Symphony No. 1 (Tchaikovsky) - Form

Form

  1. Dreams of a Winter Journey. Allegro tranquillo
  2. Land of Desolation, Land of Mists. Adagio cantabile ma non tanto. This is an essentially monothematic structure, based on subtle gradations and variations on a single melody.
  3. Scherzo. Allegro scherzando giocoso. This was the earliest movement to be written. Salvaged from a piano sonata in C-sharp minor that he had written as a student, Tchaikovsky transposed the movement down a semitone to C minor and replaced the trio with the first of a whole line of orchestral waltzes.
  4. Finale. Andante lugubre—Allegro maestoso. Tchaikovsky uses the folk-song "Распашу ли я млада, младeшенка" (Raspashu li ya mlada, mladeshenka) as the basis for both the introduction and the second subject. This song also colors the vigorous first subject. Tchaikovsky had borrowed the folk-song motive into the prelude and the finale of his Cantata for the Opening of the Polytechnic Exhibition in Moscow 1872 (commemorating the bicentenary of the birth of Peter the Great).

Read more about this topic:  Symphony No. 1 (Tchaikovsky)

Famous quotes containing the word form:

    The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature—a type nowhere at present existing.
    Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)

    Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider’d as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of thought to pass from cause to effects and effects to causes, according to their experienc’d union.
    David Hume (1711–1776)

    I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.
    Joseph Epstein (b. 1937)