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Originally Posted by HumanePain
Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata would be fitting for a funeral, now I will have to find and listen to Tchaikovsky's Pathetique.
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Yes, do that! It's a masterpiece.
Just nine days after the first performance of his Sixth Symphony, Pathétique, in 1893, in St Petersburg, Tjajkovskij died. Until recent years it had been generally assumed that he died of cholera after drinking contaminated water. However, a controversial theory explains that Tjajkovskij committed suicide by consuming arsenic (symptoms from arsenical poisoning have similarity with cholera) following an attempt to blackmail him over his homosexuality.
Some believe that he consciously wrote Pathétique as his own Requiem. In the development section of the first movement, the rapidly progressing evolution of the transformed first theme suddenly "shifts into neutral" in the strings, and a rather quiet, harmonized chorale emerges in the trombones. The trombone theme bears absolutely no relation to the music that preceded it, and none to the music which follows it. It appears to be a musical "non sequitur", an anomaly — but it is from the Russian Orthodox Mass for the Dead, in which it is sung to the words: "And may his soul rest with the souls of all the saints."
Tchaikovsky was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St Petersburg.
