Woodwinds Brass Percussion Strings By the summer of 1878, Tchaikovsky, exhausted from working on the Fourth Symphony the previous year, decided he needed a sabbatical from symphonic music.
However, in foregoing the composition of emotionally heavy music, he did not wish to negate his personality as much as he had in writing the Variations on a Rococo Theme.
[5] Few of Tchaikovsky's compositions are as far removed from the idea of the composer as musical confessor as his orchestral suites would become, yet they would remain entirely true to the pre-Romantic ideal he wished to summon.
They were an outgrowth of a trend beginning in Germany following the rediscovering of Bach's orchestral suites, and he valued the genre for formal freedom as well as its unrestricted musical fantasy.
Johannes Brahms would happily find a similar outlet in his serenades, providing him with a medium in which to compose pure orchestral music more relaxed than had previously been possible in the post-Beethoven symphony.
To ensure that the piece did not come across as overtly light or frivolous in tone, the composer afforded himself some highmindedness with the opening introduction and fugue.
[4] In addition, Tchaikovsky had to ensure that while the piece presented a wide range of styles and moods, it would add up to a coherent, satisfying experience.
Complications arose when, once in Florence, Italy and anxious to continue the suite, Tchaikovsky realized the manuscripts for the three movements he had already finished were in his luggage, which had not arrived.
[10] Complicating matters was that, in August 1879, after P. Jurgenson had already started engraving the printing plates for the suite, Tchaikovsky realized all the movements were in duple meter—in other words, two beats per measure.
He quickly penned a Divertimento in triple meter, which he called a minuet but is actually a waltz, to break up this potential metric monotony.
If Taneyev thought it worthwhile, then Tchaikovsky wanted to drop the Andante and reorder the movements as Introduction and Fugue, Divertimento, Scherzo, March, Gavotte.