In bed with Tchaikovsky

In bed with Tchaikovsky

 

SIMON MORRISON

 

The Times Literary Supplement

How scholarship concerned with the Russian composer’s sexuality traps him in a perpetual adolescence – and drags him into modern debates about Russia and the West

Published: 29 April 2015

Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Lilia Yudina as Antonina Milyukova in Tchaikovsky, 1969 Photograph: © RIA Novosti/akg-images

 

 

 

Once more, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s sexuality has come up for debate, and once more, the discussion has nothing to do with the composer’s time or place but everything to do with ours. Tchaikovsky has no say in the matter, so we feel free to interpret his music, even when fixed to words or grounded in dancers’ feet, however we like. Doing so keeps the music relevant. Apparently relevance means dragging Tchaikovsky into the political and cultural conflict between Russia, as the born-again defender of traditional conservative values, and the decadent, declining, same-sex- marriage-sanctioning West.

“Who Made the Genius Gay?” asks an article published last November in the semiofficial arts and politics newspaper Kul’tura. Homosexuality is presumed to be something extrinsic, something that has been done to Tchaikovsky. The perpetrators need to be named and shamed, which then allows for the redemption, through purification, of the composer’s reputation.

 

 

 

The historiographic purge is carried out in Kul’tura by Svetlana Belicheva, who dabbles in music criticism but identifies herself as a “doctor of psychology, professor, and honoured scientist of the Russian Federation”. She deems it “absurd” to assess Tchaikovsky’s genius “based solely on his sexual orientation” but then does just that, and quite shockingly. “Such music – harmonic, radiant, healing – could not have been written by an unbalanced person”, she asserts. “Homosexuality is not a defect but it is also not normal. This is a sexual pathology which, like any illness, leaves an imprint on the creative act – and so some sort of rupture must be felt.” Such views would not be worth airing were there not a broader campaign, in the long run-up to the 175th anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s birth, to establish once and for all that the composer was neither homosexual nor heterosexual but asexual. “Sex as such was of little interest to him”, a like-minded Russian psychiatrist, Mikhail Buyanov, assures us, because “he had greater concerns”. The quote comes from an article published in 2010 on korolevnews.ru under the title “Russian Psychiatrists Prove Tchaikovsky Wasn’t Gay”. The Russian Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinsky, endorsed the general sentiment in an interview given to the Interfax news agency last September.

 

 

 

According to Belicheva, recent Tchaikovsky scholarship rests on a “false dichotomy” that posits everything Soviet as a lie and everything Western as the truth. Yet as rhetorical practices of this sort demand, the division is here reinforced – albeit in a different context and with impeccable illogic. Belicheva chides the “Yale University employee and emigrant” Alexander Poznansky for succumbing to “ideas about same-sex marriages, numbered parenting, and propaganda about homosexual relationships”. Had Poznansky not moved from Russia to the liberal state of Connecticut and steeped himself in various Circuit Court decisions concerning divorced parent visitation schedules, Belicheva assures us, he would not have unearthed all those titillating documents in the Tchaikovsky House-Museum in Klin, near Moscow.

 

 

 

The unexpurgated letters nonetheless make plain that Tchaikovsky loved men more than women

 

 

 

Poznansky is among the world’s leading Tchaikovsky experts, having published, both in English and in Russian, a collection of reminiscences of the composer, a documents-based assessment of the circumstances surrounding his death, numerous articles and reviews, and two thick biographies, the thicker published in St Petersburg in 2009. He co-authored the massive two-volume The Tchaikovsky Handbook: A guide to the man and his music (2002), which includes a thematic catalogue of works, photographs and letters; a new translation of Tchaikovsky’s autobiography; plus a genealogy and a bibliography. Poznansky also masterminded an indispensable online research guide. Contra Belicheva, he has provided a much-needed corrective, less to Soviet accounts of Tchaikovsky’s life than to those published outside Russia by the late British musicologist David Brown. Unlike Poznansky, whose biographies rest on the sources that document Tchaikovsky’s life, Brown imagined that life from having listened to the music. The scores are his sources. Tchaikovsky’s life – his humanity – is reduced to the notes he wrote and the fantasies they engendered in the mind of the listener.

 

 

 

Poznansky consulted thousands of documents, including Tchaikovsky’s occasionally self-effacing letters and journal entries. His brother’s memoirs fill in the picture along with a selection of reviews and critical pieces; the letters of his publisher, relatives, and Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich; and the recollections of the people with whom Tchaikovsky attended the School of Jurisprudence and lectured at the Moscow Conservatoire. Men tended to write effusive letters to each other during the period, and neither the verbal conventions nor the rhetorical style had a sexual orientation. The unexpurgated letters nonetheless make plain that Tchaikovsky loved men more than women. He wrote the following, for example, about his relationship with Iosif Kotek, the celebrated violinist who helped him compose his D-Major Violin Concerto: “When he caresses me with his hand, when he lies with his head inclined on my breast, and I run my hand through his hair and secretly kiss it, when for hours on end I hold his hand in mine and grow faint in my battle with the impulse to fall at his feet and to kiss them – these little feet – passion rages within me with such unimaginable strength, my voice trembles like that of a youth, and I talk nonsense”.

 

 

 

Tchaikovsky wrote this letter to his brother Modest in 1877, when he was thirty-seven (the translation is by Roland John Wiley). That same year, he entered into a calamitously ill-advised marriage to a female admirer, Antonina Milyukova. The episode inspired an irresponsible film by Kenneth Russell, The Music Lovers (1970), in which a perspiring Tchaikovsky is seen swilling vodka in the nuptial train carriage, resisting his lustful bride in abject terror. Its Soviet antipode, the lavish and chaste Tchaikovsky (1969), has a train scene of a different sort – a dreamscape in which the composer chats with his patroness Nadezhda von Mekk as the birch trees whizz by. The two of them agree that his emotional life must be sublimated, placed in the greater service of his art.

 

 

 

The affection Tchaikovsky showed for Milyukova when they wed in 1877 did in fact turn to revulsion, prompting the composer to thoughts of suicide born out of sheer desperation. The closest he came to taking his own life involved wading waist-deep into the icy waters of the River Moskva. Had he contracted pneumonia, as he briefly hoped he would, the Symbolist and Surrealist movements in music might have been delayed, along with some much-needed reforms in ballet. The symbol of his survival is his opera Eugene onegin (1878), on the immortal text by Alexander Pushkin. The heroine Tatiana impulsively declares her love for onegin, an inauthentic indifferent. Rebuffed, she turns forever inward, cold to the touch. The plot is propelled by filigreed salon-song melodies and the geometric forms of ballroom dances; their musical interaction highlights the discord between Tatiana’s feelings and her aristocratic obligations.

 

 

 

That does not mean that Eugene onegin merely reflects Tchaikovsky’s own suffering. Even if Romantic aesthetics endorsed the transformation of life into art, and even though there may be no shortage of nineteenth- century artists who advertised their attempts to express themselves through their craft, still Tchaikovsky’s music may not so simply be read as a cipher for his psyche.

 

David Brown, the scholar most heavily invested in yoking Tchaikovsky’s life to his art (and vice versa), died last year at the age of eighty-four. In his four-volume chronicle of Tchaikovsky’s career, published between 1978 and 1992, Brown invoked the hoariest clichés about the tortured Russian soul as part of his effort to interpret the composer’s music as an intimate diary. Like biographers before and after, he saw Eugene onegin in terms of the real-life drama of 1877. He also interprets the fatefulness of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony of 1878 in light of the marriage mess. Even the original version of Swan Lake, with its tragic ending, reflected in his view the nuptial debacle, never mind that the plot was not Tchaikovsky’s doing, being the work of the dramatist Vladimir Begichev, and he had received the commission for it in 1875, long before he met his future wife. To justify his analysis, Brown matched select and sorrowful passages from the composer’s letters with the pages of the scores. Tchaikovsky’s life is heard in the kitschiness of the Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture; in Francesca da Rimini, an orchestral evocation of lovers condemned to hell; in the Manfred Symphony, whose protagonist roams the Alps to seek the meaning of it all. Whatever works do not fit the mould tend to be given short shrift or dismissed as creative misfires. The perennial Christmas favourite The Nutcracker comes in for the greatest censure. “Why Tchaikovsky should ever have let himself be persuaded to accept this tale as the subject for a ballet is bewildering”, Brown writes. “Some, of course, will think this judgment too harsh. Yet the fact remains that The Nutcracker is the most inconsequential in all Tchaikovsky’s mature theatrical pieces, and its dramatic structure the least satisfactory.”

 

 

 

Yet at the time of his death in 1893, Tchaikovsky was perceived by his peers, including the avant-garde Russian “mystic” Symbolists, as a modernist seer. He was the lodestar of “Zukunftsmusik”, the music of the future. The word is borrowed from Wagner but was applied to Tchaikovsky’s final opera Iolanta and, yes, The Nutcracker, first performed with it on a double bill. The two scores attested to Tchaikovsky’s radically original genius for using timbre and texture as compositional determinants. He had the ability to turn the orchestra into a phantasmagoric instrumental kaleidoscope, shifting colours and patterns to make new musical worlds appear. Tchaikovsky may have declared his allegiance to Mozart, but he anticipated Debussy.

 

 

 

Brown needed to sweep aside the cheerfulness of The Nutcracker to support his larger claim, which makes the psychosexual drama surrounding Milyukova seem like a mere bad date. Brown believed the sensational rumour, spawned by the expatriate Soviet musicologist Alexandra Orlova, that Tchaikovsky took his own life in 1893 for fear that a liaison with an underage male would become public. That piece of gossip was tied to another: that the composer was tried in a court of honour consisting of classmates from the School of Jurisprudence. The invented incident led Brown to the “inescapable conclusion” that “Tchaikovsky committed suicide”. We now know, as surely as we can know anything about the past, that Tchaikovsky did not commit suicide, thanks to the meticulous research of Polina Vaydman, the in-house scholar at the Tchaikovsky House-Museum, and to the distinguished scholar who has done the most to correct Brown’s speculations – none other than Poznansky.

 

Poznansky put a stop to the suicide talk by doing his homework. In his book Tchaikovsky’s Last Days (1996), he records the spread of Asiatic cholera from the south to the north of Russia in 1892. The first cases were detected around Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, after which the disease moved upstream along the Volga River until it reached the underperforming sewer and water system of St Petersburg. Clinics were opened along rural transport routes yet they proved ineffective, since the rural types viewed urbanites with suspicion. There were riots. Bizarre stories spread about people dying after digging for potatoes in infected soil and putting dirty money in their mouths. In St Petersburg, the homes of the ill were disinfected with lime and chlorine, but the disease could not be eradicated. It lingered for over a year in the city, taking the lives of more than 1,300 ne’er-do-wells, manual labourers, rank-and-file bureaucrats, and eventually Russia’s greatest composer. Cholera bacillus was even found in the pipes leading to the Winter Palace, the residence of the Tsar, alarming those in the upper ranks who considered themselves immune to the disease by virtue of avoiding untreated water and the regular intake of ether, camphor and castor oil.

 

Cholera had killed his mother when Tchaikovsky was fourteen, shattering his childhood, yet the composer did not fear the disease. He contracted it by drinking unpurified water at (it is presumed) one of the restaurants he frequented with family and friends. Loss of appetite preceded headache, nausea, diarrhoea and cramps, and then his heart stopped. Tchaikovsky’s doctor was vilified for his flat-footedness in treating the composer with hot baths and doses of musk. Tchaikovsky was fifty-three, full of plans and with commissions in hand. Poznansky notes that the composer had not aged particularly well; he was white-haired, yellow-toothed, and plagued with digestive troubles before he reached the half-century mark. But his service to his art had steadily increased over time. In the weeks leading up to his end, he showed himself in fine form, boasting “I feel I shall live a long time!” shortly after conducting the premiere of his death-themed Pathétique Symphony.

 

Brown could not ignore evidence against him; yet although he allowed a hint of doubt to creep into his single-volume biography of Tchaikovsky published in 2006, he did not backtrack. Indeed, he continued to point to the neurotic effusions in Tchaikovsky’s letters as proof that the composer had hidden his sexuality and suffered on its account. His life and his art were, for Brown, a cauldron of anguish – The Nutcracker aside.

 

Scholarship concerned with Tchaikovsky’s sexuality has trapped the composer in a perpetual adolescence

 

Meanwhile, the myth entered musical scholarship. Timothy Jackson, a professor of music theory in the College of Music at the University of North Texas, uses graphic representations of tonal space (what is known in the trade as Schenkerian analysis) to argue that the composer’s nervousness, weepiness and occasional outbursts find ｅxpression in the Pathétique Symphony. Syntactical instabilities and aberrances in the middle-ground and background structure of the score (which is to say, nothing anyone hears) become evidence of a morbid psychology. Tchaikovsky’s symphony is interpreted as a musical suicide note – never mind how pleased the composer was with the premiere. The strangeness of it all turns up in Jackson’s subheadings: “Amorous combat: The march, militarism, and homosexual non-conformism”; “Ecce homo!: the crucified artist”; “‘Diseased’ Tristan-deformation”; and “Large-scale harmonic organization and narrative: the structural dominant and the lovers’ tryst”. Reviewers have not been kind to this book, which was marketed as a guide to the Pathétique. The analytical tools in Jackson’s kit are (ironically) those that other theorists have used to keep music pure, to protect composers and their compositions from the hermeneutic balderdash of music historians. But here we have its inversion: graphs and charts in the service of a hermeneutic hallucination. Jackson’s discussion concludes with the reception of the Pathétique under Hitler and “Nazism’s complicated attitude to homosexuality”.

 

Let’s lose the Nazis, please; and fiction, whether it comes from psychologists or musicologists, needs to stop masquerading as fact. If Tchaikovsky’s life must be related to his art (and I would advocate keeping the two of them separate for a while), then the context of both needs to be enriched.

 

Ultimately, scholarship concerned with Tchaikovsky’s sexuality has had the unpleasant effect of trapping the composer in a perpetual adolescence – a spring awakening with no thought of summer. Although he acknowledged in a diary entry in 1888 that he tended to strike a pose in his letters, that he was never quite at ease, he also recognized that he had done himself no favours by leaving behind such a long paper trail of self-reflections. His remorseful, sorrowful outpourings left him feeling remorseful and sorrowful. But in the end, they had much less to do with his doubts as a person than with his doubts as a musician. Tchaikovsky possessed and nurtured and endured a musical gift such as few other composers have ever enjoyed. But genius brings its burdens. These became apparent to him when he was only four years old. His nanny found him weeping and wailing in his bed, distraught because the music in his head would not leave him in peace.

 

Somehow we have all climbed into bed with him, wondering what went on in the great composer’s boudoir and whether or not, for the sake of his reputation and Russian culture in general, the linens should be sent to the cleaner. Beginning in 1940, Soviet aestheticians and ideologues tried to put a stop to the tongue-wagging about Tchaikovsky’s private life as partly fuelled by the Soviet publication of his correspondence with his patron Nadezhda von Meck, in 1934. The eminent American musicologist Richard Taruskin reminds us, in an essay from 1995, “Pathetic Symphonist”, that “the young Soviet Union was the one place where Tchaikovsky’s sexuality was treated in frank and adult fashion – before, that is, the country lapsed into its high-Stalinist meshchanstvo, to use the Russian word for petit-bourgeois narrow-mindedness”. By 1940, his centennial year, the goal was – like Belicheva’s today – to transform Tchaikovsky into a shining beacon of a classical Russian tradition that never existed in the first place. Since then, in the United States and the United Kingdom, Tchaikovsky’s sexuality has become a cause célèbre in the battle to make the musical canon less relentlessly, heterosexually male. It has also seemed, to far too many, to be the skeleton key to the secret of his art – the real treasure.

 

On both sides of the debate and in between, prurient emphasis on the issue has kept it alive. Meanwhile, there is evidence to suggest that Tchaikovsky achieved a state of personal happiness in his later years. The Pathétique was not his death knell: he was contemplating, among other things, a comic ballet about an ancient samurai clan known for fighting demons, dragons and man-eating hags. Although Tchaikovsky’s patron curtailed her support of his activities in 1890, he enjoyed the favour of Tsar Alexander III and received a generous government pension. He was deeply gratified to have been accepted into the inner realm of the Russian Imperial Court, and achieved worldwide stardom. Embraced for his music at home and abroad, he could do, and be, what he wanted. But then he died, and his legacy has been left to the politics, sexual and nationalistic, of the moment.

 

Simon Morrison is Professor of Music at Princeton University, specializing in Russian and French music. He is the author of The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years, 2009, among other books. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011.