Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 74, Pathétique
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born at Kamsko-Votkinsk, Vyatka Province, Russia, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He began his Symphony No. 6 on February 16, 1893, and completed it on August 31, 1893. The first performance took place in the Hall of Nobles, St. Petersburg, on October 28, 1893, with the composer conducting, nine days before his death. The second performance, with Eduard Nápravnik conducting, took place twenty days later in the same hall, as part of a concert given in the composer’s memory. The symphony is dedicated to Tchaikovsky’s nephew, Vladimir (Bob) Davidov.
The score of the Pathétique Symphony calls for 3 flutes (third doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Few symphonies in the standard repertoire have spawned more controversy, mystery, and legend than Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, the Pathétique. Musicians and musicologists recognize it as the pinnacle of the composer’s instrumental craft—nothing less (in one scholar’s words) than “the most truly original symphony to have been composed in the seventy years since Beethoven’s Ninth.” But beyond its innovative formal brilliance and raw emotional intensity, the Sixth became famous immediately after its premiere as a weird harbinger of the composer’s death. Only nine days after Tchaikovsky—who was then an international cultural celebrity at the peak of his career—conducted the first performance in St. Petersburg, he succumbed to what appeared to be cholera. He was only 53. The strange coincidence of these two events led to furious speculation about the relationship between the Sixth Symphony and various aspects of Tchaikovsky’s life.
“Was this last symphony a kind of musical suicide note, a personal requiem, as was widely believed after the second, posthumous performance?” asks musicologist Timothy Jackson. For many years, scholars and biographers have attempted to determine how Tchaikovsky coped personally and creatively with the incurable and “sinful disease” of his homosexuality. Did he feel deep self-loathing over his apparently active sex life, or did he, as some believe, accept his inclinations? And even more important: was Tchaikovsky urged by some highly placed friends to drink a glass of cholera-infected water as an act of suicide because they feared his semi-secret gay life was about to be publicly exposed, shaming him and them? Or did he even ingest poison to make it look like he had died of cholera? The Russian-American choreographer George Balanchine, who created a ballet on the Sixth Symphony’s despairing fourth movement, had yet another theory: “What if Tchaikovsky was playing with fate? If he drank the tap water as if playing a kind of Russian roulette: will I get cholera or won’t I?”
Much ink has been spilled in the pursuit of answers to these provocative questions, but as Tchaikovsky biographer Alexander Poznansky writes, “not a single shred of concrete evidence exists to support these stories.” By its nature, music remains an ambiguous and abstract medium, and the score of the Sixth Symphony provides no clear answers. Tchaikovsky also remained oddly reticent about the exact “meaning” of the Sixth Symphony. Although he told friends that the symphony did have a program, he failed to describe it in words as he had for his Fourth and Fifth symphonies. The hypothesis that the secret program was “gay,” however, seems to be supported by Tchaikovsky’s dedication of the Sixth Symphony to his 21-year-old nephew, Vladimir (“Bob”) Davidov, for whom the composer had long felt an intense—and guilty—sexual attraction.
Recent research also indicates that it was Tchaikovsky himself, and not (as was long believed) his brother Modest, who decided upon the descriptive title of “Pathétique” (in Russian, “Patetichiskaya”). So the composer seems always to have envisioned the work as reflective of his inner emotional and erotic life. Although English speakers often wrongly think of the title “Pathétique” as meaning “pathetic,” in French and Russian this adjective is more accurately translated as “impassioned” or “emotional.” When he was working out the symphony’s program in January 1893, Tchaikovsky confessed that he “often wept bitterly.”
And yet one does not need to know anything of the tortured autobiographical subtext to marvel at the purely technical mastery. Tchaikovsky himself considered the Sixth Symphony, as he wrote to Davidov, “the best and, in particular, the most sincere of all my works. I love it as I have never loved any other of my musical offspring.” For several years, the composer had been collecting ideas for a projected symphony in E-flat major. This symphony was never completed, but some of its materials went into the Sixth. Working quickly and with special inspiration, mostly in the pastoral surroundings of his home in Klin, Tchaikovsky completed sketches for its four movements in only six weeks in February and March. In May, he traveled to England to accept an honorary doctorate from Cambridge, and then returned to Klin, where he completed the orchestration in July and August.
In the Sixth Symphony, the sometimes prolix Tchaikovsky achieves an impressive formal conciseness, clarity, and thematic unity. Although no central “signature theme” appears in all four movements, as one does in his Symphony No. 5, the Sixth’s opening and closing measures are constructed as mirror images. A winding four-note motif, repeated three times by the solo bassoon, emerges pp out of hushed silence at the outset of the first movement. At the work’s end, the cellos play a descending motif, disappearing into sonic nothingness. To conclude the symphony not with the expected triumphant finale, but with a “most protracted Adagio,” was one of Tchaikovsky’s earliest ideas for the Pathétique, and an innovation later copied by numerous other composers, including Gustav Mahler (in his Third Symphony) and Dmitri Shostakovich (in his Eighth Symphony). This unifying structure also traces the symphony’s psychological journey, from tentative hope and yearning to overwhelming gloom and resignation to fate.
From its highly atmospheric introduction, the first movement proceeds to treat two highly contrasting themes in sonata-allegro form: an anxious idea in rising and falling sixteenth-note figurations derived from the introductory motif; and a serene, lilting pastoral melody. Several ingenious moments provide unexpected drama and emotional depth. One is a quotation in the brass from the Russian Orthodox Requiem, the traditional chant sung over the open coffin of the deceased to the words “With thy saints, O Christ, give peace to the soul of thy servant.” Was this a foreshadowing of Tchaikovsky’s own approaching death? The other is the highly theatrical transition from the exposition to the development section, from a languid, deeply descending bassoon solo (marked pppppp) to a sudden orchestral explosion that never fails to snap audiences to attention. Balanchine vividly described this first movement, the symphony’s longest, as “a blizzard.”
The second and third movements offer some shelter from the storm. Tchaikovsky labelled the second movement “Allegro con grazia,” and its stuttering waltz in unexpected 5/4 meter demonstrates his graceful mastery of dance forms, perfected in Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and, most recently relative to the Pathétique, The Nutcracker. In the waltz’s central section (“con dolcezza e flebile”—“with sweetness and mournfully”), a sense of foreboding returns, however, as the timpani throbs insistently like a softly beating heart (or clock?). Critics and audiences found the subsequent rousing third movement, an infectious march that grows from scherzo-ish lightness to brutal ferocity, confusing, too. Was it intended as a statement of heroism and strength, or, as David Brown suggests, “a desperate bid for happiness so prolonged and vehement that it confirms not only the desperation of the search, but also its futility”? The movement climaxes with a spectacular four-octave descent in the violins and then the trombones and tubas, landing on a solid G major triad that often provokes premature cheers.
But this is not the end. What follows is one of Tchaikovsky’s most imaginative and influential creations, a despairing “Adagio lamentoso” that the English annotator/composer Donald Francis Tovey described as “a stroke of genius which solves all the artistic problems that have proved most baffling to symphonic writers since Beethoven.” In form, the movement possesses a sonata structure, but without development. Both of its themes press relentlessly downward, continuing the descent that concluded the preceding movement. A single funereal strike of the gong and solemn brass chords introduce the somber second theme, heavy with resignation and seeming to yield to the power of fate. In the final minutes, the muted double basses pulsate gently on B as the orchestral texture gradually thins into silence and darkness.
Harlow Robinson
Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cineaste, and Opera News, and he has written program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera.
The first American performance of the Pathétique Symphony took place on March 16, 1894, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, with Walter Damrosch conducting.
The first Boston Symphony performance of the Pathétique Symphony was led by Emil Paur on December 29, 1894
