Tchaikovsky, Unburdened

In his new biography of Tchaikovsky, Simon Morrison disentangles fact from myth.

Tchaikovsky House-Museum in Klin, Russia, where the composer spent his final year.

Who was Tchaikovsky, really? It’s a question scholars and musicologists have been unpeeling and arguing over since the composer’s death, at 53, of cholera, a disease that killed thousands in late nineteenth century Russia. Tchaikovsky’s music and life have been subjected to countless analyses and arguments, many centered on his sexuality—he was gay—and psychology, and how these questions help to explain or define qualities in the music. The musicologist and historian Simon Morrison has now published a new biography, Tchaikovsky’s Empire (Yale UP) based on documents, letters, notebooks kept by the composer, and copious other materials retrieved from archives in Russia and abroad. Morrison takes a more down-to-earth approach to studying his subject, relieving the composer of a sheen of sentimentalism and melancholia that have accrued over the decades. He is utterly unconvinced by the idea, floated in the last decades, that Tchaikovsky might have committed suicide because of a scandal revealing his sexual orientation.  As Morrison says in the interview below, “Tchaikovsky wasn’t 13 or 14 years old forever. What the literature has done is reduce him to this teenage state.” The book is witty—as it appears Tchaikovsky was—and often argumentative in its effort eschew psychologizing and instead look at the man and his music straight on, and let the materials speak for themselves.

Morrison is based at Princeton University, where he is a leading expert on Russian and Soviet music. His books on Prokofiev (and the composer’s wife, Lina) and Russian opera are vivid explorations of not only the Russian world, but also of the highly specific, complex figures who inhabited that world. He has also branched out into subjects as far-ranging as the history of the Bolshoi Theater—a place riven, from the start, by politics and personal ambition—and the rock icon Stevie Nicks. In addition, he has collaborated or consulted on numerous productions of dance and opera, including revivals of Prokofiev’s Le pas d’acier and Shostakovich’s Bolt.

This summer, we spoke about his recently-published Tchaikovsky book.

Was Tchaikovsky a subject you’ve been wanting to take on for a long time?

You know, I’ve been teaching him for a long time and he's super popular with students. I taught a couple of undergrad courses on him, and then two graduate seminars. And I had written little things about him here and there, mostly when this controversy arose a few years ago, when the Russians decided that as a great artist and genius he had transcended everything to do with his identity and sexuality. So you had this kind of double repression. In the Soviet period, you couldn't talk about the fact that he was homosexual, but you could talk about the fact that he was a Romantic sufferer. And then came the idea, proposed by people like Alexander Poznansky, an emigre Russian who became a Yale librarian, that represented Tchaikovsky as mainly a gay artist whose gay identity was being worked out in all of his music. I found it all pretty tedious, given that what the students loved about Tchaikovsky was the gorgeousness of the music and the craft, the orchestration, the things he wanted people to love about the music: the beauty of it.

Was your research hampered at all by the inability, because of the war, to work in the Russian archives?

I felt pretty good about what I already had. A lot of the material in the archive housed in the last place where he lived, in Klin, has been published already. The scores are appearing in a new collected edition of Tchaikovsky by Polina Vaidman and others, which is well underway. I have a lot of those. When I wrote my book on the Bolshoi, I worked a lot with the collection at the Russian State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg, “Fond 497,” an immense trove of stuff about Tchaikovsky's relationships with administrations and institutions and politics. Also, places like the Pushkin House archive and others contained family letters and other things that had not been published or translated. Slowly, over the years, I had gathered all of this stuff. So I felt ok. There’s no end to the research one can do, but in general I thought the point of the book was to look at some of these legends and myths by starting from what’s actually there and build up from that.

Hearing you speak about different interpretations that have been applied to Tchaikovsky’s music reminds me a bit of the controversies surrounding Shostakovich and his relationship to Communism and the Communist state. Once people get their hands on one idea, there is no room for anything else. Do you feel something similar has happened with Tchaikovsky?

Yes, with the two of them in particular. In the case of Shostakovich it’s politically overdetermined. He's super popular with audiences, and the idea that he served the regime is unpalatable, so the narrative of resistance crept in. But the idea that he was pathologically invested in creating subversive music doesn't stand up at all.  Likewise, with Tchaikovsky, two things happened. There was a Soviet musicologist who defected in the ‘80’s, Alexandra Orlova who said she had a big secret about Tchaikovsky that the Soviets had suppressed, namely, that he had been caught in a homosexual affair in 1892 and was facing the possibility of public humiliation and imprisonment and decided to take his own life. It’s a shocking tale, and of course one that the Soviets could never tell, right? That was fine as long as the Soviet Union existed. But now we have all of the medical records showing that he died of cholera. We know about his fear of cholera, and that he had lost his mother to it. What we had were these very effusive letters that he wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, that created this narrative of him as a suffering soul. And so British musicologists and an American musicologist, cued by this émigré writer, quickly hitched up to the idea of this tragic ending, because of his sexuality. And we can listen to the music and find underneath the notes some clues that support that idea, right? But it’s a presentist attitude, dependent on the notion that to be gay is tragic. You're making assumptions about Russian society, about Tchaikovsky, without actually exploring how human beings develop and change. The idea that all of his works, across fifty-two-and-a-half years, are somehow related to his orientation, is incredibly reductive.

The author, Simon Morrison, in a photo taken by his daughter.

It's somehow connected to the way people feel about the music.

It’s been this way since the time of Jean Baptiste Lully who decided that he could make court dances affecting by building long-breathed melodies on top of them that were the bearers of feeling and emotion. Tchaikovsky was very much a composer of the long-breathed melody, and someone who felt that music should be the bearer of a great amount of sentiment. He talked a lot about the fact that he was interested in the abstraction known as beauty. He was an incredibly talented melodist at a time when in other European practices, like the German tradition, compositions were fashioned out of the manipulation of small musical motifs, as opposed to what he did, which was to put together different genres of dance and song and create large scale works out of that. And then, with this incredible gift for melody on top, it’s easy to hear and read things into it.

In a way it’s like Puccini, right? Who wrote very sentimental, very melodic, very emotion-driven music. But in fact he was a jolly guy who liked the company of beautiful women and fast cars.

Tchaikovsky actually loved Verdi. He was at the premiere of La forza del destino. Verdi was a great inspiration to him. But those composers were heterosexual, and not Russian, and Russia to many people represents melancholia and repression.  

Is there a difference in the way that Russian historians and Western historians have treated Tchaikovsky? Are there different kinds of projection going on?

Russian musicology has never been much for interpreting works. It's mostly about documents and bringing to light letters and chronologies. It's lighter on technical stuff; the theory is more semiotic and sociopolitical in terms of how the music is treated. There is magnificent musicology in terms of reading the scores as a kind of map of social realities, what's going on, and the manipulation of codes of communication. Seeing music as something that is really grounded in the human experience. That’s something that the Russians privileged. Whereas in the Anglophone traditions, we were more about the nuts and bolts of harmony and so forth. But in the case of Tchaikovsky, once this sociopolitical fashion, through Adorno, among others, became part of musicology, it was very easy to pick up on that tradition in Russia and add the sexual element to it.

You said at the beginning that Tchaikovsky is really popular among your students, and I wonder if you had ideas about what it is about his music that they respond to so strongly.

For them it’s about all the things that he wanted—this idea that music should be about moving audiences, about expressing the basic human condition and real human experience. And what he was able to do, because he worked with familiar forms and familiar harmonies, and because he had a gift, was to create music that was easily accessible and deeply expressive at the same time. Students instantly like it, because it's easy to grasp and it's also gorgeous. On the one hand, the music is a lot like popular music. It repeats itself a lot. But there’s enough variance and nuance to give it this idea of magic built into it. It’s very subtle. The magic here has to do with the fact that you're on familiar terrain. The harmonies are known. The structures are known. You know the rules of the game. And then it’s the slight alteration that creates this frisson. There are other composers, like Ravel, who do that as well.

I was thinking of Mozart.

Mozart was a hero of Tchaikovsky's, as well as of Ravel’s. He showed that you can alter something, and it opens up an entire other cosmos. People who complain about how Tchaikovsky repeats himself so much aren't listening to the colors. He would create this kind of halo around the sound, this aura of heavenliness.

When you play his piano works, you realize that in a way they’re incredibly pedestrian, because they repeat themselves over and over. But the beauty lies in these little shifts and additions, the harmonies and doublings or decorations. It gives you a feeling of addition and growth.

One of the things Débussy picked up from Tchaikovsky was the idea that you can motivate a form through other means than developmental processes and transformation. You can motivate an entire structure through amplitude or by changing the color. In Iolanta, the physician is this character from the East [the Moorish Ibn-Hakia]. He comes in and sings this song about two worlds, our world and this mystic other plane. And he repeats the same thing over and over again. It seems like a complete throw-away, plus a little bit of Orientalia. But the orchestration is constantly morphing. The things that, in other traditions, are supposed to transform, he keeps static, and the things that are supposed to be untransformed, he manipulates. He becomes very painterly that way.

The more you talk about this, the more connections I see to Puccini. Both composers are considered sort of simple minded and sentimental, but if you really pay attention to the effects he's creating, with harmonies, with the qualities of sound, and with the way he incorporates what's happening on the stage, is so masterful.

Puccini is another popular composer whose academic reputation is nowhere near as strong as that of Verdi or Wagner, but who is super popular with audiences. The thing that Tchaikovsky hated is the idea that if you're popular with the public, then somehow you're not profound or serious.

Why was he attracted to writing for dance, even though it wasn’t considered a serious genre?

When he wrote Swan Lake he had very little experience with dance, but he was hustling. One of his friends, Vladimir Begichev, was an administrator at the Bolshoi Theater. They wanted to commission a ballet score and Begichev thought that Tchaikovsky might do a good job with this story he had created, and offered it to him. Tchaikovsky kind of needed the money so he said, okay. He had to scramble to look at some scores and figure out how a ballet is constructed. One of the fascinating things we know is that he went to the Bolshoi library and took home scores, like a ballet called The Fern [music by Yuli Gerber, choreography by Sergei Sokolov], now lost. He studied up. He became a great ballet composer but it’s not as though it was a big desire on his part. Whereas with opera he was constantly looking at different topics and picking and choosing.

And yet his affinity for dance is evident in the scores.

That’s because he was always—whether it was for an opera, or a symphony— manipulating these “smaller” forms that are appealing to the audience. A lot of those have dance origins. He loved sarabandes and courantes and allemandes and gavottes and minuets. He created a lot of symphonies out of assemblages of these things. So for him to pump them up and add gorgeous orchestration and long forms was fairly easy to do.

There is also, often, this sense of grandeur that matches so well with the idea of the Imperial Ballet. Not just in the actual ballet scores, but even in something like the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 3, which Balanchine used as the basis of his ballet Theme and Variations. When the polonaise comes in, it's just so incredibly stirring and Imperial-sounding. And it gets you, even if you're not a fan of Imperial power or the Imperial idea.

It's hard to resist. That’s the point of it. It's supposed to make you want to believe in those things. And you can say that about all sorts of deeply affecting music. You can say Wagner, in the Ring Cycle, he makes you want to believe in some pretty terrifying ideas.

Do you consider him a national composer? What was his attitude to tsarist power and was that just part of the deal?

I would say he was casually patriotic, more Imperial in his sentiments than nationalist because he really got fed up with the narrowness and small-mindedness of nationalists like Mily Balakirev and their constant hectoring. He was pretty conservative politically, and he liked Alexander III’s politics. And those are politics that I don't think we necessarily agree with. That is another one of those contradictions. The assumption is that a gay man in Russia would be resisting political structure. But no, he was very conservative. His gay friends were all high-ranking members of the aristocracy.

Would a composer of his importance have been expected to serve the court?

There wasn't the kind of pressure to serve that was imposed in the 20th century, but certainly for him to have all of his music performed on the Imperial stage, he would need to have an in with the tsar. I do believe he was very proud of being a member of the Russian Empire and of that identity. And he became even more proud when he went to the West and met the likes of Brahms and Liszt and was looked down upon as a Russian, as if he were a backward kind of individual. He was also somebody who believed in Orthodox church, despite not being particularly reverent. He was always an institutional figure. He believed in these institutions. They did a lot for his family.

Tsar Alexander III (1845-1894), in a portrait by Nikolay Shilder.

What about the Ukrainian and folk material in his music? Why was he drawn so drawn to those sources, and in particular to Ukraine?

One of the things he knew is that Russian musical culture, and vocal traditions, are Ukrainian. A story I tell in my upcoming history of Moscow is the fact that the first famous choral instructor at the courts in Muscovy was basically somebody kidnapped from Kyiv. Tchaikovsky knew this connection. He was also taught liturgical traditions, and that meant Kyivan chant and Znamenny chant; these traditions had come up from Kyivan Rus via Constantinople. He grew up in the Ural Mountains, but he had distant relatives who were Poles. So he knew that layer in the history. And he had a sister who settled through marriage in Ukraine. He also had a brother who became the vice governor of Georgia. So he traveled frequently to all of these places, the Empire. And as much as he loved imperial grandeur, he didn’t necessarily feel comfortable in these glittering occasions. He had a great love for regular people. His subjects, for the most part, are regular people. Even in Mazeppa [inspired by the story of the historical figure of Ivan Mazepa, Hetman of the Zaporizhian Host], the opera is about the domestic side of Mazepa’s life. Tchaikovsky was drawn to subjects that were set in the provinces. His masterpiece, which no one ever performs, The Enchantress, is about an innkeeper. But also, Russian musical identity is very much about materials from elsewhere, beginning with Ukraine.

What do you think of this idea that Ukrainian artists shouldn't perform Tchaikovsky now as a response to the Russian invasion?

There are two answers. One is that if you make the decision not to play Tchaikovsky for political reasons, they should be reasons that have to do with the treatment of Ukraine in Tchaikovsky's own time, like the repression of Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture. So you can make that ethical judgment based on the fact that Tchaikovsky did align himself with the Romanov regime. The other side is the fact that he spent a huge swath of his life in Ukraine and wrote a lot of pieces there, including some of his most cherished compositions. So you can make the argument for continuing to play him based on the fact that he loved it there, he loved the people there, and he felt very much at home there. You can't censor him for that, even if you can probably complain about the fact that he aligned with a very conservative Romanov generation. I think it's worth talking about.

What sense did you get through your research of Tchaikovsky as a person, a friend, a sibling?

A simple guy, the kind of guy that would sit around, watch TV, drink beer, make some jokes at the expense of the Tsar. A bloke. He liked pranks and jokes and tricks. I didn't include the coarser letters in which he talks about taking the train and being happy to be in his own cabin because he could crap as many times as he wanted. He made a lot of potty and bathroom jokes. Sexually, he was pretty explicit. He engaged in a lot of rough trade in Italy, particularly, although he was terrified about getting sick and people not leaving him alone. He had a good time. He had periods where he worked every day for a few hours, but then there were periods when he became a complete hermit and shut himself off to work and not socialize at all. At those times he would completely cut himself off from the world. The Pathétique was written that way.

And to what extent do you think his homosexuality affected his sense of self, or his psychology, or his musical writing?

I know that his coming out was pretty typical, with certain teenage experiences and then a period of discovery. One of his friends early on was a poet who was gay as well [Aleksey Apukhtin], and they spent summers together early on, so he had those private experiences. His brother Modest was also a gay man, and his other brothers were very tolerant. I can say that he did feel that it would be useful to have a lavender marriage [to Antonina Milyukova, a former student]. It was a disaster. He freaked out, and then he hated her for the rest of his life. My sense is that it’s not like he wore the identity of being a homosexual man. He was homosexual, and he had those desires. My biggest complaint is that, whatever struggles he had, they didn't define his entire existence, right? He died in his 50s. Tchaikovsky wasn’t 13 or 14 years old forever. What the literature has done is reduce him to this teenage state, and I just find that homophobic.

He seems to have organized his life the way many gay men have through history, in order to be able to do the things he wanted and needed to do. He managed somehow.

The sexual encounters were discrete. In St. Petersburg, there were a few places, but certainly abroad. He was horrified of getting sick, so I think that at a certain point it became more about observing and flirtations. He was pretty paranoid about his health. His whole family had gastrointestinal problems, their whole lives. He had upset stomachs all the time.

You use the phrase “hyper-focused” and “hyper-disciplined” to describe Tchaikovsky. Given your productivity, I suspect you may have this in common! How long did it take you to write this book?

It was unlike other writing projects in the sense that the research was done before I started to write, and the writing came pretty quickly. I wrote it in about six months. Most of that time I was in my study with the cat [Kailey]. She’s the dedicatee of the book. She loves his music, except for certain pieces like the violin concerto [in D major], so I didn't really write about it. She loved The Enchantress, though.

What are your desert island Tchaikovsky works?

The Enchantress from start to finish, every note. The second movement of the second piano concerto I adore. The song “Again, as Before, Alone,” written right at the end of his life, Souvenir de Florence.