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Symphony No. 6 in B Minor: Op. 74 "Pathetique"
The brooding melancholy that pervades many of Tchaikovsky's compositions is perhaps most concentrated in his Symphony No. 6, the "Pathétique," a remarkably innovative, highly personal, and deeply emotional work. A perennial concert favorite since its premiere in 1893, this symphony is also characterized by two of the composer's most consistent and memorable his effortless melodic invention and superb orchestration.
This miniature-score edition of the work is complete in all respects, containing the original instrumentation with bar-numbered movements. Reproduced from the authoritative Breitkopf & Härtel edition, it is ideal for study in the classroom, at home, or in the concert hall — an affordable, high-quality, conveniently sized volume that will be the edition of choice for music students and music lovers alike.
This miniature-score edition of the work is complete in all respects, containing the original instrumentation with bar-numbered movements. Reproduced from the authoritative Breitkopf & Härtel edition, it is ideal for study in the classroom, at home, or in the concert hall — an affordable, high-quality, conveniently sized volume that will be the edition of choice for music students and music lovers alike.
- GenresMusic
176 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1985
7 people want to read
About the author
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1,875 books67 followersPyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (Russian: Петр Ильич Чайковский) was a Russian composer of the Romantic era. While not part of the nationalistic music group known as "The Five", Tchaikovsky wrote music which was distinctly Russian: plangent, introspective, with modally-inflected melody and harmony.
Tchaikovsky considered himself a professional composer. He felt his professionalism in combining skill and high standards in his musical works separated him from his colleagues in "The Five." He shared several of their ideals, including an emphasis on national character in music. His aim, however, was linking those ideals with a professional standard high enough to satisfy European criteria. His professionalism also fueled his desire to reach a broad public, not just nationally but internationally, which he would eventually do.
Tchaikovsky considered himself a professional composer. He felt his professionalism in combining skill and high standards in his musical works separated him from his colleagues in "The Five." He shared several of their ideals, including an emphasis on national character in music. His aim, however, was linking those ideals with a professional standard high enough to satisfy European criteria. His professionalism also fueled his desire to reach a broad public, not just nationally but internationally, which he would eventually do.
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October 9, 2025
A work of art so extreme in its emotions that it can be almost too much to bear, Tchaikovsky’s 6th, the famous “Pathétique” (or “Passionate”) symphony, carries with it a mystique that very few pieces of music can match. Tchaikovsky himself seemed to recognise that he’d written something special when he said of it: “I believe it comes into being as the best of my works.” Beyond the raw nuts and bolts of his music, the fact that the emotionally turbulent composer died under mysterious circumstances only nine days after the work’s premiere is, of course, a source of much of its enduring allure. Furthermore, there will always be the question of the symphony’s secret programme (the narrative story Tchaikovsky wrote to accompany each of its four movements). He insisted the programme would remain a mystery and he seems to have quickly taken that mystery to his grave:
Listening to the 6th’s finale, it is hard to rid yourself of the image of the sensitive composer writing his music on a wave of grief. Indeed, at the concert performance I attended in London earlier this week the music seemed to pass through like a hurricane. After the show, I walked back from Cadogan Hall to Sloane Square Tube on slightly unsteady legs, mulling over the symphony’s unusual shape.
Even though there is little evidence to support the often-repeated claim that Tchaikovsky pre-meditatively composed a masterpiece (one which was to act as his suicide note) before drinking unfiltered cholera-infected water, the image of the tormented romantic genius dying while intertwined with his tragic art strikes as an undying story. Such stories persist because we all love a compelling tragedy just as much as we detest a coincidence; however, I find this particular story just a little hard to take. While Tchaikovsky’s music may well be unsurpassed in its exaggerated emotion, my inner realist can’t help but question the likelihood that someone deep in the grip of suicidal depression might possess the strength to write a sprawling masterpiece. Inspiration often comes to people full of life, rarely to those downtrodden to the point of death. And while the 6th may end on a note of despair, the symphony’s earlier movements are rich with genuine love and joy, emotions I don’t think would have a place in the nihilistic vision of someone who can see no reason to keep going.
So, if Tchaikovsky’s programme wasn’t directly about existential anguish, what was it about? I think the answer is simple. He was an archetypal 19th-century man, a romantic to his core; what else could his symphony be about but love? It is the sound of the open wound left by doomed, raw love. The kind of love that was never allowed to live.
Here is a fascinating paragraph from the 6th’s Wikipedia page:
The above is an almost comical catalogue of anecdotal “poorly remembered hearsay”; however, the story it tells feels so true to the way the music actually sounds that I can’t help but suspect the story attributed to Modest probably has some factual merit. I also think it would make sense for Tchaikovsky to have kept the 6th’s subject matter secret if it had been based on a private and taboo topic, such as homosexuality. Tchaikovsky was a gay man living in pre-revolutionary Russia, a lonely hypersensitive emo who never recovered from his mother’s early death, and an unsurpassed melodic genius; it seems only inevitable that his crowning masterpiece should express his shame and heartbreak, emotions imposed on him by the society in which he lived.
It was only at my concert this week that my own version of Tchaikovsky’s secret programme finally fell into place. I’ll start by saying that Modest’s description of the symphony’s epic 18-minute opening movement feels to me like a given. The movement’s iconic second theme (easily one of the greatest melodies ever written) is a tune which emerges like a yearning swoon after a turbulent and searching opening few minutes. It is so self-evidently an expression of the sensation of falling in love that it can’t be mistaken for anything else; however, unlike the similarly gorgeous love theme from composer’s earlier Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture (a piece which, notably, also shares more than a few structural similarities to the 6th’s opening), the love theme here doesn’t seem to spiral into an abandon of youthful bliss; instead, it is a melting sigh that hurts as much as it soars; it presses against the heart, expressing both the comfort of love as well a sense of sadness at the prospect that one day it must inevitably be lost. After a short exploration, this love theme settles down into a cadence of quiet contentment, a moment of serene calm which is aggressively interrupted by the arrival of the deeply contrasting central development section (one of classical music’s greatest jump scares). This new turbulence loudly launches itself across the auditorium, driven forward by forceful brass and timpani. It hurls itself at your sensibilities with a violence you won’t find elsewhere in Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre. Tension builds until it seems to be on the verge of collapse before the assault masterfully transitions into a deeply disturbing slower passage of searing intensity, one which forcefully builds to a crushing and anguished climax of quite overwhelming ferocity. Eventually, the orchestra, exhausted, falls into a heavy silence, only the ominous heartbeats of the basses keeping the music from dying out altogether. The hero has been beaten into submission. Soon, however, like a phoenix rising from ashes, Tchaikovsky’s sinuous love melody quietly begins to ascend up from the low strings before flourishing across the orchestra and swelling into a great swirling crescendo, one more forceful and richly orchestrated than we had heard during the love theme’s previous emergence. This is a consolation and a release. It is, according to Modest, an escape from society’s hostile attacks through love. It is marvellous.
The emotions here are complex, neither soaring bliss nor outright despair. The end of the movement is like being hugged, but it’s a comforting hug in times of sadness rather than one of outright warmth. At my concert (in truth a very average performance from the Royal Philharmonic, the least of London’s 5 major symphony orchestras), my eyes welled up as I became overwhelmed by the relentless cascade of gorgeous melody. After you’ve listened to this opening movement through the lens of the love poem as described by Modest, it can only be heard that way forevermore. Modest’s programme, regardless of how closely it matches Tchaikovsky’s own, is true to the emotions in the music, and so it is also true to Tchaikovsky in that least literal but most important of ways.
The Pathétique’s first movement is novelistic, so it’s easy to forget that after it there are still three movements to come. Modest doesn’t seem to have given much thought to movements two and three, so I’m forced to interpret them on my own. The second movement is the lightest of the four. It is a waltz, but one written in the uncommon meter of 5/4 time (it has 5 beats in a bar instead of a Waltz’s usual 3). It comes as a breath of fresh air after the intensity of the symphony’s long and emotionally involved opening. It is hard not to see it as an expression of dreamy and content queer love. Tchaikovsky’s special melodic gifts make the quirkiness of 5/4 time seem as flowing and as natural as anything that he could have written in a more common meter. Gay love may be different, his music seems to say, but is not, perhaps, just as beautiful?
Common practice dictates that, after a playful second movement, the audience should expect to hear an emotional slow movement (often an adagio or an andante). This standardised structure then leaves space for a loud and bombastic closing fourth and final finale, a rousing extravaganza that would usually be an appropriate note to finish an evening. This classical structure gives a symphony a shape I think of like this: The opening movements represent an initial dive down and in (with the meatiest emotions found at the symphony’s centre), the finale then lets the audience swim back up and out, bringing them back to the surface transformed. Where Tchaikovsky had always adhered to this form in his previous symphonic works, for his 6th he made the surprisingly effective decision to swap the traditional ordering of his third and fourth movements, delaying the more heartfelt emotions of his adagio to the end of the evening. There was to be no “rising up and out” from his 6th.
Because of this structural reworking, we hear the bombastic finale in third place, straight after the 5/4 waltz. I’ve always understood this as a necessity, a byproduct of the decision to delay the 6th’s heavy emotions to the end; however, seeing a large-scale symphonic work live always puts its form into a new perspective. I think I now finally understand that the point of delaying the slow movement wasn’t just to give the symphony a more emotionally true ending; the intention was also to trick us into thinking the evening is over ahead of time. Towards the end of the finale-like third movement, the orchestra swells to a big jubilant tutti march, cymbals and bass drum adding a percussive drive. In a flourish very typical of Tchaikovsky, the orchestra finally lands on the tonic note in unison and sputters out a triumphant triplet marking that we have arrived home in glory. In a good performance, this movement should be played with the full energy usually reserved for the end of a concert, like the last sprint of a marathon runner. It’s all part of the trick Tchaikovsky is playing on his audience. Indeed, at my concert the other night, it was at this point the audience spontaneously erupted into a round of applause, not the kind of polite and tentative applause you sometimes get between particularly powerful symphonic movements, but rather the kind which suggested that many people in the room genuinely did believe the performance was over. (If you ever go to a classical concert you’d do well to remember that many of the grey haired old fogies who seem to claim ownership of this music are in truth just pretenders who don’t have much love or knowledge of it.) This eruption of applause amused me at first, but it was only later that a realisation hit me: This audience reaction wasn’t a byproduct of what Tchaikovsky wrote but rather exactly what he’d intended. His audience is supposed to feel fulfilled and buoyed up by his fake-out finale. They should expect to go home to their warm houses with a spring in their step, content with their night of escapism. His symphony’s two Romeos have reached their highest point of sensual abandon; reality has been kept at bay. The truth, however, is that the third movement’s militaristically jubilant march really is as empty and insincere as it first seems to be. Reality must bite, just as every relationship ends in tragedy.
Through the applause, the orchestra suddenly strikes up again. Only now, with the audience’s guard down, does Tchaikovsky get them where it truly hurts. A high, cold shriek from the strings pierces through the confused hubbub. The smiles fade and hands fall back onto their owners' laps. The opening of the finale is the sound of despair itself, an abrupt change of tone which comes as a shock. All we have from Modest about this final movement is that it was intended as “an elegy for a dead lover.” Judging by how it sounds it certainly fits that bill, although it may be less an elegy and more a howl of pain.
This deathly slow movement comes in four distinct passages. It starts with a downward-moving motif in the strings interwoven with cold woodwinds. The opening section is music of such bleak despair that it feels suppressed beyond the point of tears. It eventually settles on the tonic minor chord, and, after a short pause, the ascendant second section takes over. A descending line in the strings is heard over pulsating horns, the music now in the relative major. With each repetition of this phrase, the harmony rises a step, implying an upward moving narrative towards some possibly triumphant cadence. This hopeful gathering of energy builds to a hair-raising crescendo, liberal harmonic suspension and chromatic accidentals stretching the harmony as it goes, each phrase more wrought with yearning as we climb. However, when the climax is reached, the music is ruthlessly struck back down to the bleakness it tried to escape. We seem to start over, the third section starting by returning to the bleak opening minor key theme. This time it does ultimately find the energy to break out into a cry of histrionic despair. This, the movement’s second major crescendo, is more massive than its first, the brass rising from its low end one step at a time up and up to the higher limits of its register. Where the first crescendo felt like an attempt to escape grief, either through denial, faith, or sheer force of will, this crescendo represents something altogether more crushing. It should force your shoulder blades into the back of your chair. Even so, like the first crescendo, it also fails and collapses back into the pervading mood of resignation. Nevertheless, unlike its predecessor, its collapsing failure now hits with inevitability. In the following silence, we hear the tam-tam’s one and only quiet note — a note which in a good performance should wash through a stunned auditorium like a wave of fateful realisation. A mournful and portentous motif from the low brass follows. Finally, before the momentum of the music is lost, the strings re-enter on a variation of the downward motif from the second section surfing on wave after wave after wave of descending despair, down through the violins, down through the violas, then through the cellos, and ultimately to the bottom end of the double basses. Down, down, down. Black as death, we descend into the quiet of night, fateful plucks on the basses bringing the symphony to its breathtaking close like the last flutters of a broken heart. At last, after one of the most extraordinary fade-outs in music history, we find ourselves standing on nothing.
Where it seemed only natural to burst into a frenzy of applause after the symphony’s third movement, it feels somehow wrong to clap at the end of the finale. I have not yet found a more sublime expression in art of utter devastation; after such nakedness, cheering feels inappropriate. Whatever the narrative of Tchaikovsky’s original programme may have contained, the emotions expressed in the “Pathétique” could not be clearer. It expresses an all-consuming grief that only doomed love can inspire. And while it might be no wonder that the myth of the symphonic suicide note persists, Tchaikovsky’s music seems, to me at least, to be too impassioned and too full of life to be a calling upon death. In my mind, it will always, therefore, come with the weight of repressed shame and grief. It carries the burden of all the love that never came to be; not just Tchaikovsky’s own love, but rather that of the lovers throughout history who never were, or who had to part because this world could find them no place.
“Now, on my journey, the idea of a new symphony came to me, this time one with a programme, but a programme that will be a riddle to everyone. Let them try and solve it... The programme of this symphony is completely saturated with myself and quite often during my journey I cried profusely.”
Listening to the 6th’s finale, it is hard to rid yourself of the image of the sensitive composer writing his music on a wave of grief. Indeed, at the concert performance I attended in London earlier this week the music seemed to pass through like a hurricane. After the show, I walked back from Cadogan Hall to Sloane Square Tube on slightly unsteady legs, mulling over the symphony’s unusual shape.
Even though there is little evidence to support the often-repeated claim that Tchaikovsky pre-meditatively composed a masterpiece (one which was to act as his suicide note) before drinking unfiltered cholera-infected water, the image of the tormented romantic genius dying while intertwined with his tragic art strikes as an undying story. Such stories persist because we all love a compelling tragedy just as much as we detest a coincidence; however, I find this particular story just a little hard to take. While Tchaikovsky’s music may well be unsurpassed in its exaggerated emotion, my inner realist can’t help but question the likelihood that someone deep in the grip of suicidal depression might possess the strength to write a sprawling masterpiece. Inspiration often comes to people full of life, rarely to those downtrodden to the point of death. And while the 6th may end on a note of despair, the symphony’s earlier movements are rich with genuine love and joy, emotions I don’t think would have a place in the nihilistic vision of someone who can see no reason to keep going.
So, if Tchaikovsky’s programme wasn’t directly about existential anguish, what was it about? I think the answer is simple. He was an archetypal 19th-century man, a romantic to his core; what else could his symphony be about but love? It is the sound of the open wound left by doomed, raw love. The kind of love that was never allowed to live.
Here is a fascinating paragraph from the 6th’s Wikipedia page:
“Simon Karlinsky, a composer and professor of Slavic languages and literature at UC Berkeley and “an expert on homosexuality in pre-Soviet culture”, wrote in the gay literary magazine Christopher Street in 1988 that in 1941 a musician friend of his youth called Alex, who had spent several months associating with the painter Pavel Tchelitchew, told him an oral tradition that Tchelitchew had heard from the composer's brother Modest, told to him by Tchaikovsky himself. According to this, what Karlinsky himself calls “poorly remembered hearsay”, the secret programme of the symphony is about love between men: the search for it, from the beginning of the first movement; finding it, in the romantic andante theme (measure 89); and the attacks of a hostile world on it, in the agitated allegro vivo passage that follows (measure 161); and escape from that, in the return to the love theme (andante come prima, measure 305). The last movement, Karlinsky was told, is an elegy for a dead lover.”
The above is an almost comical catalogue of anecdotal “poorly remembered hearsay”; however, the story it tells feels so true to the way the music actually sounds that I can’t help but suspect the story attributed to Modest probably has some factual merit. I also think it would make sense for Tchaikovsky to have kept the 6th’s subject matter secret if it had been based on a private and taboo topic, such as homosexuality. Tchaikovsky was a gay man living in pre-revolutionary Russia, a lonely hypersensitive emo who never recovered from his mother’s early death, and an unsurpassed melodic genius; it seems only inevitable that his crowning masterpiece should express his shame and heartbreak, emotions imposed on him by the society in which he lived.
It was only at my concert this week that my own version of Tchaikovsky’s secret programme finally fell into place. I’ll start by saying that Modest’s description of the symphony’s epic 18-minute opening movement feels to me like a given. The movement’s iconic second theme (easily one of the greatest melodies ever written) is a tune which emerges like a yearning swoon after a turbulent and searching opening few minutes. It is so self-evidently an expression of the sensation of falling in love that it can’t be mistaken for anything else; however, unlike the similarly gorgeous love theme from composer’s earlier Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture (a piece which, notably, also shares more than a few structural similarities to the 6th’s opening), the love theme here doesn’t seem to spiral into an abandon of youthful bliss; instead, it is a melting sigh that hurts as much as it soars; it presses against the heart, expressing both the comfort of love as well a sense of sadness at the prospect that one day it must inevitably be lost. After a short exploration, this love theme settles down into a cadence of quiet contentment, a moment of serene calm which is aggressively interrupted by the arrival of the deeply contrasting central development section (one of classical music’s greatest jump scares). This new turbulence loudly launches itself across the auditorium, driven forward by forceful brass and timpani. It hurls itself at your sensibilities with a violence you won’t find elsewhere in Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre. Tension builds until it seems to be on the verge of collapse before the assault masterfully transitions into a deeply disturbing slower passage of searing intensity, one which forcefully builds to a crushing and anguished climax of quite overwhelming ferocity. Eventually, the orchestra, exhausted, falls into a heavy silence, only the ominous heartbeats of the basses keeping the music from dying out altogether. The hero has been beaten into submission. Soon, however, like a phoenix rising from ashes, Tchaikovsky’s sinuous love melody quietly begins to ascend up from the low strings before flourishing across the orchestra and swelling into a great swirling crescendo, one more forceful and richly orchestrated than we had heard during the love theme’s previous emergence. This is a consolation and a release. It is, according to Modest, an escape from society’s hostile attacks through love. It is marvellous.
The emotions here are complex, neither soaring bliss nor outright despair. The end of the movement is like being hugged, but it’s a comforting hug in times of sadness rather than one of outright warmth. At my concert (in truth a very average performance from the Royal Philharmonic, the least of London’s 5 major symphony orchestras), my eyes welled up as I became overwhelmed by the relentless cascade of gorgeous melody. After you’ve listened to this opening movement through the lens of the love poem as described by Modest, it can only be heard that way forevermore. Modest’s programme, regardless of how closely it matches Tchaikovsky’s own, is true to the emotions in the music, and so it is also true to Tchaikovsky in that least literal but most important of ways.
The Pathétique’s first movement is novelistic, so it’s easy to forget that after it there are still three movements to come. Modest doesn’t seem to have given much thought to movements two and three, so I’m forced to interpret them on my own. The second movement is the lightest of the four. It is a waltz, but one written in the uncommon meter of 5/4 time (it has 5 beats in a bar instead of a Waltz’s usual 3). It comes as a breath of fresh air after the intensity of the symphony’s long and emotionally involved opening. It is hard not to see it as an expression of dreamy and content queer love. Tchaikovsky’s special melodic gifts make the quirkiness of 5/4 time seem as flowing and as natural as anything that he could have written in a more common meter. Gay love may be different, his music seems to say, but is not, perhaps, just as beautiful?
Common practice dictates that, after a playful second movement, the audience should expect to hear an emotional slow movement (often an adagio or an andante). This standardised structure then leaves space for a loud and bombastic closing fourth and final finale, a rousing extravaganza that would usually be an appropriate note to finish an evening. This classical structure gives a symphony a shape I think of like this: The opening movements represent an initial dive down and in (with the meatiest emotions found at the symphony’s centre), the finale then lets the audience swim back up and out, bringing them back to the surface transformed. Where Tchaikovsky had always adhered to this form in his previous symphonic works, for his 6th he made the surprisingly effective decision to swap the traditional ordering of his third and fourth movements, delaying the more heartfelt emotions of his adagio to the end of the evening. There was to be no “rising up and out” from his 6th.
Because of this structural reworking, we hear the bombastic finale in third place, straight after the 5/4 waltz. I’ve always understood this as a necessity, a byproduct of the decision to delay the 6th’s heavy emotions to the end; however, seeing a large-scale symphonic work live always puts its form into a new perspective. I think I now finally understand that the point of delaying the slow movement wasn’t just to give the symphony a more emotionally true ending; the intention was also to trick us into thinking the evening is over ahead of time. Towards the end of the finale-like third movement, the orchestra swells to a big jubilant tutti march, cymbals and bass drum adding a percussive drive. In a flourish very typical of Tchaikovsky, the orchestra finally lands on the tonic note in unison and sputters out a triumphant triplet marking that we have arrived home in glory. In a good performance, this movement should be played with the full energy usually reserved for the end of a concert, like the last sprint of a marathon runner. It’s all part of the trick Tchaikovsky is playing on his audience. Indeed, at my concert the other night, it was at this point the audience spontaneously erupted into a round of applause, not the kind of polite and tentative applause you sometimes get between particularly powerful symphonic movements, but rather the kind which suggested that many people in the room genuinely did believe the performance was over. (If you ever go to a classical concert you’d do well to remember that many of the grey haired old fogies who seem to claim ownership of this music are in truth just pretenders who don’t have much love or knowledge of it.) This eruption of applause amused me at first, but it was only later that a realisation hit me: This audience reaction wasn’t a byproduct of what Tchaikovsky wrote but rather exactly what he’d intended. His audience is supposed to feel fulfilled and buoyed up by his fake-out finale. They should expect to go home to their warm houses with a spring in their step, content with their night of escapism. His symphony’s two Romeos have reached their highest point of sensual abandon; reality has been kept at bay. The truth, however, is that the third movement’s militaristically jubilant march really is as empty and insincere as it first seems to be. Reality must bite, just as every relationship ends in tragedy.
Through the applause, the orchestra suddenly strikes up again. Only now, with the audience’s guard down, does Tchaikovsky get them where it truly hurts. A high, cold shriek from the strings pierces through the confused hubbub. The smiles fade and hands fall back onto their owners' laps. The opening of the finale is the sound of despair itself, an abrupt change of tone which comes as a shock. All we have from Modest about this final movement is that it was intended as “an elegy for a dead lover.” Judging by how it sounds it certainly fits that bill, although it may be less an elegy and more a howl of pain.
This deathly slow movement comes in four distinct passages. It starts with a downward-moving motif in the strings interwoven with cold woodwinds. The opening section is music of such bleak despair that it feels suppressed beyond the point of tears. It eventually settles on the tonic minor chord, and, after a short pause, the ascendant second section takes over. A descending line in the strings is heard over pulsating horns, the music now in the relative major. With each repetition of this phrase, the harmony rises a step, implying an upward moving narrative towards some possibly triumphant cadence. This hopeful gathering of energy builds to a hair-raising crescendo, liberal harmonic suspension and chromatic accidentals stretching the harmony as it goes, each phrase more wrought with yearning as we climb. However, when the climax is reached, the music is ruthlessly struck back down to the bleakness it tried to escape. We seem to start over, the third section starting by returning to the bleak opening minor key theme. This time it does ultimately find the energy to break out into a cry of histrionic despair. This, the movement’s second major crescendo, is more massive than its first, the brass rising from its low end one step at a time up and up to the higher limits of its register. Where the first crescendo felt like an attempt to escape grief, either through denial, faith, or sheer force of will, this crescendo represents something altogether more crushing. It should force your shoulder blades into the back of your chair. Even so, like the first crescendo, it also fails and collapses back into the pervading mood of resignation. Nevertheless, unlike its predecessor, its collapsing failure now hits with inevitability. In the following silence, we hear the tam-tam’s one and only quiet note — a note which in a good performance should wash through a stunned auditorium like a wave of fateful realisation. A mournful and portentous motif from the low brass follows. Finally, before the momentum of the music is lost, the strings re-enter on a variation of the downward motif from the second section surfing on wave after wave after wave of descending despair, down through the violins, down through the violas, then through the cellos, and ultimately to the bottom end of the double basses. Down, down, down. Black as death, we descend into the quiet of night, fateful plucks on the basses bringing the symphony to its breathtaking close like the last flutters of a broken heart. At last, after one of the most extraordinary fade-outs in music history, we find ourselves standing on nothing.
Where it seemed only natural to burst into a frenzy of applause after the symphony’s third movement, it feels somehow wrong to clap at the end of the finale. I have not yet found a more sublime expression in art of utter devastation; after such nakedness, cheering feels inappropriate. Whatever the narrative of Tchaikovsky’s original programme may have contained, the emotions expressed in the “Pathétique” could not be clearer. It expresses an all-consuming grief that only doomed love can inspire. And while it might be no wonder that the myth of the symphonic suicide note persists, Tchaikovsky’s music seems, to me at least, to be too impassioned and too full of life to be a calling upon death. In my mind, it will always, therefore, come with the weight of repressed shame and grief. It carries the burden of all the love that never came to be; not just Tchaikovsky’s own love, but rather that of the lovers throughout history who never were, or who had to part because this world could find them no place.
None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness.
Alone and parted
Far from joy and gladness,
Heaven's boundless arch I see
Spread about above me.
O what a distance dear to one
Who loves me.
None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness.
Alone and parted
Far from joy and gladness,
My senses fail,
A burning fire
Devours me.
None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness.
— Goethe
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