Customer Reviews

Tchaikovsky: The Early Years, 1840-1874

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Even with the passage of over 30 years since David Brown's first of his 4 volumes on the life and works of Tchaikovsky, his collected epic biography is still the prime place for those who really want to dive into the composer's life in detail, beyond a one-volume treatment (and David Brown has himself produced one-volume works on Tchaikovsky). At the time of his research, he had to work within the restrictions of what the old USSR would have allowed in terms of documentation, not to mention attitudes towards homosexuality in general. Brown notes in his foreword that, in the context of the latter and Tchaikovsky's sexual orientation, he did not want to try for a "deep elucidation" of the composer's personality. Brown mixes a straightforward treatment of the biographical facts with discussions of Tchaikovsky's major compositions. In particular, he gives notably extended treatment to Tchaikovsky's operas, up through 1874 in this volume (obviously before "Eugene Onegin" and "The Queen of Spades"), which definitely count among the more neglected of Tchaikovsky's works.

Brown tries to "have it both ways" here, in a sense, where he writes both for the "intelligent layperson" in terms of the biographical narrative, but also for the musicologist, where there are a fair number of reproductions of musical excerpts and some diagrams of musical structure. His analysis of the musical excerpts in parallel with the reproductions is actually remarkably light, or perhaps "not so heavy", on technical jargon. However, readers who are not musically trained should definitely be aware of these sections.

It will probably be some time before a new English-language biographical study of Tchaikovsky on the scale of Brown's work, which can incorporate all the newly available documentation since the 1970's, will appear. That new biography, if it ever does appear, will have a very tough act to follow, since even accounting for the fact that this volume first appeared in 1978, the story is rich enough in details for any Tchaikovsky fan to take in.