Recent Reads {Tchaikovsky}

Tchaikovsky by Roland John Wiley - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a colorful and tragic character in so many ways, so I thought that his biography would be very interesting. I was a bit surprised that my own library system didn't have much choice at all when it came to biographies of this great composer, however. This one by Wiley may have been the only one written for adults, if I remember correctly. It was held by the college branch of the library, which should have tipped me off that it was more textbook than anything. I hesitate to say that it was painfully boring, because if I had been a college student and had this work as assigned reading, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it compared to most textbooks. But compared to the enjoyable biographies of composers by Jeremy Siepmann that I'd recently read, this was much too dry and detailed to hold my interest. Wiley followed a similar format to the Siepmann books - a chapter describing his life, activities, and correspondence during a particular time period; then a chapter describing the music composed during that period. However, this book was so densely packed with minutiae and footnotes that I skimmed over large portions of the "everyday life" chapters, and actually skipped most of the "music" chapters. It was just too much detail. And without the compositions to listen to, I wasn't much interested in reading page upon page of description of the musical devices used in an opera or song cycle I wasn't even familiar with. I now know a lot more about the background and character of Tchaikovsky, and a great deal about what he and his correspondents thought and felt about his music and life circumstances. As a detailed and annotated biography and description of his compostions, this is a very thorough study, but it is not exactly an attention-grabber.