Symphony No. 3 (Tchaikovsky) - Form

Form

Like Robert Schumann's Rhenish Symphony, the Third Symphony has five movements instead of the customary four in a suite-like formal layout, with a central slow movement flanked on either side by a scherzo. The work also shares the Rhenish's overall tone of exuberant optimism. For these reasons, musicologist David Brown postulates that Tchaikovsky might have conceived the Third Symphony with the notion of what Schumann might have written had he been Russian. The Rhenish, in fact, was one of two works that had most impressed Tchaikovsky during his student days at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory; the other was the Ocean Symphony by his teacher, Anton Rubinstein.

The average performance of this symphony runs about 45 minutes.

1. Introduzione e Allegro: Moderato assai (Tempo di marcia funebre) (D minor → D major)

   This movement, in common time, begins with a slow funeral march opening in the parallel minor . The movement then accelerandos and crescendos up to a key change back into the parallel major, where, in a typical sonata-allegro form, after the exposition in the major key it modulates to the dominant, before repeating the theme from the key change and then returning to the tonic at the end instead of the dominant, with a developmental section in between before the recapitulation. The movement closes with a coda, which occurs twice (essentially back to back) and accelerandos to an extremely fast tempo towards the very end.

2. Alla tedesca: Allegro moderato e semplice (G minor/B flat major)

   In a sort of ternary form, this begins as a waltz, and then after a trio consisting of a many-times-repeated triplet 8th note figure in the winds and strings, after which the beginning up to the trio is basically repeated again. The movement closes with a brief coda consisting of string pizzicatos and clarinet and bassoon solos.

3. Andante elegiaco (D minor/B-flat major/D major)

   Also in 3/4 time, this movement opens with all winds, notably a flute solo. This movement is the most romantic in nature of the five, and it is roughly a variation of slow-sonata/ternary form without a development, although the traditional dominant-tonic recapitulation is abandoned for more distant keys, the first being in B-flat major (the subdominant to F) and the recapitulation in D major (the parallel major to D minor). This movement is atypically more lyrical than the second. Between the two is a contrasting middle section, consisting of material closely resembling the repeated eighth note triplet figures in the trio of the second movement. The movement closes with a brief coda with string tremolos, and a repeat of the wind solos accompanied by string pizzicatos from the opening of the movement.

4. Scherzo: Allegro vivo (B minor)

   The scherzo is in 2/4 time. This is somewhat unusual, as scherzi in classical music of the time are traditionally in triple meter, although the name scherzo (literally meaning 'joke' in Italian) does not in itself imply this metric convention. Like other scherzi of its time, the movement is fast enough to be conducted in one and is composed in ternary form. After a prolonged 'question and answering' of 16th note figures between the upper strings and woodwinds, there is a trio in the form of a march, which modulates through a number of different keys, starting with G minor, before returning to the relative major to the tonic B minor of the movement, D major. The entire opening of the movement up to the trio is then repeated, and the movement closes with a brief reprise of some of the trio's march material. The trio uses material Tchaikovsky had composed for an 1872 cantata to celebrate the bicentenerary of the birth of Tsar Peter the Great. The entire movement has muted strings, and there is a trombone solo at the exposition before the trio and the recapitulation after the trio, the only appearance of the trombone in the symphony outside of the first and last movements.

5. Finale: Allegro con fuoco (Tempo di polacca) (D major)

   This movement is characterized by rhythms typical of a polonaise, a Polish dance, from which the symphony draws its name. The opening theme is effectively a variety of a rondo theme, and it returns several more times in the movement, with different episodes in between each occurrence: the first is fugal, the second is a wind-choral, and the third is a section in the relative minor, B minor, where some of the second movement's trio's triplet figures make another reprise. There is then another longer fugal section, a variation of the main theme which modulates into a number of different keys along the way. It is characterized by staggered entrances of the theme, before another variation on another reprise of the main theme slows dramatically into a slower chorale section featuring all the winds and brass. There is then a section with another variation on the original theme up to the original tempo, and then a presto in 1 which drives to the end, which concludes with 12 D major chords over a long timpani roll, and then 3 long Ds, the third of which is a fermata in the last bar of the symphony.

In his biography and analysis of Tchaikovsky's music, Roland John Wiley likens the five-movement format to a divertimento and questions whether Tchaikovsky wanted to allude in this work to the 18th century. Such a move would not be unique or unprecedented in Tchaikovsky's work; David Brown points out in the 1980 edition of the New Grove that the composer occasionally wrote in a form of Mozartian pastiche throughout his career. (The Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra, which Wiley suggests by Tchaikovsky's use of the word Rococo in the title is his "first nominal gesture toward 18th century music," is in fact a near-contemporary of the symphony.) Musicologist Richard Taruskin makes a similar statement by calling the Third Symphony 'the first 'typical' symphony (and the first Mozartean one!) in the sense that it is the first to be thoroughly dominated by the dance."

In explaining his analogy, Wiley points out how the composer holds back the full orchestra occasionally in a manner much like that of a concerto grosso, "the winds as concertino to the ripieno of the strings" in the first movement, the waltz theme and trio of the second movement and the trio of the fourth movement (in other words, the smaller group of winds balanced against the larger group of strings). The finale, Wiley states, does not decide which format Tchaikovsky may have actually had in mind. By adding a fugue and a reprise of the movement's second theme in the form of a recapitulation to the opening polonaise, Wiley says Tchaikovsky concludes the work on a note "more pretentious than a divertimento, less grand than a symphony, leaves the work's genre identity suspended in the breach."

For other musicologists, the Schumannesque formal layout has been either a blessing or a curse. John Warrack admits the second movement, Alla tedesca, "balances" the work but he nonetheless senses "the conventional four-movement pattern being interrupted" unnecessarily, not amended in an organic manner. Brown notes that if Tchaikovsky amended the four-movement pattern because he felt it no longer adequate, his efforts proved unsuccessful. Hans Keller disagrees. Rather than a "regression" in symphonic form, Keller sees the five-movement form, along "with the introduction of dance rhythms into the material of every movement except the first," as widening "the field of symphonic contrasts both within and between movements."