“Fourth movement. If you had no pleasure in yourself, look about you. Go to the people. See how they can enjoy life and give themselves up entirely to festivity. The picture of a folk-holiday. Hardly have we had time to forget ourselves in the happiness of others when indefatigable Fate reminds us once more of its presence. The other children of men are not concerned with us. They do not spare us a glance nor stop to observe that we are lonely and sad. How merry and glad they all are. All their feelings are so inconsequent, so simple. And you still say that all the world is immersed in sorrow? There still _is_ happiness, simple, native happiness. Rejoice in the happiness of others—and you can still live.” SYMPHONY IN E MINOR, NO. 5, OPUS 64 If surroundings alone determined the mood of a piece of music, Tschaikowsky’s Fifth Symphony, composed one summer in a country villa near Klin, would be a sunlit idyl. Of course it is nothing of the sort, for though Tschaikowsky responded keenly to outdoor beauty, he was a prey to gloomy thoughts and visions that constantly found their way into his music. His own inner world crowded out the other. Frolovskoe, where he wrote his symphony in 1888, was a charming spot, fringed by a forest. Between spurts of composing he took long walks in the woods and puttered around the villa garden. On his return from Italy two years later he found that the forest had been cut down. “All those dear shady spots that were there last year are now a bare wilderness,” he grieved to his brother Modeste. Ironically, Tschaikowsky also composed his _Hamlet_ overture in the sylvan retreat at Frolovskoe, though from his own and others’ descriptions, the place was an ideal setting for an _As You Like It_ symphonic fantasy, say. The first intimation that Tschaikowsky was considering a new symphony appears in a letter to his brother Modeste dated May 27, 1888. A dread that he had written himself out as composer had been steadily gaining a grip on Tschaikowsky’s mind. He had complained about his imagination being “dried up.” He felt no urge to write. Finally he resolved to shake off the mood and convince the world and himself there were still a few good tunes in him. “I am hoping to collect, little by little, material for a symphony,” he writes to his brother on May 27. The following month we find him inquiring of his lady bountiful, Nadezhka von Meck: “Have I told you that I intended to write a symphony? The beginning has been difficult; but now inspiration seems to have come. However, we shall see.” In the same letter he makes no bones about his intention to prove that he is not “played out as a composer.”