By Terry Blain

Published: Thursday, 13 October 2022 at 12:00 am


‘You can’t imagine how blissful I feel in the conviction that my time is not yet passed, and to work is still possible”. Tchaikovsky’s comment to his nephew Vladimir ‘Bob’ Davydov in February 1893 captures the elation he experienced composing what would ultimately become his sixth and final symphony.

It also hints at the difficulties that writing the new work had created. A first sketch was completed before Tchaikovsky realised he had composed it ‘simply for the sake of composing something’, and the music had no interest. Deflated, he even began wondering if he should ‘go into retirement and start to live out my days quietly’.

Fortunately, however, the programme Tchaikovsky had outlined for the new symphony still existed, and fermented in his imagination. ‘Second part love’, it read in part. ‘Third disappointments; fourth ends dying away’. There, in outline, were the starting points for three of the four movements Tchaikovsky now began casting as an entirely new work in the solemn key of B minor.

Ideas for the music quickly germinated. ‘All my thoughts are now taken up with a new composition’, the composer wrote, ‘and it’s very difficult for me to break away.’ From an early stage he seemed especially affected by the mood of the new piece he was creating. It would ‘be suffused with subjectivity’, he commented. ‘While composing it in my head, I wept a great deal.’

Tchaikovsky wrote the bulk of the manuscript in a house he rented out in Klin, a town 60 miles north-west of Moscow. ‘The work went so furiously and quickly,’ he wrote, ‘that in less than four days the first movement was completely ready, and the remaining movements already clearly outlined in my head.’ A rough draft was completed in three weeks, and by the end of August the finished symphony was ready.