Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4

The Fourth Symphony was a product of the most turbulent time of Tchaikovsky's life—1877, when he met two women (Nadezhda von Meck, a music-loving widow of a wealthy Russian railroad baron, and Antonina Miliukov, an unnoticed student in one of his large lecture classes at the Moscow Conservatory), who forced him to evaluate himself as he never had before.