Two other movements were reworked for piano and orchestra by Sergei Taneyev as the Andante and Finale, which was published as Tchaikovsky's Op.
Between 1951 and 1955, Soviet composer Semyon Bogatyrev reconstructed the symphony from Tchaikovsky's sketches and various re-workings.
More important still was a programme he roughed out, possibly at the same time: "The ultimate essence ... of the symphony is Life.
[3] Tchaikovsky had already offered to conduct the premiere of the symphony at a charity concert in Moscow the following February.
"I've decided to discard and forget it ... Perhaps," he added, though he can hardly have realized how precisely, "the subject still has the potential to stir my imagination.
In a letter dated December 19, 1892, Davydov wrote, "I feel sorry of course, for the symphony that you have cast down from the cliff as they used to do with the children of Sparta, because it seemed to you deformed, whereas it is probably as much a work of genius as the first five.
When worked out by a composer whose handling of such a theme could become a delight to hear and, for the musicologist, to analyze, the results could become extremely worthwhile after all.
[7] More importantly, the composer did not abandon the thought of writing a new symphony based on the program he conceived.
By August he had decided the concerto was too long, and he wrote to Alexander Siloti saying that he would publish just the first movement, under the title of Allegro de concert or Conzertstuck.
Three days later, in a letter to Bob Davydov (the dedicatee of the 6th Symphony), he again referred to the work as a concerto.
Three weeks later, and only nine days after conducting the first performance of the 6th Symphony, which he had permitted after its premiere to be known as the Pathétique, Tchaikovsky was dead.
After considerable discussion between 1894 and 1896 between Tchaikovsky's brother Modest, Taneyev, Siloti, the publisher Belyayev and others, it was decided that Taneyev would convert two of the E-flat Symphony's abandoned three remaining movements into piano-and-orchestra form, starting with the very brief sketches Tchaikovsky had made along these lines before deciding not to proceed beyond the first movement.
[10] Eight other conductors have recorded it: Dmitri Kitayenko,[11] Neeme Järvi, Sergei Skripka, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Mikhail Pletnev, Kyung-Soo Won, Kees Bakels, and Leo Ginzburg.
[12] In 2005, a second reconstruction of the symphony, commissioned by the Tchaikovsky Fund, was completed by Russian composer Pyotr Klimov.
[13] It had its first public performance at the Tchaikovsky State House-Museum in Klin, near Moscow, by the Symphony Orchestra of Russia led by conductor Tomomi Nishimoto.