Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4

Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is a musical diary of his emotional life during a period of intense personal crisis.  “I was down in the dumps last winter when the symphony was in the writing, and it is a faithful echo of what I was going through at that time,” he wrote to the work’s dedicatee, Nadezhda von Meck. Though his external life was not extraordinarily tumultuous, Tchaikovsky’s hypersensitive nature made him feel every event keenly, and this intensity of experience forms his first orchestral masterpiece from beginning to end.