During this period, which extends from May to September, 1877, Tschaikowsky worked on his Fourth Symphony. Just how much of his private woes were transmuted into symphonic speech cannot be determined, even from Tschaikowsky’s own written confidences. Possibly, the symphony was an avenue of escape from his mounting anxieties. Anyway, his completion of the sketch coincides with his engagement to Antonina in May. The orchestration of the first movement took up a month, from August 11 to September 12—the breathing spell between his two flights from Antonina. Then followed the nerve-racking fortnight in Moscow. The other three movements were completed in the Swiss Alps, where, thanks to his brother, he regained his full sanity and working tempo. A passage in a letter to Mme. von Meck, during the Antonina regime, suggests an explanation of Tschaikowsky’s abstract talk of Fate in connection with his Fourth: “We cannot escape our fate, and there was something fatalistic about my meeting with this girl.” In January, 1878, when the whole dismal affair was safely locked away in the past, he wrote to Mme. von Meck that he could only recall his marriage as a bad dream: “Something remote, a weird nightmare in which a man bearing my name, my likeness, and my consciousness acted as one acts in dreams: in a meaningless, disconnected, paradoxical way. That was not my sane self, in possession of logical and reasonable will-powers. Everything I then did bore the character of an unhealthy conflict between will and intelligence, which is nothing less than insanity.” Tschaikowsky wrote to the composer Taneieff that there was not a single bar in his Fourth Symphony which he had not truly felt and which was not an echo of his “most intimate self.” He frankly avowed the symphony’s “programmatic” character, but declared it was “impossible to give the program in words.” Yet, to Mme. von Meck, who insisted on knowing the full spiritual and emotional content of the symphony, he wrote out a detailed analysis which has long been familiar to concert audiences. In reading it the listener usually does one of three things: takes it literally; regards it as irrelevant to the music as such; relates it to Tschaikowsky’s private life. There is the fourth choice of combining all three. In that choice lies the synthesis of mind, emotion, and external stimuli which is regarded as the very stuff of art. “Our symphony has a program,” he writes. “That is to say, it is possible to express its contents in words, and I will tell you—and you alone—the meaning of the entire work and its separate movements. Naturally I can only do so as regards its general features.