Tchaikovsky: Serenade for Strings
While musicologists have performed innumerable valuable services to the world, they’ve been known to get up to some mischief on occasion, as well. Readers need look no further than the “Tchaikovsky” entry in the fifth edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians for proof.
New Grove is the most respected multi-volume reference work on musical subjects; every 25 years or so a brand-new, entirely updated edition is published. The fifth of these, which appeared in 1979, prints as fact a story about Tchaikovsky’s death, that – were it true – would be surely the most sensational demise of any composer.
Earlier in the decade, a Russian émigré musicologist published a paper that, citing an overheard deathbed confession that in turn cited a second, decades-old deathbed confession, claimed that Tchaikovsky had not died of cholera as had previously been believed but had poisoned himself with arsenic. The story went that the composer had been caught in flagrante with a young nephew of the Romanoff family; before the liaison was made public, a secret “honor court” made up of Tchaikovsky’s former military school classmates gave the composer two options: a dignified suicide, or public scandal and exile to Siberia. Tchaikovsky, we are to believe, chose the former, and his physician, who was in on the conspiracy (as was his family), supplied him with the poison. That so wild a tale could be published as fact in the New Grove, despite the conspicuous lack of any shred of evidence other than a third-hand deathbed confession, tells us something about the preoccupations of the 1970’s, but even in its outlandishness, it’s a testament to the composer’s tumultuous inner life.
Tchaikovsky was indeed gay, as his frank letters to his brother Modest make clear. In fact, he spent much of his adult life struggling with that aspect of his being, public acknowledgment of which would have crippled his career and maybe even jeopardized his life in Czarist Russia. He even went so far as to marry one of his students, but their marriage remained unconsummated: on their wedding night, the composer fled his young bride and, distraught, walked into the Moskva River. And his eventual death was, in a certain sense, self-inflicted – he drank a glass of unboiled water during a raging cholera epidemic and contracted the disease that killed him.
Tchaikovsky was one of the most personal and emotionally direct of composers, and so his difficult inner life is indeed pretty directly relevant to his music. It is especially relevant to the Serenade, as the composer himself wrote in a letter: “The 1812 Overture [which was written at the same time as the Serenade] will be very showy and noisy, but will have no artistic merit because I wrote it without love. But the Serenade, on the contrary, I wrote from inner compulsion. This is a piece from the heart, and so I venture to say it does not lack artistic worth.”
The Serenade was born after an extended trip to Italy prescribed by the composer’s doctor to heal the trauma caused by his failed attempt at marriage. And its four movements so seem to reflect both the warmth and sunshine of the Italian countryside and the emotional journey from exhaustion to elation familiar to anyone who has recovered from a serious illness. And in fact, its finale is based on two Russian folksongs, as the Russian composer’s emotional homecoming reflects a gloriously literal homecoming as well.
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Chris Vaneman is the Director of the Petrie School of Music and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse College. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.