I
Since he was both gay and agnostic,
There was a tug of war after his death
Between those who were diagnostic,
And those who were simply out of breath
From talking so much nonsense about him,
Who believed he had taken his own life,
Or were convinced that his brother, the grim
Modest, had cut his throat with a knife,
Or, in yet another tale, that the tsar,
Whose nephew he allegedly had seduced,
Became furious and banished him far
From Russia, to Maylay, where he was mongoosed
For being the slithering snake he was,
His serpentine corpse being devoured by daws.
II
For those who were diagnostic, doctors,
The explanation was brief: cholera.
They had focused on facts, not rumors.
Ignoring gossip, they spoke ex-cathedra.
But how he caught it was sheer speculation:
He had drunk a glass of unboiled water,
Or it was a consequence of conflation—
Mixing body fluids with a male hustler.
Shortly before his death by cholera,
His Sixth Symphony premiered in Moscow.
In some respects it was like an opera,
With him conducting, wiping his brow,
Thinking the orchestra played uninspired,
Unaware his time had almost expired.
III
The Sixth was next performed not long after
His death when it was
wildly applauded
By the audience—cheers, even tearful laughter—
And then the finicky critics lauded
The way the Russian soul
had been plumbed
By the end of the deep final movement
When the spent listener felt benumbed,
Like Byron after swimming the Hellespont.
Cholera solemnized Tchaikovsky’s art,
Wrapping the quotidian in mystery,
Liberating the circumscribed
heart
From the shallowness of the periphery—
From the lightweight, the frivolous, the vague—
With the heft, the gravitas, of the plague.
IV
In class-conscious imperial Russia,
Cholera was linked with the peasant
And was therefore a social stigma,
Often fatal, not to speak of unpleasant,
Especially for the upper classes:
One has to cross that bridge before one dies.
The Tchaikovskys, not being what passes
For aristocrats, in trying to rise,
Could ill afford to catch the dread disease,
But his father did, then his dear mother.
In spite of the family down on its knees,
She passed on with a minimum of bother,
Like a humble serf,
piously meek,
Unshrouded in the cholera mystique.
V
Unrepentant, he refused to atone
For his nightly cruises in Moscow’s slums.
The tsar dared not cast the first stone
Since the royal family and courtly bums,
The aristocrats as a privileged class,
Were rife with an unrefined sodomy.
Who heard intimations of a black Mass
Echo in the music of Tchaikovsky?
Under the Romanovs, wearing the crown,
The unforgivable sin was getting caught,
Flagrante delicto, with
your drawers down,
Like the incestuous family of Lot.
Life’s orchestrated, he played his part,
Making of love sin, of cholera art.
VI
Among the happy plans his death disrupted
Was the long spring hike he and a friend
Would make along the canal that was interrupted
Before it was finished, before its end,
By which the tsar had hoped to link the Sestra
With the Volga, Russia’s longest river,
Called Mother by the peasants, “Matushka.”
The canal would have been a liquid sliver
Linking two waterways in a vast tract,
The largest country in the whirling world,
But without a meter of railroad track—
Treeless steppes over which cholera swirled,
Where he still might be humming the melody
That haunted him, from Mozart, in #C.
Robert Forrey,
2013
