PROGRAM NOTES PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Opus 36 COMPOSER: Born Votkinsk, Russia, May 7, 1840; died St. Petersburg, Russia, November 6, 1893 WORK COMPOSED: May–December 1877. Dedicated “to my best friend” [Nadezhda von Meck]. WORLD PREMIERE: Moscow, February 22, 1878. Russian Musical Society, conducted by Nikolay Rubinstein. INSTRUMENTATION: Piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, strings ESTIMATED DURATION: 45 minutes T hose of us ever curious about what composers wanted to express with their music may think we have all the answers in Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. After all, didn’t the composer offer a detailed program about the meaning of each movement in his work? Everyone who loves Tchaikovsky should know this fascinating private document, contained in a letter dated March 1, 1878, and addressed to his friend and benefactor Nadezhda von Meck. In the letter, Tchaikovsky even included a number of musical examples to illustrate his points. Here we learn that Tchaikovsky thought of “Fate” as the central concept of the symphony. The composer described human struggle, joys and sorrows, dreams and rude awakenings in the first three movements, before finding solace by watching a joyful communal celebration in the finale. Yet in the postscript of the same letter, Tchaikovsky took it all back, realizing that words were hopelessly inadequate to convey what only music could express. The feelings described in Tchaikovsky’s tentative program, then, seem to be no more than a stepping stone for the composer’s musical imagination. In addition, some of the images Tchaikovsky used derive from musical sources to begin with: when he spoke about “Fate,” he didn’t mean “fate” in general but “Fate” as it was said to have been portrayed in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. (As Tchaikovsky wrote in the same letter to Mme von Meck, “The work is patterned after Beethoven’s Fifth, not as to musical content, but as to the basic idea.”) He may have been thinking, as well, of his destroyed early symphonic fantasy Fatum. Similarly, when he described the finale by joining a crowd of people in celebration, he probably thought about the peasants rejoicing to the sound of folk dances in Beethoven’s Sixth, or perhaps even about the millions embraced by Beethoven in his Ninth. These seemingly extra-musical images clearly came to Tchaikovsky filtered through a musical tradition in which they had found expression. In his finale, Tchaikovsky “embraced the millions” by quoting the well-known Russian folksong “In the fields there stands a birch-tree.” Commentators have made much of the extra two beats Tchaikovsky added to the tune to make its rhythmic structure more regular; that is something his erstwhile mentor Mily Balakirev, who had used the same melody earlier in an overture, had not done. But then, Balakirev never subjected the folksong to nearly as many ingenious transformations as did Tchaikovsky who, combining “The Birch-tree” with a vigorous and dynamic first thematic group, developed one of his most rousing symphonic finales out of that simple little song. srsymphony.org 2026-2027 Season 15
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