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| gpmf.org
of high tragedy.... There are so few concertos for viola that it would be poor compliment
to say that this was the finest. Any concerto for viola must be a
tour de force
; but this
seems to me to be one of the most important modern concertos for any instrument.”
SYMPHONY NO. 4 IN F MINOR, OP. 36
(1877-1878)
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 is scored for pairs of woodwinds
plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, percussion and strings. The performance time is
44 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this
Symphony on September 8, 1935, Frederick Stock conducting.
The Fourth Symphony was a product of the most crucial and turbulent time of
Tchaikovsky’s life—1877, when he met two women who forced him to evaluate himself
as he never had before. The first was the sensitive, music-loving widow of a wealthy
Russian railroad baron, Nadezhda von Meck. Mme. von Meck had been enthralled by
Tchaikovsky’s music, and she first contacted him at the end of 1876 to commission a
work. She paid him extravagantly, and soon an almost constant stream of notes and
letters passed between them: hers containedmoney and effusive praise; his, thanks and
an increasingly greater revelation of his thoughts and feelings. She became not only
the financial backer who allowed him to quit his irksome teaching job at the Moscow
Conservatory to devote himself to composition, but also the sympathetic sounding-
board for reports on the whole range of his activities — emotional, musical, personal.
Though they never met, her place in Tchaikovsky’s life was enormous and beneficial.
The second woman to enter Tchaikovsky’s life in 1877 was Antonina Miliukova, an
unnoticed student in one of his large lecture classes at the Conservatory who had
worked herself into a passion over her young professor. Tchaikovsky paid her no special
attention, and he had quite forgotten her when he received an ardent love letter
professing her flaming and unquenchable desire to meet him. Tchaikovsky (age 37),
who should have burned the thing, answered the letter of the 28-year-old Antonina in
a polite, cool fashion, but did not include an outright rejection of her advances. He had
been considering marriage for almost a year in the hope that it would give him both the
stable home life that he had not enjoyed in the 20 years since his mother died, as well
as to help dispel the all-too-true rumors of his homosexuality. He believed he might
achieve both these goals with Antonina. He could not see the situation clearly enough
to realize that what he hoped for was impossible — a pure, platonic marriage without
its physical and emotional realities. Further letters from Antonina implored Tchaikovsky
to meet her, and threatened suicide out of desperation if he refused. What a welter
of emotions must have gripped his heart when, just a few weeks later, he proposed
marriage to her! Inevitably, the marriage crumbled within days of the wedding amid
Tchaikovsky’s searing self-deprecation.
It was during May and June that Tchaikovsky sketched the Fourth Symphony,
finishing the first three movements before Antonina began her siege. The finale was
completed by the time he proposed. Because of this chronology, the program of the
Symphony was not a direct result of his marital disaster. All that—the July wedding,
the mere 18 days of bitter conjugal farce, the two separations—postdated the actual
composition of the Symphony by a few months, though the orchestration took place
during the painful time from September to January when the composer was seeking
respite in a half dozen European cities from St. Petersburg to San Remo. What
Tchaikovsky found in his relationship with this woman (who by 1877 already showed
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
