The Tchaikovsky Handbook: A Guide to the Man and His Music (review)

Abstract

Tchaikovsky has frequently inspired long books, a peculiarity that he shares with very few other composers—Richard Wagner, of course; Gustav Mahler; and, more recently, Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, and Igor Stravinsky. One thinks immediately of David Brown's four-volume treatment (Tchaikovsky [New York: Norton, 1978-91]) and maybe of the three-volume remembrance by Modest Tchaikovsky, the composer's youngest brother (Zhizn' Petra Il'icha Chaikovskogo [Moscow: P. Jurgenson, 1900- 1902; reprint, Moscow: Algoritm, 1997]), which ran to almost two thousand pages and whose English translation by Rosa Newmarch (as The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) [New York: John Lane, 1906; reprint, New York: Vienna House, 1973]), albeit "abridged," still reached nearly eight hundred pages. Alexander Poznansky's own Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991) comes in at around seven hundred pages; and now we have this new bibliographic Handbook, at almost sixteen hundred. The phenomenon is only partly accidental, of course: the fact that [End Page 659] Modest Tchaikovsky was able to establish a memorial museum at his recently deceased brother's house at Klin near Moscow in 1895 meant that a large number of Tchaikovsky's manuscripts, including many of his letters, remained in one place, ready and waiting for the scholars from Russia and abroad who, sooner or later, would surely come to study them. The sheer extent of the Soviet-sponsored editions of Tchaikovsky's complete correspondence, in seventeen volumes (Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii: Literaturnye Proizvedniia i Perepiska [Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Muzyka, 1953-81]), and music, in sixty-two volumes (Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii [Moscow: Gos. muzykalnoe izd-vo, 1940-71, supplementary volume 1990]), established the "monumentality" of Tchaikovsky as a national musical figure. But the other, less ideologically motivated, explanation for the expansive treatments of this most famous Russian is surely that, as with Wagner, the public remains fascinated by the man as well as by his music. As Poznansky wrote in his Tchaikovsky's Last Days: A Documentary Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), "Nearly as much as his music, Tchaikovsky's very personality persists in haunting our contemporary imagination" (p. 5). This personality has to an extent, of course, been carefully managed over the years: one tends to visualize Tchaikovsky as he appears in the painting by Nikolai Kuznetsov, i.e., as an elegant and handsome man with a white beard and fine features, and it is probably no coincidence that similar photographs of this same Tchaikovsky stare out from the dust jackets both of this new catalog and of Tchaikovsky's Last Days. This is the friendly, approachable Tchaikovsky of the Nutcracker, not the alleged homosexual whose reported suicide at the instigation of a court of honor caused such a flurry of excitement in the 1980s, following its promotion by Alexandra Orlova. In many of the surviving photographs reproduced in the first volume of this new Handbook we see the composer looking directly at us through the camera, rather than averting his gaze. "Who," one might almost hear him asking, "do you say I am?"