Death of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky's tomb at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery

Nine days after the premiere of the Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky died on 6 November 1893.

Most biographers of Tchaikovsky's life have considered his death to have been caused by cholera, most probably contracted through drinking contaminated water several days earlier. In recent decades, however, theories have been advanced that his death was a suicide. According to one variation of the theory, a sentence of suicide was imposed in a "court of honor" by Tchaikovsky's fellow alumni of the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, as a censure of the composer's homosexuality.

After the death

Tchaikovsky biographer David Brown argues that even before the doctors' accounts on Tchaikovsky's death had appeared, what happened at his brother Modest's St. Petersburg flat, where the composer died, had been totally inconsistent with standard procedures for a death from cholera. The authorities knew well this disease could be highly contageous; regulations stipulated the corpse was to be removed from the scene of death immediately in c closed coffin.

Instead of its immediate removal, Tchaikovsky's body was displayed in Modest's flat. Moreover, the flat was freely opened to visitors wishing to pay their last respects. Among the guests was composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who was bewildered by what he saw: "How strange that, although death had resulted from cholera, still admission to the Mass for the dead was free to all! I remember how [Alexander] Vyerzhbilovich [a cellist and professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory], totally drunk ... kept kissing the deceased man's head and face."

Before the first requiem service, scheduled for 2:00 that afternoon, the apartment was choked with mourners. By 1:00, so many people had gathered that it was impossible to push past the entrance hall. Gradually a line of waiting people stretched along all four flights of stairs leading up from the street.

At 2:00, the doors to a corner reception room were opened. Tchaikovsky's body, dressed in a black suit, lay exposed on a low catafalque draped in white satin. "[O]nly the presence near the head of someone continually touching the lips and the nostrils of the deceased with a bit of light-colored material soaked in carbolic reminds one of the terrible illness that struck down the deceased," wrote a reporter for the Petersburg Gazette.

Another biographer, Alexander Poznansky, counters Brown's claim with a few of his own. He argues that, despite Rimsky-Korsaskov's comment, there was nothing odd about what went on. He writes that despite lingering prejudice, the prevailing medial opinion was that cholera was less contagious than previously supposed. Though public gatherings for cholera victims had previously been discouraged, the Central Medical Council in the spring of 1893 specifically allowed public services and rituals in connection with the funerals of cholera victims.

There was also the medical opinion, reported by the Petersburg Gazette, that Tchaikovsky had not died not from the disease itself, but from a resulting blood infection. (The disease had reportedly been arrested on Friday, November 3, three days before the composer's passing.) With the added precaution of the constant disinfectant of the lips and nostrils of the body, Poznansky claims, even the drunken cellist kissing the face of the deceased had little cause for worry.

After a second requiem service that evening, Tchaikovsky was placed in his coffin, with all prescribed measures against the spread of cholera taken. The body was wrapped in a sheet soaked in a solution of mercuric chloride. The metal inner coffin was soldered shut and the oaken outer coffin screwed shut. All this was done in the presence of the police, as required for victims of cholera. Tchaikovsky's friend Nikolay Kashkin, who arrived the next day for Tchaikovsky's funeral with a delegation from the Moscow Conservatory, remembered finding the coffin both sealed and shut.

The funeral

When Tsar Alexander III received news of Tchaikovsky's death, he volunteered to pay the costs of the composer's funeral himself and instructed the Directorate of the Imperial Theatres to organize the event. According to Poznansky, this action showed the exceptional regard with which the Tsar regarded the composer. Only twice before had a Russian monarch shown such favor toward a fallen artistic or scholarly figure. Nicholas I had written a letter to the dying Alexander Pushkin following the poet's fatal duel. Nicholas also came personally to pay his final respects to historian Nikolay Karamzin on the eve of his burial.

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Tchaikovsky's funeral procession in St. Petersburg.

The outpouring of grief over Tchaikovsky's death, and the resulting interest in his funeral, was extremely great. Tchaikovsky's funeral took place on November 9, 1893 in St. Petersburg. Participation in the funeral procession was by special ticket only. This ticket included entrance to Kazan Cathedral, where the funeral was to take place, and access to the cemetery of Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Kazan Cathedral holds 6,000 people. Sixty thousand people — 10 times the cathedral's capacity — applied for tickets. Finally, 8,000 people were crammed in.

In addition, Poznansky writes that on the day of the funeral, "[i]t seemed that all the inhabitants of St. Petersburg had come out on to the streets to pay their last respects. The whole of Nevsky Prospect was packed with people.

What those people saw as they lined the streets was equally great. Behind entire rows of wreaths marched the clergy, wearing white cassocks. Behind them was the coffin, on a hearse pulled by three pairs of horses. Tchaikovsky's family followed the hearse. After them, in order of importance, came the representatives of various institutions.

After a short liturgy the coffin was placed on a hearse to be taken to Kazan Cathedral, following a special route that took the procession past the Mariinsky Theatre. Grand Duke Konstantin and other members of the imperial family arrived at the cathedral in time for the main religious service, which lasted until 5 o'clock in the afternoon.

Particularly absent from Tchaikovsky's funeral was Nadezhda von Meck, though she sent a very expensive wreath. She was already gravely ill and moved with great difficulty. When Anna Davydova-von Meck was later asked how her mother-in-law had endured the news of the composer's death, Anna replied, "She did not endure it," adding that von Meck soon felt much worse. Madame von Meck died three months after Tchaikovsky, in Nice.

He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. His grave is located near those of fellow-composers Alexander Borodin, Mikhail Glinka and Modest Mussorgsky.

Cholera a surprise

At least as surprising to many people as the suddenness of Tchaikovsky's death was its attribution to cholera. While cholera in fact touched all levels of society, it was largely considereed a disease of the poor, thus a vulger and socially demeaning manner of demise. That such a famous composer as Tchaikovsky would pass from such a disease appeared to degrade his reputation among the upper classes and struck many as inconceivable.

True to its reputed form, the cholera outbreak that began in the summer of 1893 in St. Petersburg had been confined primarily to the city's slums, where the poor "lived in crowded, insanitary conditions without observing elementary medical conditions.... [Cholera] did not usually touch the affluent and more educated families because they observed strict precautions. Medical advice not only forbade the drinking of unboiled water; it recommended that water for washing should also be boiled."

Also, we know from Tchaikovsky's friend Hermann Laroche that the composer was scrupulous in his personal hygene. In the hope of avoiding doctors, Laroche writes, "he relied above alll on hygene, of which he seemed (to my layman's view) to be a true master."

Moreover, this epidemic had actually sharply declined with the arrival of the cold autumn weather. On October 13, 200 cases of cholera were reported. By November 6, the day of Tchaikovsky's death, this number had been more than halved to only 68 cases, accompanied by "a sharp decline in mortality." Though these figures were taken from Novosti i Birzhevaya Gazets, Poznansky challenges them as inaccurate.

Biographer Anthony Holden maintains that since cholera was rarely encountered in the upper echelons in which they practiced, physicians Valery and Lev Bertenson, who treated Tchaikovsky during his final days, may have never treated or even seen a case of cholera previous to the composer's case. All they might have known of the disease was what they had read in textbooks and medical journals.

Holden questions whether the senior brother's description of Tchaikovsky's condition came from his observation of the patient, or from what he had once read, thus using the terminology in the wrong sequence. He raises Russian musicologist Alexandra Orlava hypothesis that perhaos the pysician was "forced by circumstances to lie." Was cholera, Holden asks, a subsequently convenient camoflauge for a very different affliction?

The glass of unboiled water

If Tchaikovsky did contract cholera, it is impossible to know precisely when or how he became infected. Unboiled water was naturally assumed to be the source. If this is the case, though, when and where did Tchaikovsky drink it?

One version offered in newspapers by confused relatives, maintained that Tchaikovsky recklessly drank a glass of unboiled water during a late supper Wednesday evening at Leiner's restaurant. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest does not mention this story. Instead, he suggests his brother drank the fateful glass at Modest's apartment during lunch on Thursday. "[I]t was right in the midddle of our conversation about the medication he had taken that he poured a glass of water and took a sip from it. The water was unboiled. We were all frightened: he alone was indifferent to it and told us not to worry."

The problem with both these stories is that the incubation period for cholera is between one and three days. Tchaikovsky started having difficulties early Thursday morning. This means the latest the composer could have been infected would have been Wednesday morning, earlier than either the dinner at Leiner's that evening or lunch at Modest's the following afternoon.

Also, the possibility of there even being unboiled water available at a restaurant such as Leiner's was a surprise to some. "We find it extremely strange that a good restaurant could have served unboiled water during an epidemic," wrote a reporter for the newspaper Son of the Fatherland. "There exists, as far as we can recollect, a binding decree that commercial establishments, eating houses, restaurants, etc., should have boiled water."

Theories

Cholera from tainted water

Even with the discrepency in timelines, Poznansky dos not rule out Tchaikovsky's contracting cholera from drinking contaminated water. On the contrary, he ventures the possibility that Tchaikovsky could have drunk that water very unwittingly before the Wednesday supper at Leiner's.

Tchaikovsky habitually drank cold water at meals. Poznansky points out that in July 1893, while visiting his brother Nikolay, the composer had to delay his departure. Tchaikovsky later wrote his nephew Vladimir "Bob" Davydov that he had "became terribly ill ... from the abuse of cold water at dinner and supper."

Also, Poznansky ventures that the cholera bacillus was more prevalent in the St. Petersburng water supply than had been imagined. Just weeks after the composer's death, the cholera bacillus was discovered not only in the water of the river Neva, but even in the water supply of the Winter Palace. Also, a special sanitary commission found that some restaurants, to cool boiled water more quickly for patrons, mixed it with unboiled water

Another factor Pozansky mentions is that Tchaikovsky, already in gastric distress Thursday morning, drank a glass of the alkaline mineral water Huniadi-Jannos in an attempt to ease his stomach. The alkaline in the mineral water would have neutralized the stomach acids. This might have stimulated the cholera bacillus if it were present by giving it a more favorable environment in which to flourish.

Cholera from other means

Biographer Anthony Holden mentions another theory — that drinking unboiled water may not have been the only way Tchaikovsky could have contracted cholera. Referencing cholera specialist Dr. Valentin Pokovsky, Holden mentions the "faecal-oral route" — that Tchaikovsky could have possibly contracted cholera from less than hygienic sexual practices with male prostitutes in St. Petersburg. This theory was advanced separately in The Times of London by its then veteran medical specialist, Dr. Thomas Stuttaford.

Holden admits that, while there is no further evidence to support this theory, if it had been true, Tchaikovsky and Modest would have both gone to great pains to conceal the truth. By mutual agreement, they could have staged the drinking of the glass of unboiled water for the sake of family, friends, admirers and posterity. In the case of an almost sacred national figure, as Holden claims Tchaikovsky was by the end of his career, the doctors involved with Tchaikovsky's case might have permitted their medical consciences to go along with such a deception.

Suicide ordered by "court of honor"

This mutual agreement with Modest and the doctors could have just as easily proved true regarding the "court of honor" theory first broached publiclly by Russian musicologist Alexandra Orlova in 1979, when the emigrated to the West. This "court of honor" was an assembly of Tchaikovsky's fellow alumni of the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence.

The key witness in Orlova's case was Alexander Voitrov, a pupil at the School of Jurisprudence before the First World War. Voitrov had ammassed a great deal of infirmation about some of the history and people of his alma mater and shared this story, which Orlova wrote down from his dictation:

Among the pupils who completed their studies at the School of Jurisprudence at the same time as Tchaikovsky there occurs the name of Jacobi. When I was at the school I spent all of my holidays in Tsarkoye Selo with the family of Nikolay Borisovich Jakobi, who had been Senior Procurator to the Senate in the 1890's, and who died in 1902. Jacobi's widow, Elozabeta Karlovna, was connected to my parents by affinity and friendship. She was very fond of me, and welcomed me warmly. In 1913, when I was the last but one class in the school, the twentieth anniversary of Tchaikovsky's death was widely commemorated. It was then, apparently under the influence of surging recollections, that Mrs. Jacobi, in great secret, told me the story which, she confessed, had long tormented her. She said that she had decided to reveal it to me because she was now old and felt she did not havce the right to take to the grave such an important and terrible secret. "You," she said, "are interested in the history of the school and in the fates of its pupils, and therefore you ought to know the whole truth, the more since it is such a sad page in the school's history." And this is what she told me.

The incident took place in the autumn of 1893. Tchaikovsky was threatened with terrible misfortune. Duke Stenbok-Fermor, disturbed by the attention which the composer was paying to his young nephew, wrote a letter of accusation to the Tsar and handed the letter to Jacobi. Through exposure Tchaikovsky was threatened with the loss of all his rights, with exile to Siberia, with inevitable disgrace. Exposure would also bring disgrace upon the School of Jurisprudence and upon all the old boys of the school, Tchaikovsky's fellow students. To avoid publicity Jacobi decided upon the following. He invited all Tchaikovsky's former schoolmates [he could trace in St. Petersburg], and set up a court of honour which included himself. Altogether theree were eight people present. Elizveta Karlovna sat with her needlework in her usual place alongside her husband's study. From time to time from within she could hear voices, sometimes loud and agitated, sometimes dropping apparently to a whisper. This went on for a very long time, almost five hours. Then Tchaikovsky came headlong out of the study. He was almost running, he was unsteady, and he went out without saying a word. He was very white and agitated. All the others stayed a long time in the study talking quietly. When they had gone Jacobi told his wife, having made her swear absolute silence, what they had decided about the Stenbok-Fermor letter to the Tsar. Jacobi could not withhold it. And so the old boys [of the school] had come to a decision by which Tchaikovsky had promised to kill himself. A day or two later news of the compooser's mortal illness was circulatingh in St. Petersburg.

In her never-published book Tchaikovsky Day by Day, she argues for suicide based on oral evidence and various circumstantial events surrounding his death (such as discrepancies over death dates, and handling of Tchaikovsky's body), suggesting that Tchaikovsky poisoned himself with arsenic. Orlova cites no documentary reference for these claims, however, relying on oral commentary. Holden goes into detail over the various trials Orlova and her husband suffered at the hands of Soviet censors, since the subjects of Tchaikovsky's death and his reputed homosexuality were both forbidden topics of discussion.

In November 1993 the BBC aired a documentary entitled Pride or Prejudice, which investigated various theories regarding Tchaikovsky's death. Among those interviewed were Orlova, Brown, Poznansky and Karlinsky, along with various experts on Russian history. The conclusion reached in the documentary leaned largely in favor of the "court of honor" sentencing to death.

Dr John Henry of Guy's Hospital, an expert witness working in the British National Poison Unit at the time, concluded in the documentary that all the reported symptoms of Tchaikovsky's illness "fit very closely with arsenic poisoning." He suggested that people would have known that acute diarrhoea, dehydration and kidney failure resembled the manifestions of cholera. This would help bolster a potential illusion of the death as a case of cholera.

Other well-respected studies of the composer have challenged Orlova's claims in detail, and concluded that the composer's death was due to natural causes. Among other challenges to Orlova's thesis, Alexander Poznansky revealed that there was no Duke Stenbock-Fermor (a major player in Orlova's case), but there was a Count of that name. However, he was an equerry to Tsar Alexander III, and would not have needed an intermediary to deliver a letter to his own boss. As for the supposed threat to the reputation of the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence represented by Tchaikovsky's gay rampages, Poznansky depicts the school as a hotbed of all-male debauchery which even had its own song hymning the delights of homosexuality..

Suicide ordered by the Tsar

One other theory regarding Tchaikovsky's death is that it was ordered by Tsar Alexander III himself. This story was told by a Swiss musician named Robert Aloys Mooser, who supposedly learned it from two others — Riccardo Drigo, ballet conductor of the Mariinsky Theater, and composer Alexander Glazunov. According to their scenario the compposer had seduced the son of the caretaker of Modest's apartment block.

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Portrait of Tsar Alexander III of Russia. Tchaikovsky was the Tsar's favorite composer.

On learning of Tchaikovsky's indiscretion, the Tsar had reportedly decreed that the composer must leave the capital forthwith. Realizing his career was at an end and that his reputation would be irreparably damaged, Tchaikovsky had poisoned himself. One variant of the story has the Tsar offering Tchaikovsky the choice of a revolver or a ring filled with opison for this purpose, with Tchaikovsky choosing the poison.

The plausibility of this story for many people was that Glazunov reportedly confirmed it. Mooser condisered Glazunov a reliable witnesss, stressing his "upright moral character, veneration for the composer and friendship with Tchaikovsky." Mooser claims Glazunov confirmed the story was true, weeping as he did so. More recently the French Tchaikovsky scholar André Lischke has confirmed Glazunov's confession. Lische's father was a student of the composer in Petrograd in the 1920's. Glazunov confided the story to Lische's father, who in turn passed it to his son.

However, Poznansky counters, Glazunov could not have confirmed the suicide story unless he were absolutely certain of its truth. The only way that could have been possible, though, was if he had been told by someone in Tchaikovsky's innermost circle—in other words, someone who was present at the composer's deathbed. It was exactl;y this circle of intimates, however, that Drigo accused of concealing the "truth," [Poznansky's quote marks for emphasis] demanding false testimonies from authorities, physicians and priests. Only by swearing Glazunov to the strictest secrecy would anyone in this circle revealed the "truth." That Glazunov would then share this information with Mooser, Poznansky concludes, is virtually inconceivable since it would have compromised Glazunov entirely.

Moreover, Holden points out that Alexander III was well aware of the homosexuality said to be rife amid his own courtiers and close relatives. Some of those relatives were, in fact, ensconced in high public positions. Also, Tchaikovsky was the Tsar's favourite composer. As the Tsar is supposed to have said upon hearing of the composer's death, "We have many dukes and barons, but only one Tchaikovsky." In all likelihood, Holden writes, had the monarch received a letter of complaint about Tchaikovsky's indiscretions, he probably would have consigned it to the nearest waste-paper basket..

Holden maintains, though, that this final point actually strengthens the theory that Tchaikovsky committed suicide, because it underlines what Holden calls "the fundamental assumption" that Tchaikovsky would have preferred death to public exposure of his sexual proclivities.

Suicide by drinking unboiled water

Another version holds that Tchaikovsky had been unergoing a severe personal crisis. This crisis was precipitated, according to some accounts, by his infatuation for his nephew, Bob Davydov. This would reportedly explain the agonies expressed in the Sixth Symphony, as well as the mystery surrounding its program. Many analysists, working from this tangent, have since read the Pathétique as intensely autobiographical.

The theory goes that Tchaikovsky realized the full extent of his feelings for Bob, plus the unlikelihood of their physical fulfillment. He supposedly poured his misery onto this one last great work as a conscious prelude to suicide, then began to drink unboiled water in the hope of contracting cholera. In this way, as with his wading into the Moscow river in 1877 in frustration over his marriage, Tchaikovsky could commit suicide without bringing disgrace upon his family.

Glazunov was with Tchaikovsky's party at Leiner's when the composer reportedly drank the glass of unboiled water. He left no personal account of the meal but may have seen what happened, since Brown claims he told at least two independent people about the incident and that Tchaikovbsky's death was suicide. The fact Glazunov may have been confirming this story and not Tchaikovsky's being poisonied on order of the Tsar would explain why he would tell it so readily. With no intimate to whom he would have had sworn secrecy, what did Glazunov have to hide?

No strong evidence

Without strong evidence for any of these cases, it is possible that no definite conclusion may be drawn and that the true nature of the composer's end may never be known. Conclusive evidence, Holden suggests, would mean exhuming Tchaikovsky's corpse for tests to determine the presence of arsenic, as has been done with the body of Napoleon Bonaparte, since arsenic stays in the human body an extremely long time. He adds this suggestion has been made more than once. However, this proposal has yet to be acted upon.

The English composer Michael Finnissy composed a short opera, Shameful Vice, about Tchaikovsky's last days and death.

Pathétique as requiem

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Excerpt from the fourth movement of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony.

Two weeks after Tchaikovsky's death, on November 18, 1893, the composer's longtime friend, conductor Eduard Nápravník, led the second performance of the Pathétique Symphony at a memorial concert in St. Petersburg. This was three weeks to the day after the composer had led the premiere in the same hall, before much the same audience. At the premiere, the work had been greeted with respectful applause for its composer but general bewilderment about the work itself. This time, in the wake of Tchaikovsky's death, audience and critical reaction was much different.

"It is indeed a sort of swan song, a presentiment of impending death, and hence its tragic impression" wrote the reviewer for the Russkaya Muzykal'naya Gazeta. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who attended both performances, attributed the public's change in opinion to "the composer's sudden death ... stories about his presentiments of approaching demise (to which mankind is so prone), and a tendency to link these presentiments with the gloomy mood of the last movement of this splendid ... famed, even fashionable work."

Though some modern musicologists, such as David Brown, dispute the view that Tchaikovsky wrote the Pathétique as his own requiem, many others, notably Milton Cross and David Ewen, accord it credence. The musical clues include one in the development section of the first movement, where the rapidly progressing evolution of the transformed first theme suddenly "shifts into neutral" in the strings, and a rather quiet, harmonized chorale emerges in the trombones. The trombone theme bears no relation to the music that either precedes or follows it. It appears to be a musical "non sequitur" — but it is from the Russian Orthodox Mass for the Dead, in which it is sung to the words: "And may his soul rest with the souls of all the saints."

Sources

• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 1885-1893 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991).
• Brown, David, The Man and His Music (New York: Pegasus Books, 2007).
• Holden, Anthony, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995).
• Norton, Rictor, "Gay Love-Letters from Tchaikovsky to his Nephew Bob Davidof", The Great Queens of History, 19 October 2002, updated 5 November 2005 <http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/tchaikov.htm>.
• Poznansky, Alexander Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991)
• Poznansky, Alexander, Tchaikovsky's Last Days.
• Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, Letoppis Moyey Muzykalnoy Zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1909), published in English as My Musical Life (New York: Knopf, 1925, 3rd ed. 1942).