Tchaikovsky: The Crisis Years 1874-1878

In the opening chapters he approaches the central crisis of his whole existence: his marriage to Antonina Milyukova. The marriage was a desperate gesture, a hopeless attempt to balance, or at least disguise, his strongly homosexual nature. But only five days after the wedding he wrote to his brother Anatoly, "Physically my wife has become totally repugnant to me." David Brown has had access to some of Tchaikovsky's most revealing letters; they were printed in Russia in 1940, but suppressed before publication, and in 1979, one of the few surviving copies was smuggled out of the country.