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Malte Korff creates a deep understanding of Tchaikovsky's insurmountable shyness towards people with his portrayal of his thoroughly analyzed childhood and youth.
The findings with which the Leipzig musicologist and concert dramaturge Malte Korff shines in his appreciation of the life and work of the most complex and contradictory Russian composer are not new. Never before, however, has a renowned author of composer biographies in the German-speaking world taken the trouble to compile so many documents from the first two decades of Tchaikovsky's life in order to examine them critically and present them in a generally understandable way.
Korff convincingly attributes almost all of the complexes and depressions suffered by the Russian, who was born 175 years ago, to the very close bond between the boy and his mother and to the problems with his homosexuality. The importance of his governess Fanny Dürbach, who came from western Switzerland, for his human and intellectual development is even clearer from the detailed description of those years than from the standard English biography by Edward Garden (1973).
In just three sentences, the tutor provided one of the many keys to understanding Tchaikovsky's later life: "You had to be extremely careful with him. Every little thing could hurt him. He was a child made of porcelain." The entangled cycle in which Anton Rubinstein's composition pupil, who initially trained as a lawyer, became entangled when he tried to suppress his shyness towards people and other problems with vast quantities of alcohol is expressed just as clearly as his prominent position in Russian society. With regard to the still mysterious cause of death, Korff adheres to the version that Tchaikovsky died of cholera after drinking unboiled water.
The list of works, which is followed by a chronological table and bibliography, is limited to a selection. A few illustrations span the spectrum from the portrait of the eight-year-old to the funeral at state expense with which a commoner was honored for the first time in St. Petersburg in 1893.
Malte Korff, Tchaikovsky. Life and Work, 256 p., Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-423-28045-7
