Klarinet Archive - Posting 000274.txt from 1998/10

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: [kl] The skeletons in Tchakovsky's closet
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 03:58:22 -0400

I thank Av for telling that story, but I am afraid that there is
a version of it that is infinitely more serious an indictment.
And several Russian musicians to whom I have spoken of it have
said that it is common talk in Russia that THIS is the reason
behind his suicide.

Apparently Tchaikovsky was more than a homosexual. He was a
pedophile. The story goes that he had a sexual experience
with a number of children who were peasants. And as long as
he kept it with peasants, the government (who knew all about
it) ignored it. Frankly, the Russian goverment at the time
cared little about the fate of the peasantry. Some suggest
that they have not changed.

But then real tragedy struck. A child with whom he was
having sex (and who was the son of Russian nobility) died
of suffocation. There are a variety of opinions on how
suffocation could have occurred, but the most common view
is that it happened during forced oral sex.

As long as the children were children of peasants, that was
one thing, but when the child of nobility died, Tchaikovsky
was given the option of suicide or imprisonment. The
common view is that he took poison and that the Russian
government said that his death was from cholera. They
could have said that he died from malaria for all that
it mattered, but he died from his own hand.

This is a story that the leading Russian musicologists speak
of as being valid. I can't say. I wasn't there.

But it is certainly a grim, morbid, and horrible episode in
the history of music.

=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
Rosanne Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
=======================================

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