Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky struggled with sonata form, the primary Western principle for building large-scale musical structures since the middle of the 18th century. Traditional Russian treatment of melody, harmony and structure actually worked against sonata form's modus operandi of movement, growth and development. Russian music—the Russian creative mentality as a whole, in fact—functioned on the principle of stasis. Russian novels, plays and operas were written as collections of self-contained tableaux, with the plots proceeding from one set-piece to the next. Russian folk music operated along the same lines, with songs comprised as a series of self-contained melodic units repeated continually. Compared to this mindset, the precepts of sonata form probably seemed as alien as if they had arrived from the moon.
Sonata form also was not designed to accommodate the emotionally charged statements that Tchaikovsky wanted to make. In this, he was far from alone—it was a major preoccupation of the Romantic age, to the point that the validity of the symphony was questioned seriously and alternatives to it were actually devised. These alternatives, which included program music in general and the symphonic poem in particular, did not offer a complete solution. Instead, they left Tchaikovsky facing a paradox. He reportedly did not care for program music, to the point of reproaching himself for writing the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet. Yet the notion of writing symphonies as purely intellectual patterns of chords, rhythms and modulations was at least equally abhorrent.
Nevertheless, Tchaikovsky attempted to adhere more closely at least to the manner of sonata form in his first three symphonies. They remain chronicles of his attempts to reconcile his training from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory with the music he had heard all his life and his own innate penchant for melody. Both those factors worked against sonata form, not with it. With the Fourth Symphony, Tchaikovsky hit upon a solution he would refine in his remaining two numbered symphonies and his program symphony Manfred—one that would enable to reconcile the more personal, more dramatic and heightened emotional statements he wished to make with the classical structure of the symphony, showing, as musicologist Martin Cooper phrased it, that "his inspiration was stronger than scruple."
Scrutability over Tchaikovsky's work, however, has remained intense at times, especially among critics. The fact that Tchaikovsky did not follow sonata form strictly and instead amended it creatively has been seen at times as a weakness rather than a sign of originality. Even with what music critic Harold C. Schonberg termed "a professional reevaluation" of Tchaikovsky's work, the practice of faulting Tchaikovsky for not following in the steps of the Viennese masters has not gone away entirely. More often than in the past, however, his approach is being viewed as innovative rather than evasive and an effective fusion of two dissimilar musical philosophies.
Russian versus Western
Ideally, Tchaikovsky's training at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory would have thoroughly equipped him to work with European principles and forms of organizing musical material, just as immersion in those things might have helped him gain a sense of belonging to world culture. However, Tchaikovsky was still "Russian to the marrow," as he told his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, "saturating myself from earliest childhood with the inexplicable beauty of the characteristic traits of Russian folk song, so that I passionately love every manifestation of the Russian spirit." Native instincts that strong could drive him toward Russian musical principles, which in several ways worked in opposition to Western ones, and make his Russianness work as much against him as it did for him. The result was a continual struggle with Western sonata form, especially in dealing with the symphony. A major block for Tchaikovsky in this department, according to musicologist David Brown, may have been
a cardinal flaw in the Russian character: inertia.... In literature it produces the novel that proceeds as a succession of self-contained sections, even set-piece scenes....Indeed, such tableau organization is fundamental to the most Russian of operatic scenarios.... [T]he most characteristic Russian scenario is like a strip cartoon, each scene presenting a crucial incident or stage in the plot, leaving the spectator to supply in his imagination what has happened in the gaps between these incidents.