Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
St Petersburg, 28 October 1893: Tchaikovsky conducts the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, which ends as no symphony had ever ended, with a slow movement that dies away in the low register. The audience is left puzzled. Nine days later, on 6 November, the composer is dead, at fifty-three. For a hundred and thirty years people have argued about what from.
The official version is cholera: a glass of unboiled water, drunk in a restaurant during an epidemic, the illness documented in the medical bulletins of the Bertenson brothers, the agony at the home of his brother Modest. It is the version upheld by the leading modern biographer, Alexander Poznansky, who has combed through memoirs and archives. Against it have always stood a few oddities: the sanitary rules for the funerals of cholera victims, imposed and flagrantly ignored, with the body laid out at home and kissed by visitors, and the contradictions among the doctors’ accounts of the day of the fatal glass.
The second version is an offshoot of the first: not cholera through carelessness but deliberate self-harm, infected water drunk in search of the disease, by a man who had known depression all his life. It has no documents behind it: it has the ending of the Pathétique, which to many has seemed a farewell written in notes. It is an emotionally powerful argument and a historically very weak one: the letters of his last months show a Tchaikovsky busy, full of projects and rather cheerful.
The third is the most novelistic, and must be reported at arm’s length: it was put forward in 1979 by the émigré scholar Alexandra Orlova, on the basis of second-hand testimony. A court of honour of former classmates from the School of Jurisprudence supposedly ordered the composer to take his own life with poison, to smother the scandal of a relationship with a young aristocrat before it reached the tsar. The thesis dominated the newspapers for twenty years and is today rejected by most scholars: too many inconsistencies, no paper trail. But it says something true even if the fact were false: in the Russia of 1893 Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality was an open secret that could destroy him, and the fear was real even if the tribunal was not.
Melos sides with the documents, and so with cholera, and with a rule that holds for every famous death, from Mozart onwards: when the legend is more beautiful than the truth, the legend wins in the newspapers and the truth wins in the archives. The Pathétique has nothing to do with any of the three versions: it is only the last symphony of a man who knew how to end things like no one else. That fate should then have proved it right, that is what is unbearable. And that is music, not biography.