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

The Need To Write ...

"I literally cannot live without working," Tchaikovsky once wrote to the Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, "For no sooner has some labor been completed ... there appears a desire to begin at once on some new labor.... nder such circumstances this new labor is not always provoked by true creative necessity."

By November 1889, Tchaikovsky's creative itch was becoming extreme. A year had passed since completing the Fifth Symphony, and eight months since writing another musical composition. Tchaikovsky confided to the Grand Duke that he had long aspired to crown his creative career with a grand symphony on some as yet undefined programme, but it was evidently on his return voyage from America in May 1891 that he jotted down a few preliminary ideas for what might become such a piece. More important still was a programme he roughed out, possibly at the same time: "The ultimate essence ... of the symphony is Life. First part – all impulse, passion, confidence, thirst for activity. Must be short (the finale death – result of collapse). Second part love: third disappointments; fourth ends dying away (also short)."

During the following months, while at work on The Nutcracker and Iolanta, he continued to note down further materials, but when at last he began systematic work on the piece, many of these and earlier ideas were discarded; nor was the programme to be used. Others were drawn in, however, and by June 8, 1892, both the first movement and the finale were fully sketched. He had hoped to continue work in July and August, but further composition was delayed until October. Nevertheless, by November 4, 1892 the entire symphony was sketched, and within three days the first movement was scored up to the recapitulation.

Tchaikovsky had already offered to conduct the premiere of the symphony at a charity concert in Moscow the following February. However, after another enforced break, the composer took another look at the sketches and experienced total disenchantment. "It's composed simply for the sake of composing something; there's nothing at all interesting or sympathetic in it," he wrote to his nephew Vladimir "Bob" Davydov on December 16, 1892. "I've decided to discard and forget it ... Perhaps," he added, though how he can hardly have realized how precisely, "the subject still has the potential to stir my imagination."

Davydov's response came quickly and, to the composer's surprise, very strongly worded. In a letter dated December 19, 1892, Davydov wrote, "I feel sorry of course, for the symphony that you have cast down from the cliff as they used to do with the children of Sparta, because it seemed to you deformed, whereas it is probably as much a work of genius as the first five."