TCHAIKOVSKY’S 4TH PROGRAM NOTES: PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY’s SYMPHONY NO. 4

Posted on February 7, 2018

PYP will perform Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky‘s Symphony No. 4 on Saturday, March 3, 2018 in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

Sometimes the times and the man just make each other; the Fourth Symphony is the spectacular product of a multitude of forces acting on Tchaikovsky in 1877-1878.  Together they led him to draw the more Germanic, architectural symphony form into new emotional, Romantic, and Russian territory.

The times: The Romantic era’s valuing of subjective individual experience affected all artistic disciplines; in terms of music, the rational, rule-bound Germanic classical symphonic form had been undergoing change as many nineteenth-century composers prioritized individual feeling and illustrative ‘program’, or story told through music. Across Europe, symphonic tone poems and ballets (including Tchaikovsky’s recent “Swan Lake”) were leading the way toward a harmonically and structurally freer, sometimes autobiographically narrative, episodic orientation for orchestral works.

Further, in the mid-nineteenth century Russia was experiencing national growing pains, characterized in part by a general divide between “Slavophiles”, who promoted a uniquely Russian cultural idiom, and “Westernizers” who wanted to bring Russia to international greatness by incorporating the best of European culture into a Russian context.  Composers were similarly split, with some zealously exploring what indigenous Russian classical music, as opposed to European-influenced academic music, could sound like.  Tension grew between a group (they were called “The Five” by others, but didn’t refer to themselves by that name) which included Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, who prided themselves on being self-taught and taking their composing cues from Russian folk music, and those trained at the newly-established St. Petersburg and Moscow Conservatories.  Class issues played into this tension as well; European classical music was available to only the aristocracy, whereas popular folk music was the rest of the country’s traditional lifeblood. 

Since Tchaikovsky was a famous graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, at first he naturally drew fire from the Five.  Nevertheless, he cultivated individual friendships with them, collaborated with and mentored them, as well as included Russian themes in his own work, so despite his more European academic orientation, he was eventually spared their antagonism and developed a positive relationship with the entire group.

The man: 1877-1878 was a time of vividly dramatic episodes in Tchaikovsky’s life, as he acceded to very different relationships proposed to him by two very different women. At 37 he began what would be a fourteen-year-long, purely epistolary, immensely productive relationship with the Mme. Nadezhda Von Meck, a widowed benefactress he considered his ‘soulmate’, and began and ended a disastrous nine-week marriage of convenience to a woman who claimed to be a former student. 

In mid-1877, attempting to placate his family’s embarrassment over public knowledge of his homosexuality (even though his non-famous brother lived with his own gay lover for years), Tchaikovsky hesitantly accepted his student’s proposal, rationalizing that ‘fate’ had brought them together and that the marriage would allow his family some peace. His new wife could not accept the platonic terms Tchaikovsky had made perfectly clear before the wedding, however, and both of them were thrown into chaos. Tchaikovsky made his first suicide attempt at this point, wading up to his neck into the freezing-cold Moscow River; it took months for him to get back to completing the orchestration of the symphony.

The symphony: All this drama found its way into the Fourth Symphony. Tchaikovsky’s preserved voluminous 500-letter correspondence with Von Meck, which he thought would stay private, allows us to peek in as he described to her the progress of his composition of the Fourth, which he called “our” symphony, and which was ultimatedly dedicated to her, “my friend”, as well.  In one letter just after the premiere, he wrestled with the aforementioned tension between program and what he calls “purely lyrical” music:

After this waffling disclaimer, he then proceeded to describe, in detail, a narrative driving each movement.  The descriptions are enlightening, even though Tchaikovsky was obviously conflicted about them and the music stands on its own.

First Movement: Of the horn theme that opens the dramatic, chiaroscuro Andante sostenuto - Moderato con anima first movement, Tchaikovsky wrote:

Of course the dictionary doesn’t define ‘fate’ as a solely negative force, but according to the evidence in Tchaikovsky’s massive collected correspondence, he saw it as such.  The more famous and successful he became, the more impossible it became for him to achieve the simple happiness of being allowed to love whomever he chose. (Note: to this day the possibility that Tchaikovsky was gay is still intensely controversial in official Russian histories.  The idea is just too much for the homophobic Russian government to countenance publicly in one of their pre-eminent musical gods.)

Further, keeping in mind Tchaikovsky’s 1893 death, which is still shrouded in mystery and controversy, this idea of enduring unhappiness as long as possible before being drowned by it takes on a looming sense of foreboding, no matter what transient beauty appears in the intervening time.

Since this movement is the longest and contains the ‘Fate’ motif’, most commentators take it, perhaps along with the fourth movement, as the symphony’s main reason for being. The first movement is also the closest to traditional European classical A-B-A’ sonata form as he would have learned at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, although with changes that already herald the episodic construction to come in the rest of the work.  After the initial storm of the introductory “Fate” motif, the A-theme enters in the strings, a somewhat unsettled ‘waltz’ filled with dotted eighths.  The sweet, meandering B theme first given to the clarinet, along with an almost balletic secondary motif in the strings, afford a dreamlike respite.  But the dotted eighth-note A-theme motif, with periodic intrusions of “Fate” and more brief respites, drives the recapitulation from that gentleness to an ominous finale.

Second Movement: While the first movement is surely epic in scope, the more episodic second and third movements should not be overlooked simply because of their brevity, the second movement especially.  The gorgeous minor-key eighth-note oboe melody that opens the Andantino in modo di canzona (‘canzona’ is Italian for ‘song’, as well as referring to a particular Renaissance instrumental form) gently lets us know that we have entered different, but just as emotionally powerful, territory.

The movement is a series of wistful, simple song-like melodies alternating between strings and woodwinds that supposedly reflect the bittersweet state of

“both regretting the past, and yet not wishing to begin life over again. Life is wearisome. It is pleasant to rest and look around. Memories abound! Happy moments when the young blood boiled, and life was satisfying. There are also painful memories, irreconcilable losses. All this is now somewhere far distant. It is both sad, yet somehow sweet to be immersed in the past…”

Third Movement: According to Tchaikovsky, the third movement Scherzo was actually the least reflective of his own life.  After a pizzicato string introduction, a very different kind of oboe solo from that of the second movement enters here, depicting, according to Tchaikovsky, “drunken peasants and a street song… Then, somewhere in the distance, a military procession passes”. The street musicians playfully riff off the band, then the strings re-enter, again in pizzicato. 

Of the visions in this movement Tchaikovsky wrote, “they have nothing in common with reality; they are strange, wild, and incoherent”; while the terms ‘strange’ and ‘wild’ don’t necessarily fit the mood—maybe ‘odd’ and ‘unsophisticated’ (which, who knows, may be a better translation?), they are certainly incoherent to each other but unobjectionably so: an enjoyable palate-cleanser.

Fourth Movement: The fourth movement, aptly indicated as Allegro con Fuoco, flies out of the gate. Immediately after the bravura major-key first theme comes a classic minor-key Russian folk song, “In the field a birch tree stood” as the second theme. It would have been deeply meaningful to his Russian audiences that conservatory-trained “Westernizer” Tchaikovsky gave such prominence and central role to a folk song in a symphony. 

The themes alternate and develop episodically, finally building to what seems to be a natural point for a final cadence; at that moment the “Fate” theme shockingly reappears in the brass and slams the brakes on the celebration. Are we back under the sword of Damocles?  The music halts; but when all seems lost, the first theme crescendos back from a distance to overcome the sudden reappearance of “Fate”, and the two main fourth-movement themes weave together to conclude in an apparent of brass, cymbals, and timpani.

This victory over ‘Fate’ in the finale hides an achingly sad secret, however.  In his program-letter to Von Meck, he confides that the finale illustrates his exhortation, “If you cannot discover reasons for happiness in yourself, look at others. Get out among the people. Look what a good time they have simply surrendering themselves to joy.  Life is bearable after all.”  Listeners who aren’t aware of Tchaikovsky’s letter would be justified in thinking that the finale is simply celebratory, not a recommendation of the secondhand ‘joy’ of watching someone else’s party in the park.

After all the specifics Tchaikovsky had given Von Meck, he concluded with more second-guessing and self-recrimination:  “This is the first time in my life that I have attempted to translate musical thoughts and images into words, and I could not manage to do this adequately. I was severely depressed last winter when writing the symphony, and it serves as a faithful echo of what I was experiencing. But it is known as an echo. How can it be translated into a clear and coherent succession of words?” 

The whole narrative, while sometimes cited as evidence of Tchaikovsky’s ‘secret program’ for the Fourth, could just as easily be a document of someone trying hard to fit a square into a circle.  His new benefactress asked him what was probably a very common question in that era, and he tried hard to respond positively while reminding her before and afterwards that music just doesn’t work the same way as poetry or literature, and that this symphony is neither purely programmatic nor purely academically musical. 

The underlying dynamic of much of Tchaikovsky’s life at this time, with its placating, accommodating, and attempts at the appearance of happiness, can also be seen as trying to fit squares into circles.  In a way, then, even his trying to create a direct relationship of his symphony to a specific ‘program’ itself echoes what he was experiencing.

Reception: Evidently the first performance, in Moscow in February 1878, was so badly received that Tchaikovsky’s friends avoided even telling him about it, as he was abroad at the time.  In a letter after the premiere, Taneyev, one of Tchaikovsky’s colleagues, accused the Fourth of being merely a work of ‘ballet music’, a programmatic first movement with three other movements tacked on for length. Tchaikovsky replied that if ‘program’ meant the idea of music expressing feeling, even including the occasional dance melody, then ‘program’ is inherent in all successful composition. He aligned his symphony with none other than Beethoven’s Fifth, contending that the program in Beethoven’s work is clear, and that Tchaikovsky was working with the same idea.  He also asserted that every moment he wrote was felt in his soul, while acknowledging that there were some tacked-on ‘artificiality…seams, glued-together bits” in his first movement.  (It’s possible that the ‘bits’ Tchaikovsky was referring to might be the transitional passages between the various themes, e.g. higher and higher repetitions of the same motif.)

As Taneyev’s critique suggests, perhaps the symphony struck the audience as too ‘balletic’ for those expecting something similar to Tchaikovsky’s first three; the St. Petersburg premiere in November was evidently better received, however, with thunderous applause and encores demanded.

The United States didn’t understand it at first, either; at the 1890 New York premiere, the Post reviewer condemned the Fourth as if it were completely ‘Slavophile’: “The Fourth Tchaikovsky Symphony proved to be one of the most thoroughly Russian, i.e. semi-barbaric, compositions ever heard in the city. ... If Tchaikovsky had called his symphony ‘A Sleigh Ride Through Siberia’ no one would have found this title inappropriate.” 

Given that the first movement is close to traditional European sonata form and that Tchaikovsky had been a favorite critical target of the truly ‘Slavophile’ Five earlier in his career, it’s particularly ironic that outside the more nuanced intra-Russian context, he was tarred with the same broad brush as would have been used on, say, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.

Since then, however, for all the angst and fatalism, the lyricism and the cymbal crashes, the symphony has prevailed through the various culture wars of the 19th century and come to be recognized as one of Tchaikovsky’s best and most-often performed works, giving true happiness to audiences worldwide.

- Carolyn Talarr, PYP’s Community Programs Coordinator