29. Man or Myth? The Retrieval of the True Chaikovsky

Abstract

A look at any CD catalogue or at the yearly plan of any symphony orchestra around the world will confirm the secure place of Chaikovsky’s music in the repertoire. Conductors, instrumentalists, and singers, from his day to ours, have loved to perform his music. But the enthusiasm of the public and the performers has not yet been matched by a corresponding appreciation or even acceptance by his biographers, music critics, and other commentators. In what used to be the Soviet Union, compulsory nationalistic idolatry of Chaikovsky went hand in hand with a ban on all information about his personal life or his conservative political views. In the West, interest and enthusiasm have always been accompanied by critical incomprehension and hostility. A comment by the venerable Eduard Hanslick at the time of the 1881 Vienna world premiere of Chaikovsky’s Violin Concerto to the effect that this was music one “could hear emit a stench” is attributable to Western prejudice against Eastern Europe; people then could not quite believe that a Russian could produce a world-class masterpiece. But the contemptuous dismissal of Chaikovsky’s music by such heavyweights of twentiethcentury musicology and criticism as Donald Francis Tovey, Paul Henry Lang and Edward Lockspeiser was due, as Richard Taruskin pointed out in a recent article, not to the quality of the music itself but to the critics’ perception of the composer and his character.2