7. Reception.

Tchaikovsky's posthumous reputation differs by locale – within Russia or without – and by the distinction between his music and his person. Outside Russia, his art was debated in discourses from programme notes to books, most aimed at defining his Russianness. These could be simple attempts to locate his style in the welter of modern musical voices, or complex explanations, as from Hugo Riemann or Iwan Knorr or even Hanslick in his later writings, of the multifarious nature of Tchaikovsky's gift – European or Asiatic, dramatic or lyrical, symphonic or operatic.

Inside Russia, the composer's immense stature spawned imitators and performances so numerous as to risk devaluation of the genuine artistic coinage. Yet Tchaikovsky's art, paradoxically, was sustained and renewed by the cultural avant garde. Arkady Klimovitsky (E1995) cites The Queen of Spades as stimulus for a Tchaikovsky cult founded mostly by poets, painters and philosophers for whom Tchaikovsky exemplified a ‘Petersburg mythos’ which embraced a disparate collection of cultural motifs: phantasmagoria, transformed Western influence, continuity with the 18th century or with Pushkin and the Golden Age of Russian literature, or an interface with Wagner for Russian symbolists. Tchaikovsky excited these tendencies with works such as The Nutcracker, with its marionette-like, Harlequinesque figures, and Iolanthe, with its audible echoes of Tristan (in the english horn solo of the introduction), answering the Liebestod in the survival and gratification of the mythic lovers.

Tchaikovsky's reputation among concert audiences is secure. In Great Britain, the United States and many other countries, his music has won a following throughout the 20th century second only to Beethoven's, in contrast to such temporary fashions as Skryabin enjoyed in the 1910s and 20s, and Sibelius through the 1950s. When he was alive, and in the first decades after his death, no significant link was posited between Tchaikovsky's art and life. Innuendo about his personal life in the Russian press was occasional, and virtually non-existent elsewhere, at the same time that his music was described in robust terms. Albert Stanley, introducing the Sixth Symphony to audiences of the Ann Arbor May Festival in 1897, wrote of the virility of Tchaikovsky's music, and described the Serenade for Strings in 1902 as having a ‘primal quality’ and a style ‘of breadth and fervor’. The more widely read James Huneker remarked in 1899 on Tchaikovsky's ‘unfortunate and undoubted psychopathetic temperament’, referring to the Sixth as the ‘Suicide Symphony’, yet praised his ‘tremendous sincerity’ and his ‘passionate, almost crazy intensity’.

Linking Tchaikovsky's popularity with the emotional appeal of his music, Western aesthetes disdained it for half a century as vulgar, wanting in philosophy and elevated thought. Then, with the removal of taboos in public discussion of the 1960s and 70s, Tchaikovsky's life was caught up in a discourse, exceptional for its tenacity, linking his music with his sexuality, an indignity that would have caused the composer unspeakable humiliation. When historical factors were brought into play – especially Freud's pathologizing of homosexuality – specialist opinion of Tchaikovsky's music changed accordingly, and dubiously slanted assessments of his music followed suit.

In Soviet Russia, by contrast, Tchaikovsky's sexuality, together with his religious belief and monarchist politics – all aspects of his personality – were largely suppressed. Although his music was part of the canon (Lenin favoured the Sixth Symphony), and it garnered support among advocates of heritage, it came to be criticized through the 1920s as irrelevant to avant gardists in a non-bourgeois, revolutionary society. Detractors claimed that it was ideologically corrupt, that it suffered from a kind of social malaise, and that its emotions were alien to the new Soviet audience. Thus A.N. Ostretsov (C1929), writing a dismissive and tedious account of Tchaikovsky's socialist and musical characteristics in 1929, found him to be a bad citizen: Europeanized, connected his entire life with bureaucratic and landowning circles, detached from the new political reality. The last was killing for his music, which from the 1880s was subjective, unrealistic, and too profoundly personal to manifest any socially redeeming qualities. For these reasons Tchaikovsky could not be credited with resurrecting Beethoven's symphonic thought – Beethoven the ‘active musician-citizen’ who conveyed the ‘joy of life’, striving for the realization of democratic emotions, and for ‘bold, collective musical self expression’. Nor did claims of pathology escape the Soviets, though couched in clinical terms and never achieving much notoriety. In 1929 a psychiatrist from Perm (E.R. Klevezal) found clear evidence of raptus melancholicus in the Andante cantabile of the First String Quartet: by using muted strings Tchaikovsky transformed the weeping of his soul into a quiet murmur; the monotonous repetition, present in the first phrase and intensified in the second, was characteristic of the melancholic, while the second theme expressed the highest intensity of Tchaikovsky's spiritual pain – the primeval outcry of the suffering soul.

With the advent of Socialist Realism in 1932 these judgments fell silent, and Tchaikovsky's music was affirmed in the mainstream of concert life; in the increasingly muted cultural debate, however, it was emasculated by political expediency. In the 1930s and 40s a new generation of advocates – Al'shvang, Budyakovsky, Kremnev, Zhitomirsky, Yakovlev, Yarustovsky – rehabilitated the composer, writing learned if dogmatic studies about Tchaikovsky which continued to the end of the Soviet era.

In the early 1980s freedom of expression exercised by Soviet emigrés joined forces with modernist criticism (and its penchant for psycho-sexual analysis) and with a politically aggressive gay scholarship to refute stale notions of Tchaikovsky's pathology. Parallel with this development has come a revival of documentary studies (notably by Thomas Kohlhase and Polina Vaydman) which seek to clarify various questions about Tchaikovsky and his music in the post-Soviet atmosphere of openness.