More Rosebud - Tchaikovsky

This week we're delighted to be bringing you another ground-breaking conversation between Gyles and one of the world's great composers: on this occasion, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In this episode, Gyles will find out about Tchaikovsky's first memory, the fragile and sensitive nature which gave him the nickname "child of glass", his early love of music, and his struggles to come to terms with his homosexuality. We find out about Tchaikovsky's musical education, his worldwide fame, and his tragic demise. In this conversation, Tchaikovsky is brought to life by the writer and performer, Tama Matheson. What you are going to hear is a classic Rosebud interview, answered by Tama as if he were Tchaikovsky himself. Tama is a brilliiant writer/performer who has written and conceived a series of shows based on the lives of great artists - composers and poets - in which he brings these geniuses to life through performance, music, and meticulous research. Tama's show about the life of Tchaikovsky, Child of Glass, is at Opera Holland Park in London on the 13, 14 and 15 August. Tickets are available here https://operahollandpark.com/productions/tchaikovsky-child-of-glass/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:52Speaker 01

  Welcome to Rosebud. In fact, welcome to more Rosebud. That's what we call Rosebud on a Tuesday because there's, well, actually, there's less of me because there's more of somebody else. And that somebody else is my friend and producer, Harriet Jane. Good to be with you again, Harriet.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  We are gearing up for all sorts of excitements in our lives because we are going to Edinburgh, Harriet and I, because we're going to be on the fringe, doing a show every day. It's got some music in it. But I wanted to ask you, Harriet, because today we're going to be talking to a composer. Do you, when it comes to classical music, do you have time for classical music in your life?

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I went to a concert yesterday that my daughter was playing in.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  And what was the music in that?

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Oh, there were loads of different things. There was some Beethoven, there was some Massenet, that was lovely at the end. There was some jazz, yeah. It was like a school concert, lots of different bits.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  What instrument does she play?

• 1:51Speaker 02

  The violin.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  And was she good?

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Very good, yeah.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Can you, I mean, was it an orchestra or was she doing a solo?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, she was in an orchestra, yeah.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Could you discern her? Could you hear her?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  You're very good, well done. Massenet, I love the name. Beethoven, of course, we had on this show, on Rosebud last year. And we had, we were able to have Beethoven on this show because about three years ago, I went to the old sorting office in Barnes in southwest London. It's a community arts center. And I saw a young Australian called Tama Matheson give a show, create a show about Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach. And I was blown away by it. Just one man, and I think he had two other people on stage with him. And he told the story amazingly. And I met him afterwards, and I thought, well, this guy's a bit of a genius. He's a polymath, he's remarkable.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  And then I introduced him to you. And we, together, I think, went to see him do a show about Beethoven. And we had the idea that maybe we could have him come onto Rosebud as Beethoven. And we did about a year ago, and it worked. And he then told us he was coming back. He did that show at the Holland Park Opera in London. And it was a huge success, and I know a lot of Rosebud listeners went to see it. And then he told us, oh, well, this August, when you're in Edinburgh, I'm in London at Opera Holland Park again. And this time I'm doing a show about Tchaikovsky.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  I'll give you more details at the end, but essentially, it's on 13th, 14th, 15th August, 7:30 PM, Opera Holland Park. Tickets at all prices. It is fantastic. So, Tama Matheson as Tchaikovsky. But forget that. For now, just sit back and go with the flow, and you will be listening to Tchaikovsky. I do guarantee that within five, 10 minutes, you'll be totally caught up with the story, and I think you'll stay to the end. Cue the music, it's not Tchaikovsky, but still quite good.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Well, this week I promised you a different kind of Rosebud. And it is a different kind of Rosebud because my guest is one of the most famous names in the history of music. My guest is going to be Tchaikovsky, the composer Tchaikovsky. Now, we've played this game before on Rosebud, only a couple of times, but it's worked before. We were very lucky, was it last Christmas or the Christmas before last? We had as a guest Gerald Dickens, who is a direct descendant of Charles Dickens. And he does a show in which he plays the part of his forebear. And I'd seen the show, and it was brilliant. And I invited him to come onto Rosebud and be Charles Dickens for an hour.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  And people were totally gripped. But before that, we'd had a young Australian actor called Tama Matheson as a guest, who I'd seen on stage, giving a show, I think it was about Lord Byron. And then I saw him doing a show about Beethoven. And I then met him, and I thought, this is an extraordinary polymath. It's sort of, I don't know, Stephen Fry crossed with Valentino because he had Stephen's breadth of interest and Valentino's profile physique. The point is, Tama came and gave us a conversation when he played the role of Beethoven. And people thought, an Australian actor, young man being Beethoven.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  But they gave him the benefit of the doubt, and they listened for an hour, and they were completely mesmerized. And I saw that Tama was doing a show about Tchaikovsky. And I thought, well, maybe he knows Tchaikovsky as well as he knew Beethoven. Anyway, before we start my conversation with Tchaikovsky, here is Tama. How are you?

• 5:52Speaker 03

  I'm very well, thank you very much.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  How has your year been? What have you been doing since we were last together?

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Well, we've been, well, since we were last together, I've done various shows. More of these shows about, you know, great figures of the past, including Byron again and Bach. And this year has been, to be, to a great extent, getting ready for this particular show that's coming up. It's a very, very big show. It's at Opera Holland Park.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Opera Holland Park in London?

• 6:16Speaker 03

  In London. It's on the 13th to the 15th of August. And it's a great big spectacle of the life of Piotr Ilić Tchaikovsky, which is a really extraordinary life.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  As we can discover, because he's agreed to be on the show today.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Yes, he has, extraordinarily. And it's rather unusual in that it's a play knitted together with a concert of his music. So at these salient sort of emotional moments, the music comes swelling out and takes over, which is very, very moving and powerful.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  This is what you like to do with these shows of yours? You combine music and storytelling?

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Well, I think you can't have a real picture of a composer's life if you don't see how the music adheres in it somehow. And that, at the right moment, contextualizing the music makes it mean more. And you understand more the power of what is inside that music. And I think if people want to approach classical music, you have to show them how much is buried within it and how much can be sucked out of it, because it is so dense and powerful.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Well, we are now going to discover the life experiences of Tchaikovsky.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Who is hugely famous, hugely popular.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Hugely famous and popular. I think, I think perhaps he has the most famous tunes of any composer in the world, barring perhaps Bach. So his violin concert, his piano concert, the Nutcracker Suite, the Sugarplum Fairy, the 1812 Overture, Sleeping Beauty, which of course we all know from Walt Disney, Swan Lake. I mean, there is an endless fund of glorious melody, and everybody knows them. Everyone seems to know Tchaikovsky. They may not know exactly who wrote that, but they'll know the music. And it goes right to the center of people's souls. Because Tchaikovsky, more than anyone, I think, poured his heart's blood onto the page. So when you hear his music, you are hearing, hearing his passion poured onto the page.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  I can't wait to meet him. And if you're listening to this, stay with us because I think you will enjoy meeting him too. Because Tama has soaked himself in the story of Tchaikovsky to create his show. And he is going to now answer my questions in the guise of Tchaikovsky. He's not going to change his voice, he's not changing his appearance, but he is actually inside Tchaikovsky. And we're going to bring Tchaikovsky out for you today. So may I say, welcome to Rosebud, Piotr Ilić Tchaikovsky.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  The Piotr is just Peter?

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  In Russian?

• 8:57Speaker 03

  In Russian, yes.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  And the Ilić is a family name?

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Yes, it's an old family name, exactly.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  And Tchaikovsky?

• 9:04Speaker 03

  It actually comes from my great-grandfather, who apparently had an ability to imitate a seagull, which is called a chika. And then this S-K-Y, the ski, was added because of his services. It's an honorific, it's an ad as a services as a medic in one of the wars that had convulsed Russia at that time, I forget which.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  So the family name comes from the grandfather's ability to do impressions of a seagull?

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Peculiar, but that apparently is where it came from.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  And because he was a distinguished warrior, he was got the honorary ski at the end.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  An honorific seagull.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Oh, that's fantastic. All right, well, do I call you Piotr? Would his, would his friends, and at the time, I imagine, if he'd been interviewed by a newspaper, because he was before the era of radio or television?

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Would he, would, how would they address him? Maestro, would they?

• 9:59Speaker 03

  Piotr Ilić.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  They would have said, Piotr Ilić?

• 10:01Speaker 03

  Friends sometimes, and my parents would call me Petja.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Petja. I'm going to begin more formally, though, and simply say to you, Piotr Ilić Tchaikovsky, born on the 7th of May, 1840?

• 10:15Speaker 03

  If you go by the Gregorian calendar. But in Russia, we hadn't yet changed the Gregorian, we were still in the Julian calendar. So my birthday in Russia was the 25th of April, 1840. But according to your calendar, yes.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Good. Well, we're wanting your story, so you were born when you say you were born.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  23rd of April.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Good, I don't want to make you a year, a month younger than you actually are. So, tell me, what is your very first memory?

• 10:45Speaker 03

  I think my earliest memory was, I was born in the beautiful town of Votkins, near the Urals, where my father was a mining engineer. And Votkins was a kind of Eden, and I remember, when I was very young, looking out of my bedroom window, at the swans swimming on the local lake. It's the earliest memory I have. I don't know how that lodged in my mind, but obviously came out later in my music.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  It is uncanny, this often happens.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  People's first memories in some way link up with what their later life becomes.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Indeed.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  So the man who gives us Swan Lake, your first memory is of swans.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Watching the swans swimming in the lake. And it went right into my mind and stayed there. Alas, my father had a terrible tendency to bounce from job to job, which meant that far too frequently, we had to leave where we were living and rush off to some other part of Russia.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  So tell me, who was your father? What was his name?

• 11:42Speaker 03

  His name was Ilyich Akovsky. He was a mining engineer. And he kept trying to get other jobs. And so when I was very, very young, four or five, he took another job in Moscow. And one of the earliest griefs of my life, I think, was having to leave the beautiful town of Votkins and exchange it for the rambling urban squalor of Moscow, which is a city I never came to love, although I lived there for a long time.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Before we get to Moscow, tell us about your mother. Who was she and how did your parents meet?

• 12:12Speaker 03

  Alexandra, she was my father's second wife. He had a child by his first wife, Maria. Her name was Zinaida, my eldest sister. My father and mother were deeply in love.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  He was a widower, I assume?

• 12:26Speaker 03

  He was a widower, yes, indeed, yes.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  He meets your mother, Alexandra?

• 12:29Speaker 03

  He meets my mother.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Is she beautiful?

• 12:32Speaker 03

  A very beautiful lady with French ancestry. And so I always had a sort of yen for France and a sympathy with French culture. I learned French as early as I could. Indeed, we had a Swiss-French nurse when I was a boy, a wonderful girl called Fanny Durbach, who taught me French and German as a boy. So I was able to converse in those languages. And I came to adore her almost as much as my own mother. It broke my heart when she left.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Tell me a bit more about your parents together, before we talk about the nurse, the nanny.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Well, they were very much in love. My father was a very soft and gentle man, who almost smothered us with kindness. This is a softness I myself have inherited. And he loved my mother deeply, and frequently, it seems, for the six of us children. And my mother was a little harder by nature, but I adored her with an almost morbid passion. I could not see how harsh she was in those days. I worshipped her far too fiercely.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Can you give me a specific there of how this would manifest itself? How does a little boy worship his mother?

• 13:45Speaker 03

  There seemed to be nothing that she could do that didn't fill me with joy. And when I was away from her, I was almost desperate. When she left me at my first school, which was a school of jurisprudence, not a school of music, I couldn't bear the thought of her leaving. And as she left me in the school, I was 10 years old, I clung to her skirts and I had to be forcibly removed from her, screaming, "Don't leave, Mama, don't leave." And she said, "Go, go, play with the other boys." And as her carriage drove away from the school, I clung to the backboard and was dragged across the schoolyard until I couldn't hold on anymore. That's how much I couldn't stand to be away from my mother.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Have you, in retrospect, thought about why this was?

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Yes, I have. And I think it's because she played music and sang. And I was musical. I felt it from the first. And as such, I suppose that I felt that our souls walked together on the plane of music. My father was not musical in the same way, although it was he who brought music home to me, quite literally, because he brought home one day from St Petersburg, an orchestion, which is a sort of automated orchestra in a great big cabinet.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Oh, my.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Like a sort of sideboard. And it played music. It played Snatchers Donizetti and Rossini and Bellini, and most wonderful of all, Mozart.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Before we get into you and music, I want to really nail down the relationship between your parents.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  You're telling me that your father was the soft one?

• 15:28Speaker 03

  The soft one, absolutely, yes.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  And physically affectionate?

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  And your mother, you describe her as harsh. Does that mean she was a disciplinarian? Did she, did she beat you when you were naughty?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  No, she was just rather detached. We never got beaten, but she was just rather detached. My father was completely invested in his family and his children. And he adored the role of husband. And he always assumed I would grow into it one day. And he would say, "You will find the right woman one day, Piotr." I fear he wasn't enormously perceptive. But my mother was always a little more detached. And she left the rearing of her children to various nannies.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  So you say there were six children in all? And were you the oldest of the six children?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  I was the third.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Oh, so lots of brothers and sisters?

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  And did you have a particular favorite or how did you get on?

• 16:17Speaker 03

  My favorites, I had two twin brothers.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  They seemed to me angels.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  I can imagine, looking at those children, why we imagined angels in the first place. Why the artists think of puti and cherubs? Because these were, these were my angels.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  We're hearing you now, and of course, we know your kind of music, but you're giving the impression of being quite a romantic child.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Enormously so.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  And were you conscious of that then? When did you first become aware of this streak in you?

• 16:44Speaker 03

  I don't know if I was ever aware of it as such, it just seemed to be my nature. My nurse was very aware of it. I met her some 40 years later. She reminded me of how I was as a child. And apparently, I was deeply susceptible to music and very, very frail and fragile. She said, "You couldn't accept criticism of any kind." And I thought, "If I gave you criticism, you would shatter." And she called me her child of glass. And I would sometimes rush to her with music in my head, saying, "Fanny, Fanny, the music is in my head, I can't get rid of it. Help me, help me get it out of my head." And she didn't know how to calm me down.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  And because of this music, I would drum my fingers relentlessly on the furniture and the walls. And she said, "There was one occasion in which I drummed them so hard on a windowpane that I actually put my hand through the glass." And she said, as she bandaged me up, she thought to herself, "Here is my child of glass, cut by his own substance."

• 17:48Speaker 01

  And what age were you when this was happening?

• 17:50Speaker 03

  I was, I think, six. And in the intervening years, I've learned that we are all cut by our own substance. That is what it means to be human.

• 18:07Speaker 00

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• 18:39Speaker 01

  So you're moving around, though?

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  You were born in that lovely town that you told us.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Votkins, yes.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  And then you go...

• 18:45Speaker 03

  We went to Moscow first. It didn't work out with my father's job in Moscow. We moved to St Petersburg. And then I was put in two schools, a very brief stint in a school, before I was put into the School of Jurisprudence to become a civil servant. See, there was nothing to suggest that I would be a musician when I was a boy.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  But you're drumming your fingers aged six?

• 19:08Speaker 03

  I was very susceptible to music. And I kept trying to write songs or make up songs for the family to sing. But as Fanny said, you were no Mozart, Piotr. I said, "Wasn't I always writing songs for the family to sing?" She said, "Yes, of course, but not good ones."

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Was there any musicality in the family at all?

• 19:24Speaker 03

  My mother, who could play the piano beautifully and sang very well.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  And did she sing with you? Did you play the piano with her?

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Yes, of course. She sang my songs.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Ah, in time.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  I don't know how much she enjoyed them.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  But even when you were a little boy?

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  And did she teach you to play the piano?

• 19:38Speaker 03

  No, that came later. There was a freed serf, in fact, who, the serfs were in the process of being freed, who taught me music.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  And the serfs, just to explain to the modern audience who don't know about it, basically, it was a form of slavery. You were indentured to a family forever.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Forever.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  You just worked on their land.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  And you could never move from that plot. And you owed everything to your master. And if you tried to escape, you could be brought back and lashed.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  But your family was not a prosperous family?

• 20:10Speaker 03

  No, but we were, we did all right.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  You did all right.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  My father was quite well off at first, when we were in Votkinsk. Unfortunately, he made some silly speculations and kept leaving his job, so we got poorer and poorer.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Do you have any recollection of those early, of sitting at a piano, looking at it and playing? Do you have any recollection of that?

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Nothing specific. Although one thing I do know is that my parents, seeing that I could play the piano, took me to a very famous music teacher called Rudolf Kündinger to see if I had any skill. And he said, rather forthrightly, "Well, the boy has some skills on the piano, but nothing special. I can't imagine he will ever have any kind of career in music." So that was the judgment on my future as a musician. And so it was a good bet to send me to the School of Jurisprudence.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  So you're 10, and you're sent to this School of Jurisprudence?

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  The idea is you're going to be a civil servant, which will mean that you have a good income for the rest of your life?

• 21:03Speaker 03

  That's the idea, yes.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  And security, that's the plan. In your head, you're this romantic creature.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  By then, have you learned to play the piano by the time you were 10?

• 21:11Speaker 03

  Yes, I could play very well by that time.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  And you composing at all? You writing music down?

• 21:16Speaker 03

  I was writing little sketches, but never taking anything seriously. I was doing it as an amateur, as a lover of music.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  And can you remember the first time you performed in front of other people outside your family?

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Oh, I played for my friends at the School of Jurisprudence. I found a very interesting bunch of friends who were all artistic in nature. And we enjoyed illuminating each other with our various forms of art. One of my greatest friends was the now famous poet Alexei Apuchtin, who was an extraordinary character.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  You say now famous, Alexei?

• 21:48Speaker 03

  He's a very famous poet now in Russia.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Oh, how do you pronounce this name?

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Apuchtin.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Apuchtin.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  And he was an extraordinary character. Everything about him, his... His conduct, his conversation and his poetry was an unapologetic shade of lavender.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Oh, you were the same age, were you?

• 22:05Speaker 03

  We were exactly the same age and he was the first to teach me to accept my own desires. He taught me something about the ancient Greeks.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Well, we've got to this age, you know, you're ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. This is the years we're talking about. And what you're telling me is what we would call in modern parlance that you were realising you were gay. Is that right?

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Indeed.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  I mean, that is the the nub of it. Were you as aware of it as I've just put it? Or did you just... Explain those early feelings, how they manifested themselves for you.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  I realised when I went to the School of Jurisprudence, which of course was completely filled with boys, that I had...

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Was it a boarding school?

• 22:45Speaker 03

  It was, yes.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Oh, so you were sent away from... hence your mother leaving in that carriage. You clinging on to the board behind as she firmly went ahead saying...

• 22:54Speaker 03

  She was going to leave me forever. And I felt it was a prison sentence. And she said, "Go and play with the other boys, Pyotr." Well, she little dreamed how faithfully I would follow her instructions. I began to feel very strong affections for some of the boys. There was a young boy called Sergey Kirayev, only a year younger than I, for whom I developed something of an infatuation. And all the more so, I fear, because he treated me very, very cruelly. Once even slapped me in the face in front of all the other boys, which was a terrible humiliation. And I have to admit, only added zest to my affection. What perverse creatures we humans are to love the thing that brings us pain.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  And Apuktin, who was much more in touch with his feelings and much more overt than I, taught me that I shouldn't be ashamed of my own nature. Now, I fear in this, he was a little naive about the nature of the world. Because this is a hangman world.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  What do you mean by that?

• 23:53Speaker 03

  It's pleasures are the pleasures of an inquisition. It's a sour, sadistic world that loves to hate and judge and punish. And in that world, someone who is different is reviled and needs to be punished.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  And did you and your friends talk about this, or was much of this happening in your head?

• 24:12Speaker 03

  I was aware of it and Apuktin, who was very, very open about his sexuality.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  And this is a boy of fourteen, fifteen?

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Yes, he said, "Don't be afraid of it, Pyotr."

• 24:22Speaker 01

  What did the teachers think?

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Well, I think they thought, and I thought so too, that it was a youthful fad that would one day blow away on the wind.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  You were going through a phase.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Boys go through this phase.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Of course, and you know, I think people were a little more freely emotional with each other in those days. Boys in particular. But I was also aware that regardless of the fact that it felt natural, it could also very easily be reviled.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  There were some injunctions against it at the school, which were often ignored. And curiously, it was it was accepted amongst the aristocracy in Russia. But how could it not be? If it wasn't, you'd have to arrest two thirds of Russia's oligarchy. But for ordinary men, such as myself, it was punishable by public disgrace, the loss of civil rights and exile to Siberia. So it was not an idle threat.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Known act of homosexuality.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Punishable, say it again?

• 25:28Speaker 03

  By public disgrace, loss of civil rights and exile to Siberia.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Wow, so you could be arrested?

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Tried in some way, shape or form?

• 25:38Speaker 03

  And sent to Siberia.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  So, my goodness.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  Very, very frightening and I felt this at school. I think perhaps the first time I really felt the danger of my own nature was when I was having dinner at the Châteauneau Restaurant in Saint Petersburg with Apuktin and a few sympathetic friends, when suddenly, in the middle of the supper, a man stood up in the restaurant and stridently denounced us for our habits, hurling all sorts of epithets and slurs at us.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  And you're teenagers still, are you?

• 26:14Speaker 03

  We're teenagers and the next day, our names were published across the city in connection with that ugly French word "bougre", "buggers". And it was then that I realised that my nature was a peril to me, that like a spider, I could be reviled for being what I am.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  And that is why for the rest of your life, you suppressed in public this side of your nature?

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Except there was a freedom with certain friends.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  There was a freedom with certain friends and a freedom in certain places. There was a very dear friend of mine called Prince Mashewski and he called himself Prince of Sodom and Citizen of Gomorrah. You can imagine that things were a little freer with him. But for myself, I was always terribly frightened and I wanted to be dignified and I wanted to be respectable. And I eventually found ways to try to suppress this thought. I mean, we're jumping ahead, but I attempted to get married once.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Well, we're going to hear about that in a moment.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  A terrible disaster.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Well, I remember that from the film version of your story, which you may not have seen, but I saw in the nineteen seventies. And you're correcting a lot of things that I thought had happened that didn't happen, which is good. But back as a schoolboy, how's your academic work?

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Very good. I passed my tests with fine colours and was after that admitted to the Ministry of Justice.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  So it was still your plan to become a civil servant?

• 27:36Speaker 03

  It was, indeed.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  And at sixteen or something, you go to this next place?

• 27:38Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right, yeah, yeah. And there I became, if you can believe it, a minor civil servant. If you can imagine the great Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky and in consequence a clerk in the Ministry of Justice.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Well, I can, because that's real life.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  What is difficult to believe is in Tchaikovsky. We can believe in this young boy.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  It was agonising. I have no inkling, not the faintest inkling, of what I did at the Ministry of Justice. Tells you something about the civil service, doesn't it? I had the rank of titular councillor, though what that might mean passeth all understanding. But that's bureaucracy and inventory of titles with no jobs attached. But all I really remember was the boredom. Mindless, gormless, endless boredom. It was interminable. I don't know how people do it every day.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  And where were you living at night when you were doing this? Was your...

• 28:32Speaker 03

  I was renting a house.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  You were renting... So you've left your home by now?

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Because, and this is where are you, Saint Petersburg, Moscow?

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Saint Petersburg. I did eventually go and live with my father again. By this time, alas, my mother had died. She died when I was fifteen.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Ah, tell us, oh my gosh, tell us about that.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Well, I was at the School of Jurisprudence and I heard that she died of cholera. A cholera epidemic swept through Saint Petersburg.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Of course, you were a boarder, so the head of the school will have told you?

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  And what was the effect on you?

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Absolute devastation. No pain I have ever felt has been as great as that. When I think about my mother and the fact that she is gone, I can hardly control the anguish that I feel in my soul.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Were you by then writing music more regularly?

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Yes, I began attending lectures at the newly established conservatoire in Saint Petersburg.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  And eventually I thought, this is what I need.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  And when your mother died, did that have an influence on your work in any way?

• 29:39Speaker 03

  I think all the passions in my life have had an influence on my work. I didn't write anything specifically for the death of my mother, but the anguish went into my soul and came out in some of the more howling passages of my music.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  You mentioned though that after your mother's death, you went and spent some time with your father? And how was your relationship with him as the years went by?

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Well, I fear he didn't quite understand me. Our friendship was always very civil and cordial, although I have to say he did grow a little distant towards the end of my life, before he died.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Do you think he was aware that you were gay? I'm sure it's not something you ever talked about with him, but was he aware of it?

• 30:18Speaker 03

  He hoped I would one day find the right girl to marry. "All my life", he would say, "you will find the right girl".

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Seriously, did you hope that as well?

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Very much so.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  When I was at the Ministry of Justice,

• 30:37Speaker 03

  I pursued my passions, my predilections, with a sort of mad vivacity. Partly because my life was so empty, the emptier it was, the more I tried to fill it with frivolity.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  And give us some examples of what you were.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Well, I would go to certain parties and certain areas of the city. I would, uh...

• 31:03Speaker 01

  So there was...

• 31:03Speaker 03

  ...deborch myself, let's say.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Gay, gay, what we now call gay sex.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  A sybaritic life and the...

• 31:10Speaker 03

  The emptier my life, the more I tried to fill it with frivolity. And I pursued this vice with a sort of frenetic abandon.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  And this was a high-risk exercise?

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Very much so.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Were you half hoping to be caught?

• 31:24Speaker 03

  I... It's hard to say. I, I just...

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Well, it's like...

• 31:27Speaker 03

  I, I felt that I was trying to distract myself from a life that was itself a distraction. The Ministry of Justice was nothing. It was an emptiness. And if I could distract myself, myself from that distraction, then perhaps I could live a full life. And for a while, I, I submitted myself to this sort of seductive illusion. I, I... Life seemed to spread out before me like a sort of endless carnival. But illusions, however powerful they are, ultimately fail to satisfy. And I could feel this deep artistic urge in me, sort of crying out to be fulfilled. And then, once again, Mozart appeared in my life and came to my rescue. I saw a production of Don Giovanni.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  It was a revelation. I, as soon as those big D minor chords began, I felt as though I had walked through the portals of heaven and stumbled on the angels singing to God. I did, it charged my soul with enthusiasm, with aspiration. And suddenly I realized this was what I needed. This was what I had to do. I must become a musician. And within weeks, I had enrolled in the conservatoire. That's when I began.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  And was it easy to do? They took you? They were pleased?

• 32:39Speaker 03

  They took me. Indeed, at first I thought, oh, I'd better keep my secure job. And so I did the conservatoire in my off times and evenings. And eventually I decided I must transition out. I did not want to be a civil servant.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  And was there a particular teacher there who sort of said, "Pietra, you're my man"?

• 32:55Speaker 03

  There was a... I, I learned from Zarembe first, who was a lovely teacher. And there was, uh, then the conservatoire's director, the Olympian Anton Rubenstein, the world's preeminent pianist, saw something in me and took me under his wing. And under his mentorship, I... Things really, really took off. There was one other very curious character. I could just paint you a picture of him before that. He's an Italian singing teacher by the name of Luigi Piccoli, and he was a peculiar character. For a start, we could never tell how old he was. His age seemed to hover somewhere between about thirty and seventy-five. Because he had a peculiar habit of rougeing his cheeks to a gleaming rubescence,

• 33:39Speaker 03

  dyeing his hair to an improbable black, and taking the skin of his face and pulling it tight,

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Stretching it, gathering it the back of his neck, and clipping it with a sort of glorified clothes peg to keep his face taut.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  I've started doing that.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Oh, have you indeed?

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, I'm afraid. He was nearer seventy-five than thirty-four.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  And despite this, he had a slew of young men coming up to visit him in his apartments. And I always thought to myself, what happened when he fight... When things got amorous and he finally took the peg off the back of his neck?

• 34:14Speaker 01

  By then, he's blown out the candle.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  I imagine...

• 34:16Speaker 01

  I do know.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  I imagine both their faces fell.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Oh, that's so good.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  That's very funny. You're funny.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, were you? You were the...

• 34:31Speaker 01

  A lot of people are leading very risky lives.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Very risky lives.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Because these people at the conservatoire, he was almost... I mean, he was parading himself in the streets, this teacher.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely, yes.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  This Italian teacher, because he was seen to be that. But he got away with it because unless you were caught or doing it in public or seen to be a corruptor of youth, you could... It was overlooked, was it?

• 34:50Speaker 03

  It was an eccentricity.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  In his case.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  It was an eccentricity that could be overlooked. He was a strange character, and who knows what all that stuff meant.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Did you become happy then? Were you happy at the conservatoire?

• 35:01Speaker 03

  I think I've never been as happy as I was the four years that I worked in the conservatoire. I, I, I studied, I practiced piano, I wrote until my fingers bled. I absorbed Beethoven and Weber and Schubert.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  You say you wrote until your fingers bled?

• 35:15Speaker 03

  I wrote piece after piece after piece, a tone poem called "Fatim". I tried my hand at a symphony, operas. I wrote and wrote with chamber music. I would usually tear them up again afterwards because I was ill-satisfied with them. Um, and I absorbed all the great masters. Beethoven left me rather cold. Schubert, I loved. Schumann, I loved the most of all because he was so unashamedly emotional, something I would try to emulate all my life. I tried for a while to write as Schumann, but imitation is not art, and I had to find my own style. And then, of course, I had this support, let's say, from Anton Rubenstein, who sort of thought I was the best of all his pupils.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  But I did finally get a terribly bad review at the end of my schooling from a composer called César Couy, who was one of the, the mighty handful, who were the five great composers who hung around, Balakirev, Balakirev, Couy, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Baradin.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  I've only heard of the last two.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  Right, right. And César Couy was also a critic. And when I wrote my final assessment, "Kantata", which was a setting of Schiller's "Ode to Joy", if you please, as though there weren't a good setting of that already, he wrote a review that said that this Tchaikovsky has no talent whatsoever. I was devastated. I was in floods of tears and at the same time furious. And I wanted to punish Couy somehow. And then I heard his music, and I realized I didn't have to. To long to be a composer and to have so little talent, that is punishment enough.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Before we get to your, your breakout moments, tell me about some of the girls that you met and that you liked and that you thought, "Well, this is what everybody else does. I maybe I'm going to give this a go".

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Well, all right. I'll start this another way, if I may. It's I, I... After the, after the conservatoire, I was invited to Moscow by Anton Rubenstein's brother Nikolai Rubenstein, who asked me to be a professor of music, which was extraordinary. I, I...

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Because you're now in your early twenties.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  I, I finished the conservatoire mere seconds ago, and suddenly I was being requisitioned as a professor. I had nothing to profess. I accepted. Um, but unfortunately, teaching turned out to be a sort of wearisome vexation. It was endless rounds of tutorial drudgery. It kept me from my own composing. And I was constantly surrounded by crowds of adoring women. They loved me.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  And it horrified me. I, I have to say, I was always afraid. I was terrified at the sight of so many crinolins and petticoats.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  What did you look like? Because the pictures I have of you, there are photographs, aren't there, taken later on? You're covered in beard.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  What were you looking like when you were in your early twenties?

• 38:05Speaker 03

  I was growing my beard to hide a rather weak chin. But I had, I, I, I think I was quite handsome, if I may say so.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  You're amazing.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  I had, I had rather sensuous lips and penetrating blue eyes. Um, but at that time, I, I think I was rather interesting to the young ladies. I, of course, had no interest in the young ladies and was terribly confused. And all the time, my, my, these darker passions would rear their irresistible head, and I surrendered to them. But every time I surrendered, I felt a terrible sense of guilt. And I would go to the church and kneel and pray to God. I would say...

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Had faith been part of your family's upbringing?

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Always, yes, always.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  And you, you...

• 38:41Speaker 03

  And I am very, very faithful. So I kneel to God and I would say, "Let me be as other men know, Lord. Take away this thing in me and let me walk freely in the world with my hand in the hand of my beloved, but my prayers are never answered".

• 38:56Speaker 01

  But you kept your faith?

• 38:57Speaker 03

  I kept my faith.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  To your dying day?

• 38:59Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, absolutely. I did finally fall in love with a soprano, a French soprano by the name of Desiree Arthaud, who came to St. Petersburg to perform. She was a wonderful soprano, and when she sang, I was transfixed. And I suddenly felt myself extremely smitten. And I thought, this was what I needed. An artist such as this could bend my soul to common love. If I could, if I could reach out and wed her, then I could become respectable. I met her after the concert. I said, "May I give you a compliment"? She said, "I would be very happy to receive a compliment", and we flirted. Our flirtation evolved into a courtship. And within a short time, we were engaged to be married.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Tell me a bit more about the courtship. Did you wine her, dine her? What happened? She will have had chaperones.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Imagine she...

• 39:50Speaker 03

  She was beyond chaperones then. She was five years older than I was.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  Um, and it was, it was very respectable. And nothing really took place between us because I suppose in the end I didn't want it to.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  I, I loved her in a metaphysical sense, in an artistic sense.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  It was a different world.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  It was, of course, a different world, from your debauched world, of course.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think there was enough...

• 40:10Speaker 03

  A dissipated world.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, Piotr Ilić. There was enough debauchery.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  There was occasion. There was on occasion, alas.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  On those dark nights in the woods around St. Petersburg. We don't need to go any further there.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  But we, I found myself suddenly engaged, and I thought, "A woman, how, how... Well, a woman".

• 40:29Speaker 01

  But also you enjoyed her company, didn't you?

• 40:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Because she was musical.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  And she was a tremendous artist.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  She was tremendous. And, and...

• 40:36Speaker 01

  And she fell in love with you, do you think?

• 40:37Speaker 03

  I think she fell in love with me, but something intervened. Whether it was the rather unenticing prospect of marrying an impoverished young composer who would follow her around like a sheepdog while she pursued her career, or whether she had been apprised of certain other quirks in my character, I don't know.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  She, she'd...

• 40:56Speaker 03

  Well, worse than that, she went for a holiday to Warsaw and returned to St. Petersburg a married woman.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  And I can assure you, nothing dampens an engagement quite so effectively as that. I was heartbroken for, oh, hours.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  And for a while after this debacle, I pursued my old vice with refreshed abandon. And I was sure now that I was not suited to women, nor were women suited to me.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  But you did get married eventually, didn't you?

• 41:23Speaker 03

  I did.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  And how did that come happen?

• 41:25Speaker 03

  A curious concatenation of circumstances drove me to it. I, my, my brother Modest came to me in the late eight and seventies and said, Piotr, I'm the same as you in my nature and my constitution. And I said, Modest, you must repress these pernicious passions. I think of nothing but trying to get rid of these passions all my life. They are the greatest obstacle to my happiness, our happiness. And he said, how can, how can I deny what I am by nature? And I said, you must try, you must try. He said, I can't do it. And I said, I will show you how. I will, I will eschew my wish wicked habits forever. I will marry someone, anyone. I will enter into matrimony with anyone prepared to have me.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  And just at that moment, a letter arrived from a young lady called Antonina Milukova, who had, it seems, been a pupil of mine at the conservatoire. And she wrote to say that she had fallen under the tyranny of very strong affections for me, and she was in love with me and wished to marry me, and she would kill herself if I would not marry her. Now, I felt a revulsion at this letter, but I felt that I had to answer it because I couldn't, like Anjegin, be heartless to this sincere girl. And I had just been working on my opera, Evgeny Anjegin, which tells of the young, sincere Tatiana, and how she writes a letter to Anjegin as horribly rejected. I couldn't be heartless like Anjegin. So, reality and fiction began to blur together in my mind.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  And she became the image of Tatiana for me, and I had fallen in love with my own character by then. And I met her in Saint Petersburg. And stupidly, I told her I intended to marry, I could never love her as a husband, I would always love her as a brother, and I was always be her staunch and grateful friend, and would she be prepared to marry me under these conditions? She said, yes. And we were married. I wept the entire day of our wedding, which she put down to tears of joy. But it was a torment for me. I knew at that moment I had done the wrong thing. I could never bend my soul to common love. Was this to be my future, married life?

• 43:38Speaker 01

  But why did you do it?

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Because I had to have a screen to hide my nature, a badge of respectability.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  So you took advantage of her desire to marry you? So how long did it last?

• 43:49Speaker 03

  About three months.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  I immediately steamed away on a train. Worse than that, I thought...

• 43:57Speaker 01

  You ruined her life.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  It never seemed to ruin her life. She was so thrilled to have married Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the famous composer. She, she didn't quite exist in reality. She was married because she, I, I was always...

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Did she come to the funeral as, as, as the widow?

• 44:14Speaker 03

  I believe she did. I think she did.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  The widow Tchaikovsky. So she carried on living as the celebr, the wife of the celebrated composer?

• 44:22Speaker 03

  I believe so.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  And you lived a separate life?

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Yes, I did, yeah. I, I, but she didn't seem to understand. I sent my brother Anand Thulli and Nikolai Rubenstein to break it off, and she didn't understand. She just smiled, sipping tea the whole time. When they left, she said, who would have thought I would have the famous Rubenstein to tea in my house? And she appeared one day on my doorstep again, hurling herself at my feet, saying, Piotr, Piotr, you must be my husband. Take me back, take me back. And there is a sadness in the fact that I deceived her, I manipulated her. That is a sadness in my life. I should not have done it. But I felt I was advanced on a spear point. Push forward, I was to die, and if I turned backwards, I would wear out my life in cowardice. It's, it's an impossible situation for men like me, is either you abjure the world or else abjure yourself.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  And yet, as the Bible says, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his own soul?

• 45:15Speaker 01

  And it was unconsummated?

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Entirely unconsummated. The day I saw her getting ready for the bath, I had to rush out to Saint Isaac's Cathedral. I felt a sudden urgent need to pray. I said I was terrified of crinolins and petticoats, it's infinitely worse when the crinoline comes off. And I, I, I thought at one point I had no way out except self slaughter. And I walked, I waded waist deep into the icy Moskva River and stood there a while, hoping to contract some malady from the freezing water and be carried off this troublesome plane, till death us do part, you see? It's easier than filing for divorce.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  So your whole life, really, has been defined by your sexuality?

• 45:56Speaker 03

  It has. There was one woman who I absolutely adored, though. I haven't talked about her yet, if I may.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Her name was Madame Madzijda Filarevna von Meck, who was a wealthy widow, the widow of a railway magnate, who had a vast fortune. And she was a great lover of music. And she had asked me to, to write her a little piece of music, which I did, and then she wrote me a letter of thanks. And our correspondence blew up into an enormous kind of manifesto of art and life and everything. Our letters, perhaps one of the most extraordinary conversations about life, art, ambition, music that exists in the world of ballet. But we decided that we would never meet. She became my greatest friend, my greatest confidant. She supported me with a stipend of 6,000 rubles.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  She helped me with my separation expenses, and we should never meet because our love was metaphysical. And even to meet her for a moment would burst the delicate illusion of perfection. We blew up around each other. I did encounter her once, though, quite by accident. I was staying in her estate in Berilov, where she invited me often, and she, we'd exchange itinerary so that we shouldn't meet. But as I was walking the forest one day, she was there in front of me. And we froze. I felt my face turning crimson with embarrassment. She was the same. And we didn't know what to say, and this hiatus stretched and stretched between us. And finally, I tipped my hat and walked on. And we never said a word to each other.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Your story is remarkable.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yes, I, I, we thought that it would ruin things if we met each other. And I think I was always afraid that her perspicacity might see through me to the shadow in my soul and revile me for it.

• 47:50Speaker 04

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• 48:24Speaker 01

  So tell us about your music. How do you go from being somebody who's just left the conservatoire, and indeed has had a bad review for your end of year performance, to being this world famous composer? What are the steps? What happens next?

• 48:40Speaker 03

  It took, it took a while. Fortunately, the bad review was rather modified by my friend Germaine Larosche, who also said he thought it was a wonderful piece, the Cantata, and that in fact, I embodied the greatest hope for Russia's musical future.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  Obviously, we became fast friends. He seemed a man of discernment and intelligence. And then eventually, one of my pieces was played, a piece called Characteristic Dances, was played by the great Johann Strauss, the Waltz King himself, who played it in a concert in Pavlovsk.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  And, forgive me, you sent this to him? I mean, how does, how, those days, how did people get their work done?

• 49:16Speaker 03

  I think it had been given to him by someone else. So people, work was performed and, and sent around. And suddenly, I found that this was happening, and it made me slightly famous. But the trouble with fame is that it increases the scrutiny in one's life. Fame, it seems to me, is like Brutus in the Capitol waiting to stab Caesar to death. And the public are its willing accomplices, we're standing with sharpened knives to join in the execution.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  So when you were an unknown, jobbing composer and musician, you could get away with anything?

• 49:50Speaker 03

  Anything.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  But once you became somebody who appeared in the newspapers...

• 49:53Speaker 03

  The scrutiny became more rigorous.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  And you were conscious of that?

• 49:56Speaker 03

  I became more and more frightened of it. But then, an extraordinary thing happened. My first great success, I suppose, came from my Romeo and Juliet overture, which had been suggested to me by Balakiev.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  This is Romeo and Juliet overture to what?

• 50:10Speaker 03

  It's just an overture, a free standing overture. So it's essentially a tone poem about Shakespeare's play.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  And could, would it have been played before a production of the play?

• 50:18Speaker 03

  No.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Or is it just called an overture?

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Just called an overture, but it's essentially a tone poem. And Balakiev had written to me a sort of plan. He said, you could set it out like this. And I was thrilled by the idea because I loved Shakespeare.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  And is somebody reading the poem or singing the poem?

• 50:31Speaker 03

  No, no, it's purely orchestral, so it's just orchestral color that suggests the incidence of the play.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  And who's this man who wrote you?

• 50:38Speaker 03

  Balakiev, the great composer, who was the leader of the great five, the Moguchka, Yekuchka.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  And I'd heard of Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Yes, indeed, yes, indeed.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  The first three passed me by.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  But he was the leader of that group.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  And he wrote inviting you, suggesting this was something...

• 50:52Speaker 03

  He suggested I write this, as it would be a good project for me as a young composer. And I have to say, I, I loved the idea, but at first, I didn't know how to write it. The love between girl and boy rather eluded me, and I faltered rather miserably at the sketches. And then I met a young man called Eduard Zach, and suddenly inspiration struck. And the star-crossed lovers came blazing to life in my love for Eduard.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  And was that a consummated love?

• 51:23Speaker 03

  It was. And, and for the first time, I realized how my passion could become the inspiration of my music. Then my passion could become the form which guided my music.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  And this was a proper relationship? You and he became lovers and partners?

• 51:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Or was that not possible?

• 51:41Speaker 03

  It was not quite possible. And then, unfortunately, some three years later, life proved how horribly it can imitate art, when my beloved Eduard, perplexed and ashamed at his aberrant nature, took his own life. I was devastated. I have never loved anyone as much as him. But I, you see, I had done something magical. Because in the overture, I had captured his spirit and made him immortal. In that, he can never die. As long as that overture is played, my Edward lives again. You see, the ancient gods of Greece and Rome had power to turn their lovers into constellations.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  I have only the power to turn them into music. But as Mercutio says, 'Tis enough, twill serve.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  It is very beautiful, but I imagine no consolation to his parents.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  No consolation to his parents and no consolation in the end to me.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because he was young when this happened and he just couldn't, he couldn't face society taking a different view.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  I believe that's what happened.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  A lot of my friends took their lives in the end, they couldn't face it.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  I mean, you say a lot, you mean many people, a number of people.

• 52:56Speaker 03

  Many people that I knew.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  There are always other reasons given, but it seems quite obvious to me that that was the problem. If you cannot, if you cannot allow your soul to speak in public, what can you do? For me, the great miracle was music. That allowed me to express the emotions of my heart. You see, the dots and scratches on a musical page are more than mere sound. They are freedom for the imprisoned soul.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  After Edward, did you have any other permanent lovers, partners?

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Never permanent. I, I met much later on a violinist called Joseph Kotek, for whom I wrote my violin concerto. One of the most heartfelt pieces I have ever written.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  The truth is, you were going really from success to success.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Success to success, I mean qualified successes. Then I, my next great project and perhaps my first real enormous success was, I'd written a couple of symphonies, my first and second, third symphonies were not my best works. But then I began a piano concerto. I worked extremely hard on it because with pianists like Anton and Nikolai Rubenstein as my mentors, I couldn't afford any foolish blunders. I worked incredibly hard on it and I took it to Rubenstein. As clumsily as my fingers would allow, I played it through to him. And when I had finished, he said nothing. Absolute silence. A terrible echoing hiatus opened between us. And I looked him, I thought, did he like it, did he hate it? I had no idea. He frowned down at the music.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  I thought, say something, for God's sake, anything, even if it's not gushing praise. And then he said, "Peter, it is grotesque. It is absolute garbage. It is a piece of derivative nonsense. You have pinch bits from here and there, rags of Litov and scraps of Chopin, and bits of Schumann all flung together without any organisation or harmony or intelligence. It was an absolute piece of garbage and he was sorry I'd wasted my time on such filth. And I can't tell you the tone of voice in which he said this. And then he had the gall to say, "But if you will make some amendations, which I will suggest,

• 55:06Speaker 03

  then we can save the piece from utter oblivion." I grabbed the score off the piano, I marched to the door and I said, "Nikolai, I'm going to the publisher and I assure you, I will not change a single note, I shall publish it exactly as it stands." And that is what I did. I took away the dedication, which had been to him, and gave it to Hans von Buhlow. And then the epilogue, the palinode, let's say to that story, is that...

• 55:31Speaker 01

  I love this palinode.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  Palinode, a retraction, as it were, is that Rubenstein himself became one of the great interpreters of a concerto in his life. So our first judgements are often erroneous.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Extraordinary, but well done you, sticking to your guns.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  Yes, I am glad I didn't. It's become a staple of the repertoire.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Well done you. And when did you get into ballet? I mean, opera we don't really associate you with, do we?

• 56:00Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I, I wrote many operas, I wrote more operas than ballets. There are two great successes I've had, Yevgeny Onyekin and The Queen of Spades, Pika la dama. They're the two that remain in the repertoire. In, in Russia, they still play Tchaevichki and Voyevorova and Mazepa, but they're not well known, I thi- I think, here in the West. I wrote my first ballet, Swan Lake, I think in eighteen seventy-six, seventy-five. I had long, long to try my hand at ballet music, as I rather fancied myself as a dancer. In fact, I was quite nimble on my feet. But unfortunately, the stories for ballet are always rather silly. And Swan Lake was no exception. Although I did find something intriguing in the duality of the black and white swans.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  Good and bad, virtue and vice, conformity and rebellion. I felt it was like the two sides of myself sort of eternally clashing in the struggle for meaning.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  And was it a success from the start? Where was it first?

• 56:56Speaker 03

  It was a failure. Played once and never played again. I hear it's been played ever since. But it was a great, it was a great failure in St Petersburg.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 57:04Speaker 03

  Went absolutely nowhere, so I discarded that. Some years later, I wrote Sleeping Beauty, which I worked very, very hard on, although the choreographer, Marius Purti Pa, kept telling me, "I need eight bars here and I need four measures here and I need a half beat here" and I had to follow his thing. I was very proud of my orchestration in that and that was more of a success. But the Tsar, Alexander the Third, who was a great supporter of mine, in fact, he'd given me a pension of some three thousand rubles a year. He came to see it and after the performance, he yawned and said, "Ah, very nice."

• 57:37Speaker 01

  And how were you at coping with all this?

• 57:40Speaker 03

  Well, by that time, I, I had been able to rise above. Although I, I, I did rather disregard my ballets. The third ballet was a piece called Nutcracker, I don't know if you've heard of it. But it's a very silly piece, it's not worth talking about, it'll quickly be forgotten. The, the opera I wrote with it though, Eolant, now that, I'm sure is destined for immortality. I'm sure you'll all know that one.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Well, we're going to talk about your, the retrospective view of you in just a moment. But as we come towards the end, I'd like to ask you about extraordinary people that you would have met during. You mentioned the Tsar there. Once you've become a nationally known figure.

• 58:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  And maybe internationally known, were your works being?

• 58:25Speaker 03

  Very much so, yes.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Did you travel abroad?

• 58:27Speaker 03

  I travelled to America.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  I travelled all over the world, in fact, but I had one marvelous occasion. I was invited to New York to play at a new hall funded by Andrew Carnegie. They absolutely adored me in New York, I was more famous in America than in Russia.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  And were you enjoying this?

• 58:42Speaker 03

  I, I loved the attention, I was terrified of the city. The, the great skyscrapers frightened me and I would go to my hotel and whimper in fear at night, although the hotel was a marvelously opulent affair with all sorts of unimaginable conveniences. They had a faucet that dispensed real running water, had lights that turned on at the flicking of a switch and perhaps the most wonderful of all, a water closet by which one could flush away one's, let us say, least respectable compositions in a great gushing waterfall. There's nothing amuse me so much as pressing down the handle of this marvel over and over again. I wanted to write a tone poem about it.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  I also travelled around Europe and I met various people, Gunno, Masne.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Did people like you? Gunno, he wrote operas, is it?

• 59:32Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right, yeah, Gunno Faust, that's right.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Masne, we've heard of. And did you get on well with these people?

• 59:37Speaker 03

  Yes, I got on all, very well with them all. I also met Johannes Brahms and I have to tell you, in all earnestness, that in my estimation, Brahms is without parallel. He is the most boring composer on earth.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  As a composer or as a person?

• 59:55Speaker 03

  As a, as a, as a composer, in, in his music, you can really hear that composing is difficult. He's a giftless bastard, he is. And I, I, I, he seems to me the ideal composer for those who like their music. Four-square, bland, predictable and tuneless. He's very popular, as it happens with the British. Having tasted your food, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Did you come to Britain, in fact, on your international travels?

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  I did, I came because I was given an honorary doctorate by Cambridge University.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  Which no other Russian composer ever received, not even Klinka.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  You die at the age of only fifty-three.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  On the sixth of November, eighteen ninety-three.

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Why do you die young? And are you happy at the time of your death? Not obviously not at the moment of your death, but towards the end of your life? Because you had this international success?

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  I don't know exactly how to quantify happiness. As you go through life, I realise, as I got older, that fate begins to take away the things she gives you at the outset.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  All my friends, slowly, La Roche, Kotek, even the Livia Pukkin, were blown away on the wind like autumn leaves. Because we only borrow the things we have from that great user of time. And when we pay him back, we pay him with the interest of heartache and pain. And when I was young, I felt as though time had no power over me. There was no chance that I could ever grow old. As I got older, it seemed to be no possibility that I was ever young. I lost a great number of my friends along the way. One of the worst thunderbolts in my life was the death of Nikolai Rubenstein,

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  my mentor, who died the year after my father. So in quick succession, these two died. It was horrible to see his little coffin carried through the Gardiner in Paris. All that greatness reduced to nothing. And then a young artillery officer, with whom I had grown very fond, took a gun and put an end to his sexual confusion. And his death almost defeated me. And the longer I lived, the more I seemed to realise that there is never a moment of true happiness in this life. For me, only music could keep me from despair. Of all heaven's gifts to humanity wandering in the darkness, music is the most beautiful.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Did you go on working until the end?

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  I did, to the very last moment. I was writing my sixth symphony, my patetique, as I called it. It was just at that time that another cholera epidemic appeared in St Petersburg and people started to die all around me. It terrified me because my mother had died of cholera. And at that time, the cholera rose freshly into my mind and mortality felt ominously close. I put that aside and thought about the symphony. I was thrilled with the piece. I knew it was my greatest work, but the audience didn't like it.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  After the performance, there was silence in the hall. A few scattered claps and nothing. And I think I realised what it was. With the cholera there and the world sighing into death all around, people wanted heroic defiance, not craven submission. But for me, that was not life. For the most part, life doesn't end in glory. It blows away on a whisper of sorrow. I thought, what could be more human than to end my symphony with a whisper and a fall? Such an ending speaks for the many, not the few, for the reality, not the lie. But people live by their illusions and I suppose they want to die by them.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Do you know who was with you at the time of your death?

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  My brother Modest was with me. And a family doctor, Dr Bertinson, and some of my friends came because I contracted cholera. It seemed fitting, is what killed my mother. And so it seemed proper for me to follow in the same way. And I know that there has been controversy about my death ever since. The story is that I drank a glass of unboiled water in the middle of a cholera epidemic. How could this be when we knew we had to boil the water to get rid of the disease? The disease lives in the water. Always boil the water. For some reason, I drank a glass of it

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  and within five or six days was dead. Horrible torments. And one of the things I had to endure was an immersion into a boiling hot bath of water, which they thought activated your kidneys. The same had happened to my mother. I remember her screams. It's hard to say. Perhaps my mind clouded over about why this happened and how I died. But there is another story which comes into my mind, that a court of honour was convened by some of my old compatriots from the School of Jurisprudence, who had said to me, "Your amours are becoming public

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  and you are so famous, you are disgracing the country. You must do the honourable thing and remove yourself." And I have a memory of going home and making the decision. And a strange metaphor blew up in my mind. Boil the water. Always boil the water. The disease lives in the water. The water is life and life must be purged of all corruption. And I am the disease. I am the corruption in the water. I must be boiled away so I do not infect the whole reservoir.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  When your death was reported, how was it reported? And what was the immediate... How were the obituaries? How were you treated?

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  I was treated as a hero of the Russian conscience, the greatest artist after Tolstoy and the true spokesman for Russian music. I've been greatly, greatly feted. It is a great irony that that should happen after... When I have poured forth feelings into music, which would be reviled if people knew what they were. Because what can love be in a world such as this?

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Three more quick questions.

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  I want you to say what comes immediately into your head when I ask you for, particularly maybe if you're in your earlier years, a moment of joy.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  A moment of joy?

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  A moment of joy.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  Perhaps my greatest moments of joy were sometimes I would leave the turmoil and the anxiety and the trouble of Russia and dash off to Paris to recreate myself. And in that, it was an unending carnival of epicurean lassitude. And there I could soothe the pricklings of my skin with sumptuous entertainments. I could fill my soul with the languorous pleasures of a Byzantine concupiscence.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  I'm so glad you chose that and not composing a particular piece. That's marvellous. Not the audience reception.

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  Music is the greatest of all the pleasures. May I just say that when inspiration overtakes you, the feeling is so extraordinary. You can hardly think. You forget everything. Your entire being trembles and rise and you can hardly set down thoughts. One idea presses so upon the other and you're mad with it. And it's so powerful, this feeling, so creative, that if it were to continue unbroken, you wouldn't be able to live for a single day. The strings would snap and the instrument would shatter. It is a wonderful feeling.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  A moment of sadness for you?

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  The greatest moment of sadness remains the death of my mother. There is nothing to compare with, not even the suicide of Edward Zak. It was impossibly painful, remains so to this moment.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  And what of you, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky? What has life taught you? This remarkable life with such high achievement, but the pain caused by your natural inclination, that you had to keep a secret all your life. What has life taught you that you'd like to share with us?

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  The only thing that can keep us from despair, in my opinion, is music. It is the most beautiful of all heaven's gifts to humanity wandering in the darkness. It alone calms, enlightens and stills our souls. And only music can make us whole again when we are broken. Art for me is like a great torch that the artist shines into his soul. And it can sublime the spirit out of the artist as the sun sucks up the dew. So can join the great cloud work of emotion and intellect that we call art,

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  which sits above us as a cooling presence. And when the world overheats itself in one of its periodical convulsions, then this art can fall upon the earth like a cooling, quenching rain, refreshing us for all the ages of the world to come.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  But all I can say is I'm thrilled to have met you, Tchaikovsky.

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  Thank you. Lovely to have met you as well.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  And if you enjoyed hearing Tchaikovsky's voice there, based on the extraordinary scholarship of Tama Matheson and also on letters and correspondence from the period. It's all beautifully researched. And you'd like to see Tama bringing Tchaikovsky to life on stage? Well, Tchaikovsky, Child of Glass, will be at the Holland Park Opera this August. We'll give you further details in a moment. But I'm now going to go and lie down. Thank you. Oh, our thanks there to Tama Matheson. That was extraordinary, wasn't it?

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  Amazing, yeah. Our thanks to Tchaikovsky.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Yes, you're right.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Interpreted for us today by Tama. And you can go to see his show and I recommend it thoroughly. Fourteenth, fifteenth and thirteenth of August this year, the Opera, Holland Park Theatre.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Or even thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Oh, I like to mix things up a bit.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  It's very confusing.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Tickets from thirty-five to eighty-five pounds. It's fabulous. It's, you know, well, it is a fusion.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  It's a great venue as well, isn't it? Because it's in Holland Park and it's sort of open air. It's really a great place to go and watch something like this, I think.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the joy of this show, I mean, we were just talking there to Tchaikovsky. The difference of seeing it on the stage is that really, as he tells the story there, Tchaikovsky's incredible music just surges through it, illuminating his life with breathtaking emotional force. So that's fantastic. So go to Opera, Holland Park. Book now. You will not be disappointed. That's if you're in London. If you happen to be in Edinburgh in August, well, come and see Harriet and me in Charles Brandon's Up Memory Lane with a twist of Rosebud and Harriet Jane. You can go to our website, which is simply rosebutfodcast.co.uk

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  or you can go to the Edinburgh Fringe website or you can go to Assembly Edinburgh. Lots of places to find it and we look forward to seeing you. There will be a modest meet and greet after every show. That's it for this week. Cue the music. Oh, say goodbye, Harriet.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

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