Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Fate (Part 2)

This is the second of Christopher Nupen's films about Tchaikovsky and it continues his examination of Tchaikovsky's preoccupation with the idea of fate as a governing force in our lives. The first film (Tchaikovsky's Women) focused on the young composer's identification with the fate of his vulnerable young heroines, from Katerina in his first orchestral work, The Storm, to his dearly beloved Tatanya in Eugene Onegin. It ended with the composition of that Opera and its close connections to the disastrous failure of Tchaikovsky's marriage to Antonina Milyukova. The second film picks up the story with Tchaikovsky's strange relationship with Nadezhda von Meck and looks at the way in which, after the failure of his marriage, Tchaikovsky's concern with fate shifts steadily away from his young heroines to a preoccupation with his own fate in the composition of the later symphonies. After his mother, Nadezhda von Meck was the most important person in Tchaikovsky's life and she became his most intimate confidante. They never met and came face to face only once, by accident (to the acute embarrassment of both parties), but their long and highly charged correspondence is full of the most intimately revealing details of Tchaikovsky's innermost concerns. So important was the relationship that when von Meck withdrew her support both as patron and as friend it dealt Tchaikovsky a blow from which he never recovered. This dramatic event contributed to an increasing depression which made him so vulnerable - only three years later - to the demands for his enforced suicide. The orchestra once again is the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy and the film ends with a complete performance of the last movement of the Sixth Symphony; that most powerful augury of the composer's own death.