A new life, Simon Morrison’s book brands itself. But it is also a somewhat selective life, notable almost as much for what is omitted as for what it includes. This, I hasten to add, is deliberate. ‘The details of his life presented here’, Morrison announces at the outset, ‘are fewer than in other books about Tchaikovsky,’ the general aim being ‘to distance his music from the letters to his brothers, sister, and trusted friends’. Morrison’s point is that biographies of Tchaikovsky tend to portray him as a frail neurotic, unhinged by the early death of his too-much-loved mother, tormented by his homosexuality and catastrophic marriage, and ostensibly driven in a state of near-total disintegration to suicide. Worse, this same literature interprets the music in light of Tchaikovsky’s supposed mental condition – Tchaikovsky the slushy, sobbing, overwrought Romantic with no symphonic brain is a cliché of popular mythology. 

Morrison evades these issues not, I suspect, because they are wholly without basis (though he rightly has no truck with the suicide theory and in fact never mentions it), but because they get in the way of a balanced assessment of the work of ‘Russia’s greatest composer’, as his subtitle – not unreasonably – has it. His method, after providing a straightforward account of Tchaikovsky’s early life up to his graduation from the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1865, is to foreground the works, which he examines in turn. This is underpinned by the assumption that the most important things in a composer’s life are the music he wrote and the conditions under which he wrote it and under which it was first performed. 

The approach is even-handed but has some curious side-effects. It naturally involves treating big but unsuccessful works as fully as successful masterpieces, simply because at the time they filled the composer’s life just as much. So we get ten pages on the early opera The Voyevoda, which had to