U-M scholar's "Tchaikovsky" offers biography and musical analysis
“I’ll give you the excuses in a moment,” Wiley, a member of the University of Michigan School of Music faculty, said in a phone interview.
He enumerates a death in the family, a Tchaikovsky entry for the “New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,” another book, “Tchaikovsky’s Ballets,” in the pipeline and the fall of the Soviet Union, which precipitated an avalanche of newly available materials.
So you might envision a magnum opus — grand in size as well as scope. But you’d be only partly right. Both the life and music of Tchaikovsky receive ample treatment in Wiley’s “Tchaikovsky,” published in August by Oxford University Press as part of its Master Musicians Series. But as for size, Wiley says, “It started out very long and it grew shorter, for commercial reasons.”
Still, it weighs in at over 500 pages, divided between biography and musical analysis, with the latter section beefy but somewhat reduced because “book publishers don’t want a lot of that,” Wiley said, referring to the analysis.
Tchaikovsky was a musical giant in his day, though some of his works received a puzzled reception (including the beloved “Nutcracker”). “His funeral was like that of a head of state,” Wiley notes.
And whether one considers the ballets — “Swan Lake,” “Sleeping Beauty” and, of course, “Nutcracker” — or symphonies like the “Pathetique” or operas like “Eugene Onegin” or “Queen of Spades,” Tchaikovsky’s music has enjoyed enduring and enviable popularity among audiences.
What has endeared his music to the masses is “beauty for the sake of beauty,” Wiley says. “If Tchaikovsky gets a beautiful idea, he writes it down,” Wiley says, He worries about the technical possibilities of the ideas second. That’s unlike some of the German-school masters like Brahms or even Bach, he adds, for whom the technical possibilities of their ideas — how they can manipulate them — are prime.
In academia, the beauty of Tchaikovsky has been suspect, to some degree; there Tchaikovsky has endured the consequences of a “hateful popularity” that Wiley feels a duty to help the composer overcome in the ivory tower.
“I think it’s just a longstanding prejudice in academia,” he says, “but there is a slow change.” He is happy when colleagues accost him in the School of Music parking lot to say that, wow, the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 is actually really wonderful after all, once you go beneath the surface.
“There is depth and sophistication there,” Wiley is happy to concur. Whether in his symphonic works, his ballets, or his operas, Tchaikovsky, Wiley says, is not imitating Western forms less than perfectly, but rather crafting his own route, often plying Russian roads, as in the last movement of the fourth symphony, where Wiley tracks him artfully using folkloric material: the themes dissolve just as do the bridal wreaths tossed in the waters in the text of the folksong, “In a Field Stood a Birch Tree,” that Tchaikovsky quotes.
Sometimes, when he plies Russian roads, as in his opera “Eugene Onegin,” based on Pushkin’s poem, he takes his Russian sources on transformational detours.
“He has a different take from Pushkin,” who is sardonic where Tchaikovsky is serious, Wiley notes. The death of all things concerns Tchaikovsky here (“You understand why Russians love it so much,” Wiley says). One proof is that Tchaikovsky even — as one of Wiley’s sources insists — quotes the Mozart Requiem.
On the biographical side of the equation, Wiley wanted to set a number of matters to right. It wasn’t until relatively recent times, he says, that the life of the composer — his homosexuality (and its supposed reflection in his music, on which Wiley casts a wary eye); his disastrous marriage; his relationship to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, whom he never met; and the circumstances of his death — began to overshadow his music. And much of what circulated for truth needed fixing. For example, Wiley says we really don’t know, and may never find out, what “killed” Tchaikovsky at 53. Was it suicide? Cholera? Foul play? The controversy arose within days of his death, and Wiley reviews the evidence and settles on “probably from natural causes,” a less sensational option than other options here.
The “flawed data reach back to the wellsprings of Tchaikovsky’s biography,” Wiley writes, defining that wellspring as Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest’s, three-volume “The Life of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.” How much did Modest, in this fundamental turn-of-the-last-century work, obscure or leave out for the sake of propriety and other reasons? Wiley writes “that Modest fictionalized parts of ‘The Life’ and omitted references to Pyotr’s sexuality and awkward family circumstances.”
“Modest had to be reined in,” Wiley says, explaining one of the motivations for undertaking the biography. “There is mischief on every page, and something had to be done to adjust the view for later generations.”
With his book out now, Wiley is hardly abandoning the composer he has championed these years. He is merely shifting his gaze, readying himself for a book about the choreographer most associated with Tchaikovsky’s ballets, Marius Petipa, a seminal figure in Russian ballet whose professional life is far better documented than his personal life. So there are mysteries to be solved and documents — reams of them, including nearly a century of newspaper files and all of the printed libretti of the ballets — to sort through.
“I’ve had a 40-year project on Marius Petipa,” he says. “You don’t know how much you collect in 40 years.”
Susan Isaacs Nisbett is a free-lance writer who covers classical music and dance for AnnArbor.com.
Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the fourth movement of the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4:
In March, the University Musical Society brings Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony to Hill Auditorium. The Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, with violinist Christian Tetzlaff, is on the bill. For tickets and information, go to the UMS web site.