4 symphony tchaikovsky biography

“An artist lives a double life: an everyday human life and an artistic life, and the two do not always go hand in hand.” So wrote Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whose often uneasy balances are well known: between a profoundly Russian spirit and European training, between heartfelt romanticism and reverence for Mozart’s classicism, and, most painfully, between homosexuality and society’s intolerance.

His Fourth Symphony is the first full expression of his artistic voice and represents a turning point on multiple levels: as a composer, toward mastery of technique; as a human, toward confronting his demons; as an artist, toward a more cosmopolitan idiom.

He wrote much of the work in Italy, and a sense of warm lyricism balances the work’s dramatic and fantastic elements. “My Symphony is definitely the best work I have written so far,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Modest in the fall of 1877, “but it needed some hard work to compose it; especially the first part.”