Tchaikovsky's last symphony, called, at the prompting of his brother Modest, the Pathetique, rather than simply "Programme Symphony", as the composer had originally intended, was first performed in St. Petersburg under Tchaikovsky's direction on 16th October (28th October on the Western calendar), 1893. The programme of the work, which had been sketched earlier in the year and orchestrated during the summer, was autobiographical. Tchaikovsky had jotted down a rough plan in 1892. The whole essence of the plan of the symphony is Life. First movement: all impulsive, confidence, thirst for activity and must be short. (Finale - Death - result of collapse). Second movement love; Third disappointments; Fourth ends dying away (also short). In a letter to his nephew Bob Davidov he had suggested that the programme of the symphony was to be a secret, but subjective to the core. This it remained, although the details of the original scheme were to be modified.

The first movement opens with a slow introduction, in which the bassoon, over divided double basses, prefigures the first theme of the following Allegro. Here there is conflict for life, leading to the tenderness of the second subject, a love theme. This in turn fades into a whispered bassoon fragment, marked, with characteristic exaggeration, pppppp, in a symphony that is later to reach the other dynamic extreme of ffff. Compressed in its use of traditional symphonic form, the movement interrupts the surge of life with the presence of death and with overt references to elements of the Russian Orthodox Requiem.

The second movement is in unconventional 5/4 time, something that Hanslick, in his hostile review of the first performance in Vienna in 1895, found loathsome. The melody, however, must seem a particularly fine example of Tchaikovsky's powers of invention, a gift allowed such apt expression in his ballet scores. The middle section of the movement admits the intrusion of an ominous element of mortality, with its descending scale of death.

There follows a scherzo, its first subject leading to a march in which triumph is tinged with irony. In the succeeding final movement there is a stark confrontation with death, as the music, entrusted as at the beginning to the darker toned lower instruments of the orchestra, fades to nothing.

Writer: Keith Anderson