Symphony No. 1 (Tchaikovsky)
The composer's brother, Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky, asserted that the symphony's creation from beginning to end cost his sibling more labor than any other works and even involved considerable suffering.
Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck in 1883 that he believed, "although it is in many ways very immature," he still knows that "yet fundamentally it has more substance and is better than any of my other more mature works.
"[2] Tchaikovsky dedicated his first symphony to his contemporary musician Nikolai Rubinstein, who as both a close friend and as a pianist of note helped with the former figure's career aspirations.
He began writing it while experiencing considerable alienation and dealing with extreme fatigue, with his graduation from the St. Petersburg Conservatory and initial efforts at composition failing to provide the creative opportunities that he had hoped for.
This aggravation became compounded by how Tchaikovsky found it impractical if not impossible to come up with a whole symphony of the inherent quality he demanded of himself under the strict attitudes towards form and function, at the level of unreasonable imitation in his opinion, held by other Russians as both teachers and peers.
While composing such a dramatically ambitious work ravaged both his mental state and physical health, particularly given the suffocating ethos of the conservative and even formalist musicians around him, the symphony received acclaim from both popular audiences and professionals alike after its release.
This has continued over the course of many years, and it has remained significantly lauded in large part due to its structural inventions in the context of Russian music during the middle to late 1800s.
A scathing review by César Cui of the cantata he had written as a graduation piece from the St. Petersburg Conservatory shattered his morale.
Despite his lack of progress, Tchaikovsky sought the opinion of his former teachers, Anton Rubinstein and Nikolai Zaremba, when he returned to St Petersburg at the end of August.
[7] He had hoped for their approval of what he had written as well as accepting at least part of it for a St Petersburg concert of the Russian Musical Society (RMS).
As musicologist David Brown wrote, "The opening stretch of the first movement is enough to scotch the hoary old legend that Tchaikovsky was devoid of any real symphonic aptitude.
"[20] Warrack notes that "the obsessive thirds of Russian folk-song permeate Tchaikovsky's tunes; and he must also at some time been haunted by the interval of the falling fourth, so strongly does it colour the invention in the early symphonies, always prominently placed in the melodies and acting as emotional coloration rather than implying a harmonic progression.
"[21] In contrast to the outright suffering involved with its composition, both mentally and physically, the finished symphony received acclaim from both popular audiences and professionals alike after its release.
This has continued over the course of many years, and it has remained significantly lauded in large part due to its aforementioned structural inventions, with this taking place in the context of Russian music during the middle to late 1800s.
Writing for the British mass media publication The Guardian in 2014, music journalist Tom Service argued that "Tchaikovsky's first symphony remodelled the form into a truly Russian style".
