WHO KILLED TCHAIKOVSKY?
He is a monument to classical music, but being gay in Tsarist Russia was not easy, even for the artistic elite and his death is shrouded in suspicion and sinister scheming. Was it cholera, suicide… or was he sentenced to die by a court of his peers? Jesse
It should come as little surprise that the musical genius behind the Dance Of The Sugarplum Fairy was gay. It was an open secret that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky spent a lifetime trying to conceal. To be convicted of the crime of homosexuality in 19th Century Russia would have seen him stripped of all civil rights and imprisoned or worse – banished to Siberia.
When Tchaikovsky died suddenly at age 53, nine days after premiering his Sixth Symphony, the official cause of death was listed as cholera. Almost immediately, this diagnosis attracted suspicion and rumours began to circulate. Could cholera have been a complex cover-up orchestrated to save Tchaikovsky’s legacy from a far greater shame? Inconsistencies around his death are well-documented and his fatal symptoms are curiously similar to those of arsenic poisoning. Was he forced to commit suicide because he’d seduced the young nephew of a nobleman? Was his heady Sixth Symphony a suicide note set to music?
In many ways, the death of Tchaikovsky set the bar for the sensational conspiracies surrounding the deaths of modern celebrities from Marilyn to JFK and Princess Diana.
Even today, many Russians don’t want to believe that their beloved composer was gay but, last year, as he was defending laws that make it a crime to be openly gay in Russia, President Putin was loath to admit the country’s most famous composer was one of them. “They say Tchaikovsky was a homosexual,” Putin said casually, as if to imply his new laws were not homophobic. “Truth be told, we don’t love him because of that, but he was a great musician and we all love his music. So what?”
Tchaikovsky himself may have hoped for a more enlightened future Russia.
The composer’s sexuality may not be the most interesting part of his genius and to hunt for the queer bent in his craft is not only subjective, it’s missing the point. We love Tchaikovsky because of his music, yes, but considering the intensity, depth and power of Swan Lake’s second act overture, it’s impossible to not hear in it the reflection of his human experience, and that cannot preclude the strictly forbidden nature of his sexuality.
Still, despite mountains of irrefutable evidence including the aforementioned admission by Putin, Russian commitment to denying Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality persists.
The Russian screenwriter of an upcoming Tchaikovsky biography, Yuri Arabov, claims that only “philistines” believe that the composer was gay.
“It is far from a fact that Tchaikovsky was a homosexual,” he said, an assertion that was publicly backed by the current Russian culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky. “Arabov is actually right,” he said in an interview. “There is no evidence that Tchaikovsky was a homosexual.” Arabov did concede that perhaps there was some buggery going on, clarifying that Tchaikovsky was, “a person without a family who was stuck with the opinion that he supposedly loves men.”
Perhaps Arabov will only believe he was gay once the sex tape surfaces. Arabov’s Kremlinfunded “biography” ought to prove interesting because not only did Tchaikovsky come to accept his homosexuality as a fact, he also had a lot of family – including a nephew who became his last lover. Arabov also ignores the fact that Tchaikovsky’s collaborator, confidante and f irst biographer was his younger brother, the dramatist Modest Tchaikovsky, who was also gay. In the letters he sent to Modest, censored for decades in Russia, he candidly described his feelings, f rustrations and desires.
Tchaikovsky wrote the following about one of his pupils, Iosif Kotek: “When he caresses me with his hand, when he l i es with his head i nclined on my breast and I r un my hand t hrough his hair and s ecretly kiss it … passion rages within me with such unimaginable st rength…”
Iosif Kotek became Tchaikovsky’s lover and, in 1878, he would dedicate a waltz to him, Valse-Scherzo In C Major, but ultimately Kotek’s constant womanizing drove him mad with f rustration and they ended the affair.
For a man of his day, Tchaikovsky was about as openly gay as a man could be. Earlier, the muse for his Romeo And Juliet Fantasy Overture was another male pupil, Eduard Zak (who later killed himself ). Tchaikovsky became lovers with his valet, Alexei Sofronov, and he fell hard for his nephew, Vladimir “Bob” Davidov. Thirty-one years his junior, there doesn’t seem to have been any objections to the affections he lavished upon Bob, the second son of his sister Alexandra, until his death.
Tchaikovsky dedicated his sixth and final symphony to his nephew and, when touring, wrote rapturous prose to the young man: “I am writing to you with a voluptuous pleasure. The thought that this paper is soon going to be in your hands fills me with joy and brings tears to my eyes…”
Tchaikovsky frequented gay circles, most of his life was spent as a bachelor and he kept his complicated sexual life under the radar. He often slept with male prostitutes, especially while travelling. When sending correspondence from abroad, all scholars agree that he feminised the names of men in his letters. He sometimes alternated male and female pronouns on the same page, a crossgender conceit less for the purposes of camp humour, as we might employ it today, than to avoid detection by Imperial censors.
Even though he knew his truth, Tchaikovsky desperately wanted to fit in and he struggled, like so many gay men before and since, with wanting to change his nature. Aspiring to live a normal life, he wrote to his brother Modest: “Cursed buggermania forms an impassable gulf between me and most people. It imparts to my character an estrangement, fear of people, shyness, immoderate bashfulness, mistrust, in a word, a thousand traits from which I am getting ever more unsociable. Imagine that often, and for hours at a time, I think about a monastery or something of the kind.”
This private torment has been regarded as the catalyst to his impressive creative output. Professor Robert Greenberg of the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music believes that Tchaikovsky, “found a world of self-expression that he might never have discovered had he felt less alienated from society.” Perhaps attempting to relieve the alienation caused by his cursed “buggermania”, Tchaikovsky became engaged to famed Belgian opera star, Désirée Artot. The affair ended when, without telling her fiancé, Artot suddenly married another man in her touring company. Tchaikovsky did not grieve long, although he would later claim she was the only woman he ever loved. Some suggest that his feelings for Artot were closer to diva worship; that it was her commanding artistry and not the woman herself that had intoxicated him.
When another friend, possibly another of his former male lovers, married – Tchaikovsky decided it was time for him to do the same. His homosexuality, he believed at the time, was an impediment to his family and his own happiness. Marriage would stop the relentless probing into his private life and, hopefully, allow for sexual freedom under the cover of convention. In thoughts echoed by many oppressed gay men, he also came to believe that taking on a double life would make his father happy.
To Modest, he wrote: “I have decided to get married. It is unavoidable. I must do it, not just for myself but for you, Modest, and all those I love. I think that for both of us our dispositions are the greatest and most insuperable obstacle to happiness, and we must fight our natures to the best of our ability.
“Surely you realise how painful it is for me to know that people pity and forgive me when in truth I am not guilty of anything. How appalling to think that those who love me are sometimes ashamed of me. In short, I seek marriage or some sort of public involvement with a woman so as to shut the mouths of assorted contemptible creatures whose opinions mean nothing to me, but who are in a position to cause distress to those near to me.”
It followed that in 1877, at the age of 37, >>
>> he hastily married a former student named Antonina Milyikova. It was a disastrous decision that Tchaikovsky would regret almost instantly. He informed his wife that their marriage would not be consummated and that he could not return her love but he promised to remain a devoted friend. Antonina was unwilling to accept such a proposition from her new husband and was disgusted by his sexuality when he tried to explain it. The marriage lasted two months, by which
Cursed buggermania forms an impassable gulf between me and most people. It imparts to my character an estrangement, fear of people, shyness, immoderate bashfulness, mistrust, in a word, a thousand traits from which I am getting ever more unsociable.
time Tchaikovsky was all but psychotic. He threw himself into the Moscow River, intent on suicide. He began hallucinating about death, visualising his head falling off into the orchestra pit as he was conducting. The tormented composer fled his wife and raced to Switzerland in full mental breakdown.
The marriage would haunt Tchaikovsky for the rest of his life. Antonina taunted him by agreeing, at first, to a divorce but she never granted one, and he remained constantly petrified that she would publicly reveal his dirty little secret. There is no evidence, however, that she extorted or lorded over him this advantage. In letters to his brother he recounted her insufferable scorn: she considered him a “deceiver who married her in order to hide my true nature”. This truth he was not able to deny, and from that time forward any mention of his wife, any letter from her, any sight or news of her at all and he would launch headlong into a deep depression.
Mistakes are often excellent teachers and what Tchaikovsky learned in attempting to lead a false life was that he could not escape himself. In a letter to another brother, Anatoly, he admits to finally having to face the music: “I have completely recovered from my insanity,” he wrote regarding his marriage, adding that there was “nothing more futile than wanting to be anything other than what I am by nature.” It helped that Tchaikovsky had at least two supportive brothers and, thanks to his extraordinary achievements, he also ran in more tolerant, aristocratic circles.
The emotional strain may have had yet another happy by-product: enhanced output. His Fourth Symphony and the opera and symphony of Eugene Onegin, completed during this time, were his most remarkable to date. Also at this time, his ex-lover Iosif Kotek introduced him to Nadezhda von Meck, the nouveau riche widow of a railway magnate. Willful, atheist and not a fan of marriage herself, the widow von Meck enjoyed having chamber music played on her estate and commissioned a few pieces from Tchaikovsky. She was soon entranced and became the composer’s patron, providing an annual salary of 6,000 rubles which allowed him to quit his work at the conservatory in Moscow and focus full-time on composing.
The two became very close confidantes and their relationship, spanning the years 1877 to 1890, is one of the longest art patronages in history. Tchaikovsky was candid with von Meck about his creative process and their exchanges, comprising over 1,200 letters, offer historians priceless insight into his mind and creative process. It’s easy to imagine how the trauma of his marriage had a lasting effect on his interpersonal relationships. Perhaps that explains why the neurotic and nervous composer never once actually met his benefactress in person.
Tchaikovsky was extremely sensitive in his personal life and also to criticism of his work. Between constant productions of his ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, his symphonies, concertos and those cannons in the Overture Of 1812, Tchaikovsky is the most played composer in history and yet, it appears, his mastery is still up for debate. Various complaints are lodged against his music:
not complex. Too sentimental. A poor man’s Beethoven. In a 2002 New York Times piece, an argument raged between musicologists over his relevance. Some accepted his fantastic postmodern appeal, while others considered him hopelessly sappy and, like those who dismiss pop stars as mere flash and finesse, unworthy of his popularity. It’s difficult for the untrained ear to imagine the polished, soaring compositions of Tchaikovsky as anything less than the epitome of sophistication, but his detractors are legion.
Even during his day, Tchaikovsky faced intense criticism in his homeland. The Mighty Five were prominent composers in Russia’s nationalist movement. Building on the work of the composer Mikhail Glinka, they strove to create a totally Russian sound, to the exclusion of any outside influence. Just as Russia today insists on perpetual uniqueness by refusing to engage with Western customs or civil rights protections, the Five considered Europe and academia as heresy, relying instead on the inspiration of folk songs and rhythms found in the far corners of the empire. Although European artists were touring Russia successfully at the time, the Orthodox church considered them infidels and the lower classes were outraged. The nation was experiencing an identity crisis and Tchaikovsky, his Russian sound placed firmly on Western musical structures, was perceived as a threat at the very centre of it all.
Tchaikovsky was looking to the West when his compatriots were looking east, and he was lauded abroad before he became a national treasure in his homeland. Around the time of his Fourth Symphony (which he dedicated to his patroness, von Meck), his music was starting to become associated with the psychological brilliance of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, an ardent nationalist. As fate would have it, Dostoyevsky himself would soon be credited with the rise in Tchaikovsky’s image. In 1880, six months before his own death, Dostoyevsky dedicated a monument to the writer Alexander Pushkin with a gripping speech that prophesied Russian greatness, calling upon his countrymen to embrace “universal unity” and become “a brother to all men”. His speech had unprecedented reach and resonance; it went 19 Century viral and its message of inclusion saw Tchaikovsky, once considered a renegade, soar in popularity.
It was not long before Tchaikovsky was decorated by the Tsar, and he would go on to become a figure of universal importance. He received an honorary doctorate at Cambridge and embarked upon a triumphant tour of America, including conducting the opening of New York City’s Carnegie Hall. He returned to St Petersburg hailed as a “modern music lord” and conducted his Sixth Symphony at the peak of his powers. Nine days later, he was dead.
The cause of death was listed as cholera, an acute intestinal disease brought on by contact with bacteria through infected feces, usually through contaminated water or food. During a previous outbreak in Russia, when he was a boy, both Tchaikovsky’s parents caught the disease and it killed his mother. In the era before antibiotics it was often fatal and still is today in parts of the world with poor sanitation (cholera is responsible for more than 100,000 deaths per year). Then, as now, it primarily affected those who lived in high density areas with no water supply or sewage system. So how did a member of the upper elite contract a disease of the lower class – especially when St Petersburg was under strict health regulations to contain the outbreak?
Tchaikovsky died on November 6, 1893. On the night of November 1, he dined at a ritzy restaurant called Leiners. Regulations required that everyone drink water that had been boiled, but Leiners was fresh out. According to those present, Tchaikovsky ordered cold, unboiled water anyway and then, against the remonstrations of all those at the table, including his brother Modest, he drank it.
By the following morning he was very sick, and he died five days later. In disbelief, the public demanded answers. Why had his private physicians not taken him to hospital? Instead, they attended to him at the home of his brother, Modest. At the time he fell ill, the outbreak of cholera in St Petersburg had already killed hundreds but statistics indicate that more than half of those infected survived. Why had the doctors not sent him to a hospital if his condition were so serious? Questions gave way to deepening suspicions. The incubation period of cholera is usually 24 to 72 hours, and Tchaikovsky was ill early the next morning after supposedly drinking contaminated water – an act made very public. It was hardly conceivable that a man of his stature would play Russian roulette by drinking unboiled water, or that a restaurant of the caliber of Leiners would serve it. It’s been theorised that Thaikovsky and his brother may have staged the drinking of the unboiled water in order to disguise his having already caught cholera in a much less savory way – through unhygienic oral-anal sex with a St Petersburg prostitute. A more popular hypothesis is that the Tchaikovsky brothers conspired to avoid the stigma of the composer’s suicide by making it appear to be cholera. If Tchaikovsky did choose to kill himself, he could hardly have chosen a more painful way to go: severe abdominal cramps, extreme vomiting, diarrhea, kidney failure leading to uremia, paralytic intestines and, mercifully, loss of consciousness. The fatal agonies he suffered are the symptoms of cholera infection but, chillingly, they are also identical to death by arsenic poisoning.
The suicide theory persists, and not merely because the symptoms of cholera resemble those of arsenicosis. The Tsarist health authorities that required restaurant water to be boiled also sought to contain the >>
>> outbreak with strict regulations on how to treat the corpse of a cholera victim. The instructions were clear: the body was to be wrapped in a sheet, doused with disinfectant and removed immediately. If the patient was treated at home, the family was also to leave the house.
There are conflicting reports on whether or not the body was disinfected, but Tchaikovsky’s corpse was not wrapped, covered or removed from the house. He was placed in an open coffin inside the home. Many people visited the house to bid their farewells and they weren’t keeping their distance. If the cause of death was genuinely cholera, wouldn’t those visitors have been more concerned about possible contagion? Against the cholera protocols of the day, the house overflowed with visitors and there are multiple reports of one drunken cellist repeatedly kissing the dead composer’s head and face.
Following the death, a journalist from a leading newspaper explained it this way: “In view of the fact that Tchaikovsky had not died of cholera but as a result of blood poisoning, there could have been no fear of infection, therefore, his coffin had long been left open.”
Curiously, this opinion on cause of death, stated as a fact by the journalist, was not refuted by authorities. What’s more, a letter written to Modest immediately following the death by the principal physician, Dr Lev Bertenson, can been viewed as instructions, telling the dead composer’s brother exactly how to describe a cholera death.
It would have been quite an impressive undertaking to fake the suicide of such a famous man. It would have required the
He returned to St Petersburg hailed as a “modern music lord” and conducted his Sixth Symphony at the peak of his powers. Nine days later, he was dead.
collusion of family, friends, doctors, the press – and probably even the victim himself. Nine days before his death, Tchaikovsky premiered what many consider his masterpiece. His Sixth Symphony was dedicated to his nephew, Bob, his last love and heir. He titled the symphony Pathétique, which does not mean pathetic, but translates in Russian to something along the lines of impassioned suffering. Fans argue it is autobiographical and, indeed, Tchaikovsky claimed to have put his “entire soul” into the work. He also introduced a radical new concept to the symphonic journey. The norm was to finish on an upbeat, noisy and fast allegro, but Tchaikovsky made a very conscious decision to invert the movements and this symphony, as often with life, finishes with a drawn out adagio, an intensely somber (suicide?) note of resignation.
But Tchaikovsky was at the glorious pinnacle of his career, universally acclaimed and admired, so the question is: why would he commit suicide?
It has been suggested that he couldn’t bear the extent of his feelings for his nephew or knowing that this great love would never be reciprocated. A much more sensational, and enduring, possible motive comes by way of a 1913 deathbed confession not revealed until 1979, when an émigré to the USA, a Soviet musical scholar with excellent credentials by the name of Alexandra Orlova, was finally able to speak freely. According to Orlova, a former pupil at the St Petersburg School Of Jurisprudence, Alexander Voitrov, told her that back in 1913, a widow named Ekaterina entrusted him a secret she did not wish to take to the grave.
The woman explained that in the fall of 1893, her high-ranking husband Nikolay Jacobi (a peer from Tchaikovsky’s alma mater) was charged to deliver the Tsar a letter from a Count Alexey Stenbock-Fermor accusing Tchaikovsky of conducting, or attempting to conduct, an affair with the Count’s young nephew. Instead of delivering the letter and incurring potential ruinous consequences for Tchaikovsky and all those associated with him, Jacobi assembled a court of eight esteemed peers and Tchaikovsky was summoned. Ekaterina claimed to have heard loud voices from behind the closeddoor meeting until, after more than four hours of deliberation, Tchaikovsky left her house, speechless and spooked.
Following his exit, Jacobi told his wife that in order to avoid the disgrace and scandal of
publicly exposing his crimes, this “court of honor” had come to a chilling conclusion: they had sentenced Tchaikovsky to die – and the fearful composer had promised to comply. When Orlova published her account, (now pay attention) the granddaughter of the sister of the wife of Tchaikovsky’s eldest brother, Nikolay, corroborated her story, saying that she had heard the same story from her grandmother before she died in 1955.
This theory has received considerable publicity and, based on its seeming veracity, was even entered into the Encyclopedia Brittanica and featured in a 1993 BBC documentary that leaned largely in its favour. But Orlova’s unscientific, unscholarly claim has more than a few holes. It relies entirely on hearsay from multiple sources, spanning more than a century. Orlova, for her part, was not dogmatic in her assertions and was surprised at the fervor with which she was attacked, including by another Soviet emigrant, the Tchaikovsky biographer, Alexander Poznansky, who growled that none of what she said could be confirmed.
It is true, however, that Tchaikovsky spent a lifetime trying to conceal his nature from the public’s perception, shielding his family and reputation. The consequences of exposure in Tsarist Russia would have been far more severe than they were for Oscar Wilde in England, a more socially progressive country, just two years later. After Wilde’s affair with a young aristocrat was exposed he was sentenced to hard labour and later died penniless, friendless and ill in Paris.
Could the lurid controversy surrounding Tchaikovsky’s death have been invented as a way of pathologising his sexuality and killing him off, like at the end of so many movies? In this case, his suicide could be presented as the logical end to such a lifestyle. Others
Surely you realise how painful it is for me to know that people pity and forgive me when in truth I am not guilty of anything. How appalling to think that those who love me are sometimes ashamed of me.
argue that homosexuality was accepted in aristocratic Russian circles; that at the time of Tchaikovsky’s death there were gays in prominent positions within the government and they, like him, would have been above reproach. Would the Tsar really have wanted to make a scandal of someone as culturally important as Tchaikovsky? It’s worth mentioning that, of all the Tsars, Alexander III was known as “the peacemaker”. He even paid for Tchaikovsky’s funeral – or does that fact arouse further suspicion?
To put an end to speculation, there have been cries to exhume his body from its St Petersburg slumber, as arsenic is said to be detectable in human remains well beyond one hundred years. That is unlikely to happen, but Pyotr Tchaikovsky will likely never rest in peace. Not when the story of his death swirls with such tantalising mystery.
For those who detect an artistic farewell in the strains of his Sixth Symphony, the one that sounds so very much like a requiem, there is one last clue. Uncharacteristically, Tchaikovsky failed to leave program notes on its content. In fact, he almost called this last symphony Programme, but that would have aroused too many questions from the audience. There was a program, but it would never be printed. It was all in his head and he wrote to his nephew that offering no description was his express intention. As to what it all meant, he might well have been engineering his own enduring enigma. “Let them guess!” he wrote.