Tchaikovsky’s Deadly Symphony: Superstition or Fact?

Image via Wikipedia

Many musicians believe that some musical compositions court sinister coincidence.  Among them were the noted conductors, Arturo Toscanini and Walter Damrosch.

The Pathetique has a somber history.  Maestro Toscanini declared it to be the most sorrowful of all symphonic music and explained:  “In its adagio lamentation it is the wail of a soul in torment.  Perhaps the soul or Peter Ilyich Tchakovsky is eternally imprisoned therein for it was the swan song of this greatest of all Russian composers.”

Born in 1840, educated at the Technological Institute of St. Petersburg, Tchaikovsky’s life was a tragic, thwarted one.

In 1877 he married but soon afterward separated from his wife.   He attempted to commit suicide by walking into an icy river and standing there chest-deep, thinking he would catch pneumonia and die quietly without scandal.

He survived and later took a house in the village of Klin, where he isolated himself.  He wrote six symphonies, seven symphonic poems and more than a hundred lyric songs.

Of them all it was the Sixth Symphony into which he fully poured his tortured soul.  In it he composed, according to the eminent American critic, James G. Huneker, “a page torn from Ecclesiastes, the cosmos in crepe.”

Tchaikovsky’s sudden death in the autumn of 1893 startled the world.  There were rumors that he committed suicide.  It was believed that he died of cholera.

Whatever the cause of his death, it occurred shortly after he had conducted an orchestra in the premiere of his Sixth Symphony.  Among those in the audience on the night of his premiere were his nephew and a talented young musician, Ossip Gabrilowitsch.  Three days after the concert the nephew committed suicide and the series of sinister coincidences associated with the Pathetique began. 

From then on whenever it was played someone in the audience or one of the musicians met a sudden, unexpected end.  It wasn’t long before many musicians came to dread the Sixth Symphony and a number refused to play or listen to it.

Many years passed after Tchaikovsky’s death.  In 1935, in Detroit, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who had by now an accomplished musician, was brilliantly conducting a symphony orchestra.  There was a strange excitement in the air which he somehow transmitted to the audience.  Each composition played received a tremendous ovation.

Nearing the end of the concert, Gabrilowitsch raised his hands and the orchestra began to play Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony.  The eyes of the attentive audience were focused on the maestro’s expressive hands limned in the spotlight.  They seemed to flow toward each instrument, beseeching and cajoling it to give its best. 

As the Pathetique movement began, Gabrilowitsch himself seemed to be transmuted into a sensitive medium pouring forth all the anguish which human beings have accumulated since the dawn of time.  Perhaps the thoughts of Gabrilowitsch were entirely upon the music.  Perhaps he had a premonition of impending doom.  No man will ever know.  The Pathetique was his swan song, just as it had been that of its composer forty-two years before.

He died quite suddenly the next morning after his greatest triumph.  And shortly thereafter, Ray Schmidt, a clarinet player in his orchestra, unexpectedly died, too. 

If the musical world had momentarily forgotten the ominous association of the Pathetique, the death of Gabrilowitsch proved to be a poignant reminder.  There was much discussion in the orchestra pit and rehearsal hall.  From that day on, the Pathetique has been taboo with many musicians

One was Victor Kolar, internationally known conductor who has related his own experiences thus:

“In the last twenty five-years I played the Pathetique movement exactly fifteen times.  Each of these times someone, usually a close friend, died soon afterwards…It began when I was directing with the New York Symphony Orchestra under Walter Damrosch.  I noticed that the death of someone among my acquaintances followed each performance of the Pathetique. Year by year the toll mounted.”

Once in Chicago, against his better judgment he was persuaded to conduct the Pathetique.

“I had directed the orchestra twice daily for four and a half weeks without repeating a composition,” he explained.  “We had about exhausted the available symphonic literature and were trying to decide what to play at the next performance.  Murray G. Patterson, manager of the orchestra, suggested the Tchaikovsky Sixth. I shook my head…”

He was eventually convinced to do the performance with Patterson saying that it was just a crazy superstition. Patterson wanted to prove that nothing bad will come out of it.

After the performance Kolar returned to his hotel and went to bed, tossing restlessly for hours before sleep came.  He awoke the next morning feeling strangely depressed.  A knock at the door followed later.  One of the musicians came to tell him that a mutual friend had fallen or jumped from a hotel room during the night and crashed to his death on the pavement. 

With this experience, Toscanini quoted “Music is a language of the emotions as words are the language of the intellect.  Both have the power either to soothe or excite and perhaps to reverse the most important of all human instincts, that of self preservation.”