In the summer of 1864, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, aged 24 and a second-year student at
the St Petersburg Conservatoire,
wrote his first full-scale orchestral work and called it The Storm.
Tchaikovsky had based the piece on a new play by Russia's leading dramatist, Aleksandr Ostrovsky,
which had touched him deeply and inspired him to produce quite suddenly a work that stood
head and shoulders above anything that he had written before.
It marked the beginning of his career as a composer,
and it established patterns of composition and an artistic identification with suffering women
that would remain with him for the rest of his days.
In his play, Ostrovsky portrays a sensitive spirit destroyed by a rigid and uncomprehending society,
and it was the idea of the vulnerable young woman
in the grip of inescapable fate that touched Tchaikovsky so deeply.
Ostrovsky's heroine, Katerina, is married to a weak young man dominated by his mother.
Oppressed and frustrated, she falls secretly in love with another man,
and, left alone, she succumbs to her passion.
A wild storm breaks out and, in terror, she confesses her guilt.
She is pursued through the storm by her mother-in-law until she drowns herself in the Volga.
In his first orchestral work, Tchaikovsky had demonstrated skill
and some originality in his handling of the orchestra.
But more significantly, he had shown an ability to capture the motivating forces of the drama.
But none of this was seen at the time.
The piece incurred the intense displeasure of his teacher,
Anton Rubinstein, for going far beyond what was
expected from a second-year student, and Rubinstein insisted that a performance was quite impossible.
The work was never published or even played during Tchaikovsky's lifetime.
With its virtues unrecognised and its daring condemned, The Storm was an inauspicious start for
a young man who had come late to music
and whose talent had already been described as "quite unexceptional".
But worse was to follow.
For his graduation exercise, Tchaikovsky was given the task of setting Schiller's Ode To Joy.
Time was limited, and the subject did not touch his imagination.
In addition, he was conscious of having to compete with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
and was so nervous that he failed to appear at the final examination and very nearly lost his diploma.
But the music was performed in his absence at the prize-giving ceremony and was a full-scale disaster.
It drew widespread criticism both at the conservatoire and in the press,
but none more biting than what appeared in print from the mighty Cesar Cui.
"The conservatoire composer Mr Tchaikovsky is utterly feeble.
"It is true that his composition was written under the most unfavourable circumstances,
"but if he had any gift at all, then at least somewhere or other it would have broken through."
Tchaikovsky was deeply affected.
"When I read this terrible judgment, I hardly knew what I was doing
"and everything went black before my eyes.
"My head began to spin and I ran out of the cafe like a madman.
"I was not aware of what I was doing or where I was going.
"The whole day long I wandered the streets, repeating to myself,
"'I am sterile and shall never amount to anything.'"
But alone among the critics, his friend Herman Laroche had seen his potential.
"I tell you frankly that I consider yours is the greatest musical talent to which Russia can look forward.
"I see in you the greatest, or rather the only, hope for our musical future.
"Your own original creations will probably not make their appearance for another five years,
"but they will surpass everything that we have heard since Glinka.
"To sum up, I do not honour you so much for what you have done as for
"what the force of vitality of your genius will accomplish one day."
Tchaikovsky responded to both the encouragement and the criticism by plunging himself so fiercely into
the composition of his first symphony that he came close to collapse from exhaustion.
His doctor was called, declared him close to madness and ordered complete rest.
Three difficult years were to follow, with a number of disturbing failures,
before Tchaikovsky's imagination would again take flight as it had done with The Storm.
Again, he was touched by the idea of the suffering woman,
but this time it was Juliet, trapped and finally destroyed
in the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets.
Tchaikovsky had again been drawn by a literary source which mirrored his own mental state.
He was recovering from an infatuation with the Belgian opera singer Desiree Artot
and already convinced that his life was governed by a fate
quite beyond his control that would crush his own emotional longings,
the beginnings of a preoccupation with fate that would become in time a mortal obsession.
At the age of 21, he had written to his sister, "How will I end up?
"What does the future hold?
"It is terrifying even to consider.
"But I know that sooner or later, and probably sooner,
"I will not be able to struggle with the difficult side of this life and will smash myself into pieces."
His words were to come true at the age of 53,
but more tragically than even he could have foreseen.
What Tchaikovsky felt for Artot was almost certainly
the only sexual attachment to a woman in the whole of his life,
although it was by no means certain where the feelings for the woman left off
and his fascination with the performer began.
Nevertheless, the attachment was very real,
and it helped to produce for Juliet the most convincing love music that Tchaikovsky had written yet.
Romeo and Juliet had been suggested as a subject by Mily Balakirev when Tchaikovsky was feeling
particularly low in the autumn of 1869,
and Balakirev played a crucial role in its development.
One of the failures of the preceding years had been an overture which Tchaikovsky had
dedicated to Balakirev, who accepted the dedication but after performing it in St Petersburg early in 1869
delivered a devastating criticism in a private letter to the composer.
Tchaikovsky responded with disarming grace.
"Your letter contains only criticisms,
"but they are just ones, and I was not in the least offended.
"In my heart, I salute that absolute integrity
"which is one of the most attractive facets of your musical personality.
"Of course, I shall not withdraw the dedication,
"but some day, I hope to write something better for you."
This set the tone of the relationship for some time to come,
and with Romeo and Juliet, Balakirev saw his opportunity
to do something of real value for the young composer.
Having first proposed the subject,
he quickly followed with a ground plan for the whole piece,
and within a few weeks, Tchaikovsky was able to write to him,
"The greater part is already composed in outline, and a
"large portion of what you advised has been carried out as instructed."
But his mentor was far from satisfied
and kept up a highly critical scrutiny relieved only at times by flashes of spontaneous enthusiasm.
"This is simply delightful."
"When I play it, I can just see you wallowing in your bath
"with Artot herself ardently rubbing you with fragrant soap suds.
"Just one thing I will say against it -
"there is little in it of inner spiritual love and only a passionate physical longing."
But he did note approvingly Tchaikovsky's skill in projecting
the twin themes of love and implacable feud.
Never again would Tchaikovsky work under such close critical scrutiny,
nor take so long to perfect the form of any of his works.
In the end, he worried at Romeo And Juliet for ten years before he felt that he had done it justice.
Never again would he feel for any woman what he had felt for Desiree Artot,
although the theme of love crushed by a hostile fate would continue to inspire many of his greatest works.
Under his friend's guidance, Tchaikovsky had produced his first real masterpiece
and, at its close, some of the tenderest music that he ever wrote.
Pyotr Tchaikovsky, second son of Ilya, was born in this house in Votkinsk on 7th May 1840,
his father a hard-working chief inspector of mines
who was both liked and respected in the local community.
Ilya Tchaikovsky had no particular musical talent, although he had
played the flute in his youth and had an interest in the theatre.
But he was even-tempered and fair-minded and enjoyed a warm and committed relationship with his
second son throughout his life, supporting him and guiding him through many a difficult crisis.
The boy's relationship with his mother, Alexandra, was, by contrast, highly charged.
She had an excitable, nervous temperament inherited from
a family with a history of epilepsy and had spent her childhood from the age of six in an orphans' home.
Alexandra Tchaikovskaya was of French Huguenot descent,
spoke fluent French and German and played the piano and sang with talent.
So there was music in the house, which possessed both a piano and an orchestrion.
This was a grand and magical music box which played excerpts from
well-known operas, including significantly, Don Giovanni,
and which would always be remembered with gratitude as the introduction to Mozart.
The music of Don Giovanni was the first to make a deep impression on him.
It awoke the spiritual ecstasy that was later to bear fruit.
"With its help, I penetrated into that world of artistic beauty where only great genius soars.
"It is due to Mozart that I have devoted my life to music.
"He gave me the impulse to all my efforts and made me love it above all else in the world."
At three-and-a-half, Pyotr was attempting to improvise at the piano.
And at the age of four, when his mother went away and a journey, he and his sister, Alexandra,
aged two-and-a-half, devised a song with the title Our Mama In St Petersburg.
On her return, his mother brought with her a governess from Alsace
named Fanny Durbach to begin the education of her eldest son Nikolai and his cousin Lydia.
Pyotr soon asked to join in and made such rapid progress that, by the age of six, he could read
French and German fluently and, by seven, was writing verses in French.
His first was a poem about Joan Of Arc, a subject that would continue to fascinate
him all through his life and, presumably, his first encounter with the doomed young woman.
Fanny Durbach was pleased both by the boy's sensitivity and by his ability to learn.
Not surprisingly, he was soon very firmly attached to her.
"At lessons no child was more industrious or quicker to understand.
"In playtime, none was so full of fun.
"But his sensitivity was extreme and I had to be very careful how I treated him.
"He was as brittle as porcelain and a trifle could wound him deeply.
"With Pyotr there could be no question of punishment - the least criticism or reproof,
"of a kind that would pass lightly over other children, would upset him alarmingly."
She was disturbed also by the way in which music would excite and unsettle the child.
The next few years brought painful changes to a temperament that was already hyper-sensitive.
The changing fortunes of the family deprived him of Fanny Durbach at the age of eight,
turned his industriousness to indolence and, at the age of ten,
brought the two most wounding experiences of his childhood.
Taken to boarding school in St Petersburg by his mother, he could not face the parting.
The incident was later recalled by his brother, Modest.
"When the actual moment of parting came, he completely lost his self-control
"and, clinging wildly to his mother, refused to let her go.
"Neither kisses nor words of comfort nor the promise of return were of any use.
"He saw nothing, heard nothing and hung onto her as though he were part and parcel of her beloved presence.
"It became necessary in the end to carry him off by force
"and to hold him fast until his mother had driven away.
"Even then he broke loose and, with a cry of despair,
"ran after the carriage and clung to one of the wheels.
"To his life's end, Tchaikovsky could never recall this hour without a shiver of horror."
Worse was to follow.
Within a month, scarlet fever broke out at the school and his guardian,
Modest Alekseyevich Vakar, took the boy to his own home for safety.
Soon afterwards, Vakar's own son caught the disease and died.
Pyotr Tchaikovsky, aged ten, felt responsible and was overcome with guilt and remorse.
When the period of mourning was over,
Vakar and his wife took the boy to a performance of Don Giovanni.
Once again, Mozart bowled him over, and once again,
it was the desperate plight of a woman that touched him most.
SHE SINGS
"I simply cannot convey to you what I experience when Donna Anna,
"that majestic image of proud, vengeful beauty appears on stage.
"Nothing in any opera affects me so strongly.
"When she recognises Giovanni as the man who has killed her father,
"and her anger finally pours out in a raging torrent
"in that marvellous recitative and then that wonderful aria,
"I tremble with horror and am ready to cry out and weep
"from the overwhelming force of it."
SHE SINGS
"Mozart is the Christ of music in whom are quenched
"all his predecessors, just as rays of light
"are quenched in the sun itself."
A quieter and happier period followed with two long summer holidays
and some musical encouragement from Aunt Katerina
who played through the piano score of Don Giovanni with him.
But in the following year, 1854,
when he was 14 years old, his mother died of cholera.
She had been the central figure in his life and, in some sense, would remain so for the rest of his days.
More than 20 years after her death he would write,
"Despite the overwhelming strength on my conviction that there is no after-life,
"I can never reconcile myself to the thought that my mother, whom I loved so much, has disappeared forever,
"that I shall never have the chance to tell her that even after 23 years of separation, I still love her."
As always, he sought solace in music and, within two months,
had made his first serious attempt at composition.
Soon afterwards, he produced the first real
signs of developing talent with a setting of a simple poem
in which a young poet quietly invokes his muse.
"Will you not come to me, like a gentle shadow
"My genius, my angel, my friend
"And commune with me quietly and gently fly round me
"And will you bring shy inspiration and heal my sweet disorder
"And give a quiet dream
"My genius, my angel
"My friend?"
Serious interest in composition had begun relatively late,
and not surprisingly in so sensitive a nature, very tentatively.
Progress over the next few years would be difficult and uncertain.
Tchaikovsky continued his studies at the School of Jurisprudence,
which included both singing and piano lessons.
At the age of 15, he also had lessons from an eminent German pianist, Rudolf Kundinger.
On being asked for an opinion by the boy's father, Kundinger advised against a musical career,
although he admitted to being impressed by his pupil's capacity for improvisation.
"If I had any idea of what he was to become, I should have kept a diary of our lessons.
"But, I must admit, to my great embarrassment,
"that at no time did it occur to me
"that Tchaikovsky had in him the stuff of a great musician.
"Certainly, he was gifted, had a good ear and memory,
"and an excellent touch.
"But apart from that there was nothing, absolutely nothing,
"that suggested a composer or even a fine performer."
At 16, Tchaikovsky studied singing with an eccentric Neapolitan,
Luigi Piccioli, who painted his face, dyed his hair, and declared
that he loathed all music, save that of the great Italian melodists.
At 19, he left the School of Jurisprudence,
and took up a post at the Ministry of Justice as a clerk, first class.
But soon, he was going to concerts and operas
and became something of a dandy, assisted in this by his good looks
and his ability to play the piano with convincing elegance.
But, he was not at ease, and letters to his sister trace the next tentative steps.
"They have made a civil servant out of me, and a bad one at that.
"I try to improve as best I can, and to do my job more seriously,
"and suddenly I am also studying harmony."
At 21, his father encouraged him to think seriously about music once again.
"Father declared that it was not too late for me to become an artist.
"If only that were true.
"But, even if I do have any talent, it is probably too late to develop it now."
By the autumn of 1861, he was studying harmony
with Nikolai Zaremba, at the newly established St Petersburg Conservatoire.
But he continued to hold his post at the Ministry, and to send reports of his progress to his sister.
"I wrote to you that I had begun to study music theory, and very successfully.
"I hope you won't think I am boasting if I say that I have a tolerable talent.
"The only thing I fear is lack of willpower.
"Perhaps laziness will claim her own in the end,
"but if the opposite happens, then I promise I will become something.
"I am making good progress.
"Who knows? Perhaps in three years' time you will be listening to my operas and singing my arias.
"I am now firmly convinced that, sooner or later, I shall exchange my present work for music.
"Don't think I imagine I will become a great artist.
"I just feel that I must do work for which I have a vocation.
"Whether I shall be a famous composer, or a struggling teacher,
"I shall feel that I have done the right thing."
At 23, Tchaikovsky resigned his post at the Ministry of Justice,
and, in spite of financial difficulties, began full-time study at the St Petersburg Conservatoire.
A little over a year later, at the age of 24,
and inspired by Ostrovsky's play, he wrote The Storm,
his first piece for full orchestra, and, touched by the fate
of Ostrovsky's Katerina, his first work of real significance.
Tchaikovsky's identification with his ill-fated heroines
would haunt him through much of his life,
and would form the substance of much of his greatest work.
It can also be linked to the best music in many of his lesser pieces,
and was at times to exercise a strong and disturbing influence
on his own emotional life.
In the next few years, he further developed the idea
in his first two operas, The Voyevoda and Undine,
both suggested by Ostrovsky.
It then appeared even more strongly in 1869 as the central theme in Romeo and Juliet,
followed by Miranda's music in the overture to the Tempest.
And, two years later, in 1875, with Odette in Swan Lake,
the most vulnerable and appealing of all Tchaikovsky's ballerinas.
Swan Lake was to be his first ballet, an enterprise about which he felt justifiably nervous.
But Odette had been in his mind for some years,
and, once again, the power of his muse more than compensated for his lack of experience.
He had devised a children's ballet on the same subject six years earlier.
Now he insisted on the same fantastic story, and even used some of the original music.
He may also have drafted the plot himself,
but certainly his involvement is very clear from his own instructions in the manuscript score.
"The Prince is constantly close to Odette.
"During the dances, he falls wildly in love with her
"and implores her not to reject his love.
"Odette laughs,
"'I am afraid to believe you, noble knight.
"'I fear it is only your imagination deceiving you.
"'Tomorrow, at your mother's feast, you will see many beautiful
"'young women and will fall in love with someone else.
"'You will forget me.
"'I will not hide from you that I have also fallen in love with you.
"'But a terrible foreboding grips me.
"'I shall love you, only you, all my life.
"'It is not in my power to forgive you.
"'All is finished and we are seeing each other for the last time.
"'You have destroyed us both, and I am dying.'"
"The waves sweep over the Prince and Odette, and they swiftly disappear beneath the waters.
"The storm dies down, and pale moonlight breaks through the scattering clouds."
Swan Lake was completed in the spring of 1876, when Tchaikovsky was nearing his 36th birthday.
He had a growing store of successes to his credit, but an increasing sense of loneliness and uncertainty,
both about his life and about his ability to work.
During the summer, he suffered an unexplained illness,
and, as so often in the past, several bouts of acute melancholy.
The prime cause on this occasion was a desperate attempt
and failure to come to terms with his homosexuality,
something of which he had confided to his brother, Modest,
who shared the same difficulties.
In July, Tchaikovsky went to Vichy in search of a cure
for his mysterious illness.
But, within days, he wrote again to his brother
opening with a quotation from Dante's Divine Comedy.
"'There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of the happy time in misery'.
"The melancholy that consumes me is the more terrible because those
"three days that I spent with you in Lyons are so clear in my memory.
"I am troubled by that intolerable condition of the spirit
"which descends on me every time I am abroad by myself.
"There is something unhealthy in this.
"Just imagine, yesterday I wept 10 times."
August found Tchaikovsky again reading an edition of The Inferno,
with illustrations by Gustav Dore, in the train on the way to Bayreuth
for the first performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Modest had suggested Francesca da Rimini as a subject
for a new orchestral work,
and before the end of the month Tchaikovsky wrote to him again.
"I am living through the most critical period of my life.
"Soon, I shall tell you about it in more detail,
"but, meanwhile, I will just say that I have decided to marry.
"I cannot avoid this, I must do it.
"But I shall not do it hastily or suddenly."
In this atmosphere, he began work on Francesca da Rimini,
and it was to reflect his inner turmoil more directly than anything he had written before.
Tchaikovsky prefaced the score with the same lines from Dante which he had quoted in his letter to Modest.
"There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of the happy time in misery."
Tchaikovsky's capacity to identify with his heroine had moved on to
a new and dangerously personal level.
Francesca's illicit love, and the dreadful inevitability of her fate,
powerfully matched his own despair,
and the expression of her predicament
became, in some sense, a vehicle for the release of his own sexual guilt.
Dante's Francesca, married against her will and through deception
to a deformed tyrant, Rimini, is in love with her husband's brother.
Rimini surprises the couple in their one act of passion,
and stabs them both to death.
For their sin, they are condemned
to spin eternally in the dark whirlwinds of hell.
Despite Tchaikovsky's acute sense of crisis,
work on the overture brought a measure of relief from his persistent melancholy,
and his brother tried to dissuade him
from his desperate plan to marry.
Tchaikovsky replied,
"You say that one should not give a damn for what people say.
"That is true only up to a certain point.
"Of course there are people who cannot despise me for my vices,
"simply because they began to love me before they suspected.
"But isn't it a terrible thought
"that people who love me can sometimes be ashamed of me?
"But my habits and inclinations have become so hardened
"that it is impossible to discard them now just like an old glove.
"In short, I should like,
"through marriage or an open liaison with a woman,
"to stop the mouths of the contemptible creatures
"who could cause distress to people close to me.
"In any case, don't fear for me, dear Modest."
By mid-October, Tchaikovsky was able to write to his brother in better spirits.
"I have just this very moment finished the composition.
"I worked on it con amore, and I believe that my love has been successful.
"As for the whirlwind, I could have written something which corresponded more closely to Dore's drawings.
"But it didn't turn out as I wanted.
"However, it is impossible to come to a true judgment of this piece
"until it is orchestrated and performed."
Tchaikovsky was aware that his inner turmoil had spilled over into his work,
and that much of the wilder music seems overstated.
But he knew also that he had once again produced his best work in the love music.
MUSIC: "Francesca da Rimini" by Tchaikovsky.
"There is no greater sorrow
"than to be mindful of the happy time in misery."
Tchaikovsky quotes 22 lines from Dante's poem.
In the second circle of hell's abyss,
Dante see the spirits of mortals whose reason in life has been clouded by sexual passion,
eternally tormented in the hellish whirlwind.
He is struck by the beauty of Francesca and her love of Paolo.
She recounts to him her sad tale, and then is carried away again by the storm,
Iocked forever in her amorous embrace.
In Francesca da Rimini,
Tchaikovsky's tormented emotional life had come dangerously close to his music,
and with damaging results.
But worse was to follow with the composition of Eugene Onegin.
This time, however, it was to be the other way round.
It was to be the music that would come dangerously close to his life.
His decision to marry at all costs
had set him on just the sort of fateful road to inevitable disaster, that he so feared.
When he had first resolved to marry, in August of 1876, he had nobody particular in mind.
But not surprisingly, it did not take long for fate to present him with an opportunity to choose.
In the spring of the following year, he received a letter from Antonina Miliukova,
a former piano student at the Moscow Conservatoire,
declaring that she had been in love with him for some years.
Tchaikovsky had replied, courteously sidestepping her advances, and without taking the letter seriously.
Another followed.
"I see I ought to begin by mastering my feelings, as you said in your first letter,
"but wherever I may be, I he shall not be able to forget you, or to lose my love for you.
"What I liked in you when I first came to know of you, I no longer find in any other man.
"Indeed, I do not want to look at any other man after you."
On the same day, yet another letter appeared.
"I have been in the most agonising state for a whole week.
"Will you really break off this correspondence with me without ever having met me even once?
"No, I am convinced you will not be so cruel.
"After your letter, I love you twice as much again, and your shortcomings mean absolutely nothing to me.
"There is no failing which might cause me to fall out of love with you.
"I pace the room from corner to corner like a crazy thing,
"thinking only of that moment when I shall see you.
"My first kiss shall be given to you, and to no one else in the world.
"I cannot live without you, and so I shall soon perhaps kill myself.
"Let me see you, and kiss you, in order that I may remember that kiss in the other world.
"Farewell, my dearest.
"Yours eternally, Antonina Miliukova."
This time, Tchaikovsky ignored the letter.
But as fate would have it, just nine days later a singer, Yelizaveta Lavrovskaya
suggested as Pushkin's Onegin as a subject for an opera,
and it was to have a major impact on his life.
"The idea seemed to me wild, and I said nothing.
"Afterwards, when I was dining alone, I recalled Onegin and fell to thinking about it.
"Next, I began to find the idea a possibility, then got enthusiastic about it
"and by the end of the meal had made up my mind.
"I ran off to track down a copy of Pushkin, found one with difficulty, went home,
"read it through with delight, and spent an utterly sleepless night devising the scenario."
As always, Tchaikovsky's imagination was fired by the plight of his heroine,
and he began with Tatyana's letter scene, in which he first declares her secret love Onegin.
SHE SINGS
"Having an invincible desire to write the letter music,
"I set about it and entirely forgot about Miss Miliukova.
"I identified myself so thoroughly with the image of Tatyana that she became for me like a living person.
"I loved Tatyana and was furious with Onegin, who seemed to me cold and heartless."
"When I received another letter from Miss Miliukova, I felt ashamed.
"I even became furious with myself for my attitude towards her.
"In her letter, she complained bitterly that she had received no reply,
"adding that if her present letter suffered the same fate as its predecessor,
"then the only thing left for her would be to put an end to herself.
"In my mind this linked with the idea of Tatyana,
"and it seemed that I myself had acted incomparably more bestial than Onegin.
"Since the letter contained Miss Miliukova's address, I went there immediately."
And so Antonina Miliukova and Pyotr Tchaikovsky
met for the first time on the 1st June 1877.
Another meeting followed a few days later, at which Tchaikovsky proposed and was accepted.
Within a week, he had left Antonina alone to make preparations for the wedding,
while he retreated to a friend's country estate to continue his work on the opera.
SHE SINGS
There are striking parallels between Tatyana's words
and what Antonina Miliukova had written only a few days before.
Tchaikovsky was caught in a dangerous double fantasy,
but his identification with Tatyana was absolute.
Just as he saw fate as the controlling influence in his own destiny,
so he made it the mainspring of his opera.
SHE SINGS
Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Antonina Miliukova
were married on the 18th July, 1877.
He was 37, she 28.
It was not a happy occasion.
Tchaikovsky had told no-one until shortly before the wedding
and the only other person present, apart from the priest,
Dmitri Razumovsky, were Tchaikovsky's brother, Anatoly,
and his young friend, the violinist Josif Kotek.
"I remained a sort of bystander until the moment at the conclusion of the ceremony,
"when Razumovsky made us kiss.
"Then, a kind of pain gripped my heart,
"and I was suddenly seized with such emotion that it appears I wept.
"When the carriage started, I was again ready to burst out sobbing."
"I think that little by little, I shall grow accustomed to my new situation.
"It would be an intolerable sham if I were to deceive my wife in anything,
"but I have warned her that she can count only on my brotherly love.
"Physically, she has become totally repugnant to me."
"Yesterday morning, while my wife was taking a bath,
"I went to mass at St Isaacs Cathedral.
"I felt a need to pray."
Within a week, Tchaikovsky wrote to Anatoly.
"Yesterday was perhaps the most painful day since the wedding.
"In the morning, it seemed to me that my life was broken forever and I suffered a fit of despair.
"This crisis was terrible.
"If it had not been for my love for you and others close to me, it might have ended with illness or madness.
"Today, we go back to Moscow."
The couple were together for only three weeks
before Tchaikovsky escaped alone to his sister at Kamenka.
On his return seven weeks later, he wrote again to Anatoly.
"Naturally, you will want to know how I feel.
"Tolya, allow me to pass over this in silence.
"I am distressed. That's all I will say.
"But, of course, this was inevitable after the abundance of happiness which I experienced at Kamenka.
"I know I must be patient and then calm contentment
"and, who knows, perhaps even happiness may come bit by bit."
Within days, however, he was to make an indirect attempt at suicide.
"Although not more than a week has passed since my return from my sister's,
"I have already lost all ability to cope with the burden of my situation.
"Not daring to go off to a friend or even to the theatre, I set off each evening for a walk.
"The weather has become gloomy and cold,
"and at night there is sometimes a slight frost.
"On one such night I came to the deserted bank of the River Moscow
"and there entered my head the thought that it might be possible to kill myself by contracting a chill.
"I entered the water up to my waist
"and stayed there until I could endure no longer the bodily ache induced by the cold.
"I came out of the water with a firm conviction
"that I should die either from pneumonia or some other respiratory illness.
"At home, I said I had taken part in a nocturnal fishing expedition
"and had fallen into the water by accident.
"But my health showed itself to be so sound
"that my icy bath had no consequence for me.
Finally, with the help of a telegram from Anatoly,
he fled to St Petersburg.
When Anatoly met him at the station, he had difficulty in recognising his own brother.
Tchaikovsky collapsed and a doctor was called.
He ordered that Tchaikovsky should never again live with Antonina, nor even see her.
After this, neither the man nor his music would be quite the same again.
But he would continue to feel the need of a relationship of some sort with a woman,
and he was to find it with Nadezhda von Meck.
It was to be the longest and most important relationship with anyone outside of his family.
It was also to be the strangest.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
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