Volume 40, Number 19 · November 18, 1993
Love in a Cold Climate
By Robert Craft
'To My Best Friend': Correspondence between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck (1876–1878)
translated by Galina von Meck, edited by Edward Garden, by Nigel Gotteri, Introduction by Edward Garden
Oxford University Press, 439 pp., $49.95
Tchaikovsky: The Final Years (1885–1893)
by David Brown
Norton, 527 pp., $40.00
When the correspondence between Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck began, in December 1876, the bachelor of thirty-six was the most promising of Russian composers and the most highly regarded abroad; four months earlier, at Bayreuth for the first Ring of the Nibelung, he had been warmly—he thought obsequiously—received by Liszt. Shortly after returning from Germany, morbidly fearful of public exposure of his homosexuality, he wrote to his homosexual brother Modest: 'I should like to marry or enter into an open liaison with some woman so as to shut the mouths of assorted contemptible gossipers.' The woman of his dreams, or nightmares, should not expect the consummation of conjugal rights.
Review, 5424 words
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