Serenade, page 16
But again and again he returned home, to Tschaikovsky, the Russian composer of his boyhood debut in The Sleeping Beauty. And at the end of his life, at age seventy-seven, he came back, yet one last time, to Tschaikovsky, in his transcendent masterpiece Mozartiana, which he positioned—no, he did not say this, but how clear it is!—in heaven, a joyous place filled with wit, elegance, and explicit prayer, with dancers dressed in black, trimmed in white lace. So Balanchine closed his travels with Tschaikovsky in a perfect circle: this 1981 version of Mozartiana was an entirely new ballet to the same music that had marked his first full ballet to Tschaikovsky, in 1933, at age twenty-nine.[*3] But in his final version, Balanchine, rascal to the end, changed, as he did with Serenade, the order of the composer’s score.
Serenade thus became Balanchine’s second complete ballet to the composer’s work, and it is interesting to note that in both of these scores Tschaikovsky paid homage to his musical god: “I not only love Mozart, I worship him.” I view Serenade as Balanchine’s communion with Tschaikovsky, a spiritual union that endured, fully alive, for the remaining fifty years of Balanchine’s life. The last festival he conceived, in 1981, two years before he died, when he was already in declining health, was to celebrate Tschaikovsky; it featured over twenty works by the composer. Alas, Tschaikovsky never knew, never saw, the beauty Balanchine shaped to his work, or the incalcuable effect that these ballets have had in bringing his music to a whole new audience in their visualizations—nor did he hear the changes his compatriot made in his music!
I, too, love Tschaikovsky. For most dancers, his music is the pervasive aural aura of our earliest years at the barre, in class variations, in teenage school performances. And, for me, it became the physically inculcated soundtrack of my young life when, starting at age eleven, I danced, year after year, in The Nutcracker. (I did know who the Beatles were and had heard of the Rolling Stones and of someone who growled unintelligibly called Bob Dylan and another who groaned unintelligibly called Leonard Cohen—but they were all of less than little interest.) Here lies a great obstacle for me: using words on a page to convey the experience of Serenade. The music, the music, the music. While I certainly can accurately describe these thirty-three minutes of celestial sound as lyrical, melancholy, delicate, anguished, sacral, otherworldly, exalted, vivacious, joyous, and elegiac, this will transmit to you little actual feeling. What I cannot convey is the effect of these sounds, rhythms, moods, or swaying melodies. Music enters the mind instantly like no other medium, and, if a connection is made in the core, can pierce the heart. It carves out a different route than language, blessedly bypassing intellect. “Tenderness” is perhaps the single word—should I have to choose one—to describe Tschaikovsky’s Serenade, tenderness punctuated by sorrow. The sorrow. The rapture and the loss, inseparable. And the violins—ah, the violins!
Unlike Balanchine, who left us only his ballets as his autobiography, Tschaikovsky was quite the correspondent and wrote not only voluminously—over five thousand letters to almost four hundred recipients—but eloquently, intimately, often with brutal honesty.
How beautifully Tschaikovsky breaks—as does Balanchine—the much-adored romanticization of the great artist with a raging ego and selfish temperament. His letters demonstrate compassion and kindness, generosity, penetrating self-knowledge, warmth, frequent gratitude, and a moving humility. He called himself on one occasion “merely a talented person, but no extraordinary phenomenon.” But he also revealed his irritability, shyness, reclusiveness, sensitivity, and moody, highly emotional states; he wept easily, frequently. He offers numerous damning judgments: he detested Brahms—“What a giftless bastard!”—calling him “a pot-bellied boozer” and “a conceited mediocrity”—all the while also enjoying the occasional inebriated socializing with him. And he wrote much about the day in, day out relentless struggle, particularly as his celebrity grew, to obtain the right conditions, to be alone, to work.
“I love fame and strive for it with all my soul,” he wrote the year he composed Serenade. “But from this, though, it does not follow that I love the manifestations of fame that take the form of banquets, suppers, and musical soirées, at which I have indeed suffered, just as I always suffer in the company of people who are alien to me…I want, desire, and love people to take an interest in my music and to praise and love it, but I have never sought to get them to take an interest in me personally, in the way I look or in what I say.”
His description of the delicate, thrilling process he calls “inspiration” is unmatched in its clarity:
The SEED of a future composition usually reveals itself suddenly, in the most unexpected fashion. If the soil is favourable…this seed takes root with inconceivable strength and speed, bursts through the soil, puts out roots, leaves, twigs and finally flowers. I cannot define the creative process except through this metaphor…All the rest happens of its own accord. It would be futile for me to try and express to you in words the boundless bliss of that feeling that envelops me when the main idea has appeared…I forget everything, I am almost insane, everything inside me trembles and writhes…one idea presses upon another. Sometimes in the middle of this enchanted process some jolt from outside suddenly wakens you from this somnambulist state…and reminds you that you have to go about your business. These breaks are painful, inexpressibly painful…But there is no other way. If that state of the artist’s soul…were to continue unbroken, it would not be possible to survive a single day; the strings would snap and the instrument would shatter to smithereens. Only one thing is necessary: that the main idea…appear not through SEARCHING but of its own accord as the result of that supernatural, incomprehensible force which no one has explained, and which is called INSPIRATION…I consider it is the duty of the artist never to give way, for LAZINESS is a very powerful human trait. For an artist there is nothing worse…Inspiration is a guest who does not like visiting those who are lazy. She reveals herself to those who invite her. YOU MUST, YOU HAVE TO OVERCOME YOURSELF.
Such eloquence throws into stark relief the virtually total lack of writing of any kind left to us by Balanchine, who said, “I am silence.” He left no diaries, no memoirs, a bare handful of short notes—a rarity among artists of all disciplines. Truly he was a cloud passing over and wanted it so.
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Pyotr Illyich Tschaikovsky’s life was defined by his relationships with three women: his mother, his wife, and his patron. Born in 1840 in Votkinsk, a small town about nine hundred miles southeast of St. Petersburg, Tschaikovsky was the second son of a family with six children and many generations of men dedicated to military and government service. His Ukrainian Cossack great-grandfather served under Peter the Great. And the civil service was to be young Pyotr’s destiny—as it was to be Georgi’s. Tschaikovsky’s mother, eighteen years her husband’s junior, was, also like Balanchine’s, his father’s second, much younger, wife.
At age ten, the boy was abruptly separated from his family, when he was shipped off (again, like young Balanchivadze) to board at the prestigious Imperial School for Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, to train as an imperial administrator. Four years later his mother’s sudden death from cholera began his lifelong mourning.
“Tchaikovsky loved his mother more than his father,” Balanchine told Volkov. “Even when he was a grown man he couldn’t talk about her without tears…It was an open wound for the rest of his life…Childhood impressions are…always the most powerful. This holds particularly for musicians and dancers because they usually start studying music and ballet at a very early age.”
While the young Tschaikovsky had been an outstanding student—in addition to Russian, he spoke Italian, French, English, and German—he also excelled at piano and composition. After completing his course at the School of Jurisprudence, he decided, at age twenty-two, to devote himself to music, and his talent, soon recognized, resulted in a teaching position at the newly established Moscow Conservatory. By his midthirties he had already become a well-recognized composer of singular, occasionally controversial, accomplishment. When he composed Serenade, in 1880, he was just forty years old, but the preceding few years had been the worst of his life—defining years, precipitated by his marriage.
Pyotr Illyich Tschaikovsky, 1867 (ullstein bild Dtl./Getty Images)
Tschaikovsky was homosexual at a time in Russia when it was very dangerous and illegal, and the attendant shame and secrecy were particularly threatening to one of budding fame and ambition, so he decided at age thirty-six that he must abandon “forever my habits.” (He never did.) He wrote to Modest, one of his brothers, who was also homosexual: “I find that our inclinations are for both of us the greatest and most insurmountable obstacle to happiness, and we must fight our nature with all our strength.”
Fate soon provided. In May 1877, the composer received several unsolicited, passionate letters from a twenty-eight-year-old woman, Antonina Ivanovna Miliukova, who had briefly attended the Moscow Conservatory. She had been secretly in love with Tschaikovsky for four years, since a chance meeting that he did not recall.
“I am dying of longing,” she wrote to the composer. “My first kiss will be given to you and to no one else in the world…I cannot live without you, and so maybe soon I shall kill myself. So let me see you and kiss you so that I may remember that kiss in the other world.” Thus began the disaster.
“I have decided to marry,” wrote Tschaikovsky to Modest. “It’s unavoidable. I have to do this, and not only for myself, but also for you…for everyone I love. Especially for you!…Homosexuality and pedagogy cannot get along together.”
Miliukova and Tschaikovsky had met for the first time at his instigation on June 1, and three days later he proposed, telling her what she could expect from him “and on what she should not count,” namely he offered her “brotherly” love. He told her that he required complete “freedom,” though it is quite possible, given the times, that his bride-to-be still did not comprehend that he was homosexual—or perhaps she did not regard this as a hindrance.
“Why did I do this?” he wrote three days before the wedding. “Some force of Fate was driving me to this girl…I told my future wife that I did not love her…It is very distressing, through force of circumstances, to be drawn into the position of a bridegroom who, moreover, is not in the least attracted to his bride.” But Tschaikovsky was, of course, inherently romantic—not about conjugal bliss but about “Fate” as a living force.
At the altar—one of the two witnesses was Tschaikovsky’s most recent young lover—he cried when asked to kiss his bride. Within days of cohabiting, he wrote of his “intolerable spiritual torments.” The thought of her bathing he found so “totally repugnant” that he left their apartment and went to church to Mass to pray. “It appeared to me,” he wrote, that “the only good part of myself, that is, my musical talent, had perished irretrievably. My future rose up before me as some pitiful vegetation and the most insufferable and pedestrian comedy…death seemed the only way out.” He found his wife to be “an unbearable encumbrance,” “a terrible wound,” and spoke of drowning himself.
The couple separated in the fall after having lived together a total of thirty-three days: the marriage remained unconsummated. Tschaikovsky descended into an unprecedented state of emotional anxiety, a breakdown—possibly exaggerated by him and his family to justify his hasty escape.
Though she twice refused his requests to divorce, the couple never lived together again, but he supported her financially thereafter. By 1884 she had given birth to three illegitimate children with a lover, but she gave them up to an orphanage for pecuniary, health, and legal reasons.[*4]
All three children died before age eight.
Antonina Tschaikovskaya outlived her famous husband by twenty-four years, spending the last twenty of them in an insane asylum with “paranoia chronica” that included hallucinations and delirium. The lifelong pension from Tschaikovsky’s will paid for her keep. Her grave has long since disappeared.
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A bare six months before his nuptials another woman had made herself known to Tschaikovsky. Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck was no dreamy, naive young woman in love but a formidable force who would change the composer’s life forever and is now inseparably melded to the music he left us.
Von Meck, at age forty-five, was nine years older than Tschaikovsky and recently widowed, leaving her an incredibly wealthy woman, when she first wrote to the musician whose work she much admired. Music was von Meck’s great passion, and she wanted something for herself—she was a pianist—and her in-house violinist to play for her own pleasure. The remuneration was handsome; inept with money, Tschaikovsky was ever in need and immediately complied, inaugurating a fourteen-year friendship.
After an elaborate confession to von Meck of his marital debacle, she offered Tschaikovsky a very generous yearly stipend of six thousand rubles (a civil servant at the time earned only three to four hundred rubles a year), which allowed the composer to renounce his teaching at the Moscow Conservatory and devote himself entirely to his composition.
“You know how I love you, how I wish you the best in everything,” she wrote with graceful insistence. “You know how many happy moments you have afforded me, how deeply grateful I am to you for them, how necessary you are to me, and how for me you must be exactly that which you were created to be. Consequently I am not doing anything for you, but everything for myself…so do not prevent me from giving my attention to your housekeeping, Pyotr Ilich!”
“Every note that will now pour out from under my pen,” he wrote to the woman he called “my own Providence,” “will be dedicated to you. Never, never, not for one second, while working, I will not forget that you give me the opportunity to continue my artistic vocation.” On another occasion, he demonstrated with startling directness their ease with each other, stating, “You are the only person in the world I am not ashamed to ask for money. First, you are very kind and generous; second, you are rich.”
While one cannot measure the exact effect this financial stability had on his output for the remainder of his life, it can be safely assumed that von Meck’s support gave us much music that perhaps otherwise would not have been made. This was patronage of the highest order—though it came with peculiar strings attached, or, more accurately, unattached.
Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck. “Music puts me in a state of intoxication,” she wrote. “One is mysteriously propelled…into a world whose magic is so great that one would be willing to die in this condition.”
Von Meck requested from the very start that they never meet in person. Tschaikovsky, suffering similarly from their mutual “illness” of “misanthropy,” agreed.
“My ideal man is a musician,” she explained. “The more I am enchanted by you, the more I fear acquaintance…I prefer to think of you in the distance, to hear your music, and to feel myself at one with you in it. Of my imaginary relationship with you…I will say only that this relationship, however abstract it may be, is precious to me as the best, the highest of all feelings of which human nature is capable.” She did, however, ask for a photo of him, and spoke of being “delirious” over his music.
Tschaikovsky, in accord, wrote back of “that disenchantment, that yearning for the ideal that follows upon every intimacy…I am in no way surprised that, loving my music, you are not attempting to make the acquaintance of its author…you would not find…that complete harmony between the musician and the man.”
On a single occasion, due to missed messages about a change in her daily schedule, they came face-to-face when he was out on one of his frequent walks while staying, at her invitation, in his own well-appointed house on one of her enormous estates. She, in her carriage, froze, and he just tipped his hat. Not a word was spoken, and both were shaken by the chance encounter.
“I am very unsympathetic in my personal relations,” von Meck wrote to her “beloved friend.” “I do not possess any femininity whatever; second, I do not know how to be tender.” This from the woman who had once written to Tschaikovsky of his marriage, “the thought of you with that woman was unbearable. I hated her because she did not make you happy; but I would have hated her 100 times more if she had.” Her years of devotion to Tschaikovsky belie in a stroke her claim that she lacked tenderness.
For over thirteen years, they wrote to each other weekly, sometimes daily, often at great length, resulting in an astonishingly intimate epistolary outpouring that produced (due to Tschaikovsky’s noncompliance with her request to destroy the letters) over twelve hundred letters that fill three volumes and offer an unprecedented window into the man behind the music.
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In June 1880, Tschaikovsky received the suggestion to write a commemorative piece for an upcoming Moscow Exhibition to celebrate the Russian defeat of Napoléon in 1812. He was disgruntled at both the request to produce music glorifying “what [delighted him] not at all,” and the imprecise remuneration.
