The story behind the composition of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky's final symphony, the Pathétique, nearly trumps the work itself. Written in 1893 shortly before Sibelius’s Wood Nymph, the composer led the work's premiere in St. Petersburg on October 28, just nine days before his death. Exactly how and why Tchaikovsky died is something of a mystery, however. While the official explanation given was cholera, transmitted through careless consumption of a glass of unboiled water, a darker story quickly emerged: Tchaikovsky committed suicide to avoid being publicly outed as a homosexual.
As early as 1899, music critic James Huneker pointed out the controversy, writing, “As regards the suicide story, while it has been officially denied, it has never been quite discredited.” In 1979, musicologist Alexandra Orlova published an article suggesting that Tchaikovsky—after an affair between him and a nobleman came to light—had been ordered to commit suicide by a “court of honor,” consisting of several alumni from the School of Jurisprudence where Tchaikovsky had once studied. Orlovsky’s theory was eventually accepted by Tchaikovsky biographer David Brown and made its way into the Tchaikovsky entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. (In the late 1980s, Slavic specialists discredited many of Orlovsky’s assertions.) While we may never know what led to Tchaikovsky's death, his preoccupation with an inexorable Fate seems to give artistic credence to the darker interpretation.
After completing his Fifth Symphony, Tchaikovsky began a new work in the key of E-flat but found that work did not proceed smoothly. As he later wrote to his nephew Vladimir “Bob” Davydov, with whom he was in love, “The symphony is only a work written by dint of sheer will on the part of the composer; it contains nothing that is interesting or sympathetic. It should be cast aside and forgotten. This determination on my part is admirable and irrevocable.” (The composer later recycled the symphony as his third piano concerto.) Tchaikovsky started a new, "deeply subjective" symphony early in 1893. As he wrote to his brother Modest, work proceeded much more smoothly:
I am now wholly occupied with the new work ... and it is hard to tear myself away 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 and I must soon go to London. I told you that I had completed a Symphony, which suddenly displeased me, and I tore it up. Now, I have composed a new symphony which I certainly shall not tear up.
And as he wrote to Bob, “I certainly regard it as easily the best—and especially the most ‘sincere’—of all my works, and I love it as I have never before loved one of my musical offspring.”
Dedicated to his nephew, the Symphony No. 6 has a subtitle that can be traced to its composer, unlike many such monikers. At the work's premiere, Rimsky-Korsakov asked Tchaikovsky if the symphony had a program. The composer responded that there was one but did not wish to announce it. As he had written to Bob months before, the new piece did have a program,
“but a program of a kind that would remain an enigma to all—let them guess, but the symphony would just be called Program Symphony (No. 6), Symphony à Programme (No. 6), Eine Programm Symphonie (No. 6). This program is saturated with subjective feeling, and often…while composing it in my mind, I shed many tears…Do not speak of this to anyone but Modest.”
The day after the work’s premiere, his brother Modest suggested “Tragic” as its subtitle—and after Tchaikovsky rejected it, proposed “patetichesky.” Tchaikovsky was delighted, according to Modest, responding, “Excellent, Modya, bravo, patetichesky!” Although he changed his mind less than 24 hours later, a savvy publisher had already printed the work with the descriptive subtitle.
The Pathétique Symphony has an emotional power and dramatic intensity that points to composers like Mahler and Shostakovich. The work opens in rumination and contemplation, with brilliant flashes of brass occasionally illuminating the dark color. After the brooding first movement comes a stately, elegant waltz in 5/4 rather than 3/4, giving it a slightly off-kilter feel. The third movement, a manic march, concludes with such fire and conviction that more than one audience has mistakenly applauded upon its conclusion. The symphony's true end lies in the concluding Adagio lamentoso, in which, as Huneker describes, “an atmosphere of grief, immutable, eternal, hovers about like a huge black-winged angel.” Given the impenetrable darkness of the symphony's conclusion, it is incredibly poetic that its creator died just weeks after its genesis.
—Jennifer More, ©2023