In Love with Peter
Ilyich Tchaikovsky
I have a terrible
confession to make. For years and years I have been hopelessly in love
with Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. I cannot even remember when it started,
way before I knew anything about him—perhaps it was the first time my
mother took me to the ballet in Savannah, Georgia, when American Ballet
Theatre would hit town on one its yearly pilgrimages through the South,
or the remains of the Ballets Russe would make a similar stop. The
program was almost always the same—in fact, in a recent, wonderful talk
the filmmaker Wakefield Poole did at the Donnell Library in New York,
he explained it. Before he became a “pornographer” as he proudly calls
himself, making the groundbreaking Boys
in the Sand, with Casey Donovan, he was a young ballet dancer,
touring with the always-touring Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo. “We
always did the same ballets, to save scenery and costumes. There was
‘Graduation Ball,’ ‘Gaite’ [for ‘Gaite Parisian’] and the third act of Swan Lake.”
He went on to explain:
“The third act of Swan
Lake made me know I was a dancer. All I did was stand there and
move my arms a bit, but just seeing all those dancers in white with the
blue light around them made me know that I was doing something very
special and wonderful.”
Well, that did it for me, too. Just being this child
in the audience (I think I was maybe eight or nine), and seeing this
absolute magic floating on the stage—I was hit. I was smeared. I was .
. . I was absolutely intoxicated with ballet and Tchaikovsky. I wanted
to live inside it, and him.
That feeling continued in my life, decade after decade, and I still
have it. I cry my eyes out at the last act of Swan Lake—it has nothing to do with
the story, but the fact that he is watching it, too. I’m sure of it.
This handsome Russian man with all of his imaginative power, delight
and wit is watching every single performance of it. I'm sure of it. I
felt that way before I knew anything about him, when he was only some
strange name most people can not spell, and his life seemed so remote
as to be untouchable.
There are, I am sure, two Tchaikovkys: one is the
popular composer who wrote all those engaging, marvelous ditties from The Nutcracker Suite and Sleeping Beauty, and lots of other
music that seems almost destined to be lampooned, ridiculed, by a lot
of highbrow critics, and even labeled as throw-away. But the really
smart people will have nothing to do with that. The genius
choreographer George Ballanchine said that Peter Ilyich was the world’s
greatest composer for ballet, and if anyone knows, Ballanchine should. Yes, the
smart people know that even under some of the sillier things he wrote,
there was this brooding intensity; but under the other things—Tatiana’s
fantastic letter scene from the opera Eugene
Onegin, for instance; the Little
Russian Symphony, among so many others—an emotional storm is
unleashed and working. You are completely inside him and beside
yourself. He has found the perfect expression of everything he could
not express.
Then there are other things, like the wistful
waltzes in Swan Lake, that
seem so simple as to be simple-minded, but which truly haunt you. You
realize inside them is the sadness of men who can never have what they
want. And that was Tchaikovsky’s own sadness. He was gay—to use one of
our many names for this—at a time when being that way was hell. It was knowing you were what
was unnamable; it was knowing you were never going to be able to go,
freely, inside that deep romantic heart of yourself and bring back the
gold of your own feelings and lay it openly, kindly, at the feet of
another man.
This was peculiar, too, in the fact that Tchaikovsky
was so Russian and so loathed by so many of Russia’s other composers,
because they felt that his never descreet enough homosexuality in their
closed but gossipy society was an insult to a country trying hard to
re-identify itself only a few decades before the Revolution exploded
it. For two hundred years, Russia’s upper class had been under the
dominance of French and English culture. It was impossible to be among
the elite and not speak and write fluent French and adequate
English—then Victorianism, from both sides of the English Channel, was
considered the arbiter of the high taste. There were still the wild,
hyper-religious masses of Mother Russia, but the enlightened upper
classes rejected them as boorish for French or English refinement.
Countering this was an attempt at a "real" Russian
music and culture based on folk tales and songs, coming from Nikolai
Rimski-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, and Modest Mussorgsky. They wanted
a hairy-chested, back-to-the-people, two-fisted Russianism, and Peter
Ilyich’s very existence represented a spit in the face to that. He was
too “light”; a pansy with
gossip swirling around him. He was drawn to younger men—sometimes
servants, sometimes men of his own class—and as much as he tried,
through a disasterous false marriage, to hide it, this attraction
dogged him.
In 1891 he sailed to New York to open Carnegie Hall.
He was one of the world’s most famous composers, and I keep wondering,
would he have been happier in New York, if that could have been
possible? New York was known to be a more open city than most of
Europe. It had a fairly accessible underground gay culture. But it was
impossible for him to stay. He came back to Petersburg, and died there,
in 1893, of cholera—and the question has always been, did he willingly
drink a glass of water that was contaminated with it? Did Peter Ilyich
kill himself in this almost untraceable way, or was he forced to kill
himself, as the only way to keep gossip about him (and possible
blackmail) from emerging, in the way that it broke out and destroyed
Oscar Wilde?
This question has been asked over and over again;
Ken Russell in his way- over-the-top Tchaikovsky movie starring an
unbearably handsome young Richard Chamberlain, The Music Lovers, gives us the idea
that he was forced to do it. This was so, even though his brother
Modest, who was also his manager, was known to be "queer as the
proverbial goose," but able to stay in the background.
What brought me back to Tchaikovsky was reading the
Rev. Mel White talking about his own “engagement” with of all people
the loathsome Jerry Falwell, who I’m sure would have forced poor Peter
Ilyich to drink that water at the drop of . . . anyway, it was so
terrible reading Mel White talk about himself in these words:
“After I put myself through exorcism, electric-shock
therapy, then slitting my wrists, and going to the hospital, my wife
finally said, ‘You know, you really have a life of your own. I like gay
people, but I just didn't want you to be one.’ Eventually I met and
fell in love with Gary Nixon, and as soon as I realized that my sexuality
was a gift from God and got over my fear and guilt, I wrote Stranger at the Gate, in which I
told the leaders of the religions right that they are doing terrible
damage and they must stop.”
Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky
Unfortunately, Peter Ilyich did not get that chance.
But every time I go to the ballet and see Swan Lake or Ballanchine’s Serenade, or at Christmas, when I
hear the Nutcracker, I think
of him, and imagine this handsome man sitting next to me, reaching for
my hand.
Home
News
Book Buys
Something
for Peter Ilyich
