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Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man
This monumental biography traces Tchaikovsky's relationship to the culture in which he lived and created. Drawing on the composer's correspondence and diaries, the author deciphers the often coded language that surrounded Tchaikovsky's passionate attachments.
679 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 8, 2015
There are wars on in the field of Tchaikovsky biography. If you’re thinking about a Tchaikovsky biography, if you’re deciding which, I cannot too highly recommend Richard Taruskin’s review-article ‘Pathetic Symphonist: Chaikovsky, Russia, Sexuality, and the Study of Music’. It was published in New Republic or is collected in On Russian Music. Failing that, you can read a shorter explanation of the state of affairs at the Times Literary Supplement online: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/a.... ‘Pathetic Symphonist’ explains the whole history of how and why we came to mythologise Tchaikovsky as a tortured soul, guilty about his sexuality and suicidal at the end.
I grew up with that Tchaikovsky, and I’ve had to farewell him. He made my heart bleed with the gloomy charm of Romantic tragic lives. But I am not sorry to learn that he never gave his homosexuality other than a neutral value; that he operated quite well in his time and place, had a lot of company, had numerous physical relationships and warm emotional relationships, a few of which coincided; that he did not commit suicide; that the Court of Honour by old schoolmates now highly-placed, or even a suicide order from the Tsar (Roman-style), is absurd for the social realities, both crazy legends. Tchaikovsky lived safely enough as an open secret and the Tsar had declined to prosecute in worse homosexual scandals in high government places. Nor is it in the least likely that his letter-friend and sponsor Nadezhda von Meck abandoned him when his sexuality was made known to her, as in Ken Russell’s film (which can still be enjoyed as a lurid metaphor) The Music Lovers.
The end of their story, however, is genuinely sad, a tragedy indeed in real life. It seems, when she was old and ill, her family insisted she cease to sponsor Tchaikovsky and then intercepted letters between them; each thought the other had changed towards them, had reneged on their friendship. Poznansky calls their 13-year connection ‘arguably one of the most extraordinary unions between a man and a woman known to modern history’, so it is terribly sad that both went to their deaths hurt by an estrangement that they were left to assume was the other’s wish.
There are other sad stories in here, and vivid lives other than Tchaikovsky’s. I read this like a study in manners, like a novel. As an additional, this book is well worth putting on shelves for gay history, because Poznansky uncovers so much of the social life of the times. In 19thC Russian writings I’ve found cause to wonder how homosexuality was viewed (what does Dostoyevsky mean with his lesbian interlude in Netochka Nezvanova? What was the social context for his behaviour towards a gay prisoner in The House of the Dead?) – but after reading about the Tchaikovsky-biography wars, I sincerely believe that the research hasn’t been done and the only way to answer my questions was probably to stumble on this book. Tchaikovsky is a case in point: when the Soviets refused to talk about his sexuality and kept his archive shut, while on the other hand Britishers who dealt with his life were by their own admission uncomfortable with homosexuality (David Brown: see Taruskin’s article) – then how is research to be done? Poznansky is utterly cheerful about his sexuality, or anybody else’s for that matter, and this is a great virtue since, sad to say, we have never achieved openmindedness in Tchaikovsky biography before. The image of the tortured soul, who wasn’t very active on that front, is how stuffy Britishers (I am British, I can say that) deal with an admired musician whose sexuality they think – not he – a flaw, that must have been hard to live with.
What I did gather from these pages – and this is not something Poznansky makes explicit – is that Tchaikovsky suffered from a lack of knowledge about sexuality. He knew heaps about sex, don’t worry about that. But he misunderstood himself disastrously in his famously disastrous marriage; and although homosexuality itself was always ‘neutral’ to him (Poznansky’s term), he went through misgivings, and what read as muffled understandings without any help in the form of available knowledge or discussion, about his and his brother Modest’s influence on the young.
Poznansky ends his pages with this, and I cannot disagree:
Rarely do we encounter a genius in art who fully lived a genuinely interesting life parallel to his creativity, yet historically significant and engaging in itself. Tchaikovsky is one of these… Fact is often more richly intriguing and satisfying [than fictions]… Whatever Tchaikovsky’s sins and confusions, however great his music, the life he led in itself is a generous achievement worth telling for its own sake.
This is a document-based biography, and documents (in spite of those closed archives) are in profusion. It is, I think, the most enjoyable biography I have read; challenged only by the early volumes of Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky biography. My four stars, rather than five, are for a certain dissatisfaction… a feeling that there is more work to do. But Poznansky has done further work since this publication; I trust him on Tchaikovsky and I want to get my hands on what else he has written.
I grew up with that Tchaikovsky, and I’ve had to farewell him. He made my heart bleed with the gloomy charm of Romantic tragic lives. But I am not sorry to learn that he never gave his homosexuality other than a neutral value; that he operated quite well in his time and place, had a lot of company, had numerous physical relationships and warm emotional relationships, a few of which coincided; that he did not commit suicide; that the Court of Honour by old schoolmates now highly-placed, or even a suicide order from the Tsar (Roman-style), is absurd for the social realities, both crazy legends. Tchaikovsky lived safely enough as an open secret and the Tsar had declined to prosecute in worse homosexual scandals in high government places. Nor is it in the least likely that his letter-friend and sponsor Nadezhda von Meck abandoned him when his sexuality was made known to her, as in Ken Russell’s film (which can still be enjoyed as a lurid metaphor) The Music Lovers.
The end of their story, however, is genuinely sad, a tragedy indeed in real life. It seems, when she was old and ill, her family insisted she cease to sponsor Tchaikovsky and then intercepted letters between them; each thought the other had changed towards them, had reneged on their friendship. Poznansky calls their 13-year connection ‘arguably one of the most extraordinary unions between a man and a woman known to modern history’, so it is terribly sad that both went to their deaths hurt by an estrangement that they were left to assume was the other’s wish.
There are other sad stories in here, and vivid lives other than Tchaikovsky’s. I read this like a study in manners, like a novel. As an additional, this book is well worth putting on shelves for gay history, because Poznansky uncovers so much of the social life of the times. In 19thC Russian writings I’ve found cause to wonder how homosexuality was viewed (what does Dostoyevsky mean with his lesbian interlude in Netochka Nezvanova? What was the social context for his behaviour towards a gay prisoner in The House of the Dead?) – but after reading about the Tchaikovsky-biography wars, I sincerely believe that the research hasn’t been done and the only way to answer my questions was probably to stumble on this book. Tchaikovsky is a case in point: when the Soviets refused to talk about his sexuality and kept his archive shut, while on the other hand Britishers who dealt with his life were by their own admission uncomfortable with homosexuality (David Brown: see Taruskin’s article) – then how is research to be done? Poznansky is utterly cheerful about his sexuality, or anybody else’s for that matter, and this is a great virtue since, sad to say, we have never achieved openmindedness in Tchaikovsky biography before. The image of the tortured soul, who wasn’t very active on that front, is how stuffy Britishers (I am British, I can say that) deal with an admired musician whose sexuality they think – not he – a flaw, that must have been hard to live with.
What I did gather from these pages – and this is not something Poznansky makes explicit – is that Tchaikovsky suffered from a lack of knowledge about sexuality. He knew heaps about sex, don’t worry about that. But he misunderstood himself disastrously in his famously disastrous marriage; and although homosexuality itself was always ‘neutral’ to him (Poznansky’s term), he went through misgivings, and what read as muffled understandings without any help in the form of available knowledge or discussion, about his and his brother Modest’s influence on the young.
Poznansky ends his pages with this, and I cannot disagree:
Rarely do we encounter a genius in art who fully lived a genuinely interesting life parallel to his creativity, yet historically significant and engaging in itself. Tchaikovsky is one of these… Fact is often more richly intriguing and satisfying [than fictions]… Whatever Tchaikovsky’s sins and confusions, however great his music, the life he led in itself is a generous achievement worth telling for its own sake.
This is a document-based biography, and documents (in spite of those closed archives) are in profusion. It is, I think, the most enjoyable biography I have read; challenged only by the early volumes of Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky biography. My four stars, rather than five, are for a certain dissatisfaction… a feeling that there is more work to do. But Poznansky has done further work since this publication; I trust him on Tchaikovsky and I want to get my hands on what else he has written.
March 21, 2019
Well it took me a while to get through this (I'm not a fan of huge tomes as a rule, but I do make exceptions), and I'm so glad I stuck with it! This is a fascinating and very readable biography which seeks to debunk the myth of Tchaikovsky the 'tormented homosexual' who spent all his life trying to suppress his nature and whose death is shrouded in mystery (Poznansky provides ample testimony that the composer died from cholera, as his relatives and his doctors always claimed, and not by suicide).
I was fascinated to learn that despite his disastrous attempt at marriage (a step he took to please his doting father), Tchaikovsky enjoyed an active sex life and also an active romantic life - the former being mainly confined to encounters with servants, working men and sometimes male prostitutes, the latter involving colleagues, proteges and even members of his own family. According to the mores of the time, this was not a sad state of affairs - upper class heterosexual men would similarly seek out sexual encounters with women of the former serf class without compromising their respectability and without a shred of guilt. Homosexuality was kept under wraps in 19th century Russia, but hardly ever openly prosecuted, and Tchaikovsky's sexuality seems to have been an 'open secret' amongst his acquaintance, which included members of the nobility and even the Tsar himself. Tchaikovsky's erotic interest in adolescent boys, so evident from his correspondence (often heavily censored in publication), is tackled with honesty and sympathy for the conflicted feelings it aroused (which often resulted in sexual interest being commuted to romantic appreciation).
Poznansky also documents the composer's extraordinary thirteen-year correspondence with his patron, the wealthy businesswoman Nadezhda Filaretovna Von Meck - an intimate relationship despite the two never actually meeting face to face (with the exception of one embarrassing, accidental encounter). It is, as he says, 'arguably one of the most extraordinary unions between a man and a woman known to modern history' - but a relationship that suited the sensitive, nervous, passionate composer down to the ground, both emotionally and materially.
Tchaikovsky's passionate friendships and music are treated here as the joint legacy of a remarkable man who enjoyed life, sex, romance and friendship whilst also suffering agonies of self-doubt about his own worth, health and vocation. The music Tchaikovsky bequeathed to the world is, of course, sublime - but his inner life deserves appreciation too, and that is what is explored so sympathetically in this biography.
I was fascinated to learn that despite his disastrous attempt at marriage (a step he took to please his doting father), Tchaikovsky enjoyed an active sex life and also an active romantic life - the former being mainly confined to encounters with servants, working men and sometimes male prostitutes, the latter involving colleagues, proteges and even members of his own family. According to the mores of the time, this was not a sad state of affairs - upper class heterosexual men would similarly seek out sexual encounters with women of the former serf class without compromising their respectability and without a shred of guilt. Homosexuality was kept under wraps in 19th century Russia, but hardly ever openly prosecuted, and Tchaikovsky's sexuality seems to have been an 'open secret' amongst his acquaintance, which included members of the nobility and even the Tsar himself. Tchaikovsky's erotic interest in adolescent boys, so evident from his correspondence (often heavily censored in publication), is tackled with honesty and sympathy for the conflicted feelings it aroused (which often resulted in sexual interest being commuted to romantic appreciation).
Poznansky also documents the composer's extraordinary thirteen-year correspondence with his patron, the wealthy businesswoman Nadezhda Filaretovna Von Meck - an intimate relationship despite the two never actually meeting face to face (with the exception of one embarrassing, accidental encounter). It is, as he says, 'arguably one of the most extraordinary unions between a man and a woman known to modern history' - but a relationship that suited the sensitive, nervous, passionate composer down to the ground, both emotionally and materially.
Tchaikovsky's passionate friendships and music are treated here as the joint legacy of a remarkable man who enjoyed life, sex, romance and friendship whilst also suffering agonies of self-doubt about his own worth, health and vocation. The music Tchaikovsky bequeathed to the world is, of course, sublime - but his inner life deserves appreciation too, and that is what is explored so sympathetically in this biography.
March 27, 2021
A serious in depth narrative of the creative and psychological life of one of the greatest composers of any era. The author discusses both the music and the inner life of Tchaikovsky with a care for the the intensity with which Tchaikovsky approached both aspects of his life.
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