An Interview with Simon Morrison
Author of Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer
by Néstor Castiglione
Simon Morrison discusses the man and music that are the subjects of his forthcoming book.
“Our life offers little material for pure comedy”, noted a reviewer for Tchaikovsky’s early opera, The Oprichnik. Those words unintentionally took on added resonance on the day I read them. Just a few hours before, a country with a former comedian as head-of-state launched a deadly missile attack against sunbathers in another country, whose leader is often fodder for jokes by Western comedians. Whatever comedic material could be extracted from such an event could only be of a very Gogolian kind, with its inevitable punchline coming at the audience’s expense.
Simon Morrison’s Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer arrives at a precarious historical moment, when the complacent “end of history” expectations of post-Cold War neoliberalism triumphant are rapidly dissolving before an emerging paradigm, both familiar and disconcertingly new, whose features have yet to be fully revealed. Amidst all of this, Tchaikovsky and his music remain, paradoxically more relevant and fought-over than ever before, even as classical music as a whole continues to be further marginalized by an increasingly hostile mainstream.
Morrison, professor of music at Princeton University, is no stranger to subjects who were caught in inexorable historical processes beyond their control, as his authoritative The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years demonstrates. (He is also currently working on a biography of Shostakovich.) Tchaikovsky’s legacy, however, has uniquely been ensnared in the intersecting threads of competing ideologies which have sought to claim or repudiate him since at least those short moments after his death while his body was still warm. Like the winding passages in a funhouse hall of mirrors, the attendant posthumous reception of Tchaikovsky makes it difficult for listeners to distinguish between the real and the illusory – a state of affairs that Morrison smashes in his book with clear-eyed observations and bracing wit.
The following interview was conducted via e-mail in late June and early July 2024.
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Néstor Castiglione: How long have you been working on your book?
Simon Morrison: The archival documents were gathered over many years from several Russian federal archives and I’ve taught Tchaikovsky’s music in different contexts. The writing came pretty quickly. I produced the draft in about nine months.
NC: How has the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War affected access to primary sources about Tchaikovsky?
SM: Archives in Russia remain open, but scholars from elsewhere are hesitant to travel there for moral, ethical, political, and financial, as well as logistical reasons. Grants and institutional support are lacking, Russia is on the State Department’s no-fly list, and so on. Those non-Russians who have been willing and able to use the archives tend to be slow-played by archivists; that is, access has been impeded (yet again). As to how long the situation will persist, no one knows, not even those responsible for the calamity.
NC: It may surprise some of your readers that Tchaikovsky was relatively uninterested in politics. How, then, did his music become so fraught with political baggage?
SM: I’d say that Tchaikovsky was casually patriotic, fond of Tsar Alexander III, but not Alexander II, positively acquainted with Moscow’s governors-general; and willing (for the right fee) to compose music for civic, national, and imperial occasions. Most of his time, however, was spent on works of broader human appeal; these made him famous in his final years and even more so after he died. His music was performed internationally. He became increasingly popular with the public because of his common touch and relatability during a time when music elsewhere—France, Germany, and the United States—was becoming increasingly abstract, distanced from the human. Tchaikovsky wrote music about family ties, first loves, and what it’s like to die. Critics denigrated his traditionalism, without recognizing his innovative handling of the orchestra and dramaturgical experiments, but concertgoers preferred his music to attenuated chromaticism and composition, if you will, by number. The Soviets canonized him for his outsized contribution to culture, and his sound served as a model for the middle-brow aesthetics prized by Soviet aestheticians. The First Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, and the three ballet scores are the soundtrack of the Russian twentieth century.
NC: At one point in your book, you quote the musicologist Marina Ritzarev, who theorized a Christian basis for the Sixth Symphony. Was religion important to Tchaikovsky?
SM: He wasn’t especially religious. Culturally, he was Orthodox, but he didn’t spend large amounts of time in services. His immersion in the Russian liturgical musical traditions dates from his time as a Moscow Conservatory professor. His arrangements of the Cherubic Hymn, Vespers, and Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom were commissions from a publisher seeking to carve out a niche for himself.
NC: Your book reveals that much of what the public perceives as “Tchaikovsky” is really a highly romanticized fantasy. How much of his life as we understand it is a posthumous construct?
SM: His biography has been shamefully distorted by homophobic scholars seeking to represent him as a tortured gay man, unhappy in life and love, as well as those who would reduce music to the sound of suffering. I won’t name names, but the books are in the libraries. The Soviets didn’t talk about his homosexuality, but scholars outside of the Soviet Union did, over and over and over again, even though nothing he composed has much to do with his personal life. He was a poor student and had to borrow to make ends meet getting his start as a composer, but even in his salad days his life was generally happy. Some failures, a lot of successes, much love and support from his family and friends, travel, fame, and wealth. I wouldn’t want to die from cholera, but other than that I’d take it.
NC: Did Tchaikovsky or his contemporaries think about his sexual orientation as much as we do today?
SM: His homosexuality was never an issue for him, nor for his brother Modest. He had lots of homosexual friends, including members of the imperial court. It was common to take a wife as a “beard”; his marriage to a friend, a woman he had known for several years in and out of the Moscow Conservatory, was an instant fiasco that he rued to the end of his days. Clearly his bride, Antonina Milyukova, wanted a different kind of relationship than he said he could provide—and yes, she knew he was gay. There’s almost nothing I’ve seen in the literature of his day, the archival documents, the recollections of contemporaries, his letters or diaries to indicate that he was discriminated against because of his sexuality. The homophobic invective is posthumous and mostly non-Russian. The first edition of his letters to his patron Nadezhda von Meck was published under Stalin. It says, right at the start, that Tchaikovsky was a homosexual.
NC: Aside from his correspondence with von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s inner circle of friends was almost exclusively male. At one point, you describe him as a “misogynist”. Yet he created some of the most enduring representations of femininity and womanhood in all of opera.
SM: Like all people, he had his biases, none greater than the bias he held against his wife for refusing to agree to a divorce. The granting of women’s rights was a source of debate and controversy in Russia in the 1860s; his politics tended to be more conservative than progressive. That said, he wrote a lot of music for and about women, especially young women, and he seems to have been interested in the female imagination. Tatyana, the heroine of Eugene Onegin, is one of his greatest musical creations: he loved her. In a sense, he was her.
NC: Another potential revelation for readers is your contextualization of Tchaikovsky as a Classicist against the prevailing Romanticism of his time.
SM: Great artists tend to be romanticized, especially those who fell ill or died young or couldn’t keep a roof over their heads. Schubert and Schumann are valorized in part for their torments. Artists who had good lives—Haydn and Milhaud come to mind—are less interesting to us. Tchaikovsky’s reputation as a Romantic is based on an incorrect perception of his personal life—that he was tormented because of his sexuality—and a mapping of that incorrect perception onto Francesca da Rimini, the “Pathétique”, and other works of super-charged sentiment. He wrote Romantic music along with pieces we would consider to be more in the spirit of the Enlightenment. At the end of his life, he was moving towards a surrealist direction. I also see him heading more in the direction of Debussy as an orchestrator and manipulator of form. His antipathy towards Wagner is manifest in his final opera, Iolanta, whose opening is a bald satire of the Tristan und Isolde prelude.
NC: Should musicians work toward performances that reflect Tchaikovsky’s Classical restraint?
SM: I wouldn’t posit an ideal. My sense is that if a performance of one of his works moved the audience he was happy with it. I do think that schmaltzy, kitschy, overburdened, portentously labored readings of his works obliterate the finer details. The nuance, the play of timbres, the distribution of melodic ideas over multiple registers can get lost. The best performance of Tchaikovsky’s music is the next one, whether in the ballet or opera house, the concert hall, paraphrased on a soundtrack, quoted in hip hop, or bowdlerized by AI. So long as he’s heard we’ll all be better off.
NC: Some of his major works were the outcomes of more collaborative processes than one may expect. Does this pose a challenge to musicians seeking to find Tchaikovsky’s authentic intent in his scores?
SM: Tchaikovsky reviewed and vouchsafed the orchestration and arrangement work he farmed out to students and assistants. The problems are the works that were altered after his death, like Swan Lake and the piano concerti. The critical edition that’s being published in Moscow will, I trust, clean out the errors in the scores and indicate what Tchaikovsky did and didn’t authorize.
NC: In the introduction of your book, you point out that very many aspects of Tchaikovsky and his world are remote to the readers of today. Nevertheless, his music remains exceptionally relatable to modern audiences. How come?
SM: His music continues to speak to us because it addresses everyday experiences, because his gift as a melodist remains without peer, because he absorbed the best of his European predecessors, and because so many later composers, “serious” and “popular”, borrowed from him.
NC: Classical music is a marginal presence in the twenty-first-century mainstream, yet the proxy wars raged over Tchaikovsky and his music in the months immediately after the escalation of hostilities in the Russo-Ukrainian War were intense enough to make international headlines. Why is it that a composer who died over 130 years ago still matters to so many, even to those who may not typically listen to classical music?
SM: He’s one of Russia’s biggest cultural symbols, and his music is performed all of the time everywhere. Rightly and wrongly, he is also associated with Russian imperialism. I say “rightly” because he composed music for imperial occasions, but “wrongly” because he spent a lot of his life in Ukraine and absorbed French and Austrian musical influences. The Soviets canonized him as a Russian “classic” and he remains a state brand, proof of Russian culture’s might. He based three operas on Pushkin and his ballets are at the heart of the canon. And because he composed exceptionally challenging music for piano and violin, his music is a staple of international competitions for aspiring virtuosos. Chiefly, though, his music matters because it relates to experiences shared by all of us. It’s less about epic and myth and transcendent ideas than common experiences, familiar rites of passage. A lot of nonsense has been written about his life, eclipsing the modest amount that’s been written about how he actually composed. I hope my book will help correct the record and perhaps even encourage performances of some of his lesser-known works, including his wonderful opera The Enchantress, his personal favorite. Mine, too.
Néstor Castiglione
