彼得·伊里奇·柴科夫斯基

Tchaikovsky left school in 1858 and received employment as an under-secretary in the Ministry of Justice, where he soon joined the Ministry's choral group. In 1861, he befriended a fellow civil servant who had studied with Nikolai Zaremba, who urged him to resign his position and pursue his studies further. Not ready to give up employment, Tchaikovsky agreed to begin lessons in musical theory with Zaremba.

The following year, when Zaremba joined the faculty of the new St Petersburg Conservatory, Tchaikovsky followed his teacher and enrolled, but still did not give up his post at the ministry, until his father consented to support him. From 1862 to 1865, Tchaikovsky studied harmony, counterpoint and the fugue with Zaremba, and instrumentation and composition under the director and founder of the Conservatory, Anton Rubinstein, who was both impressed by and envious of Tchaikovsky's talent.

Tchaikovsky in 1874

Tchaikovsky'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.^[1] Although some historians continue to view him as heterosexual, many others — such as Rictor 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.

During his education at the School of Jurisprudence, he was infatuated with French soprano Désirée Artôt, but she married another man. One of his conservatory students, Antonina Miliukova, began writing him passionate letters around the time that he had made up his mind to "marry whoever will have me." He did not even remember her from his classes, but her letters were very persistent. Ironically, the composer had been studying Pushkin's poem Eugene Onegin and was considering making it into an opera. A crucial scene is when the heroine, Tatiana, receives a letter from Onegin, rebuffing her romantic advances. Now truth seemed to imitate fiction. Was he to play Onegin to this Tatiana? Would he, like Onegin, live a lifetime of regret if he followed a similar course?

Tchaikovsky could have tactfully attempted to dissuade Antonina. Instead, he replied that he could offer only gratitude and sympathy in reply to her love. He retained enough sense to have discreet inquiries made about Antonina from a friend. That friend returned with a highly unfavorable account of her. Even with this information in hand, Tchaikovsky allowed his feeling for drama and Fate to outweigh his common sense, and he hastily married her on July 18, 1877.

Within days, while still on their honeymoon, Tchaikovsky deeply regretted his decision. By the time the couple returned to Moscow on July 26, he was a state of near-collapse. The strain in his appearance became obvious to his friends as the days passed, but they may not have truly realized how far Tchaikovsky was sliding into disaster. Two weeks after the wedding the composer supposedly attempted suicide by wading waist-high into the freezing Moscow River. He stood there until he could bear the cold no longer, certain he would contract a fatal case of pneumonia. His robust physical constitution defeated that plan, and his mental state grew even worse. Tchaikovsky fled to St Petersburg, his mind verging on a nervous breakdown.

Tchaikovsky's brother Anatoly met him at the railroad station when he arrived, but did not initially recognize his brother's changed face. Anatoly rushed him to a hotel where, after a violent outburst, Tchaikovsky lapsed into a two-day coma. Anatoly never told the specifics of what happened during that time. However, he must have explained at least some, if not all, of the truth to the mental specialist who was the only other person apart from his brothers and father to see the composer. The specialist prescribed a complete life change. He recommended Tchaikovsky make no attempt to renew his marriage, nor try to see his wife again. The composer never returned to his wife but did send her a regular allowance through the years. They remained legally married until his death.

Tchaikovsky lived for years in the fear that Antonina would reveal publically the true reason for their separation. Anatoly tried talking her into accepting a divorce. She would not, however, consent to the necessary fiction, needed for grounds of divorce, that Tchaikovsky had committed adultery. Tchaikovsky's publisher, Pyotr I. Jürgenson, tried his best to intercede in the matter on the composer's behalf. Eventually in the summer of 1880 Jürgenson discovered that Antonina had taken a lover the previous winter and had a child by him. She continued to have children at regular intervals and to deposit them all in a foundlings' home. By 1896 she was herself in a home, certified insane. She died in 1917.

Tchaikovsky himself never laid any blame upon Antonina. He considered his falling in with her, at a time when he had grown to be married for the sake of being married, as something to simply attribute to Fate. Regardless of whether a more tactful and intelligent woman could have come to terms with his homosexuality and provided him with the affection and care for which he longed both to receive and to give, Tchaikovsky never lost his personal ideal of marriage. When Anatoly became engaged, the composer wrote him a warm letter of congratulations. There he confessed, "Sometimes I am overcome with an insane craving for the cares of a woman's touch. Sometimes I see a sympathetic woman in whose lap I could lay my head, whose hands I would gladly kiss...." Biographer John Warrack maintains that the terms of this letter reveal Tchaikovsky was actually far from the realization of a true relationship with a wife, and that what Tchaikovsky describes may be a vision of his lost mother^[2].

A far more influential woman in Tchaikovsky's life was a wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meck, with whom he exchanged over 1,200 letters between 1877 and 1890. At her insistence they never met; they did encounter each other on two occasions, purely by chance, but did not converse. As well as financial support in the amount of 6,000 rubles a year, she expressed interest in his musical career and admiration for his music. However, after 13 years she ended the relationship unexpectedly, claiming bankruptcy.

Meck's claim of financial ruin is disregarded by some who believe that she ended her patronage of Tchaikovsky because she supposedly discovered the composer's homosexuality. However, von Meck's second daughter Alexandra -- who had literally shocked her father to death by revealing to him that her sibling Milochka was actually not his child -- told her mother about Tchaikovsky's homosexuality at the outset of her relationship with him. Her news may not have come as much of a surprise to von Mech. She was not only highly intelligent but also extremely diligent in discovering all she could about her composer. If anything (at least according to von Meck family tradition), that knowledge might have reassured her that there could be no other woman in Tchaikovsky's emotional life.

Tchaikovsky reportedly never recovered from the shock of von Meck's abrupt rejection nor discovered what had actually caused the break. What he did not know, and has not been known widely outside the von Meck family, was that both Tchaikovsky and von Meck were victims of a series of misunderstandings. Von Meck was under more financial pressure than she was ready to admit. She was being blackmailed by her son-in-law Shirinsky over the illegitimacy of his wife Milochka. Her son Vladimir had become financially extravagant and demanded more of his mother's attention. Von Meck herself was increasingly ill. She suffered from tuberculosis, which by this time had reached her larynx. Within three months of Tchaikovsky's passing, she would die in a choking fit.

Another complication was that von Meck had developed an atrophy of the arm. This made the physical act of writing difficult. Continuing her relationship with Tchaikovsky as they both had, with all its extravagantly expressed terms, would have been extraordinarily awkward if she dictated her letters to a servant or relative. Tchaikovsky's biographer John Warrack maintains that von Meck knew her relationship with Tchaikovsky had to be altered, but she never intended to break it off totally. At von Meck's request, Vladimir Pakhulsky urged Tchaikovsky to write, assuring that von Meck's feelings had not really changed. Tchaikovsky, however, felt at a loss and was perhaps unwilling to make further attempts to maintain contact that might be met with more of what seemed to him silent rebuffs.

By the time his relationship with von Meck had ended, Tchaikovsky no longer really needed the annual allowance she had provided. Tchaikovsky had already achieved success throughout Europe and by 1891, even greater accolades in the United States. In fact, he was the conductor, on May 5th, 1891, at the official opening night of Carnegie Hall. With fame came financial independence, so money was not hardly as much of a concern as it had been at the beginning of his correspondence with von Meck.

As Warrack phrased it, "Her faith in him as an artist worthy of support was more important to him than the actual money ... It was, indeed, the fact that her interest in him seemed to go with the money she gave him that upset him most deeply, the more enduringly when he found that neither his willingness to start repaying the subsidy nor simply to continue the friendship apparently affected her decision. He could not even let her know how distressed and hurt he was, for even now he did not wish to hurt in return someone who had done so much for him, and who had once represented an ideal relationship to him^[3]."

One person who may have welcomed the break was Tchaikovsky's brother Modest. Like his brother, Modest was also homosexual, although he too married. When the two brothers discussed the break, Modest did not try to explain her behavior. He told the composer that, in his view, what had been to Tchaikovsky the unique and mutual relationship of two friends had been for von Meck the passing fancy of a wealthy woman.

This judgment on Modest's part might be accepted with a certain degree of doubt. For all his adulation for his brother, Modest's feelings were actually deeply ambivalent. Modest may have been intensely jealous of his brother's creative success and equally insecure about this secret friend being his closest rival for his brother's attention and affections. Just as Tchaikovsky's break with his wife Antonina might have brought joy to Nadezhda von Meck, so now the break with von Meck nay have brought joy to Modest.

Modest, who also became the composer's biographer, maintained that Tchaikovsky's bitterness at what he considered von Meck's betrayal remained unassuaged, and that on his deathbed, the composer constantly repeated von Meck's name, reproaching her. However, a very different story persisted within the von Meck family. Galina von Meck -- the daughter of von Meck's son Nikolay and Tchaikovsky's niece Anna Lvovna Davidova -- maintained that the rift was secretly healed. In September 1893, only weeks before his death, Tchaikovsky had approached Galina's mother, Anna. Anna was about to leave for Nice to help nurse her dying mother-in-law. Tchaikovsky asked her to beg his former friend for forgiveness for his own silence. This apology was reportedly accepted wholeheartedly by von Meck and reciprocated.

Another biographer, David Brown, maintains that Galina’s account “contains much hearsay and a good deal that is romantically heightened.” He concedes some plausibility in her account of this reconciliation, however, especially since Galina received the story directly from the intermediary, her mother^[4].

When Brown interviewed Galina shortly before her death in 1985, she confirmed her grandmother had an "atrophied" arm which made writing nearly impossible in her last years. He also asked her about Modest's fundamental feeling toward his brother. Galina, who had known Modest well during the first 25 years of her life, answered in one word: "Jealousy^[5]."