At the end of the narrative portion of Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (London: Grant Richards, 1900), Rosa Newmarch speculated about the possibility of an official biography of her subject:
Upon this episode I am not able to throw any
Rosa Newmarch, Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), 110
further light. When the authorised life and corre-
spondence of the composer appears, his relatives may
possibly clear up the mystery which surrounds it.
On the other hand, it is more than probable that
they will not take the public into their confidence
upon a subject about which Tchaikovsky himself
preserved an almost unbroken reticence.
In 1905/6 “the authorised life and correspondence” by Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest appeared in an English translation by Rosa Newmarch (London and New York: John Lane). Newmarch was aware that her work as translator, editor, and biographer was a daunting task–the introduction refers to Tchaikovsky’s correspondence alone of comprising 3000 letters. Newmarch also considered her role as largely presenting Tchaikovsky’s own voice to a curious public, observing that “is not so much the needs of the specialist I have kept most constantly in view, as those of that large section of the musical public whose interest in Tchaikovsky has been awakened by the sincerely emotional and human elements of his music” (xi). This is typical for Newmarch’s other translations and biographical writings; she relies on her subject’s words as much as possible, largely limiting her own commentary to the introduction and selection of content.
Both Modest’s biography and Newmarch’s translation present intriguing problems for queer readings of Tchaikovsky’s life and works. As Philip Ross Bullock has noted in his recent critical biography of Tchaikovsky (Reaktion Books 2016), Tchaikovsky’s collected letters (at least the ones Modest allowed to be published) were often less private or confessional than typically understood by commentators. Tchaikovsky was, after all, an international celebrity at a time when the composer biography was increasingly established as a literary and scholarly genre. He himself briefly considered turning to the topic of Mozart biography as a way of dealing with writers block. And he was well aware that many of his letters and diaries would eventually be published and read after his death. Modest Ilich Tchaikovsky (who was himself also gay) was similarly aware of both the great public interest and concerns about his and his late brother’s reputations.
As with her first biography of Tchaikovsky, Newmarch follows Modest in not discussing the issue of her subject’s homosexuality directly. There are places in which one might see her as engaging in some amount of misdirection, particularly in her decision to focus on the Tchaikovsky-von Meck correspondence, which she describes as representing “the most romantic episode of Tchaikovsky’s life” and [sparing] “all but the most necessary abridgments” (x).
That said, however, these translation and editing choices might appear in 2023, at least a few of Newmarch’s readers–in particular the novelist E.M. Forster–clearly found themselves reading between the lines of her account and the Tchaikovsky brothers’ words. Forster copied excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s account of his marriage into his so-called Locked Diaries (discussed in Michelle Fillion’s Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E.M. Forster). He borrowed elements of the account of Tchaikovsky’s death (which discusses the dedication of the Pathétique to Tchaikovsky’s nephew Bob Davidov) for the dialogue between Risley and the title character in the novel Maurice and even had his protagonist seek out “a life of Tchaikovsky.”
Newmarch’s translation of Modest’s work can be read in full on the Internet Archive here.