Time out for Tchaikovsky
Harold Hark
11 August 2003

The breakfast ritual never varies: a perusal of The Age while ingesting some kind of awful slop to get me through to lunch. The letters page is reserved for the grand finale to accompany what's left of a tepid cuppa. I cheer the letters I agree with and give a hearty raspberry to the ones I don't. This morning, I was half standing, ready to move on, when my eyes fell upon this simple comment from one, Susan Cafarella--a genuine non-sequitur coming at the end of all the other raging letters: "The world would be impoverished without the music of Tchaikovsky." That's all she said.

It provoked in me one of those rare occasions when the beginning of an astonished laugh ends in choked sob. Why has she said this, I wondered, and why did The Age, print it?

Perhaps she was referring to the recent fiasco over homosexuality in organised Christian religions. Certainly there is many a reactionary homophobe (now there's a tautology) who loves Tchaikovsky. They may not know that it has only recently been discovered that the composer did not die from cholera, but at his own hand, forced to commit suicide because of his love of the son of a high ranking official. Had he not killed himself he would probably have been murdered.

Tchaikovsky was a homosexual we could not have done without.

Perhaps she was just drawing our attention to his music in these troubled times. My own experience of Tchaikovsky has led me to believe that no other composer has so gloriously captured the adolescent heart, and the hearts of those who later in life recall the bittersweet passage from adolescence to adulthood.

Then again, maybe she was just trying to insert a momentary pause in our scramble to assert supremacy in the eternal rock fight that so foolishly consumes our lives.

Whatever her reason, it worked for me.

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