Symphony No. 1 (Tchaikovsky)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote his Symphony No. 1 in G minor, Winter Daydreams (or Winter Dreams) (Russian: Зимние грёзы, Zimniye gryozy), Op. 13, in 1866, just after he accepted a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory: it is the composer's earliest notable work. The composer's brother, Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky, asserted that the symphony's creation from beginning to end cost his sibling more labor than any other works and even involved considerable suffering. Even so, he remained fond of it throughout his life. Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck in 1883 that he believed, "although it is in many ways very immature," he still knows that "yet fundamentally it has more substance and is better than any of my other more mature works."

Tchaikovsky dedicated his first symphony to his contemporary musician Nikolai Rubinstein, who as both a close friend and as a pianist of note helped with the former figure's career aspirations. He began writing it while experiencing considerable alienation and dealing with extreme fatigue, with his graduation from the St. Petersburg Conservatory and initial efforts at composition failing to provide the creative opportunities that he had hoped for. Work proved sluggish. This aggravation became compounded by how Tchaikovsky found it impractical if not impossible to come up with a whole symphony of the inherent quality he demanded of himself under the strict attitudes towards form and function, at the level of unreasonable imitation in his opinion, held by other Russians as both teachers and peers.