A Biography Clinging to One Note

Poor Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Generations of serious musicians and music lovers have deemed his music too sentimental, too facile, and indeed altogether too popular to be regarded as great art. Legend has it that the governing board of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, early in the century, ordered conductor Karl Muck to program a work by Tchaikovsky. Muck's disdainful response was to have his orchestra perform Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, in those days considered difficult music, without the benefit of a single rehearsal.


In his new biography, simply titled "Tchaikovsky," Anthony Holden, a British journalist and biographer who has previously produced lives of Prince Charles and Laurence Olivier, as well as books on such diverse subjects as the House of Windsor, Hollywood's Oscars and the game of poker, seems determined to inflict on the composer another sort of posthumous torture. What Holden appears to be telling us is that everything we hear in Tchaikovsky's music had its origin, one way or another, in the composer's enormous sexual appetite for members of his own sex. Indeed, as Holden recounts the composer's life, one has the impression that the man's every thought and action, and certainly his every musical inspiration, stemmed not from his brain but from his penis.


That Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was homosexual has never been much of a secret -- notwithstanding the efforts of his gay brother, Modest, to cover the matter up or attempts by the Soviet authorities to censor his correspondence. And any biographer who failed to confront this aspect of the man would surely not be telling the whole story. But to harp singlemindedly on Tchaikovsky's sexuality, as Holden does, at the expense of other facets of the composer's life and nature, to say nothing of his music or the creative process which went into making it, leaves the reader with an absurdly distorted picture.


To his credit, Holden does tell some parts of the story rather well. The Tchaikovsky family's complicated relationships, the marriage which the composer hoped would set him straight, but which quickly ended in disaster, and the tumultuously acclaimed visit to the United States are all well described. Best of all is his account of the relationship between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy widow of a railway magnate. She supported and passionately corresponded with the composer for a decade and a half, but, by choice, avoided meeting him.


In spite of "living in a house filled with Tchaikovsky's music for four long years," Holden has nothing particularly enlightening to say about it. The only substantial passage of musical description comes from the composer's own oft-quoted program note to his Fourth Symphony. Moreover, certain major works seem practically to have escaped Holden's attention, including above all "Eugene Onegin," which might arguably be called the finest opera created during the 19th century.


Holden has nothing to tell us about the musical forces which influenced Tchaikovsky's writing, nor does he make any serious attempt to place the composer in either the Russian or European musical context. Holden also ignores Tchaikovsky's meticulous professionalism, traits which distinguished him from other Russian composers of his era, with the exception perhaps of Rimsky-Korsakov.


Holden appears to have spent much time researching this book, making a number of trips to St. Petersburg and to the Tchaikovsky archives at the composer's home in Klin. But all of the material he uses was apparently read in translation. This explains the book's lack of atmosphere, of any real feeling for the era or for the places, in particular the Russian ones, where Tchaikovsky spent his life.


As has become fashionable in recent years, Holden dwells at length on the mysterious circumstances of Tchaikovsky's death in 1893 at age 53. Was it cholera that killed him, as diagnosed, or was it suicide by poison? Holden makes a fairly convincing case for suicide, but the reason he cites hangs tenuously on second- or third-hand testimony given long after the event. Still, it fits Holden's picture of the composer to believe that a "court of honor," made up of old schoolmates, gave him the choice of taking his own life or facing public exposure for his attentions to the nephew of a certain nobleman.


Appended to the book is a useful listing of all of the composer's known musical works, together with an eccentric choice of recommended recordings.


All in all, reading "Tchaikovsky" is an exasperating experience. Hardly a page goes by without some mention of the composer's sexual orientation. And Holden is the kind of biographer who makes a point of telling the reader what was going on in his subject's head: a tactic which is just about acceptable with the living subjects of his former biographies, but which will not wash with Tchai-kovsky. Holden has indeed managed to justify the composer's fear "that one day people will try to probe into the private world of my thoughts and feelings, into everything that I have so carefully hidden throughout my life." The result is the virtual obliteration of Tchaikovsky the musical genius.





"Tchaikovsky" by Anthony Holden, Bantam Press, 490 pp, ?18.99 ($29), can be ordered from the Post International Bookshop, 1/20 Petrovskiye Linii, Tel: 200-2488.