The year 1877 proved a fateful one for Tchaikovsky. He was at the peak of his powers as a composer: In this single year, he completed virtually all of his opera Eugene Onegin and wrote most of his masterful Symphony No. 4 in F minor. Nikolai Rubinstein conducted the premiere of the Symphony on February 22, 1878, for the Russian Music Society in Moscow. The work was moderately well received, but a performance conducted by Eduard Nápravník the following November in St. Petersburg was wildly acclaimed. One critic lauded the Symphony as “the pure creation of an artful master.”
The success of the Fourth Symphony is all the more remarkable if viewed against the chaos of the composer’s private life. Partly to please his father and partly to quiet gossip about his homosexuality, Tchaikovsky made the disastrous decision to marry Antonina Ivanova Milyukova, an unstable young woman who was one of his students at the Moscow Conservatory. Predictably, the marriage was a fiasco. Tchaikovsky is reputed to have made a half-hearted “suicide attempt” by wading up to his knees in the cold waters of the Moskva River. Using his disordered mental state as a pretext, he fled to St. Petersburg. There he found obliging doctors who ordered him never to see his wife again.
Earlier that year, however, Tchaikovsky had begun a platonic epistolary relationship with the fantastically wealthy Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, an accomplished amateur pianist who became his patron. She detested his wife, writing to him, “I am glad … that you have made that decisive step, which was necessary and which is the only correct one in this situation.” Von Meck supported Tchaikovsky morally and financially in his decision to spend a lengthy period recuperating in Italy and Switzerland. In return he dedicated the Symphony to “My Best Friend,” Madame von Meck.
On March 1, 1878, Tchaikovsky wrote to von Meck in response to her question about whether or not there was a program or explicit narrative imbedded in the Fourth Symphony: “In our symphony there is a program (that is, the possibility of explaining in words what it seeks to express), and to you and you alone I can and wish to indicate the meaning of both the work as a whole, and of its individual parts.”
Tchaikovsky identified the imperious opening fanfare played by French horns and bassoons (Andante sostenuto) as “the kernel of the whole symphony,” declaring “This is Fate.” This Fate motif is used throughout the work, rather like the “idée fixe” in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. With this programmatic description, Tchaikovsky neatly lays out the basic elements of the exposition of a taut adaptation of sonata form: a descending main theme, a contrasting waltz-like melody as the second subject, and a codetta. The development section (Moderato con anima) begins with a restatement of the Fate motif, and the recapitulation is announced by the same dark fanfare. The harrowing coda contains a second development section similar to the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
The second movement, described by Tchaikovsky as an Andantino “in modo di canzona” (in the manner of a song) has a three-part form: The opening folk-like melody is played by the oboe and returns after a contrasting central section. The Scherzo (Allegro) is a brilliant tour-de-force in which the strings play pizzicato throughout; the trio is scored for woodwind and brass instruments with interjections from the piccolo. About the fourth movement (Allegro con fuoco), Tchaikovsky wrote to von Meck, “If you can find no impulse for joy within yourself, look to others. Go among the people. See how well they know how to be happy.” The finale uses a structure that Tchaikovsky borrowed from Kamarinskaya (1848), an orchestral scherzo by his revered predecessor Mikhail Glinka (1804–57). As in Glinka’s score, Tchaikovsky introduces two contrasting melodies that are varied through changes in orchestration and harmony, and that always recur in the order of their first appearance. The first theme features rushing strings and exuberant rhythms, while the more subdued second melody is the Russian folksong “In the Field Stood a Birch Tree.” At the climax of this vertiginous movement, the Fate motif returns ominously, but the darkness is banished by the spirited coda in which the two main themes hurtle towards an exhilarating close.
—Byron Adams
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