Symphony No. 1 (Tchaikovsky)

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 Ilyich Tchaikovsky, asserted that the symphony's creation from beginning to end cost his sibling more labor than any other works and even involved considerable suffering. Even so, he remained fond of it throughout his life. Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck in 1883 that he believed, "although it is in many ways very immature," he still knows that "yet fundamentally it has more substance and is better than any of my other more mature works."

Tchaikovsky dedicated his first symphony to his contemporary musician Nikolai Rubinstein, who as both a close friend and as a pianist of note helped with the former figure's career aspirations. He began writing it while experiencing considerable alienation and dealing with extreme fatigue, with his graduation from the St. Petersburg Conservatory and initial efforts at composition failing to provide the creative opportunities that he had hoped for. Work proved sluggish. This aggravation became compounded by how Tchaikovsky found it impractical if not impossible to come up with a whole symphony of the inherent quality he demanded of himself under the strict attitudes towards form and function, at the level of unreasonable imitation in his opinion, held by other Russians as both teachers and peers.

While composing such a dramatically ambitious work ravaged both his mental state and physical health, particularly given the suffocating ethos of the conservative and even formalist musicians around him, the symphony received acclaim from both popular audiences and professionals alike after its release. This has continued over the course of many years, and it has remained significantly lauded in large part due to its structural inventions in the context of Russian music during the middle to late 1800s. Writing for the British mass media publication The Guardian in 2014, music journalist Tom Service argued that "Tchaikovsky's first symphony remodelled the form into a truly Russian style" in a way that beyond "staking out territory that his five other symphonies continued to explore" additionally serves as "one of the most irresistibly attractive first symphonies ever written". Service added that the composer's skills particularly shine through given how certain sections involve "Tchaikovsky proving a point" about the fact "that he knew all the tricks in the academic book" while Tchaikovsky still incorporated certain boldly distinct musical elements, with the symphony's final movement striking listeners such as himself given its "irresistibly over-the-top conclusion".