Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5

by Chris Vaneman

Composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893)

There are, essentially, two ways to write program notes. The first (or, as I think of it, the “boring”) way is to deliver a theoretical analysis of each piece, listing key areas and structural plans. The second (“less boring”) way is the historical one, telling stories that illuminate a bit about each piece and hopefully preparing the reader to encounter it. The thing about history, though, is that the stories we use to tell it often reveal as much about ourselves, our own priorities and obsessions, as they do about history: no matter how hard we might try, no historian can fully escape her own time and place.

Readers need look no further than the “Tchaikovsky” entry in the fifth edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians for proof.

New Grove is the most respected multi-volume reference work on musical subjects; every 25 years or so a brand-new, entirely updated edition is published. The fifth of these, which appeared in 1979, prints as fact a story about Tchaikovsky’s death, that – were it true – would be surely the most sensational demise of any composer.

Earlier in the decade a Russian émigré musicologist published a paper that, citing an overheard deathbed confession that in turn cited a second, decades-old deathbed confession, claimed that Tchaikovsky had not died of cholera as had previously been believed but had poisoned himself with arsenic. The story went that the composer had been caught in flagrante with a young nephew of the Romanoff family; before the liaison was made public, a secret “honor court” made up of Tchaikovsky’s former military school classmates gave the composer two options: a dignified suicide, or public scandal and exile to Siberia. Tchaikovsky, we are to believe, chose the former, and his physician, who was in on the conspiracy (as was his family), supplied him with the poison. That so wild a tale could be published as fact in the New Grove, despite the conspicuous lack of any shred of evidence other than a third-hand deathbed confession, tells us something about the preoccupations of the 1970’s, but even in its outlandishness it’s a testament to the composer’s tumultuous inner life.

Tchaikovsky was indeed gay, as his frank letters to his brother Modest make clear. In fact he spent much of his adult life struggling with that aspect of his being, public acknowledgment of which would have crippled his career and maybe even jeopardized his life in Czarist Russia. He even went so far as to marry one his students, but their marriage remained unconsummated: on their wedding night the composer fled his young bride and, distraught, walked into the Moskva River. And his eventual death was, in a certain sense, self-inflicted – he drank a glass of unboiled water during a raging cholera epidemic and contracted the disease that killed him. (The 2004 sixth edition of New Grove quietly returns to that accepted story of the Composer’s death, in case you were wondering.)

Tchaikovsky was one of the most personal and emotionally direct of composers, and so his difficult inner life is indeed pretty directly relevant to his music; you can’t exactly blame the fifth edition’s editors for wanting the composer’s demise to equal his music in drama. Next-to-last of Tchaikovsky’s six symphonies, the Fifth was written in 1888, and while it was attacked by critics, the piece was a hit with audiences and has remained in the repertoire ever since.

It opens with a pensive melody, one which the composer associated with “willing acquiescence” to the inscrutable design of fate. That melody becomes a “motto theme,” appearing, transformed, in each of the movements that follow and going out in a blaze of melancholy glory in the symphony’s Finale.