Queer Musician

"BELOVED FRIEND"--Catherine Drinker Bowen & Barbara von Meek--Random House ($3). Any musician runs the risk of being thought queer, but Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky ran a bigger risk than most. Just how queer he actually became was related last week by Authors von Meek & Bowen, in a full-dress, 484-page biography that Tchaikovsky addicts will find sympathetic, non-musical readers interesting if partly incomprehensible. With only a slight stiffening of technical talk and musical illustration, "Beloved Friend" is a revealing human document on the genus musician, Russian species. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, known to friend & foe alike as "the culmination-- almost the last stand--of the Romantic Movement in music," was a Petersburg law student of 22 when he first became seriously interested in music. Once he caught fire he blazed up. But he had no money, had to support himself by teaching a heavy schedule at Rubinstein's Moscow Conservatory. At 37 he had become a composer but he was still just a music-teacher. When Rubinstein went to 45-year-old Nadejda von Meek, music-loving widow of a railroad tycoon and Moscow's richest woman, to get her to do something for Tchaikovsky, he started more than he intended.

When Nadejda heard her first Tchaikovsky music she liked it so much she gave the composer a commission to write something for her. Soon they were in frequent and increasingly intimate correspondence. Nadejda had 12 children and was very much the head of her family. She had a whim of iron, and it was her strongest whim never to appear in public, never to be at home to anyone but her own kin (Rubinstein was apparently the lone exception). As her epistolary friendship with Tchaikovsky grew, her commissions got more munificent, her language ever more affectionate, until finally she was supporting Tchaikovsky and their letters to each other were more platonic than respectable.

But they never met. They sent each other their photographs; he visited her town house and her country estate, but never while she was there; she went to hear his concerts, in the seclusion of her box; they saw each other, over other people's heads, at the theatre. As her guest in Florence he lived in the luxurious apartment she engaged and fitted up for him; they passed _ each other's windows daily, and by appointment; on a few embarrassing occasions they actually passed on the street. At first short-sighted Nadejda did not recognize her elderly lover-orlce-removed. Thereafter she bowed. But in all this strange love affair the principals never so much as touched hands, never exchanged one word of mouth. As Tchaikovsky put it:_ "All the charm, all the poesy of my friendship with you is based on the fact that you are so close to me, so infinitely dear to my heart, and yet in the ordinary sense of the word, we are not acquainted." To judge from some of Nadejda's letters, she would have been willing to come to slightly closer grips. Not so Tchaikovsky. Although she became his best "beloved friend," there was one basic flaw in her musician she apparently never discovered, which kept them forever at pen-point's distance. Tchaikovsky was a homosexual. In a desperate attempt to conquer his nature and incidentally to scotch gossip about himself, he married. The announcement of his impending marriage was a terrible blow to Nadejda. Tchaikovsky himself was very gloomy about it. He was touched by Antonina's passion for him; if he had known she was almost a nymphomaniac his gloom would have turned to panic. The attempted honeymoon was a fiasco. Tchaikovsky fled from his untouched bride with unconquerable revulsion. After that, whenever she was in the same town with him his feelings became murderous but panicky. In his letters to Nadejda, Tohaikovsky took to calling his wife The Reptile. Antonina finally died in an asylum, after giving birth to several children, none of whom was ever claimed as a Tchaikovsky. Nadejda was pleased that Tchaikovsky's marriage went on the rocks, glad that it was she who could haul him to safety. "I hated that woman because she did not make you happy, but I would have hated her a hundred times more if you had been happy with her." She made him an annual allowance of _ 6,000 roubles, cordially agreed with him that he had slaved at Rubinstein's Conservatory long enough, that it was high time to strike out for himself. In the twelve years Tchaikovsky taught musical theory there, besides his 26 hours a week of teaching, he had written four symphonies, four operas, dozens of shorter pieces, a Manual of Harmony. The Petersburg Conservatory had offered him twice the salary for four hours a week, but out of loyalty to Rubinstein he had turned down the offer. Rescued by Nadejda from the necessity of hack work, with his music, "so Russian yet so cosmopolitan and easily comprehended," winning an ever wider circle of admirers, from the Imperial Family to the more critical audiences of Paris, Tchaikovsky found himself famed. He went on concert tours throughout Europe and the U. S., with brilliant successes everywhere. His queer affair with Nadejda petered out into a bitter mystery. After 14 years' intimacy she suddenly wrote him a curt note, saying she could no longer send him any money. "Do not forget," she ended, "and think of me sometimes." Tchaikovsky's wildest pleas brought nothing after that but a polite note from Nadejda's son-inlaw, to say that she was too ill to write. They never corresponded again, died within three months of each other, four years later.

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