Conflict suppression
Following the completion of the Fourth's subtle psychography, eleven years would pass before Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikowsky would return to the composition of a 'purely' symphonic work – the Fifth Symphony (the composer considered his mighty Manfred Symphony dating from 1885 as his only explicitly programmatic symphony). And, despite having just returned from a spectacularly received European concert tour, he commenced the project in a state of complete exhaustion, self-doubt and uncertainty. From his new country residence in Klin, he wrote in the spring of 1888: "I frequently have doubts about my own abilities and wonder if it is not time to stop, and if my creativity has not been stretched to the limit." His comments in a letter to his benefactor, Nadeshda von Meck, in June, are similar; he fears that "the well may be dry." However, once he has for the first time made mention of the new Fifth Symphony, inspiration appears to return surprisingly quickly: in a matter of less than eight weeks, Tchaikowsky can report to von Meck that the work has been completed. In all, he had required only four weeks to sketch the work and three to orchestrate it; he conducted its world premiere on 5 November 1888 in St Petersburg.
As with the Fourth, fate also determines the discourse of the Fifth, here, however, more as a poetic idea or predominating common thread than as a concretely formulated programme for the listener. Tchaikowsky himself regarded the symphonic medium as "the most lyrical of all musical forms," endowed with "incomparably richer expressive means and a finer language for rendering the movements of the soul [than poetry itself]." In creating the work's lyrical tapestry, Tchaikowsky's draws on his enormous powers of melodic invention (Stravinsky would later go so far as to call him a "creator of melody"). In this sense, the Fifth is anything but a programmatic symphony, but rather an entirely autonomous, absolute work of instrumental composition.
The symphony opens with a slow introduction, with the 'fate theme' in the bottom register of the clarinets. The downward theme shows, as the composer wrote in a notebook, "a complete and utter surrender to Fate, or to what is effectively the same thing: the imponderable will of Providence." Even more crucial to the further course of the work than this 'semantic' consideration, however, is the fact that the motto-like fate theme plays a decisive, albeit in each case individualised, role in each movement, such that the andante introduction functions, through to the symphony's conclusion, like a motivic link. The Allegro of the first movement is characterised by a dotted, restless principal theme, once again introduced by a clarinet (doubled by a bassoon), before it is intensified by the strings and a cantabile secondary theme arises in the violins. Classical thematic development, in particular that of the initial motif of the principal theme, dominates the development section. Following the 'rulebook' recapitulation and the coda, the movement fades out in pianissimo. - The slow movement, a tripartite Andante cantabile characterised by an emphasis on the lyrical and a preoccupation with melody as such, is one of the movements that have occasioned severe criticism of Tchaikowsky amongst German-language commentators. It prompted Theodor W. Adorno, who compared it with the music used to accompany silent films and even characterised it as kitsch, to accuse Tchaikowsky of emotional overstatement. Also with regard to the movement, German-speaking critics often failed to differentiate between art and biography, eliciting the following emphatic defence from Tchaikowsky: "The life of an artist is a double one, consisting both of a life like everyone else's and one of an artistic nature. [...] Anyone who thinks that, in the moment of an emotion, the creative artist is capable of expressing what he feels in his art, is mistaken." Before the backdrop of the seeming idyll of the impassioned horn melody accompanied by the oboe's counter-voice, in the middle section, the fate theme 'barges in' twice with primordial power. - The third movement is a tuneful waltz in A major, which already presages the ballet, Sleeping Beauty, whose composition Tchaikowsky commenced immediately following his completion of the Fifth. It is imbued with an elegant, albeit fragmented, French ambiance, into which the fate theme, in the clarinets and bassoons, once again masochistically storms close to the movement's conclusion. - The finale opens with a slow introduction (analogous to that of the first movement), in which the fate theme, now for the first time in the major mode, is announced assertively and in an almost hymnal guise. Together with the march-like principal theme of the movement, it determines the formal sequence of events in it. Tchaikowsky introduces ever new variants of these themes, at times shrouding his material in the minor or illuminating it in the major, at times intensifying the tempo. At the end of the recapitulation, the fate theme takes an unexpected turn to the minor. The discourse progresses toward a general pause. The work's motto then once again appears, with finality, in the strings, before the glare of the brass, and the first movement's principal theme as well, are added. This centrifugal, blaring, hollowly jubilant, indeed noisy and downright garish conclusion has been a perennial object of controversy in the literature, where it has been hotly discussed. Within this context, Russologue Sigrid Neef offers the following stimulating thesis: "[...] this is an extremely violent sort of jubilation – an 'outside' is placed over an 'inside' and conventionality triumphs. No resolution to the stated conflicts has been attained, but rather, only their suppression. As in Tchaikowsky's life, so also in his art."
In addition to his six symphonies and the Manfred Symphony, Tchaikowsky was also the creator of several magnificent tone poems. In composing programmatic works, his aim was not the elaboration of a literary programme or the detailed representation of plot, but rather, it was the psyches of the figures of a literary work, their character development or, often, the emotional dead ends and upheavals into which they navigated or were drawn, that fascinated him. As reading material on his journey to the world premiere of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung in 1876, Tchaikowsky took with him Dante's Divine Comedy. One of the work's episodes must have made a particularly deep impression upon him, namely that concerning the unhappy and ill-fated love of Francesca da Polenta for her brother-in-law, a story which ends with the violent death of the lovers. The tone poem in three parts, Francesca da Rimini, was composed in Moscow 1876 and premiered in that city on 25 February 1877 under the baton of Nikolai Rubinstein. Whilst a type of motto theme pervades throughout the tone poem, it outer portions are devoted to a musical evocation of the agonies of hellfire. In particular the work's beginning is extremely radical, glaring, and dissonant in character. Here, continual repetition of the piece's highly chromatic material conveys the unending tortures of Hell. The following middle portion tells of the love between Francesca and her brother-in-law, Paolo. Love themes intoned by clarinet and strings form the basis of the lyrical narrative, which is brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of Francesca's husband, announced by horn calls. The pair's doom is sealed. In the third and closing portion, the music falls back into the infernal torments of the first, before it is the turn of the percussion to underscore the eternal atonement of the damned with brutal ferocity.

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