Symphony No. 3 in D, Opus 29, Polish
Composition and premiere: Tchaikovsky wrote his Symphony No. 3 between June and August, 1875, in Usovo, Russia, and two estates now within Ukraine, Nizy and Verbovka. Nikolai Rubinstein led the first performance at a concert of the Russian Musical Society in Moscow on November 19, 1875. The Boston Symphony Orchestra first performed it under Wilhelm Gericke on December 1, 1899. Neville Marriner led the BSO in the first Tanglewood performance of the symphony on August 18, 2002, in the Shed.
Like many middle children, Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony has never received the same affection accorded to its younger and older siblings. Composed with apparent ease and speed during a relatively peaceful period in Tchaikovsky’s often turbulent life, the Third doesn’t have the heart-on-sleeve passion of the angst-laden last three symphonies, culminating with the tragic Sixth (Pathetique). Nor does it project the cozy folksiness of the first two youthful symphonies (Winter Dreams and Little Russian). Sometimes dismissed as “academic” and “abstract,” the Third Symphony shows up on concert programs these days more rarely than the other five. And yet its charms are many, especially the evocation of the world of dance that Tchaikovsky was about to explore with such mastery in his very next large composition and first ballet, Swan Lake.
When he began work on the Third Symphony in the summer of 1875, Tchaikovsky was still recovering from the humiliation and shame he had experienced when his former professor Nikolai Rubinstein launched a tirade of abuse at his new First Piano Concerto the preceding December. (The Concerto No. 1 went on to sensational fame after its premiere was relocated from Moscow to Boston.) In the late spring he spent three weeks at Usovo, at the estate of his close friend and most likely lover, Vladimir Shilovsky, where he found peace and concentration. “I’m now composing a new symphony, and I’m doing it a bit at a time. I don’t sit over it for hours on end, and I’m walking more.” By mid-August Tchaikovsky had finished the score, which he dedicated to Shilovsky.
Surprisingly, Nikolai Rubinstein (who had since reversed his verdict on the Piano Concerto) conducted the premiere in Moscow in late 1875. The performance received generally positive reviews. Leading Russian music critic Herman Laroche called the Third Symphony “one of the major musical events of the last ten years not only in Russia but in the whole of Europe.” After the Philharmonic Society gave the American premiere less than four years later at the Academy of Music in New York, the New York Times proclaimed in its “Record of Amusements” that the Third was a symphony “of decided merit” that “cannot fail to command the respect and attention of all who hear it.”
Tchaikovsky was also pleased with his work. In a letter to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov he wrote: “It seems to me that the Symphony does not present any particularly successful ideas, but technically it’s a step forward. Above all I’m satisfied with the first movement and both scherzos, the second of which is very difficult.”
Sir August Manns, who conducted the London premiere at the Crystal Palace on March 4, 1899, was so taken with the piece, and especially its last movement — a fiery Polonaise — that (according to most accounts) he even bestowed upon the symphony the descriptive title by which it subsequently became known: “Polish.” In fact, there is very little Polish about the symphony except for this last movement, and the Polonaise was a dance frequently encountered in Russian ballrooms and beloved of the Russian aristocracy for its processional grandeur, as Tchaikovsky demonstrated with great success in the final act of his opera Eugene Onegin. Some commentators have suggested that in this symphony Tchaikovsky was expressing sympathy for the plight of the Poles — unhappy subjects of the Tsar — but such a view seems quite far-fetched considering his enthusiastic Russian nationalism.
Perhaps one reason for the Symphony’s relative neglect lies in its hybrid genre and unusual structure, consisting of five loosely connected movements rather than the traditional four. (It is also Tchaikovsky’s only symphony in a major key.) Composer and critic Boris Asafiev called the Third “a symphony in the form of a suite,” possibly influenced by the divertimento cycles of Tchaikovsky’s most beloved composer, Mozart. At the symphony’s center lies a dreamy and nostalgia-inducing Andante, flanked by two dance-inspired scherzo movements. The first and last movements are fast and march-like.
Opening with a lengthy funeral march introduction that seems to promise a solemnity that remains mostly unrealized, the first movement, the longest, then follows sonata form (usually consisting of two contrasting themes in different keys, a development section, and a recapitulation). In the wake of Rubinstein’s harsh criticism of the Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky was intent on proving he could demonstrate command of symphonic form and tonal unity. The first theme (marked Allegro brillante) strides confidently forward in brisk 4/4 meter, while the second, lyrical subject, a falling motif announced in a plaintive oboe solo, is songlike and more intimate, reminiscent of Schumann. Even Tchaikovsky admitted that he was prone to excessive repetition and “a mountain of padding” in his treatment of symphonic form, and musicologist John Warrack has described this first movement as “really an ingenious treatment of two tunes rather than a symphonic development of them.”
The unusual second movement, labeled Alla tedesca (“In the German style”) is a rustic waltz of the Ländler variety, with a prominent first-beat rest in the first and third measures that adds an element of rhythmic surprise. Fleeting sixteenth-note triplets give the Trio section a light, Mendelssohnian quality. A slightly mournful pastoral serenity, ornamented with what sounds like bird song, reigns in the following Andante elegiaco, in D minor, perhaps the most emotionally satisfying of the five movements.
Mily Balakirev, one of the members of the nationalist group of composers called “The Mighty Handful,” who were not always complimentary about Tchaikovsky’s music, judged the fourth movement scherzo one of his most impressive creations, with its feeling of a perpetuum mobile and what historian A. Peter Brown has called a “kaleidoscope of timbres.”
Returning to affirmative D-major, the finale, marked Allegro con fuoco (tempo di Polacca) brings us back to earth with a declarative and insistent polonaise set out in dutiful rondo and fugal treatment. A second subject climbs squarely from the dominant A, but mostly yields in the thick contrapuntal texture to the dotted rhythms of the polonaise. A furious coda whips the movement to a conclusion after what may feel like excessive repetition of the main theme, bringing an end to a carefully crafted but oddly impersonal symphony.
Two years later, in 1877, Tchaikovsky would make a giant leap forward with the Fourth Symphony, a mature masterpiece of cyclic form, thematic invention, and intensity of feeling.
Harlow Robinson
Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography, and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. He has contributed essays and reviews to the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Classical Voice, Symphony, Musical America, and Opera News, and program essays to the Boston Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Aspen Music Festival, and Metropolitan Opera.