Tchaikovsky’s Fourth symphony is among the most popular and most frequently-performed orchestral works in the canon, and it’s fashionable to spend a lot of time and energy trying to describe what it is “about”. During the Soviet era there was an official line which was largely accepted without question in the West. Tchaikovsky was portrayed as a closeted, self-hating homosexual who tried to “go straight” by entering into a marriage with a suicidal nymphomaniac. This official line continues with Tchaikovsky attempting suicide soon after his marriage and pouring out his terror and turmoil in this symphony and the opera Yevgeny Onegin.

With the fall of the USSR in 1991 and the opening up of Russian archives to musicologists, not to mention a more humane view of homosexuality, a more accurate picture of Tchaikovsky’s emotional state at the time of the Fourth symphony has emerged. Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality was an open secret in a Russia where attitudes to sexuality were much more relaxed than they were in, say, England at the time. He certainly wasn’t the only known homosexual in the Russian artistic world of his day.

The available evidence indicates that Tchaikovsky’s marriage in July 1877 to Antonina Milyukova was not some pathetic attempt to become heterosexual but rather a means – not uncommon today – of maintaining a veneer of social conformity. He made it quite clear to Antonina that their relationship would be platonic, something she accepted, and there is also evidence that Tchaikovsky married her in consideration of a sizeable inheritance she would shortly receive. (He wouldn’t have been the first man to have done that, either.) On the other hand, there is no evidence that Tchaikovsky attempted suicide shortly after his marriage. It is true that he realised within a few days that the marriage was a mistake, but his letters to his brothers make it clear that the mistake was on cultural grounds – they came from very different backgrounds – and not some sort of sexual horror.

In the 16 years between the end of their brief marriage and Tchaikovsky’s death, Antonina was in a relationship with another man and bore three children. Her mental instability didn’t develop until after the composer’s death. 

So what is the Fourth symphony “about” if not post-marital trauma? At the request of his patron Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky provided a guide to the symphony’s emotional journey, and it’s true that it describes various emotional states, including despair. But the symphony isn’t written in some sort of secret code which displays Tchaikovsky’s emotions, whatever they were. Rather, as he himself pointed out, the symphony follows a similar course to that of Beethoven’s Fifth: Fate is presented, experienced and dealt with within the formal structure of a symphony and not in the freer, more personal and less-structured context of a symphonic poem, for example. Beethoven’s Fifth moves from darkness to light; Tchaikovsky’s Fourth does the same.

Tchaikovsky’s Fourth is personal because of its approach to form and not because of mental stress. It’s perhaps vital to remember that the first three movements of the symphony were completed by early May, 1877, two months before his marriage in July. The finale was finished around the start of June, and the orchestration completed over the ensuing months.

So what are we to make of Tchaikovsky’s description of the symphony which he provided for Von Meck? For a start, it was written at her request (the woman who paid his bills). It was also written for her eyes only.

As such, I think Tchaikovsky’s so-called “program” for the Fourth should not be taken as gospel. The circumstances of its creation make it, at the very least, suspect. If Tchaikovsky’s separation from Antonina was simply over incompatibility, then there were no great traumas or horrors which needed exorcising, let alone subjects requiring expression in a symphony. And even though the Fate motif reappears in the finale, it doesn’t have the last word; 
the music of rejoicing does.