Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64

Program notes

About the Work

Tchaikovsky wrote his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1888, ten years after the Fourth, at a time when he had come to fear that his powers were failing. ‘I want so much to show not only to others, but to myself, that I still haven’t expired,’ he told his patron Nadezhda von Meck that June. A few weeks later he had the work sketched, and before the end of August the score was finished. As it neared completion he allowed himself a cautious verdict: ‘thank God, it is no worse than my previous ones.’

Before starting he had jotted down a plan in a notebook. The introduction was to represent ‘total submission before fate, or, which is the same thing, the inscrutable designs of providence’; the Allegro would bring ‘murmurs, doubts, laments, reproaches’; and for the second movement he asked himself, ‘Shall I cast myself into the embrace of faith?’ He never published this programme and it is not clear how closely he kept to it, but one feature of the finished symphony matches it plainly. The sombre theme heard at the very beginning comes back in every movement, usually as an intruder, and in the finale it is transformed from minor to major and from a funeral tread to a triumphal march.

Tchaikovsky conducted the first performance himself in St Petersburg on 17 November 1888, and took the symphony to Prague soon afterwards. Critical reaction was mixed, and he quickly lost confidence. ‘I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure,’ he wrote after the second performance. ‘There is something so repellent about such excess, insincerity and artificiality.’ It was the finale that troubled him, and the question he raised has never quite gone away: whether its victory is a real one or only loud.

He dedicated the score to Theodor Avé-Lallemant, a director of the Hamburg Philharmonic Society whom he had met in that city in January 1888, and he conducted the work in Hamburg in March 1889.

Audiences have not shared his doubts. The Fifth has long been one of the most often played of all symphonies, for its melodies and for the directness of its emotional journey. It is also the most classically proportioned of his last three symphonies, with four movements in the traditional order, a waltz standing in for the scherzo.

What to Listen For

First movement. Two clarinets in their lowest register, over quiet strings, give out the motto theme, a grave melody with the rhythm of a slow march. Fix it in your ear. The Allegro grows from a lilting, slightly uneasy tune for clarinet and bassoon and rises to several great climaxes, then sinks back into the depths of the orchestra where it began.

Second movement. After a few bars of dark string chords a solo horn plays one of the best-known melodies Tchaikovsky wrote, long-breathed and yearning. The oboe joins it with a second idea, and the music swells into an impassioned love song. Twice the motto theme breaks in at full force on the brass, and after the second interruption the movement ends in exhausted quiet.

Third movement. In place of a scherzo comes a graceful waltz, a reminder that this is the composer of the great ballets. Its middle section is a scurrying, feather-light passage for the strings. Just before the close the motto slips in softly on clarinets and bassoons, like a shadow crossing the ballroom.

Finale. The motto opens the movement, now in the major and broad and solemn in the strings. A stormy Allegro follows and drives to a tremendous halt on a held chord, a pause so emphatic that audiences sometimes start to clap. Then the motto returns as a grand march for the whole orchestra, and in the last bars the trumpets and horns bring back the main theme of the first movement, also turned to the major.