Tchaikovsky: The Crisis Years, 1874-1878

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Brown's monumental study--so exhaustive that it is regarded even in Russia as definitive--reaches its conclusion with this fourth volume. Here we see the composer beginning to conduct his own works and consolidating his international reputation with triumphant tours throughout Western Europe and the United States. Major pieces from this final period include the fifth and sixth symphonies, the Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty ballets and the opera The Queen of Spades. With his administrative and teaching duties, his frequent travels, his voluminous correspondence and his daily work schedule, Tchaikovsky's life was hectic, and Brown relates it almost moment by moment. There is also a great deal of technical musical discussion and material (complete synopses of operas and ballets, for example) that will seem superfluous to any but professional musicians. But Brown's scholarship and objectivity remain winning, and his account of the composer's mysterious death, with the various theories about it, is careful and convincing. Strangest is the story that Tchaikovsky had agreed to kill himself when faced by a group of old school friends with the threat of reporting a homoerotic dalliance to the Czar--which would have meant banishment to Siberia. The mass spectacle of his funeral brings a remarkable work to a touching close. Photos. (Apr.)