Review: Tchaikovsky — The man revealed by John Suchet (2018), hardback

John Suchet is a celebrity and a known classical music broadcaster, so he was feted to write a popular biography of Tchaikovsky in a “man revealed” series, at a commercial scale. It’s amusing to see another title of a review to this work on Amazon as “Tchaikovsky — the man reviled” and that amusing description does apply in part to this biography, that is in danger not being sufficiently sympathetic to this very great composer.

However the first half or more of this work reads very well. It is well paced and richly illustrated with lots of sources and notes. I do not fault this book for being lavish to look at and peruse — it is written in a style that compels one to get to the end.

It begins with Tchaikovsky’s encounter with his old nanny, Fanny Durbach and the great composer’s death and so, the story unfolds like a sort of flashback in series, leading towards this point at the end.

However there are more than a few editorial and factual mistakes as well as author opinions that leave a lot to be desired. Whereas the work makes no claims to being authoritative or scholarly, it is somewhat judgemental and does engage in its own share of muckraking with an unnecessary trigger warning at the beginning of this book that seems to suggest that Tchaikovsky had a dubious morality.

Well, he was always fearful that his fame would yield him indecent exposure in the public gaze, and it seems that even up to 200 years later —…