Introducing Tchaikovsky the merry scamp

Some years ago, following a Christmas performance of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, I sat in one of the dives near the theatre with a member of the corps de ballet, the gay son of close friends. The audience had been populated largely by children and teenagers, most of whom were either smitten by the intrepid, empathetic Clara or wanted to be her. Yet the mood perceptibly shifted when, at the end of Act I, the life-sized nutcracker doll transformed into a most handsome prince, all grace and gluts. ‘Do you think in that moment,’ I asked my dancer friend, ‘that a smattering of adolescent boys, out on a family treat, notice their affections shifting from Clara to the Prince and receive there and then the gentlest yet unmistakable insight into their future selves?’ ‘Oh absolutely,’ he answered.

One could reasonably expect similar such tales of awakened, sublimated or explicit sexuality in a book about a famously gay and tortured composer (more on this in a moment), whose opening pages promise tales of rough trade and language, and whose distinguished author has talked of censorial predecessors excluding from their biographies anything that strayed from ‘the conventional and misleading suffering melancholic narrative’. Yet classical ballet, like much else here, is a strangely chaste affair. (The author’s contextualisation and analysis of Tchaikovsky’s sensuous ‘Overture-Fantasia’, his retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is a welcome exception.) And neither the bit-player rough trade nor the promised bounty from long suppressed archival sources shifts the narrative dial to any great extent.

Not that warhorses aren’t trotted out, prodded and then led back to their stall, a spring in their step. Simon Morrison is admirable in his treatment of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony – a piece historically lumbered with saddlebags of pathos and speculation owing to a programme note Tchaikovsky sketched, yet never published, outlining the work’s arc of fate, doubt, lament and providence – travelling with ease through a century of psycho-sexual analysis.