Tchaikovsky's life
Modest Tchaikovsky's biography of his brother is now available in a new edition after more than a hundred years.
The biography of the composer, arranger, conductor, music theorist and pedagogue Peter Tchaikovsky, written by his brother Modest, occupies a prominent position in the extensive literature on the composer. Written in Russian, the work was published in 1903 by Tchaikovsky's main publisher Jurgenson in Moscow in two volumes and contains over 1300 pages. Largely based on correspondence with his close friend Nadezhka von Meck, it also contains letters to his professional colleagues Alexander Glazunov and Sergei Taneyev, portraits and other illustrations.
The two volumes were translated into German by Paul Juon (1873-1940), a Swiss-Russian student of Taneyev from Moscow. The publication, which became an important source work and was soon out of print, was one of the rarest biographies of musicians for almost a century. Surprisingly, the new edition only appeared in 2011 as the 13th volume of Tchaikovsky Studies. Alexander Erhard and Thomas Kohlhase are responsible for the carefully revised edition, sponsored by the International Juon Society (Liebefeld/BE) and the Tchaikovsky Society Tübingen. They accuse Juon's transmission of being "linguistically at times whimsical and not always satisfying, full of stylistic oddities". As her corrected new edition follows the transliteration commonly used in Slavic studies, Ms. von Meck appears in the phonetically consistent but equally whimsical and unsatisfactory spelling "fon Mekk".
In contrast to the German first edition, the new edition uses both the "old-style" Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar for dates. Furthermore, the scholarly appendix contains a differentiated subject index, an alphabetical index of works, an index of names, an index of abbreviations and other indexes. The genesis of the violin concerto composed in Clarens on Lake Geneva in 1878 and the opera begun there is documented in detail with quotes from letters The Maid of Orleans.
Modest Tchaikovsky, The Life of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, German by Paul Juon, new edition by Alexander Erhard and Thomas Kohlhase, XXX p., 2 vols., 1152 p., € 54.95, Schott, Mainz 2011, ISBN 978-3-7957-0778-1
