Tchaikovsky Roland John Wiley Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2009. 546 pages. ISBN-10: 0195368924 ISBN-13: 978-0195368925 Summary for the Busy Executive: For once, Tchaikovsky the composer as well as the man. For several reasons, most books on Tchaikovsky tend to concentrate on the life, rather than on the music, or at least see the music solely in terms of the life. Tchaikovsky's neuroses, the rise of so-called "queer studies," and the mysteries surrounding his death all contribute to this phenomenon, as if we could understand his music by understanding his life or his sexual orientation or the "clues" he left behind. I don't completely buy this, simply because I believe that artists (indeed, human beings in general) have more than one self and that the lens we choose through which to examine the data comes down to a matter of current fashion. An artist may of course suffer the pangs of love, but composing a decent symphony, painting a good picture, or writing a non-junk poem demands a bit of distance and attention to too many issues that have nothing to do with any spur the life may have given. Tchaikovsky undoubtedly viewed himself as homosexual, but his art as Russian - nationalism trumping sexual orientation in the nineteenth century as the more important viewpoint. As Wiley makes clear from the composer's letters, the Sixth Symphony came about because Tchaikovsky wanted to write a symphony which outdid all his others, especially in the matter of form, and which would force non-Russians to take his music as seriously as they took that of the Germans. Wiley organizes the book mainly by alternating chapters on phases of the life and then on the music composed during each phase. He follows this with his analysis of the various theories of Tchaikovsky's death and an afterward. As back matter, one also finds a helpful index, parallel chronologies of Tchaikovsky's life and European events, and a "cast of characters," just in case you forget someone in the crowd. Tchaikovsky knew a lot of people. Wiley, an old Tchaikovsky hand (he also wrote a book on the ballets and others on Russian ballets generally), doesn't gloss over the hard facts of Tchaikovsky's life and personality, which comes across as a mixture of self-indulgence and self-loathing. Wiley has no moral ax to grind one way or the other. He reserves his criticism for Modest and the rest of the family, who ruthlessly censored or destroyed Tchaikovsky's letters in order to avoid posthumous scandal. While mourning the loss to scholarship, one can't help but think that Tchaikovsky would have sided with the family. At some level, he was ashamed of his sexual preferences, and because of this, he married disastrously, thinking to overcome them. On the other hand, he (and his brother Modest, also gay) viewed homosexuality as innate. So the marriage had little chance, even as a marriage of convenience. Antonina, his unlucky wife, tried her best to please him. Wiley cites many testimonials to her modest character, at least in the beginning. Tchaikovsky's desertion seems to have undone her. She descended into harder and meaner circumstances and eventually insanity. Moreover, she always held the threat of blackmail over him, even as she seemed to want him back. Her letters always upset him and often cut into his composing. Nevertheless, he supported her for the rest of his days and left her a stipend in his will. His deepest relationship, ironically enough, was with a woman: his patron, Nadezhda von Meck. I think Wiley a little weak here. There's more to their connection than he elucidates, although he's very clear as to why she broke off. Tchaikovsky earned a lot of money, in addition to her bequests, and yet he was always in some financial hole. He kept touching her for more. A reversal in her fortunes frightened her, and she determined to keep the money for herself and her family. Tchaikovsky saw this as a personal betrayal. He kept insisting to correspondents that she was still rich as Croesus. He obviously hadn't a clue. The facts of Tchaikovsky's life (with the exception of his last days) are pretty well established. To his credit, Wiley also discusses the music - the reason why Tchaikovsky attracts us in the first place. Until quite recently, the composer got little respect. Adorno particularly (and predictably) bashes him as cheap and second-rate. When Stravinsky - the cachet of his reputation helped - named Tchaikovsky as his favorite Russian composer, the tide slowly began to turn. Even so, outside of academic papers, very little has appeared on the music. Wiley tells you not even close to everything. In a book this length, it would be hard. However, at least he gets beyond the usual picture of the composer as a "musical idiot" who occasionally turned out something good, despite himself. He places Tchaikovsky's music within its time and gives us a peek at how Tchaikovsky structured his works. The Fourth Symphony, for example, uses a descending tetrachord for the opening theme of each movement. It's not exactly the steely logic of Beethoven but more of a technique of reminiscence, the feeling that "I've heard this before." He cites many more instances of Tchaikovsky's original approach to structure. He also offers a pretty convincing rationale for the opening movement of the first piano concerto - that great striding theme the composer suddenly drops and never uses again. Furthermore, Wiley goes into Tchaikovsky's operas, an important part of his output. Indeed, the composer wrote more operas than symphonies, but only two are done in the West. I know only those two - Yevgeny Onegin and Pique Dame. A lot of it comes down merely to summing up the plot, but Wiley does make musical points and occasionally quotes from the scores. He speculates very well about Tchaikovsky's theory of drama and applies it to the late ballets Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker as well. The argument is too complex to sum up here (you can read the book), but essentially it comes down to Tchaikovsky's rejection of realism in favor of the new symbolism. At any rate, Wiley fired me up to listen to Vakula the Smith (a.k.a. The Slippers, in its revised form), Iolanta, The Enchantress, and Maid of Orleans. Wiley subjects the various accounts of Tchaikovsky's death, from brother Modest on, to severe historic scrutiny. Modest, as we have seen, is unreliable. Another family member gives another account, but it doesn't jive with the bulk of testimony and has all the marks of a "good yarn" to dine out on. The judgment of the Court of Honor which supposedly condemned Tchaikovsky to death for his sexual activities gained a vogue some years ago, mainly because it has all the sweet juice of scandal. However, as Wiley points out, why would Tchaikovsky have committed himself to future projects (as we know he did) after the Court supposedly met? Second, Tchaikovsky's homosexuality was hardly a deep dark secret. Why did the Court wait to convene until the man was in his Fifties? Still, Wiley has questions of his own: why did the doctor leave in the middle of the composer's death crisis; why did Modest allow him to? I do have some nits to pick. Wiley's a fairly blah writer, although what he has to say is interesting. The book could have used some tightening. Also, there's the thorny matter of Russian-English transliteration. "Tchaikovsky" is spelled thus on the cover and throughout the text, "Chaikovsky" in the index and in the cast of characters. This happens with several names. It's the current academic fad to try to transliterate character to character. Furthermore, my sister, a big-deal Russian translator, tells me that the Library of Congress insists on its own system for indices. However, pick a spelling and stick to it, please. At any rate, I hope this signals more Tchaikovsky aesthetic studies to come. Steve Schwartz *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html