Tchaikovsky: Three Mysteries
BY Warren Boroson
The former chief music critic of the New York Times, Harold
Schonberg, had this to say about Tchaikovsky: He was “lacking in elevated
thought.”
Schonberg also
had contempt for George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and his American in Paris.
He called them “junk.”
For sophisticated
music lovers like Schonberg, music that is mainly melodies—even beautiful
melodies—simply is not enough. They want development—variations on the
beautiful melodies—complexity.
And T. didn’t choose
to write in sonata form—the traditional Western form of music.
Anyway, I myself
like T. and his beautiful melodies. Not as much as I like Beethoven and
Schubert and Mozart, because Schonberg had a point. You can get tired of eating
only desserts. As a kid I loved T.’s Romeo and Juliet—but I can no longer
listen to it. Still, I’m grateful for much of the other music he wrote.
That’s one mystery about T.—why so many critics
look down on him. His music is lovely but....
Another mystery
is: Why did Nadezhda von Meck stop giving him money?
She was a
wealthy widow—Russian—and she had learned that he had financial problems. So
she offered him a regular stipend and to live on her estate. With this proviso:
they should never meet. This went on for 13 years. Twice they encountered each
other—accidentally. Each scurried away. (Sort of like Dante and Beatrice.)
Von Meck had had
13 children, 11 of whom lived.
She also supported Claude Debussy financially—and Anton
Rubinstein.
He wrote his
“beloved friend,” as she called her, 1,200 or so letters.
Von Meck had had 13 children, 11 of whom
lived. She was a controlling person—and micromanaged her children. She wrote to
T.: “I am very
unsympathetic in my personal relations because I do not possess any femininity
whatever; second, I do not know how to be tender, and this characteristic has
passed on to my entire family. All of us are afraid to be affected or
sentimental…”
And then she
stopped giving T. money and broke off with him. Why? Was her money running out?
No. Was she upset upon learning of his homosexuality? She must have known, T’s
biographers say. Did her children object? It’s very possible. In fact, that
seems to be the best explanation.
T. was
devastated by the breakup. He wrote: “Perhaps it is because I never knew
NF personally that she seemed to me the
ideal of a human being; I could no imagine inconstancy in such a demigoddess.”
***
A key event in T.’s
life was, as a child, his leaving his mother to go to boarding school. He himself
wrote that he had loved her “with a sort of morbidly passionate love.”
He grew up
in Russia to be a nervous, shy, melancholy person. No doubt this was related to
his homosexuality—about which he was deeply ashamed. When he was young, he went
on a trip with a friend of his father’s, working as his secretary—and
discovered that that friend had “the most vile qualities of mind. Up till then
I had not suspected that such incredibly base persons existed on this earth.”
David Nice, a biogapher, suspects that his father’s friend “made sexual
advances” to T.—who wasn’t aware of his own homosexuality then “and reacted
with a disproportionate sense of revulsion.” One can imagine his shock when he
found that he himself, like his father’s friend, was an “incredibly base
person.”
Later he wrote
about his homosexuality: “It is a fact that [missing words—my inclinations?]
create an impossible gulf between the majority of people and myself. They
impart to my character a host of features—a sense of alienation, fear of others,
timidity, excessive shyness, mistrustfulness—which make me more and more
unsociable.”
He decided that he
had to get married—for his own sake, and for the sake of other members of his
family. His brother was also homosexual, and T. wrote to him that “for both of
us our dispositions are the greatest and most insuperable obstacle to happiness
and we must fight our natures to the best of our ability.”
Some famous
homosexuals also got married—to persuade their followers that they were
hetereosexual. Rock Hudson, Elton John, Cole Porter, Vincente Minnelli.
So T. married a
young woman who was madly in love with him—after explaining to her that there
was to be nothing physical in the marriage. Antonina Milyukova. She said she
understood.
At some stage, David
Nice writes, the sexual aspect of their marriage
reared its head. (“Not, perhaps as
swiftly as Ken Russell has Glenda Jackson make the attempt in the film ‘The
Music Lovers.’”) T. “found his bride physically repulsive as well as musically
insensitive….” So he supposedly jumped into the Moscow River, hoping to die of
pneumonia. Actually, his health, writes one biographer, improved because of the
cold bath!
Divorce was impossible—she
was convinced he loved her.
Antonina outlived
T. by 25 years, but she spent most of them in an insane asylum.
T.’s Sixth
Symphony, the Pathetique, which he wrote just before his death, is supposed to
be autbiographical—“…he bared his torment over the forced concealment of his
sexual nature and relived the crisis of his marriage,” wrote Nice.
+++
His father had wanted
him to become a lawyer, but approved of his son’s trying to become a composer
instead. And T. quickly showed his musical genius. Anton Rubenstein, a famous
pianist, took T. under his wing, and T. dedicated hs first piano concerto to
him. When T. played the first movement for him, Rubenstein said he hated it—and
that it was unplayable—and asked T. to completely revise it. T. angrily replied
that he wouldn’t change one note. Eventually Rubenstein played the music and
acknowledged his error.
Gradually T.’s music
won him attention and praise all over the world. (“Gradually.” “One critic
referred to his “melodic monotony.”)
He became a friend
of Tolstoy, whom he considered the greatest writer in the world (ahead of even
Dickens). In fact, T. wrote that he was “never was more flattered in my life…as
when Lev Tolstoy beside me listening to [T.’s music] dissolved in tears.”(Tolstoy,
as he had told Rachmaninoff and
Chaliapin, expressed his complete contempt for Beethoven to T.)
T. loved Mozart,
and especially Don Giovanni. “It is to Mozart that I am indebted for the fact
that I have dedicated my life to music.” Why Mozart? T.’s own explanation: “…perhaps
it is because as a man of my times I am broken and morally sick that I so love
to seek peace and consolation in Mozart’s music.”
T., besides
writing music, worked as a music critic. He didn’t like Moussorgsky’s Boris
Godunov, calling it “utterly and
damnably awful….” But he loved Bizet’s Carmen—“In ten years,” he predicted, in
1879, “Carmen wil be the most popular opera in the world.” He went to Bayreuth
to listen to a complete performance of Wagner’s Ring…and had reservations. When
the Ring ended, he wrote, “I felt as if I had been liberated from captivity.”
Even so, he admired Wagner and acknowledged that his own music had been
influenced by Wagner’s.
He met and befriended Edvard Grieg—he admired
Dvorak—thought Brahms’s music cold and shallow—he admired the “astounding
talent” of Gustav Mahler—as well as works by the young composer, Sergei
Rachmaninoff—like the Prelude in C Sharp Minor.
The biggest
mystery about T., of course, is: Did he commit suicide? Did the Czar himself
ORDER T.’s suicide because a horrible scandal about his homosexuality
was about to explode? Did T.’s former classmates at the School of Jurisprudece
order his suicide?
Biographer Nice
writes, “… it had to be suicide.” He deliberately drank a glass of polluted
water at a time when cholera was epidemic in Moscow.
In
a book that Bard College compiled a in 1998, Alexander Poznansky argues that T.’s
death was certainly NOT suicide—that homosexuality was common and accepted
during T.’s day—that T. was leading a happy life—and that T. and others at the
time paid little attenton to warnings about the drinking water. Poznansky
forcefully argues against the suicide theory. He works at Yale’s Sterling
Library and has written extensively on T. He is described in the Bard book, by
the editor Leslie Kearney, as “the leading authority on T.’s life.”
Poznansky writes
that “we have no factual evidence whatsoever that T. attempted suicide after
his marriage by wading into the freezing cold Moscow River.” And that there was
no fatal drug that imitates the symptoms of cholera. Besides, he argues, T.
finally had accepted his homosexuality. And as a composer, he was now idolized
throughout the world; he led the first concert ever given at Carnegie Hall;
audiences in Boston went mad over his
piano concerto.
As for his supposed
suicide, Poznansky writes that T.’s “recklessness was self-evident; nor was he
alone in ignoring elementary hygienic measures.”
Normally, given
a colorful, exciting explanation and an alternative, dull, commonplace
explanation, it’s wise to accept the dull, commonplace explanation. Oswald
alone shot Kennedy; fellow named Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays. And I suspect T. was simply not careful what
he drank because of his profound misery — and guilt over the fate of his wife.
