‘From today I seriously intend to enter into lawful matrimony with anyone at all.’ This was the seemingly frivolous comment that the great Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky made to his his brother Modest in 1876. Tchaikovsky was 36 years old at the time. Of marriageable age, in short, although if you know much about tuhe composer’s life you’ll know that this wouldn’t have been a wise move. Nonetheless, Tchaikovsky was in deadly earnest. The following year, true to his word, he would take a wife.
Who did Tchaikovsky marry?
On 18 July the following year, just 11 months later, Tchaikovsky married Antonina Milyukova, a woman eight years his junior, at a Moscow ceremony with most of his family absent. Why did Tchaikosvky marry, and what happened next?
Their union lasted the blink of an eyelid: two months later they separated, never to be reunited. What had gone so spectacularly wrong?
The official line, peddled for decades by friends and family of Tchaikovsky, was that his wife Antonina was to blame. A one-time student of Tchaikovsky’s at the Moscow Conservatory, she wrote to him in the spring of 1877 confessing her long-held love and admiration. Against his better judgement Tchaikovsky replied, starting a correspondence which Antonina described as ‘not without interest’.
‘A crazed half-wit’
The two were, though, desperately ill-matched. Despite a respectable family background, Antonina was, Tchaikovsky wrote, ‘utterly poor’ with only an ‘average level’ of education. His brother Modest was even more unkind, calling her a ‘crazed half-wit’ who was unable to understand her future husband’s refined sensibilities and intellectual interests. In truth, however, Tchaikovsky’s blind desire to suddenly marry ‘anyone at all’, and use her as a cloak to hide his homosexuality from society, was the real culprit.
He had good reason to fear that his sexuality could ruin a career that had already yielded masterpieces such as the ballet Swan Lake and the First Piano Concerto. Russian society of the period tolerated homosexuality only if it remained private. Declaring it publicly would, Tchaikovsky realised, bring shame and scandal, and ‘pain to the people close to me’.
‘No deflowering took place… nor is it likely to happen’
But was marrying a woman he barely knew and didn’t love – ‘to shut the mouths of all those scum whose opinions I don’t give a damn about’ – really the answer? For a while it seemed it might be. Tchaikovsky told Modest he wanted a woman who would ‘not interfere with my peace of mind or my freedom’, and initially he reported Antonina was ‘blindly compliant with my every wish’. This included, he added breezily, the non-consummation of the marriage. ‘No deflowering took place,’ he wrote of their wedding night, ‘nor is it likely to happen any time soon.’
This unnaturally contrived situation, stifling for Antonina, couldn’t last. Tchaikovsky admitted to finding her physically ‘absolutely repulsive’, a rejection which must have shaken Antonina deeply. He spoke of ‘unbearable moral torments’ and was unable to write music. Wracked with anxiety, he suffered a complete nervous collapse and fled to Switzerland, leaving a hapless Antonina behind.
Some of the tormented passions of this period found their way into Eugene Onegin, the opera he was writing.
Did Tchaikovsky’s sexuality play a part in his failed marriage?
‘The best of all his operas,’ Antonina later called it, ‘because it is based on us’ – though in fact Tchaikovsky had started composing it before their first encounter. The two remained officially married – divorce was complicated in tsarist Russia – but the rift was total. From that point on, Tchaikovsky vilified his wife as ‘the reptile’, and Antonina has been demonised for destabilising their marriage with unreasonable emotional demands, not least by those keen to airbrush the composer’s sexuality from official narratives of his life.
Nowadays, however, we may view her as a largely unwitting victim of a sexually repressive society, and of a husband whose attempt to hide his own sexuality led to marital disaster – albeit some recent biographers have claimed that prior to his untimely death he was reconciled to his homosexuality. Antonina outlived Tchaikovsky by 23 years although, sadly, she spent most of this time in psychiatric hospitals.
Clues to Tchaikovsky’s unhappiness in his music
Alongside the tortured passions of Eugene Onegin, it’s interesting to look at some of the other music Tchaikovsky composed during this relatively short but intensely unhappy period of his life. 1877, the year of his marriage, also saw him working on his Fourth Symphony, whose first movement has an incredibly powerful, urgent, and (you might say) doom-laden ‘Fate’ motif. A cry for help from Tchaikovsky, an outward expression of his feelings of powerlessness and incarceration within a deeply unhappy relationship? Here it is in a suitably emotional performance by the great Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic:
Conversely, among the pieces that Tchaikovsky composed after the breakup of his marriage is his wonderfully eloquent, ebullient Violin Concerto – for our money one of the very greatest violin concertos in the repertoire. Could this exuberant, richly colourful piece be – among other things – an expression of joy at his release from this disastrously unhappy time?
As well as being one of the best ballet composers ever, Tchaikovsky is considered one of the greatest composers of all time
Read our reviews of the latest Tchaikovsky recordings