Tchaikovsky's heterosexuality

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bilbo47

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I apologize if this digs too far into the personal life for any lover of music, but I'm looking for a bit of help with regards to Tchaikovsky's sexual orientation. In Russia, he's straight, in the West, very much gay. As I understand, the claim for his homosexuality has virtually no support, is based purely on speculation. So if you could let me know of any concrete evidence, as it exists here (in the West), of his homosexuality, I'd very much appreciate it.

I think it's important to mention that the Russian stance isn't at all due to any homophobic motives (even gay.ru ridicules the composer's homosexuality). The country isn't any more homophobic, with openly gay and transvestite pop stars, and a Mon Lewinsky in the politics arena.
 

Thomas Dressler

New member
Just a quick quote from Wikipedia to start:

"The composer's homosexuality, as well as its importance to his life and music, has long been recognized, though any proof of it was suppressed during the Soviet era. Although some historians continue to view him as heterosexual, many others--such as Richard Norton and Alexander Poznansky--conclude that some of Tchaikovsky's closest relationships were homosexual, (citing his servant Aleksei Sofronov and his nephew, Vladimir "Bob" Davydov.) Evidence that Tchaikovsky was homosexual is drawn from his letters and diaries, as well as the letters of his brother, Modest, who was also homosexual."

I'm no expert on Russia or the Soviet Union, but my guess is that maybe Russia isn't homophobic NOW, but it surely was in Tchaikovsky's day (just as everyone else was) and I think it was especially so during the Soviet years. I think the Soviet leaders did not like Tchaikovsky being known as the GAY composer.

How about this--what is the evidence that he was NOT homosexual? I believe most of it points to him BEING gay. In those days, as even here in the US when I was a teenager, no public person in their right mind would leave any conclusive evidence that they were gay. Even recently, people have been murdered simply for being gay, and it was much worse in Tchaikovsky's day. So one has to surmise based on circumstantial evidence, most of which, in Tchaikovsky's case, points to him being gay. What evidence is there that he was not? Certainly not his marriage. . .
 

bilbo47

New member
Yes, I've come across that same paragraph, and I've looked at the citation, which is a terrible source for Wikipedia; the Encyclopedia of Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender and Queer Culture, with no author or citation of its own. And I've also looked at the Russian version, which states that there's little support for his homosexuality. Where does the idea that Soviets destroyed some of his letters and diaries come from? As far as I know, those letters and diaries have been published in 1936, in a rare edition that is still available. The original diaries and correspondences still exist. You may say that by that time, 1936, there had been enough censure to get rid of any suggestive material, but allegations of his homosexuality are taken from what remains.

And this is what's strange, the Western authors, Holden, Poznansky, are feeding on tip offs and rumors to analyze those personal letters in search of anything that would suggest sexual innuendos. There's very weak support for their accusations from those letter, and none at all of you read them in original language.

I'm looking for anything concrete.
 

bilbo47

New member
Russia THEN is another topic that contradicts the assumption of homosexuality since there was no reason for him to suffer any turmoil; many other prominent figures lived openly as homosexuals.
 

Thomas Dressler

New member
I'll have to leave this to someone who knows more about Tchaikovsky than I. You're correct--I did some searching and found that Russia was extremely tolerant of homosexuality during the 19th century, so my argument is not strong.

Someone else might have some answers. But one has to wonder when looking at the events of his life. . .why?
 

bilbo47

New member
[FONT=&quot]I think that the mystery of the great composers’ lives, their music, and most importantly how it is that their music is shaped by their lives and personal characters in one way or another interests us all. I found certain incongruence with Tchaikovsky, his music, and the relationship that he had with his nephew as it is portrayed by certain biographers. [/FONT]
 

Ouled Nails

New member
[FONT=&quot]I think that the mystery of the great composers’ lives, their music, and most importantly how it is that their music is shaped by their lives and personal characters in one way or another interests us all. I found certain incongruence with Tchaikovsky, his music, and the relationship that he had with his nephew as it is portrayed by certain biographers. [/FONT]

I do not know if this question of sexual orientation is relevant in my mind but I appreciate your curiosity and desire to understand why/how labels of this nature attract so much attention. One observation I wish to express, for the sake of discussion, is that Tchaikovsky's letters (those I have read) mainly reveal a desire to express feelings and emotions to his nephew. In the autumn of his life, based on this little evidence, there is little expression on his part of a need for female companionship. Maybe that's the reason why assumptions of this nature have been attributed the weight of hard evidence.
best regards.
 

rojo

(Ret)
Sorry, I have no clue. Kind of obvious, but have you tried contacting, say, members of any of the societies that bear Tchaikovsky`s name?

Good luck in your quest for truth.
 
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Sybarite

New member
First, it shouldn't matter.

Second, a brief article on the subject from the BBC.

Third, Soviet and post-Soviet society is not exactly good on the issue of sexuality. The current Russian state is quite homophobic, often supporting (certainly at regional level) various ultra-nationalist and religious leaders in their homophobic statements and actions, as has been seen in the last few years in refusals for the Russian LGBT community to hold a Pride march in Moscow and attacks on LGBT activists, which have been ignored by the police etc.

Report from the BBC last year.

Some support from the Russian president may help, but here's some information on the LGBT community in today's Russia.

Against this background, it's hard to imagine the Russian musical/academic establishment openly agreeing that such a national icon was gay.
 

crina

New member
First, it shouldn't matter.

Against this background, it's hard to imagine the Russian musical/academic establishment openly agreeing that such a national icon was gay.

Problem is, nobody can agree on anything without reasonable evidence. And there is none in Tchaikovsky's case, as far as I know.
 

Sybarite

New member
Problem is, nobody can agree on anything without reasonable evidence. And there is none in Tchaikovsky's case, as far as I know.

The article that I linked to from the BBC – which is not prone to writing fantasy on such matters – suggests that there is evidence.

It says that:

BBC said:
He now resigned himself (with some relief) to the life of a discreet homosexual, forming a long-lasting relationship with his servant Alyosha Sofronov, while from time to time he had temporary relationships with men of his own social class, like the violinist Josef Kotek, and while abroad he would sometimes seek the services of male prostitutes.

This suggests known facts.

Later, it notes that:

BBC said:
The exact nature of his profound love for his nephew Bob Davydov, the dedicatee of the Sixth Symphony, may never be known.

In other words, it is quite clear that there is not the same amount of knowledge about that relationship. Which in turn supports the belief that it clearly cites the rest of the information as fact.

It is, however, a very brief article, which doesn't give space for expansion or explanation of sources. But that isn't its job. And the author is hardly an amateur: Dr Marina Frolova Walker is a university lecturer in the faculty of music and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and has taught at the Moscow Conservatoire. Again, I would suggest that isn't playing fantasy games.

Since she suggests that Alexander Poznansky's Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man is a work of "serious scholarship", perhaps you might to check that out if you're interested.

But, as I said in my initial post: does it matter? And if so, why?
 

Miz_ai

New member
^^;; i actually care-less about his sexuality, i love his music very very very very much!
his pieces sounds like magic for me, morelike fantasies!!

i think i kinda think he's somewhat homosexual from what i've read so far about him..
also the fact that most of his pieces somewhat feminine..
 

Sybarite

New member
^^;; i actually care-less about his sexuality, i love his music very very very very much!
his pieces sounds like magic for me, morelike fantasies!!

i think i kinda think he's somewhat homosexual from what i've read so far about him..
also the fact that most of his pieces somewhat feminine..

All of which raises some interesting questions.

For instance, if Tchaikovsky's music is "feminine", and that is indicative of his sexuality, then what does that say about, for instance, Mozart, whose music could hardly be called macho? Is Benjamin Britten's music particularly "feminine"?

Indeed, once we get into such realms, we start having to define 'masculine' music. Would that be the same as 'heterosexual' music? And what would bisexual music (or any other art) be like?

Personally, I don't think that the sexuality of an composer/artist/writer is the most important aspect of their work. If you're particularly interested in an artist, then understanding something of their life can be of help to understanding their creative output better (the author Thomas Mann is a perfect example, to my mind), but it isn't crucial. :)
 

janny108

New member
Don't you feel that people sometimes out of appreciation, want to feel like they know something about the person? I heard Tchaik 4th symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas was conducting San Francisco symphony. I never saw him conduct before, but I enjoyed the video. (got it from Netflix).He did a commentary on the symphony and it was interesting. Now MTT is decidely gay, and he comments that part of the 4th is due to Tchaik I guess finding out he was gay? I don't know. I think he appreciated women too though if you read Tchaikovsky's bio though.
Jan
 

Andrew Roussak

New member
Hi Bilbo47,

I can't judge about your reasons to find out whether Tschaikowsky was a gay or not - but as I myself was born in Russia, I can tell you it is just a commonplace between the musicians there. I have never met anybody who would say Tschaikowsky was not a gay, though it might be a little bit difficult to prove this fact in any court. But everybody knows it - as well as nobody raises the like question concerning Bach or Chopin.

But - should it really matter???

As for me, I DON'T LIKE TSCHAIKOWSKY and, say,David Bowie. I like ( and very much ) Elton John and Freddie Mercury. If the music is good - then the sexual orientation of the composer is not that important, isn't it?

Am I wrong??

All the best
Andrew
 

janny108

New member
I think people like to know who they are admiring and NO being gay does not have a bearing on their talents.
Jan
 

zlya

New member
I can think of one reason why Tchaikovsky's sexual-orientation might matter. Feel free to disagree.

Say we want to study Tchaikovsky's music as a product of his life and his personal experience. In that case, if the rumors are true and he was trying to hide or suppress homosexual feelings or practices for whatever social or political reason, that would be a major contributor to his emotional state. So if we want to determine whether a composer's emotional state and personal life affect his compositions, we might want to know whether or not he was gay.

On the other hand, I once read an article which maintained that Tchaikovsky's use of the feminine subdominant and discordant tri-tone rather than the manly dominant clearly proves his sexual deviation. There is only one word for THAT sort of analysis, and I am far too polite to mention it in mixed company.
 

giovannimusica

Commodore de Cavaille-Coll
I find it strange that the issue of Tchaikovsky's supposed homosexuality has never been independently confirmed and submitted in scientific and peer-reviewed academic journals. It's just been taken for granted that he was *homo* - sort of a validation a certain group seeks in order to browbeat everyone else who disagrees with them.

My $0.03 cents worth,

Giovanni
 

Ouled Nails

New member
David Brown, Tchaikovsky: the Man and his Music, Pegasus Books, 512 pages.

This recent biography, drawn from an article in today's Moscow Times, was almost certainly peer reviewed:

For the Record
A new biography of Tchaikovsky ranks the popular composer among the giants of 19th-century music.
By George Loomis
Published: April 20, 2007
Music lovers of a certain age conditioned to think of Pyotr Tchaikovsky as a second-rate composer may have stories of their own personal epiphanies, when the splendor of the music trounced such assertions as Paul Henry Lang's "Tchaikovsky does not belong to the company of the great of music" (1941) or Gerald Abraham's "Beginning with the Fourth Symphony and 'Eugene Onegin,' Tchaikovsky's music now reflects all the indulgent yearning and the garish exteriorization of a composer who can never refrain from wearing his heart on his sleeve" (1945). My awakening came in the early 1970s when I was asked to write program notes for his Fifth Symphony (a work with which I had no prior experience) and was blown away by the melodic inspiration, craftsmanship and drama of the piece.

What happened in recent decades to cause a 180-degree shift in the critical estimation of Tchaikovsky? How could mid-century critics have gotten it so wrong? One person in a position to answer is the British musicologist David Brown, formerly professor at the University of Southampton and author of a previous four-volume biography of the composer, which, as he reminds us in this new one-volume book, is "the largest life-and-works of a Russian composer ever written anywhere -- including Russia itself." Yet his new book does not answer such questions. Instead of addressing concepts or polemics, it is pitched to the lay listener, for whom trends in criticism are peripheral matters at best. Tchaikovsky, in fact, was always popular with the general public, and Brown seeks to ensure that he will remain so.

Brown keeps technical jargon to a minimum in musical discussions, which are laced through an account of Tchaikovsky's life. As a sign of user-friendliness, he sets forth his list of the composer's "top dozen" works. (In fact, there are 17, because some entries have alternates, e.g., "'Eugene Onegin' or 'The Queen of Spades.'") All works discussed are subjected to a ranking system -- one to five stars (few win under three stars.) Printed musical examples apparently being deemed the province of scholarly endeavors, there are none, although they could jar one's memory of familiar theme -- didn't any of Brown's hypothetical readers play an instrument or sing in a church choir? Footnotes are also dispensed with, though there is a comprehensive index.

Brown makes no effort to respond to critics of his magnum opus (the four-volume biography), such as the American musicologist Richard Taruskin, nor does he even acknowledge them. His musical discussions -- descriptive guides for listening, really -- are unfailingly evenhanded. A work's shortcomings are duly noted, but Brown balances them with something positive. Readers of the new book will be astonished to learn of Taruskin's assertion that Brown's earlier work had an "agenda" to document Tchaikovsky's "secondary, subcanonical status." (It is typical of Taruskin's efforts, at times unfair, to link Brown with earlier, benighted critical views of Tchaikovsky.) Yet the new book is unambiguous in proclaiming Tchaikovsky's greatness, and Brown would have the reader believe that his veneration of the composer is nothing new. "Never had I realized [before undertaking the four-volume biography] how fascinating, how complex a man Tchaikovsky was -- even more, how great and varied a composer, and just how much of his vast output I simply had not known. Tchaikovsky was, I discovered, one of the true giants of nineteenth-century music."

On one point Brown seems to have come around to the Taruskin view, and that concerns measuring a work's quality by the extent of its "Russianness." "The best of Tchaikovsky's work is more distinctly Russian than that of most of his compatriots; it is not German music in disguise," trumpets the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition. Implicit here is the idea that composers from countries outside the European mainstream had to write music with a character of its own because they were somehow unfit to contribute meaningfully to the European mainstream tradition. Earlier, Brown had called "Eugene Onegin" "not only perhaps Tchaikovsky's masterpiece, but also the most deeply Russian of all his works"; now the "masterpiece" label requires no further gloss. Brown does observe that the Austro-German symphonic tradition is "characterized by 'thoughtful' practices," whereas Slavic composers "created much more impulsively." But at least he backs up his point with an observation by Modest Mussorgsky: "A German, when he thinks, first analyzes, then creates. A Russian first creates, then amuses himself with analysis."

Tchaikovsky's favorite composer was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a point many writers have found inconsistent with Tchaikovsky's status as an arch-Romantic. Yet both composers were closely linked to royal courts -- an 1884 production of "Eugene Onegin" mounted in St. Petersburg at Tsar Alexander III's request made Tchaikovsky a celebrity. And the two composers shared a common aesthetic by writing music intended to give pleasure to the listener, a goal that Richard Wagner, in Tchaikovsky's view, did not always set for himself. Tchaikovsky paid homage to Mozart in several works, including the extended pastoral divertissement, in 18th-century style, in his opera "The Queen of Spades." In his earlier work, Brown called the pastoral "too otiose." A more mellow Brown now questions "whether it was wise to interpolate into this otherwise taut opera such a protracted interlude of very charming, but also very slight music." I have always found the pastoral a bold and highly unusual way of evoking an operatic setting, here 18th-century St. Petersburg.
In recounting Tchaikovsky's life, Brown has engagingly and thoughtfully distilled his earlier work. Tchaikovsky led a charmed life in many respects. He was among the first graduates of Russia's new conservatories in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and thus had the advantage of a professional education, something Mussorgsky and other members of the "Russian Five" group of composers lacked. Later, he taught at the Moscow Conservatory instead of having to take a civil-service day job. And even his conservatory position became unnecessary thanks to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, who supported him from 1877 to 1890. In his later years he was acknowledged (by the young Anton Chekhov, among others) to rank second only to Leo Tolstoy as a Russian creative artist. As a personality, he emerges as perhaps a bit highly strung, but caring and compassionate in relationships with his extended family, professional colleagues and friends.

He was also homosexual. Typically, Brown sets forth the facts, including those pertaining to the occasional one-night stand, and leaves it to the reader to make of them what he or she will. Homosexuality, of course, was at the root of Tchaikovsky's disastrous marriage and, arguably, of the circumstances of his death at age 53 in 1893. Tchaikovsky married Antonina Milyukova to scotch "rumors," thinking that the two could live "like brother and sister," as he explained to her. But he found that he could not tolerate her presence, and the resulting turmoil affected his work, although his treatment of her remained honorable and generous.

Brown's article on Tchaikovsky for the 1980 edition of "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians" helped legitimize a theory about Tchaikovsky's death -- long attributed to cholera -- propounded by an expatriate Soviet musicologist. It holds that an "honor court" made up of alumni of the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, Tchaikovsky's alma mater, was convened after evidence came to someone's attention that Tchaikovsky seduced an aristocrat's nephew; the court ordered that he take his own life and he complied. I personally find the theory, which sparked a vigorous debate, hard to credit, both because it conflicts with other evidence and because it attributes to Tchaikovsky behavior that simply doesn't seem plausible. If Brown had second thoughts about his Grove article, he doesn't say so, but his position appears to have softened. About the cause of Tchaikovsky's death he now writes, "I doubt we shall ever know."

George Loomis writes about classical music from Moscow and New York.
 

giovannimusica

Commodore de Cavaille-Coll
Hi Ouled Nails,

That was an interesting outlay you shared but I hardly consider it to be a scientific fact. Even at the end of the outlay *about the cause of Tchaikovsky's death*......."I doubt if we shall ever know." I perceive the same to apply as to Tchaikovsky's life. Yes, his unhappy marriage to Ms. Milyukova does not speak well of his heterosexualness but we should keep in mind that many couples will wind up with failed marriages.

That, of course, is not a reason not to get married. There was also gossip about Tchaikovsky having been involved in a scandal with a member of Romanov family and in order for the member of the Romanov family to rectify the situation, he/she fabricated something that was untrue. Again, what that was we will never know. Therefore, I find it folly and fallacious the constant uncritical *manufacturing* of *evidence* that Tchaikovsky was a *homo*.

I will entertain, although not lightly, that Tchaikovsky *might* have had *homophile* desires, which is quite different from homoeroticism. Most men will struggle at one point in their lives with *homophile* desires. That is the human condition we find ourselves in. The same goes for women also. We can choose to live out/indulge in our fantasies about same-sex relations or we can choose not to. I will submit the following scientific paper written by a qualified physician about the same-sex phenomenon:

http://www.narth.com/docs/TheTrojanCouchSatinover.pdf


Regards!

Giovanni
 
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