Symphony No. 1 (Tchaikovsky)

Tchaikovsky at the time he wrote his first symphony

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote his Symphony No. 1 in G minor, Winter Daydreams (or Winter Dreams) (Russian: Зимние грёзы, Zimniye gryozy), Op. 13, in 1866, just after he accepted a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory: it is the composer's earliest notable work. The composer's brother Modest claimed this work cost Tchaikovsky more labor and suffering than any of his other works.[1] Even so, he remained fond of it, writing to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck in 1883 that "although it is in many ways very immature, yet fundamentally it has more substance and is better than any of my other more mature works."[2] He dedicated the symphony to Nikolai Rubinstein.

  1. ^ Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 1840–1874 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978), 99
  2. ^ Brown, 102; Warrack, 48