From Publishers Weekly
Brown's monumental study--so exhaustive that it is regarded even in Russia as definitive--reaches its conclusion with this fourth volume. Here we see the composer beginning to conduct his own works and consolidating his international reputation with triumphant tours throughout Western Europe and the United States. Major pieces from this final period include the fifth and sixth symphonies, the Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty ballets and the opera The Queen of Spades. With his administrative and teaching duties, his frequent travels, his voluminous correspondence and his daily work schedule, Tchaikovsky's life was hectic, and Brown relates it almost moment by moment. There is also a great deal of technical musical discussion and material (complete synopses of operas and ballets, for example) that will seem superfluous to any but professional musicians. But Brown's scholarship and objectivity remain winning, and his account of the composer's mysterious death, with the various theories about it, is careful and convincing. Strangest is the story that Tchaikovsky had agreed to kill himself when faced by a group of old school friends with the threat of reporting a homoerotic dalliance to the Czar--which would have meant banishment to Siberia. The mass spectacle of his funeral brings a remarkable work to a touching close. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
The third and concluding volume of Brown's monumental study (1983, 1986) of the Russian composer--which combines detailed musicological analysis (including generous excerpts from scores) with thorough, if not especially penetrating, life-history. As Brown himself says, ``it is a paradox of the professional man's biography that its externals can become less interesting as its subject's distinction and fame grow.'' So it is here: much of this undramatic book chronicles Tchaikovsky's late-blooming conducting career and his many tours. Even more space is devoted to critiques of the operas The Queen of Spades and Iolantha; the ballets Sleeping Beauty (which Brown finds profound as well as beautiful) and The Nutcracker (which Brown clearly loathes); and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the former a ``compromise'' between Russian soul and Western form, the latter an uncompromising triumph, ``surely the most truly original symphony to have been composed'' since Beethoven's Ninth. Throughout, Brown is properly cautious--but not unimaginative--about finding autobiography in the music. The composer's homosexuality is mentioned occasionally, matter-of-factly, downplayed (to a fault, perhaps) rather than overplayed as in last fall's speculative biography by Alexander Poznansky. And, as for Tchaikovsky's death, Brown finds suicide the ``inescapable conclusion.'' Not the last word, of course: glasnost is likely to open up previously closed Tchaikovsky archives. But, for now, a solid windup to the critical biography for serious students and knowledgeable music-lovers. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
