Symphony guide: Tchaikovsky's Sixth ('Pathetique')

Let’s get this clear: Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony is not a musical suicide note, it’s not a piece written by a composer who was dying, it’s not the product of a musician who was terminally depressed about either his compositional powers or his personal life, and it’s not the work of a man who could go no further, musically speaking. It shouldn’t even be called the Pathétique, strictly speaking, with its associations of a particularly aestheticised kind of melancholy. Tchaikovsky himself, having supposedly approved his brother’s Russian word Патетическая (“Patetitčeskaja”) for the work (a better translation of which is “passionate” in English), and having decided against calling the piece “A Programme Symphony”, sent his publisher the instructions that it was simply his Sixth Symphony in B Minor, dedicated to his nephew Bob Davydov. That’s how the piece appeared when Tchaikovsky himself conducted the premiere in St Petersburg on 28 October 1893. It was only in its first posthumous performance, three weeks later, that it was called the “Pathétique”, a moniker that has stuck ever since.

Instead, the Sixth Symphony is a vindication of Tchaikovsky’s powers as a composer. It is the piece that he described many times in letters as “the best thing I ever composed or shall compose”, a work whose existence proved to him that he had found a way out of a symphonic impasse, which represented a return to the heights of his achievement as a composer – away from what he thought of as the numbing, written-by-numbers populism of his ballet The Nutcracker or the trivial “pancakes” of the piano pieces he was also writing in 1893 – and brought a deep, personal satisfaction that he hadn’t felt in years. Having recently sent the score of the Sixth Symphony to his publisher, his brother remembered “I had not seen him so bright for a long time past”.

And yet the Sixth Symphony is about death. It’s the fulfilment and tranfiguration of a programme that Tchaikovsky had sketched for a Symphony in E Flat Major that he discarded in 1892 (whose first movement he reworked as his Third Piano Concerto). “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).” While that isn’t a precise description of what became the Sixth Symphony, in the broadest sense of a symphony whose final image is of musical, emotional, and physical collapse – as it is in the Sixth’s Adagio lamentoso fourth movement – there is a clear connection. It’s also the closest we have to a revelation of the programme behind the Sixth Symphony, which Tchaikovsky told his beloved nephew Bob was there in the music, but which would remain a secret.

But frankly, there’s no need for the divulging of anything more programmatically specific. That this is a piece about a struggle between the life-force and an inevitable descent to an exhausted physical and emotional demise is obvious to anyone who has heard it and lived through it. This symphony finally faces the fate that stalks Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies (the motto themes of both symphonies stand for the destiny of their symphonic heroes) but which their frenetic, bombastic concluding movements attempt to dodge. In the Sixth, Tchaikovsky meets that inexorable descent head-on, and in so doing he creates a new shape for the symphony, in one of the most audacious and boldest compositional moves of the 19^th century. That slow, lamenting finale turns the entire symphonic paradigm on its head, and changes at a stroke the possibility of what a symphony could be: instead of ending in grand public joy, the Sixth Symphony closes with private, intimate, personal pain.

Which might have some saying: Exactly! That’s why this symphony is a reflection of Tchaikovsky’s autobiography! He must have been depressed/suicidal/about to become the victim of an anti-homosexual secret court (one of the more recent and most ludicrous theories behind Tchaikovsky’s death on 5 November 1893, nine days after he had premiered the Sixth Symphony) to have composed this! And there’s more: the Russian Orthodox Requiem chant even makes a blatant appearance in one of the most dramatic coups-de-théâtre in the first movement! You see? He knew he was dying!

To which the only possible rejoinder is: I’m afraid that’s nonsense. To take some examples from elsewhere in musical history: many of Rachmaninov’s pieces are haunted by the Dies Irae plainchant, that symbolic intonation of impending fate, and yet even after writing a piece called The Isle of the Dead, he kept on living; Berlioz’s music too is full of intimations of mortality, but he kept going for decades after dreaming of his own execution in his Fantastic Symphony; Beethoven didn’t expire after just after he faced the limits of human mortality in the Missa Solemnis; and even Mahler remained alive just after he had just crossed the border into silence at the end of his Ninth Symphony. In fact, if every composer, author, painter, or poet had died after making their greatest works about death, none of them would have been around for very long. It is pure, tragic coincidence that Tchaikovsky should die of cholera a few days after conducting the Sixth Symphony at the age of just 53 – a piece, to reiterate, that he actually composed in good mental and physical health – but that’s all it is. We do this symphony a terrible injustice if we only see and hear it through the murky prism of myth, story, and half-truth that now swirls around accounts of what happened in the composer’s final days.

So yes, this symphony is about a battle between a stubborn life-energy and an ultimately stronger force of oblivion that ends up in a terrifying exhaustion, but what makes the piece so powerful is that it’s about all of us, not just Tchaikovsky. And that’s because of how Tchaikovsky makes the musical and symphonic drama of the piece work. So when you’re listening to the performances below, hear instead how the cry of pain that is the climax of the first movement is a musical premonition of the inexorably descending scales of the last movement, and how the second movement makes its five-in-a-bar dance simultaneously sound like a crippled waltz and a memory of a genuinely sensual joy. Listen to how the March of the third movement creates a seething superficial motion that doesn’t actually go anywhere, musically speaking, and whose final bars create one of the greatest, most thrilling, but most empty of victories in musical history, at the end of which audiences often clap helplessly, thinking they have arrived at the conventionally noisy end of a symphonic journey. But then we’re confronted with the devastating lament of the real finale, that Adagio lamentoso, which begins with a composite melody that is shattered among the whole string section (no single instrumental group plays the tune you actually hear, an amazing, pre-modernist idea), and which ends with those low, tolling heartbeats in the double-basses that at last expire into silence.

That silence was its own kind of victory for Tchaikovsky. He knew this piece marked a new high-watermark in his confidence as a composer, and that he had re-invented the symphony on his own terms, and for so many composers who came after him. Mahler, Shostakovich, Sibelius, and many others could not have composed the symphonies they did without the example of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth. It’s just a terrible fluke of fate that this was his last symphony, and not the beginning of what could have been his most exciting creative period as a composer.

Five key recordings

Evgeny Mravinsky/Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra: perhaps the most unflinchingly intense recording ever made of this symphony.

Mikhail Pletnev/Russian National Orchestra: Pletnev’s interpretative imagination blazingly illuminates Tchaikovsky’s unique symphonic structure.

Valery Gergiev/Kirov Orchestra: one of the most white-hot of Gergiev’s recordings - and therefore, one of the most white-hot recordings, ever!

Andris Nelsons/City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra: the pick of recent recordings, with Nelsons’s in-the-moment brilliance and the CBSO’s collective virtuosity.

Paul Kletzki/Philharmonia Orchestra: apologies for the sentimentality, since it’s hard to get hold of now, but this is the - I think! - fantastically emotionally raw recording I grew up with, and which still defines the piece for me – it might for you, too.

Myung-Whun Chung conducts Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra on 27 August at the Proms.