Read below for program notes for the Classics Series concert “Tchaikovsky’s Fifth” on May 31-June 1, 2025. Program notes are written by Jeremy Reynolds Copyright © 2024.
VIOLIN CONCERTO in E MINOR, Op. 64 by Felix Mendelssohn
What some concertgoers believe to be an unbreakable rule: “thou shalt not clap between movements at the symphony” is actually a tradition that emerged in the 20th century, spearheaded by conductors, not composers.
Like the practice or hate it, it’s a convention, not a rule.
In reality, composers in previous centuries expected applause during movement breaks and were even hurt if it didn’t occur, barring exceptional circumstances. Composers who didn’t want applause between movements had an easy option to prevent it. Take Felix Mendelssohn, who wanted a seamless listening experience in his Violin Concerto. He simply wrote an orchestral transition that would preclude listeners from clapping between movements.
This is hardly his only innovation in the concerto. A wunderkind pianist, Mendelssohn’s first serious piano concertos in G Minor and D Minor introduce the soloist immediately rather than with the customary long orchestral introduction. The violin concerto is no different, with the soloist entering about two seconds after the orchestra with an aching, passionate song. After this initial presentation of the theme, the orchestra leaps in to confirm this longing with its brawnier exploration of the same tune before pivoting to a contrastingly sweet secondary melody.
Another unusual move, Mendelssohn wrote out the cadenza near the end of the first movement, using it to build back into the recapitulation, or the restatement of the opening tune. A simple transition into the second movement introduces an achingly sweet, lyrical second movement reminiscent of his “Songs Without Words,” vocal-style music for instrumentalists.
The finale commences after another applause-forestalling bridge, a mock-serious lamentation that contrasts the sparkling wit to come. Mendelssohn is perhaps best remembered for his incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, composed at the tender age of 17, a near-perfect musical representation of the Bard’s lighthearted fairies and their fleet-footed scurrying. The concerto’s finale contains more than a hint of that lightness. It’s a brilliant, zippy test of the soloist’s technical skill with engaging orchestral countermelodies and an utterly electrifying close to this groundbreaking work, which demands an enormous, long-awaited ovation.
SYMPHONY NO. 5 in E MINOR, Op. 64 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
In Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, the opening tune is the key to the entire symphony.
The melody is a funereal, trudging theme in the clarinets in the low strings, at once determined and resigned. It returns each movement, transforming throughout until it becomes a dizzyingly triumphant march in the finale.
Tchaikovsky didn’t write the symphony with an explicit story in mind, but listening to the tune as it repeats and develops can help penetrate the music’s abstraction. It returns twice in the second movement, first as a defiant fanfare in the brass and later as a violent, tortured cry, accentuating the aching pain of that movement. Near the end of the third movement, the tune appears again in the clarinet and bassoon, now more gently, a pleasant respite. The finale begins with a full restatement of the theme, now in a stately major key, passed around the orchestra before the movement takes off in earnest, eventually coming full circle to that opening material once more.
This approachability was immediately apparent to listeners, who responded enthusiastically to the symphony, unlike professional critics of the day. Tchaikovsky, ever his own worst critic, chose to believe the naysayers:
“Having played my Symphony twice in Petersburg and once in Prague, I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure. There is something repellent in it, some over-exaggerated color, some insincerity of fabrication, which the public instinctively recognizes. It was clear to me that the applause and ovations referred not to this but to other works of mine, and that the Symphony itself will never please the public.”
History has proven this assessment incorrect. At worst, the symphony is a bit hodgepodge, as it explores an enormous variety of material throughout its movements, some of which transition to one another rather abruptly. However, tying the symphony together with such a recognizable melody, often characterized as a sort of “fate motif” by scholars, unites the work as a coherent whole. The piece has a form of internal memory that gives it a sense of captivating narrative drama.
Tchaikovsky, born into a military family in a provincial town, proved a precocious pianist at a young age. Though his family sent him to a prestigious school to study imperial administration, he leaped at the chance to study music in the inaugural class of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. A whiff of his military background remains clear in the pomp and flair of the so-called “fate motif.”