Question by hi!!: Did Tchaikovsky ever reflect his inability to accept his homosexuality in his music?
if so, which pieces?
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suhwahaksaeng says
I understand that when Tchaikovsky wrote his Pathetique Symphony,
he was thinking of his nephew, who was 14 years old at the time.
As far as I know, no one has ever found any stylistic correlates for male hetero’s, male homo’s, female hetero’s, and female homo’s.
In a composition contest, the judges were once asked to guess which compositions were by boys and which were by girls. In making that guess, the judges didn’t do any better than chance.
Larry says
I actually was Piotr Ilich’s gay lover (we all called him Peter, for obvious reasons) and I can tell you that being a homo had no effect on his composing. Other than the occasional Neapolitan sixth chord and those phallic cannons in the 1812 Overture.
del_icious_manager says
As has been said already, one can’t be that specific in music about such things (or, even if Tchaikovsky intended to put it into his music, there’s no guarantee we would interpret it correctly).
This having been said, Tchaikovsky wrote a lot of letters to his benefactor Nadyezhda von Meck at the time he was writing his 5th Symphony. Included among his writings is a suggested programme for the 5th Symphony, which reads as follows:
“Programme of the first movement of the Symphony: Introduction. Complete resignation before Fate or, which is the same, before the inscrutable predestination of Providence. ‘Allegro’ (I) Murmurs, doubts, plaints, reproaches against XXX. (II) Shall I throw myself in the embrace of faith???”
The ‘XXX’ was Tchaikovsky’s code for his homosexuality, which tormented him throughout his life (19th-century Russia was not a good place to be a homosexual in the public gaze).
This is as near as anything I know which directly expresses Tchaikovsky’s personal anguish in relation to one of his works.
petr b says
Music, without text, is a non-verbal medium.
There is no real transliterating a group of notes into any verbal medium, any more than there is a valid transliteration to a pictorial medium.
The cliche ‘Music is a language’ is of itself an Analogy, not meant to be taken literally.
Anything that anyone says about the ‘meaning’ of any piece of music is basically displaying their own personal conjecture or thought, and nothing else.
Artists often enough say something to a friend or colleague about some intent they have about a piece they are working on, again put into words because they do not yet have the completed piece to send.
Words about the meaning of music, beyond the nitty-gritty of technical terms or purely musical aspects of the craft, are simply not to be trusted.
“When words leave off, music begins.” ~ Heinrich Heine
Best regards.
Lilya says
6th Symphony
df74sg says
I heard some of his pieces sounded very “tortured” and “anguished”. May have reflected on his personal life.
Malcolm D says
No it is not possible to portray anything that specific in instrumental music
adagio58 says
Yes, in a way. His later symphonies are sooo sad and this has been commented on as reflecting his personal life too.