SYMPHONY NO.5, E MINOR, OPUS 64

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

1. Adante; Allegro con anima 2. Adante cantabile, con alcuna licenza
3. Valse Allegro moderato 4. Andante maestoso-Allegro vivace

It is particularly interesting to learn that Tchaikovsky looked upon this symphony which the world now acknowledges as one of his greatest as proof that he was through as a composer. He felt that his creative urge had grown feeble. And when the Symphony was introduced in St. Peterburg, he felt that there was something repellent about it.

Such self-depreciation sounds strange to present-day concert-goers, to whom the Fifth is a favorite symphony, of moving grandeur and majesty. Tchaikovsky himself soon realized that he had been too harsh. After a subsequent performance of the symphony, he wrote, “I like it far better now.” The gloomy, mysterious opening theme.

Suggests the leader, deliberate tread of life. The opening Allegro, after experimenting in many moods, ends mournfully and wearily. The beauty of the Andante is twice broken in upon by the first sombre theme. The third movement he waltz is never really gay : there is always the suggestion of impending fate in it : while at times the scale passages for the strings give it an eerie, ghostly character. At the end of this also there comes the heavy, muffled tread of the veiled figure that is suggested by the opening theme. Finally the last movement shows us, as it were, the emotional transformation of this theme, evidently in harmony with a change in the part it now plays in the curious drama. It is in the major instead of in the minor : it is no longer a symbol of weariness and foreboding, but bold, vigorous, emphatic, self-confident. What may be the precise significance of the beautiful theme of the second movement that reappears in the finale it is impossible to say : but it is quite clear that the transmutation which the first subject of the allegro undergoes, just before the close of the symphony, is of the same psychological order as that of ‘fate’ motive a change from clouds to sunshine, from defeat to triumph.

The repetitious use of the fate motive has given this work the sobriquet of “Fate Symphony”.