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Russians do things in sudden bursts of energy. Like sleeping giants (or sleeping beauties, if you like), they tend to linger, collect their thoughts, digest Western influences, and nourish their creativity until it bursts into the open. This helps account for the explosion of Russian novelists in the second half of the 19th century, the emergence of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Alexander Rodchenko onto the visual arts scene of the early 1900s, and the sudden triumph of Russian giants in silent film like Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Alexander Dovzhenko. The same can be said about Russian classical music: all of a sudden, seemingly at once, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky introduced themselves to the world.
Tchaikovsky led the charge of this Russian invasion into Western music; in fact, he became so popular in the United States that we might as well call him an American composer. From The Nutcracker (1892), performed across the country every Christmas, to the grand finale of the 1812 Overture (1880) that accompanies every self-respecting fireworks display during Fourth of July celebrations, his music is ubiquitous. Add to that the swans that fill up the magical swan lakes of ballet schools everywhere, the generations of children raised on Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), or the fact that Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto was premiered in Boston in 1875, and the result is a portrait as much of an American as of a Russian composer.
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In Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer, Princeton University music professor Simon Morrison sketches a few brief biographical details concerning Tchaikovsky’s ten years as a boarding student at the St. Petersburg school of Jurisprudence, his musical education, and his early career. After graduating with a Silver Medal from the conservatory in St. Petersburg, in 1866 he became one of the first professors at the one in Moscow. Tchaikovsky’s mastery of music theory and the complex nuances of composition and orchestration separated him from his contemporaries, composers like Mussorgsky and Borodin who formed the so-called “Mighty Handful.”
Yet his reception in his home country was mixed. The influential conductor Nikolay Rubinstein alternately welcomed and dismissed his compositions, sending him into tailspins. Morrison gives an engaging account of why Tchaikovsky’s celebrated First Piano Concerto didn’t premiere in Moscow: “Rubinstein drank. A lot. He was kind when drunk, irritable when sober. Tchaikovsky made the mistake of presenting the concerto to him when he was sober.” Morrison adds, “It’s a great story and might even be true, albeit exaggerated in an effort to secure [the businesswoman] Nadezhda von Meck’s financial support.” As usual, Russia’s loss was America’s gain: the German virtuoso Hans von Bülow premiered the concerto on October 25, 1875, at Boston’s Music Hall.
Tchaikovsky was a master of allusions and quotations, which he orchestrated, combined, and embellished in a manner befitting such eclectic empires as the United States and Russia. He was one of the lucky few who got into Carnegie Hall not by practice but by composition, inaugurating the grand venue’s opening in 1891 with a performance of his own Marche Solennelle for a hefty sum of $5,000. Curiously, he continued to have less luck in Europe; once, upon arriving in Vienna, he realized that it wasn’t the Vienna Opera he was invited to conduct, but a restaurant serving beer and sausages. Scandalized, Tchaikovsky walked out on the engagement.
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He was American, too, in another sense: the story of his life would make a picture-perfect subject for a biopic, if not a Netflix mini-series. He traveled all across Russia and Europe, and he even made it all the way to New York. Along the way he encountered Romanov royalty and their courtiers, fellow composers Johannes Brahms and Claude Debussy, and men for hire in assorted bathhouses catering to homosexuals. He managed to fall in love with a Belgium Opera diva only to lose her to a Spanish singer; he entered a disastrous marriage that practically drove him to suicide. His premature death at the age of 53 gave rise to numerous conspiracy theories, most of which postulated the existence of some aristocratic tsarist cabal that had forced him to kill himself to avoid the exposure of his illicit rendezvous. These rumors were further exaggerated by the Soviet cultural establishment, which cynically used them to malign the Romanov regime.
If he doesn’t quite fit the bill as a tragic victim of elite scheming, Tchaikovsky could be portrayed as a valiant hero struggling against a hostile society, or an artist negotiating the complex tension between complicity and resistance by deftly navigating a labyrinthine international patronage network. Tchaikovsky’s sexuality plays well into these narratives, establishing the composer as either a long-suffering target of the empire’s homophobia, or a quietly dignified survivor accommodating himself to the various tacit opportunities that 19th-century Russia (in contrast to the Soviet Union) afforded its sexual minorities.
Aware that the sensational details of Tchaikovsky’s life can distract us from his music, Morrison takes a different route. The first words of his biography are: “He was a composer.” Morrison goes on to note that “to produce as much music as he did—an entire empire’s worth—Tchaikovsky had to be hyperfocused and hyperdisciplined, not lurching from one personal crisis to another.” These are useful corrections, reminding us to keep our ears tuned to the music.
The introduction promises to spend less time on the minutiae of Tchaikovsky’s life, and more on its context, ranging from musical to sociopolitical and historical analysis. Morrison does manage to avoid fixating on lurid biographical anecdotes, but his analytical success is mixed. His excellent musical commentaries are interspersed with various observations on Tchaikovsky the man—some illuminating, others superficial—while his repeated invocations of “empire,” “nationalism,” and “imperialism” to provide sociopolitical and historical subtext are rarely illuminating, frequently biased, and occasionally ill-informed. Despite its lively style and revealing detail concerning Russian habits of traveling, performance, money, sex, class, and education, this ambitious book is not fully integrated.
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Discussing Tchaikovsky’s musical structures and strategies, Morrison is in his element. He delivers informative, nuanced, and thought-provoking insights, mercifully liberating Tchaikovsky from the rainbow net of “queer studies” and returning attention to his music. But is it such an improvement to obsess over Russia’s imperialism instead of its homophobia? Morrison’s focus on “empire” is reflected in the structure of the biography, which has four parts: 1) Local and Regional Matters, 2) Nationalism, 3) Imperialism, and 4) Matters of Life and Death. The first page features a map of European Russia in the 19th century with the territories of its expansion shaded in various stripes.
This is not to say that the attention to imperial themes is fruitless. I never previously suspected that there is more to the 1889 ballet The Sleeping Beauty than fairy-tale plot, magical costumes, and playful dances. But I found myself in agreement with Morrison’s suggestion that Aurora, the ballet’s heroine, can be seen as Russia coming to full bloom once she shares a kiss with Emperor Alexander III. After that moment, new styles of music, choreography, and costuming suggest the multidimensional empire standing at the peak of its powers. But how far can this mode of interpretation be pushed? If some things are about empire, it doesn’t follow that everything is.
Furthermore, we never get sophisticated theoretical discussions of what “imperialism” and “colonialism” actually mean. Instead, Morrison gives us journalistic anti-imperialism, that is, compulsive digressions on questions like whether the term “Ukraine” is being justifiably employed. So, in the discussion of the composer’s Second Symphony (1872), often designated “Ukrainian” (Malorossiskaia), Morrison discusses various meanings of the term. Malorossia means “Little Russia,” he notes—quoting an essay in Politico, rather than a historical study. Then he asserts that “Moscow belonged to the boonies…Kiev was the Slavic heart.” The implication—and motivation—of all this is plainly a desire to belittle Vladimir Putin and condemn his present war. This aspiration, whatever its merits unto itself, does not make for particularly trenchant analysis of artistic developments in Tchaikovsky’s day.
Similarly contemporary concerns lead the author to numerous haphazard assertions of dubious quality. Referring to Alexander II’s policy of “Russification,” as part of which he restricted publications in languages besides Russian, Morrison alludes to “Russians generally having fewer books and poorer education than Ukrainians.” Then he denounces “empire’s chief export: violence.” He mitigates this diatribe with the concession that “it would be a stretch to claim that Tchaikovsky was an unwavering supporter of Russian imperial ambition and the horrors—invasions, expulsions, pogroms—committed in the service of empire.” But if Tchaikovsky was neither an unwavering supporter nor a staunch opponent of these policies, do they need to be discussed?
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This equation of Russian imperial ambitions with invasions and pogroms also highlights Morrison’s tendency to use historical and geographical terminology as it suits him. Consider the pogroms, which he characterizes as “committed in the service of empire.” While the empire’s abuses are well known, it is equally well known that the pogroms took place in the territories of today’s Ukraine, Poland, and Moldova. That’s where the majority of the Russian Empire’s Jews lived, restricted to a region known as the Pale of Settlement. Why mention Ukraine to claim that it had more books, and not that it had more pogroms?
In the same vein, it is surprising that Morrison does not mention Tchaikovsky’s own anti-Semitism. Commenting in 1878 on his sister’s estate in Kamenka, where he spent several summers, the composer wrote to his benefactor Nadezhda von Meck: “The air is poisoned by the proximity of a factory and the Jewish settlement, in particular.” His references to dirt and smell found enthusiastic response from the refined von Meck, who provided her share of complaints about Jewish shenanigans perpetrated by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Tchaikovsky’s critical detractors, opera performers, or the local merchants taking advantage of her. Both correspondents favored the pejorative term zhid for “Jew,” rather than the neutral evrei.
The rest of the book ranges over all sorts of Tchaikovsky compositions—some famous, some easily forgotten—summarizing the history of their creation and reception. Literary influences and interactions with other musicians are frequently mentioned, as are various geographical locations, especially those that can be made to evoke Russia’s imperial policies: Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey. After the fashion of the British tabloids, Morrison likes to drop names and mention the high and mighty whenever Tschaikovsky enters into contact with them. Royalty, industrialists, ministers, and wealthy landowners play an outsized role. So do Tchaikovsky’s male servants, some of whom he dallied with sexually.
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The analysis of literary texts and their impact upon the music rarely moves beyond encyclopedic. But occasionally it does, as in Morrison’s excellent discussion of Tchaikovsky’s 1879 operatic adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin. Morrison underscores Tchaikovsky’s effective use of music to convey Pushkin’s irony at the expense of his protagonist, embedding Onegin’s inadequacy and superficiality into the score. “[Onegin] never sings a tune; he flails in the minor mode. He repeats the music of others, blandly, because he’s never had an original thought.”
Equally refreshing are Morrison’s observations about Tchaikovsky’s changing interest in the theme of fate (made explicit in the 1877 Fourth Symphony): “Tchaikovsky ruminated about fate in other contexts, suggesting a creative obsession or, worse, a deficit of imagination.” Yet “[m]ost of what he composed in midcareer isn’t in fact fate-based but the opposite: luminescent, neoclassical, indebted to eighteenth-century dances and divertissements. It’s youthful.” Even more apposite is the analysis of the C-Major Serenade (1881), with its roots in the work of other composers like Mozart and Robert Volkmann, and its engagement with Imperial Russian architecture. The Serenade’s “formal perfection” and “immutable content” capture the best that music affords us: participation in “immortal things” as the means of escaping the “mortal frame.”
These insightful observations go hand in hand with rather fanciful statements concerning the big bad Russian Empire. Commenting on Tchaikovsky’s Slavonic March, which blends Russian anthems with Serbian folk melodies to celebrate Russian volunteers to the Serbian-Ottoman War, Morrison claims that Tchaikovsky learned about the war from “well-paid Russian journalists in the Balkans covering the multisided conflict between the Orthodox populations of the southern Slavic States and the Ottoman Empire.” But accounts of Ottoman butchery did not come from “well-paid Russian journalists.” They came from the valiant American reporter Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, whose publications in The New York Herald and London Daily included a gruesome description of 3,000 Bulgarians killed by Turks in the town of Batak. This story galvanized the British statesman William Gladstone—the Jimmy Carter of his day—to publish Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (1876). Gladstone subsequently unseated the Tories, who were dead set on dismissing the news of atrocities as Russian propaganda.
Morrison adds that Tchaikovsky “considered it an insult to be asked” to compose a war march in honor of Russian General Mikhail Skobelev. But it was less that Tchaikovsky felt insulted than that, as he wrote in an 1887 letter to his publisher Pyotr Jurgenson, he viewed such compositions as “too banal” or “vulgar” (bol’no poshlo). He clearly shared the Russian intelligentsia’s fear of seeming to fawn over the government by expressing patriotism on the cheap. But an 1878 letter to von Meck makes it clear that he had few reservations about the war effort itself as distinct from his personal relation to it: “We have to fight till the enemy is defeated…still it is embarrassing to demand this fight…when you sit in a comfortable airy room, protected from elements, hunger, and physical suffering.” In the end, Tchaikovsky found a way out of this dilemma by composing the march and publishing it anonymously.
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All told, even granting that Morrison wants to explore the composer’s music within its geopolitical context, can he really justify ignoring the thorny questions of human psychology and personality to the extent that he does? He declares at the outset that “[c]hildhoods aren’t interesting to read about, and Tchaikovsky’s childhood didn’t interest his own parents.” This dubious witticism excuses a pretty myopic oversight. Tchaikovsky was born into a close-knit bourgeois family with plenty of children and plenty of parental support. His father was excessively affectionate and sentimental. His early separation from his mother and his loving family to go to boarding school in St. Petersburg was so painful that he declared the day he was left there “one of the most terrible days of his life,” according to biographer Alexander Poznansky’s Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (1991). He couldn’t pass the place of separation “without experiencing anew that mad despair…when the carriage carrying away everything most dear to me disappeared.”
This formational trauma was compounded by his mother’s death three years later, which scarred Tchaikovsky for life. “I…would never reconcile myself to the thought that my mother, whom I loved so much and who was such a wonderful person, vanished forever,” he wrote to von Meck in 1877. His desire to fill the role of mother for his young siblings points to the same wound, as does his fixation on Louis XVII, the son of the executed Louis XVI, who died at the age of ten in captivity. The portrait of this boy-prince was one of the few that always adorned the composer’s lodgings.
Can Tchaikovsky’s fear of abandonment and desire to restore family happiness explain his failed marriage as a desperate attempt, at the age of 37, to regain his lost domestic paradise? Tchaikovsky wrote to his sister, whose children he adored: “I feel a strong desire to hear the cries of children, to take part in various little domestic chores; in a word, I desire a family atmosphere.” Bombarded by the love letters of his former student, Antonina Milyukova, he decided to answer her by delicately offering the calm brotherly love of an aging musician. Antonina replied with the confidence of Osgood Fielding, the suitor who settles for a man in a dress in Some Like it Hot (1959): “nobody’s perfect.” People are imperfect in thousands of ways. But not sleeping with one’s wife, even on the wedding night, is an imperfection with serious implications that Tchaikovsky failed to foresee.
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Morrison finds an easy explanation for the fiasco that the marriage became and the unbridled hatred Tchaikovsky developed for Antonina: “Tchaikovsky was a misogynist.” But can “misogyny” explain the endless hysterics; the terms of abuse like “reptile” and “spawn of hell”; the diarrhea, vomiting, and hemorrhoids; the inability to compose, the loss of appetite and sleep, the desire to write a will and die? In saner moments Tchaikovsky admitted to his brother that it was he who deceived his wife and insulted her daily. This is a classic case of hating one’s victim, a dynamic captured so well in the novels of Dostoevsky. Misogyny hardly scratches the surface.
Scholars might debate how happy or miserable Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality made him. It is clear that conventional channels of expressing true love, such as marriage and family, were not available to him. He found outlets for his sexuality, but still yearned for a union that was unacceptable for his culture. In his music, he could never leave the subject of impossible love behind. His second operatic attempt, Undina (1869), focuses on the love between a knight and a mermaid. Another, The Snow Maiden (1873), features a mythical creature whose love for a human makes her melt away. He explored the forbidden loves of Francesca da Rimini and Romeo and Juliet, the doomed love of Odette and Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake (1876), and the prince’s love for the blind Iolanta (1892). A full list of these “impossible” loves would embrace Tchaikovsky’s entire oeuvre.
In retrospect, what Tchaikovsky could not realize in his life, he realized through his music. He did create a community of loving and devoted listeners—a family the size of two empires. The bittersweet loveliness of this colossal achievement is as much a product of personal disappointments and private agonies as it is of national sympathies and structural forces. Tchaikovsky is bigger than empire. There will always be more to him than any one ideological point of view can capture.
