Symphonies By Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Conclusions

Conclusions

Cooper maintains that if Tchaikovsky's symphonies were to be judged on strictly academic terms—in other words, on the same level as their Austro–German contemporaries and predecessors—they might "be considered fine music but poor symphonies." This line of thought, he maintains, is like architecture critics who believe that, "because no more beautiful and satisfactory churches than the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages have been built since, therefore all churches should be built in the Gothic Style."

However, Cooper suggests, if they were to be "judged as a hybrid species" of symphony and symphonic poem, with inner workings more flexible and varied than sonata form might allow inhabiting the general four–movement structure to accommodate the musical and extra–musical demands sought not just by Tchaikovsky but also a number of other Romantic–age composers, they could be considered "completely successful." This, again in architectural terms, would be like when Gothic style was combined with the ideals of the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation and a genuinely new style, the Baroque, resulted, "an organic development from the Gothic but as different in individuality as a child from its father." Soviet musicologist Boris Asafyev, in fact, calls the Tchaikovsky symphonies "dramatic" as opposed to the "non–dramatic" symphonies of Franz Schubert and Alexander Glazunov, as though he is discussing, if not two entirely different genres, then two separate variations on a common form.

Brown delineates the issue along cultural as well as formal lines. Russian symphonies are not German symphonies, he maintains, and the fact they may function along different parameters than their German counterparts does not make them any less valid on a musical or experiential level. Critics and musicologists agree universally that Tchaikovsky was not able to manipulate sonata form along the lines of a Mozart or Beethoven. This was a fact the composer himself bemoaned on more than one occasion. Though he received a Western European–style musical education, he still faced a native set of musical rules and traditions that did not conform at all to Western ones. Rather than ignore his native music and look Westward as his teacher Anton Rubinstein had done or forgo the West as much as possible as The Five did, he chose to face the problem from both sides head–on.

The truth is, Wood writes, despite the composer's occasional self-indictments, Tchaikovsky did master "form" as he actually understood and could manage it from a compositional level. Warrack calls Tchaikovsky's solution to large-scale composition "a compromise with sonata form." Wood maintains that what the composer called his "mountains of padding" were simply inseparable from his initial conceptions—from his process of starting with an extra-musical program and from there deducing musical motives of widely divergent moods and character to be somehow worked into one movement. The alternative method was allowing his second theme to arise after and at the same time from the first, may have never occurred to him. However, it may have been equally likely that Tchaikovsky's compositional method never occurred to Mozart.

While Tchaikovsky may have been incapable of writing absolute music, his real challenge was that while he was conscious of his formal shortcomings and continued striving for an unreached perfection, his actual ideal never really changed. Because the ideal never changed, the problems to which Tchaikovsky addressed himself never really changed, either. In this sense, it could be argued that he never really grew or matured. Nevertheless, Tchaikovsky discovered a method by which to circumvent what he perceived as formal shortcomings and put his emotional life to work in large-scale abstract structures.