Bullock, Philip Ross Pyotr Tchaikovsky (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 355 of David Brodbeck, who gives a sophisticated account of the reception of Smetana in the 1890s by the German-Bohemian critic Eduard Hanslick. For Hanslick, pro-Czech or anti-Czech rhetoric was less important in his positive interpretation of Smetana than a German-liberal rhetoric surviving from an earlier period. The first chapter claims to locate Smetana within the National Revival more broadly. For reasons that cannot be explored here, no satisfactory overall account of music in the Czech National Revival has ever been written in any language, even though Zdeněk Nejedlý argued in his unfinished, but hugely influential, Smetana biography, that it was music, and not literature or art, that had ensured the survival of the nation until the time came for the Revival and for the appearance of Smetana as its great hero. In her focus on the Czech patriotism that emerged after 1848, St. Pierre suggests that the Revival was a mid-century movement with roots in the 1830s; yet it had begun in the late eighteenth century (arguably as a consequence of the Germanization of the schools by Joseph II), with the groundbreaking research of that period into Czech language and literature, and indeed also into the musical history of Bohemia, at a time when ‘Bohemian’ and ‘Czech’ were not yet mutually exclusive categories. And it was not entirely centred on Prague, nor on the middle class. No modern PhD dissertation could have been expected to cover all this, but a new book on a central figure of the Revival should have done so. Whatever its drawbacks, St. Pierre’s book will need to be consulted by anyone interested in its subject. It is lucidly constructed and well written, and has been well served by Rochester Press in its editing of her prose (although the index is unfortunately inadequate). It is especially valuable in the lively details it gives of the Umělecká beseda and its members. St. Pierre describes her book as ‘not an end, but a beginning’; it is to be hoped that she will return to the subject in due course and write the definitive work on this important and yet elusive composer. And, if this definitive work is not to be allowed to deal with TMI for fear of fetishizing it, someone ought to write a life and works for the sake of the interested amateurs who would still like to be persuaded that Smetana’s music is worth listening to. Royal Holloway, University of London Geoffrey Chew Bullock, Philip Ross. Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Critical Lives. Reaktion Books, London, 2016. 219 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Select discography. £11.99 (paperback). This is an engaging read, a good length, and light enough to travel with. As an account of Chaikovskii’s life unencumbered by technical language, it is SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 356 ideal. There are judicious re-evaluations of works: Queen of Spades receives an insightful discussion (pp. 156–60), the First and Sixth Symphonies are well situated (deciding to write the First was an ‘audacious choice’, p. 19), and Eugene Onegin is read in terms of Chaikovskii’s personal foibles and occasional confusion between life and art (p. 100). One of the book’s best features is its extensive use of Chaikovskii’s correspondence. This numbers some 5,000 letters, of which 1,000 were exchanged with Nadezhda Von Meck. Chaikovskii was sensitive to the transformation of private information into public property, though acknowledged reluctantly that his life would eventually become a biography (p. 14) with a misleading ‘degree of retrospective coherence and inevitability’ (p. 23). So he developed different tones for different letters: those to Von Meck read quite differently to those to his publisher. Writing, like composing, was a mask, and Chaikovskii believed that ‘the artist lives a double life’ (Chaikovskii quoted p. 15), bound to the principle of the ‘legibility of both his works and the artistic personality’ (pp. 16, 18, 95). Bullock assesses Chaikovskii’s career realistically. Chaikovskii understood how careers developed, engaged with his own actively, and had a resilient ‘work ethic’ (pp. 31, 39). He understood the historical prejudice that music was a ‘vocation’ (p. 26) providing ‘personal pleasure’ (p. 30...