May 7, 1840 – November 6, 1893, often called Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky in English, was a Russian composer of the Romantic era. As his style developed, Tchaikovsky wrote music across a range of genres, including symphony, opera, ballet, instrumental, chamber and song. He wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets “Swan Lake”, “The Sleeping Beauty”, and “The Nutcracker”, the “1812 Overture”, his First Piano Concerto, his last three numbered symphonies, and the opera “Eugene Onegin”. Thchaikovsky was born into a middle-class family. His education prepared him for a career as a civil servant, despite the musical precocity he had demonstrated. Against the wishes of his family he chose to pursue a musical career, and in 1862 entered the St Petersburg Conservatory, graduating in 1865. This formal, Western-oriented training set him apart, musically, from the contemporary nationalistic movement embodied by the group of young Russian composers known as “The Five”, with whom Tchaikovsky sustained a mixed professional relationship throughout his career. Although he enjoyed many popular successes, he was never emotionally secure, and his life was punctuated by personal crises and periods of depression. Contributory factors were his suppressed homosexuality and fear of exposure, his disastrous marriage, and the sudden collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck. Amid private turmoil Tchaikovsky’s public reputation grew; he was honored by the Tsar, awarded a lifetime pension and lauded in the concert halls of the world. His sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera, but some attribute it to suicide. Tchaikovsky scholar and biographer Alexander Poznansky showed through his research that Tchaikovsky had homosexual tendencies and that some of the composer’s closest relationships were with males. Tchaikovsky’s valet Aleksei Sofronov is thought to have been one of his romantic interests, and while the relationship was apparently never consummated, the composer’s nephew, Vladimir “Bob” Davydov, was one of the great loves of his life. Tchaikovsky’s love for his nephew dates back to 1883, when the boy was 12 years old. Poznansky maintains that even when Bob grew past the age Tchaikovsky normally found sexually attractive, “his hold on his uncle’s heart never slipped, and in the last years of Tchaikovsky’s life bob reigned supreme”. Tchaikovsky dedicated his Sixth Symphony, the “Path’etique”, to Bob. More controversial than Tchaikovsky’s reported sexual proclivities is how comfortable the composer might have been with his sexual nature. After reading all Tchaikovsky’s letters (including unpublished ones), Poznansky concludes that the composer “eventually came to see his sexual peculiarities as an insurmountable and even natural part of his personality … without experiencing any serious psychological damage.” Relevant portions of his brother Modest’s autobiography, where he tells of his brother’s sexual orientation, have also been published. Modest, like Tchaikovsky, was homosexual. Some letters previously suppressed by Soviet censors, where Tchaikovsky openly speaks out about his homosexuality, have been published in Russian, as well as by Poznansky in English translation. However, biographer Anthony Holden claims British musicologist and scholar Henry Zajaczkowski’s research “along psychoanalytical lines” points instead to “a severe unconscious inhibition by the composer of his sexual feeling”: One consequence of it may be sexual overindulgence as a kind of false solution: the individual thereby persuades himself that he does accept his sexual impulses. Complementing this and, also, as a psychological defense mechanism, would be precisely the idolization by Tchaikovsky of many of the young men of his circle (the self-styled “Fourth Suite”), to which Poznansky himself draws attention. If the composer’s response to possible sexual objects was either to use and discard them or to idolize them, it shows that he was unable to form an integrated, secure relationship with another man. That, surely, was Tchaikovsky’s tragedy. Musicologist and historian Roland John Wiley suggests a third alternative, based on Tchaikovsky’s letters. He suggests that while Tchaikovsky experienced “no unbearable guilt” over his homosexuality, he remained aware of the negative consequences of that knowledge becoming public, especially of the ramifications for his family. His decision to enter into a heterosexual union and try to lead a double life was prompted by several factors–the possibility of exposure, the willingness to please his father, his own desire for a permanent home and his love of children and family. While Tchaikovsky may have been romantically active, the evidence for “sexual argot and passionate encounter” is limited. He sought out the company of homosexuals in his circle for extended periods, “associating openly and establishing professional connections with them.” Wiley adds, “Amateurish criticism to the contrary, there is no warrant to assume, this period (of his short-lived marriage) excepted, that Tchaikovsky’s sexuality ever deeply impaired his inspiration, or made his music idiosyncratically confessional or incapable of philosophical utterance.”
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