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.