Newmarch’s first book-length work on Tchaikovsky (published by Grant Richards in 1900) reflects the popular interest that the then-late composer had on the British (and English-speaking) musical imagination. The book developed out of two series of articles and collected writings that she had published during the late 1890s in The Musician and The Musical Standard. While Tchaikovsky would be the subject of several of her later works over the next few decades, including program notes, books on Russian opera more generally, contributions to Grove’s Dictionary, and (perhaps most influentially) her translation of Modest Tchaikovsky’s biography of his brother (with selected letters), this book in particular appears specifically as a reaction to English curiosity about Tchaikovsky’s life and death and the then-inaccessibility of many of the important Russian-language sources. As she observes in the book’s preface:
Meanwhile the public interest, especially in England, is steadily increasing, and almost every scrap of information concerning the composer of “The Pathetic” Symphony is eagerly sought after. In the absence of anything more complete and authoritative I venture to offer this volume to the admirers of Tchaikovsky’s works.
Rosa Newmarch, Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (London: G. Richards, 1900), vii.
The mention of the Symphony No. 6 is not accidental and may well have spurred popular interest in Newmarch’s work. The book’s cover contains a gold image of the opening theme of the Adagio lamentoso and the matter of popular gossip about the symphony and its supposed connection to Tchaikovsky’s death is as close as Newmarch gets here to alluding directly to his homosexuality:
There is no doubt that one of the reasons of the extraordinary popularity of this work lies in the fact that it has been invested with an autobiographical interest for which there is no real warranty. It is said that in some vague and mysterious way it foreshadowed the composer’s approaching end. Perhaps it is also with the idea of supporting this theory that sensationalists have discovered that Tchaikovsky shortly afterwards committed suicide. The idea is picturesque, but neither in Russia nor abroad have I discovered any substantial ground for the report.
Newmarch, Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works, 106-7.
As I quote in my discussion of Prime-Stevenson’s The Intersexes, the rumor of Tchaikovsky’s suicide and the possibility of some sort of secret meaning attached to the Pathétique seems to have gained particular currency in Anglophone gay circles around New York and London (and likely elsewhere), although by the mid-twentieth century, it also became heavily associated with more homophobic readings of Tchaikovsky’s works.
Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works can be viewed in its entirety via the Internet Archive. Newmarch’s narrative life of Tchaikovsky can be found on pp. vii-110, with the remainder of the book largely taken from the then-available writings by Tchaikovsky and his colleagues, including his music criticism and secondhand reports of his musical opinions (pp. 111-167) and his travel diary of 1888 (168-225).
Newmarch’s focus on letting her subject and sources speak for themselves and her simultaneous stated skepticism towards gossip and anecdote and necessary reliance on limited, censored, or otherwise unavailable sources may have come from a variety of factors: awareness of subject matter that could not be published or cited, discomfort with her access to Russian sources at that time, and/or methodological ambivalence towards the role of the biographer in interpreting their subject (a tension that also arises in some of Newmarch’s biographical writings on those she counted as closer personal friends).
One moment in Newmarch’s translation of Tchaikovsky’s writing that I find especially entertaining in light of layers of acknowledging or not acknowledging queer knowledge is the meeting between Tchaikovsky and Smyth:
Since no Englishwoman is without her originalities and eccentricities, Miss Smyth had hers, which were: the beautiful dog, which was quite inseparable from this lonely woman, and invariably announced her arrival, not only on this occasion, but at other times when I met her again; a passion for hunting, on account of which Miss Smyth occasionally returned to England for a time; and, finally, an incomprehensible and almost passionate worship for the intangible musical genius of Brahms.
Tchaikovsky (as translated by Newmarch), Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works, 194.
I have often found myself wondering what Smyth and Tchaikovsky knew or suspected about one another in their meeting and subsequent correspondence (wherein Smyth’s dog Marco and her and Tchaikovsky’s disagreements about Brahms remained topics of conversation), but which were (at least in print) attributed to national and artistic differences. (As passages from Vernon Lee’s Music and its Lovers and Prime-Stevenson’s The Intersexes demonstrate, Brahms seems to have occupied a complicated place in some musical circles when it comes to constructions of music, gender, and sexuality.)