Echos of an Imperial Composer

August 23, 2024  |  The Wall Street Journal

Was Tchaikovsky a tempest or a drudge? The great Russian composer of iconic works like “The Nutcracker” and the “1812 Overture” is generally thought to have lived a life of melodrama. An alcoholic and an insomniac, he endured a catastrophic marriage and suffered from depression as well as consuming self-doubt. His sexuality—publicly conventional but privately gay, including physical relationships with boys—left an unclear mark on his music. He died young, at age 53, under uncertain circumstances. In short, in Peter Ilych’s life there are the makings of a dramatic biography.

Yet the musicologist Simon Morrison, of Princeton University, presents the composer as a head-down plowhorse in “Tchaikovsky’s Empire.” Announcing upfront that his biography focuses less on personal history than on the music itself, Mr. Morrison casts a skeptical eye on the archetype of the Romantic artist in thrall to the storms of life. “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 and indulging morbid fantasies.”

That is a defensible point of view, although it will not persuade the type of reader who struggles to look past Roman Polanski’s rape conviction or the fact that Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. In the enduring debate over art versus the artist, Mr. Morrison clearly believes that art has the greater claim on our attention. Tchaikovsky’s has endured. The book is a lively, argumentative and thoughtful reflection on one of the 19th century’s most important musical figures.

Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 into a comfortable upper-middle-class family whose proudest moment was once hosting future Czar Alexander II for an evening. The household was steeped in Russian folklore and Pushkin’s fairy tales, which would form the backbone of several of Tchaikovsky’s operas. He trained to become a civil servant until his artistic gifts began to shine. At the Russian Musical Society he studied under the pianist and conductor Anton Rubinstein. Mr. Morrison’s assessment of the volcanic teacher is delightfully caustic: “No one listens to him anymore; everyone listens to the student he treated like dirt.” After initial success with a student composition project, Tchaikovsky took up a music professorship at the Moscow Conservatory, a post he loathed but held until 1878.

He was no meteor. His initial operas flopped; his first two symphonies yielded limited success. The young composer was sensitive to criticism and had trouble finding the right form. That changed with the orchestral suite for “Romeo and Juliet,” which premiered in 1870 and set a classic tale in catchy, bite-size movements that anticipated the sublime ballets to come. It was not until the First Piano Concerto, completed in 1875, that Tchaikovsky produced a work of mature genius. It would harden into a symbol of Russian nationalism. Ironically, it was Van Cliburn, a Texan, who renewed interest in the work in the 20th century, playing the concerto “throughout his career like a record on repeat, wearing out the grooves.”

Tchaikovsky harbored ambivalent feelings toward the motherland, Mr. Morrison tells us. His nation claimed him “as a symbol of all things Russian; however, he led an international, cosmopolitan existence,” traveling widely in Europe and even America. Several of his works harbored a distinctly French sensibility. Tchaikovsky composed during a time of political upheaval, living to see the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 and the ascendancy of Alexander III. The new czar provided Tchaikovsky with income, status and comfort. In return he played ball. “Serving the court meant writing courtly music, aristocratic assortments for well-heeled listeners,” Mr. Morrison writes. “It also meant operatic and balletic imperialism” in the form of major productions that dramatized Russia’s national grandeur. Alexander III was a particular admirer of “Eugene Onegin” (1879), Tchaikovsky’s sole great operatic success, which was based on Pushkin’s novel in verse.

Despite the many pages that Mr. Morrison devotes to Tchaikovsky’s other operas, many of which are lost to time, it is the trio of ballets that secured his legacy. “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty” and “The Nutcracker” stand at the heart of the balletic repertoire and are known around the world. By orchestrating a profusion of dramatic, accessible tunes in a neoclassical style, Tchaikovsky echoed his hero, Mozart. Mr. Morrison, a gifted analyst of scores, ably explains the music’s appeal: “Tchaikovsky avoids densities, thicknesses, since these have no interior space, nothing for the listener to mull, to try to understand.” In illustration of this principle, the author cites the “Serenade for Strings,” which “inhabits a vast singing space” and achieves “formal perfection.”

If those are the favorites, what about The Favorite? Tchaikovsky wrote the bombastic “1812 Overture” on assignment in 1880 to mark the completion of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior; the music itself celebrated Russia’s resistance to Napoleon. Working quickly and producing a daft piece that he dismissed as “very loud and noisy,” Tchaikovsky musically wheeled out the cannon and lighted the fuses. Mr. Morrison is at his snarky best in describing the result. The piece “became but a bonbon on pop concerts, background music for commercials, sporting events, and of course jingoistic national celebrations.” He notes that in “The Music Lovers,” the 1971 Ken Russell movie, “the famous cannons fire as chorus girls kick up their legs.” In sum: a gaudy monstrosity.

The irony is that it is Tchaikovsky’s best-known work. It presents one more paradox in a life full of them. As the historian Michael Steen observed in “The Lives and Times of the Great Composers” (2004), Tchaikovsky reveals the gulf between the people’s tastes and expert opinion. The public loves the very music that elites disdain. And the man who molested boys produced art of sensitive beauty. A confused and troubling figure, Tchaikovsky is better remembered for his music than his life.