Symphony No. 4
A symphony about fate as an inescapable force, and the search for happiness against it. It turns Tchaikovsky's personal crisis into one of his most powerful public statements.
The Fourth was written in 1877 and 1878, across the most turbulent period of Tchaikovsky's life, spanning his brief and disastrous marriage. It is dedicated to Nadezhda von Meck, his patroness and correspondent, whom he privately wished to name only as my best friend. He described its meaning to her in unusual detail, calling the blaring opening fanfare the fate motif, the force that blocks the way to happiness. That motto returns across the work like a recurring shadow, much as it does in Beethoven's Fifth.
The first movement moves between hard reality and fleeting visions of joy, framed by that fate call. The slow movement is tender and songful, opening with a plaintive oboe. The scherzo is one of Tchaikovsky's boldest strokes, played entirely pizzicato in the strings, a shimmering, weightless texture set against woodwind and brass. The finale bursts in with festival energy and uses the Russian folk song In the Field Stood a Birch Tree as its second theme. Fate intrudes once more before the music drives to a loud, hard-won close. The Fourth marks the point where Tchaikovsky fully fused Western symphonic form with intense personal feeling.
Movements
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky.