Its first performance was at a Russian Musical Society concert in Moscow on February 22 (or the 10th using the calendar of the time), 1878,[1] with Nikolai Rubinstein as conductor.

[4] It is also due to Madame von Meck that, at her request, Tchaikovsky wrote a program explaining the symphony.

This action encouraged numerous writers to quote it instead of focusing on the symphony's purely musical qualities, including what Hans Keller termed "one of the most towering symphonic structures in our whole literature" in the opening movement.

But despite this negative impact on the symphony's reception history, the composer's program gives one very telling clue regarding the work's musical architecture.

Assertions to the effect that "the first movement represents Fate" are oversimplifications: according to a letter the composer wrote to Madame von Meck in 1878, it is actually the fanfare first heard at the opening ("the kernel, the quintessence, the chief thought of the whole symphony") that stands for "Fate", with this being "the fatal power which prevents one from attaining the goal of happiness ...

As the composer explained it, the programme of the first movement is—"roughly"—that "all life is an unbroken alternation of hard reality with swiftly passing dreams and visions of happiness ...".

The composer's description of the symphony's opening fanfare as a metaphor for "Fate" becomes more telling in the context of a letter he wrote Sergei Taneyev.

[7] Keller has mentioned a parallel between the four-note motif which opens Beethoven's Fifth and the fanfare at the outset of Tchaikovsky's Fourth.

The symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, and strings.

Western musical form, as developed primarily by Germanic composers, was analytical and architectural; it simply was not designed to handle the personal emotions the Romantics wished to express.

[10] The difference with Tchaikovsky was that while the other Romantics remained generally autobiographical in what they wanted to express, he became more specific and, consequently, more intense.

This was because Tchaikovsky's creative impulses had become unprecedentedly personal, urgent, capable of enormous expressive forcefulness, even violence.

This dominance of one melody can ruin the balance and proportion Western classical composers considered the proper beauties of sonata form.

The only course of action left was to substitute repetition for true development—in other words, to say again in a different way what has already been said and to trust the beauty and significance of what are fundamentally variations to supply the place of a development section as demanded by sonata form.

[13] Like "The Five," Tchaikovsky found that with a loose symphonic-poem type of structure pioneered by Franz Liszt,[14] he could combine large-scale orchestral writing with emotions and instrumental colors toward which he gravitated naturally.

[17] This perhaps seemed only natural—many Russian folk songs are actually a series of variations on one basic shape or pattern of a few notes, so it was something with which Tchaikovsky was already familiar.

It results from rhythmic opposition between the polonaise rhythm of the aggressive "Fate" motif in the brass and the gentler waltz of the first theme, carried alternately by woodwinds and strings.

This, he thought, gave the work as a whole the feeling of a symphonic poem with three additional movements attached to justify it being called a symphony.

In 1890 a reviewer for the New York Post wrote, "The Fourth Tchaikovsky Symphony proved to be one of the most thoroughly Russian, i.e. semi-barbaric, compositions ever heard in the city.