SYMPHONIES
Symphony in F minor, No. 4, Opus 36
At first sight, this symphony arouses no “cherchez la femme” mystery. Seemingly, the lady is not far to seek. In fact, Tschaikowsky throws off the search in his dedication. The lady is Madame Nadia Filaretovna von Meck. She was his loyal confidante and benefactress. The least Tschaikowsky could do was to dedicate a symphony to her. Comfort and encouragement in the form of checks and adulatory letters from Mme. von Meck saw the sorrowing Slav through many bleak periods.
The association has been called “the most amazing romance in musical history.” That the “romance” was purely platonic does not make it any the less “amazing.” Whatever Mme. von Meck’s secret hopes and longings, Tschaikowsky shrank from carrying the liaison beyond epistolary scope. Mme. von Meck resigned herself to an advisory role of patroness-friend, and played it nobly. The world reveres her for it. “Our symphony,” Tschaikowsky wrote to her, communicating his intention to dedicate the Fourth to her. “I believe you will find in it echoes of your deepest thoughts and feelings.”
What Tschaikowsky meant, of course, was “my deepest thoughts and feelings.” The plural possessive, “ours,” is gallant rather than collaborative. Even so, he could with more truth than courtesy have written to another woman, Antonina Ivanovna Miliukov, in similar style. Antonina was Tschaikowsky’s wife in a domestic farce lasting two weeks. The whole episode—spanning a wild sequence of engagement, marriage, flight in the night, attempted suicide, separation—nestles snugly in the period of the symphony’s origin. Antonina would have understood the words “our symphony.” Only fate and brother Anatol saved it from becoming Tschaikowsky’s obituary. Not that it was Antonina’s fault. Far from it. But no psychological analysis of the Fourth can be complete without her.
The girl was a conservatory pupil. Tschaikowsky’s music acted like magic on her. Through it she came to a slavish worship of the composer. Next followed written avowals of love sizzling with passion. At first Tschaikowsky was amused, then alarmed, finally haunted. The girl was persistent. Her pleas grew piteous. To make matters worse, Tschaikowsky was immersed in his romantic opera Eugene Onegin at the time. He had just composed music for Tatiana’s impassioned love-letter to Onegin. Antonina’s plight was too much like the spurned Tatiana’s to be lost on Tschaikowsky’s sensitive nature. Onegin’s cold disdain had virtually wrecked the girl’s life. Antonina might even kill herself. Tschaikowsky saw himself as another and more heartless Onegin. The situation probably stroked his vanity, too.
He made a naïve offer of friendship. It only stirred up more trouble. He finally granted a meeting. Antonina had won. The girl was deaf to his self-depiction as a morose, ill-tempered neurotic who would assuredly drive her mad. Antonina knew better. No, there was only one way out—marriage. Tschaikowsky became engaged. He repented at leisure. Attempts to break the engagement proved futile. Antonina was bent on becoming Mrs. Tschaikowsky. They were married. A few days later Tschaikowsky fled for his sanity. They were reconciled. There followed two hellish weeks of tragi-farcical life together in Moscow. One night, in a wild daze, Tschaikowsky fled again. He wandered about wildly and reached the Moscow River. He had made up his mind. He stood neck-deep in the water, hoping to freeze to death. He was rescued in time.
Though for long he “bordered on insanity,” somehow he came through the crisis with most of his mind. His brother Anatol took him to Switzerland. Slowly Tschaikowsky got back to normal. He never saw Antonina Ivanovna again. The clinical aspects of the case have been thoroughly aired in recent years. The publication of long-withheld letters throw fresh light on Tschaikowsky’s temperament. Antonina and he were mentally and physically incompatible. Despite the fearful suicidal state into which his marriage plunged him, Tschaikowsky never made a harsh reference to his wife. Antonina, for her part, graciously cleared him in her memoirs. “Peter was in no way to blame,” she wrote.
The house at Votinsk, in western Russia, where Tschaikowsky was born and where he spent the early years of his life before his family moved to St. Petersburg.
Mme. Nadeshka von Meck, Tschaikowsky’s life-long benefactress, whom he corresponded with but never met
During this period, which extends from May to September, 1877, Tschaikowsky worked on his Fourth Symphony. Just how much of his private woes were transmuted into symphonic speech cannot be determined, even from Tschaikowsky’s own written confidences. Possibly, the symphony was an avenue of escape from his mounting anxieties. Anyway, his completion of the sketch coincides with his engagement to Antonina in May. The orchestration of the first movement took up a month, from August 11 to September 12—the breathing spell between his two flights from Antonina. Then followed the nerve-racking fortnight in Moscow. The other three movements were completed in the Swiss Alps, where, thanks to his brother, he regained his full sanity and working tempo. A passage in a letter to Mme. von Meck, during the Antonina regime, suggests an explanation of Tschaikowsky’s abstract talk of Fate in connection with his Fourth: “We cannot escape our fate, and there was something fatalistic about my meeting with this girl.” In January, 1878, when the whole dismal affair was safely locked away in the past, he wrote to Mme. von Meck that he could only recall his marriage as a bad dream:
“Something remote, a weird nightmare in which a man bearing my name, my likeness, and my consciousness acted as one acts in dreams: in a meaningless, disconnected, paradoxical way. That was not my sane self, in possession of logical and reasonable will-powers. Everything I then did bore the character of an unhealthy conflict between will and intelligence, which is nothing less than insanity.”
Tschaikowsky wrote to the composer Taneieff that there was not a single bar in his Fourth Symphony which he had not truly felt and which was not an echo of his “most intimate self.” He frankly avowed the symphony’s “programmatic” character, but declared it was “impossible to give the program in words.” Yet, to Mme. von Meck, who insisted on knowing the full spiritual and emotional content of the symphony, he wrote out a detailed analysis which has long been familiar to concert audiences. In reading it the listener usually does one of three things: takes it literally; regards it as irrelevant to the music as such; relates it to Tschaikowsky’s private life. There is the fourth choice of combining all three. In that choice lies the synthesis of mind, emotion, and external stimuli which is regarded as the very stuff of art.
“Our symphony has a program,” he writes. “That is to say, it is possible to express its contents in words, and I will tell you—and you alone—the meaning of the entire work and its separate movements. Naturally I can only do so as regards its general features.
“The Introduction is the kernel, the quintessence, the chief thought of the whole symphony. This is Fate, the fatal power which hinders one in the pursuit of happiness from gaining the goal, which jealously provides that peace and comfort do not prevail, that the sky is not free from clouds—a might that swings, like the sword of Damocles, constantly over the head, that poisons continually the soul. This might is overpowering and invincible. There is nothing to do but to submit and vainly to complain.
“The feeling of despondency and despair grows ever stronger and more passionate. It is better to turn from the realities and to lull oneself in dreams. O joy! What a fine sweet dream! A radiant being, promising happiness, floats before me and beckons me. The importunate first dream of the Allegro is now heard afar off, and now the soul is wholly enwrapped with dreams. There is no thought of gloom and cheerlessness. Happiness! Happiness! Happiness! No, they are only dreams, and Fate dispels them. The whole of life is only a constant alternation between dismal reality and flattering dreams of happiness. There is no port: you will be tossed hither and thither by the waves until the sea swallows you. Such is the program, in substance, of the first movement.
“The second movement shows another phase of sadness. Here is that melancholy feeling which enwraps one when he sits at night alone in the house exhausted by work; the book which he had taken to read has slipped from his hand; a swarm of reminiscences has arisen. How sad it is that so much has already been and gone! And yet it is a pleasure to think of the early years. One mourns the past and has neither the courage nor the will to begin a new life. One is rather tired of life. One wishes to recruit his strength and to look back, to revive many things in the memory. One thinks on the gladsome hours when the young blood boiled and bubbled and there was satisfaction in life. One thinks also on the sad moments, on irrevocable losses. And all this is now so far away, so far away. And it is also sad and yet so sweet to muse over the past.
“There is no determined feeling, no exact expression in the third movement. Here are capricious arabesques, vague figures which slip into the imagination when one has taken wine and is slightly intoxicated. The mood is now gay, now mournful. One thinks about nothing; one gives the fancy loose rein, and there is pleasure in drawings of marvellous lines. Suddenly rush into the imagination the picture of a drunken peasant and a gutter-song. Military music is heard passing by in the distance. These are disconnected pictures which come and go in the brain of the sleeper. They have nothing to do with reality; they are unintelligible, bizarre, out-at-elbows.
“Fourth movement. If you had no pleasure in yourself, look about you. Go to the people. See how they can enjoy life and give themselves up entirely to festivity. The picture of a folk-holiday. Hardly have we had time to forget ourselves in the happiness of others when indefatigable Fate reminds us once more of its presence. The other children of men are not concerned with us. They do not spare us a glance nor stop to observe that we are lonely and sad. How merry and glad they all are. All their feelings are so inconsequent, so simple. And you still say that all the world is immersed in sorrow? There still is happiness, simple, native happiness. Rejoice in the happiness of others—and you can still live.”
Symphony in E minor, No. 5, Opus 64
If surroundings alone determined the mood of a piece of music, Tschaikowsky’s Fifth Symphony, composed one summer in a country villa near Klin, would be a sunlit idyl. Of course it is nothing of the sort, for though Tschaikowsky responded keenly to outdoor beauty, he was a prey to gloomy thoughts and visions that constantly found their way into his music. His own inner world crowded out the other. Frolovskoe, where he wrote his symphony in 1888, was a charming spot, fringed by a forest. Between spurts of composing he took long walks in the woods and puttered around the villa garden.
On his return from Italy two years later he found that the forest had been cut down. “All those dear shady spots that were there last year are now a bare wilderness,” he grieved to his brother Modeste. Ironically, Tschaikowsky also composed his Hamlet overture in the sylvan retreat at Frolovskoe, though from his own and others’ descriptions, the place was an ideal setting for an As You Like It symphonic fantasy, say.
The first intimation that Tschaikowsky was considering a new symphony appears in a letter to his brother Modeste dated May 27, 1888. A dread that he had written himself out as composer had been steadily gaining a grip on Tschaikowsky’s mind. He had complained about his imagination being “dried up.” He felt no urge to write. Finally he resolved to shake off the mood and convince the world and himself there were still a few good tunes in him.
“I am hoping to collect, little by little, material for a symphony,” he writes to his brother on May 27. The following month we find him inquiring of his lady bountiful, Nadezhka von Meck: “Have I told you that I intended to write a symphony? The beginning has been difficult; but now inspiration seems to have come. However, we shall see.” In the same letter he makes no bones about his intention to prove that he is not “played out as a composer.”
On August 6 he reported progress on the new work. “I have orchestrated half the symphony,” he writes. “My age, although I am not very old, begins to tell on me. I become very tired, and I can no longer play the piano or read at night as I used to do.” Ill health troubled him during the summer months, but by August 26 he was able to announce the completion of the symphony. At first he was dissatisfied with it. Even the favorable verdict of a group of musical friends, among them Taneieff, did no good. Early performances of the symphony only strengthened Tschaikowsky’s misgivings. The work was premièred in St. Petersburg on November 17, 1888, with Tschaikowsky conducting. A second performance followed on November 24, at a concert of the Musical Society, with the composer again conducting. Then came a performance in Prague. The public was enthusiastic. The critics, on the other hand, almost unanimously attacked it as unworthy of Tschaikowsky’s powers. In a letter to Mme. von Meck in December he expressed frank disgust with the symphony:
“Having played my symphony twice in Petersburg and once in Prague, I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure. There is something repellent in it, some over-exaggerated color, some insincerity of fabrication which the public instinctively recognizes. It was clear to me that the applause and ovations referred not to this but to other works of mine, and that the symphony itself will never please the public. All this causes a deep dissatisfaction with myself.
“It is possible that I have, as people say, written myself out, and that nothing remains but for me to repeat and imitate myself. Yesterday evening I glanced over the Fourth Symphony, our symphony. How superior to this one, how much better it is! Yes, this is a very, very sad fact.” A composer who was still to write the Hamlet overture-fantasy, the Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker ballets, the opera Pique Dame, and the Pathetic symphony, was anything but “written out,” as Tschaikowsky feared!
After the symphony triumphed in both Moscow and Hamburg, Tschaikowsky speedily changed his mind and wrote to his publisher Davidoff: “I like it far better now, after having held a bad opinion of it for some time.” He speaks of the Hamburg performance as “magnificent,” but expresses his old complaint about the Russian press, that it “continues to ignore me,” and bemoans the fact that “with the exception of those nearest and dearest to me, no one will ever hear of my successes.” Modeste Tschaikowsky attributed the work’s early failure in St. Petersburg (that is, with the critics) to his brother’s poor conducting.
The assumed programmatic content of the Fifth Symphony has aroused much speculation. Most analysts are convinced Tschaikowsky had a definite, autobiographical plan in mind. Yet he left no descriptive analysis such as we have of the Fourth Symphony. There he had set out to depict the “inexorableness of fate.” One Russian writer discerned “some dark spiritual experience” in the Fifth. “Only at the close,” he observed, “the clouds lift, the sky clears, and we see the blue stretching pure and clear beyond.” Ernest Newman spoke of the sinister motto theme first announced in the opening movement as “the leaden, deliberate tread of fate.” Many have agreed with Newman in classing the Fifth with the Fourth as another “fate” symphony.
Symphony in B minor, No. 6, Opus 74 (Pathetic)
First drafts of a sixth symphony—not the Pathetic—were made by Tschaikowsky on his return trip from America in the late spring of 1891. Dissatisfied with the way the new score was shaping up, he tore it up and congratulated himself on his “admirable and irrevocable determination” to do so. It is not till February, 1893, that first mention is made of a fresh start on a sixth symphony. “I am now wholly occupied with the new work,” he writes excitedly to his brother Anatol. “It is hard for me to tear myself from it. I believe it comes into being as the best of my works. I must finish it as soon as possible, for I have to wind up a lot of affairs....” Subsequent events were to give the last sentence of this letter a sinister note of prophesy. Like Mozart writing the Requiem Mass on his deathbed, Tschaikowsky seemed to be defying some unfriendly fate to stop him in the midst of his great symphony.
There was to be a program to this symphony, a mysterious, profoundly personal program. But Tschaikowsky would never tell the world what it was. “Let them guess who can,” he challenged. Amid the beautiful natural scenery of Klin, near Moscow, Tschaikowsky worked at his symphony. Curiously enough, his mood was bright and cheerful for a change. Early in October he left for Moscow to attend a funeral. There he met his friend Kashkin and together they talked jovially of life and death. Tschaikowsky was in excellent spirits and Kashkin assured him that he would outlive them all. Tschaikowsky laughed, and talked excitedly about his new symphony, how he was satisfied with the first three movements, how the finale still needed tinkering.
At length he was in St. Petersburg again. The day of the première of his symphony was approaching. Rehearsals were begun and Tschaikowsky soon found reason to grow morose and pessimistic again. He had counted on the musicians reacting warmly to this new music of his, but he began to notice cool faces, indifferent glances, and—horror of horrors—yawns. This was too much for the hypersensitive Tschaikowsky. He felt his hands suddenly become lifeless, his mind lose its alertness. His confidence ebbed from him. To spare the men any further boredom he cut short the rehearsal. Still, he knew he had written his greatest symphony. At the première of October 28th, the audience received the new symphony coolly, and it was not till shortly after Tschaikowsky’s death that it began to make a mighty, overpowering impression on listeners wherever it was played.
But the symphony had been baptized without a name. Tschaikowsky felt the term “No. 6” was too bald and lonely a title for it. “Programme Symphony” was also ruled out, for the good reason that he refused to divulge the “program.” His brother Modeste suggested “Tragic,” but Tschaikowsky rejected that too. When Modeste left him, he went on casting about for a title. In a flash it came to him. He rushed back to his brother. “Peter,” he exclaimed; “I have it! Why not call it the ‘Pathetic’ symphony.” Tschaikowsky pounced on the proposal eagerly: “Splendid, Modi, bravo—Pathetic!” he shouted. In his brother’s presence Tschaikowsky wrote on the score the name by which the symphony has since been known. Most programs, however, give the title in its French form, Symphonie Pathétique.
Shortly after the conversation with his brother, Tschaikowsky attended a performance of Ostrowsky’s play, A Warm Heart. Later he went backstage to pay his respects to the leading actor, Warlamoff. The talk somehow turned to spiritualism, and again Tschaikowsky showed a lighthearted mood. When Warlamoff laughingly ridiculed “these abominations which remind one of death,” Tschaikowsky agreed jovially. “There is plenty of time before we have to reckon with this snub-nosed horror. It will not come to snatch us off just yet! I feel that I shall live a long time!” Five days later, Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky, generally regarded as Russia’s greatest composer, was dead, one of the many victims of the fearful cholera epidemic then raging in St. Petersburg.
If Tschaikowsky followed a definite emotional or philosophical program in the Pathetic symphony, the key to it died with him. Had he lived, the chances are he would have divulged it, since he was not by nature a secretive, unconfiding man. However, many have probed the symphony’s content and concluded it harbored a message of impending death. Yet Kashkin, Tschaikowsky’s close friend, interpreted the fierce energy of the third movement and the abysmal sorrow of the Finale “in the broader light of a national or historical significance.” He refused to narrow down the scope of the symphony to a merely personal experience.
“If the last movement is intended to be prophetic, it is surely of things vaster and issues more fatal than are contained in a purely personal apprehension of death,” he said. “It speaks, rather, of une lamentation large et souffrance inconnue—a large lamentation and unknown suffering. It seems to set the seal of finality on all human hopes. Even if we eliminate the merely subjective interest, this autumnal inspiration of Tschaikowsky’s, in which we hear the whirling of the perished leaves of hope, still remains the most profoundly stirring of his works.”
I think we may safely agree with Kashkin’s judgment, at the same time reserving the right to read into this monumental dirge, for such it unmistakably is, our own individual sense of its profoundly moving theme of tragic resignation. That Tschaikowsky left it as a testament of disillusion and futility is likely. Yet no one can miss the fine vein of tenderness and the flashes of defiance recurring through it. Few artists have bequeathed the world such a candid, soul-searing self-portrait.