Symphony No.4 in F minor, Op.36

According to the composer himself, Tchaikovsky was “cruelly depressed” when he started work on his Fourth Symphony. The precise nature of his depression is not known but it was almost certainly something to do with the torments of guilt he was suffering (and would long continue to suffer) over the nature of his sexuality. Certainly, it was at about this time that, in an effort to counteract it or at least disguise it, he decided that he should get married - which only a few months later, in July 1877, he duly did. Disastrous though the consequences of the marriage immediately turned out to be, he had actually gone into it with some confidence that it would have the desired effect. He had completed the sketches of his Fourth Symphony shortly before the wedding and it could well be that the emotional scenario of that work, which begins in despair and ends in triumph, reflects his belief that there would be a satisfactory outcome to his unhappy situation.

After the first performance of the Fourth Symphony, in Moscow in February 1878, Tchaikovsky’s patron Nadezhda von Meck wrote to the composer to ask him whether there was a story behind it. “Usually when people ask me this question about a symphonic work,” he replied, “I say None at all!” This is more or less what he said to a musician colleague when he told him that “fundamentally, my symphony is an imitation of Beethoven’s Fifth” and left it at that. For Mme von Meck, however, since he had dedicated the work to her as his “best friend” and since he depended on her for both moral and financial support, he did his best to outline a “programme” of the emotional context of each movement. While he could not tell her the whole truth, the details of which would have horrified her, he could get somewhere near it in more general, less personal terms.

Quoting the ominous brass fanfare that so grippingly dominates the opening Andante sostenuto section of the first movement, Tchaikovsky told Mme von Meck that “the introduction is the seed of the whole symphony, undoubtedly the main idea. This is fate, this is that fateful force which prevents the impulse to happiness from attaining its goal… It is invincible and you will never overcome it. You can only reconcile yourself to it and languish fruitlessly” - at which point he quotes the restlessly obsessive theme introduced by violins and cellos as the tempo changes to a quicker moderato con anima.

“Is it not better to turn away from reality,” he goes on to ask, “and submerge yourself in day-dreams?” - which is the cue for the entry, in a slower tempo after a dramatic climax, of the charmingly fanciful second subject on clarinet and other woodwind. “O joy!” he says, “some blissful, radiant human image hurries by and beckons you away” - which is reflected in an intimate exchange between violins and woodwind over a gently articulated rhythmic ostinato on timpani. “How good this is!” Tchaikovsky writes. “How distant now sounds the obsessive first theme…No! These were day-dreams and fate wakes you from them” - which catastrophic event is signalled by an intrusive recall of the ominous fanfare from the slow introduction. “Thus all life is an unbroken alternation of hard reality with swiftly passing dreams and visions of happiness… No haven exists.”

According to Tchaikovsky’s programme, the second movement “expresses another phase of depression. This is that melancholy feeling which comes in the evening when you are sitting alone…and there comes a whole host of memories. It is both sad that so much is now past and gone, yet pleasant to recall your youth.” This essentially nostalgic mood, which is so aptly expressed by the lovely melody awarded to the oboe in the opening bars, is interrupted in the middle section of the movement by a quicker episode haunted by the doubts and fears, in the form of variants of the obsessive main theme and the ominous fanfare, that dominated the first movement.

“The third movement,” Tchaikovsky says, “expresses no definite feeling.” Although he does offer Mme von Meck a few ideas here, it is probably more illuminating to recall an earlier letter in which he told her of his pride in a “new instrumental effect in the Scherzo of which I have high hopes. First the strings play on their own, pizzicato all the time; the woodwind enters in the Trio and also plays on its own; their place is taken by a brass group, yet again on their own; at the end of the Scherzo all three groups exchange brief little phrases. I think this should make an interesting effect of sounds” - as, indeed, it does and in a highly entertaining and totally original way.

“If within yourself you find no reasons for joy,” said Tchaikovsky of the fourth movement, “look at others. Go among the people. Observe how they can enjoy themselves.” This “picture of festive merriment of the people” is represented by the brilliantly vigorous opening on woodwind and strings, the simple folk song ‘In the fields there grew a birch tree,’ together with a whole series of variants on it, and a jubilant march theme. However, “hardly have you managed to forget yourself and be carried away by the spectacle of others’ joys than irrepressible fate again appears” - which it does here with a chilling recall of the ominous fanfare before it is finally swept away in a frenzied resumption of the celebrations. “To live is still possible!” the composer concludes.