Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36

Program notes

About the Work

Tchaikovsky wrote his Fourth Symphony between 1877 and early 1878, during the most turbulent period of his life, and the work is inseparable from two relationships that began almost simultaneously. The first was with Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow and passionate admirer of his music who, from 1877, granted him an annual allowance that freed him from teaching, on the condition, which both honoured for thirteen years, that the two of them never meet. Their friendship was conducted entirely by letter, in an extraordinary correspondence of well over a thousand letters, and the Fourth Symphony became, in Tchaikovsky’s words, ‘our symphony’. He dedicated it ‘to my best friend’.

The second relationship was a catastrophe. In July 1877 Tchaikovsky married Antonina Milyukova, a former student at the Moscow Conservatory who had written to him declaring her love. The motives behind the marriage have been endlessly debated, but it is widely understood that Tchaikovsky, whose homosexuality was a private torment in the society he lived in, hoped a conventional marriage would protect him from gossip. Within weeks he found the arrangement unbearable. He suffered a severe emotional collapse, fled Moscow, and spent the following months recovering abroad, largely in Switzerland and Italy, supported by von Meck’s money. It was there, in Venice and San Remo among other places, that he completed the orchestration of the symphony, alongside his opera Eugene Onegin.

The first performance took place in Moscow on 22 February 1878 (10 February in the Russian calendar of the time), at a concert of the Russian Musical Society conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein. Tchaikovsky was still abroad and did not hear it. Its reception was respectful rather than ecstatic, but the symphony soon established itself as one of the central pillars of his output, and it is the first of his three late symphonies (with the Fifth and the ‘Pathétique’) to hold its place at the heart of the orchestral repertoire.

What makes the Fourth unusual is that Tchaikovsky explained its meaning. In a long letter to von Meck, written in March 1878, he described a programme for each movement. The blaring fanfare with which the symphony opens is, he wrote, ‘Fate, the fatal force which prevents the impulse to happiness from attaining its goal’, a power that hangs over the listener like the sword of Damocles. The first movement alternates this oppressive force with fleeting dreams of happiness that dissolve as soon as they are grasped. The second movement is the melancholy that comes in the evening when one sits alone, remembering the past. The third consists of ‘capricious arabesques’, the elusive images that pass through the mind after a little wine. And in the finale, if you find no joy within yourself, you should go out among the people and see how they enjoy themselves, only for Fate to return and remind you of its presence. Tchaikovsky was always ambivalent about such explanations, and added that the true content of a symphony could not be put into words; but the letter has shaped how the work has been heard ever since.

The musical design is as bold as the programme. The first movement, nearly as long as the other three combined, is built around that recurring fanfare and a main theme in a restless, lilting 9/8 time, like a waltz that cannot find its footing. The third movement is one of the most original pieces of orchestration of the nineteenth century, and the finale draws on a Russian folk song, ‘In the field there stood a birch tree’, turning the symphony outward from private crisis to the noise and energy of a crowd.

What to Listen For

The symphony opens with the Fate motif: a stark, blazing call in the horns and bassoons, taken up by the trumpets, hammering on a single repeated rhythm. Remember its shape, because it returns at every crucial turning point. After it fades, the strings begin the main theme of the first movement, a sighing, syncopated melody in 9/8 that sways uneasily, never quite settling on the beat. Listen for the contrasting music that follows: a gentle, rocking tune introduced by the clarinet, with delicate answers in the woodwinds, which is Tchaikovsky’s dream of happiness. Each time the music seems to relax into it, the Fate fanfare breaks in with brutal force. Towards the end of the movement the orchestra builds to shattering climaxes, and the close is fierce and abrupt.

The second movement (Andantino in modo di canzona) begins with a long, plaintive song for solo oboe over soft pizzicato strings. It is music of memory and loneliness, and it is taken up in turn by the cellos and the full strings. In the middle, a more animated passage briefly lifts the mood, before the song returns, now decorated by the woodwinds, and the movement fades away into silence.

The Scherzo is a delight and an ingenious experiment. For its outer sections the string players put down their bows and play pizzicato throughout, producing a rapid, whispering, plucked texture that swells and recedes like a breeze. In the central Trio the woodwinds take over with a jaunty, rustic tune, and then the brass enter with a distant, quiet march, as if a military band were passing in the street. Listen, near the end, for all three groups (plucked strings, woodwinds and brass) trading brief fragments with one another.

The finale (Allegro con fuoco) erupts without warning in a cascade of the full orchestra. Soon the woodwinds introduce the folk song ‘In the field there stood a birch tree’, a plain, slightly melancholy tune that Tchaikovsky treats to increasingly hectic variations, set against the returning whirlwind of the opening. Just as the celebration reaches its height, the Fate fanfare returns from the first movement, loud and unmistakable, halting everything. The music falls quiet, and then gathers itself again, the festive energy sweeping back in for a coda of tremendous, almost defiant brilliance.