Rediscovering Tchaikovsky’s sublime Symphony No. 5

I was thrown back in time recently, through music, while attending the San Francisco Symphony. The piece in question was a perennial crowd-pleasing warhorse, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Now, if you’re thinking, “been there, done that,” yeah, so was I. I’d chosen the symphony program not for the Tchaikovsky but for the opening work, Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor. I love this concerto and it was as sumptuous and stunning as I’d hoped. During intermission, in fact, I wistfully concluded that the night’s best music was behind me.

Here’s why: Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 was one of my earliest classical-music obsessions as a teen, my raging hormones a perfect match for the music’s powerful emotional charge. My dad would play it on the living room stereo at night while he settled down to read, and it would draw me out and into the living room like the Pied Piper’s flute. Eventually my dad made me a cassette recording and from then on, I could binge-listen to my heart’s content. And oh, the emotions it produced.

That cassette went off to college with me. Upon graduation, we both went over to Africa for the Peace Corps. Four years later the cassette made the trek with me from my native Kansas to my new home in California. Eventually, though, cassette tapes were overtaken by CDs and, as I matured, a broader expanse of the classical-music world revealed itself to me. I remained partial to Tchaikovsky, discovering his Symphony No. 1, “Winter Daydreams,” which stole my heart. So did his No. 2, “Little Russian.” (Thank you, Michael Tilson Thomas, for programming both of these underperformed gems during your tenure.) Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. His string sextet, “Souvenir de Florence”). His piano concertos. It shocks me to consider how long it’s been (years–decades even) since I’d given Symphony No. 5 a good listen or sought it out in the concert hall.

I thought I was through with it. I thought I’d moved on.

I’d thought wrong.

From the moment of hearing those opening notes, everything in me scrambled and resettled, catapulting me back to 1978. Then, like now, it amazed me how immersive it all was, from the moment the clarinets, accompanied by the softest of strings, set off on their journey, like an enormous ship leaving the pier on a foggy, overcast day and you, the passenger, are not even sure you’re moving until you see the pier silently slipping away. It’s not until three minutes in, via the strings and bassoons introducing a new musical theme, that you feel the ship really take off, chugging out of the harbor and into full-fledged transportation.

Speaking of being transported, hold on tight when listening to the second movement. The “Andante Cantabile” seizes you, reaches inside to grab your heart and just doesn’t let go. Listening, I became that 16-year-old all over again, so hungry to experience love and passion yet caught in the teen awkwardness of glasses, braces, gangly body parts and an inability to put into words the poetry churning inside me. The music said it all. It was everything to me back then. It was art and passion and yearning incarnate. And here I was now, a world-weary, less sentimental (or so I thought) 60-ish year-old, trying to keep my expression composed as the tears dribbled down my cheeks, wishing I’d thought to pull out Kleenex from my bag in advance. Silly me, to have assumed a live performance of Symphony No. 5 wouldn’t faze me.

Now’s a good time to give it a listen.

The second movement’s solo horn that follows an introduction from the strings section delivers a beautiful, wistful  melody. A clarinet joins in. An oboe. More strings. A bassoon. All of it like honey being poured into a bowl, the mass of it slowly rising to culminate in an incredibly full sound. When all the musical voices are crescendoing, accompanied by kettledrum rolls, it’s like a transcendent power has swept through the concert hall and lifted us out of our seats.

Pretty sensational stuff. So’s the final movement.

I’ve blogged about Tchaikovsky and his music in the past, HERE and HERE, so I won’t repeat myself. But in a nutshell, Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840, to a prosperous family in provincial Votkinsk, Russia. At age ten, he was sent off to boarding school in St. Petersburg, much to his horror (he was sensitive, prone to hysteria, deeply attached to his mother). Surviving the experience, he then attended university to study law, as there were no conservatories in Russia to study the music he infinitely preferred. University degree in hand, he found employment as a government clerk, which he found relentlessly dull. When, a few years later, composer and famed pianist Anton Rubinstein founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music, Tchaikovsky quit the clerk job without a backward glance to become one of the Conservatory’s first students. The rest, as they say, is history.

Throughout his life, Tchaikovsky never lost his sensitivity, emotionality and theatrical nature. He grappled continually with his homosexuality, taking pains to keep it hidden, even going so far as to marry a determinedly enamored (and neurotic) student of his, Antonina Milyukova, an act he instantly regretted, one that nearly drove him to suicide until his family stepped in to rescue him after three months. Another woman soon stepped in to rescue him too—this time financially. Nadezhda von Meck, a fabulously wealthy widow of 46, greatly admired his music and offered to subsidize him as he composed, a situation that plucked him from the grind of a salaried job, into a well-padded paradise. The best part: the only stipulation, von Meck wrote, was that they never meet, and only correspond via letters. Tchaikovsky must have felt like he’d found the Holy Grail.

Wikipedia has tons to say about Tchaikovsky’s symphonies HERE. It’s fascinating to read. That was the problem, I found, in more deeply researching the man and his work. There’s tons to read, which risks turning a project into a black hole for writers. (Surely I’m not the only one who finds it infinitely easier to read words, pages, chapters, instead of creating them.) And yet, there’s so much to say and know about Tchaikovsky. Some listeners worship his music. Others find it too over-the-top. Jan Swafford in The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, offers an elegant, distilled analysis of the perennial allure of Tchaikovsky and his work.

“[Tchaikovsky] prospers partly because in the long run he transcends his faults; he recognized and struggled tenaciously against them, with some success. His musical hero, surprisingly enough, was Mozart; perhaps this enabled him to keep a bit of Classical rein on his rampaging passions. But clearly, heart-on-sleeve emotion is his main stock-in-trade. In his music and his life, Tchaikovsky was the archetypical Russian artist; a hectic blend of spiritual aspiration and extravagant self-indulgence, a saint and a charlatan, self-inflated and self-loathing, fatalistic and more than a little mad.”

If you are that “been there, done that” type about Tchaikovsky’s symphonies and his ballet music (The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty), give this “Best of Tchaikovsky — Classical Music Gems” a listen. It’s a nice wide variety of Tchaikovskian flavors, and includes quite a few of the lesser-known works I’ve come to know and love over the past few decades.