After the first performance of Symphony No.3 one critic wrote: “…though from Mr Tchaikovsky we have a right to expect something more”. Barely two years later, he delivered; this Fourth is no less than a cracking masterpiece, one of the stable and most popular warhorses in the entire orchestral repertoire. A lot had happened to Tchaikovsky in those two years: he had been befriended by the extraordinary, kind and sympathetic rich widow Mme. Nadezhda von Meck, who granted him a substantial annuity enabling him to devote himself entirely to composition and to whom this first new symphony is dedicated. But the turbulence of the symphony, with its insistent ‘Fate’ motif, reflects the events of that crisis year 1877: the desperate, insoluble conflict of his life was that the comforts of steady normality for which he longed were absolutely incompatible with his homosexuality, and as the sketches for the symphony were approaching completion he was – crazily – persuading himself to go ahead and get married to a poor young student who had written to him with a passionate declaration of love. The outcome was of course disastrous, but by that time the music of the symphony was essentially finished. Tchaikovsky entrusted its first performance, in Moscow in February 1878, to Nikolai Rubinstein, “the only conductor in the world I can rely on”, but in the end the symphony was inadequately rehearsed and indifferently performed, and had to await its St Petersburg premiere in November, under Nápravník, for the triumphant success it deserved.

sources

A  Autograph manuscript (1877), in the Russian National Museum of Music, Moscow, viewable online at IMSLP

E  First edition score, published by P. Jurgenson, Moscow in 1880

Br  Full score and parts, published by Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig c.1946, reprinted by Dover; score has bar numbers, parts originally not, but in the Wiesbaden reprint they are added

Um  Urtext score, published in 1949 by State Music Publishers, Moscow as part of the Soviet Tchaikovsky Complete Edition