and deployed it more liberally than he had previously. Paradoxically, this great asset also became his greatest enemy in terms of form. A melody is complete on its own terms. Because of this completeness, it stands apart from other themes meant not only to contrast, but more importantly to interact and build upon one another naturally. This dominance of one melody can ruin the balance and proportion Western classical composers considered the proper beauties of sonata form. The combination of emotional urgency and supercharged melody precluded musical development not only because of the completeness of the melody, but also because the melody's emotional content was already in full bloom, with all the emotional and musical interest it could bear. Since musical development is a creative unfolding of the latent possibilities—rhythmic, melodic and harmonic—of contrasting themes, there was literally nothing to develop further. The only course of action left was to substitute repetition for true development—in other words, to say again in a different way what has already been said and to trust the beauty and significance of what are fundamentally variations to supply the place of a development section as demanded by sonata form. Symphonic hybrid Like "The Five," Tchaikovsky found that with a loose symphonic-poem type of structure pioneered by Franz Liszt, he could combine large-scale orchestral writing with emotions and instrumental colors toward which he gravitated naturally. The result was a symphonic hybrid, a cross between the primarily architectural form of the symphony and the primarily "literary" or "poetic" form of the symphonic poem. This is what he wrote to Nadezhda von Meck, regarding the Fourth Symphony, This hybrid form allowed Tchaikovsky to fall back on a structure that was basically a series of self-contained sections, emphasizing the contrast between these sections, however violent, while allowing the consequent drama to erupt in the context of one movement. This perhaps seemed only natural—many Russian folk songs are actually a series of variations on one basic shape or pattern of a few notes, so it was something with which Tchaikovsky was already familiar. The problem it did not solve was the problem of inertia. The key of the music could change, but the music itself would basically repeat itself, remaining static in the Western sense of musical architecture. However, structure in Tchaikovsky's work became more than purely architecture. Melody, tonality, rhythm and orchestral timbres work together to form an indivisible