Symphony in E Flat (Tchaikovsky) - ... Vs. The Need To Express

... Vs. The Need To Express

Tchaikovsky gave up on the symphony because he now found the music impersonal, lacking the introspection he felt a symphony needed. He had no wish to continue making, as he said, "meaningless harmonies and a rhythmical scheme expressive of nothing".

However, Davydov's comments spurred Tchaikovsky to reuse the sketches instead of totally writing them off. The music may have meant nothing to him on a personal level emotionally, but that did not mean it was worthless. The main theme was highly attractive, skillfully worked out, extroverted. When worked out by a composer whose handling of such a theme could become a delight to hear and, for the musicologist, to analyze, the results could become extremely worthwhile after all.

More importantly, the composer did not abandon the thought of writing a new symphony based on the program he conceived. Though his efforts with the E-flat symphony did not turn out as planned, they influenced his conception of what would become the 6th Symphony (Pathétique), the first movement of which was fully sketched less than six weeks later, by 9 February 1893.

By April 1893, Tchaikovsky had also decided to rescore the E-flat Symphony as a piano concerto, his third. In June he did preliminary work on this project, while simultaneously pushing ahead with work on the 6th Symphony. By August he had decided the concerto was too long, and he wrote to Alexander Siloti saying that he would publish just the first movement, under the title of Allegro de concert or Conzertstuck. The 6th symphony was finished by the end of August. On 6 October he wrote to Zygmunt Stojowski, "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". Three days later, in a letter to Bob Davydov (the dedicatee of the 6th Symphony), he again referred to the work as a concerto. By 15 October 1893 he had completely finished the recomposition. A note on the manuscript reads, "The end, God be thanked". But the last page was notated "End of movement 1", which has caused considerable speculation ever since. Had he decided that the 3rd Piano Concerto would have the usual three movements after all, but fate intervened before he could complete this work? The record favours the interpretation that he had decided on a single-movement concerto, despite the irregularity of this approach. Three weeks later, and only eight days after conducting the first performance of the 6th Symphony, which he had permitted after its premiere to be known as the Pathétique, Tchaikovsky was dead.

The one-movement Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 75, Tchaikovsky's last completed composition, was published by Jurgenson the following year. It had its premiere in January 1895, with Sergei Taneyev as the soloist.

After considerable discussion between 1894 and 1896 between Tchaikovsky's brother Modest, Taneyev, Siloti, the publisher Belyayev and others, it was decided that Taneyev would convert two of the E-flat Symphony's abandoned three remaining movements into piano-and-orchestra form, starting with the very brief sketches Tchaikovsky had made along these lines before deciding not to proceed beyond the first movement. The Andante and Finale was premiered in January 1897, again with Taneyev at the piano. It was published later that year by Belyayev as Tchaikovsky's Op. 79, even though it was arguably as much Taneyev's composition as Tchaikovsky's. The 3rd Piano Concerto and the Andante and Finale are sometimes played and recorded together to constitute a full three-movement piano concerto, even though this was almost certainly not Tchaikovsky's final intention.