If surroundings alone determined the mood of a piece of music,
Tschaikowsky’s Fifth Symphony, composed one summer in a country villa
near Klin, would be a sunlit idyl. Of course it is nothing of the sort,
for though Tschaikowsky responded keenly to outdoor beauty, he was a
prey to gloomy thoughts and visions that constantly found their way
into his music. His own inner world crowded out the other. Frolovskoe,
where he wrote his symphony in 1888, was a charming spot, fringed by a
forest. Between spurts of composing he took long walks in the woods and
puttered around the villa garden.
On his return from Italy two years later he found that the forest
had been cut down. “All those dear shady spots that were there last
year are now a bare wilderness,” he grieved to his brother Modeste.
Ironically, Tschaikowsky also composed his _Hamlet_ overture in
the sylvan retreat at Frolovskoe, though from his own and others’
descriptions, the place was an ideal setting for an _As You Like It_
symphonic fantasy, say.
The first intimation that Tschaikowsky was considering a new symphony
appears in a letter to his brother Modeste dated May 27, 1888. A dread
that he had written himself out as composer had been steadily gaining
a grip on Tschaikowsky’s mind. He had complained about his imagination
being “dried up.” He felt no urge to write. Finally he resolved to
shake off the mood and convince the world and himself there were still
a few good tunes in him.
“I am hoping to collect, little by little, material for a symphony,”
he writes to his brother on May 27. The following month we find him
inquiring of his lady bountiful, Nadezhka von Meck: “Have I told you
that I intended to write a symphony? The beginning has been difficult;
but now inspiration seems to have come. However, we shall see.” In the
same letter he makes no bones about his intention to prove that he is
not “played out as a composer.”
On August 6 he reported progress on the new work. “I have orchestrated
half the symphony,” he writes. “My age, although I am not very old,
begins to tell on me. I become very tired, and I can no longer play
the piano or read at night as I used to do.” Ill health troubled him
during the summer months, but by August 26 he was able to announce
the completion of the symphony. At first he was dissatisfied with
it. Even the favorable verdict of a group of musical friends, among
them Taneieff, did no good. Early performances of the symphony only
strengthened Tschaikowsky’s misgivings. The work was premièred in
St. Petersburg on November 17, 1888, with Tschaikowsky conducting. A
second performance followed on November 24, at a concert of the Musical
Society, with the composer again conducting. Then came a performance in
Prague. The public was enthusiastic. The critics, on the other hand,
almost unanimously attacked it as unworthy of Tschaikowsky’s powers.
In a letter to Mme. von Meck in December he expressed frank disgust
with the symphony:
“Having played my symphony twice in Petersburg and once in Prague, I
have come to the conclusion that it is a failure. There is something
repellent in it, some over-exaggerated color, some insincerity of
fabrication which the public instinctively recognizes. It was clear to
me that the applause and ovations referred not to this but to other
works of mine, and that the symphony itself will never please the
public. All this causes a deep dissatisfaction with myself.
“It is possible that I have, as people say, written myself out,
and that nothing remains but for me to repeat and imitate myself.
Yesterday evening I glanced over the Fourth Symphony, _our_ symphony.
How superior to this one, how much better it is! Yes, this is a
very, very sad fact.” A composer who was still to write the _Hamlet_
overture-fantasy, the _Sleeping Beauty_ and _Nutcracker_ ballets, the
opera _Pique Dame_, and the _Pathetic_ symphony, was anything but
“written out,” as Tschaikowsky feared!
After the symphony triumphed in both Moscow and Hamburg, Tschaikowsky
speedily changed his mind and wrote to his publisher Davidoff: “I like
it far better now, after having held a bad opinion of it for some
time.” He speaks of the Hamburg performance as “magnificent,” but
expresses his old complaint about the Russian press, that it “continues
to ignore me,” and bemoans the fact that “with the exception of those
nearest and dearest to me, no one will ever hear of my successes.”
Modeste Tschaikowsky attributed the work’s early failure in St.
Petersburg (that is, with the critics) to his brother’s poor conducting.
The assumed programmatic content of the Fifth Symphony has aroused much
speculation. Most analysts are convinced Tschaikowsky had a definite,
autobiographical plan in mind. Yet he left no descriptive analysis
such as we have of the Fourth Symphony. There he had set out to depict
the “inexorableness of fate.” One Russian writer discerned “some dark
spiritual experience” in the Fifth. “Only at the close,” he observed,
“the clouds lift, the sky clears, and we see the blue stretching pure
and clear beyond.” Ernest Newman spoke of the sinister motto theme
first announced in the opening movement as “the leaden, deliberate
tread of fate.” Many have agreed with Newman in classing the Fifth with
the Fourth as another “fate” symphony.