<\/p>
‘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<\/a> 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 the 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. <\/strong><\/p> On 18 July the following year, just 11 months later, Tchaikovsky married Antonina Miliukova, a woman eight years his junior, at a Moscow ceremony with most of his family absent. Why did Tchaikosvky marry, and what happened next?<\/p> Their union lasted the blink of an eyelid: two months later they separated, never to be reunited. What had gone so spectacularly wrong?<\/p> 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\u2019s 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 \u2018not without interest\u2019.<\/p> The two were, though, desperately ill-matched. Despite a respectable family background, Antonina was, Tchaikovsky wrote, \u2018utterly poor\u2019 with only an \u2018average level\u2019 of education. His brother Modest was even more unkind, calling her a \u2018crazed half-wit\u2019 who was unable to understand her future husband\u2019s refined sensibilities and intellectual interests. In truth, however, Tchaikovsky\u2019s blind desire to suddenly marry \u2018anyone at all\u2019, and use her as a cloak to hide his homosexuality from society, was the real culprit.<\/p> He had good reason to fear that his sexuality could ruin a career that had already yielded masterpieces such as the ballet Swan Lake<\/a><\/strong><\/i> 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 \u2018pain to the people close to me\u2019.<\/p> Who did Tchaikovsky marry?<\/h2>
‘A crazed half-wit’<\/h2>