David Brown, Tchaikovsky: the Man and his Music, Pegasus Books, 512 pages.
This recent biography, drawn from an article in today's Moscow Times, was almost certainly peer reviewed:
For the Record
A new biography of Tchaikovsky ranks the popular composer among the giants of 19th-century music.
By George Loomis
Published: April 20, 2007
Music lovers of a certain age conditioned to think of Pyotr Tchaikovsky as a second-rate composer may have stories of their own personal epiphanies, when the splendor of the music trounced such assertions as Paul Henry Lang's "Tchaikovsky does not belong to the company of the great of music" (1941) or Gerald Abraham's "Beginning with the Fourth Symphony and 'Eugene Onegin,' Tchaikovsky's music now reflects all the indulgent yearning and the garish exteriorization of a composer who can never refrain from wearing his heart on his sleeve" (1945). My awakening came in the early 1970s when I was asked to write program notes for his Fifth Symphony (a work with which I had no prior experience) and was blown away by the melodic inspiration, craftsmanship and drama of the piece.
What happened in recent decades to cause a 180-degree shift in the critical estimation of Tchaikovsky? How could mid-century critics have gotten it so wrong? One person in a position to answer is the British musicologist David Brown, formerly professor at the University of Southampton and author of a previous four-volume biography of the composer, which, as he reminds us in this new one-volume book, is "the largest life-and-works of a Russian composer ever written anywhere -- including Russia itself." Yet his new book does not answer such questions. Instead of addressing concepts or polemics, it is pitched to the lay listener, for whom trends in criticism are peripheral matters at best. Tchaikovsky, in fact, was always popular with the general public, and Brown seeks to ensure that he will remain so.
Brown keeps technical jargon to a minimum in musical discussions, which are laced through an account of Tchaikovsky's life. As a sign of user-friendliness, he sets forth his list of the composer's "top dozen" works. (In fact, there are 17, because some entries have alternates, e.g., "'Eugene Onegin' or 'The Queen of Spades.'") All works discussed are subjected to a ranking system -- one to five stars (few win under three stars.) Printed musical examples apparently being deemed the province of scholarly endeavors, there are none, although they could jar one's memory of familiar theme -- didn't any of Brown's hypothetical readers play an instrument or sing in a church choir? Footnotes are also dispensed with, though there is a comprehensive index.
Brown makes no effort to respond to critics of his magnum opus (the four-volume biography), such as the American musicologist Richard Taruskin, nor does he even acknowledge them. His musical discussions -- descriptive guides for listening, really -- are unfailingly evenhanded. A work's shortcomings are duly noted, but Brown balances them with something positive. Readers of the new book will be astonished to learn of Taruskin's assertion that Brown's earlier work had an "agenda" to document Tchaikovsky's "secondary, subcanonical status." (It is typical of Taruskin's efforts, at times unfair, to link Brown with earlier, benighted critical views of Tchaikovsky.) Yet the new book is unambiguous in proclaiming Tchaikovsky's greatness, and Brown would have the reader believe that his veneration of the composer is nothing new. "Never had I realized [before undertaking the four-volume biography] how fascinating, how complex a man Tchaikovsky was -- even more, how great and varied a composer, and just how much of his vast output I simply had not known. Tchaikovsky was, I discovered, one of the true giants of nineteenth-century music."
On one point Brown seems to have come around to the Taruskin view, and that concerns measuring a work's quality by the extent of its "Russianness." "The best of Tchaikovsky's work is more distinctly Russian than that of most of his compatriots; it is not German music in disguise," trumpets the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition. Implicit here is the idea that composers from countries outside the European mainstream had to write music with a character of its own because they were somehow unfit to contribute meaningfully to the European mainstream tradition. Earlier, Brown had called "Eugene Onegin" "not only perhaps Tchaikovsky's masterpiece, but also the most deeply Russian of all his works"; now the "masterpiece" label requires no further gloss. Brown does observe that the Austro-German symphonic tradition is "characterized by 'thoughtful' practices," whereas Slavic composers "created much more impulsively." But at least he backs up his point with an observation by Modest Mussorgsky: "A German, when he thinks, first analyzes, then creates. A Russian first creates, then amuses himself with analysis."
Tchaikovsky's favorite composer was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a point many writers have found inconsistent with Tchaikovsky's status as an arch-Romantic. Yet both composers were closely linked to royal courts -- an 1884 production of "Eugene Onegin" mounted in St. Petersburg at Tsar Alexander III's request made Tchaikovsky a celebrity. And the two composers shared a common aesthetic by writing music intended to give pleasure to the listener, a goal that Richard Wagner, in Tchaikovsky's view, did not always set for himself. Tchaikovsky paid homage to Mozart in several works, including the extended pastoral divertissement, in 18th-century style, in his opera "The Queen of Spades." In his earlier work, Brown called the pastoral "too otiose." A more mellow Brown now questions "whether it was wise to interpolate into this otherwise taut opera such a protracted interlude of very charming, but also very slight music." I have always found the pastoral a bold and highly unusual way of evoking an operatic setting, here 18th-century St. Petersburg.
In recounting Tchaikovsky's life, Brown has engagingly and thoughtfully distilled his earlier work. Tchaikovsky led a charmed life in many respects. He was among the first graduates of Russia's new conservatories in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and thus had the advantage of a professional education, something Mussorgsky and other members of the "Russian Five" group of composers lacked. Later, he taught at the Moscow Conservatory instead of having to take a civil-service day job. And even his conservatory position became unnecessary thanks to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, who supported him from 1877 to 1890. In his later years he was acknowledged (by the young Anton Chekhov, among others) to rank second only to Leo Tolstoy as a Russian creative artist. As a personality, he emerges as perhaps a bit highly strung, but caring and compassionate in relationships with his extended family, professional colleagues and friends.
He was also homosexual. Typically, Brown sets forth the facts, including those pertaining to the occasional one-night stand, and leaves it to the reader to make of them what he or she will. Homosexuality, of course, was at the root of Tchaikovsky's disastrous marriage and, arguably, of the circumstances of his death at age 53 in 1893. Tchaikovsky married Antonina Milyukova to scotch "rumors," thinking that the two could live "like brother and sister," as he explained to her. But he found that he could not tolerate her presence, and the resulting turmoil affected his work, although his treatment of her remained honorable and generous.
Brown's article on Tchaikovsky for the 1980 edition of "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians" helped legitimize a theory about Tchaikovsky's death -- long attributed to cholera -- propounded by an expatriate Soviet musicologist. It holds that an "honor court" made up of alumni of the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, Tchaikovsky's alma mater, was convened after evidence came to someone's attention that Tchaikovsky seduced an aristocrat's nephew; the court ordered that he take his own life and he complied. I personally find the theory, which sparked a vigorous debate, hard to credit, both because it conflicts with other evidence and because it attributes to Tchaikovsky behavior that simply doesn't seem plausible. If Brown had second thoughts about his Grove article, he doesn't say so, but his position appears to have softened. About the cause of Tchaikovsky's death he now writes, "I doubt we shall ever know."
George Loomis writes about classical music from Moscow and New York.
