About this Piece

The emotional turbulence of Tchaikovsky’s mature masterpieces often suggests a confessional quality around which it’s tempting to construct a narrative. Compounding this tendency is the simple fact that Tchaikovsky was a favorite in the early days of radio and the recording industry. This is when classical music was first becoming available to a mass audience, and such narratives abounded as a marketing strategy. Nowadays it’s with bemused detachment that we come across the impossibly flowery commentaries (quite apart from Tchaikovsky’s own descriptions) to which the composer was subjected. They’re of the stereotypical “fickle finger of fate” variety, where melodies chastely pick themselves up despite bruised wings to soar aloft, newly armed for spiritual victory. Tchaikovsky’s popularity as a source for Hollywood scores and Tin Pan Alley tunes of that period is hardly coincidental. 

All of this eventually led to an unfortunate critical backlash. Tchaikovsky became a whipping boy for the worst excesses of Romanticism: sentimental self-indulgence, emotional exposure, even an out-of-control “hysteria.” But the court of popular opinion has proved more farsighted than the critics. Tchaikovsky has remained firmly entrenched in the repertoire because the music “says” something far richer, more passionate, and more profoundly moving than any dated characterization could convey. 

Tchaikovsky himself showed ambivalence about the issue of program music. For his Fourth Symphony he supplied an elaborate program detailing the content of each movement, centered on the idea of Fate. The most programmatic of all his symphonies, the unnumbered Manfred Symphony of 1885, is based on Lord Byron’s poetic drama and its Faustian hero. The Fifth Symphony, for which the composer supplied a minimal description, occupies a middle ground. 

By the time of his final symphony, the Sixth, Tchaikovsky developed an esoteric and unpublished program. Nevertheless, he drew attention to it with the working subtitle “Program Symphony” and with the dedication to “Bob” Davydov, his nephew and confidant over his final decade. One of the many legends that surround the work is that Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest came up with the name “Pathétique”—suggesting “impassioned suffering.” Whether or not the composer acquiesced to this christening before his sudden death just over a week after October 28, 1893, world premiere in St. Petersburg, it is uncannily suitable for the devastating psychological drama the symphony lays bare. 

The circumstances of Tchaikovsky’s death have further enshrouded the “Pathétique” in mystery: Was an accidental drink of cholera-contaminated water what killed him, or did the scandal of his homosexuality result in Tchaikovsky’s submitting to a kind of Socratic suicide? The debate rages on unresolved. Meanwhile, a long series of commentators claiming to decipher the symphony’s internal musical codes have contributed to its aura of intrigue, ensuring that this remains the most controversial of all his works. 

The first movement—around twice the length of each of the remaining three—immediately ushers us into a world of bleak despair that attains a crushing intensity. Tchaikovsky employs the mastery of his technical skill to give his emotional power resilient shape. He manages his traditional orchestral forces in unexpected ways, with brass chorales as rousing as Judgment Day and delicately sprung wind solos. Even the composer’s trademark roulades possess a shattering, nervous energy. 

In the middle of the movement, the explosive rupturing of the pppppp called for in the score comes as a shock. This is just one of the formidable challenges that interpreters of the “Pathétique” face, along with establishing a coherence behind what seem such sharply marked-off, disparate sections (for example, the pause and tempo change before the indelibly lyrical second theme, inspired by Don José’s “Flower Song” in Carmen, a favorite opera of the fate-

Two inner movements of entirely different character turn out to be interludes rather than actual shifts of direction. The second movement’s flowing, dance-like charm is given a subtle displacement through the use of 5/4 meter (two beats followed by the triple pattern of the waltz). In the third movement, Tchaikovsky presents a blazing but hollowly triumphant, brass-reinforced march that revels in aggressive, swaggering rhythms. 

It’s often been pointed out that had Tchaikovsky simply switched the order of the final two movements, he would have preserved the optimistic, Beethovenian model of light over darkness. Yet by reversing that model and ending with the nihilistic, dying fall of the Adagio (the same tempo with which the symphony began), he introduces a radically new concept of the symphonic journey (Mahler would follow a similar pattern in his Ninth). Tchaikovsky writes about his novel approach to form here as an aspect that excited his creative fancy. The valedictory plunge into silence from a sustained B-minor chord deep in the strings sets the stage for a new century of bleak requiems. Tchaikovsky declared that he had put his “whole soul into this work.” And there it remains—beyond all attempts at reductive explanations—for us to encounter anew. —Thomas May