Symphonies by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky struggled with sonata form, the primary Western principle for building large-scale musical structures since the middle of the 18th century.

Traditional Russian treatment of melody, harmony and structure actually worked against sonata form's modus operandi of movement, growth and development.

They remain chronicles of his attempts to reconcile his training from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory with the music he had heard all his life and his own innate penchant for melody.

Ideally, Tchaikovsky's training at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory would have thoroughly equipped him to work with European principles and forms of organizing musical material,[1] just as immersion in those things might have helped him gain a sense of belonging to world culture.

[11] He repeats the theme 75 times, all the while varying the accompaniment—the instrumental timbres, harmonization and counterpoint—in a technique that Brown, Francis Maes and other musicologists call "changing backgrounds.

However, even when those melodies were conceived with broad, multi-phrase structures, they tended to be even more self-contained than those in Russian folk songs, "thus requiring the composer to climb, as it were, a perimeter fence if he wanted to move on, perhaps to explore a new melodic field.

[20] Tchaikovsky had already shown "a flair for harmony" that "astonished" Rudolph Kündinger, his music tutor during his time at the School of Jurisprudence,[21] and a thorough knowledge should have been part of his studies at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.

This worked most successfully in Brahms, Cooper explains, "because in him the violence and directness of emotional expression was somehow veiled and muted and therefore least apt to disturb the balance and proportion of the form.

In these new, looser and more flexible musical forms, large-scale orchestral writing could be combined with strong emotions and brilliant timbres to fulfill a wide range of extra-musical demands.

[34] Tchaikovsky's opening entry for his diary of 1872 reads as follows: Yesterday, on the road from Vorozhba to Kiev, music came singing and echoing through my head after a long interval of silence.

[45] Tchaikovsky realized while composing it that, for him to grow as an artist, he needed to work "around the rules" of sonata form to accommodate the music he was hoping to write.

"[46] Here Tchaikovsky harnessed the harmonic, melodic and rhythmic quirks of Ukrainian folk music to produce an opening movement massive in scale, intricate in structure and complex in texture—what Brown calls "one of the most solid structures Tchaikovsky ever fashioned"[47]—and a finale that, with the folk song "The Crane" offered in an ever-dizzying series of backdrops, showcased how well he could mine the same vein as Glinka and the nationalist set of composers known collectively as The Five.

[51] Patterned after Schumann's Rhenish Symphony and possibly conceived with the notion of what that composer might write if he were Russian,[52] the Third shows Tchaikovsky at what musicologist Hans Keller calls "his freest and most fluent so far.

[55] Maes points out its "high degree of motivic and polyphonic intricacies" and its "magic of sound ... combined with capricious rhythms and fanciful manipulation of musical forms.

By doing so, he hoped to combine the dramatic, emotive and evocative qualities of concert overtures with the scale and musical complexity normally reserved for the opening movements of symphonies.

[69] For his next programmatic work, the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet, Tchaikovsky reverted to sonata form, structuring it in a similar fashion to Beethoven's concert overtures.

[71] This potential played to the conception Tchaikovsky would form of the symphony as a vehicle for personal expression[72] and one whose details could, as he phrased it to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, "be manipulated as freely as one chooses.

But it is another matter when a musician, reading a poetic work or struck by a scene in nature, wishes to express in musical form that subject that has kindled his inspiration.

[77] Also, Tchaikovsky was apparently expanding his conception of the symphony from one where Germanic models were to be followed slavishly to a looser, more flexible alternative more in keeping with the symphonic poem.

Sonata form, according to Wood, was never intended to be a musical straitjacket but, rather, to leave the composer "innumerable choices for building up a coherent movement" that would offer variety and, "by the relationships of its successive thematic elements and the management of its transitions ... have the appearance of organic growth.

The first answer was essentially to sidestep thematic interaction and keep sonata form only as an "outline," as Zhitomirsky phrases it, containing two contrasting themes.

[83] These blocks, Zhitomirsky explains, are demarcated by their distinct contrast in musical material and "by the fact that each theme [used in them] usually constitutes an independent and structurally complete episode.

The former, he continues, is "steadily enlivened in reiteration" by what Warrack calls "ostinato figures, dramatic pedal–points, sequences that screw anticipation to a fever pitch with each new step, all expressed in frenzied rhythmic activity.

Although the composer himself complained about the formal "contrivances" and "artificiality" present there,[96] Warrack maintains that in this symphony, Tchaikovsky found "the symphonic method that matched his temperament to his talents.

[105] "Both in idea and exposition," Zhitomirsky writes, the Fifth Symphony is "a variation on the concept of the Fourth" but "is embodied with even greater unity and scope" than its predecessor,[106] more even in its "expressive balance," according to Brown, more symmetrical in form and orthodox in its tonal progressions.

[109] Brown says it "fatally mars a splendid symphony which earlier demonstrated how convincingly Tchaikovsky could now create a large–scale symphonic work of complete technical assurance and structural equilibrium, yet wholly his own in expression.

This holds most true, he says, with the slow finale, marked Adagio lamentoso, ending on a note of complete resignation in the basses—the first time a composer had dared to do so—while the opening movement "is more emotionally balanced than the reputation of the symphony would lead one to suppose.

"[27] However, Cooper suggests, if they were to be "judged as a hybrid species" of symphony and symphonic poem, with inner workings more flexible and varied than sonata form might allow inhabiting the general four–movement structure to accommodate the musical and extra–musical demands sought not just by Tchaikovsky but also a number of other Romantic–age composers, they could be considered "completely successful.

"[89] Wood maintains that what the composer called his "mountains of padding" were simply inseparable from his initial conceptions—from his process of starting with an extra-musical program and from there deducing musical motives of widely divergent moods and character to be somehow worked into one movement.

[121] While Tchaikovsky may have been incapable of writing absolute music, his real challenge was that while he was conscious of his formal shortcomings and continued striving for an unreached perfection, his actual ideal never really changed.