A Talk with the Man Who Knew Tchaikovsky

Evan Senior, editor-in-chief of the famous English magazine “Music and Musicians,” tells us of his journey last year to Russia and of his meeting with the man who personally knew the Russian composer Tchaikovsky.

On one of June's blazing hot days I went with my friend Kenneth Wright, in a ZIS car, from Moscow out toward the countryside. The road was exceedingly beautiful, shaded on both sides by forests of fir and pine. That day I was tired, having been up all night attending concerts; but for all that I was eager to reach the Kaaba of musicians — the house of Tchaikovsky near the village of Klin, ninety miles from Moscow.

While the car was carrying us past the little villages, the ornamented wooden houses, and the old churches, my friend suddenly turned to me and said: “Be ready, and keep hold of your camera — who knows, you may get a picture of Tchaikovsky's ghost!!”

After a few hours we reached Tchaikovsky's house: two stories of wood painted a dark red. We made for the door, and there we saw an old, faded sign on which was written: “P. Tchaikovsky receives on Mondays and Tuesdays. Not at home. Do not disturb him.” While we were contemplating the writing, the door opened; our tongues were tied, and we stared in bewilderment at the person standing before us, so strong was the resemblance between him and Tchaikovsky, and I murmured in a low voice, “Kenneth — this is the ghost!” And in truth, whoever studies this man's features closely would take him for Tchaikovsky himself: he has the very same roundness of head and that same short white beard!! He welcomed us in clear English, wishing us a pleasant stay. This old man with the radiant face was none other than Vladimir Davydov, son of Alexandra, the sister so dear to Tchaikovsky's heart; he had been his uncle's petted favorite, whom he took as friend and companion in his last days. Sixty-one years ago Vladimir was in the army and was present at his uncle's death; and now you see him, at eighty, presiding over this museum with vitality, a smile never leaving his face.

This house, to which visitors come from every part of the world, is the third house Tchaikovsky lived in in this neighborhood; he used the upper floor for sleeping and for work, and the lower floor for meals. When Tchaikovsky died, his servant Alexei Sofronov bought the house and preserved all his master's belongings; but four years later, that is in 1897, Modest, the composer's brother, and his nephew Davydov joined in buying the house and fitting it out to become a museum for visitors; and it was Davydov who took over the running of the house, for he loved it more than himself. We went up to the upper floor and entered the sitting room: it is long and narrow, and all its furniture of the massive kind; at the head of the room stand a piano and a table laden with boxes of cigarettes, for Tchaikovsky was a heavy smoker — so Davydov told us. On the table we also saw a memorandum book on which was written: “I must be in London on the first of June.” He did in fact reach London on May 29, 1893, and on June 1 he attended the playing of his Fourth Symphony; afterward he went to Cambridge, and all that while he was

engrossed in composing the Sixth Symphony.

The walls of the room were covered with portraits of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Mendelssohn, and Mozart; all of these he used to call his gods. But among them all he worshiped the music of Mozart — are not all his melodies inspired by his love of Mozart? From his childhood days he would listen to certain melodies of Mozart from a music box that belonged to his father, and those tunes awakened in him his love of music and his resolve to become a composer.

Among his effects are many photographs, among them one of his mother, and of his father, who helped him with money for several years; here is a picture of his sister Alexandra, and of Davydov, and others of the artists who took part in singing the operas he composed; and here is a picture of Lucien Guitry, the father of Sacha Guitry — he was an accomplished actor and an intimate friend of Tchaikovsky, for whose sake Tchaikovsky composed the famous Hamlet overture.

Among his collection of pictures there are enchanting views of the Russian countryside. In his last days he would work in the morning and stroll in the afternoon through the beautiful forests, and he was forever repeating: “I am Russian in every sense of the word.” And once he wrote: “I love Russia above all things.”

We looked over his library and saw volumes of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and an edition of Byron in French, and other books in English, Russian, French, German, and Italian — for all these languages he mastered well. I took up in my hand a volume of Pushkin and asked Davydov's leave to photograph certain passages of verse marked in pencil in Tchaikovsky's hand, for these had inspired his famous melodies.

After the sitting room we entered the bedroom. It is simple in the extreme: in it an iron bed covered with an embroidered spread, and on it two large pillows and one small one on which Tchaikovsky used to rest his chin; on the wall his ornamented Turkish robe hung from a nail; on the dressing table were ranged the brushes and combs and the scents he used to buy from France. Davydov opened his wardrobe, and we saw it full of evening dress and suits of thick-woven tweed, and of shirts and handkerchiefs bearing the two letters of his name.

Two rooms have been added to the house on the lower floor, beyond what it had before; the brother of Tchaikovsky built them when he bought the house and furnished them with the same sumptuous furnishings, and in them the visitor listens to Tchaikovsky's music.

When the armies of the Germans entered and swept toward Moscow in the days of the war, they occupied the house for twenty-one days; but before this occupation all the furniture had been carried off to a distant place in Siberia, so that when the Germans entered they found the house empty save for a single sofa left in the room of Tchaikovsky's brother. After the army's departure it was found in a wretched, broken state, and it now stands in the museum as a reminder of what would have befallen the furniture had it remained in its place.

The Germans used the upper floor as a place for mending their boots, and the ground floor as a garage. Grievous damage was done to the house; and had the Soviet armies been a few seconds behind the appointed hour of their arrival, this house would have been food for the flames, for the Germans were on the very point of burning it before they left.

The house has now been restored and everything returned to its original place; and for all the remoteness of this shrine, it draws to itself some 20,000 visitors a year.

When two hours had passed in our visiting all the rooms of the house, Davydov bade us farewell with his sweet smile — and received fifty German tourists.