Bernstein conducts TCHAIKOVSKY’S 6TH Symphony The Pathetique

The 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. Tchaikovsky himself, having supposedly approved his brother’s Russian word Патетическая (“Patetitčeskaja”) for the work (a better translation of which is “passionate” in English), and having decided against calling the piece “A Programme Symphony”, sent his publisher the instructions that it was simply his Sixth Symphony in B Minor, dedicated to his nephew Bob Davydov. That’s how the piece appeared when Tchaikovsky himself conducted the premiere in St Petersburg on 28 October 1893. It was only in its first posthumous performance, three weeks later, that it