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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: The Great Composers
- Sprache: Englisch
Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music. Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time. Unlike many of the composers in this series, Tchaikovsky showed no indication of genius as a child and he spent several years as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice before entering the St Petersburg Conservatoire. His composing career only really took off in his mid-30s. Late starter he may have been but, in the nearly twenty years left to him (he died at 53), he created some of the undisputed masterpieces of the repertoire: the operas, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, and in ballet, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. The Fourth Symphony, with its fate motif, and the Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, along with his First Piano Concerto, make constant appearances on the concert platform. Behind these achievements, as Michael Steen's gripping narrative shows, lay a life of anguish and sexual crisis as Tchaikovsky tried alternatively to accommodate and repress his homosexuality (then punishable by death in Russia). It led him to make a disastrous marriage at 37, which caused him much distress, and after only a few months, they arranged to live apart. In many ways his most successful relationship with a woman as an adult was with his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, which lasted fourteen years, during which time they never spoke to each other in person. Even today, the true cause of his death remains open to question, with competing theories jostling for acceptance.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Published by Icon Books Ltd,
Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-84831-802-1
Text copyright © 2003, 2010 Michael Steen
The author has asserted his moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.
Also by the Michael Steen:
The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (ebook and paperback)
Great Operas: A Guide to 25 of the World’s Finest Musical Experiences (ebook and paperback)
Enchantress of Nations: Pauline Viardot, Soprano, Muse and Lover (hardback).
He is currently engaged in a project to publish one hundred ebooks in the series A Short Guide to a Great Opera. Around forty of these have already been published' and further details on these are given at the back of this book.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to our ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.
Extracted from his book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, Michael Steen explores the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.
Unlike many of the composers in this series, Tchaikovsky showed no indication of genius as a child and he spent several years as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice before entering the St Petersburg Conservatoire. His composing career only really took off in his mid-30s. Late starter he may have been but, in the nearly twenty years left to him (he died at 53), he created some of the undisputed masterpieces of the repertoire: the operas, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, and in ballet, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. The Fourth Symphony, with its fate motif, and the Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, along with his First Piano Concerto, make constant appearances on the concert platform.
Behind these achievements, as Michael Steen's gripping narrative shows, lay a life of anguish and sexual crisis as Tchaikovsky tried alternatively to accommodate and repress his homosexuality (then punishable by death in Russia). It led him to make a disastrous marriage at 37, which caused him much distress, and after only a few months, they arranged to live apart. In many ways his most successful relationship with a woman as an adult was with his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, which lasted fourteen years, during which time they never spoke to each other in person. Even today, the true cause of his death remains open to question, with competing theories jostling for acceptance.
TCHAIKOVSKY
OF ALL COMPOSERS, Tchaikovsky must provide one of the more interesting studies for an armchair psychologist. The disastrous marriage, the mysterious relationship with his patroness, the alcoholism, the taste for young boys, which he was desperate to conceal, all make for a colourful life. Even his death, at only 53, provides one of the most absorbing ‘whodunits’ since the senile Salieri claimed to have murdered Mozart.
His outward appearance, tall, distinguished and elegant, with grey hair and blue eyes, concealed the tempestuous personality reflected in his compositions. This ‘exhibitionism’ has been regarded as decadent, a last outpouring of 19th-century Romanticism. He ‘intensified everything to the extreme’, said one commentator.1 Experts, while acknowledging his skill at orchestration,2 have referred to his ‘unbearable vulgarities’, his ‘cheap chains of sequences’, his ‘naked feelings’.3
Yet, Tchaikovsky’s popularity provides an interesting example of the gulf between people’s taste and the experts’ opinion. So often, the general public love the music which the experts disdain, and dislike the music of which the experts approve.
We will start with Tchaikovsky’s early life, and then turn to the Moscow years. We need to consider three important women in his life; his sister Sasha, his patroness Madame von Meck, and his far from normal wife, Antonina. For a long time, he was a rolling stone. He eventually settled near Klin, a small town not far from Moscow. However, his work as a conductor took him abroad to London and the USA. He deteriorated and died suddenly. Why? We shall probably never know.
THE YOUNG TCHAIKOVSKY
If one uses the Julian calendar, which applied in Russia until 1918, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky was born on 25 April 1840, although for us that would have been 7 May. His father ran the mining and ironworks at Votkinsk, near the Urals. This was an important industrial complex which provided iron with which to build the Trans-Siberian Railway and ships for the Caspian Sea.4 Tchaikovsky’s father had the rank of major-general. Many civilian jobs were carried out by people with military rank.5
The family name came from Tchaikovsky’s Kazakh great-grandfather, who apparently could imitate the call of a seagull (a tchaika). More import antly perhaps, he had fought for Peter the Great when he defeated the Swedes in the Battle of Poltava in 1709; his son was given the noble suffix ‘-sky’ for services as a military doctor.6
As the crow flies, the Tchaikovsky home was about 600 miles east of Moscow, on the edge of European Russia. The major-general was a big noise in a small and distant place, a place which Gogol might have described as a ‘dull provincial hole’. The kindred spirits could typically have been the governor, the vice-governor, the president of the court, the chief of police and the liquor tax contractor. The tedium could have been broken by games of whist or the regular ‘governor’s balls’, because ‘where there is a governor, there is a ball, for otherwise he would not enjoy the respect and love of the nobility’.7 The place was sufficiently remote that, only a few years before, a suitable sentence for Alexander Herzen, the socialist, revolutionary and journalist, was six years’ exile working in the provincial bureaucracy.*
Peter (or Pyotr, but we shall call the boy Petya) had an older brother, Nicholas and a younger sister, Sasha. Ten years after he was born, twin brothers arrived, Anatole and Modeste. When Petya was four, his mother, who was said to have been descended from a French Huguenot family, employed a young Swiss governess to teach Nicholas and a cousin. The nanny, or governess, was a central pillar of the prosperous Russian household, 9 so, not surprisingly, Petya became very attached to her: she knew how to handle the difficult child, who was prone to tantrums.
The family enjoyed music. They had a piano and a large musical box called an ‘orchestrion’ which played excerpts from operas by Mozart, Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. Petya was given piano lessons by a freed serf, and he used to make up songs for the family to sing. However, he wrote later: ‘It was my good fortune that fate brought me up in a not very musical family and, in consequence, I did not suffer in childhood from that poison in which music is steeped after Beethoven.’10
When he was eight, this happy life was disrupted. The family moved to Moscow where the major-general thought he had a new job lined up. By the time they arrived there, the job had gone to someone else, and an epidemic of cholera was raging. So they went on to St Petersburg. Petya must have been impressed by the city, every bit an imperial capital, with its ornate buildings, its boulevards, its canals and the broad River Neva. But it cannot have been much fun being teased as country bumpkins at the fashionable Schmelling school, where the boys were sent.11
His father then found himself a job in a town beyond the Urals, almost 1,000 miles to the east of Moscow, virtually in Siberia. The governess had left and Petya’s unlovable stepsister, his mother’s daughter from an earlier marriage, was now responsible for his education. In these bleak surroundings, Petya consoled himself by playing the piano and writing letters to the governess.
