Women have always played an ambiguous role in the life of  PIOTR  ILYICH  TCHAIKOVSKY, and even to this day there has been no end to various attempts – both in the field of serious research and popular literary speculation – to unravel the mysteries of his complicated fate, so inherent to an artist of the romantic age.

The year 1877 was particularly complex and eventful. At the time when he was devoted entirely to the work on his opera Eugene Onegin, the composer started to receive importunate letters full of love declarations from young pianist Antonina Ivanovna ftilyukova who was for a couple of  years secretly  in love with him. And, swayed  by  a seeming similarity with Tatiana, the female character from his opera, he impetuously married her in July 1877 in the church of St. George’s in Мoscow, with only two witnesses in attendance. But just two weeks later, utterly disappointed with the abortive marriage attempt, Tchaikovsky suffered a mental and creative crisis; he even made a suicide attempt, left Мoscow and parted with his wife for good.

Deliverance came from another woman – Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, a famous patron of art, with whom he began to exchange letters, but never met in person. Raised in a family which nurtured great passion for music and inspired by the example of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was Richard Wagner’s patron, Nadezhda von Meck used the wealth inherited from her husband (a Russian nobleman, one of the founders of the Russian  railways) to support Nikolai Rubinstein and later the young Debussy, whom she invited to her family as a teacher of music, and between 1877 and 1890 provided Tchaikovsky with an annual allowance of 6 000 rubles. Thanks to his patroness he was able to leave his position at the Мoscow Conservatory and to devote himself exclusively to creative work. He travelled for several months – visited Berlin, Geneve, Clarant, Paris, Florence, Venice, Vienna, Мilan, Genova.

And not until the end of 1877, while at San Remo, he finished his renowned FOURTH SYMPHONY. On  the title page he placed a dedication to Nadezhda von Meck – „To my best friend”. Later he also dedicated to her Suite No. 1 for orchestra and Funeral Мarch (later lost). The spiritual relationship between the two was extremely solid psychological support to Tchaikovsky and a stymulus for work in his direst moments, and Nadezhda von Meck repeatedly emphasized in their 13 years correspondence the great significance of his music to her inner peace.

In a letter to his benefactress Tchaikovsky revealed his gratitude for her and the partially implied programme of the Fourth Symphony, which was to remain his most cherished work, as „…a memorial to that epoch, when, following a prolonged mental malady and a whole series of unbearable feelings of grief  and  espair,  which  almost   brought me to demise, suddenly the dawn of resurgence shone… It is to you that I owe everything – my life, the ability to walk ahead in pursuit of great aims, my freedom, the feeling of happiness..”

But even though the composer himself elucidates the significance of the „the motive of fate” in the opening of the first movement or the appearance Russian folk tune „Vo polye beryoza stoyala” (“A Birch i the Plain”) in the finale, in another letter to his close friend, composer Sergey Taneev, Tchaikovsky stresses that it would be useless to attempt to construe some specific programme from this material and that the work mostly follows the concept of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – „from darkness to light.”

The first performance of the Fourth Symphony took place in February 1878 under the direction of Nikolay Rubinstein at the concert series of the Russian Music Society in Sankt Peterburg.