Tchaikovsky was not tragic but had a ‘Monty Python’ sense of humour, says biographer

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky has long been portrayed as a melancholic and tragic figure tormented by his homosexuality. But the Swan Lake composer was in fact a fun-loving man with a “Monty Python” sense of humour, according to a biographer.

Prof Simon Morrison, a leading musicologist, has studied previously unpublished letters and diaries that, he said, reveal a new side to the composer, whose masterpieces include the ballets The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker , as well as symphonies, operas and concertos.

Related: Tchaikovsky: where to start with his music

Morrison said: “A certain narrative about Tchaikovsky had been set in stone in the middle of the last century to the present day, and I found it to be completely incorrect.

“His biography has been shamefully distorted by scholars – almost in a way you could say is homophobic – because they represent him as a tortured gay man who was unhappy in his life and his love, and his music is thus reduced to the sound of suffering.

“But he wasn’t any of those things. He was successful, had a lot of love from family and friends, wealth, boyfriends, girlfriends. He really had quite a fabulous life.”

The life of Tchaikovsky, who was born in 1840 in Votkinsk in the former Russian empire, has been pored over by biographers and was made into The Music Lovers , a 1971 film starring Richard Chamberlain and Glenda Jackson.

The movie Tchaikovsky’s Wife , released last year, was loosely based on the unhappy union between the composer and Antonina Miliukova, whom he married in 1877.

Morrison, a professor of music and Slavic languages and literatures at Princeton University in New Jersey, has unearthed material from several Russian archives over the past 10 years that had not been consulted before by music historians.

His research will be published later this month in a new book, Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer .

Morrison writes that the unpublished letters and diaries from Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries portray a side to him that has been “excluded from the conventional and misleading suffering melancholic narrative”.

Morrison believes that incorrect assumptions have been made through a reliance on the same limited sources, notably Tchaikovsky’s correspondence with his patron Nadezhda von Meck, who was passionate about German Romantic composers and transcendental ideals.

In a famous letter to her, the composer described his Symphony No 4, discussing themes such as fate and competing forces of good and evil in relation to the work’s original title, Two Lions, which was inspired by a trip to Venice.

“It’s a morbid letter and she loved it,” Morrison said. “When Tchaikovsky described the music to her, he wrote up a kind of story of how fate is going to get us all. Then you listen to the music … and what he says doesn’t seem to line up.”

Morrison concluded from the composer’s letters to other recipients that Tchaikovsky had been writing “highfalutin, idealist stuff” for that particular patron.

He said: “The worst thing he ever did was write that letter to [von Meck]. In his letters to her, he does come across as always disappointed in himself. Because he was gay, the narrative took hold that this melancholy was somehow a reflection of his sexuality.”

Tchaikovsky did express fears for his health, particularly about cholera, which killed his mother. In 1893, he too fell victim to it. But he had also seen the funny side of ill health, notably gastrointestinal problems, doodling a picture of himself in a distressed state while on a train.

Morrison said that many of the letters to three of Tchaikovsky’s siblings, to whom he was close, are “extremely funny and graphic”.

“Some are completely over the top, a kind of Monty Python sense of humour, talking about everything from his sexual adventures to his terrible intestinal troubles. They really are very funny.”

In an unpublished 1877 diary, a music critic recalled the composer among “beautiful people of global fame” at an evening meal: “Pyotr Ilyich took the role of Amphitryon [a figure from Greek myth made famous by a Molière comedy as a great entertainer and host]. Oysters were served and disappeared with amazing speed from the huge dish, leaving a rather large amount of sea water behind … ‘Do you want to see a magic trick?’ asked Pyotr Ilyich …

“He tipped half a glass of vodka into the oyster dish, causing an immediate disturbance in the sea water … The ciliates living in the water … were protesting the extremely unpleasant surprise that he’d dropped on to them … Needless to say, our cherished Pyotr Ilyich was the centre of attention.”