November 6, 1893—With 16 people (including a priest) watching, in anguished disbelief, as he expired, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky—wildly popular composer, insomniac, backpain-sufferer, gambler, homosexual, alcoholic, manic-depressive—died in St. Petersburg, Russia, after five days of physical agony. Almost immediately, the rumor machine went into overdrive on the circumstances of his death.
I just love mysteries, don’t you? Too bad there wasn’t a real-life equivalent of the Lieutenant Columbo forerunner in Dostoyefsky’s Crime and Punishment, Porfiry Petrovich, around to make sense of the following:
* Did Tchaikovsky die of complications from cholera, as his younger brother Moleste and an attending doctor insisted?
* Did the neo-Romantic composer, already given to bouts of depression, decide to commit suicide after tiring from his constant struggle to maintain emotional equilibrium?
* Did Tchaikovsky’s pedophilia lead to threatened public exposure—even a criminal trial—that forced him to desperate measures?
Bad enough that Tchaikovsky’s own nature made him a subject for dispute. But what makes this a far more controversial musical mystery than, say, Antonio Salieri’s alleged poisoning of Mozart (an unlikely scenario given unexpected life by Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus) are the number of unexplained circumstances:
* Nobody can account for Tchaikovsky’s whereabouts at all on October 31.
* Why did Tchaikovsky even contract cholera? The overwhelming majority of Tchaikovsky’s fellow aristocrats knew the steps to take to avoid this epidemic circulating through St. Petersburg at the time.
* Why did Tchaikovsky even drain a glass of unboiled water while out dining—especially when his brother specifically warned him about it just as he did so?
* Why wouldn’t someone so fearful of death—not to mention someone whose beloved mother had died of cholera—have been more cautious about avoiding the disease?
Except for a passing reference in the 1954 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, dismissing unnamed “sensational accounts” of the death, nothing concrete was printed until 1980, when a Soviet émigré musicologist, Alexandra Orlova, wrote an article that gave form to the inchoate rumors. In her scenario, the following happened—or might have happened:
* Tchaikovsky abandoned all discretion by seducing the nephew of one Duke Stenbock-Fermor.
* The outraged duke spoke to a lawyer named Jacobi about it. An old classmate of Tchaikovsky’s from the Imperial Law School in St. Petersburg, Jacobi convened seven other classmates in a four- or five-hour “Council of Honor” to consider the duke’s threat of taking the case straight to the Czar.
* Tchaikovsky’s classmates at the meeting told him there was only one honorable way to avoid scandal for his family and his beloved alma mater—and he dashed out of the room without a word.
* The next day, Jacobi visited the composer and convinced him to take arsenic, which would, in effect, mimic the symptoms of cholera.
* On the day that Tchaikovsky was out dining, the arsenic was already circulating through his system when he staged the public charade of drinking the unboiled water when it was presented to him by a waiter.
* On the second day after the visit from Jacobi, at lunch this time, the composer left his table, feeling nauseous and vomiting. The royal physician came to treat him, but not till 10 at night.
Other variants on the incident leading to Tchaikovsky’s despair have also been cited, by Michael Steen in his excellent précis of the composer’s life in The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, including that he seduced the son of the caretaker of his brother Modeste’s apartment block; that it was the Czar’s own nephew, even his son, that caught the composer’s eye; and that he contracted cholera from one of his pick-ups in St. Petersburg.
At first, it seemed that this revisionist account of the death would become the accepted gospel. It spoke to a new age more frank about sexual matters than Tchaikovsky’s own Victorian era. Just as important, it was a conspiracy theory. Oliver Stone would have a field day with this, if he knew even a little bit about music (though anyone who’s seen the director’s JFK can attest that ignorance of a subject is no impediment to him filming it.)
Over the last nearly 30 years, however, a strong counterrevisionist school—led most notably by Alexander Poznansky in Tchaikovsky's Last Days: A Documentary Study--has countered these arguments.
In an act of historical ju-jitsu, it has taken the most sensational aspect of what the sterling music critic-blogger Alex Ross calls this “penny-dreadful” controversy and used it to its own advantage. Of course Tchaikovsky was a homosexual, even a pedophile, this argument goes, but that was commonly accepted in high St. Petersburg circles. Both the Russian court itself and the Imperial Law School were filled with homosexual affairs. In other words, who cared?
Poznansky and his followers pointed out other problems with the conspiracy theory:
* There was no “Duke” Stenbock-Fermor but a count by that name, who had direct access to the Czar and therefore needed no intermediary such as Jacobi.
* No poison could have duplicated the effects of cholera to the extent postulated in the conspiracy theory.
* The suicide theory requires a coverup among so many participants—in the infamous Joseph McCarthy phrase, a “conspiracy so immense”—that it could not possibly be sustained.
* Tchaikovsky had no free time even to meet with his old school friends at this time because of the premiere of his Sixth Symphony.
* At a time when the composer should have been in enervating despair, Tchaikovsky actually sat down and wrote a long letter listing possible dates for a trip to Odessa.
* The medical treatment Tchaikovsky received worked to some extent in that the effects of cholera were stemmed after treatment by the royal physician—it was, ironically, the concern of the composer and his family that the bath cure administered to his mother that had hastened her death from cholera which delayed this treatment in his own case until it was too late.
All of this sounds pretty plausible. But there are a couple of nagging aspects of this affair that render it unlikely to be resolved so quickly, in my opinion:
* As the critic Donal Henahan pointed out in the early 1980s, the penalty for homosexuality under the Czarist regime—repeated four times in criminal codes dating from 1842 to 1885—was lashing with birch rods, deportation to Siberia and loss of all civil rights.
* Rather than being blasé—gay, if you will—about his sexual tendencies, Tchaikovsky was tortured by them, even going so far as to contract a short-lived sham marriage (and advising brother Modeste, also homosexual, to do likewise).
* Tchaikovsky had already demonstrated a tendency toward self-destruction, becoming so repulsed by his wife that he’d waded into the Moskva River hoping to die.
* His final composition, the Sixth Symphony, was retitled, on the spur of the moment, “Pathetique” by the composer, startling listeners then and now with what Alex Ross calls “a dying roar of sorrow.”
Unless some new documentary evidence comes to light, my own theory is that we’ll never know for sure what happened. Add together the cloud of witnesses to Tchaikovsky’s final days, the background of the gay demimonde of Russian court and artistic circles, the true conspiracy of silence on what was deemed shameful sexuality in those days (the death by syphilis of Vincent Van Gogh’s devoted art-dealer brother Theo was not confirmed by the family until several decades later, even after publication of Irving Stone’s Lust for Life), and the introduction of modern sexual politics into the art of biography, and you have a very tangled web indeed.
Too bad. In the end, despite the natural human tendency to want to know everything, then share it in the form of gossip, what really matters is the music—something that the public has understood, even when critical opinion of Tchaikovsky’s own time (and even for a long time afterward) dismissed it as overly sentimental or bombastic rather than capturing the titanic flow of emotion at the heart of the composer’s troubled existence.
I just love mysteries, don’t you? Too bad there wasn’t a real-life equivalent of the Lieutenant Columbo forerunner in Dostoyefsky’s Crime and Punishment, Porfiry Petrovich, around to make sense of the following:
* Did Tchaikovsky die of complications from cholera, as his younger brother Moleste and an attending doctor insisted?
* Did the neo-Romantic composer, already given to bouts of depression, decide to commit suicide after tiring from his constant struggle to maintain emotional equilibrium?
* Did Tchaikovsky’s pedophilia lead to threatened public exposure—even a criminal trial—that forced him to desperate measures?
Bad enough that Tchaikovsky’s own nature made him a subject for dispute. But what makes this a far more controversial musical mystery than, say, Antonio Salieri’s alleged poisoning of Mozart (an unlikely scenario given unexpected life by Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus) are the number of unexplained circumstances:
* Nobody can account for Tchaikovsky’s whereabouts at all on October 31.
* Why did Tchaikovsky even contract cholera? The overwhelming majority of Tchaikovsky’s fellow aristocrats knew the steps to take to avoid this epidemic circulating through St. Petersburg at the time.
* Why did Tchaikovsky even drain a glass of unboiled water while out dining—especially when his brother specifically warned him about it just as he did so?
* Why wouldn’t someone so fearful of death—not to mention someone whose beloved mother had died of cholera—have been more cautious about avoiding the disease?
Except for a passing reference in the 1954 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, dismissing unnamed “sensational accounts” of the death, nothing concrete was printed until 1980, when a Soviet émigré musicologist, Alexandra Orlova, wrote an article that gave form to the inchoate rumors. In her scenario, the following happened—or might have happened:
* Tchaikovsky abandoned all discretion by seducing the nephew of one Duke Stenbock-Fermor.
* The outraged duke spoke to a lawyer named Jacobi about it. An old classmate of Tchaikovsky’s from the Imperial Law School in St. Petersburg, Jacobi convened seven other classmates in a four- or five-hour “Council of Honor” to consider the duke’s threat of taking the case straight to the Czar.
* Tchaikovsky’s classmates at the meeting told him there was only one honorable way to avoid scandal for his family and his beloved alma mater—and he dashed out of the room without a word.
* The next day, Jacobi visited the composer and convinced him to take arsenic, which would, in effect, mimic the symptoms of cholera.
* On the day that Tchaikovsky was out dining, the arsenic was already circulating through his system when he staged the public charade of drinking the unboiled water when it was presented to him by a waiter.
* On the second day after the visit from Jacobi, at lunch this time, the composer left his table, feeling nauseous and vomiting. The royal physician came to treat him, but not till 10 at night.
Other variants on the incident leading to Tchaikovsky’s despair have also been cited, by Michael Steen in his excellent précis of the composer’s life in The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, including that he seduced the son of the caretaker of his brother Modeste’s apartment block; that it was the Czar’s own nephew, even his son, that caught the composer’s eye; and that he contracted cholera from one of his pick-ups in St. Petersburg.
At first, it seemed that this revisionist account of the death would become the accepted gospel. It spoke to a new age more frank about sexual matters than Tchaikovsky’s own Victorian era. Just as important, it was a conspiracy theory. Oliver Stone would have a field day with this, if he knew even a little bit about music (though anyone who’s seen the director’s JFK can attest that ignorance of a subject is no impediment to him filming it.)
Over the last nearly 30 years, however, a strong counterrevisionist school—led most notably by Alexander Poznansky in Tchaikovsky's Last Days: A Documentary Study--has countered these arguments.
In an act of historical ju-jitsu, it has taken the most sensational aspect of what the sterling music critic-blogger Alex Ross calls this “penny-dreadful” controversy and used it to its own advantage. Of course Tchaikovsky was a homosexual, even a pedophile, this argument goes, but that was commonly accepted in high St. Petersburg circles. Both the Russian court itself and the Imperial Law School were filled with homosexual affairs. In other words, who cared?
Poznansky and his followers pointed out other problems with the conspiracy theory:
* There was no “Duke” Stenbock-Fermor but a count by that name, who had direct access to the Czar and therefore needed no intermediary such as Jacobi.
* No poison could have duplicated the effects of cholera to the extent postulated in the conspiracy theory.
* The suicide theory requires a coverup among so many participants—in the infamous Joseph McCarthy phrase, a “conspiracy so immense”—that it could not possibly be sustained.
* Tchaikovsky had no free time even to meet with his old school friends at this time because of the premiere of his Sixth Symphony.
* At a time when the composer should have been in enervating despair, Tchaikovsky actually sat down and wrote a long letter listing possible dates for a trip to Odessa.
* The medical treatment Tchaikovsky received worked to some extent in that the effects of cholera were stemmed after treatment by the royal physician—it was, ironically, the concern of the composer and his family that the bath cure administered to his mother that had hastened her death from cholera which delayed this treatment in his own case until it was too late.
All of this sounds pretty plausible. But there are a couple of nagging aspects of this affair that render it unlikely to be resolved so quickly, in my opinion:
* As the critic Donal Henahan pointed out in the early 1980s, the penalty for homosexuality under the Czarist regime—repeated four times in criminal codes dating from 1842 to 1885—was lashing with birch rods, deportation to Siberia and loss of all civil rights.
* Rather than being blasé—gay, if you will—about his sexual tendencies, Tchaikovsky was tortured by them, even going so far as to contract a short-lived sham marriage (and advising brother Modeste, also homosexual, to do likewise).
* Tchaikovsky had already demonstrated a tendency toward self-destruction, becoming so repulsed by his wife that he’d waded into the Moskva River hoping to die.
* His final composition, the Sixth Symphony, was retitled, on the spur of the moment, “Pathetique” by the composer, startling listeners then and now with what Alex Ross calls “a dying roar of sorrow.”
Unless some new documentary evidence comes to light, my own theory is that we’ll never know for sure what happened. Add together the cloud of witnesses to Tchaikovsky’s final days, the background of the gay demimonde of Russian court and artistic circles, the true conspiracy of silence on what was deemed shameful sexuality in those days (the death by syphilis of Vincent Van Gogh’s devoted art-dealer brother Theo was not confirmed by the family until several decades later, even after publication of Irving Stone’s Lust for Life), and the introduction of modern sexual politics into the art of biography, and you have a very tangled web indeed.
Too bad. In the end, despite the natural human tendency to want to know everything, then share it in the form of gossip, what really matters is the music—something that the public has understood, even when critical opinion of Tchaikovsky’s own time (and even for a long time afterward) dismissed it as overly sentimental or bombastic rather than capturing the titanic flow of emotion at the heart of the composer’s troubled existence.
3 comments:
I wonder where the rumours about Tchaikovsky's pedophilia come from. He might have had affairs with young fellows, however this doesn't have to mean that he is pedophilic, isn't it?
By "young fellows," if you mean twentysomething men, no. But his close relationships with young boys--not just children in middle-class families, but child prostitutes in cities he visited--gave rise to the rumors.
The question of the age and relationship with his nephew 'Bob' also gives rise to the idea of pedophile instead of homosexuality. I don't think we will ever know.
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