putting Tchaikovsky off: “To lower an acknowledged genius to the level of their lack of understanding is a quality of intellectually limited people.”4
Paradoxically, Tolstoy, justly celebrated for the psychological insights in his work, did not do so well in person with Tchaikovsky. He did not notice—or simply ignored—the extreme nervousness of that small, delicate, and seemingly acquiescent man with his neat gray beard. That is obvious from Tolstoy’s later description of his meetings with the composer: “I think there was a bond between us.” (If there was anything, it was lingering irritation on the part of Tchaikovsky.)
Tolstoy pursued his uninvited expansion into Tchaikovsky’s realm, sending him an old edition of Russian folk songs, which he himself loved (he even figured out the piano accompaniment to one of them), with a suggestion that the composer write arrangements of them and with precise instructions how to do it: “In the Mozart-Haydn mode, not in the Beethoven-Schumann-Berlioz mode, so artificial and pretentious.”5
Bearing in mind Tchaikovsky’s shyness and his admiration for Tolstoy the writer, the response from the usually polite composer was uncharacteristically direct. Tchaikovsky wrote Tolstoy that the folk songs he had sent him (“an amazing treasure,” Tolstoy had called it) were recorded “by an untutored hand and so bear only the traces of their original beauty.”6 He flatly refused to execute Tolstoy’s idea about arranging the songs.
Still, Tchaikovsky buffered his refusal in some pleasantries and a request for a photograph as a memento of their meetings. But the angered Tolstoy did not oblige with his photograph, even though he routinely sent out hundreds to fans, and began denigrating the composer’s works as an “artistic lie.” In 1894, after Tchaikovsky’s death, Tolstoy summed up his opinion of the composer this way: “So-so, one of the average ones.”7
In October 1878, Tolstoy wrote to Turgenev in Paris, complaining that he had been suffering a “mental breakdown” of late, overcome by “a complex feeling in which the main part is shame and fear that people are laughing at me … it seems to me that you are laughing at me, too.” At the end, Tolstoy asked an unexpected question: “What is Tchaikovsky’s
Everything about this letter is curious—Tolstoy’s admission of his psychological vulnerability as well as his inexplicable interest in the latest work by a composer he so disliked (the piano score of the opera had just appeared).
In response, Turgenev, somewhat smugly, explained that although “some of your writing pleased me greatly, and others I did not like at all,” he had never laughed at them and expressed the rather ironic hope that Tolstoy’s “mental illness” had passed.
As for Tchaikovsky’s
It is without a doubt marvelous music; the lyrical, melodic parts are especially fine. But what a libretto! Just imagine, Pushkin’s descriptions of the protagonists are put into their mouths. For example, Pushkin says of Lensky: He sang of life’s end / At barely the age of 18, etc.
And in the opera, Lensky sings: I sing of life’s end, etc.
And it’s like that throughout.9
We know Tolstoy’s reaction to Turgenev’s letter from his own to his friend the poet Afanasy Fet: “Yesterday I received a letter from Turgenev, and decided to keep my distance from him. He’s such an unpleasant bully.” After that summary, the letter from the unpleasant bully should have sunk into oblivion. But no. Mysteriously, Turgenev’s review of the opera—and, interestingly, only the negative part, with the criticism of the libretto—instantly circulated throughout Moscow’s cultural circles.
The only person who could have given such publicity to Turgenev’s letter was Tolstoy himself. He was a master of manipulating public opinion. His wife once compared him to a spider catching wretched buzzing flies in his web. Tolstoy must have really enjoyed humiliating Tchaikovsky using Turgenev’s words.
The phenomenal speed with which the acidulous response traveled is explained by special circumstances. Music in Russia then (and now) played a marginal role compared to literature. But here was the opinion of one great writer in a letter to another about a new musical work based on Pushkin’s
No one cared that the particular example Turgenev used to prove Tchaikovsky’s unforgivable distortion of Pushkin did not actually exist in the libretto. It was Turgenev’s error, made worse by his assertion that the whole libretto was like that. His accidental mistake, disseminated by Tolstoy, and thereby supported by his powerful authority, was about to undermine the reputation of the as yet unperformed opera (which was probably what Tolstoy intended) among the literature-centric Moscow public.
It had that effect, according to Modest Tchaikovsky, the composer’s brother, who was present at the premiere of
The impression Turgenev’s letter made on newsmakers was so strong that even six years later, after the opera’s premiere at the Imperial Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1884, an influential journalist, Alexei Suvorin, quoted Turgenev in his review in the popular newspaper
Tchaikovsky was in a panic. He tried inviting Tolstoy to a Moscow performance of his opera, for him to see that there was no “blasphemy,” but Tolstoy ignored the invitation and later recalled, after the composer’s death, “I think he was hurt that I did not attend his
Trying to control the damage, Tchaikovsky literally dictated an article to a friendly music critic, which proclaimed that it was too easy “to dismiss the new opera with a few loud phrases about the profanation of Pushkin.”11 Following Tchaikovsky’s prompting, the critic tried to explain both the innovative character of the work (not a traditional opera but “lyrical scenes,” as Tchaikovsky called it) and the unusual degree of the composer’s psychological identification with Pushkin’s characters.
The article could only hint at what is now well known. In the spring of 1877, Tchaikovsky received several letters from one Antonina Milyukova, twenty-eight, a former student of the Moscow Conservatory who had fallen in love with him. The letters made a profound impression on the thirty-eight-year-old composer who consequently wrote the opera based on
Pushkin has the cold Onegin reject the letter of the naive, emotional Tatiana. He, and therefore his readers, interpreted the rational Onegin’s attitude as a fatal mistake. Apparently, Tchaikovsky decided not to repeat
