Cover art for Tchaikovsky's Empire
Published
Yale University Press, December 2024
ISBN
9780300192100
Format
Hardcover, 384 pages
Dimensions
23.5cm × 15.6cm

Tchaikovsky's Empire A New Life of Russia's Greatest Composer

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Due December 2, 2024.
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A thrilling new biography of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky-composer of some of the world's most popular orchestral and theatrical music

Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed as a hopeless romantic, a suffering melancholic, or a morbid obsessive, the Tchaikovsky we think we know is a shadow of the fascinating reality. It is all too easy to forget that he composed an empire's worth of music, and navigated the imperial Russian court to great advantage.

In this iconoclastic biography, celebrated author Simon Morrison re-creates Tchaikovsky's complex world. His life and art were framed by Russian national ambition, and his work was the emanation of an imperial subject: kaleidoscopic, capacious, cosmopolitan, decentred.

Morrison reexamines the relationship between Tchaikovsky's music, personal life, and politics; his support of Tsars Alexander II and III; and his engagement with the cultures of the imperial margins, in Ukraine, Poland, and the Caucasus. Tchaikovsky's Empire unsettles everything we thought we knew-and gives us a vivid new appreciation of Russia's most popular composer.

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