Composed 1888; Duration: 47 minutes
First BPO Performance: November 5, 1939 (Franco Autori, conductor)
Last BPO Performance: February 19-20, 2011 (JoAnn Falletta, conductor)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was in the right place at the right time. Born in 1840 to a firmly middle-class Russian family, his interest in music was easily accommodated with piano and orchestration lessons. However, at a time when a career in music would have placed him in an undesirable social rung, he was sent to school to pursue the more stable but less glamorous field of civil service. During his decade of studies, he remained musically aware as Russia began transforming into a more open society with an eye on Western Europe as a model.
In 1861, the same year that Tsar Alexander II liberated Russia’s serfs (some 38% of the population), Tchaikovsky began attending classes hosted by Anton Rubinstein at the Russian Musical Society founded just a few years earlier. The Rubenstein brothers then opened the first music school in Russia, the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, in 1862. This change allowed the precocious Tchaikovsky to pivot and pursue his true calling as a composer, and he became a member of the conservatory’s first class of students. Upon graduating in 1865, he eagerly filled a professorship at the forthcoming Moscow Conservatory.
He maintained personal relationships with a group of composers, known as “The Five,” who aggressively pursued a nationalist agenda for music composition, but Tchaikovsky himself did not have the same vigor for Russianism in his own music. The conservatism of the Rubensteins held sway over the blossoming Tchaikovsky, and he tended to look to the music of Germanic composers like Beethoven and Schubert for guidance. However, he avoided taking a firm position with either camp and reconciled his Russian origin with his European outlook with great success, always hinting at Russian folk and pop idioms in the very European forms of symphonies and operas.
As Tchaikovsky’s bright career evolved into fame, he benefited from a stipend from Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy patron whom he never met. In 1885, his social and economic standing increased further when Tsar Alexander III granted him a title of nobility and an annual salary. His fame allowed him to promote Russian music as a conductor throughout Europe, including the premiere of his own fifth symphony in 1888. The St. Petersburg premiere was met with a harsh reaction, with critics claiming the work to be vain and the finale distastefully bombastic. Yet, time has been kind to the work, and the now-beloved symphony was performed in wartime Leningrad and broadcast to London to bolster wartime spirits.
His fourth symphony explicitly addressed matters of fate in direct reflection of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Tchaikovsky’s own fifth, however, was written more than a decade after his previous symphony, and is not quite as easily associated with an overt theme. But, the composer left clues that perhaps this work may have been a reassessment of his idea of fate.
With some notebook entries, he addressed the pretense for the work: “Complete resignation before Fate, or, which is the same, before the inscrutable predestination of Providence. Allegro. (1) Murmurs of doubt, complaints, reproaches against XXX. (2) Shall I throw myself in the embraces of faith??? A wonderful program, if only it can be carried out.” Today, there is only speculation regarding Tchaikovsky’s “XXX.” Could he be referring to his homosexuality? Addiction? The work is full of melodies that embody his pessimism and struggle in such confrontations. Perhaps this musical confrontation, which originated in the fourth, finds its triumphant conclusion in his fifth symphony’s grand finale.