Love me, or go to hell

This is a wonderful and moving book of correspondence and biographical documents promising one Tchaikovsky in its subtitle and introduction, but actually delivering another — and thank the musical gods for that. Nothing here is horrid or even secret; the Russian edition was published in 2009 and has been used by English-speaking authorities since. And yet it claims to ‘unlock’ scandal: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky often swore in his letters (shock!), had many homosexual encounters, including one-night stands (covered in previous biographies) and felt at home in the upper echelons of the 19th-century Russian autocracy.

Indeed, some find Tchaikovsky troublesome, such as the Soviets, readers of this book’s original Russian edition (one review thinking it a hoax, a gay composer not being seen as capable of beauty), and even partly Tchaikovsky himself, who burnt many of his diaries. As he wrote to his brother Modest in one of the book’s (previously published) letters: ‘Can you understand how it kills me that people who love me can sometimes feel ashamed of me!’ — a desperately painful comment then as now.