Stuck on Tchaikovsky's 6th [View all]

[BeyondGeography]

Truly one of the greats. That first movement...goodness. I finally figured out the "Grande Crise" passage toward the end of it thanks to the ever-so-slow pacing of Sergiu Celibidache, who people seem to either love (raises hand) or not. Simply put, the percussion is your heart pounding and the strings and winds are your head screaming. It can be pretty terrifying if you're feeling vulnerable. But it's heroic stuff, deeply touching, especially as the horns come in toward the end. With Celi, I find I can hear the constituent parts of movements more clearly and his sense of the dramatic can not be debated. The whole passage starts at 13:15; the head/heart dialogue runs from about 16:45 to 19:00:

A more conventional (and not inferior in the least) reading comes from one of the greatest living conductors Myung-whun Chung and the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, famous for the single tear that Chung sheds at the end of this live performance:

The 6th, famously named Pathetique, which is best translated as "passionate" from Russian, has been unfortunately called Tchaikovsky's suicide note because it's the last thing he ever wrote, not just for its themes but because he died just a week or so after its first live performance. Here's an awesome bit of writing on all that on all that from The Guardian's Tom Service:

"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...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.

"...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."

https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/26/symphony-guide-tchaikovsky-sixth-pathetique-tom-service