony, he wrote, that other work was irksome, and it was finished and orchestrated during the winter. He played the finale over on the piano at a party given by Rimsky-Korsakov early in January and was delighted by the enthusiasm this aroused. Even so, and despite the successful concert performances, he remained personally dissatisfied with some aspects of it, and six to seven years later (in the wake of his Third and Fourth Symphonies) he rewrote much of it into the revised version which is now usually performed and is recorded here.

His most extensive revision was in the Symphony’s first and third movements, though he mentions an ‘enormous cut’ in the finale which perhaps improved its proportions. At any rate, the work made new friends when it was first heard in its revised form at St. Petersburg on 12 February 1881, and the present-day listener will find it generally lighter in expressive character than his other Symphonies. Its slow introduction to the first movement has a variant of a folksong, ‘Down by Mother Volga’, heard as a horn solo, which later emerges amid the development of two other ideas and is reintroduced as a better ending to the movement than either of those.

Instead of a lyrical slow movement, Tchaikovsky made use of a Bridal March from his rejected opera, Undine, composed three years earlier. Now adapted as the basis of a rondo-scheme, it alternates with a string melody as a first contrasting episode and a central passage derived from a folksong, ‘Spin, O my spinner’, found in the ‘50 Russian Folksongs’ he arranged for piano duet. This movement is an attractive partner to the Scherzo, which most resembles Tchaikovsky’s ballet music in its rhythmic vivacity, especially a trio-section that foreshadows a Sleeping Beauty dance and which, at the end, is played again in 2/8 time by the woodwind while the rest play the main scherzo music in 3/8.

Folksong again furnishes the finale, principally one called ‘The Crane’ which Tchaikovsky overheard the Davidov’s butler singing at Kamenka. There is a contrasting melody of Tchaikovsky’s own, a syncopated little dance tune, but the movement is chiefly concerned with the folksong theme varied not in terms of changing the melody much but of presenting it, or phrases from it, in different keys and instrumental colours, gradually absorbing the second tune until a loud stroke on the tam-tam heralds a presto coda that carries the work home in a bright C major.

Symphony No. 3 in D major Op. 29

1. Moderato assai (Tempo di marcia funebre) – Allegro brillante
2. Alla tedesca: Allegro moderato e semplice
3. Andante elegiaco
4. Scherzo: Allegro vivo
5. Finale: Allegro con fuoco – Tempo di polacca

When Tchaikovsky composed his Third Symphony in a matter of a few weeks during his summer holiday in 1875, he was 35 years old and the work helped to banish the melancholia that afflicted him through the previous winter. An emotional, sensitive man, he was prone to bouts of depression throughout his life, which he is now thought to have ended by his own hand in one such fit of despair, to avoid being disgraced by a public scandal of homosexual involvement. In 1875, however, his state of mind was affected as much by professional as emotional matters.

The year began badly for him with the celebrated occasion when he played over his sketches for the B flat minor Piano Concerto to Nikolay Rubinstein, its intended dedicatee and Director of the Moscow Conservatory where Tchaikovsky was then teaching, only to hear Rubinstein denounce it as ‘worthless and unplayable’. Before the year was out, the Concerto would be successfully launched not in Russia but in Boston, USA, by a new dedicatee, Hans von Bülow, but Tchaikovsky’s spirits were reflected in the Sérénade mélancolique he wrote in January that year for violin and orchestra.

His letters to his brothers Anatoly and Modest at this time expressed his wish to die, as well as more mundane irritation with his teaching duties, and although he craved travel, or escape from the city to the countryside, he no sooner went anywhere than he started to feel homesick. He busied himself with some songs, and with correcting his fourth opera, Vakula the Smith, ready for a prize competition which it would win later in the year: it has come down to us in a revised form as Cherevichki (The Little Slippers), but is still seldom heard.

A different fate attended another major work Tchaikovsky began that year, after the Directorate of the Imperial Theatres invited him to compose the music for a ballet intended for production at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. How much of a subject for it was already decided, and characteristic of Tchaikovsky, is the means by which this Third Symphony acquires the unconventional structure of five movements instead of four.

Ostensibly it serves as a kind of scherzo to balance the movement that bears this designation on the other side of the central slow movement, itself the most imaginative in the work and the heart of its expressive ideas. Tchaikovsky was later to declare: ‘All my life I have been much troubled by my inability to grasp and manipulate form in music ... I shall end my days without having ever written anything that is perfect in form’. We might nevertheless feel that he was the greater composer because (like others of his time) he varied form to suit his ideas, and in the present instance the Symphony gains greatly in character from the added movement.

Like all Tchaikovsky’s symphonies except the first, it begins with a slow introduction, this in D minor and marked to be played in funeral-march tempo. Sorrowful as it is, the sounds are beautiful in Tchaikovsky’s scoring, and the shadows are soon lifted in an accelerating lead into the major key and a processional theme for the main Allegro. The link passage and theme are only the first of several harbingers of Swan Lake music; another is the B minor melody on the oboe which marks the second subject. Both ideas are concisely stated then extensively developed according to the sonata principle, eventually being repeated and used to build a vigorous finish.

‘Alla tedesca’ for the second movement refers back to what was known as a ‘German Dance’ (Allemande or Deutsche, later the Ländler) before the waltz came into its own. Begun by the oboe and clarinet over plucked strings, it has a main theme of beguiling grace and elegance enclosing a trio section animated by chattering woodwind in triplet phrases passed among the orchestra. The opening tune returns and ends with its leading phrase also passed about before dropping away on the bassoon.

The elegiac slow movement recalls the mood and D minor key of the opening funeral march as broken phrases carry an affecting flute melody at the outset to other woodwind and a sorrowful horn, before the strings in richer harmony offer a more consoling idea, with this tune doubled by clarinets. As it is extended it becomes interwoven with the previous D minor phrases, but gradually overcomes all lingering doubts until the solo horn brings the movement to rest on a final chord in the security of D major.

The scherzo movement proper brings Mendelssohn irresistibly to mind in the delicacy and charm with which the whirring phrases on woodwind and strings (the latter muted throughout the movement) are embellished by the horn, later by a trombone. A trio section changes the underlying metre as the horns sustain a pedal-note D while other groups of instruments offer a new tune in seven different keys in turn, as if inviting a choice. A climax is reached by way of arpeggio phrases and fanfare figures, after which the opening section returns to bring about a disarming ending.

The polonaise tempo invoked for the finale is the ensemble dance in triple metre that adorns some of the best-known scenes in Tchaikovsky’s theatre music, Evgeny Onyegin as well as Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. It is exuberantly extended by the full orchestra before giving way to a pompous, almost hymn-like second subject. The development is by way of repetition and a somewhat academic-sounding fugal passage, leading to the second theme swelling out grandly like an anthem to crown the Symphony in confident splendour.

Symphony No. 4 in F minor Op. 36

1. Andante sostenuto – Moderato con anima
2. Andantino in mòdo di canzona
3. Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato
4. Finale: Allegro con fuoco

Soon after the first performance of his Fourth Symphony, at St Petersburg on 22 February 1878, Tchaikovsky wrote to a friend that it was ‘the best thing I have done’, He was then 38 years old, and the composition had occupied him intermittently at much the same time as his opera, Evgeny Onyegin, which was premiered in Moscow a year later. Both these works are particular examples of the technical mastery that suddenly showed itself during what were some of the most critical years of the composer’s life, while the symphony as a form became his means of expression for inward thoughts and feelings of the more subjective kind, emotions with which most listeners can readily identify.

Like the Violin Concerto, which immediately preceded it, the Fourth Symphony was begun during Tchaikovsky’s convalescence abroad after the breakdown brought on by his ill-fated marriage. Some years before, in trying to escape from what he felt to be the burden of his own homosexual nature, he became engaged to an opera singer, only to be jilted suddenly and without explanation. Then, in 1877, one of his students asked him to marry her, a proposal close to that in Pushkin’s story of Onyegin. But whereas Onyegin turned the girl down, and lived to regret it, Tchaikovsky accepted her, and came to regret that much sooner.

Incapable of loving his wife, Antonia Ivanovna (who was later found to be mentally unstable anyway), Tchaikovsky soon fled from her and suffered a serious breakdown, which threatened his own sanity and led him to contemplate suicide. He took himself to Switzerland and Italy to seek recuperation, and we owe it to another lady who came into his life some months earlier that he was able to continue working at all. Nadezhda von Meck was the wealthy widow of a railway engineer, and she conceived such a passion for Tchaikovsky’s music that she offered him generous financial help so that he could concentrate on composition without the need to earn other income, and this became an annuity which he received for almost 15 years.

Her patronage led to an extraordinary friendship between them maintained by remote control, as it was accompanied by the delicate stipulation, carefully kept on both sides, that they should never meet. Their association was entirely through the letters they exchanged, often long and fascinating (and still awaiting an adequate English version), such as the descriptive ‘meaning’ the composer wrote for her of his Fourth Symphony, which they referred to as ‘our Symphony’ in their correspondence. Some quotations from this are included here, but the reader should also keep in mind Tchaikovsky’s disclaimer to his correspondent that the work was ‘a musical confession of the soul’, which words could never adequately explain.

His contribution to symphonic form as a means of musical expression was to extend its scope and to bring to it new and vivid contrasts of melody and harmony. These are a distinctive feature of the Fourth Symphony, which ranks with the Pathétique (No. 6) and Manfred Symphonies as the composer’s finest achievement in this form. No. 4 is filled with imaginative instrumental scoring throughout the orchestra; with harmonic skill in the use of inverted and chromatically altered chords, and especially with richness of melody. Tchaikovsky was never afraid of exposing a good tune for all it was worth, and then turning it upside down to make another just as effective, as happens in the first movement of this Symphony.

It is a long and complex movement, beginning with a slow introduction in which fanfares of horns and trumpets, supported by woodwind, announce a fateful and foreboding theme that recurs throughout the movement. ‘This is Fate’, wrote Tchaikovsky to Madame von Meck, ‘that inevitable force which prevents our hopes of happiness from being realized ... It is inescapable and it can never be overcome’. To his composer-friend Sergey Taneyev he acknowledged Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as the model for the musical idea. Sometimes it is heard in stark isolation, sometimes integrated into the orchestral texture, but always with compelling power. After the change of tempo the other main themes are an agonised melody in waltz-time introduced by the strings, which is answered by a more hopeful, dreamy tune on the clarinet. The transformation and development of these is twice interrupted by slower sections based on contrasted ideas before the movement reaches a threatening and despairing coda.

The sense of isolation induced by feelings of unhappiness is intensified in each of the next two movements. The Andantino in mòdo di canzona (in mocking mood) is characterized by a nostalgic melancholy in the haunting song played by the oboe (‘One is sad because so much is gone, past ... And one regrets the past, yet has no wish to begin living again’). The procession of memories is invigorated by an answering string-theme in three low-pitched octaves, with a quieter and more dance-like middle section begun by clarinets and bassoons (‘Recalling happy moments when the young blood pulsed warm through our veins and life was good’), after which the opening song is heard again, first on the violins and then ending the movement in a sad strain from the bassoons.

Now follows one of Tchaikovsky’s most original and daring feats of orchestration, the massed strings played pizzicato ostinato throughout, like plucked balalaikas. The theme is notable for wide leaps and repeated notes, evoking what he called ‘capricious arabesques, elusive apparitions that pass through the imagination when a little wine has been drunk and one feels the first stage of intoxication’. Among them are ‘a roistering peasant and a street song’, represented by a rustic woodwind tune, and ‘a military parade passing in the distance’ heard from the brass. All these elements are then woven together in a colourful and exhilarating tapestry of themes.

A flamboyant flurry of sound launches the finale, followed quickly by a quiet statement of a theme derived from a Russian folk-song well-known in Tchaikovsky’s day, ‘In the woods there stood a birch-tree’, which is treated to much variation. ‘Go to the people, who know how to enjoy themselves’, Nadezhda von Meck was instructed, ‘but Fate returns again and others pay no heed ... Simple, strong joy does exist even so. Rejoice in the happiness of others and life is still bearable’. The variants of the folk-song generate developing excitement until the second of them is frightened out of its festive brilliance by the sudden return of the baleful Fate motif from the opening movement. For a moment it seems to have taken control as the music shrinks beneath it, but with a last upsurge the Symphony recovers its high spirits to end exultantly.

Symphony No. 5 in E minor Op. 64

1. Andante – Allegro con anima
2. Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza
3. Allegro moderato
4. Andante maestoso – Allegro vivace

Each of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies (seven, counting Manfred) gives insights into his musical personality, and the Fifth has long been among the most popular of its kind. To a great extent this is because the composer made use of symphonic form not to develop a reasoned musical discussion but as a vehicle for his own inward thoughts and feelings. ‘Should not a symphony’, he wrote to a friend, ‘reveal those wordless urges that hide in the heart, asking fervently for expression?’ He answered the question by enabling listeners to identify directly with the emotions conveyed through the musical ideas, which often haunt the mind as well as delighting the ear.

His Fifth Symphony was one of the works made possible by the financial support he received for almost 15 years from Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy widow of a railway engineer. She conceived such a passion for Tchaikovsky’s music that she paid him an annual sum to allow him to give the time he needed to composition without having to earn other income as he climbed to the peak of his career. Yet her generosity was accompanied by the firm stipulation, rigorously kept on both sides, that they should never meet.

Their association was carried on entirely through the letters they exchanged, in one of which Tchaikovsky wrote: ‘I have tried more than once to express in music the torment and delight of love ... Words alone are not enough, and where they are powerless, a more eloquent language comes fully armed: music ... What you say about words hurting music, dragging it down from some unscalable heights, is true enough, and I have always felt it deeply. Perhaps that is why I have succeeded better with instrumental works than with vocal compositions’.

He was a mature and successful composer when he began work on the Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1888. Some 10 years had elapsed since the first performance of the Fourth Symphony (Op. 36 in F minor) in Moscow. In between, Tchaikovsky had devoted much of his energy to opera, bringing to the stage Evgeny Onyegin, The Maid of Orleans, Mazeppa, Cherevichki and The Sorceress, besides which he composed the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G, Italian Caprice, Serenade for Strings, the Overture 1812, and the Manfred Symphony, among other works. He also overcame his fear of conducting to make a start in that direction at St Petersburg in 1887, when he was aged 47.

After that he was encouraged to undertake his first tour as a conductor, visiting Germany, France and England early the next year, and returning in the spring to a new home at Frolovskoye, between Moscow and Klin. It was a plain dasha in wooded surroundings, remote and secluded, and the composer started gardening with much enthusiasm. Looking back on his successes, though, he suffered the recurring fear of all creative artists, and wrote to his brother Modest that he was ‘dreadfully anxious to prove both to others and to myself that I have not yet sung myself out’. There being no better way to do this, he set to work on the new symphony.

Less than four months later, he was able to write to Nadezhda von Meck: ‘Now that the symphony is about to be finished I may say that, thanks be to God, it is not inferior to the other one’ (meaning the Fourth). Some notes were among his papers suggesting that he had a vague programme in mind for what he composed. The Symphony’s introduction, for instance, was to reflect ‘Complete resignation with regard to Fate’, and this comment was followed by a disguised reference to the central emotional problem of his homosexuality, forcibly repressed by the laws and social conventions of his time. As a Soviet writer once put it: ‘If Beethoven’s Fifth is Fate knocking at the door, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth is Fate trying to get out’.

The Fate or Destiny motif this time is very different from the battering assault of its counterpart in the Fourth Symphony. It is the foreboding figure first uttered in the low register of the clarinets at the outset of the introduction, laying immediate claim to an emotional response from the listener. The motif will be heard again in each of the four movements, serving musical as well as expressive purposes, and is possessed of an ingenious rhythmic character which will identify it even when heard without the melody. The mood is one of resignation, later verging on despair, and is intensified in the opening bars by the hesitant accompaniment from the lower strings.

Its basic simplicity of harmony is continued in the main Allegro con anima of the first movement, but the sombre instrumental colouring is soon changed and extended to build a brilliant climax. The rhythmic pattern begets a subsidiary theme on woodwind and horns, from which grows a characteristic yearning melody to provide the movement’s main second subject. Both elements are then dramatically developed in the course of the movement, reaching another big climax before subsiding again, and when the opening ideas are repeated they continue into a coda that brings back the sombre earlier mood. A long, tender melody played by a solo horn is the warmly expressive opening to the slow movement (the tune has had more than one set of words fitted to it to make popular songs in the years gone by). After a clarinet has added a counter-melody, the music gathers intensity with repetition, and a subsidiary theme from the oboe leads by way of a surging climax to a central section, Moderato con anima, with a quirky woodwind figure and sonorous writing for the horns, into which the Destiny motif suddenly and almost balefully intrudes. The movement’s opening section returns, with a different scoring, and again develops feverishly, with a further dramatic incursion by the Destiny motif before dying away to a feeling of wistful frustration.

The third movement brings a decorative contrast in a waltz that might have been designed for ballet. Graceful and extremely pretty, its main section is divided between the strings, followed by the wind instruments. A central trio section has a perky semiquaver figure played spiccato (with the tip of the bow) by the strings and spreading through the orchestra, giving added embellishment to the main waltz theme when it returns. Suddenly, as if recalling that he was, after all, writing a symphony and not a ballet, Tchaikovsky causes the waltz rhythm to be disturbed by a reminder of the Destiny theme, low on clarinets and bassoons, just before the end.

The motif is transposed from E minor into E major in the lengthy introduction to the finale, thereby striking a somewhat artificial pose. The clipped chords forming the main theme are derived from the introduction, and although there is a return to the minor key Tchaikovsky has given the broadest possible hint that he intends a ‘happy ending’, whatever Destiny may say. In the course of the movement Destiny says quite a lot, especially after the march-like second subject. The coda treats the motif still more grandiosely in E major, until the first theme of the first movement is eventually brought back and brandished like a talisman, ffff, to assert an ultimate triumph, though perhaps with more bravado than conviction.

Symphony No. 6 in B minor Op. 74 “Pathetique”

1. Adagio – Allegro non troppo
2. Allegro con grazia
3. Allegro molto vivace
4. Finale: Adagio lamentoso

The composer’s death at St Petersburg a mere nine days after conducting a none-too-successful premiere of his Symphonie pathétique, as he titled it, imparted a tragic aura to the work right from the start. It was even said the n that the music reflected a conscious premonition of death on Tchaikovsky’s part, and although it was officially put out that he died after drinking impure water during a cholera epidemic prevalent at the time, present evidence inclines to the belief that he did indeed take his own life to avoid being disgraced by a public scandal of homosexual involvement.

Tchaikovsky was then aged 53, the most honoured and celebrated of Russian composers, and with an international reputation. In the summer before he died he paid his third visit to Britain, to conduct a concert for the Philharmonic Society in London, and to receive a Doctor’s degree in music from Cambridge University (also conferred at the same time on Boito, Bruch, Saint-Saëns and Grieg, although the last-named was not present), and by this time the Sixth Symphony was already in short score awaiting orchestration.

It was his second attempt at a symphony within 12 months. Sketches from the previous year for a work in E flat found their way instead into the one-movement Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 75, and a separate Adagio and Finale, Op. 79, for piano and orchestra (they were all reconstructed back into a symphony in the 1950s by Semyon Bogatiryov, and so published and performed in the USSR). Having discarded those ideas, Tchaikovsky seems to have overcome some creative crisis in his mind and fresh thoughts began to flow.

To his nephew, Vladimir Davidov, he wrote that he had ‘the idea of writing a programme symphony, but to a programme that should remain an enigma for everyone but myself: let them try to guess it! I intend to call it simply “Programme Symphony”. It is full of subjective feeling, so much so that as I was mentally composing it during the journey (home from Odessa) I frequently shed tears. As soon as I arrived I set to work with such ardour that in four days the first movement was done and the rest clearly thought out in my head ...‘

In the same letter he added that he intended several innovations of form, and mentioned that ‘the finale, for instance, is to be not a noisy allegro but a long adagio’. He expressed his delight that his creative force was not as spent as he feared. From the time of his Fourth Symphony (1877), which marked his recovery from the serious mental breakdown that followed his disastrous marriage, Tchaikovsky’s music became more deeply subjective in emotional character – a form of self-revelation, offering not only his heart on his sleeve but his soul in his hand.

The great Russian literature of his time made much of themes involving psychological analysis before this was codified into theory and practice by the Viennese specialists. Especially is this true of Dostoyevsky, whom Tchaikovsky in his youth thought talked ‘very foolishly’ on musical matters, but whose work he later came to admire. His own later music, particularly in symphonic form, could be said to resemble a Dostoyevsky character in its desire to strip the emotional soul naked, and not least the Symphony that was to end his life’s work.

He finished the full score by the end of August 1893, when he wrote again to Davidov: ‘I consider this Symphony the best thing I have ever done. In any case, it is the most deeply felt’. In October it was played through by students of the orchestral class at the Moscow Conservatory (where Tchaikovsky once taught). He then took it to St Petersburg for rehearsals, and was unhappy that the orchestral players did not seem impressed by it. Their coolness may have inhibited his conducting of the premiere on 28 October. A few days later he was taken ill, and he died on 6 November.

On the day after the premiere Tchaikovsky asked his brother, Modest, if he could think of a more suitable title than ‘Programme Symphony’. Modest first suggested ‘Tragic’, but this was turned down. His next suggestion was the present one, which Tchaikovsky accepted; he later changed his mind, but it appeared on the first published score. It should be realised, however, that ‘pathetic’ in present-day English has a different connotation from what was then intended, the Russian pateticheskoy (and its French equivalent) being closer to the Greek pathos in its original sense of ‘suffering’.

A slow introduction is begun by a dark, lugubrious theme emerging from the depths of the orchestral strings on the bassoon, climbing slowly and painfully, and only gradually moving into the home key of B minor. At the change of tempo to Allegro, the subject is at once taken up agitatedly by the strings and extended to become the first theme of a sonata structure. The contrast is provided by the yearning, romantic melody introduced by the cellos, with a counter-melody from flute and bassoon to enrich it.

The development of these ideas begins explosively and continues in violent dynamic contrasts of loud and soft: Tchaikovsky extends the usual range of dynamic markings in the score from ffff in several places to pppppp for the bassoon at the end of the lyrical second theme. Restless, syncopated rhythms persist, and the yearning theme becomes dominant before being given a solemn burial.

Two intermezzo-type movements now follow, the first a ‘limping waltz’ which acquires a slightly feverish and macabre quality from being written in 5/4 time instead of 3/4, an irregular and unusual metre already anticipated by Tchaikovsky in his ‘Sapphire’ solo for the Jewel Fairies in the last Act of The Sleeping Beauty (1890). In the darker central section a bitter-sweet melody is accompanied by relentlessly repeated notes on basses, bassoons and timpani.

Much of the accumulated doubt and gloom is dispelled at this point by the third movement, a sequence of brilliant march-like variations developed from a few phrases and contrasts of tone-colour. It seems to promise a triumphant outcome, but the mood is dramatically dispelled by the grief-laden lamentations that begin the finale. Now the composer seems to echo Masha in Chekov’s The Seagull: ‘I am in mourning for my life’.

The first despairing phrases are answered by a more consoling theme in the major key, marked to be played ‘with gentleness and devotion’, but it cannot prevent the earlier grief from returning in still more anguished intensity. Even the consoling theme is overcome by this, so that its recall is changed into a woeful minor key. The music grows weaker, sinks lower and finally loses itself in soft, solemn chords of trombones and tuba, ending what Tchaikovsky had virtually composed as his own epitaph.

Manfred Symphony in Four Scenes Op. 58

1. Lento lugubre – Moderato con moto
2. Vivace con spirito
3. Andante con moto
4. Allegro con fuoco

Romantic music in the 19th century often found its stimulus in the other arts, poetry and Iiterature drama and painting. Manfred is a long dramatic poem by Lord Byron (1788-1824), first published in 1817, which had a fertile influence on the Romantic movement as a whole throughout Europe. It drew major musical works from Schumann (Overture and incidental music) and Tchaikovsky whose Symphony, he said, cost him ‘a whole year of [my] life’. Counting from his first reading of the poem In the autumn of 1884, the sketches were begun in the following April and the full score finished in October, eight years after the Fourth Symphony and three years before the Filth.

The idea for Manfred went back much earlier, to Berlioz’s last visit to Russia in 1867 when he conducted performances of his Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy (also linked to Byron) among other works. These ‘programme symphonies’ caused lively discussion, and the composer Mily Balakirev passed on to Berlioz a suggestion for a ‘Manfred Symphony’ outlined by the critic Vladimir Stasov, but the Frenchman turned it down. Nothing daunted, Balakirev later tried it on Tchaikovsky in the wake of the latter’s Romeo and Juliet, complete with descriptive programme and key-scheme but at first Tchaikovsky said it left him ‘absolutely cold’.

Two years went by until Balakirev, who seems to have spent more time pressing ideas on other people than in composing his own, tackled Tchaikovsky again, who reluctantly promised to do something about it. He read Byron’s poem on a visit to Switzerland, and then found his imagination stirring. Ignoring or changing many of Balakirev’s suggestions (which were curiously fixated on keys containing two sharps or five flats), Tchaikovsky went ahead. At the end, he said it left him more exhausted than any work since his First Symphony.

As always, he was in two minds about the worth of what he had done, even alter the first performance at Moscow on 23 March 1886 conducted by Max Erdmannsdörfer. To his patroness Nadezhda von Meck he wrote: ‘It seems to me the best of my symphonic compositions’, but he also considered dropping the last three movements and converting it into a symphonic poem. We may be glad he let it stand in all its grandeur of expressive character, to which the short prefaces to each movement quoted below afford the literary key:

1. Manfred wanders in the Alps, tormented by doubt and racked by remorse and despair at the memory of the beautiful Astarte, whom he has loved and lost.
Tchaikovsky mentioned that his first movement is not meant to depict a specific scene, but to reflect Manfred’s state of mind. A ‘Manfred theme’, the idée fixe, is played at the outset by bassoons and bass clarinet, with detached chords on lower strings perhaps suggesting the hammer-like blows of relentless fate. His despair is also felt in a further theme involving a falling seventh followed by a rising phrase. The music inclines to A minor, but does not settle in a definite key until the end of the movement. At a climax the Manfred theme is proclaimed with the trumpets directed to play pavillon en l’air (the bells of their instruments lifted high) to heighten the tonal brilliance. A change of tempo to Moderato con moto brings a more tender version of part of the Manfred theme, and soon after this the memory of Astarte is recalled by muted strings with an Andante melody in 3/4 time. It grows more eloquent and impassioned but, after a sudden pause, the Manfred theme lapses into renewed despair as the music sinks to a doleful B minor with a feeling of irrevocable grief.

2. The Fairy of the Alps appears to Manfred beneath the rainbow of a waterfall.
Woodwind and strings dominate a sparkling musical scene in the form of a scherzo and trio. The Fairy’s song is perhaps expressed in the graceful melody for strings with harp in the D major trio section. Manfred’s theme from the first movement makes his presence explicit, as he contemplates Byron’s scene:

It is not noon; the sunbow’s rays still arch
The torrent with the many hues of Heaven,
And roll the sheeted silver’s waving column
O’er the crag’s headlong perpendicular
And fling its lines of foaming light along.
No eyes but mine now drink this sight of loveliness

3. Pastorale. The simple, free and peaceful life of the mountain folk.
A gentle oboe melody introduces a G major movement modelled, as Balakirev suggested, on the ‘Scène aux champs’ in the Symphonie fantastique. The pastoral serenity is periodically disturbed by the idée fixe as Manfred apostrophises the scene in the dawn light: ‘My mother Earth! Thou fresh-breaking day – and you, ye Mountains! Why are ye beautiful?’ His self-questioning occasions a powerful musical climax before a distant bell heralds the return of the opening mood.

4. The infernal palace of Arimanes, where Manfred appears in the midst of a bacchanal. Evocation of the shade of Astarte, who predicts the end of his earthly sufferings. Death of Manfred.
A march-like tune brings Manfred to the abode of Evil. The furious bacchanal is Tchaikovsky’s invention, not in Byron, and the Manfred theme recurs in the midst of it, together with other motifs from the first movement. They include the Astarte music, after her shade appears to the sound of muted divided strings and harp glissandi. Manfred makes a last impassioned plea, and B minor gives way to C major, despair to exultation, as he welcomes the end of his suffering. The organ underscores his death with triumphant affirmation, the tranquil closing bars quoting the liturgical plainchant of Dies irae. In Byron, Manfred defies the fiends and claims the right to be his own destroyer, dying unpardoned. Tchaikovsky makes one last change of mood and key to B major, suggesting that his hero was redeemed in the end.

Capriccio Italien Op. 45

During the same visit to Rome early in 1880 when he undertook some of the revision on his Second Symphony, Tchaikovsky began one of his most exuberant works, the Capriccio Italien. In a letter from Rome he wrote to a friend: ‘I have sketched the rough draft of an Italian Capriccio based on popular melodies. It will be effective because of the wonderful melodies I happened to pick up, partly from published collections and partly out in the streets with my own ears’. On his return to Russia later that year he scored it for a large orchestra, and it won him another success when it was first performed at Moscow on 18 December 1880.

His handling of the orchestra is daring and immensely effective for its time, the work modelled (as he acknowledged) on Glinka’s ‘Spanish’ pieces like the Capriccio brillante (1845), and displaying unashamed pride in the blaze and blend of instrumental colour. The initial fanfare is based on a cavalry bugle-call the composer heard each night during his stay at a Roman hotel close to the Corazziere’s barracks at Caracalla. As it subsides, the strings insinuate a swaying, nostalgic melody like a Venetian gondolier’s song, and this is continued at some length before the bugle theme loudly breaks in again.

With a change of key the oboes introduce another typical song-tune, more lighthearted than the first, with a diverting echo effect decorating the end of each phrase. On its first repeat it is boldly given to two cornets and echoed by the glockenspiel. Its continuing and elaborate treatment is followed successively by another popular tune, a dashing march, and a return of the gondolier’s song. The finale is a saltarello, a fast Roman dance in 6/8 time, through which the song-melody bursts forth to a broad and exciting climax.

Noël Goodwin