Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 6 in B minor ('Pathétique') - Classic FM Become a VIP Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 6 in B minor ('Pathétique') Tchaikovsky 's greatest symphony and, possibly, his greatest work. The 'Pathétique' is one of the defining sounds of the romantic period, but the story behind it is just as intriguing. Was it due to cholera-infected water? Could it have been suicide? Or was it, quite simply, the result of a broken heart? All sorts of theories, both credible and anything but, have been espoused when it comes to the reason for Tchaikovsky ’s death in November 1893. The premiere of his Symphony No. 6 took place in October 1893, just over a week before the composer’s death. Of all Tchaikovsky’s works, this is arguably the one that spans both extremes of the emotional spectrum to the greatest extent. One moment you’re enjoying a graceful dance; the next, sombre moods dominate. The symphony’s nickname, 'Pathétique', was added by Tchaikovsky’s brother, with the blessing of the composer.

It suggests pathos in the music – something that is undoubtedly there in spades, but not at the expense of a lightness of touch and, at times, a sense of frivolity. In those moments, at least, the music seems far from autobiographical: if Tchaikovsky was struggling with suicidal thoughts, they’re by no means evident throughout. Tchaikovsky was more than satisfied with this four-movement symphony – but, as was so often and so cruelly the case, the critical reception it received was decidedly muted. Described by some as his farewell to life, in reality we shall never know exactly what inspired the work. What we can be sure of, though, is that it lives on as one of the composer’s most adored creations. Illustration: Mark Millington San Francisco Symphony - TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 74, Pathétique San Francisco Symphony Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Opus 74, Pathétique PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY BORN: April 25 (old style)/May 7 (new style), 1840.

Votkinsk, in the district of Viatka, Russia, some 700 miles east-northeast of Moscow DIED: October 25/November 6, 1893. Saint Petersburg COMPOSED: Begun in February 1893, completed August 1893. The symphony is dedicated to Tchaikovsky’s nephew Vladimir (Bob) Davidov WORLD PREMIERE: October 28, 1893. Tchaikovsky conducted the first performance nine days before his death, at the Hall of Nobles, Saint Petersburg FIRST US PERFORMANCE: March 16, 1894. Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York FIRST SFS PERFORMANCE: December 8, 1911 — the first concert ever presented by the San Francisco Symphony. Henry Hadley conducted MOST RECENT SFS PERFORMANCE: April 2014.

James Conlon conducted INSTRUMENTATION: 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam [ad lib], and strings PERFORMANCE TIME: About 46 minutes At its premiere, the Pathétique was not received with contemptuous silence, like the First Piano Concerto by Tchaikovsky’s detested Brahms, nor did it elicit anything like a Sacre-sized scandale; rather, the occasion was that always depressing event, a succès d’estime. Tchaikovsky put it this way in a letter to his publisher, Piotr Jürgenson: “It is very strange about this symphony. It was not exactly a failure, but it was received with some hesitation. We can only guess at the reasons.

It is nearly impossible now to imagine encountering the Pathétique for the first time and as a new piece, but if we can make that leap we might see how an Adagio finale with a pppp close on cellos and basses alone could have been puzzling and somehow “unfinal.” Another factor would have been a weakness in the presentation. Tchaikovsky, though he lacked a performer’s temperament, had become an efficient conductor by the end of his life; he was, however, always affected by an orchestra’s mood, and the Saint Petersburg players’ initial coolness to the new score depressed him and sapped his enthusiasm for the task. At the second performance, which was under the baton of the excellent Eduard Nápravník, the Pathétique made a powerful impression. Between the two first performances of the Pathétique there was a difference beyond Nápravník’s commanding presence on the podium. Tchaikovsky had died twelve days before, and that was something the audience could not stop thinking about as they bathed in what the English writer Martin Cooper called the “voluptuous gloom” of this all but posthumous symphony.

Black drapery and a bust modeled after Tchaikovsky’s death mask heightened the atmosphere. Tchaikovsky had died of cholera. There was an epidemic in Saint Petersburg, or at least a scare, and he had drunk a glass of unboiled water, fallen ill, and died four days later. There is little concord in the various accounts of when and where Tchaikovsky made that fatal mistake. In 1979, a Russian émigré musicologist, Alexandra Orlova, published an article in the English journal Music and Letters, claiming that Tchaikovsky had committed suicide by poison on order from a “court of honor” consisting of several of his fellow alumni of the School of Jurisprudence, where the composer had studied in the 1850s. They supposedly feared disgrace to their alma mater, anticipating the disclosure of a liaison between Tchaikovsky and a young nobleman. The story gained wider circulation as Orlova published further articles, but three years later the suicide theory drew a rebuttal focusing on the shaky foundations of her account with respect to information, interpretation, and the rules of evidence.

And so we are back with that old acquaintance from so many program notes, the glass of unboiled water. At the premiere of the Pathétique, Rimsky-Korsakov asked Tchaikovsky “whether he had a program for this composition. He replied that there was one, of course, but that he did not wish to announce it.” In February 1893, Tchaikovsky had written to Bob Davidov that he was working on his new symphony with such ardor that it had taken him only four days to write the sketch of the first movement and that the rest of the score was already clearly outlined in his head. The new piece, he added, would have a program, “but a program of a kind that would remain an enigma to all — let them guess, but the symphony will just be called Program Symphony (No. 6), Symphonie à Programme (No. 6), Eine Programm Symphonie (No. 6). This program is saturated with subjective feeling, and often ... while composing it in my mind, I shed many tears. ... Do not speak of this to anyone but Modest.

The day after the premiere, Tchaikovsky decided that Program Symphony was silly as long as he did not intend to divulge the program. Modest suggested Tragic, but Piotr Ilyich was not persuaded. “Suddenly the word patetichesky came into my head,” Modest writes. “I went back and — I remember as if it were yesterday — I stood in the doorway and uttered the word. ‘Excellent, Modya, bravo, patetichesky!’ and before my eyes he wrote on the score the title by which it has since been known.” But Tchaikovsky changed his mind once again. The next day, October 30, he asked his publisher — the score with patetichesky was already on the way — “to put on the title page what stands below: To Vladimir Lvovich Davidov — No. 6 — Composed by P. T.” He added, “I hope it is not too late. Jürgenson, who knew that a good title never hurt sales, ignored the request and sent the work out into the world as Symphonie pathétique.

This title, then, which had the composer convinced for twenty-four hours anyway, did not get his final blessing. It is, however, permanently glued to the symphony and merits a moment’s consideration. Patetichesky and pathétique, as well as our own “pathetic,” all come, by way of the Latin patheticus, from the Greek patheticos and ultimately from pathos, which means “suffering.” The words do not, however, carry the same weight of meaning in these several languages. In English, we most often use the word in what dictionaries still list as its secondary meaning of “distressing and inadequate,” and its familiarity in that sense colors and trivializes our response to Modest’s title. Tchaikovsky’s biographer John Warrack emphasizes that “the Russian word ... carries more feeling of ‘passionate’ and ‘emotional’ in it than the English ‘pathetic,’ and perhaps an overtone, which has largely vanished from our word, of ...

‘suffering.’ Tchaikovsky had begun the year 1893 in some depression over the reception of The Nutcracker and his one-act opera Iolanthe, produced as a double bill at the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg in December 1892. He was also disappointed because a symphony begun the previous year had refused to jell. In addition, he was still pained by the sudden end his mysterious patroness and pen pal Nadezhda von Meck had put to their relationship two years before. On the other hand, the world sent signals of success — Corresponding Membership in the French Academy and an honorary doctorate from Cambridge — and there was the sweet pleasure of reaping greater success than Saint-Saëns at a concert they shared in London. Above all, it was the not-yet Pathétique that gave him pleasure.

As always, he had moments of doubt; in August he told Bob that the orchestration failed to realize his dreams and that he expected the work to be met with “abuse or at least misunderstanding.” But even in that letter he conceded that he was “well pleased” with the symphony’s contents, and in general his correspondence for that year indicates that he was composing with confidence and delight. “I certainly regard it as easily the best — and especially the most ‘sincere’ — of all my works, and I love it as I have never before loved one of my musical offspring,” he told Bob. To the Grand Duke Constantine he wrote, “Without exaggeration, I have put my whole soul into this work.” Even during the dispiriting rehearsals, he maintained that this was “the best thing I ever composed or ever shall compose. Tchaikovsky begins with an extraordinary sound, that of a very low bassoon solo rising through the murk of double basses divided into two sections, with violas in their most sepulchral register adding their voices to the cadences. This and the beginning of the finale, which is at precisely the same tempo, are the symphony’s slowest passages.

When this Adagio emerges into quicker motion it does so, unlike at the corresponding places in the Fourth and Fifth symphonies, in order to continue the same musical thought. Tchaikovsky stirs this nervous theme to a climax and then lovingly prepares the entrance of one his most famous — and beautiful — melodies, an utterly personal transformation of one of his favorite pieces, Don José’s Flower Aria in Carmen. He wants it played “tenderly, very songfully, and elastically.” The melody is expansively presented; then it disappears, dwindling by degrees all the way down to pppppp. The development is a fierce and accelerating storm. The recapitulation is folded into the last mutterings of this tempest and, since the nervous first theme has received much attention in the development, Tchaikovsky moves directly to the great melody, richly rescored. It is a powerfully original and effective plan, to follow an almost recklessly spacious exposition with a combined, and therefore compressed, development and recapitulation. This time the dying of the great melody leads to a solemn — and taut — coda in which a brass chorale is quietly intoned over tolling scales in plucked strings.

Tchaikovsky was a wonderful waltz composer — after his slightly older contemporary in Vienna the best of his time. He had put a real waltz into his Fifth Symphony; now he includes a curious and melancholic variant of one. His Eighteen Piano Pieces, Opus 72, written in the spring of 1893, include what he calls a Valse à cinq temps, a waltz in five beats. Here he gives us another such piece, done beautifully and with haunting grace. Each 5/4 measure is made up of two beats plus three, and you could turn the movement into a normal waltz by stretching the first beat of each measure to double its length. How does this fit into the symphony’s program? Probably not at all, except insofar as it contributes another sort of tristful climate. This atmosphere, however, vanishes with the arrival of the next movement, a brilliant scherzo, full of strange flashes and thunders, that unveils itself as a fiery march. Here we become particularly aware of Tchaikovsky’s mastery at achieving astonishing variety — and volume — with a most economically constituted orchestra.

Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies are “fate” symphonies that end in triumph, the former because the artist finds salvation in embracing the simple life, the latter because he co-opts the “fate” theme and turns it into a victory march. The march in the Pathétique offers no affirmation; it does serve to set off more bitterly the lament of the finale. The second and third movements form a double intermezzo between the movements that carry the real burden of Tchaikovsky’s patetichesky program, but it is an intermezzo of immense dramatic power. (Deryck Cooke was the first to point out that the design of the Mahler Ninth is modeled on that of the Pathétique. The two gloom-pleased composers first met in January 1888 when Tchaikovsky came to Leipzig to conduct the Gewandhaus Orchestra.) A great cry pierces the echo left by the last bang of the march. A new melody — in major — sets out to console, but its repetitions become obsessive and threatening, leading to catastrophe. From its shards there rises the first, lamenting melody.

The snarling of stopped horns and a single, soft stroke on the tam-tam are the tokens of disaster, the harbingers of defeat. The music, over a dying pulse, sinks back into that dark region where it had begun and moves beyond our hearing. Small wonder that it was a bewildering experience on October 28, 1893, and one that took on only too frightening a meaning just three weeks later. — Michael Steinberg Michael Steinberg, the San Francisco Symphony’s Program Annotator from 1979 to 1999 and contributing writer to our program book until his death in 2009, was one of the nation’s pre-eminent writers on music. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes. His books are available at the Symphony Store in Davies Symphony Hall.

More About the Music Recordings: Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov Orchestra (Philips) | Riccardo Muti conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra (EMI Seraphim) | Evgeny Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon Originals) | Georg Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (London Double Decker) Reading: Tchaikovsky, by David Brown, a multi-volume life-and-works (Norton) | Tchaikovsky Remembered, edited by Brown (Faber & Faber) | Tchaikovsky Through Others’ Eyes, edited by Alexander Poznansky (Indiana University Press) | Tchaikovsky, by Anthony Holden (Bantam) | The Music of Tchaikovsky, edited by Gerald Abraham (Norton) DVD: MTT and the SFS explore the composer and his world in Tchaikovsky and the Fourth Symphony, part of our Keeping Score series (SFS Media). Also available at keepingscore.org . (September 2015) Pyotr Tchaikovsky Pyotr Tchaikovsky Understanding the Music: Tchaikovsky - Festival Overture, 1812, Op.

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Biography Tchaikovsky was a leading Russian composer of the late 19th century, whose works are notable for their melodic inspiration and their orchestration. He is regarded as the master composer for classical ballet, as demonstrated by his scores for Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Sleeping Beauty. Among the most subjective of composers, Tchaikovsky is inseparable from his music. His work is a manifestation, sometimes charming, often showy, of repressed feelings that became more and more despairing in later years and were most fully expressed in his Sixth Symphony, one of the greatest symphonic works of its time. Though his later work rejected conscious Russian nationalism, its underlying sentiment and character are as distinctively Russian as that of the Russian nationalist composers. His success in bridging the gulf between the musician and the general public partly accounts for the position he enjoys in Russia, as well as throughout the world of music. No composer since Tchaikovsky has suffered more from changes of fashion or from the extremes of over- and under-valuation. He achieved an enormous popularity with a wide audience, largely through his more emotional works; but the almost hypnotic effect that he was able to induce led to serious questioning of his true musical quality.

He is certainly the greatest master of the classical ballet. His last three symphonies are deservedly famous, and to these should be added the neglected Manfred Symphony, the First Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto. Notable among his other orchestral works are the early Romeo and Juliet Overture and the exquisite Serenade for Strings. Of the operas, Eugene Onegin is a masterpiece and The Queen of Spades dramatically effective. His chamber music includes string quartets, solo piano music and many fine songs. Early life and education Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840, in Kamsko-Votkinsk, a small industrial town east of Moscow. His father was superintendent of government-owned mines, and his mother Alexandra was half French. Tchaikovsky was musically precocious, but his interest was not actively encouraged because his parents felt it had an unhealthy effect on an already neurotically excitable child. One night after a party, Alexandra found him awake, pointing to his forehead, and crying, "Oh this music, this music! Take it away!

It's here and it won't let me sleep!" Pyotr's father played a great variety of music on his orchestrion, a rudimentary form of a record player. After hearing tunes from the opera Don Giovanni, Pyotr became a lifelong admirer of Mozart. His childhood piano teacher was Maria Palchikova, a freed serf, and within a year he was able to play better than she could. When his father moved to Moscow and then to St. Petersburg, the boy entered the School of Jurisprudence in 1850 and quickly passed through the school's upper divisions. When he was 14 years old, Tchaikovsky' mother died of cholera. Though his musical training was informal, the boy composed a waltz for piano in her memory. After graduation, Tchaikovsky entered the Ministry of Justice in St. Petersburg as civil servant, a class of workers that represented petty officialdom and oppression to ordinary Russians. Tchaikovsky was not naturally suited to such a job but he remained at the Ministry of Justice for four years, bored but dutiful. He continued playing the piano and going to concerts.

He joined the Ministry's own choral group, and in 1861, he began to study musical theory under Nikolai Zaremba, the Head of the Russian Musical Society The pianist and composer Anton Rubenstein, who became the first director of the new St. Petersburg Music Conservatory, was the first to see real signs of talent in Tchaikovsky. When he failed to get a promotion at the Ministry, Tchaikovsky resigned and entered the St. Petersburg Music Conservatory at the age of twenty-two. He supported himself by teaching music, learned to play organ and flute, and joined the Conservatory orchestra. Tchaikovsky's first orchestral score (1864), an overture based on Aleksandr Ostrovsky's melancholy play The Storm, is remarkable in that it shows many of the stylistic features that would later be associated with his music. Rubenstein, whose tastes were formed by earlier styles, was critical of the work; he had expected Tchaikovsky's composition to be dark and dreary, Tchaikovsky instead created a colorful, dramatic piece of "program music," including unusual instruments such as the harp, oboe, and tuba.

Rubenstein was also critical of Tchaikovsky's graduation exercise, a cantata representing Schiller's Ode to Joy. The cantata was performed January 12, 1866, in the presence of a distinguished audience - but Tchaikovsky was too nervous to attend. Rubenstein threatened to withhold Tchaikovsky's diploma, but nobody could deny Pyotr's outstanding talent. In late 1865, Rubenstein's brother Nikolai, director of the newly established Moscow Conservatory offered Tchaikovsky a post as professor of harmony, five years of lodging and monetary support to Tchaikovsky. Career Tchaikovsky settled in Moscow in January 1866, although he underwent a mental crisis as a consequence of overwork on his Symphony No. 1 in G minor (Winter Daydreams), Opus 13 (1866). His compositions of the late 1860s and early '70s reveal a distinct affinity with the music of the nationalist group of composers in St. Petersburg, both in their treatment of folk song and in their harmonies deriving from a common link with Mikhail Glinka, the "father" of a Russian nationalist style.

He corresponded with the leader of the group, Mily Balakirev, at whose suggestion he wrote a fantasy overture, Romeo and Juliet (1869). Tchaikovsky's intrinsic charm is nowhere more apparent than in the nationalist comic opera Valkula the Smith (1874; first performed 1876), which in its revised form, Cherevicki (The Little Shoes), is of similar merit to another opera, Sorochintsy Fair (also based on one of Nikolay Gogol's Ukrainian tales), by the most original composer in the Petersburg group, Modest Mussorgsky. Tchaikovsky's opera, however, is much closer to Balakirev's own folkloric idiom than anything Mussorgsky wrote. After a fleeting, but unsuccessful, love affair with Désirée Artôt, the prima donna of a visiting Italian opera company, he had only one further romantic relationship with a woman. In the mid-1870s he had another nervous breakdown. One of the symptoms of this nadir in his life was almost hysterical activity in composition culminating in the Symphony No.

4 in F minor, Opus 36 (1877), and the opera Eugene Onegin (1877-78), based on a poem by Aleksandr Pushkin. He felt in such sympathy with Pushkin's heroine, Tatyana, that when a former music student, Antonina Milyukova, became infatuated with Tchaikovsky, threatening suicide should he reject her, he identified her in his mind with the cruelly spurned Tatyana and consented to marry her. Late in 1876, Tchaikovsky had begun an extraordinary correspondence with an admirer of his compositions, the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck. She created an annuity sufficient to allow Tchaikovsky to devote himself entirely to composition. By her wish, the two never met. Their intimate correspondence was more revealing of her than of Tchaikovsky. Wishing always to be liked, he was apt to write what he thought people wanted to read rather than what he really thought. The detailed program of his Fourth Symphony, which he made up especially for her, is generally regarded with circumspection.

He later averred that replying to her frequently effusive letters had become "irksome." All the same, this curious relationship apparently fulfilled a deeply felt psychological need for both, particularly for Tchaikovsky, whose wife, proving importunate even after a separation had been arranged, had to be bought off. Tchaikovsky's attempts to justify to himself her generous annuity caused him to overwork during the next few years. He composed the Piano Sonata in G major, Opus 37 (1878), the orchestral Suite No. 1 in D minor, Opus 43 (1878-79), music for the coronation of his patron the Emperor Alexander III, and the first of his mature attempts to write a commercially successful opera, The Maid of Orleans, (1878-79).

The years 1878 to 1881 also included several major achievements: the Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35 (1878), and the popular Serenade for String in C major, Opus 48 (1880); Capriccio italien, Opus 45 (1880); and the 1812 Overture, Opus 49 (1880). Eugene Onegin, which was only a token success at its Moscow premiere, enjoyed great popularity in St. Petersburg because of the emperor's admiration. The Manfred Symphony Opus 58, composed in 1885, not only called forth unstinted praise but showed in some of its histrionically despairing episodes the path that Tchaikovsky's life and music were to follow in the last years. In 1885 he bought a house at Maidanovo, near Moscow, where he lived until the year before his death, when he moved into the house that is now the Tchaikovsky House Museum in the nearby town of Klin.

He began to travel more in Russia and vacationed twice in the Caucasus. He overcame an aversion to conducting and in 1888 undertook an important and well received foreign tour, directing his own works in Leipzig (where he met the composers Johannes Brahms and Edvard Grieg), Hamburg, Berlin, Prague, Paris, and London. This tour was the apex of Tchaikovsky's later life. From then on, despite the continuing success of many of his former compositions and the acclamation of new ones, including his second Pushkin opera, The Queen of Spades, and his favorite ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, he was working his way toward another nervous breakdown. His major compositions, starting with Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Opus 64 (1888), became more and more intense and emotional, filled with both exaltation and despair. Tchaikovsky went on further tours, including to the United States and England, where he conducted his popular Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Opus 23 (composed 1874-75), in 1889 and his Fourth Symphony in 1893.

In 1893 Cambridge University awarded him an honorary doctor of music degree. These and other successes, including the tumultuous reception accorded to the suite he hastily made for concert performance from his Nutcracker ballet music (1892), did not alter the inexorable decline in his mental condition, which was aggravated in 1890 when Nadezhda von Meck suddenly ended both their correspondence and the annuity. From a financial standpoint this hardly mattered, because the royalties from The Queen of Spades covered the loss without difficulty, and he was by this time a recipient of a state pension. Tchaikovsky never forgave her, and the nature of the psychological wound it inflicted upon him can be judged by the fact that in the delirium of his last illness he repeated her name again and again in indignant tones. In August 1893 Tchaikovsky completed his Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 74 (Pathétique) which was his last and which he rightfully regarded as a masterpiece. On October 28 he conducted its first performance in St. Petersburg.

Its novel slow finale could hardly have been expected to induce such applause as had greeted, only 18 months earlier, the premiere of the lighter Nutcracker Suite. Into this work, with its "secret" program, he had put his whole soul. Tchaikovsky was devastated by the public response. On November 2, 1893-six days after the premiere-he died. Excerpted from an essay by Maros Gazdarica: Compositions "Bluebird" Pas de Deux from Act III of The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66 "The Voyevoda" 1812 Overture, Op. 49 Eugene Onegin, Lyric Scenes in Three Acts (Libretto by the composer and Konstatin Shilovsky, after Pushkin), Op. 24 Eugene Onegin Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32 Hamlet, Fantasy Overture after Shakespeare, Op. 67 Lensky's Aria (arranged for cello & orchestra) Manfred, Symphonic Poem after Byron The Nutcracker Suite, No. 1 The Seasons Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23 Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50 Symphony No.

1 in G minor, Op. 13 "Winter Dreams" Symphony No. 2 in C minor, Op. 17 (Little Russian) Symphony No. 3 "Polish" Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Path&#233tique, Op. 74 Valse-Scherzo, Op. 34 Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.6 in B minor, Op.74 Pathetique, Swan Lake - Microsoft Store Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.6 in B minor, Op.74 Pathetique, Swan Lake 2007 • 9 songs • Classical • Orchestral / Instrumental • EMI Classics Buy album £3.99 6. Swan Lake - Ballet Suite Op.20 (1991 Digital Remaster): Waltz in A major (Act 1) (1991 Digital Remaster) Play 7.

Swan Lake - Ballet Suite Op.20 (1991 Digital Remaster): Dance of the Little Swans (Act 2) (1991 Digital Remaster) Play 8. Swan Lake - Ballet Suite Op.20 (1991 Digital Remaster): Introduction to Scene and Second Dance of the Queen of the Swans (Act 2) (1991 Digital Remaster) (C) 2007 EMI Records Ltd Format MP3 MP3 download When you buy an album or a song, you can also download it on Android, Windows 10, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. More from Herbert Von Karajan Symphony No. 6 in B minor… | Details | AllMusic google+ Description by Roger Dettmer Tchaikovsky composed this music between February and August 1893, and conducted the first performance on October 28 of that year in St. Petersburg.

Already in 1890 Tchaikovsky had written to his patroness of 13 years, Nadezhda von Meck, about a possible "program symphony." By 1893 he was ready to follow through on the idea, dedicated to his nephew Vladimir Davidov, the "Bobyk" (or "Bob") of many diary-entries and letters during the 1880s. After a successful premiere, however, he was not satisfied with Program Symphony (No. 6) on the title page. Several days later Modest suggested "patetichesky," which in Russian means "1, enthusiastic, passionate; 2, emotional; and 3, bombastic" (rather than "pathetic" or "arousing pity," as in English). Pyotr Il'yich was delighted by the suggestion: "Excellent, Modya , bravo, patetichesky!" He wrote this onto the score, and sent it the same day to his publisher, Jurgenson. Two days later, however, he had qualms and asked Jurgenson to suppress subtitles -- to issue the work simply as Symphony No. 6, dedicated to Bobyk.

One week later, he was dead. As for Jurgenson, he could not resist the opportunity in 1893 to publish No. 6, in elegant Lingua Franca, as Symphonie pathétique. The sobriquet has stuck ever since. During the work's incubation Tchaikovsky was in rare good spirits, pleased with his boldness and fluency, especially in the trailblazing finale, a drawn-out Adagio of funereal character. Where others still wrote conventional slow movements, he hit on the idea of "a limping waltz" in 5/4 time. And he made the scherzo a march that builds to such a pitch of excitement that audiences ever since, everywhere, applaud at the end. A lugubrious Adagio prologue begins with a bassoon solo in E minor that makes its way upward through the murk of divisi string basses, followed by a nervous little motif that blossoms into the main theme of an Allegro ma non troppo sonata-structure in B minor. The memorably sighing, mauve-hued melody that dominates this movement is actually its secondary subject.

A crashing orchestral tutti sets up the passionately agitated development section, followed by a condensed reprise and a brief, calmed coda. Tchaikovsky 's marking for this D major "waltz" movement is Allegro con grazia -- a song and trio with extended coda whose mood may be wistful, even melancholic midway, but whose spirit is balletic, to the extent of echoing Nutcracker's "Waltz of the Flowers," composed a year earlier. The March-Scherzo, Allegro molto vivace in common time, has an elfin character at the start. It is a sonatina (exposition and reprise without development) that quick-steps to an explosive climax but always returns to tonic G major. Another sonatina (symphonic developments were Tchaikovsky 's bête noire) is anchored in B minor, although the tragic second theme enters in D major. The overall mood is inconsolably grieving, but not "pathetic." Ultimately, the music returns to those murky depths in which the symphony was born some 40 minutes earlier -- without, however, benediction or hope.

Parts/Movements The ‘Pathétique’: Tchaikovsky takes us on a journey from darkness to darkness - Classic FM Classic FM Guides Now Playing The ‘Pathétique’: Tchaikovsky takes us on a journey from darkness to darkness 12 July 2013, 09:40 TCHAIKOVSKY - Symphony no6 (Pathetique) - Herbert von Karajan & Wiener Phil 46:48 Tchaikovsky thought his Symphony No. 6 was the best thing he'd ever written - but this masterpiece was unremittingly bleak. All of Tchaikovsky's symphonies are mini-dramas in both human and musical terms - and that was always the composer's intention. Writing to his favourite pupil, Sergei Taneyev, Tchaikovsky said: "I should be sorry if symphonies that mean nothing should flow from my pen... Shouldn’t a symphony reveal those wordless urges that hide in the heart, asking earnestly for expression?" 22 inspiring composer quotes > Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6, known as the 'Pathétique', is nothing if not revealing about his emotional struggles against what he saw as hostile forces.

It’s clear from the opening moments in the dark key of B minor, that this is a lament – although Tchaikovsky never gives us any details about the heartfelt loss for which he grieves. When asked about the programme or meaning behind his symphony, he said: "Let them puzzle their heads over it." But he did admit that the "programme is subjective through and through, and during my journey I often wept bitterly while composing it in my head." Completed in 1893, the symphony's four movements buck the trend of the romantic symphonies of the time. If you started in a minor key, convention had it that the symphony should move from darkness to light - in other words, it would finish in a major key. But Tchaikovsky’s musical journey from darkness to darkness leaves you exposed to his bleak despair by stubbornly staying where it began. Along the way, there are quotes from the Russian Requiem service in the first movement, then attempts at a waltz in the second in a fleeting attempt to lift the mood.

The march of the third movement hints at perseverance and even success with a triumphal end, but ultimately the composer’s overwhelming despair and resignation takes over for the final movement. But it’s not all gloom and doom! It seems Tchaikovsky was happiest when he was composing the saddest of music, and in a letter to his nephew he declared that this symphony was the best thing he’d composed. He must have been disappointed by the cool reception he got when he conducted the premiere in October 1893, but it’s the events that followed that add an unbearable sense of tragedy and foreboding to the music. With St. Petersburg in the grip of cholera, he drank unboiled water, and was dead within four days. The stories and speculation which surround the circumstances of Tchaikovsky’s death are for another day, and it was left to the composer’s brother Modest to add the most fitting of titles, 'Pathétique'. Latest on Classic FM

Question: What is the popular name of Tchaikovsky's Symphony no.6 in B minor?
Answer: Pathetique