Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Opus 64
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Even the Tchaikovsky Fifth was once new music, and controversial new music at that. The first
extended commentary on it in English was written by William Foster Apthorp, who by day was
ont eh Boston Symphony’s payroll as its program annotator and at night reviewed its concerts for
the Boston Evening Transcript. Apthorp was famous for his dislike of new music, no matter
whether it came from Russia, France, or Germany, and Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of
Musicians notes that “his intemperate attacks on Tchaikovsky elicited protests from his readers.”
As the Boston Symphony’s wordsmith, Apthorp had to pull in his horms. Introducing the Fifth
Symphony, when the great Arthur Nikisch brought it to Boston in 1892, Apthorp wrote that
Tchaikovsky is one of the leading composers, some think the leading composer, of the
present Russian school. He is fond of emphasizing the peculiar character of Russian
melody in his works, plans his compositions in general on a large scale, and delights in
strong effects. He has been criticized for the occasional excessive harshness of his
harmony, for now and then descending to the trivial and tawdry in his ornamental
figuration, and also for a tendency to develop comparatively insignificant material to
inordinate length. But, in spite of the prevailing wild savagery of his music, its
originality and the genuineness of its fire and sentiment are not to be denied.1
“The general style of the orchestration,” Apthorp noted, “is essentially modern, and even ultramodern.” But wearing his Evening Transcript hat, he was less cautious:
[The Fifth Symphony] is less untamed in spirit than the composer’s B-flat minor {Piano}
Concerto, less recklessly harsh in its polyphonic writing, less indicative of the
composer’s disposition to swear a theme’s way through a stone wall. . . . In the Finale we
have all the untamed fury of the Cossack, whetting itself for deeds of atrocity, against all
the sterility of the Russian steppes. The furious peroration sounds like nothing so much
as a horde of demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, the music growing drunker and
drunker. Pandemonium, delirium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse
confounded!2
Tchaikovsky’s own feelings about the Fifth blew hot and cold, as they did about so many of his
works: “I am dreadfully anxious to prove not only to others, but also to myself, that I am not yet
played out as a composer. . . . The beginning was difficult; now, however, inspiration seems to
have come. . . . I have to squeeze it from my dulled brain. . . . It seems to me that I have not
blundered, that it has turned out well.”
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth had been the symphony of triumph over fate and was in that sense,
admittedly, an imitation of the Beethoven Fifth. For Tchaikovsky’s own Fifth we have nothing
as explicitly revealing as the correspondence in which he set out the program of the Fourth for
his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck. There is, however, a notebook page dated 15 April 1888,
about a month before Tchaikovsky began work on his new symphony, where he outlines a
1
2
Boston Symphony Orchestra program book, 21-22 October 1892.
Boston Evening Transcript, 23 October 1893.
scenario for the first movement: “Intr[oduction]. Complete resignation before Fate, or, which is
the same, before the inscrut[able] predestination of Providence. Allegro. (1) Murmurs of doubt,
complaints, reproaches against XXX. (2) Shall I throw myself in the embraces of faith??? A
wonderful program, if only it can be carried out.”
This is not helpful. First of all, what is XXX? X occurs in Tchaikovsky’s diaries, as does Z.
Most writers have assumed and declared that these codes refer to Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality;
in context, however, this makes no sense. Far more persuasive is the interpretation of Alexander
Poznansky, whose revealing and extremely important Tchaikovsky biography of 1991 suggests
that X refers to the composer’s gambling addiction and Z to “his misanthropic anger . . . an
irritation connected with card playing or exacerbated by it, though not specifically stemming
from it.” Wheter the “XXX” in Tchaikovsky’s scenario for the Fifth Symphony is connected to
the X (or the Z) of the diaries remains unclear; we cannot be sure what he had in mind.
Poznansky proposes that “the crisis sparking the creation of the Fifth Symphony was that which
Tchaikovsky had experienced . . . eight months earlier as witness to [his friend] Kondratyev’s
deathbed struggle.”
In any event, to pursue the verbal plan as it appears in the notebook through the first movement
as he finally composed it is fruitless. Clearly, though, the theme with which the clarients in their
lowest register begin the symphony has a function other than its musical one: it will recur as a
catastrophic interruption of the second movement’s love song, as an enervated ghost that
approaches the languid dancers of the waltz, and—in a metamorphosis that is perhaps the
symphony’s least convincing musical and expressive gesture—in majestic and blazing E-major
triumph.
Tchaikovsky’s wonderful gift of melody, his delight in “strong effects” and his skill at bringing
them off, his fire and sentiment—these need neither introduction nor advocacy.3 A word,
though, about the orchestra. Rimsky-Korsakov, discussing Sheherazade in his memoirs,
congratulates himself on the brilliance he has been able to achieve with an orchestra no larger
than Glinka’s. Tchaikovsky, too, produces remarkable effect with remarkable economy. His
orchestra is anything other than extravagant, but the power and vividness of its fortissimo is
amazing.
And what delight there is in the delicate passages: the color of the low strings in the introduction
(with those few perfectly calculated interventions of the second violins); the beautifully placed
octaves of clarinet and bassoon when the Allegro begins its melancholy and graceful song; the
growls into which that movement finally subsides (with the timpani roll as the top note in a
chord of cellos, basses, and bassoon); the low strings again in the measures that introduce the
second movement’s famous horn solo; those great, swinging pizzicato chords that break the
silence after the catastrophe; those faintly buzzing notes for stopped horns in the waltz; the
enchantingly inventive filigree throughout the middle part of that movement (for Apthorp,
“descending to the trivial and tawdry in his ornamental figuration”); those propulsive chuggings
of cellos, basses, drums, and bassoons in the Finale; the tough brilliance of the woodwind lines
and the firmness of their basses.
When Apthorp writes about the “peculiar [Russian] character “ of Tchaikovsky’s melodies, he must refer to the
way they droop, which is not 1890s Boston at all.
3
Of course Tchaikovsky had not written himself out. As soon as he returned from a journey to
Prague, where the experience of conducting the Fifth produced the most depressed of all his
reports on it (“there is something repulsive about it”), he began work on The Sleeping Beauty;
within another year his finest operatic score, The Queen of Spades, was on its way; and The
Nutcracker and the Pathétique were yet to come.
Tchaikovsky begins the Fifth with a portentous introduction. The tempo is fairly slow, the colors
(low clarinets and low strings) are dark. The theme, suggestive here of a funeral march, sticks
easily in the memory. Let us call it the Fate theme. Its rhythm is distinctive enough to be
recognizable by itself, and that will prove to be useful. The introduction gradually subsides,
coming to a suspenseful halt.
When the main part of the first movement begins, the tempo is quicker and the theme is new;
nonetheless, we hear a connection because the alternating chords of E minor and A minor in the
first twelve measures are the very ones with which the Fate theme was harmonized.4 Clarinet
and bassoon play the theme, the one I called a “melancholy and graceful song” and which I am
surprised to see Tchaikovsky’s biographer John Warrack call a “jerky little tune.” Its first note is
always a surprise: any of us would have begun it with B-R, but Tchaikovsky gives us the more
oblique C-E. That and its little internal syncopations give it a delightfully individual flavor.
Tchaikovsky boils this up to a fortissimo climax, then goes without break in to a new, anguished
theme for strings with characteristic little punctuation marks for the woodwinds. With these
materials he builds a strong, highly energized movement, which, however, vanishes in utter
darkness.
In 1939, Mack David, Mack Davis, and André Kostelanetz came out with a song called Moon
Love. It had a great tune—by Tchaikovsky. It is the one you know hear the French horn play,
better harmonized and with a better continuation.5 Before it begins, low strings in dense, dark
chords set mood, key, and pace. Unlike the cobblers of Moon Love, Tchaikovsky is under no
obligation to round off the tune and finish it. With a slight speeding up, it devolves into a bried
duet with the oboe, before the cellos take up the great melody, the violins expanding on what the
oboe sang before. Flexibility is of the essence here: Tchaikovsky indicates “some freedom”
(alcuna licenza) as part of his general direction for this movement, instructs the horn soloist to
play “dolce con molto espressione,” and in addition constantly modifies the tempo with
“animando,” “ritenuto,” “sonstenuto,” “con moto,” and the like.
When he has built some grand paragraphs out of the horn melody and its various continuations,
Tchaikovsky speeds up the music still more (Moderato con anima), at which point the clarinet
introduces and entirely new and wistful phrase, which is picked up and carried further by the
Tchaikovsky’s tempo/character marking Allegro con anima is not a common one. Primarily it suggests “with
spirit” or “with grace,” but anima also connotes “sentiment.”
5
That same year, Tin Pan Alley writers also raided Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet for Our Love and Ravel’s
Pavane pour une infante défunte for The Lamp is Low. The year’s original songs included All the Things You Are,
God Bles America, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was, Over the Rainbow, and South of the Border. Tonight We Love,
from Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, came along two years later.
4
bassoon and then the several string sections. The spinning out of this idea is brutally interrupted
by the Fate them. The music stops in shocked silence. The great pizzicato chords I mentioned
earlier restore order, the violins take up the horn melody, which other instruments decorate
richly. Once again, there is a great cresting—Tchaikovsky actually writes ffff—and once again
the Fate theme intervenes. This time there is no real recovery: with a final appearance of what
was originally the oboe’s continuation of the horn melody, the movement sinks to an exhausted
close. “Resignation before Fate”?
In place of a scherzo, Tchaikovsky gives us a graceful, somewhat melancholic waltz. Varied and
inventive interludes separate the returns of the initial melody, and just before the end, the Fate
theme ghosts softly over the stage.
The Finale beings with the Fate theme, but heard now in a quietly sonorous E major.
(Conductors do not always care to remember that Tchaikovsky marked this page only mezzoforte). This opening corresponds to the introduction of the first movement. This time, though,
the increase in tempo is greater, and the new theme is possessed by an almost violent energy.6 A
highly charged sonata form movement unfolds. Towards the end of the recapitulation, Fate
reappears, this time just as a rhythm. This leads to an exciting and suspenseful buildup, whose
tensions are resolved when the Fate theme marches forward in its most triumphant form: in
major, fortissimo, broad, majestic. The moment of suspense just before this grand arrival has
turned out to be a famous audience trap. The grand B-major chords and the pause that follows
them represent a colon, not a period, and people who haven’t really been listening but have
noticed that the music has stopped, are liable to a premature ejaculation of applause at this point.
After the Fate theme has made its splendid entrance, the music moves forward into a headlong
presto, broadening again for the rousing final pages.
© Michael Steinberg
6
Tchaikovsky is precise about tempi in this work, indicating by means of metronome marks not only what speeds he
wants, but, more important, what relationships he wants between the speeds of different sections. By taking the first
movement’s Allegro con anima too slowly and the Finale’s Allegro vivace too fast, many conductors exaggerate the
difference between the two moevements.