Tchaikowsky and His Orchestral Music 6

Tchaikowsky and His Orchestral Music 6

During this period, which extends from May to September, 1877,

Tschaikowsky worked on his Fourth Symphony. Just how much of his

private woes were transmuted into symphonic speech cannot be

determined, even from Tschaikowsky’s own written confidences. Possibly,

the symphony was an avenue of escape from his mounting anxieties.

Anyway, his completion of the sketch coincides with his engagement to

Antonina in May. The orchestration of the first movement took up a

month, from August 11 to September 12—the breathing spell between his

two flights from Antonina. Then followed the nerve-racking fortnight

in Moscow. The other three movements were completed in the Swiss Alps,

where, thanks to his brother, he regained his full sanity and working

tempo. A passage in a letter to Mme. von Meck, during the Antonina

regime, suggests an explanation of Tschaikowsky’s abstract talk of Fate

in connection with his Fourth: “We cannot escape our fate, and there

was something fatalistic about my meeting with this girl.” In January,

1878, when the whole dismal affair was safely locked away in the past,

he wrote to Mme. von Meck that he could only recall his marriage as a

bad dream:

 

“Something remote, a weird nightmare in which a man bearing my name,

my likeness, and my consciousness acted as one acts in dreams: in a

meaningless, disconnected, paradoxical way. That was not my sane self,

in possession of logical and reasonable will-powers. Everything I

then did bore the character of an unhealthy conflict between will and

intelligence, which is nothing less than insanity.”

 

Tschaikowsky wrote to the composer Taneieff that there was not a single

bar in his Fourth Symphony which he had not truly felt and which

was not an echo of his “most intimate self.” He frankly avowed the

symphony’s “programmatic” character, but declared it was “impossible

to give the program in words.” Yet, to Mme. von Meck, who insisted on

knowing the full spiritual and emotional content of the symphony, he

wrote out a detailed analysis which has long been familiar to concert

audiences. In reading it the listener usually does one of three things:

takes it literally; regards it as irrelevant to the music as such;

relates it to Tschaikowsky’s private life. There is the fourth choice

of combining all three. In that choice lies the synthesis of mind,

emotion, and external stimuli which is regarded as the very stuff of

art.

 

“Our symphony has a program,” he writes. “That is to say, it is

possible to express its contents in words, and I will tell you—and

you alone—the meaning of the entire work and its separate movements.

Naturally I can only do so as regards its general features.

 

“The Introduction is the kernel, the quintessence, the chief thought

of the whole symphony. This is Fate, the fatal power which hinders one

in the pursuit of happiness from gaining the goal, which jealously

provides that peace and comfort do not prevail, that the sky is not

free from clouds—a might that swings, like the sword of Damocles,

constantly over the head, that poisons continually the soul. This might

is overpowering and invincible. There is nothing to do but to submit

and vainly to complain.

 

“The feeling of despondency and despair grows ever stronger and more

passionate. It is better to turn from the realities and to lull

oneself in dreams. O joy! What a fine sweet dream! A radiant being,

promising happiness, floats before me and beckons me. The importunate

first dream of the Allegro is now heard afar off, and now the soul

is wholly enwrapped with dreams. There is no thought of gloom and

cheerlessness. Happiness! Happiness! Happiness! No, they are only

dreams, and Fate dispels them. The whole of life is only a constant

alternation between dismal reality and flattering dreams of happiness.

There is no port: you will be tossed hither and thither by the waves

until the sea swallows you. Such is the program, in substance, of the

first movement.

 

“The second movement shows another phase of sadness. Here is that

melancholy feeling which enwraps one when he sits at night alone in

the house exhausted by work; the book which he had taken to read has

slipped from his hand; a swarm of reminiscences has arisen. How sad it

is that so much has already _been_ and _gone_! And yet it is a pleasure

to think of the early years. One mourns the past and has neither the

courage nor the will to begin a new life. One is rather tired of life.

One wishes to recruit his strength and to look back, to revive many

things in the memory. One thinks on the gladsome hours when the young

blood boiled and bubbled and there was satisfaction in life. One thinks

also on the sad moments, on irrevocable losses. And all this is now so

far away, so far away. And it is also sad and yet so sweet to muse over

the past.

 

“There is no determined feeling, no exact __EXPRESSION__ in the third

movement. Here are capricious arabesques, vague figures which slip into

the imagination when one has taken wine and is slightly intoxicated.

The mood is now gay, now mournful. One thinks about nothing; one gives

the fancy loose rein, and there is pleasure in drawings of marvellous

lines. Suddenly rush into the imagination the picture of a drunken

peasant and a gutter-song. Military music is heard passing by in the

distance. These are disconnected pictures which come and go in the

brain of the sleeper. They have nothing to do with reality; they are

unintelligible, bizarre, out-at-elbows.

 

“Fourth movement. If you had no pleasure in yourself, look about you.

Go to the people. See how they can enjoy life and give themselves up

entirely to festivity. The picture of a folk-holiday. Hardly have

we had time to forget ourselves in the happiness of others when

indefatigable Fate reminds us once more of its presence. The other

children of men are not concerned with us. They do not spare us a

glance nor stop to observe that we are lonely and sad. How merry and

glad they all are. All their feelings are so inconsequent, so simple.

And you still say that all the world is immersed in sorrow? There still

_is_ happiness, simple, native happiness. Rejoice in the happiness of

others—and you can still live.”

 

 

SYMPHONY IN E MINOR, NO. 5, OPUS 64

 

If surroundings alone determined the mood of a piece of music,

Tschaikowsky’s Fifth Symphony, composed one summer in a country villa

near Klin, would be a sunlit idyl. Of course it is nothing of the sort,

for though Tschaikowsky responded keenly to outdoor beauty, he was a

prey to gloomy thoughts and visions that constantly found their way

into his music. His own inner world crowded out the other. Frolovskoe,

where he wrote his symphony in 1888, was a charming spot, fringed by a

forest. Between spurts of composing he took long walks in the woods and

puttered around the villa garden.

 

On his return from Italy two years later he found that the forest

had been cut down. “All those dear shady spots that were there last

year are now a bare wilderness,” he grieved to his brother Modeste.

Ironically, Tschaikowsky also composed his _Hamlet_ overture in

the sylvan retreat at Frolovskoe, though from his own and others’

descriptions, the place was an ideal setting for an _As You Like It_

symphonic fantasy, say.

 

The first intimation that Tschaikowsky was considering a new symphony

appears in a letter to his brother Modeste dated May 27, 1888. A dread

that he had written himself out as composer had been steadily gaining

a grip on Tschaikowsky’s mind. He had complained about his imagination

being “dried up.” He felt no urge to write. Finally he resolved to

shake off the mood and convince the world and himself there were still

a few good tunes in him.

 

“I am hoping to collect, little by little, material for a symphony,”

he writes to his brother on May 27. The following month we find him

inquiring of his lady bountiful, Nadezhka von Meck: “Have I told you

that I intended to write a symphony? The beginning has been difficult;

but now inspiration seems to have come. However, we shall see.” In the

same letter he makes no bones about his intention to prove that he is

not “played out as a composer.”

 

On August 6 he reported progress on the new work. “I have orchestrated

half the symphony,” he writes. “My age, although I am not very old,

begins to tell on me. I become very tired, and I can no longer play

the piano or read at night as I used to do.” Ill health troubled him

during the summer months, but by August 26 he was able to announce

the completion of the symphony. At first he was dissatisfied with

it. Even the favorable verdict of a group of musical friends, among

them Taneieff, did no good. Early performances of the symphony only

strengthened Tschaikowsky’s misgivings. The work was premièred in

St. Petersburg on November 17, 1888, with Tschaikowsky conducting. A

second performance followed on November 24, at a concert of the Musical

Society, with the composer again conducting. Then came a performance in

Prague. The public was enthusiastic. The critics, on the other hand,

almost unanimously attacked it as unworthy of Tschaikowsky’s powers.

In a letter to Mme. von Meck in December he expressed frank disgust

with the symphony:

 

“Having played my symphony twice in Petersburg and once in Prague, I

have come to the conclusion that it is a failure. There is something

repellent in it, some over-exaggerated color, some insincerity of

fabrication which the public instinctively recognizes. It was clear to

me that the applause and ovations referred not to this but to other

works of mine, and that the symphony itself will never please the

public. All this causes a deep dissatisfaction with myself.

 

“It is possible that I have, as people say, written myself out,

and that nothing remains but for me to repeat and imitate myself.

Yesterday evening I glanced over the Fourth Symphony, _our_ symphony.

How superior to this one, how much better it is! Yes, this is a

very, very sad fact.” A composer who was still to write the _Hamlet_

overture-fantasy, the _Sleeping Beauty_ and _Nutcracker_ ballets, the

opera _Pique Dame_, and the _Pathetic_ symphony, was anything but

“written out,” as Tschaikowsky feared!

 

After the symphony triumphed in both Moscow and Hamburg, Tschaikowsky

speedily changed his mind and wrote to his publisher Davidoff: “I like

it far better now, after having held a bad opinion of it for some

time.” He speaks of the Hamburg performance as “magnificent,” but

expresses his old complaint about the Russian press, that it “continues

to ignore me,” and bemoans the fact that “with the exception of those

nearest and dearest to me, no one will ever hear of my successes.”

Modeste Tschaikowsky attributed the work’s early failure in St.