I. Andante – Allegro con anima II. Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza III. Valse. Allegro moderato IV. Finale. Andante maestoso

Audiences today tend to divide Tchaikovsky’s six symphonies into two groups. The first three are rarely heard, and are mentioned by only the most devoted of the composer’s admirers. The last three force grudging acknowledgement from even Tchaikovsky’s most trenchant detractors. Tchaikovsky’s life story supports this fault line. In 1877, the composer’s marriage to Antonina Milyukova ended after only three weeks. Tchaikovsky was homosexual and his impulsive decision to marry a woman who can best be described as a nymphomaniac, was hardly the best solution for alleviating his inner loneliness. In a letter written to his legendary patron, Nadezhda von Meck, he expressed his inner feelings, and the concealed program locked into his Fourth Symphony, composed at the end of the year. "The kernel of the symphony is the guiding thought, the one with which I built the entire work. This motif is Fate itself, Destiny, which stands in our path when we are searching for happiness." Tchaikovsky re-enacts this basic idea in his last two symphonies as well – in the Fifth with its hopeful resonance, and then in the ‘Pathetique’ (written after his relationship with von Meck was broken, in the year of his death), with its famous slow finale, leading into darkness.
 Partly because of its triumphant conclusion, the form and character of the Fifth Symphony’s movements can be described as traditional. Thus, following Beethovenian symbolism, the opening movement with its sharp contrasts is homo agens, the man of action. The slow movement is the ideal of the contemplative man homo meditans. The playful waltz of the third movement presents homo ludens, while the finale presents the conversion of the solitary individual into social group, homo communiss. Tchaikovsky shapes these different stations of traditional dramaturgy into a sweeping whole using gestures that he had learned from Liszt (and in the spirit of the words quoted in relation to the Fourth Symphony.) Thus the motto theme that is heard in the slow introduction at the beginning of the work (which is often refered to as the Fate moto, borrowed as a term from Beethoven’s Fifth symphony), recurs in a variety of guises throughout the work: in the second and third movements, it fills a memento mori function, but in the finale, it appears in the major as a triumphant final march.