The dedication of this symphony is as follows: “À mon meilleur ami” (To my best friend), and thereby hangs a tale.
This best friend was the widow Nadejda Filaretovna von Meck. Her maiden name was Frolovsky. Born in the village Snamensk, government of Smolensk, February 10, 1831, she married in 1848 an engineer, and for some years knew poverty. Her courage did not give way; she was a helpmeet for her husband, who finally became famous and successful. In 1876 her husband died. She was left with eleven children and a fortune of “many millions of rubles.” Dwelling at Moscow, fond of music, she admired beyond measure certain works by Tchaikovsky. Inquiring curiously concerning his character as a man and about his worldly circumstances, she became acquainted with Kotek, a pupil of Tchaikovsky in composition. Through him she gave Tchaikovsky commissions for transcriptions for violin and pianoforte of some of his works. There was an interchange of letters. In the early summer of 1877 she learned that he was in debt. She sent him 3,000 rubles; in the fall of the same year she determined to give him yearly the sum of 6,000 rubles, that he might compose free from pecuniary care and vexation; but she insisted that they should never meet. They never spoke together; their letters were frequent and intimate. Tchaikovsky poured out his soul to this woman, described by his brother Modeste as proud and energetic, with deep-rooted principles, with the independence of a man; a woman that held in disdain all that was petty and conventional; pure in thought and action; a woman that was compassionate, not sentimental.
The composer wrote to her on May 13, 1877, that he purposed to dedicate this symphony to her. “I believe that you will find in it echoes of your deepest thoughts and feelings. At this moment any other work would be odious to me; I speak only of work that presupposes the existence of a determined mood. Added to this I am in a very nervous, worried, and irritable state, highly unfavorable to composition, and even my symphony suffers in consequence.” In August, 1877, writing to her, he referred to the symphony as “yours.” “I hope it will please you, for that is the main thing.” He wrote in August from Kamenka: “The first movement has cost me much trouble in scoring it. It is very complicated and long; but it seems to me it is also the most important. The other movements are simple, and it will be fun to score them. There will be a new effect of sound in the scherzo, and I expect much from it. At first the strings play alone and pizzicato throughout. In the trio the wood-wind instruments enter and play alone. At the end all three choirs toss short phrases to each other. I believe that the effects of sound and color will be most interesting.” He wrote to her in December from Venice that he was hard at work on the instrumentation: “No one of my orchestral pieces has cost me so much labor, but on no one have I worked with so much love and with such devotion. At first I was led on only by the wish to bring the symphony to an end, and then I grew more and more fond of the task, and now I cannot bear to leave it. My dear Nadejda Filaretovna, perhaps I am mistaken, but it seems to me that this symphony is no mediocre piece; that it is the best I have yet made. How glad I am that it is our work, and that you will know when you hear it how much I thought about you in every measure! If you were not, would it ever have been finished? When I was in Moscow and thought that my end was about to come [There is a reference here to the crazed condition of Tchaikovsky after his amazing marriage to Antonina Ivanovna Milioukov. The wedding was on July 18, 1877. He left his wife at Moscow, October 6, of that year.] I wrote on the first draft: ‘If I should die, please send this manuscript to N. F. von Meck.’ I wished the manuscript of my last composition to be in your possession. Now I am not only well, but, thanks to you, in the position to give myself wholly to work, and I believe that I have written music which cannot fall into oblivion. Yet it is possible that I am wrong; it is the peculiar habit of all artists to wax enthusiastic over the youngest of their productions.” Later he had chills as well as fever over the worth of the symphony.
SYMPHONY NO. 5, IN E MINOR, OP. 64
I. Andante; Allegro con anima II. Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza III. Valse (Allegro moderato) IV. Finale (Andante maestoso; allegro vivace)
Tchaikovsky was singularly reticent in his letters concerning the Fifth symphony, but who can refrain from thinking with Ernest Newman that this symphony was written to a programme; that the work “embodies an emotional sequence of some kind”? There is the tread of inexorable fate; this tread disturbs the beauty of the andante; it checks the forced gayety of the dancers in the waltz, and is the triumphant spirit in the finale something more than a heroic defiance of the inevitable, a brave stand before the approach of death?
We are interested in the woe of Canio or of the Navarraise; we are moved by the infinite sadness of Mélisande; we understand the tragedy in the humble home on Montmartre and the agony of Rigoletto. We endure the spectacle of the anguish of these men and women on the stage, applaud and go comfortably to bed. Tchaikovsky’s music awakens in the breast the haunting, unanswerable questions of life and death that concern us directly and personally.
About the end of April, 1888, Tchaikovsky took possession of his country house at Frolovskoe, which had been made ready for him, when he was at Paris and London, by his servant Alexis. Frolovskoe is a picturesque place on a wooded hill on the way from Moscow to Klin. The house was simple. “Here he [Tchaikovsky] could be alone,”—we quote from Mrs. Newmarch’s translation into English of Modeste Tchaikovsky’s life of Peter,—“free from summer excursionists, to enjoy the little garden (with its charming pool and tiny islet) fringed by the forest, behind which the view opened out upon a distant stretch of country—upon that homely, unassuming landscape of Central Russia which Tchaikovsky preferred to all the sublimities of Switzerland, the Caucasus, and Italy. Had not the forest been gradually exterminated, he would never have quitted Frolovskoe, for, although he only lived there for three years, he became greatly attached to the place. A month before his death, traveling from Klin to Moscow, he said, looking out at the churchyard of Frolovskoe: ‘I should like to be buried there.’”
On June 22 he wrote to Mme von Meck: “Now I shall work my hardest. I am exceedingly anxious to prove to myself, as to others, that I am not played out as a composer.... Have I told you that I intend to write a symphony? The beginning was difficult; but now inspiration seems to have come. However, we shall see.”