Ravinia 2023 Issue 5

Lawn Clippings By John Schauer My Dinner with Pyotr PERHAPS YOU’VE PLAYED that cocktail party game of naming three people from history you’d like to invite to dinner. My own choices are Queen Elizabeth I, the Pharaoh Tuthmosis III, and the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. I chose the two monarchs because they could clarify some events that have mystified historians, but I chose Tchaikovsky because I’d really like a chance to get to know him as a person. I was actually able to do just that—or at least feel like it—when I recently got around to reading Alexander Poznansky’s landmark biography Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man . Poznansky doesn’t attempt to analyze or describe the music we’ve known and loved for over a century, but rather portrays the social milieu in which Tchaikovsky lived and how he moved through it. In the pro- cess, he exposes as false many of the judgments and preconceptions that have surrounded and obscured Tchaikovsky, such as the image of him as a tortured, depressed soul nearly incapacitated by guilt over his sexual orientation. Less than a year after his disastrous attempt at marriage, the composer wrote to his brother Anatoly, “Only now … have I finally begun to understand that there is nothing more fruitless than wanting to be other than what I am by nature.” And Russian society at that time was surprisingly accepting; or, as the poet Aleksey Apukhtin assured the composer, he had thousands of admirers and close friends who “do not care what sauce you prefer on your asparagus: sour, sweet, or oily.” The author extensively quotes Tchaikovsky’s own letters and diary entries, and it must be admitted that Tchaikovsky indulged in a highly melodramatic style in his writings—but hey, this was 19th-century Russia, and most prose of that time and place tended to run purple. Poznansky is so successful in illuminating Tchaikovsky’s humanity that his detailed description of the composer’s death at the end of the book doesn’t feel like a clinical report of a distant historic event; rather, he evokes the emotional devastation of losing a close friend. The book also raised in my mind two issues not specific to Tchaikovsky. One is censorship: Tchaikovsky’s private papers were thoroughly censored first by his surviving family members, then by the Russian/Soviet government, which held the documents in guarded secrecy, so the copies Poznansky was able to examine were heavily redacted. The result yields a surprisingly humorous consequence of an otherwise unfortunate practice. Regular viewers of Jimmy Kimmel Live will be familiar with a recurring feature on his show, “This Week in Unnecessary Censorship.” The segment consists of a series of clips from newscasts or political speeches in which strategically selected words are bleeped, creating the illusion that something really dirty was being said. That same dynamic is operative in Tchaikovsky’s letters when his descrip- tions of personal feelings or social encounters end abruptly with a bracketed note, “[the rest is cut by a censor].” What actually ensued may well have been as innocent as holding hands, but what the censor has provided is a blank screen onto which you can project the wildest fantasies your fevered imagination can conjure. Which, I am quite confident, was not what the censor was attempting to achieve. The heavy reliance upon Tchaikovsky’s own written words brought another concern to my mind. Someone I worked for many years ago once voiced the prediction that ours is the first society that will leave no permanent record. We can read the letters of Tchaikovsky and countless other prominent figures of the past few centuries; we can even examine scrolls, parchments, and illuminated manuscripts from thousands of years ago. But what about today’s creative ge- niuses? How will future historians re-create their stories? Does anyone seriously expect that the countless emails and tweets, usually hastily and carelessly sent in profusion, will still be accessible from the “cloud” hundreds of years from now? Not very likely. But back to Tchaikovsky. As I said, by the end of Poznansky’s book, I genuine- ly felt an emotional connection to someone who has remained one of my favorite composers throughout my entire life. Yet, in acquiring that connection, I also came to another understanding of the man Poznansky describes as “capricious” and “depending on the mood of the moment”; a man who treasured his privacy and deeply resented social obligations—like dinner invitations. In other words, I may well have dinner with Bess and Tuth, but in all likelihood, Pyotr’s seat at the table will be empty. John Schauer is a freelance writer and enough of a Tchaikovsky fanatic that he will persist in sending psychic invitations until the composer relents and at least agrees to meet for cocktails. Evening Company by Vladimir Makovsky (1875) RAVINIA MAGAZINE • AUGUST 15 – AUGUST 27, 2023 82