Ed. note: We’re honored at artsmeme to share a conversation between arts journalist Marina Harss with author Simon Morrison, whose recent biography, “Tchaikovsky’s Empire,” is receiving critical kudos. In Morrison’s book, writes Harss, he “takes a fresh, humanizing approach, debunking myths like the composer’s supposed suicide, and focusing on the beauty and craft of his work.” The interview was first published on Harss’s Substack, Dancing Around, and we nabbed it for our readers with her permission!
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Who was Tchaikovsky, really? It’s a question scholars and musicologists have been unpeeling and arguing over since the composer’s death, at 53, of cholera, a disease that killed thousands in late nineteenth century Russia. Tchaikovsky’s music and life have been subjected to countless analyses and arguments, many centered on his sexuality—he was gay—and psychology, and how these questions help to explain or define qualities in the music. The musicologist and historian Simon Morrison has now published a new biography, Tchaikovsky’s Empire (Yale UP) based on documents, letters, notebooks kept by the composer, and copious other materials retrieved from archives in Russia and abroad. Morrison takes a more down-to-earth approach to studying his subject, relieving the composer of a sheen of sentimentalism and melancholia that have accrued over the decades. He is utterly unconvinced by the idea, floated in the last decades, that Tchaikovsky might have committed suicide because of a scandal revealing his sexual orientation. As Morrison says in the interview below, “Tchaikovsky wasn’t 13 or 14 years old forever. What the literature has done is reduce him to this teenage state.” The book is witty—as it appears Tchaikovsky was—and often argumentative in its effort eschew psychologizing and instead look at the man and his music straight on, and let the materials speak for themselves.
Morrison is based at Princeton University, where he is a leading expert on Russian and Soviet music. His books on Prokofiev (and the composer’s wife, Lina) and Russian opera are vivid explorations of not only the Russian world, but also of the highly specific, complex figures who inhabited that world. He has also branched out into subjects as far-ranging as the history of the Bolshoi Theater—a place riven, from the start, by politics and personal ambition—and the rock icon Stevie Nicks. In addition, he has collaborated or consulted on numerous productions of dance and opera, including revivals of Prokofiev’s Le pas d’acier and Shostakovich’s Bolt.
This summer, we spoke about his recently-published Tchaikovsky book.
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Was Tchaikovsky a subject you’ve been wanting to take on for a long time?
You know, I’ve been teaching him for a long time and he’s super popular with students. I taught a couple of undergrad courses on him, and then two graduate seminars. And I had written little things about him here and there, mostly when this controversy arose a few years ago, when the Russians decided that as a great artist and genius he had transcended everything to do with his identity and sexuality. So you had this kind of double repression. In the Soviet period, you couldn’t talk about the fact that he was homosexual, but you could talk about the fact that he was a Romantic sufferer. And then came the idea, proposed by people like Alexander Poznansky, an emigre Russian who became a Yale librarian, that represented Tchaikovsky as mainly a gay artist whose gay identity was being worked out in all of his music. I found it all pretty tedious, given that what the students loved about Tchaikovsky was the gorgeousness of the music and the craft, the orchestration, the things he wanted people to love about the music: the beauty of it.