Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

From Philosopedia

Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich (7 May [O.S. 25 April] 1840 - 6 November [O.S. 25 October] 1893)

Tchaikovsky (also spelled Tschaikovsky and Chaikovsky), the Russian composer of the Romantic era, was a towering figure in Russian music and one of the most popular composers in history.

Pyotr, as he was named, was born in Votkinsky. His father was a mining inspector who arranged for his son to study music, and at the age of twenty-one Tchaikovsky entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied composition with Anton Rubinstein. An annuity from a wealthy patroness, Mme. von Meck, allowed him for years to devote himself to music, and it is not clear why she terminated her friendship and support without apparent reason. His music, richly orchestrated, is melodious, intensely emotional, and often melancholy. Among his works are his last three symphonies; the fantasy “Romeo and Juliet” (1869); the ballets “Swan Lake” (1876), “The Sleeping Beauty” (1889), and “The Nutcracker” (1892); the “Piano Concerto in B Flat Minor” (1875); and the “Violin Concerto in D” (1878). His operas include “Eugene Onegin” (1879) and “The Queen of Spades” (1890). His influence was great not only during the Soviet era but also in England, the United States, and elsewhere.

Tchaikovsky was known for his high-strung temperament. He also was known for his homosexuality. In 1876 in a letter to his brother he wrote that “I am aware that my inclinations are the greatest and most unconquerable obstacle to happiness; I must fight my nature with all my strength. I shall do everything possible to marry this year.” The following year, in fact, he did marry. But their union was doomed and his wife, frustrated by his lack of interest in her, finally took another lover and, later, was institutionalized.

His many affairs included one with his student, Vladimir Shilovsky, and with his nephew, Vladimir Davidov, whose nickname was Bobyk and to whom he dedicated his famous “Pathétique Symphony.” “Bob will finally drive me simply crazy with his indescribable fascination,” Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary about his teenaged nephew. “I begin to crave Bob and get lonely without him. . . . Frightful how I love him!” Frightful also, complain contemporary homosexuals, that the Church had so brainwashed him that he felt he had to fight his nature and that he was driven to such despair. And then there was fifteen-year-old Eduard Zak, who came to Moscow to study acting but killed himself instead. Fourteen years later Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary,

• How amazingly clearly I remember him, the sound of his voice, his movements, but especially the extraordinarily wonderful expression on his face. It seems to me that I have never loved anyone so strongly as him.

His brother edited his letters, which appear to show an interest in theism. When the Kirov Opera Chorus performed his music in New York City, the 1998 program notes noted that neither Tchaikovsky nor Rachmaninoff “expressed anything approaching religious fervor,” suggesting that “exhaustion, not spirituality, provided the impetus” for Tchaikovsky’s “Liturgy.” Vladmir Morosan, writing in Musica Russica, however, averred, “By all evidence, faith and religion played an important role throughout his life.”

According to Joseph McCabe, Tchaikovsky

• seems in the end to have become an atheist after reading Flaubert’s letters. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘found some astonishing answers to my questions about God and religion in this little book.’

But the ambiguity is such that it is not clear what the vehemently reactionary anti-Christian Flaubert might have written.

The Final Days

October 10 He arrives in St. Petersburg to stay at his brother Modest’s apartment on Malaia Morskaia.

October 16 He conducts the premiere of the Symphony No. 6 in St. Petersburg.

October 20 He dines out at Leiner’s restaurant with friends.:October 21 He complains of stomach pains, and a doctor is called, who diagnoses cholera.

October 22 Treatment begins, and he feels better.

October 22-23 His condition gradually deteriorates.

October 25 Tchaikovsky dies around 3 a.m. from complications arising from the cholera (uræmia and œdema of lungs).

October 26-27 Requiem services and tributes are held throughout Russia.

October-28 His funeral takes place in the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. He is buried in Tikhvinskii Cemetery at the Aleksandr Nevskii Monastery.

He was unconscious when his brother summoned a priest,” McCabe says, “to smear him with the sacrament.” Although The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians chooses to repeat a Soviet-era rumor that Tchaikovsky poisoned himself at the behest of a “court of honor” of former law-school classmates who were scandalized by his homosexuality, Alex Ross in The New Yorker (30 November 1998) wrote that such a “penny-dreadful version” may have satisfied some but is untrue. Alexander Poznansky’s Tchaikovsky’s Last Days refutes the tale that the composer duplicated the symptoms of cholera. Further, he had no free time during his St. Petersburg visit to have seen such schoolfellows - the day after he allegedly took poison, he wrote a letter inquiring about possible dates for a trip to Odessa. Meanwhile, four physicians gave cholera as the cause of Tchaikovsky’s death.

Not only did he not contract cholera deliberately, he had no fatal obsession for a young nephew, or so Klaus Mann claimed in a 1935 novel, Pathetic Symphony. The musicicologist Richard Taruskin has noted that in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trial critics began to describe the composer as “pathological” and “hysterical,” suggesting that his manly Beethovenian forms were weak and effeminate. Nonsense, Ross retorts, for the composer was not neurotic nor hysterical in the least. As Poznansky showed, Tchaikovsky was a proud, aristocratic, libidinous person who, despite a disastrous marriage and “various silly flings with peasant boys,” at the end of his life had an inspiring electricity in his mind and his creative works.

{The Advocate, 19 August 1997; CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}