Tchaikovsky: The Shaping of an Imperial Subject - Professor Simon Morrison

Professor Simon Morrison is the author of an outstanding new biography of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Tchaikovsky's Empire: A New Life of Russia's Greatest Composer (Yale University Press, 2024). In his book Professor Morrison describes how, from an inauspicious early life in a Ural Mountain mining town (Votkinsk),Tchaikovsky grew up to become one of the most celebrated – and greatest - composers of the Russian Empire. He re-examines the relationship between Tchaikovsky’s music, personal life and politics and his relations with civic officials and Slavophile ideologues, as well as with Tsars Alexander II and III and court circles in St. Petersburg. He also describes Tchaikovsky’s engagement with the cultures of the imperial margins, in Ukraine, Poland and the Caucasus and shows that Tchaikovsky was not a nationalist but rather that his “Russia” was cosmopolitan, encompassing the music and culture of France, Germany, Italy and Scandinavia. The book enhances our appreciation of Tchaikovsky by placing the composer and his music within the context of his times and, by dispelling the myth of the “tragic, tormented genius”, he reveals the man himself as both more complex and more joyful than the caricature suggests. 

In his talk, illustrated with slides and the playing of recorded excerpts of Tchaikovsky’s music, Professor Morrison shares with us some of the key insights in his book.

Simon Morrison, who is Professor of Music and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, is an archival historian specialising in 19th and 20th-century Russian and Soviet music, with expertise in opera, dance, film, sketch studies and historically informed performance. Having earned unequalled access to repositories in Russia, Professor Morrison has unearthed previously unknown sketches, scores, letters, diaries, official documents, contracts, financial records, photographs and other sources related to musical life from the Tsars through to the Soviet period. He is a leading expert on Sergei Prokofiev and, apart from his recent book on Tchaikovsky, has published a biography of Lina Prokofiev, the composer’s first wife (which was prominently featured on BBC Radio 4 and, BBC World News television), and a history of the Bolshoi Ballet based on exhaustive archival research in St. Petersburg and Moscow, which was enthusiastically reviewed in major newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. His current projects include a history of Moscow and a study of Shostakovich.