Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36, was written between 1877 and 1878. Its first performance was at a Russian Musical Society concert in Moscow on February 22 (or the 10th using the calendar of the time), 1878, with Nikolai Rubinstein as conductor. In Central Europe it sometimes receives the nickname "Fatum", or "Fate".
A typical performance lasts about 40 minutes.
Composition During the composition of the symphony, Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, that he wanted "very much" to dedicate it to her, and that he would write on it "Dedicated to My Best Friend". He had begun composing the symphony not long after von Meck had entered his life. He would complete it in the aftermath of his catastrophic marriageSteinberg, 626. and claimed she would find in it "an echo of your most intimate thoughts and emotions."Letter to Nadezhda von Meck, May 13, 1877. Maes asserts that the dedication was significant in more than one way. One important facet of the paternalistic nature of Russian society was that, in artistic patronage, patron and artist were considered equals. Dedications of works to patrons were not gestures of humble gratitude but expressions of artistic partnership. By dedicating the Fourth Symphony to her, he was affirming her as an equal partner in its creation.Maes, 140-141.
It is also due to Madame von Meck that, at her request, Tchaikovsky wrote a program explaining the symphony. This action encouraged numerous writers to quote it instead of focusing on the symphony's purely musical qualities, including what Hans Keller termed "one of the most towering symphonic structures in our whole literature" in the opening movement.Keller, 345-346. This program hindered acceptance of the symphony for many years, prejudicing Alfred Einstein and other musicologists against it.Keller, 346. But this must be seen in the context of Einstein's general lack of sympathy for Tchaikovsky's music.
But despite this negative impact on the symphony's reception history, the composer's program gives one very telling clue regarding the work's musical architecture. Assertions to the effect that "the first movement represents Fate" are oversimplifications: according to a letter the composer wrote to Madame von Meck in 1878, it is actually the fanfare first heard at the opening ("the kernel, the quintessence, the chief thought of the whole symphony") that stands for "Fate", with this being "the fatal power which prevents one from attaining the goal of happiness ... There is nothing to be done but to submit to it and lament in vain". As the composer explained it, the programme of the first movement is—"roughly"—that "all life is an unbroken alternation of hard reality with swiftly passing dreams and visions of happiness ...". He went on: "No haven exists ... Drift upon that sea until it engulfs and submerges you in its depths".
The composer's description of the symphony's opening fanfare as a metaphor for "Fate" becomes more telling in the context of a letter he wrote Sergei Taneyev. He wrote Taneyev that the Fourth Symphony was both program music and a reflection of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in the central idea of its program.Tchaikovsky, M., Letters, vol.1. Keller has mentioned a parallel between the four-note motif which opens Beethoven's Fifth and the fanfare at the outset of Tchaikovsky's Fourth. Like Beethoven, Tchaikovsky uses his fanfare as a structural marker. Moreover, because of both the length and unorthodox form of the symphony, he may have felt using such a marker was a musical necessity.Steinberg, 628.
Music The symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, and strings.
The symphony is in four movements:
I. Andante sostenuto – Moderato con anima – Moderato assai, quasi Andante – Allegro vivo (F minor) The symphony opens with horns and woodwinds, and trumpets join with a higher A. As the music solidifies into large, slow syncopated chords, Tchaikovsky unleashes the musical equivalent of lightning bolts: two short fortissimo chords, each followed by a long measure of silence.
As the music ebbs away, the woodwinds hint at the main melody, which is properly introduced by the strings at the Moderato con anima. (The score at this point is marked "In movimento di Valse", as it is written in .) The melody develops quite rapidly. Much later in the movement, the same A is played by the trumpets. This movement is marked by continual introductions of the fate motif, the A phrase. The motif serves as a separation between each section of the sonata-allegro form.
At around 20 minutes in length in some performances, this is one of the longest symphonic movements by Tchaikovsky. It is also just short of the length of the remaining movements combined.
II. Andantino in modo di canzona The second movement is introduced by the melancholy melody of the oboe. The music's impassioned climax is a reminder of the grieving phrases that dominated the opening movement.Steinberg, 629.
III. Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato – Allegro Strings play pizzicato throughout the third movement. They are joined by the woodwinds later when an oboe's long, high A signals the start of the A major Trio section. Later, the brass instruments come in, playing very quietly and staccato as the key modulates to D major. The three groups (strings, woodwinds, and brass) are the only groups that play; there is no percussion in this movement except for the timpani, as in the previous movement. It ends quietly with pizzicato strings.
IV. Finale: Allegro con fuoco In the vigorous finale, Tchaikovsky incorporates a famous Russian folk song, "In the Field Stood a Birch Tree", as the secondary theme — firstly in A minor, the second time in B minor and then in D minor, which leads to the A phrase of the first movement, with the 'lightning bolts', with cymbals added, being much louder. The coda is also vigorous and triumphant.
Structure
Challenges The Fourth Symphony is where Tchaikovsky's struggles with Western sonata form came to a head. In some ways he was not alone. In Cooper it is asserted that the Romantics in general were never natural symphonists because music was to them primarily evocative and biographical. Western musical form, as developed primarily by Germanic composers, was analytical and architectural; it simply was not designed to handle the personal emotions the Romantics wished to express, while the difference with Tchaikovsky was that while the other Romantics remained generally autobiographical in what they wanted to express, he became more specific and, consequently, more intense.
In his first three symphonies he had striven to stay within strict Western form. The turbulent changes in his personal life, including his marital crisis, now led him to write music so strongly personal and expressive that structural matters could not stay as they had been. Beginning with the Fourth Symphony, the symphony served as a human document—dramatic, autobiographical, concerned not with everyday things but with things psychological. Brown claims this was because Tchaikovsky's creative impulses had become unprecedentedly personal, urgent, capable of enormous expressive forcefulness, even violence.Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 441-442.
Along with this emotional urgency came an unprecedented flow of melody. Here, Tchaikovsky developed his gift for tunefulness more freely and deployed it more liberally than he had previously. Warrack asserts that, paradoxically, this great asset also became his greatest enemy in terms of form. A melody is complete on its own terms. Because of this completeness, it stands apart from other themes meant not only to contrast, but more importantly to interact and build upon one another naturally. According to Warrack, this dominance of one melody can ruin the balance and proportion Western classical composers considered the proper beauties of sonata form.Warrack, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, 8-9.
It is asserted in Cooper that the combination of emotional urgency and supercharged melody precluded musical development not only because of the completeness of the melody, but also because the melody's emotional content was already in full bloom, with all the emotional and musical interest it could bear. Since musical development is a creative unfolding of the latent possibilities—rhythmic, melodic and harmonic—of contrasting themes, there was literally nothing to develop further. The only course of action left was to substitute repetition for true development—in other words, to say again in a different way what has already been said and to trust the beauty and significance of what are fundamentally variations to supply the place of a development section as demanded by sonata form.Cooper, 30.
Symphonic hybrid Like "The Five," Tchaikovsky found that with a loose symphonic-poem type of structure pioneered by Franz Liszt,Figes, 181. he could combine large-scale orchestral writing with emotions and instrumental colors toward which he gravitated naturally. The result was a symphonic hybrid, a cross between the primarily architectural form of the symphony and the primarily "literary" or "poetic" form of the symphonic poem.Abraham Cooper, ed. (1946), 24-25 This is what he wrote to Nadezhda von Meck, regarding the Fourth Symphony,
This hybrid form allowed Tchaikovsky to fall back on a structure that was basically a series of self-contained sections,Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 422-423. emphasizing the contrast between these sections, however violent, while allowing the consequent drama to erupt in the context of one movement.Keller, 346-347. This perhaps seemed only natural—many Russian folk songs are actually a series of variations on one basic shape or pattern of a few notes, so it was something with which Tchaikovsky was already familiar. The problem it did not solve was the problem of inertia. The key of the music could change, but the music itself would basically repeat itself, remaining static in the Western sense of musical architecture.Warrack, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, 11.
However, structure in Tchaikovsky's work became more than purely architecture. Melody, tonality, rhythm and orchestral timbres work together to form an indivisible whole. In the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, he introduces a highly rhythmic theme in the brass. The structure of this movement is made up of a complete series of rotating thirds, from F to A, B D and back to F, then a recapitulation to a third below the tonic. The brass theme delineates each stage of the structure. To heighten drama, he focuses mainly on rhythm, texture and orchestral color. The resulting tension in the first movement does not come from a Germanic transformation of themes. It results from rhythmic opposition between the polonaise rhythm of the aggressive "Fate" motif in the brass and the gentler waltz of the first theme, carried alternately by woodwinds and strings.Maes, 161-162.
Imperial apotheosis The finale of this symphony is generally judged by its success in rounding off the symphonic cycle into a cohesive whole. Tchaikovsky here repeats the "Fate" motif which opened the piece. However, it could be said to appeal to the patriotic and heroic feelings of his aristocratic listeners. This would place it in line with the finales of Tchaikovsky's three earlier symphonies as an apotheosis in Imperial style.Maes, 163-164.
Performance history List of notable performances of Tchaikovsky's fourth symphony, during and shortly after his life.
Paris, France: 25 January 1880, conducted by Édouard Colonne Pavlovsk, Russian Empire: 10 September 1888, conducted by Julius Laube Dresden, German Empire: 20 February 1889, conducted by Tchaikovsky himself