Tchaikovsky gay

The evidence becomes difficult to sift through regarding modern songwriters in the pop arena because composition is inherently linked with performance and, often, a ready knowledge of an artist's sexuality.
"It's been talked about a lot in gender studies, this question about whether there's a 'gay music,'" Anderson says. It's probably the most fascinating exchange in the history of composer correspondence."
What little gray area may have existed about his sexual orientation has been eclipsed by the letters, which reveal the high-highs and low-lows of a troubled creative soul… but it's not the fact of his sexuality that seems the cause of his ennui.

Perhaps we do, if only to provide a corrective to the myth that Tchaikovsky's homosexuality was a cruel, inescapable "Fate" that made his life miserable and made him write hysteria-ridden music. Tchaikovsky became quite infatuated with one of them, the operatic diva Désirée Artôt, going so far as to consider marriage, although in the end she spurned him, leaving him feeling extremely hurt.

Both approaches, in their very different ways, are obsessive about Tchaikovsky's sexuality, the omissions of the first giving rise to the very rumours and myths that the second feeds off. His student later committed suicide after suffering a series of tragic events. The couple became engaged – but Désirée unexpectedly eloped with a Spanish baritone.

Another explanation runs along the lines that he'd begun wooing the son of a Russian Count, who'd asked the Tsar to intervene, and that Tchaikovsky was ordered to die by his own hand in the resulting dust-up.
All of these elements have led to a great deal of mythology surrounding his swan song, Sixth Symphony, Pathetique, which often gets characterized as either a suicide note, a portrait of homosexual martyrdom, or some other form of gay tragedy.

Luckily, the chance to formally pursue music came in 1862, with the founding of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. The hope of maintaining a platonic marriage while pursuing other male lovers proved to be an impossible plan. Tchaikovsky was crushed. Those claims seem mislaid now, but there's no denying that the music depicts conflict.

"Tchaikovsky wasn't as persecuted about his sexuality as was originally assumed. "Tchaikovsky was really able to give us his experiences musically, in a way that we can feel them through his work so viscerally. Tchaikovsky’s life story remains inspiring in the orchestral world and the LGBTQ community. Tchaikovsky expressed his love and deep loss over the young man’s death in later writings.

Yet, novelist E.M. Forster wrote in his  love story Maurice that “Tchaikovsky had fallen in love with his own nephew, and dedicated his masterpiece [Symphonie Pathetique] to him.”  Sidenote: You can hear this symphony performed by the HPO in January 2015. in Alexander Poznansky's book, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man), and it can now be discussed with confidence, even if there are still a few gaps in the historical narrative.

It seems that he was relatively untroubled by his feelings at first, and he did not even think they would preclude him from leading a conventional heterosexual life in the future. This could have been a result of his father’s unwavering expectation that Tchaikovsky should marry. A turning point manifests in his rather impulsive decision, at the age of 37, to marry Antonina Milyukova.

The exact nature of his profound love for his nephew Bob Davydov, the dedicatee of the Sixth Symphony, may never be known. It seems he was under the impression that he would be able to lead an entirely platonic relationship with his bride, and that both she and his family would take pleasure in the mere fact of marriage.

His brother Modest, who was his openly gay, was his closest confidant and later biographer. The question is, what was at its source – can we really hear Tchaikovsky's struggle with his sexuality?
The jury is still out on the issue of "queer sound" – that is, the debate as to whether sexuality is implied in a composer's musical choices.

In fact, Matthew Bourne addresses issues in relation to contemporary society through his modern version of Swan Lake in Tel Aviv.