Tchaikovsky and His World [Paperback]

Leslie Kearney (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 1998 | Series: Bard Music Festival Series

This volume considers the music and biography of Tchaikovsky, with an emphasis on his later life and influences. The text includes some of Tchaikovsky's own writings about music, as well as three articles from the 1993 Tubingen conference commemorating the centennial of Tchaikovsky's death. The first part of the book includes an examination of the world of realist art that was so influential in Tchaikovsky's day, and insights into Tchaikovsky's influence on the next generation of artists. The second part of the book presents findings from archival explorations in the composer's home of Klin, Russia, and the third part of the book includes Nikolai Kashkin's 1879 review of Tchaikovsky's controversial opera "Orleanskaia Deva" (The Maid of Orleans).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Published in conjunction with the Bard Music Festival, this book is a compendium of 14 scholarly, copiously annotated essays that examine Tchaikovsky's artistic, literary, and political environment, as well as his personal life. Tchaikovsky and His World endeavors to show how the composer's homosexuality impacted his music and to shed new light on his character. One chapter contends that though Tchaikovsky's sexuality may have contributed to his shyness and diffidence, it caused him no undue suffering, and refutes the myth of his suicide. Another presents a translation of previously unknown letters to his brothers that were suppressed first by his family and later by the Bolshevik government. Their confidential, intimate disclosures make the reader feel like a trespasser, an intruder.

These new revelations say less about Tchaikovsky than about the public's changing attitudes. Older biographers, like the one by distinguished English critic and scholar Edwin Evans, now out of print, attributed Tchaikovsky's depressive, melancholy tendencies to his Slavic heritage and the early loss of his mother. They found no evidence of his sexuality in his music, unlike some contributors to this volume. Leslie Kearney, for example, in her analysis of Tchaikovsky's opera The Maid of Orleans, argues that the movingly human heroine of Schiller's play attracted him because he identified with her "androgynousness."

However, the book's primarily musical articles are interesting and rewarding. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and a Renaissance man of boundless erudition, explores nationalism versus cosmopolitanism in Tchaikovsky's music and the paintings of his day, with many beautiful reproductions. The essay is fascinating, but it fails to explain its basic concept--psychological realism in music. There is a meticulous analysis of an orchestral suite; an impenetrably abstruse one of the Fourth Symphony in a terrible translation; a delightful account of three ballet productions; and more. --Edith Eisler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Leslie Kearney is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Indiana University and author of a forthcoming volume on Musorgsky. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (August 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691004307
• ISBN-13: 978-0691004303
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,332,049 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You'd be sorry to miss this if you like Tchaikovsky, November 20, 2002

By 

Sarakani (Harrow United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tchaikovsky and His World (Hardcover)

This book is a collection of the finest essays by principally American scholars who have sought to understand Tchaikovsky, contemporary Russian art and culture and the music. Each essay is sophisticated with lots of sources quoted and the book also has good pictures. It is a concise work and as an edition on Tchaikovsky to be treasured, for it succeeds in embellishing the composer at a critical level, without being a eulogy of him or his music.

Of greatest interest are the essays by Poznansky on Tchaikovsky himself. We are treated to the most intimate details of his sexuality (not all this material was destroyed it seems by his brother) though the treatment is unsalacious and full of objectivity if not humour. These facts emerge from previously untranslated or hitherto unreleased material and represent the latest material emerging about his life. Poznansky shows us that homosexuality at the time was not as much a problem as it is supposed to have been, and that people then were more or less as people are now - not less enlightened in any sense. Attitudes on morality may have shifted since then, but there was also that much more discretion on such matters at the time.

Poznansky unravels the mystery surrounding Tchaikovsky's death authoritatively and though conspiracy theories will still abound, I think the matter is laid to rest.

This is also a celebration of Russia and the greatest flowering of its art and culture, not to mention music under Tchaikovsky. We get treated to essays on Russian painting with some fine copies of the works described, the coronation of the Tsar and on writers like Chekov.

This book is also (along with Poznansky's essays), a psychological dissection into roles of gender in history and myth, with one especially good essay "Tchaikovsky Androgyne". There are also some good essays on musical theory.

Expertly edited, this is a study in scholarship, presentation and warm intelligence. Tchaikovsky emerges unscathed and as grand as ever to those who have sought to know him and his muse.