ABSTRACT
At some moment during the nine months between conceiving the symphony and its premiere, Tchaikovsky needed to explain its general mood of lament. Reflecting on the Grand Duke Constantine Romanov's suggestion to compose music to the poem Requiem, written by the recently deceased poet Apukhtin, Tchaikovsky expressed his being: disturbed by the circumstance, just recently written and scheduled for performance on 16 October, is imbued with a mood very close to that of the Requiem. As for historical personalities or cultural heroes, there are many great individuals, including composers, whom Tchaikovsky admired. The two were Mozart and Jesus Christ. Mozart was the personality Tchaikovsky loved most profoundly and for the longest time, to whom he felt he owed his own becoming a musician, and whose image he perceived through Pushkin and certainly through Otto Jahn. The unity of immortality and humanness deifies Mozart's image, and facilitates its parallel with Christ in the nineteenth-century cultural consciousness.
