More Rosebud - Tchaikovsky

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1:25Welcome to Rosebud. In fact, welcome to more Rosebud. That's what we call Rosebud on a Tuesday because there's, well, actually there's less of me because there's more of somebody else. And that somebody else is my friend and producer Harriet Jane. Good to be with you again, Harriet. Hello. We are gearing up for all sorts of excitements in our lives because we are going to Edinburgh, Harriet and I, because we're going to be on the Fringe doing a show every day. It's got some music in it. But I wanted to ask you, Harriet, because today we're going to be talking to a composer. Do you, when it comes to classical music, do you have time for classical music in your life?

2:03Yeah, I went to a concert yesterday that my daughter was playing in. And what was the music in that? Oh, there were loads of different things. There was some Beethoven, there was some Massenet, that was lovely at the end. There was some jazz. Yeah, it was like a school concert with lots of different bits. What instrument does she play? The violin. And was she good? Very good, yeah. Can you, I mean, was it an orchestra or was she doing a solo? Yeah, she was in an orchestra, yeah. Could you discern her? Could you hear her? Yeah, I think so. You're very good. Well done. Massonet, I love the name.

2:39Beethoven, of course, we had on this show. Yes. On Rosebud last year. And we had, we were able to have Beethoven on this show because about three years ago, I went to the old sorting office in Barnes in southwest London. It's a community arts centre. And I saw a young Australian called Tama Matheson give a show, create a show about Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach. And I was blown away by it. Just one man, and I think he had two other people on stage with him, and he told the story amazingly. And I met him afterwards, and I thought, well, this guy's a bit of a genius. He's a polymath. He's remarkable.

3:19And then I introduced him to you. And we together, I think, made us see him do a show about Beethoven. And we had the idea that maybe we could have him come on to Rosebud as Beethoven. And we did about a year ago. And it worked. And he then told us he was coming back. He did that show at the Holland Park Opera in London. And it was a huge success. And I know a lot of Rosebud listeners went to see it. and then he told us, oh, well, this August, when you're in Edinburgh, I'm in London at Opera Holland Park again and this time I'm doing a show about Tchaikovsky. Yeah. I'll give you more details at the end but essentially it's on 13th, 14th, 15th August, 7.30pm, Opera Holland Park, tickets at all prices.

4:05It is fantastic. So, Tom and Matheson as Tchaikovsky but forget that. For now, just sit back and go with the flow and you will be listening to Tchaikovsky. I do guarantee that within five, ten minutes, you'll be totally caught up with the story and I think you'll stay to the end. Cue the music. It's not Tchaikovsky, but still quite good.

4:40Well, this week I promised you a different kind of rosebud and it is a different kind of rosebud because my guest is one of the most famous names in the history of music. My guest is going to be Tchaikovsky, the composer Tchaikovsky. Now we've played this game before on Rosebud, only a couple of times, but it's worked before. We were very lucky, was it last Christmas or the Christmas before last, we had as a guest Gerald Dickens, who is a direct descendant of Charles Dickens. And he does a show in which he plays the part of his forebear. And I'd seen the show and it was brilliant. And I invited him to come onto Rosebud and be Charles Dickens for an hour.

5:24And people were totally gripped. But before that, we'd had a young Australian actor called Tama Matheson as a guest, who I'd seen on stage giving a show, I think it was about Lord Byron. And then I saw him doing a show about Beethoven. And I then met him and I thought, this is an extraordinary polymath. It's sort of, I don't know, Stephen Fry crossed with Valentino because he had Stephen's breadth of interest and Valentino's profile for Zeke. The point is, Taama came and gave us a conversation when he played the role of Beethoven. And people thought an Australian actor, young man being Beethoven.

6:08but they gave him the benefit of the doubt and they listened for an hour and they were completely mesmerized. And I saw that Tama was doing a show about Tchaikovsky and I thought, well, maybe he knows Tchaikovsky as well as he knew Beethoven. Anyway, before we start my conversation with Tchaikovsky, here is Tama. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. How has your year been? What have you been doing since we were last together? Well, we've been, well, since we were last together, I've done various shows, more of these shows about, you know, great figures of the past, including Byron again and Bach.

6:38And this year has been, to a great extent, getting ready for this particular show that's coming up. It's a very, very big show. It's at Opera Holland Park. Opera Holland Park in London. In London. It's on the 13th to the 15th of August. And it's a great big spectacle of the life of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, which is a really extraordinary life. As we're going to discover. I hope we'll discover. He's agreed to be on the show today. He has, he has, extraordinarily. And it's rather unusual in that it's a play knitted together with a concert of his music. So at these salient sort of emotional moments, the music comes swelling out and takes over, which is very, very moving and powerful.

7:22This is what you like to do with these shows of yours. You combine music and storytelling. Well, I think you can't have a real picture of a composer's life if you don't see how the music inheres in it somehow. and that at the right moment contextualizing the music makes it mean more and you understand more the power of what is inside that music. And I think if people want to approach classical music, you have to show them how much is buried within it and how much can be sucked out of it because it is so dense and powerful. Well, we are now going to discover the life experiences of Tchaikovsky.

8:03Yes. Who is hugely famous, hugely popular. Hugely famous and popular. I think perhaps he has the most famous tunes of any composer in the world, barring perhaps Bach. So his violin concerto, his piano concerto, the Nutcracker Suite, the Sugar Plum Fairy, the 1812 Overture, Sleeping Beauty, which of course we all know from Walt Disney, Swan Lake. I mean, there is an endless fund of glorious melody, and everybody knows them. everyone seems to know Tchaikovsky. They may not know exactly who wrote that, but they'll know the music, and it goes right to the center of people's souls, because Tchaikovsky, more than anyone, I think, poured his heart's blood onto the page.

8:45So when you hear his music, you are hearing his passion poured onto the page. I can't wait to meet him, and if you're listening to this, stay with us, because I think you will enjoy meeting him too, because Tama has soaked himself and the story of Tchaikovsky to create his show. And he is going to now answer my questions in the guise of Tchaikovsky. He's not going to change his voice. He's not changing his appearance. But he is actually inside Tchaikovsky. And we're going to bring Tchaikovsky out for you today. So, may I say, welcome to Rosebud, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Thank you very much. The Piotr is just Peter?

9:30Yes. In Russian? In Russian, yes. And the Iliad is a family name? Yes, it's an old family name, exactly. And Tchaikovsky? It actually comes from my great-grandfather, who apparently had an ability to imitate a seagull, which is called a chaika. And then this SKY, the ski, was added because of his services. It's an honorific. It's an added services as a medic in one of the wars that had convulsed Russia at that time, I forget which. So the family name comes from the grandfather's ability to do impressions of a seagull. That's peculiar, but that apparently is where it came from. And because he was a distinguished warrior, he got the honoriski at the end.

10:13An honorific seagull. Oh, that's fantastic. All right, well, do I call you Piotr? Would his friends? And at the time, I imagine, if he'd been interviewed by a newspaper, because he was before the era of radio or television. Yes. How would they address him? Maestro? Piotr Ilyich. They would have said Piotr Ilyich? Yes, friends sometimes, and my parents would call me Petya. Petya. I'm going to begin more formally, though, and simply say to you, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, born on the 7th of May, 1840. If you go by the Gregorian calendar. But in Russia, we hadn't yet changed the Gregorian. We were still in the Julian calendar.

10:56So my birthday in Russia was the 25th of April, 1840. But according to your calendar, yes. Good. Well, we're wanting your story. So you were born when you say you were born. 25th of April. Good. I don't want to make you a month younger than you actually are. So tell me, what is your very first memory? I think my earliest memory was I was born in the beautiful town of Wotkinst near the Urals where my father was a mining engineer and Wotkinst was a kind of Eden and I remember when I was very young looking out of my bedroom window at the swans swimming on the local lake it's the earliest memory I have I don't know how that lodged in my mind but obviously came out later and my music.

11:47It is uncanny. This often happens. People's first memories in some way link up with what their later life becomes. So the man who gives us Swan Lake, your first memory is of swans. Watching the swans swimming in the lake. And it went right into my mind and stayed there. Alas, my father had a terrible tendency to bounce from job to job, which meant that far too frequently we had to leave where we were living and rush off to some other part of Russia. So tell me, Who was your father? What was his name? His name was Ilya Tchaikovsky. He was a mining engineer, and he kept trying to get other jobs.

12:22And so when I was very, very young, four or five, he took another job in Moscow. One of the earliest griefs of my life, I think, was having to leave the beautiful town of Vodkinsk and exchange it for the rambling urban squalor of Moscow, which is a city I never came to love, although I lived there for a long time. Before we get to Moscow, tell us about your mother, Who was she and how did your parents meet you? Alexandra. She was my father's second wife. He had a child by his first wife, Maria. Her name was Zinaida, my eldest sister. My father and mother were deeply in love. He was a widower, I assume.

12:59He was a widower, yes, indeed, yes. He meets your mother, Alexandra. He's my mother. Is she beautiful? A very beautiful lady with French ancestry. And so I always had a sort of yen for France and a sympathy with French culture. I learned French as early as I could. Indeed, we had a Swiss French nurse when I was a boy, a wonderful girl called Fanny Durbach, who taught me French and German as a boy. So I was able to converse in those languages. And I came to adore her almost as much as my own mother. It broke my heart when she left. Tell me a bit more about your parents together before we talk about the nurse, the nanny.

13:38Well, they were very much in love. My father was a very soft and gentle man who almost smothered us with kindness. This is a softness I myself have inherited. And he loved my mother deeply and frequently, it seems, with the six of us children. And my mother was a little harder by nature, but I adored her with an almost morbid passion. I could not see how harsh she was in those days. I worshipped her far too fiercely. Can you give me a specific there of how this would manifest itself? How does a little boy worship his mother? There seemed to be nothing that she could do that didn't fill me with joy.

14:25And when I was away from her, I was almost desperate. When she left me at my first school, which was a school of jurisprudence, Prudence, not a school of music, I couldn't bear the thought of her leaving. And as she left me in the school, I was 10 years old, I clung to her skirts. And I had to be forcibly removed from her. I was screaming, don't leave, mama, don't leave. And she said, go, go, play with the other boys. And as her carriage drove away from the school, I clung to the backboard and was dragged across the schoolyard until I couldn't hold on anymore. That's how much I couldn't stand to be away from my mother.

15:04Have you, in retrospect, thought about why this was? Yes, I have. And I think it's because she played music and sang. And I was musical. I felt it from the first. And as such, I suppose that I felt that our souls walked together on the plane of music. My father was not musical in the same way, although it was he who brought music home to me, quite literally, because he brought home one day from St. Petersburg an orchestrion, which is a sort of automated orchestra in a great big cabinet, like a sort of sideboard. And it played music. It played snatches of Donizetti and Rossini and Bellini and, most wonderful of all, Mozart.

15:52Before we get into you and music, I want to really nail down the relationship between your parents. You're telling me that your father was the soft one gently spoken and physically affectionate yes and your mother you describe her as harsh does that mean she was a disciplinarian did she did she beat you when you were naughty no she was just rather detached no we never got beaten but she was just rather detached my father was completely invested in his family and his children and he adored the role of husband and he always assumed i would grow into it one day and he would say you will find the right woman one day peter I fear he wasn't enormously perceptive.

16:33But my mother was always a little more detached, and she left the rearing of her children to various nannies. So you say there were six children in all, and were you the oldest of the six children? I was the third. Oh, so lots of brothers and sisters. Yes, yes. And did you have a particular favourite, or how did you go on? My favourite, I had two twin brothers. They seemed to me angels. I can imagine, looking at those children, why we imagined angels in the first place, why the artists think of putty and cherubs, because these were my angels. We're hearing you now, and of course we know your kind of music, but you're giving the impression of being quite a romantic child.

17:12Enormously so. And were you conscious of that then? When did you first become aware of this streak in you? I don't know if I was ever aware of it as such. It just seemed to be my nature. My nurse was very aware of it. I met her some 40 years later. She reminded me of how I was as a child, and apparently I was deeply susceptible to music and very, very frail and fragile. She said, you couldn't accept criticism of any kind. And I thought, if I gave you criticism, you would shatter. And she called me her child of glass. And I would sometimes rush to her with music in my head, saying, Fanny, Fanny, the music is in my head.

17:54I can't get rid of it. Help me, help me get it out of my head. And she didn't know how to calm me down. And because of this music, I would drum my fingers relentlessly on the furniture and the walls. And she said there was one occasion in which I drummed them so hard on a window pane that I actually put my hand through the glass. And she said as she bandaged me up, she thought to herself, here is my child of glass, cut by his own substance. And what age were you when this was happening? I was, I think, six. And in the intervening years, I've learned that we are all cut by our own substance. That is what it means to be human.

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19:36So you're moving around, though. Yes. You were born in that lovely town that you told us. And then you go. We went to Moscow first. It didn't work out with my father's job in Moscow. We moved to St. Petersburg. and then I was put in two schools, a very brief stint in a school before I was put into the School of Jurisprudence to become a civil servant. See, there was nothing to suggest that I would be a musician when I was a boy. But you're drumming your fingers aged six. I was very susceptible to music and I kept trying to write songs or make up songs for the family to sing. But as Fanny said, you were no Mozart, Piotr.

20:14I said, wasn't I always writing songs for the family to sing? She said, yes, of course, but not good ones. Was there any musicality in the family at all? My mother, who could play the piano beautifully and sang very well. And did she sing with you? Did you play the piano with her? Yes, of course. She sang my songs. Ah, in time. I don't know how much she enjoyed them. Oh, but even when you were a little boy? Yes, yes. And did she teach you to play the piano? No, that came later. There was a freed serf, in fact, the serfs in the process of being freed, who taught me music. And the serfs, just to explain to the modern audience who don't know about it, basically it was a form of slavery.

20:51You were indentured to a family forever. You just worked on their land. And you could never move from that plot. And you owed everything to your master. And if you tried to escape, you could be brought back and lashed. But your family was not a prosperous family. No, but we did all right. You did all right. My father was quite well off at first when we were in Vodkinsk. Unfortunately, he made some silly speculations and kept leaving his job, so we got poorer and poorer. Do you have any recollection of those early, of sitting at a piano, looking at it and playing? Nothing specific, although one thing I do know is that my parents, seeing that I could play the piano, took me to a very famous music teacher called Rudolf Kundinger to see if I had any skill.

21:36And he said, rather forthrightly, well, the boy has some skills on the piano, but nothing special. I can't imagine he will ever have any kind of career in music. So that was the judgment on my future as a musician. And so it was a good bet to send me to the School of Jurisprudence. So you're 10 and you're sent to this School of Jurisprudence. The idea is you're going to be a civil servant, which will mean that you have a good income for the rest of your life. That's the idea, yes. That's the plan. In your head, you're this romantic creature. By then, have you learned to play the piano by the time you were 10?

22:08Yes, I could play very well by that time. And you were composing at all? You were writing music down? I was writing little sketches but never taking anything seriously. I was doing it as an amateur, as a lover of music. And can you remember the first time you performed in front of other people outside your family? Oh, I played for my friends at the School of Jurisprudence. I found a very interesting bunch of friends who were all artistic in nature. And we enjoyed illuminating each other with our various forms of art. one of my greatest friends was the now famous poet Alexei Apuchtin, who was an extraordinary character.

22:43You say now famous, Alexei? He's a very famous poet now in Russia. Oh, how do you pronounce his name? Apuchtin. Apuchtin. And he was an extraordinary character. Everything about him, his conduct, his conversation, and his poetry was an unapologetic shade of lavender. Oh, you were the same age, were you? We were exactly the same age, and he was the first to teach me to accept my own desires. He taught me something about the ancient Greeks. Well, we've got to this age, you know, you're 10, 11, 12, 13. This is the years we're talking about. And what you're telling me is what we would call in modern parlance, that you were realizing you were gay.

23:21Is that right? Indeed. I mean, that is the nub of it. Were you as aware of it as I've just put it, or did you just explain those early feelings, how they manifested themselves for you? I realised when I went to the school of jurisprudence, which of course was completely filled with boys, that I had... Was it a boarding school? It was, yes. Oh, so you were sent away from... Hence your mother leaving in that carriage. You clinging on to the board behind... Yes, yes. As she firmly went to Hensei. She was going to leave me forever. Yeah. And I felt it was a prison sentence. And she said, go and play with the other boys, Piotr.

23:57Well, she little dreamed how faithfully I would follow her instructions. I began to feel very strong affections for some of the boys. There was a young boy called Sergei Kyriev, only a year younger than I, for whom I developed something of an infatuation. And all the more so, I fear, because he treated me very, very cruelly. Once he even slapped me in the face in front of all the other boys, which was a terrible humiliation, and I have to admit only added zest to my affection. What perverse creatures we humans are to love the thing that brings us pain. And Apuqtin, who was much more in touch with his feelings and much more overt than I, taught me that I shouldn't be ashamed of my own nature.

24:41Now, I fear in this, he was a little naive about the nature of the world, because this is a hangman world. What do you mean by that? It's pleasures of the pleasures of an inquisition. It's a sour, sadistic world that loves to hate and judge and punish. and in that world someone who is different is reviled and needs to be punished. And did you and your friends talk about this or was much of this happening in your head? I was aware of it and Apuktin who was very very open about his sexuality. And this is a boy of 14-15? Yes he said don't be afraid of it. What did the teachers think? well I think they thought and I thought so too that it was um a youthful fad that would one day blow away on the wind you were going through a phase yes boys go through this phase of course and you know I think people were a little more freely emotional which with each other in those days uh boys in particular but I was also aware that regardless of the fact that it felt natural it could also very easily be reviled.

25:53There were some injunctions against it at the school, which were often ignored. And curiously, it was accepted amongst the aristocracy in Russia. But how could it not be? If it wasn't, you'd have to arrest two-thirds of Russia's oligarchy. But for ordinary men, such as myself, it was punishable by public disgrace. the loss of civil rights and exile to Siberia. So it was not an idle threat. Known act of homosexuality. Yes. Punished all set again? By public disgrace, loss of civil rights and exile to Siberia. Wow. So you could be arrested. Yes. Tried in some way, shape or form. And sent to Siberia.

26:36So, my goodness. It was very, very frightening. And I felt this at school. I think perhaps the first time I really felt the danger of my own nature was when I was having dinner at the Chateau Tong restaurant in St. Petersburg with Apokhtin and a few sympathetic friends when suddenly, in the middle of the supper, a man stood up in the restaurant and stridently denounced us for our habits, hurling all sorts of epithets and slurs at us. And you're teenagers still, are you? We were teenagers, and the next day our names were published across the city in connection with that ugly French word, bougres.

27:20And it was then that I realized that my nature was a peril to me, that like a spider I could be reviled for being what I am. And that is why for the rest of your life you suppressed in public this side of your nature. Yes. Except there was a freedom with certain friends. was a freedom with certain friends and a freedom in certain places. There was a very dear friend of mine called Prince Mesherski, and he called himself Prince of Sodom and Citizen of Gomorrah. You can imagine that things were a little freer with him. But for myself, I was always terribly frightened, and I wanted to be dignified, and I wanted to be respectable.

28:01And I eventually found ways to try to suppress this thought. We were jumping ahead, but I attempted to get married once. Well, we're going to hear about that in a moment. Terrible disaster. Well, I remember that from the film version of your story, which you may not have seen, but I saw in the 1970s. And you're correcting a lot of things that I thought had happened that didn't happen, which is good. But back as a schoolboy, how's your academic work? Very good. I passed my tests with flying colours and was, after that, admitted to the Ministry of Justice. So it was still your plan to become a civil servant?

28:33It was, indeed. And at 16 or something, you go to this next place? Yes, that's right. And there I became, if you can believe it, a minor civil servant. If you can imagine the great Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, an inconsequential clerk in the Ministry of Justice. Well, I can, because that's real life. Right. What is difficult to believe is in Tchaikovsky. We can believe in this young boy. It was agonizing. I have no inkling, not the faintest inkling of what I did at the Ministry of Justice. It tells you something about the civil service, doesn't it? I had the rank of titular councillor, though what that might mean passeth all understanding.

29:12But that's bureaucracy, an inventory of titles with no jobs attached. But all I really remember was the boredom. Mindless, gormless, endless boredom. It was interminable. I don't know how people do it every day. And where were you living at night when you were doing this? I was renting a house. So you've left your home by now. Yes. Because, and this is where, where are you? St. Petersburg, Moscow? St. Petersburg. I did eventually go and live with my father again. By this time, alas, my mother had died. She died when I was 15. Ah, tell us, oh my gosh, tell us about that. Well, I was at the School of Jurisprudence and I heard that she died of cholera.

29:53Because... A cholera epidemic swept through St. Petersburg. Of course, you were a border. Yeah. So the head of the school will have told you? Yes. And what was the effect on you? Absolute devastation. No pain I have ever felt has been as great as that. When I think about my mother and the fact that she is gone, I can hardly control the anguish that I feel in my soul. Were you by then writing music more regularly? Yes, I began attending lectures at the newly established conservatoire in St. Petersburg. And eventually I thought, this is what I need. And when your mother died, did that have an influence on your work in any way?

30:36I think all the passions in my life have had an influence on my work. I didn't write anything specifically for the death of my mother, but the anguish went into my soul and came out in some of the more howling passages of my music. You mentioned, though, that after your mother's death, you went and spent some time with your father. And how was your relationship with him as the years went by? Well, I fear he didn't quite understand me. Our friendship was always very civil and cordial, although I have to say he did grow a little distant towards the end of my life, before he died. Do you think he was aware that you were gay?

31:11I'm sure it's not something you ever talked about with him, but was he aware of it? He hoped I would one day find the right girl to marry. All my life, he would say, you will find the right girl. Seriously, did you hope that as well? Very much so.

31:28when I was at the Ministry of Justice I pursued my passions my predilections with a sort of mad vivacity partly because my life was so empty the emptier it was the more I tried to fill it with frivolity and give us some examples of what you want Well, I would go to certain parties and certain areas of the city. I would debauch myself. Gay, what we now call gay sex. A sybaritic life. And the emptier my life, the more I tried to fill it with frivolity. And I pursued this vice with a sort of frenetic abandon. And this was a high-risk exercise. Very much so. Were you half hoping to be caught? It's hard to say.

32:24I felt that I was trying to distract myself from a life that was itself a distraction. The Ministry of Justice was nothing. It was an emptiness. And if I could distract myself from that distraction, then perhaps I could live a full life. And for a while I submitted myself to this sort of seductive illusion. Life seemed to spread out before me like a sort of endless carnival. But illusions, however powerful they are, ultimately fail to satisfy. and I could feel this deep artistic urge in me of crying out to be fulfilled. And then, once again, Mozart appeared in my life and came to my rescue. I saw a production of Don Giovanni.

33:07It was a revelation. As soon as those big D minor chords began, I felt as though I had walked through the portals of heaven and stumbled on the angels singing to God. It charged my soul with enthusiasm, with aspiration. And suddenly I realized this was what I needed. This was what I had to do. I must become a musician. And within weeks, I had enrolled in the conservatoire. That's when I began. And was it easy to do? They took you? They took me. Indeed, at first I thought, oh, I'd better keep my secure job. And so I did the conservatoire in my off times and evenings. And eventually I decided I must transition out.

33:45I did not want to be a civil servant. And was there a particular teacher there who sort of said, Piotr, you're my man? I learned from Zaremba first, who was a lovely teacher, and then the conservatoire's director, the Olympian Anton Rubinstein, the world's preeminent pianist, saw something in me and took me under his wing. And under his mentorship, things really, really took off. There was one other very curious character. I could just paint you a picture of him before that. as an Italian singing teacher by the name of Luigi Piccioli, and he was a peculiar character. For a start, we could never tell how old he was.

34:23His age seemed to hover somewhere between about 30 and 75 because he had a peculiar habit of rouging his cheeks to a gleaming rubescence, dyeing his hair to an improbable black, and taking the skin of his face and pulling it tight, stretching it, gathering it the back of his neck and clipping it with a sort of glorified clothes peg to keep his face taut. I've started doing that. Oh, have you indeed? Yes, I'm afraid he was nearer 75 than 34. And despite this, he had a slew of young men coming up to visit him in his apartments. And I always thought to myself, what happened when things got amorous and he finally took the peg off the back of his neck?

35:11By then he's blown out the candle. I imagine both their faces fell. Oh, that's so good. That's very funny. You're funny. Oh, thank you. I mean, were you? You were clearly a lot of people leading very risky lives. Very risky lives. Because these people at the conservatoire, he was parading himself in the streets, this teacher. Yes, absolutely. Because he was seen to be that. But he got away with it because unless you were caught or doing it, in public or seen to be a corruptor of youth, you could, it was overlooked, wasn't it? It was an eccentricity. In his case. It was an eccentricity that could be overlooked.

35:51He was a strange character, and who knows what all that stuff meant. And did you become happy then? Were you happy at the Conservatoire? I think I've never been as happy as I was the four years that I worked in the Conservatoire. I studied, I practiced piano, I wrote until my fingers bled, I absorbed Beethoven and Weber. You say you wrote until your fingers bled. I wrote piece after piece after piece, a tone poem called Fatem. I tried my hand at a symphony, operas. I wrote and wrote chamber music. I would usually tear them up again afterwards because I was ill-satisfied with them. And I absorbed all the great masters.

36:29Beethoven left me rather cold. Schubert I loved. Schumann I loved the most of all because he was so unashamedly emotional, something I would try to emulate all my life. I tried for a while to write as Schumann. but imitation is not art and I had to find my own style and then of course I had this support let's say from Anton Rubinstein who sort of thought I was the best of all his pupils but I did finally get a terribly bad review at the end of my schooling from a composer called Cesar Cui who was one of the mighty handform who were the five great composers who hung around Balakirev, Balakirev, Cui Mussorgsky, Rimsky, Korsakov and Baradin.

37:12I've only heard of the last two. Right, right and Cesar Cui was also a critic and when I wrote my final assessment cantata which was a setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy if you please as though there weren't a good setting of that already he wrote a review that said that this Tchaikovsky has no talent whatsoever. I was devastated. I was in floods of and at the same time furious. And I wanted to punish Cooey somehow. And then I heard his music, and I realized I didn't have to. Too long to be a composer and to have so little talent, that is punishment enough. Before we get to your breakout moments, tell me about some of the girls that you met and that you liked and that you thought, well, this is what everybody else does.

38:02Maybe I'm going to give this a go. Well, all right. I'll start this another way, if I may. After the conservatoire, I was invited to Moscow by Anton Rubinstein's brother, Nikolai Rubinstein, who asked me to be a professor of music, which was extraordinary. Because you're now in your early 20s. I finished the conservatoire a mere seconds ago, and suddenly I was being requisitioned as a professor. I had nothing to profess. I accepted. But unfortunately, teaching turned out to be a sort of wearisome vexation. It was endless rounds of tutorial drudgery. It kept me from my own composing. And I was constantly surrounded by crowds of adoring women.

38:41They loved me. And it horrified me. I have to say I was always afraid. I was terrified at the sight of so many crinolines and petticoats. What did you look like? Because the pictures I have of you, there are photographs, aren't they, taken later live. You're covered in beard. Yes, that's right. What were you looking like when you were in the early 20s? I was growing my beard to hide a rather weak chin. But I think I was quite handsome, if I may say so. You may say so. I had rather sensuous lips and penetrating blue eyes. But at that time, I think I was rather interesting to the young ladies. I, of course, had no interest in the young ladies and was terribly confused.

39:21And all the time, these darker passions would rear their irresistible head, and I surrendered to them. But every time I surrendered, I felt a terrible sense of guilt, and I would go to the church and kneel and pray to God. Had faith been part of your family's upbringing? Always, yes, always. And I am very, very faithful. And I would kneel to God and I would say, let me be as other men, O Lord. Take away this thing in me and let me walk freely in the world with my hand in the hand of my beloved. But my prayers were never answered. But you kept your faith? I kept my faith. To your dying day? Yes, yes, absolutely.

39:57I did finally fall in love with a soprano, a French soprano by the name of Désirée Artaud, who came to St. Petersburg to perform. She was a wonderful soprano, and when she sang, I was transfixed. And I suddenly felt myself extremely smitten. I thought, this was what I needed. An artist such as this could bend my soul to common love. If I could reach out and wed her, then I could become respectable. I met her after the concert. I said, may I give you a compliment? She said, I would be very happy to receive a compliment. And we flirted. Our flirtation evolved into a courtship. And within a short time, we were engaged to be married.

40:41Tell me a bit more about the courtship. Did you whine her, dine her? What happened? She would have had chaperones. Yes. She was beyond chaperones then. She was five years older than I was. And it was very respectable. and nothing really took place between us because I suppose in the end I didn't want it to. I loved her in a metaphysical sense. It was a different world. It was, of course, a different world. From your debauched world, of course. Well, I think there was enough. A dissipated world. I'm sorry, Peter Ilyich. There was enough debauchery. There was an occasion. On those dark nights in the woods around St.

41:16Petersburg. We don't need to go any further there. But I found myself suddenly engaged. age that I thought a woman how how well a woman but you also you enjoyed her company didn't you because she was musical and she was a tremendous artist yeah exactly she was tremendous and and and she fell in love with you do you think I think she fell in love with me but something intervened whether it was the rather unenticing prospect of marrying an impoverished young composer who would follow her around like a sheepdog while she pursued her career or whether she had been apprised of certain other quirks.

41:51She broke it off. Well, worse than that, she went for a holiday to Warsaw and returned to St. Petersburg, a married woman. Oh, that's making it pretty clear. And I can assure you nothing dampens an engagement quite so effectively as that. I was heartbroken for, oh, hours. And for a while after this debacle, I pursued my old vice with refreshed abandon, and I was sure now that I was not suited to women nor were women suited to me. But you did get married eventually didn't you? I did. And how did that happen? A curious concatenation of circumstances drove me to it. My brother Modeste came to me in the late 1870s and said, Pyotr, I am the same as you in my nature and my constitution.

42:37And I said, Modeste, you must repress these pernicious passions. I think of nothing but trying to get rid of these passions all my life. They are the greatest obstacle to my happiness, our happiness. And he said, how can I deny what I am by nature? And I said, you must try, you must try. He said, I can't do it. And they said, I will show you how. I will, I will eschew my wicked habits forever. I will marry someone, anyone. I will enter into matrimony with anyone prepared to have me. And just at that moment, a letter arrived from a young lady called Antonina Milyukova, who had, it seems, been a pupil of mine at conservatoire.

43:19And she wrote to say that she had fallen under the tyranny of very strong affections for me, and she was in love with me and wished to marry me, and she would kill herself if I would not marry her. Now, I felt at first revulsion at this letter, but I felt that I had to answer it because I couldn't, like Onegin, be heartless to this sincere girl. And I had just been working on my opera, Evgenia Onegin, which tells of the young, sincere Tatiana and how she writes a letter to Onegin as horribly rejected. I couldn't be heartless like Onegin. So reality and fiction began to blur together in my mind.

43:52And she became the image of Tatiana for me. And I had fallen in love with my own character by then. And I met her in St. Petersburg. and stupidly I told her I intended to marry I could never love her as a husband I would always love her as a brother and I would always be a staunch and grateful friend and would she be prepared to marry me under these conditions she said yes and we were married I wept the entire day of our wedding which she put down to tears of joy but it was a torment for me I knew at that moment I'd done the wrong thing. I could never bend my soul to common love. Was this to be my future?

44:34Married life? But why did you do it? Because I had to have a screen to hide my nature. A badge of respectability. So you took advantage of her desire to marry you. So how long did it last? About three months. Oh gosh. I immediately steamed away on a train. Worse than that I thought You ruined her life. It never seemed to ruin her life. She was so thrilled to have married Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the famous composer. She didn't quite exist in reality. And she was married to you for the rest of her life. She was married because she... Did she come to the funeral as the widow? I believe she did.

45:13I think she did. The widow Tchaikovsky. So she carried on living as the wife of the celebrated composer. I believe so. And you lived a separate life. Yes, I did, yeah. but she didn't seem to understand I sent to my brother Anatoly and Nikolai Rubinstein to break it off and she didn't understand she just smiled, sipping tea the whole time when they left she said, who would have thought I would have the famous Rubinstein to tea in my house and she appeared one day on my doorstep again hurling herself at my feet saying Piotr, Piotr, you must be my husband take me back, take me back and there is a sadness in the fact that I deceived her I manipulated her, that is a sadness in my life I should not have done it But I felt I was advanced on a spear point.

45:53Push forward, I was to die, and if I turned backwards, I would wear out my life in cowardice. It's an impossible situation for men like me, is either you abjure the world or else abjure yourself. And yet, as the Bible says, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his own soul? And it was unconsummated. Entirely unconsummated. The day I saw her getting ready for the bath, I had to rush out to St. Isaac's Cathedral. I felt a sudden urgent need to pray. I said I was terrified of crinolines and petticoats. It's infinitely worse when the crinoline comes off. And I thought at one point I had no way out except self-slaughter.

46:34And I walked. I waded waist-deep into the icy Moscow River and stood there a while, hoping to contract some malady from the freezing water and be carried off this troublesome plane. Till death are two part, you see. It's easier than filing for divorce. so your whole life really has been defined by your sexuality it has there was one woman who i absolutely adored though i haven't talked about her yet if i may of course her name was madame who was a wealthy widow the widow of a railway magnate who had a vast fortune and she was a great lover of music and she had asked me to to write her a little piece of music which i did and then she wrote me a letter of thanks and our correspondence blew up into an enormous kind of manifesto of art and life and everything our letters perhaps one of the most extraordinary conversations about life art ambition music that exists in the world of ballet but we decided that we would never meet she became my greatest friend my greatest confidant she supported me with a stipend of 6 000 rubles she helped me with my separation expenses and we should never meet because our love was metaphysical.

47:46And even to meet her for a moment would burst the delicate illusion of perfection. We blew up around each other. I did encounter her once, though, quite by accident. I was staying in her estate in Brelof, where she invited me often, and we'd exchange itineraries so that we shouldn't meet. But as I was walking the forest one day, she was there in front of me. And we froze. I felt my face turning crimson with embarrassment. and she was the same. And we didn't know what to say and this hiatus stretched and stretched between us. And finally I tipped my hat and walked off. And we never said a word to each other.

48:23Your story is remarkable. Yes. We thought that it would ruin things if we met each other. And I think I was always afraid that her perspicacity might see through me to the shadow in my soul and revile me for it.

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49:44So tell us about your music. How do you go from being somebody who's just left the conservatoire and indeed has had a bad review for your end-of-year performance to being this world-famous composer? What are the steps? What happened next? It took a while. Fortunately, the bad review was rather modified by my friend Germain Laroche, who also said he thought it was a wonderful piece, the cantata, and that, in fact, I embodied the greatest hope for Russia's musical future. Obviously, we became fast friends. He seemed a man of discernment and intelligence. And then, eventually, one of my pieces was played, a piece called Characteristic Dancers, was played by the great Johann Strauss, the waltz king himself, who played it in a concert in Pavlovsk.

50:32Forgive me, you sent this to him. I mean, how does, in those days, how did people get their work done? I think it had been given to him by someone else. So work was performed and sent around, and suddenly I found that this was happening, and it made me slightly famous. But the trouble with fame is that it increases the scrutiny in one's life. Fame, it seems to me, is like Brutus in the capital waiting to stab Caesar to death. And the public are its willing accomplices with standing with sharpened knives to join in the execution. So when you were an unknown jobbing composer and musician, you would get away with anything.

51:10But once you became somebody who appeared in the newspapers... The scrutiny became more rigorous. And you were conscious of that. I became more and more frightened of it. But then an extraordinary thing happened. My first great success, I suppose, came from my Romeo and Juliet overture, which had been suggested to me by Balakiev. This is Romeo and Juliet overture to what? It's just an overture, a freestanding overture. so it's essentially a tone poem about Shakespeare's play. And would it have been played before a production of the play? No, it's just called an overture. Just called an overture, but it's essentially a tone poem.

51:43And Balakirif had written to me a sort of plan. He said you could set it out like this, and I was thrilled by the idea because I loved Shakespeare. And is somebody reading the poem or singing the poem? No, no, it's purely orchestral, so it's just an orchestral colour that suggests the incidence of the play. And who's this man who wrote to you? Balakirif, the great composer who was the leader of the Great Five, of the Moguchka and Kuchka. And I'd heard of Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov for the first three. But he was the leader of that group. And he wrote inviting you, suggesting... He suggested I write this as if it would be a good project for me as a young composer.

52:16And I have to say, I love the idea, but at first I didn't know how to write it. The love between girl and boy rather eluded me, and I faltered rather miserably at the sketches. And then I met a young man called Edward Zak, and suddenly inspiration struck and the star-crossed lovers came blazing to life in my love for Edward. And was that a consummated love? It was. And for the first time I realized how my passion could become the inspiration of my music. Then my passion could become the form which guided my music. And this was a proper relationship you and he became? Lovers and partners? Yes. Or was that not possible?

53:01It was not quite possible, and then, unfortunately, some three years later, life proved how horribly it can imitate art. When my beloved Edouard, perplexed and ashamed at his aberrant nature, took his own life, I was devastated. I have never loved anyone as much as him. but you see I had done something magical because in the overture I had captured his spirit and made him immortal. In that he can never die. As long as that overture is played, my Edward lives again. You see the ancient gods of Greece and Rome had power to turn their lovers into constellations. I have only the power to turn them into music but as Mercutio says, tis enough, twill serve.

53:52It is very beautiful but I imagine no consolation to his parents. No consolation to his parents and no consolation in the end to me. Because he was young when this happened and he just couldn't face society taking a different view. I believe that's what happened. Oh, gosh. A lot of my friends took their lives in the end. They couldn't face it. I mean, you say a lot. You mean many people, a number of people. Many people that I knew. Gosh. There are always other reasons given but it seems quite obvious to me that that was the problem. If you cannot allow your soul to speak in public, what can you do?

54:29For me, the great miracle was music. That allowed me to express the motions of my heart. You see, the dots and scratches on a musical page are more than mere sound. They are freedom for the imprisoned soul. After Edouard, did you have any other permanent lovers, partners? Never permanent. I met much later on a violinist called Josef Kotech, for whom I wrote my violin concerto, one of the most heartfelt pieces I've ever written. The truth is, you were going really from success to success. Success to success. I mean, qualified successes. Then my next great project, and perhaps my first real enormous success, was I'd written a couple of symphonies.

55:09My first and second and third symphonies were not my best works, but then I began a piano concerto. I worked extremely hard on them, because with pianists like Anton and Nikolai Rubenstein as my mentors, I couldn't afford any foolish blunders. I worked incredibly hard on it, and I took it to Rubenstein, as clumsily as my fingers would allow, I played it through to him. And when I had finished, he said nothing. Absolute silence. A terrible echoing hiatus opened between us. And I looked at him, I thought, did he like it, did he hate it? I had no idea. He frowned out at the music. I thought, say something, for God's sake, anything, even if it's not gushing praise.

55:49And then he said, Peter, it is grotesque. It is absolute garbage. It is a piece of derivative nonsense. You have pinch bits from here and there, rags of Litov and scraps of Chopin and bits of Schumann all flung together without any organization or harmony or intelligence. it was an absolute piece of garbage and he was sorry I'd wasted my time on such filth and I can't tell you the tone of voice in which he said this and then he had the gall to say but if you will make some emendations which I will suggest then we can save the piece from utter oblivion I grabbed the score off the piano I marched to the door and I said Nikolai I'm going to the publisher and I assure you I will not change a single note.

56:39I shall publish it exactly as it stands. And that is what I did. I took away the dedication which had been to him and gave it to Hans von Bülow. And then the epilogue or the palinode, let's say, to that story is that... I love this palinode. Palinode, a retraction, as it were, is that Rubenstein himself became one of the great interpreters of a concerto in his life. so our first judgments are often erroneous extraordinary but well done you yeah sticking to your guns yes i'm glad i didn't it's become a staple of the repertoire well done you and when did you get into ballet i mean opera we don't really associate you with do we no i mean i i wrote many operas i wrote more operas and ballets um there are two great successes i've had ifgeny on yegin of course and the queen of spades big of a dharma uh they're the two that remain in the repertoire.

57:33In Russia they still play Cherovitsky and Vojavodov and Mazepa, but they're not well known, I think, here in the West. I wrote my first ballet, Swan Lake, I think in 1876, 1875. I had long, longed to try my hand at ballet music, as I rather fancied myself as a dancer, in fact. I was quite nimble on my feet. But unfortunately, the stories for ballet are always rather silly and Swan Lake was no exception. Although I did find something intriguing in the duality of the black and white swans, good and bad, virtue and vice, conformity and rebellion, I felt it was like the two sides of myself sort of eternally clashing in the struggle for meaning.

58:15And was it a success from the start? Where was it? It was a failure. I played once and never played again. I hear it's been played ever since but it was a great it was a great failure in St. Petersburg. Wow. Went absolutely nowhere so I discarded that. Some years later I wrote Sleeping Beauty, which I worked very, very hard on, although the choreographer Marius Petit Par kept telling me I need eight bars here and I need four measures here and I need a half beat here and I had to follow his thing. I was very proud of my orchestration in that and that was more of a success, but the Tsar, Alexander III, who was a great supporter of mine, in fact he'd given me a pension of some 3 ,000 rubles a year, he came to see it and after the performance he yawned and said, very nice.

58:57And how were you at coping with all this? Well by that time I had been able to rise above. Although I did rather disregard my ballets. The third ballet was a piece called Nutcracker. I don't know if you've heard of it. But it's a very silly piece. It's not worth talking about. It'll quickly be forgotten. The opera I wrote with it though, Eolanta, now that I'm sure is destined for immortality. I'm sure you'll all know that one. Well, we're going to talk about the retrospective view of you in just a moment. But as we come towards the end, I'd like to ask you about extraordinary people that you will have met.

59:39You mentioned the Tsar there. Once you've become a nationally known figure, and maybe internationally known, were your works being? Very much so, yes. Do you travel abroad? I travel to America. I travel all over the world, in fact, but I had one marvellous occasion where I was invited to New York. to play at a new hall funded by Andrew Carnegie. They absolutely adored me in New York. I was more famous in America than in Russia. And were you enjoying this? I loved the attention. I was terrified of the city. The great skyscrapers frightened me, and I would go to my hotel and whimper in fear at night, although the hotel was a marvellously opulent affair with all sorts of unimaginable conveniences.

1:00:18They had a faucet that dispensed real running water, had lights that turned on at the flicking of a switch and, perhaps most wonderful of all, a water closet by which one could flush away one's, let us say, least respectable compositions in a great gushing waterfall. Nothing amused me so much as pressing down the handle of this marvel over and over again. I wanted to write a tone poem about it. I also travelled around Europe and I met various people, Gounod, Massonet. Do people like you? Gounod? Generally, I was a writer. Rote operas, is it? Yes, that's right. Guggennus Faust, that's right. Massene, we've heard of.

1:00:55Massene. Did you get on well with these people? Yes, I got on very well with them all. I also met Johannes Brahms, and I have to tell you, in all earnestness, that in my estimation, Brahms is without parallel. He is the most boring composer I know. As a composer or as a person? As a composer, in his music, you can really hear that composing is difficult. What a giftless bastard he is. He seems to be the ideal composer for those who like their music. Foursquare, bland, predictable and tuneless. He's very popular, as it happens with the British. Having tasted your food, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

1:01:37Did you come to Britain, in fact, on your international travels? I did. I came because I was given an honorary doctorate by Cambridge University. Gosh. Which no other Russian composer ever received, not even Glinka. You die at the age of only 53. on the 6th of November, 1893. Why do you die young, and are you happy at the time of your death? Obviously not at the moment of your death, but towards the end of your life, because you've had this international success. I don't know exactly how to quantify happiness. As you go through life, I realise, as I got older, that fate begins to take away the things she gives you at the outset.

1:02:24All my friends, slowly, La Roche, Cotec, even the lively of Puktin, were blown away on the wind like autumn leaves because we only borrow the things we have from that great usurer, time. And when we pay him back, we pay him with the interest of heartache and pain. And when I was young, I felt as though time had no power over me. there was no chance that I could ever grow old as I got older there seemed to be no possibility that I was ever young I lost a great number of my friends along the way one of the worst thunderbolts in my life was the death of Nikolai Rubenstein my mentor who died the year after my father so in quick succession these two died it was horrible to see his little coffin carried through the Gare du Nord in Paris all that greatness reduced to nothing.

1:03:21And then a young artillery officer with whom I had grown very fond took a gun and put an end to his sexual confusion and his death almost defeated me. And the longer I live the more I seem to realize that there is never a moment of true happiness in this life. For me only music could keep me from despair. Of all heaven's gifts to humanity wandering in the darkness Music is the most beautiful. Did you go on working until the end? I did, to the very last moment. I was writing my sixth symphony, my Pathétique, as I called it. It was just at that time that another cholera epidemic appeared in St. Petersburg, and people started to die all around me.

1:04:08It terrified me, because my mother had died of cholera. and at that time the cholera rose freshly into my mind and mortality felt ominously close. I put that aside and thought about the symphony. I was thrilled with the piece. I knew it was my greatest work but the audience didn't like it. After the performance, there was silence in the hall. A few scattered claps and nothing. And I think I realized what it was. With the cholera there, and the world sighing into death all around, people wanted heroic defiance, not craven submission. But for me, that was not life. For the most part, life doesn't end in glory.

1:05:01It blows away on a whisper of sorrow. I thought, what could be more human than to end my symphony with a whisper and a fall? Such an ending speaks for the many, not the few, for the reality, not the lie. But people live by their illusions, and I suppose they want to die by them. Do you know who was with you at the time of your death? My brother, Modeste, was with me, and a family doctor, Dr. Bertinson, and some of my friends came, because I contracted cholera. it seemed fitting is what killed my mother and so it seemed proper for me to follow in the same way and I know that there has been controversy about my death ever since the story is that I drank a glass of unboiled water in the middle of a cholera epidemic how could this be when we knew we had to boil the water to get rid of the disease the disease lives in the water always boil the water.

1:06:02For some reason, I drank a glass of it, and within five or six days was dead. Horrible torments, and one of the things I had to endure was an immersion into a boiling hot bath of water, which they thought activated your kidneys. The same had happened to my mother. I remember her screams. It's hard to say. Perhaps my mind clouds over about why this happened and how I died, but there is another story which comes into my mind that a court of honor was convened by some of my old compatriots from the school of jurisprudence who had said to me your amours are becoming public and you are so famous you are disgracing the country you must do the honorable thing and remove yourself and I have a memory of going home and making the decision and a strange metaphor blew up in my mind.

1:07:09Boil the water. Always boil the water. The disease lives in the water. The water is life and life must be purged of all corruption. And I am the disease. I am the corruption in the water. I must be boiled away so I do not infect the whole reservoir. When your death was reported, how was it reported and what was the immediate, how were the obituaries? How were you treated? I was treated as a hero of the Russian conscience, the greatest artist after Tolstoy and the true spokesman for Russian music. I've been greatly, greatly fated. It is a great irony that that should happen after when I have poured forth feelings into music which would be reviled if people knew what they were.

1:08:14Because what can love be in a world such as this? Three more quick questions. Yes. I want you to say what comes immediately into your head when I ask you for, particularly maybe for your earlier years, a moment of joy? A moment of joy? A moment of joy. Perhaps my greatest moments of joy were sometimes I would leave the turmoil and the anxiety and the trouble of Russia and dash off to Paris to recreate myself. And in that, it was an unending carnival of epicurean lassitude. and there I could soothe the pricklings of my skin with sumptuous entertainments. I could fill my soul with the languorous pleasures of a Byzantine concupiscence.

1:09:01I'm so glad you chose that and not composing a particular piece. That's marvellous. Not the audience reception. Music is the greatest of all the pleasures. May I just say that when inspiration overtakes you, the feeling is so extraordinary. You can hardly think. You forget everything. Your entire being trembles and rides, and you can hardly set down thoughts. One idea presses so upon the other, and you're mad with it. And it's so powerful, this feeling, so creative, that if it were to continue unbroken, you wouldn't be able to live for a single day. The strings would snap, and the instrument would shatter.

1:09:39It is a wonderful feeling. A moment of sadness for you. The greatest moment of sadness remains the death of my mother. There is nothing to compare with her, not even the suicide of Edward Zak. It was impossibly painful, remained so to this moment. And what of you, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, what has life taught you, this remarkable life with such high achievement, but the pain caused by your natural inclination that you had to keep a secret all your life. What has life taught you that you'd like to share with us?

1:10:27The only thing that can keep us from despair, in my opinion, is music. It is the most beautiful of all heaven's gifts to humanity wandering in the darkness. It alone calms, enlightens and stills our souls and only music can make us whole again when we are broken. Art for me is like a great torch that the artist shines into his soul and it can sublime the spirit out of the artist as the sun sucks up the dew so can join the great cloud work of emotion and intellection that we call art which sits above us as a cooling presence and when the world overheats itself in one of its periodical convulsions, then this art can fall upon the earth like a cooling, quenching rain, refreshing us for all the ages of the world to come.

1:11:31Well, all I can say is I'm thrilled to have met you, Tchaikovsky. Thank you. Lovely to have met you as well. And if you enjoyed hearing Tchaikovsky's voice there, based on the extraordinary scholarship of Tama Matheson and also on letters and correspondence from the period, it's all beautifully researched, and you'd like to see Tama bringing Tchaikovsky to life on stage, well, Tchaikovsky, Child of Glass, will be at the Holland Park Opera this August. We'll give you further details in a moment. But I'm now going to go and lie down. Thank you. Oh, our thanks there to Tama Matheson. That was extraordinary, wasn't it?

1:12:14Amazing, yeah. Our thanks to Tchaikovsky. Yes, you're right. Yeah. Interpreted for us today by Tama. And you can go to see his show, and I recommend it thoroughly. 14th, 15th and 13th of August this year, the Opera Holland Park Theatre. Or even 13th, 14th and 15th. Oh, I like to mix things up a bit. It's very confusing. Tickets from£35 to£85. It's fabulous. It's, you know, well, it is a fusion. It's a great venue as well, isn't it? Because it's in Holland Park and it's sort of open air. It's really a great place to go and watch something like this, I think. Yeah. I mean, the joy of this show, I mean, we were just talking there to Tchaikovsky.

1:12:57The difference of seeing it on the stage is that really, as he tells the story there, Tchaikovsky's incredible music just surges through it, illuminating his life with sort of breathtaking emotional force. So that's fantastic. So go to Opera Holland Park, book now. You will not be disappointed. That's if you're in London. If you happen to be in Edinburgh in August, well, come and see Harriet and me in Charles Brandworth Up Memory Lane with a twist of Rosebud and Harriet Jane. You can go to our website, which is simply rosebudpodcast.co.uk, or you can go to the Edinburgh Fringe website, or you can go to Assembly Edinburgh.

1:13:40Lots of places to find it. And we look forward to seeing you. There will be a modest meet and greet after every show. That's it for this week. Cue the music. Oh, say goodbye, Harriet. Bye. Bye.

1:14:07Thank you.

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