Tchaikovsky
Poznansky, Alexander
71/ n the ecstatic confrontation with a great work of art, one sometimes wishes that he could know what it is to create something of this staggering beauty—perhaps even wishes that he could have...
...Save me from it...
...meanwhile, he tallied up three homosexual scores in one lively month...
...He sang in the school choir, as a treble...
...From that time he became a musical zealot, studying orchestration and composition with Rubinstein, doing some teaching of his own, and working as an accompanist...
...Commissioning a few works from Tchaikovsky, Mrs...
...For the time being, I shall say one thing: I have decided to marry...
...That done with, he next had an affair, though an unconsummated one, with the French soprano Desiree ArtOt, which went so far as engagement, also unconsummated...
...von Meek died three months later...
...Occasionally they would speculate on politics, and what men are truly capable of...
...He did, however, weary of his companions, and railed against "the emptiness and insignificance of these people...
...I wish her every happiness," he wrote, "which does not prevent me from hating her deeply...
...So begins Alexander Poznansky's life of Tchaikovsky, and while Poznansky cannot help but refer to the music at times, one nevertheless misses what could have been applied in a book some fifty pages longer: a connection between the life and art...
...This dilemma "reflects the divided feelings of a society that tacitly accepted homosexuality as long as it was not spoken about, yet condemned it when publicly exposed...
...Art became conflated with life: Tchaikovsky feared to make Onegin's mistake and, instead, made a mistake all his own...
...Nevertheless, his speaking of his "vice"—the customary usage of the time—showed the extent to which the values of society had made their impression on him...
...When he dedicated his Fourth Symphony (1878) to her, program music of which the main theme is Fate 'and its implacability, she replied with the criticism, "Blame yourself, and do not say that everything in the world is sad...
...Life is still possible...
...It is impossible to imagine a more senseless utopia, something more discordant with the native qualities of human nature...
...While Tchaikovsky prepared to take his place in the bureaucracy, Russia was developing a taste for music...
...The two made a tacit agreement never to meet...
...He bragged and capered for a while, but he felt desperation closing in fast...
...Delight in the merriment of others...
...von Meck paid him more than handsomely for his compositions...
...In you the musician and the human being are united so beautifully, so harmoniously, that one can give oneself up entirely to the charm of the sounds of your music, because in these sounds there is noble, unfeigned meaning...
...After he had gone to bed early one evening, his governess looked in on him, and found him in tears: "Oh, this music, this music," he lamented...
...Tchaikovsky enrolled in the School for Jurisprudence, a "step that would ultimately cost him thirteen years of doubt and hesitation as to his true vocation...
...It was chiefly his pride that was hurt when she married a Spanish baritone she had met in Warsaw...
...In 1866 he began to teach at the Moscow Conservatory, under the oversight of Nikolay Rubinstein, who cracked piano keys like walnuts and handled the young women given to swooning in his classes by ordering them to be hauled off or doused with cold water...
...The previous biographical record includes the usual helping of Soviet untruth: "Hardly any other figure in the history of Russian culture," says Poznansky, "has been subjected by government-controlled scholarship to such a degree of biographical falsification...
...Anticipating disapproval, he kept the marriage secret even from his family until the eve of the grand occasion...
...Through Apukhtin, Tchaikovsky was introduced to numerous other homosexuals with whom he could have flings that tended to be "fairly decorous, brief, and superficial...
...Poznansky shows how deep the division runs in Tchaikovsky's heart: he despises married homosexuals who persist in their homosexuality, and in another letter he states his intention not to follow in their path should he get married himself...
...Tchaikovsky identified himself strongly with the young woman, Tatyana, and, "yielding to an irresistible emotional need," before he had a libretto or a scheme for the work, wrote the music for the letter Tatyana sends to Onegin...
...Tchaikovsky continued his musical pursuits mostly on the outside...
...This is not a study of Tchaikovsky's music...
...Petersburg, and, after quitting his post, was one of the first to enroll in the St...
...Petersburg...
...This is a study of the man who wrote the music...
...One measures the distance between failure at life and success at art, and even the artist's accomplishments fall into the abyss of his drunkenness, womanizing (or manizing), cowardice, cruelty, or turpitude...
...The correspondence, and Mrs...
...He began to think that he had the makings of a roaring heterosexual...
...to feel as one with [him] in [his music...
...And I want with all my heart to do it all...
...TT chaikovsky did marry, in 1877, Antonina Milyukova, a very pretty woman with not much else to recommend her—an "absolute vacuum" in head and heart, a Moscow Conservatory student who might have benefited from a dose of Nikolay Rubinstein's cold water...
...The time came, after he had turned 50, when she could no longer afford Tchaikovsky's allowance...
...I feel in myself great artistic power...
...he figured he could make the conversion without too much ado...
...T chaikovsky bore the customary markings of the prodigy, with none of the glitter...
...to his more robust confidants, she was "the reptile" and "this spawn of hell...
...Apukhtin was hailed as the second Pushkin, yet never quite got around to writing the poems that would have justified the comparison...
...It's here [pointing to his head], it never leaves me in peace...
...A few months later, she wrote: I regard the musician-human as the supreme creation of nature...
...Occasionally he'd remind her that he, was constructed on a strictly—that is, disappointingly—human scale...
...While working in the Department of Justice, Tchaikovsky took some classes in St...
...She would rather think of him "in the distance...
...Tchaikovsky died in 1893 at 53, a victim of the cholera epidemic in St...
...His notions of matrimony bent under the pressure of his sexual inclinations: "I shall not enter into any lawful or illicit union with a woman without having fully insured my own peace and my own freedom...
...I have not yet done even a tenth of what I can do...
...and he was never to hear from her again...
...Such words struck the sentimental Tchaikovsky to the soul, yet he warned her that he was not the man she thought he was...
...the public was introduced to Beethoven, Handel, Bach, Gluck, Schumann, Schubert, Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, and Anton Rubinstein...
...71/ n the ecstatic confrontation with a great work of art, one sometimes wishes that he could know what it is to create something of this staggering beauty—perhaps even wishes that he could have been the blessed genius who made the work...
...obese, short of breath, in an endless erotic uproar, and suffering from the inanition of "Oblomovism," he failed at his vocation, but his charm and wit earned him considerable renown...
...Of course, the more one knows of the lives of artists, the less one entertains such wishes...
...Only now, especially after the incident of my marriage, have I finally begun to understand that there is nothing more fruitless than wanting to be other than what I am by nature...
...Negotiations continued for some years, but the separation remained an informal one...
...At about the time he married Antonina, Tchaikovsky began an impassioned, if peculiar, relationship with Mrs...
...76 The American Spectator May 1992...
...The Russian Musical Society, founded in 1857, catered to a popular demand for classical music, which had always been an aristocratic prerogative...
...Once, bemused by a particular rhythm, he tapped it out with his fingers on a windowpane, until the glass broke and sliced his hand...
...At an uncertain point in their romance, she wrote to Tchaikovsky how close she was to killing herself for want of him...
...For some, great works remain what they are despite these personal revelations...
...The governess remembered the young Tchaikovsky coming to her after a long session at the piano "in a state, of nervous distress...
...There was no place for music in his TCHAIKOVSKY: THE QUEST FOR THE INNER MAN Alexander Poznansky Schirmer Books/679 pages /$39.95 reviewed by ALGIS VALIUNAS 74 The American Spectator May 1992 parents' plans for him...
...Tchaikovsky himself might have preferred Soviet obfuscation to the searchlight that Poznan-sky shines onto "everything that all my life I have so carefully hidden from the touch of the crowd...
...they are written not for other people but for the expression of your own feelings, thoughts, and mood...
...He answered that his financial dealings with her made him uneasy, and even turned down another commission, afraid of writing something slight and pocketing the usual hefty sum in reward...
...The modern industry in artistic biography finds its raw materials in the hideous aspects of character, the parts of a life that one wishes could remain hidden...
...Shortly after, he wrote to his brother Anatoly, "In the physical respect, my wife has become absolutely repulsive to me...
...The funeral service in Kazan Cathedral required a ticket of admission, but the cathedral could hold only 6,000 of the 60,000 who applied...
...He received his initiation into heterosexuality by resisting the advances of his brother-in-law's younger sister, Vera Davydova...
...ness—eroded in the second movement until it seems merely endurance but finding strength enough in the third and fourth movements for renewed joy—being continually reasserted and continually crushed...
...At the age of nine he wrote, "I . . . never leave the piano, which makes me happy when I feel sad...
...To her he wrote, "What you have said about communism is entirely true...
...If sometimes she was intellectual and confidante, at others she was pure innamorata...
...He shared in the homosexual activities at the School for Jurisprudence, and, upon leaving school, became a member of an elegant homosexual circle centered on the poet Aleksey Apukhtin...
...Considered "girlishly pretty," Tchaikovsky went in for impersonating female dancers, and developed quite a taste for ceremonial transvestism, dressing for one ball as a domino of black lace with diamonds and an ostrich-feather fan...
...Yet it was the last letter he wrote to her...
...Moreover, the Society offered music classes, with open admission, in St...
...To his brother Modest, Tchaikovsky wrote in 1876: "I am now experiencing a very critical moment in my life...
...When he fled to Switzerland that autumn, her letters followed him, and left him physically ill, incapable of composing: I am an artist who can and must bring honor to his homeland...
...He made his way through more unsuitable candidates...
...He sought divorce, which was not easily arranged...
...Nadezhda von Meck, nine years his senior, the multi-millionaire widow of a railroad tycoon, mother of eleven, and patroness of the arts...
...Tchaikovsky understood his homosexual passions to be innocent ones, The American Spectator May 1992 75 his birthright...
...All the same, Poznansky has taken on a significant project and done well by it...
...There are, in the main, two different responses to the sight of an ugly life that produces marvelous art...
...She rebuffed him every time: "I shall not give up my right to take care of you, nor have you the right to take it from me, until such a time as I am no longer able to enjoy it, and that boundary God will show to us both...
...Meanwhile I am now unable to work...
...von Meck's financial generosity, lasted more than thirteen years...
...I feel very sorry about Tchaikovsky," Tolstoy wrote, "sorry because it seemed to me we had something in common...
...A letter from Tchaikovsky absolved her of any fault in the matter, reiterated his gratitude for the years of assistance, and pitied her for the loss of her fortune...
...Poznansky even surmises that he may have engaged in sexual play with his twin brothers, ten years younger than he...
...I am ill and, I swear to you, close to insanity...
...He was a regular at the Italian Opera, where various troupes performed, generally to a higher standard than any Russian production...
...Mrs...
...Soviet popular and scholarly books represent Tchaikovsky as nothing less than a model member of the 'progressive artistic intelligentsia'—a trivial concept that strips him of his true identity...
...One wishes for a detailed description of, say, the Fourth Symphony, with its slight heroic woodwinds submitting to and emerging from the massed forces of strings and brass: the possibility of individual happiAlgis Valiunas is a writer living in Chicago...
...Sorry about him as a man with whom something was not quite clear, even more than as a musician...
...Joys there are, simple, but powerful...
...Tchaikovsky in reply undertook the composition of his opera Eugene Onegin, in which a young gentleman with a streak of nihilistic indifference turns down a young woman's advances and lives to regret it...
...For others, the worst aspects of the life take the shine off its Most splendid productions...
...Members of the lower echelons of the hereditary gentry, they considered a musician's profession one of slim prestige...
...To his more delicate correspondents, Antonina became "that certain woman...
...From her profusion of admiration, Tchaikovsky sometimes turned and hid...
...Art& was five years older than Tchaikovsky, and that rattled her mother...
...nor were there conservatories for young boys preparing for a musical career...
...Tchaikovsky spoke of the coruscating ardors of love meant to last, but he also subjected his love to "cool reason," which showed it to less advantage...
...However, these reservations faded, and he told her out and out that he needed three thousand rubles and she was the only person he would ask for money...
...ArtOt's accomplishments outshone Tchaikovsky's own, and that perturbed his friends...
...As Tchaikovsky's musical vocationwas being clarified and defined, so was his sexual nature...
...In later life, Tchaikovsky showed no sign of "moral remorse" for his life of homosexuality...
...Petersburg and Moscow...
...the merely personal does not count for much in the face of such glory...
...Petersburg Conservatory, which opened in 1862...
...Kissing the bride, he almost broke into tears...
...Repeatedly he voiced his willingness to give up her subsidy and return to teaching...
...Sundays for three years he took music lessons from the pianist Rudolph Kudinger, who eventually found him to be of small talent and broke off the instruction...
Vol. 25 • May 1992 • No. 5
