THE FLORIDA ORCHESTRA | 2017-2018 51
Program Notes
movement. The first six notes of the clarinet in the movement
(marked Andante Semplice) are played moderately slowly
and simply — it is a child’s melody, sung over and over, by
Cole Carsan St. Clair, the son of Susan and Pacific Symphony
Music Director Carl St. Clair, who died in 1999 at the age
of eighteen months. Elegiac in places, the movement is
intended as a celebration of Cole’s enduring life force and
spirit, ending in a six-part round as a group of children might
sing. I’m honored to dedicate this movement to the memory
of Cole Carsan St. Clair.
“The stillness at the end of the second movement is broken
by the energetic ascending violin solo that begins the third
movement. I had come across a poetry collection by Charles
Bukowski called The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the
Hills. That line resonated with me and was the inspiration for
the third movement.”
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
SYMPHONY NO. 4 IN F MINOR, OP. 36
Duration: ca. 45 minutes
Overview
The Fourth Symphony was a product of the most crucial
and turbulent time of Tchaikovsky’s life — 1877, when he
met two women who forced him to evaluate himself as he
never had before. The first was the sensitive, music-loving
widow of a wealthy Russian railroad baron, Nadezhda von
Meck, who became not only his personal confidante but also
the financial backer who allowed him to quit his irksome
teaching job at the Moscow Conservatory to devote himself
entirely to composition. Though they never met, her place in
Tchaikovsky’s life was enormous and beneficial.
The second woman to enter Tchaikovsky’s life in 1877 was
Antonina Miliukov, an unnoticed student in one of his large
lecture classes at the Conservatory who had worked herself
into a passion over her professor. Tchaikovsky paid her no
special attention, and he had quite forgotten her when he
received an ardent love letter professing her flaming and
unquenchable desire to meet him. Tchaikovsky (age 37),
who should have burned the thing, answered the letter of
the 28-year-old Antonina in a polite, cool fashion, but did not
include an outright rejection of her advances. He had been
considering marriage for almost a year in the hope that it
would give him both the stable home life he had not enjoyed
in the twenty years since his mother died, as well as to help
dispel the all-too-true rumors of his homosexuality. He
believed he might achieve both these goals with Antonina.
What a welter of emotions must have gripped his heart when,
a few weeks later, he proposed marriage to her! Inevitably,
the marriage crumbled within days of the wedding amid
Tchaikovsky’s searing self-deprecation.
It was during May and June that Tchaikovsky sketched the
Fourth Symphony, finishing the first three movements before
Antonina began her siege. The finale was completed by the
time he proposed. Because of that chronology, the program
of the Symphony was not a direct result of his marital
disaster. All that — the July wedding, the mere eighteen days
of bitter conjugal farce, the two separations — postdated the
actual composition of the Symphony by a few months. What
Tchaikovsky found in his relationship with this woman (who
by 1877 already showed signs of approaching the door of the
mental ward in which, still legally married to him, she died
in 1917) was a confirmation of his belief in the inexorable
workings of Fate in human destiny.
What To Listen For
Tchaikovsky wrote of the Fourth Symphony: “The
introduction blaring brasses heard in a motto theme that
recurs throughout the Symphony represents Fate, which
hinders one in the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing
to do but to submit and vainly complain the melancholy,
syncopated shadow-waltz of the main theme. Would it
not be better to turn away from reality and lull one’s self in
dreams? The second theme is begun by the clarinet. But
no — these are but dreams: roughly we are awakened by
Fate. A brass fanfare begins the development. The second
movement shows how sad it is that so much has already been
and gone! In the third movement are capricious arabesques,
vague figures that slip into the imagination when one is
slightly intoxicated. Military music is heard in the distance. If
you find no pleasure in yourself go to the people, so the finale
based on the traditional song A Birch Stood in the Meadow
pictures a folk holiday.”
© 2018 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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