Tchaikovsky and His World

by Leslie Kearney (Editor)

Overview

Tchaikovsky has long intrigued music-lovers as a figure who straddles many borders--between East and West, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, tradition and innovation, tenderness and bombast, masculine and feminine. In this book, through consideration of his music and biography, scholars from several disciplines explore the many sides of Tchaikovsky. The volume presents for the first time in English some of Tchaikovsky's own writings about music, as well as three influential articles, previously available only in German, from the 1993 Tübingen conference commemorating the centennial of Tchaikovsky's death.

Tchaikovsky's distinguished biographer, Alexander Poznansky, reveals new findings from his most recent archival explorations in Kiln, Tchaikovsky's home. Poznansky makes accessible for the first time the full text of perviously censored letters, clarifying issues about the composer's life that until now have remained mere conjecture. Leon Botstein examines the world of realist art that was so influential in Tchaikovsky's day, while Janet Kennedy describes how interpretations of Tchaikovsky's ballet Sleeping Beauty act as a barometer of the aesthetic and even political climate of several generations. Natalia Minibayeva elucidates the First Orchestral Suite as a workshop for Tchaikovsky's composition of large-scale works, including symphony, opera, and ballet, while Susanne Dammann discusses the problematic Fourth Symphony as a work perfectly poised between East and West. Arkadii Klimovitsky considers Tchaikovsky's role as a link between Russia's Golden and Silver Ages. The extensive interaction between music and literature in this period forms the basis for Rosamund Bartlett's essay on creative parallels between Tchaikovsky and Chekhov. Richard Wortman describes the political climate at the end of Tchaikovsky's life, including Alexander III's mania for re-creating seventeenth-century Russian culture. Caryl Emerson, Kadja Grönke, and Leslie Kearney examine a number of issues raised by Tchaikovsky's operas. Marina Kostalevsky translates Nikolai Kashkin's 1899 review of Tchaikovsky's controversial opera Orleanskaia Deva (The Maid of Orleans).

The book concludes with examples of theoretical writing by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, authors of Russia's first two systematic books on music theory. Lyle Neff translates and provides commentary on compositional issues that Tchaikovsky discusses in personal correspondence, as well as Rimsky-Korsakov's analysis of his own opera Snegurochka (The Snow Maiden). Tchaikovsky and His World will change how we understand the life, works, and intellectual milieu of one of the most important and beloved composers of the nineteenth century.

Originally published in 1998.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691602639
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	The Bard Music Festival , #403
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.90(d)

Read an Excerpt

Tchaikovsky and his World

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By Leslie Kearney

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1998 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-00430-3

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CHAPTER 1

Tchaikovsky: A Life Reconsidered

ALEXANDER POZNANSKY

Toward the end of his fairly short life Tchaikovsky's inner and outer circumstances appeared perfectly splendid. After completing his triumphal tour of America and receiving an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University, he was accepted as a world figure, a national composer of universal significance. In 1891 a Carnegie Hall program proclaimed Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Saint-Saens as the three greatest living composers, and music critics praised Tchaikovsky as "a modern music lord."

Within Russia he became even more than that—he was considered a national treasure, his music admired and adored by all strata of society. He enjoyed the favor of the Imperial court, where he had a number of influential protectors, including two Grand Dukes, and the personal patronage of Tsar Alexander III, who had granted him a handsome government pension. Despite his homosexuality, which had in Russia become a matter of public knowledge, it cannot be said that Tchaikovsky's inner life had suffered any prolonged frustration; on the contrary, his emotional involvement during this period with his beloved nephew Vladimir [Bob] Davydov proved a source of stability and spiritual enjoyment.

Towards the end of the century, however, rumors of Tchaikovsky's homosexuality spread beyond Russia's borders, and this caused a change in attitude toward his work within Western musicological circles. His music began to be criticized as sentimental, romantically excessive, and charged with many imperfections, even pathology.

It was Oscar Wilde's trial of 1895 that created an enormous resonance in the English-speaking world, heightening negative tendencies in the reception and critical judgment of Tchaikovsky's art. As Richard Taruskin has noted, Wilde's trial became a "major watershed in the essentialization—and pathologization—of homosexuality around the turn of the century.... The homosexual was now defined not by his acts but by his character, a character that was certified to be diseased, hence necessarily alien to that of healthy, 'normal' people."

From that moment on, the essentialist curse began to claim Tchaikovsky. Almost everything written about his work in American and especially English criticism has been substantially affected by this single fact of his personal life. Students of the composer's biography and music more often than not chose to dwell on his "abnormal" sexuality, employing their own standards of sexual morality and health to color their fundamental interpretation of his music.

For most of our century Tchaikovsky was portrayed as a sort of fictionalized figure, an embodiment of romantic grief and turbid eroticism supposed by many to have commited suicide as a logical end to his sexual lifestyle. This image, which constantly lurked in the inflamed imagination of the lay audience, fails even remotely to resemble a real man with real concerns.

It is time to change this fallacious perception of Tchaikovsky's personality and his art by putting the record straight. Because Tchaikovsky's archives in Russia have recently been made accessible to students of his life and music, we now know much more about him and his environment than we ever did before.

I

Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky was born on 25 April/7 May 1840 at Votkinsk, in Viatka Province, which is located in the Urals 600 miles east of Moscow. He was the second son of Ilia Petrovich Tchaikovsky, a mining engineer and manager of the Kamsko-Votkinsk iron works, and Aleksandra Andreievna Tchaikovsky (née Assier).

On his father's side, Tchaikovsky's origin may be traced to the Ukrainian village Nikolaevka in the Poltava region. His great-grandfather was an eighteenth-century Ukrainian Cossack named Fëdor Chaika. Later the family name was changed to Chaikovskii, which is usually spelled in English according to the French transliteration. At first Chaika's son Pyotr studied in a seminary in Kiev, but he later received medical training in St. Petersburg. From 1770 to 1777 he served as a physician's assistant in the army. Eventually he found himself in the Ural region and there, in 1776, married Anastasiia Posokhova. In 1785 he was included (as a member of the landless gentry) in the register of nobility instituted by Catherine the Great. He resigned from his medical service and ended his life as city governor of Glazov in Viatka Province. Pyotr Chaikovskii had nine children, one of whom was the composer's father Ilia (1795–1880). After graduating from the College of Mines in St. Petersburg with a silver medal, he held several teaching and administrative posts, some of the latter in the northeast of Russia.

In 1837 Ilia became a factory manager in Votkinsk. This city was famous for its ironworks, which had been founded in 1758, and by 1820 it could boast the first hearth furnace in all Russia. As manager of the ironworks Ilia Tchaikovsky enjoyed broad authority within the Ekaterinburg region—from governing local factories to repealing the decisions of local courts. In 1827 he had married Mariia Kaiser, who died in 1830, leaving him with a daughter, Zinaida.

Tchaikovsky's mother Aleksandra (1812–54) was the younger daughter of Andrei Assier (1790–1832), who was descended from a French emigre family. According to the version preferred by Tchaikovsky himself, the d'Assiers were Protestants who left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685; another, more reliable version maintains that the d'Assiers left in the wake of the French Revolution in 1789. At first Michel d'Assier lived with his family in German lands. Around 1795 they moved to Russia and, by an oath of allegiance, officially became subjects of the Imperial Crown. Michel's son Andrei, owing to his social connections and excellent knowledge of almost every European language, came to occupy a distinguished position within the bureaucracy in St. Petersburg, where he served in the Customs Department. He received government honors and was twice married. From his first marriage to Ekaterina Popova he had four children, including Aleksandra, the composer's mother. After the divorce of her parents and the death of her mother in 1816, Aleksandra was placed in the so-called Patriotic Institute, the government-sponsored school for orphaned girls from noble families, where she received a fine education. In 1833 she met Ilia Tchaikovsky and married him.

Apart from his stepsister Zinaida (1829–78) and elder brother Nikolai (1838–1911), after Pyotr's birth in 1840 the Tchaikovskys would have a daughter, Aleksandra (1841-91), and three more sons: Ippolit (1843–1927), and the fraternal twins Anatolii (1850–1915) and Modest (1850–1916). Tchaikovsky was never close to Zinaida, nor was he particularly intimate with his older brother Nikolai, who followed in the steps of their father as mining engineer, nor to a younger one, Ippolit, who became a naval officer. But he dearly loved his sister Aleksandra (or Sasha); and his youngest brothers, the twins Modest and Anatolii, always enjoyed his particular affection. Later in life Anatolii made a prominent career in law, rising by the end of his life to the rank of privy councilor and senator, while Modest became a playwright and educator, as well as the biographer of his famous older brother Pyotr.

Tchaikovsky was a very impressionable child, due in part to the highly emotional atmosphere within his family and to the characters of his parents. These factors could not but influence the specific "familial-erotic" dimension of his developing personality—a dimension later to play a prominent role in his relations with his younger brothers and his nephews.

Tchaikovsky's earliest musical impressions came from the family's orchestrion, with its excerpts from Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. In September 1844 he made his first documented attempt at composition—"Our Mama in Petersburg," a song written together with Aleksandra. Pyotr became deeply attached to his French governess, Fanny Durbach, and he also developed a friendship with the son of a neighbor, Venedikt Alekseiev. At the end of 1845 he began taking piano lessons with one Mariia Palchikova and became familiar with the mazurkas of Chopin.

In 1848 Ilia Tchaikovsky resigned his post and the family moved first to Moscow and later, in the expectation of a new appointment, to St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg, Pyotr and Nikolai were placed in the private Schmelling School, where Pyotr resumed piano lessons. But the appointment in the capital did not materialize, and in May 1849 the family had to return to the Urals, where Ilia Tchaikovsky was appointed manager of an ironworks in Alapaevsk, some 300 miles to the east of Votkinsk. This did not prevent the composer's mother from returning with him to the capital the following autumn, so that he could enroll in the preparatory class of the Imperial School of Jurisprudence. On this occasion Pyotr saw Mikhail Glinka's A Life for the Tsar (Zhizn' za Tsaria) at the Alexandrinsky Theater, and it made a lasting impression on him.

During the next couple of years Tchaikovsky's parents moved back and forth between the Urals and St. Petersburg, finally settling in the capital in 1852. By this time Pyotr had successfully passed his entrance exam for the School of Jurisprudence, where he participated in the school choir under the direction of the distinguished Russian choirmaster Gavriil Lomakin. Tchaikovsky later remembered: "My voice was a splendid soprano and for several years in succession I took the first line in the trio which on these occasions was sung by the three boys at the altar at the beginning and end of [the Liturgy]."

The sudden death of Tchaikovsky's mother from cholera on 14 June 1854 was a traumatic event for Pyotr, then a young adolescent. Earlier that year the Tchaikovsky family was living with the family of Ilia's brother Pyotr (1789–1871), a retired general, in a large apartment on Vasilevsky Island, an arrangement that lasted for three years After Ilia's eldest daughter Zinaida married Evgeni Olkhovsky and left the capital to live in the Urals, Aleksandra, now fifteen years old and newly graduated from school, took charge of the household and of the twins

Tchaikovsky spent nine years (1850–59) as a boarding student at the School of Jurisprudence At that time he also made his first attempts at composition, among which were an opera, Hyperbole (now lost), a waltz for piano, and his first published work, the song "Mezza notte" His stay in that institution must have enhanced Tchaikovsky's innate homosexual sensibilities The School of Jurisprudence, like any boarding school, was never distinguished by high morals of any sort, a fact well known to contemporaries the School, for instance, could boast an obscene homosexual song composed by its students, and it also produced a number of prominent homosexuals Of his schoolmates, two loomed large in his life of that period—Aleksei Apukhtin (1841–93), a future poet of renown, and Sergei Kireev (1845–88?), arguably the most passionate of all Tchaikovsky's attachments As regards Tchaikovsky's relationship with Kireev, Modest Tchaikovsky calls it in his still unpublished autobiography one of the "strongest, most durable and purest amorous infatuations" of Tchaikovsky's life, "it possessed all charms, all sufferings, all depth and force of love, most luminous and sublime," such that, without its passion, the "music of Romeo and Juliet of The Tempest, of Francesca da Rimini is not entirely comprehensible" I believe that one of Tchaikovsky's first songs, "My genius, my angel, my friend," composed in 1858, was dedicated to Kireev Outside the School he forged a close friendship with his cousin Anna Tchaikovsky (later Merkling), the daughter of his uncle Pyotr

In the autumn of 1858 Tchaikovsky's father was named to the coveted directorship of the Technological Institute in St Petersburg, and his family moved to the director's large apartments At the end of 1860 Tchaikovsky's sister Aleksandra moved away from the family after marrying Lev Davydov, a well-to-do landowner, the couple settled at his family estate, Kamenka, in Ukraine A few years later Ilia Tchaikovsky married for a third time, taking as his wife Elizaveta Lipport, who had already been taking care of his household for several years With the death of his mother, Tchaikovsky became a mother figure for his twin brothers, Anatolii and Modest Both boys followed in his footsteps to the School of Jurisprudence, where it became clear that Modest was alarmingly similar in character to his elder brother—he too became homosexual.

A month after his graduation on 13 May 1859, Pyotr Tchaikovsky began working as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice. Although he remained there for four years, he quickly found the job ill-suited to his abilities. At the same time he entered the capital's social and cultural milieu as a young man-about-town, spending much of his energy in the pursuit of pleasure, engaging in affairs and amorous adventures with members of his set, until the threat of homosexual scandal, according to an account in Modest's autobiography, sobered him up.

The conflict between his desire for pleasure (sexual pleasure in particular) and his creative aspirations forms the root of his phobia regarding human contact, especially in large crowds, so characteristic of the mature Tchaikovsky. This conflict could not but result in a profound ambivalence with respect to the erotic dimension of his personality.

In the summer of 1861, Tchaikovsky traveled abroad for the first time as secretary and interpreter for a family friend, Vasilii Pisarev. In the course of this trip he visited Berlin, Hamburg, Antwerp, Brussels, London and Paris.

Tchaikovsky's life took an unexpected turn that autumn: he started to attend Nikolai Zaremba's class in thoroughbass offered by the Russian Musical Society, which had recently been founded by Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and Anton Rubinstein with the purpose of promoting professional music education in Russia. When the St. Petersburg Conservatory was opened on 8 September 1862, Tchaikovsky was among its first students. Herman Laroche, the future music critic and composer, also enrolled the same year in the Conservatory, and the two soon became friends. Tchaikovsky studied harmony and form with Nikolai Zaremba, and orchestration and composition with Anton Rubinstein.

Having decided to devote his life to music, Tchaikovsky resigned from the Ministry of Justice on 11 April 1863. This decision coincided with the onset of financial hardships for his father Ilia, who by this time had retired from the directorship of the Technological Institute. To support himself, Tchaikovsky began giving private lessons in piano and music theory to students recommended to him by Anton Rubinstein. Tchaikovsky spent almost three years of his life at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In addition to his study of harmony, strict counterpoint, composition and instrumentation—and despite having been excused from the compulsory piano class—he also decided to study flute and organ.

The leading spirits of the Conservatory from its beginning were Nikolai Zaremba and Anton Rubinstein. Despite Tchaikovsky's enthusiasm for learning, he considered Zaremba just an average instructor, whose dislike of Mozart and Glinka greatly disappointed him, and whose admiration for Beethoven and Mendelssohn the future composer found unbearable.

There is no doubt that, from the beginning, Tchaikovsky's main attraction to the newly founded Conservatory was its director, Anton Rubinstein, who seems to have had the power to stimulate his student's innate abilities, so that Tchaikovsky soon threw off the last traces of dilettantism in pursuit of his goal to become a good composer.

Tchaikovsky never worked as hard as in those years: he faithfully fulfilled his technical assignments and instrumental studies, and tried to master the art of conducting. He was always in the company of fellow student Herman Laroche, who would be the first critic to champion his music, and the two friends attended concerts and operas. Together they made many important connections in St. Petersburg music circles, including to Aleksandr Serov, an ideological opponent of Rubinstein, but the composer of the opera Judith (Iudif), which Tchaikovsky admired.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Tchaikovsky and his World by Leslie Kearney. Copyright © 1998 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Permissions

Preface

Pt. I Biographical Works

Tchaikovsky: A Life Reconsidered

Unknown Tchaikovsky: A Reconstruction of Previously Censored Letters to His Brothers (1875-1879)

Pt. II Essays

Music as the Language of Psychological Realism: Tchaikovsky and Russian Art

Line of Succession: Three Productions of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty

Per Aspera ad Astra: Symphonic Tradition in Tchaikovsky's First Suite for Orchestra

An Examination of Problem History in Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony

Tchaikovsky's Tatiana

On the Role of Gremin: Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin

Review of The Maid of Orleans [1899]

Tchaikovsky Androgyne: The Maid of Orleans

The Coronation of Alexander III

Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, and the Russian Elegy

Tchaikovsky and the Russian "Silver Age"

Pt. III Theoretical Writings

A Documentary Glance at Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov as Music Theorists

Index

List of Contributors