TCHAIKOVSKY: THE LAST CHAPTER
| Autor: | Alexandra Orlova |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1981 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Music and Letters. 62:125-145 |
| ISSN: | 1477-4631 0027-4224 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/ml/62.2.125 |
| Popis: | THE CIRCUMSTANCES surrounding Tchaikovsky's death have never been fully established. From the first days of the composer's illness and from the time immediately following his death controversy has not ceased: was the cause cholera or suicide? Among musicians and the older residents of Leningrad there is no doubt: Tchaikovsky committed suicide, however much official Soviet musicology insists on maintaining the 'cholera' version instituted immediately after Tchaikovsky's death by his brother and the doctors who attended him. The broader public too believes in suicide connected with Tchaikovsky's homosexuality. The current belief is that some highly placed person accused the composer of paying unnatural attention to either the son or the nephew of that person, and that Tchaikovsky, learning of the charge and fearing an exposure that threatened not only criminal proceedings but also permanent disgrace, took poison. When Lydia Konisskaya, the author of a popular but serious book on Tchaikovsky,l met some of her readers publicly in Leningrad in 1970, the question she was openly asked was not whether the composer committed suicide but only why. Why indeed? Why should Tchaikovsky, who had such an abnormal fear of death ('the evil snub-nosed monster', as he called it), have chosen such an end? Tchaikovsky's homosexuality has been a matter of public knowledge for many years,2 however much fuss its disclosure may at first have caused. But it is perhaps still too little known how heavily his abnormality weighed with him, how cruelly he suffered in consequence of it. In the Soviet Union the subject is taboo, yet without it the intensity of Tchaikovsky's depiction of love through his music is impossible to understand. According to his brother and biographer, Modest,3 Romeo andJuliet could not have been written |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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