Abstract
‘Tchaikovsky’s death’, writes Philip Ross Bullock at the beginning of his biography, ‘has been extensively and even excessively interpreted as the key to the life that preceded it.’ Indeed, taken together with what turned out to be Tchaikovsky’s last work, the tragic and mournful ‘Pathétique’, it seemed to many that Tchaikovsky’s death had to be meaningful in some deeper way, not just an unfortunate case of misadventure. Bullock has set himself the mission of overturning this mythology that adheres to Tchaikovsky’s life and death. He seeks to prove that the composer was ‘not a victim of circumstance or conspiracy, much less a pathological case study in melancholia or sexual guilt’. Bullock wishes to restore agency to Tchaikovsky, to give him motivations and choices, to present him as acting freely in both art and life, and not as the plaything of some malign fate.
He presents a convincing portrait of Tchaikovsky as a late developer, who could have chosen other paths in life, who initially saw his music-making as an elaborate leisure pursuit (alongside his work as a civil servant). But once Tchaikovsky recognized the great potential of his compositional skills, he accepted the responsibility to nurture his talent, and submitted himself to a regimen of disciplined work which he maintained and even intensified for the rest of his life. From that recognition of his calling onwards, he never wavered in his confidence that he would achieve greatness, even through a series of early failures (particularly in opera), and through various tribulations in his personal life.
It was this confidence that led the young Tchaikovsky to keep the score of Romeo and Juliet out of Balakirev’s hands, since he knew the older composer would have rewritten it, as he had with the early works of the Mighty Handful members; Balakirev would no doubt have done it well, and would probably have required no public acknowledgement, but Tchaikovsky wanted to maintain his independence as an artist. He also dug his heels in when his other mentor, Nikolai Rubinstein, wanted to revise the solo part of his Piano Concerto. But Bullock also shows that he could not have cultivated such a degree of professional pride without the great opportunities that Russian musical life was able to offer him at just that time: if he had sought to establish himself as a composer even a mere five years earlier, there would have been no Conservatoire to train him, and the lower prestige of a musical career would have seemed a much more precarious choice. He was the first major beneficiary of the momentous changes that had transformed Russian musical life, principally through the work of Nikolai Rubinstein and his brother Anton, and he eagerly embraced the opportunity to become Russia’s first professionally trained composer.
Not only does Bullock seek to free the narrative of Tchaikovsky’s life from that notorious ‘fate’, but he also combats the predominant tendency to produce confessional interpretations for the composer’s major works. Tchaikovsky was himself quite aware that his music was already being read as a kind of emotional diary, and he even bequeathed later scholars with some ammunition against these reflex assumptions. ‘The artist’, as he wrote on one such occasion, ‘lives a double life: the everyday life of humanity and the artistic one, and it is not always the case that these two lives coincide.’ At several points, Bullock seeks to avoid lurching to the opposite extreme of denying all influence of Tchaikovsky’s emotional life, and tries to show how a measured and sober account of such influence can be constructed: ‘Tchaikovsky’s genius lay in his ability to translate his own vulnerable and sensitive disposition into an artistic method for engaging the emotions of a wide and growing audience through the projection of a seemingly readable self.’ Or here: Tchaikovsky ‘discovered a facility for turning his private emotions into a vivid and expressive musical language that could reach out to audiences who knew nothing of his inner feelings’.
For all its strengths, however, there seems to be something missing from this account, because Tchaikovsky was by no means the inventor of such an approach to art – he would already have known it from the examples of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. Tchaikovsky, in his critical writing, admired Schumann’s psychological realism in his portrayal of death and mourning in the Piano Quintet, and he certainly drew from this example. And who knows whether Tchaikovsky could have created his breath-catching climaxes if he had never witnessed Wagner conducting his Prelude to Tristan. Yes, it probably helped that he was emotionally excitable (as were Schumann and Wagner), but much of the Romantic language for representing such powerful emotional narratives was already in place, and Tchaikovsky absorbed it thoroughly and developed it further. Bullock’s arguments against popular interpretations of Tchaikovsky would, in fact, have been greatly strengthened by such contextualization.
Bullock treats the topic of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality at some length, adding many persuasive details that help to place it in the context of nineteenth-century Russian society. On the basis of this, he seeks to show that it cannot serve as a kind of master key to the music, in contrast to many recent writers who have trouble seeing beyond this aspect of Tchaikovsky’s life. In doing so, he is, in fact, being more faithful to Tchaikovsky’s own warning that we should distinguish between the personal life and the artistic life of a composer (or any other artist). Bullock’s lucid and factually reliable account of both Tchaikovsky’s personal and artistic lives is written with style and elegance. It contains a wealth of historical and musical detail, and will surely prompt many of its readers to hear the composer’s music afresh.