Andante and Finale (Tchaikovsky) - Background

Background

What we know as the Andante and Finale had its genesis as the slow movement and finale of Tchaikovsky's Symphony in E-flat, a work he started writing in 1892. He abandoned the symphony in December 1892, but after his nephew Bob Davydov chided him, he began reworking it into a piano concerto, his third, which he promised to the French pianist Louis Diémer. The composer finished the outline of the first movement (Allegro brillante) of this concerto in July 1893, then put it aside to continue work on his 6th Symphony (Pathétique). He completed the symphony in August, then returned to the concerto, which he had by this time decided to publish as a single-movement Allegro de concert. The remaining movements were left in sketch form, and there is no evidence that Tchaikovsky had any further use for them. Indeed, there is strong evidence to the contrary. As late as 6 October 1893, a month before his death, he wrote to the Polish pianist and composer Zygmunt Stojowski: "As I wrote to you, my new Symphony is finished. I am now working on the scoring of my new (third) concerto for our dear Diémer. When you see him, please tell him that when I proceeded to work on it, I realized that this concerto is of depressing and threatening length. Consequently I decided to leave only part one which in itself will constitute an entire concerto. The work will only improve the more since the last two parts were not worth very much."

The 6th Symphony was the last of his compositions to be performed in his lifetime, but the Allegro de concert was Tchaikovsky's last completed composition. It was posthumously published by P. Jurgenson as the Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 75.

Tchaikovsky had written "End of movement 1" on the last page of the Allegro de concert. However, when he decided to publish only that movement, he apparently omitted to cross this out. This has caused some speculation about his true intentions, for example, whether he might have eventually expanded the concerto to a full three-movement work, or used the other movements in some other form, had he not died.

After his brother's death, Modest Tchaikovsky asked the composer's friend and former student Sergei Taneyev to go through the sketches of compositions left unfinished. In November 1894, Taneyev began to study the unfinished sketches of these two movements. Both Taneyev and Modest questioned how the work should be published—as two orchestral movements for a symphony or to preserve its subsequent arrangement and complete reworking them as a piece for piano and orchestra. After a letter from pianist Alexander Siloti to Modest in April 1895, he and Taneyev took the piano-and-orchestra route.

Another question was where and how these two movements would be published. This was complicated by the fact that P. Jurgenson had already published the single-movement concerto as a complete work, in accordance with Tchaikovsky's wishes. Modest and Taneyev eventually offered the Andante and Finale to M. P. Belyayev, together with the overtures Fatum and The Storm, and the symphonic ballad The Voyevoda.

Belyayev questioned how to publish the Andante and Finale—as a fourth concerto in two movements, as two concert pieces, or in purely orchestral form as two movements from an unfinished symphony. He eventually published the Andante and Finale in 1897 in Taneyev's version for piano and orchestra, and gave it the opus number 79, as if it were a composition by Tchaikovsky, which is only partly true.

The first performance of Andante and Finale took place on February 8, 1897 in St. Petersburg with Taneyev as soloist.