St Petersburg полностью

Tchaikovsky’s confidant the critic German Laroche spilled onto the newspaper pages what the composer had reserved for private discussions; calling Boris Godunov a “musical defecation,” he pitied “the conductor, singers and instrumentalists, brought by fate to deal with that stinking substance.”58 Besides everything else, an important issue was the struggle for the Maryinsky stage, the most influential in the empire. It is only now that we presume that the operas of Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky could coexist peacefully on that or any other stage. Laroche did not think so, nor did Alexander III.

Laroche wrote,

The Russian musician who leafs through the piano score of Boris some thirty years from now will never believe, just as no contemporary foreigner believes, that those black signs on white paper depict anything that had been actually sung and played publicly, in costumes, before large crowds that had not only gladly paid money for their seats, but had presented the composer with a laurel wreath … that the wild sounds and wild opinions about them were heard not in some barbarous country, but in a brilliant capital…. An abyss must have gaped between Petersburg and the rest of the world; consequently the patriotic feeling of people with healthy tastes was profoundly insulted.59

The paradox is that in his tirade Laroche combined an appeal to Western taste and judgment along with one to Russian “patriotic feeling.” Such ambivalence reflected the duality of Petersburg’s position as the “window on the West” and at the same time the capital of a powerful empire with a chauvinist monarch. Speaking of “healthy tastes,” Tchaikovsky’s close friend was wisely making a deep courtier’s bow. And suddenly the emperor’s cultural policy and particularly the mystery of the Russian tsar’s animosity toward Mussorgsky becomes clearer.

The thirty-year reign (“too short,” in the words of the artist Alexander Benois) of Alexander III solidified the return to the ideals of patriotism and nationality under the aegis of autocracy, first proclaimed by the emperor’s grandfather Nicholas L In Alexander’s eyes loyalty was true patriotism, and any attempt at aesthetic radicalism smacked of subversion. The French-language Journal de St.- Petersbourg called the members of the Mighty Five “les pétroleurs de la république des beaux arts.”

Tchaikovsky, on the contrary, was perceived by Alexander III as a loyal composer. And, in fact, the composer was personally devoted to the emperor and wrote a coronation march and cantata for him, for which he received a ring with a large diamond valued at fifteen hundred rubles from the tsar. The emperor’s generosity to Tchaikovsky continued and in 1888 he granted the composer a lifetime pension of three thousand rubles a year.

Tchaikovsky may be the most popular and beloved Russian cultural figure in the West. In America, for instance, where his fame was fanned by his conducting at the opening of Carnegie Hall in 1891, it would be hard to imagine a Christmas not enveloped in the sounds of The Nutcracker or a Fourth of July without the cannon and fireworks accompanying the 1812 Overture.

This unprecedented popularity is based primarily on the obvious emotional accessibility and lushness of Tchaikovsky’s melodies. An intriguing element is added by the romantic and sensational aspects of Tchaikovsky’s biography: his homosexuality and alleged suicide.

How did Tchaikovsky’s homosexual passions affect his life and music? Did he take poison in Petersburg in 1893, in his fifty-fourth year? And did the authorities cover it up by announcing the composer had died in a cholera epidemic? As a schoolboy in Soviet Leningrad, I had heard tales from old Petersburgers about Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality and his strange death. Later in New York Balanchine had discussed these issues at length with me. It is clear, however, that the full evaluation of all these rumors can be made only after a thorough and objective study by Russian and Western specialists of the materials kept in Russian archives. The participation of the latter is particularly important since the topics of homosexuality and suicide, especially relating to popular and beloved figures, touch on Russian national pride and were still taboo in the Soviet Union even at the end of the 1980s.

Both Stravinsky and particularly Balanchine insisted on calling Tchaikovsky a “Petersburg” composer. This was based not only on the facts of his life—Tchaikovsky studied in Petersburg and died there; many of his works were first performed in the capital, which he often visited and where he had many friends—but on such personality traits as nobility, reserve, and sense of moderation, and of course the effective use of the “European” forms in his compositions, so consonant with Petersburg’s European architecture.