The religious views of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky have been the subject of scholarly interest as a controversial topic. While Tchaikovsky's contemporaries did not place emphasis on his religious views, and during the Soviet era the composer was most often classified as a materialist, modern musicological literature has produced numerous scholarly works that, based on documentary evidence, interpret Tchaikovsky's views on religion in various ways.
The composer was raised an Orthodox Christian. Tchaikovsky's childhood poems in Russian and French were addressed to God. Doubts began to emerge after the death of his mother. By the 1860s, the composer no longer felt the need for prayer or fasting. Tchaikovsky's religious sentiments began to intensify in the mid-1870s, particularly due to his sexual orientation. By the 1880s, he found spiritual support in faith and overcame the spiritual contradictions that had troubled him. Tchaikovsky became engrossed in the "practice of religious life": he frequently discussed worship and church music, compared Orthodox services with other Christian denominations, and deeply studied Holy Scripture. Among Tchaikovsky's spiritual compositions from this period are the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (1878), the All-Night Vigil (1881), Nine Sacred Musical Pieces (1884–1885), and The Angel Cried Out (1887).
In his final years, Tchaikovsky focused solely on the moral aspects of Christ's teachings, unable to overcome his doubts about dogma and moved away from Orthodoxy. Tchaikovsky began to lean toward a religious position similar to that of Ernest Renan and the pantheistic views of Baruch Spinoza. In letters from his final years, Tchaikovsky mentioned his dream of composing a secular Passion of Jesus. He also made several attempts to create poetic texts based on the gospels for a future musical work.
Evolution
Changes in views Candidate of Art History Olga Zakharova described the issue of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's religious views as "one of the most difficult and controversial topics in musicology, eliciting directly opposing interpretations", attributing this to variations in the composer's statements across different periods of his life. Candidate of Art History Antonina Makarova highlighted the evolution of Tchaikovsky's religious views throughout his life. This issue was a central focus of her dissertation, Mysterial Prototypes in the Operatic Works of P. I. Tchaikovsky, defended in Magnitogorsk in 2017. She succinctly outlined this evolution as follows: "from childhood faith in God" through "skepticism of youth", "an acute confrontation with worldview questions during the crisis years of 1877–78", to "finding a certain balance in the worldview sphere and spiritual support in faith".
Childhood
The composer's family was religious. Two revered icons from the family are preserved to this day in the Tchaikovsky House-Museum. One of them, the Virgin of Vladimir, is associated with a family legend about the miraculous recovery of Tchaikovsky's elder brother Nikolai from a severe illness. Two other family icons were in Tchaikovsky's house in Klin at the time of his death. One, Apostle Peter (made in 1841),Galina Sizko tells us in detail about this icon. It was specially ordered for either the child's first birthday or name day from an icon-painting workshop in St. Petersburg. Under the apostle's hand, a church similar to the Annunciation Cathedral in Votkinsk is depicted. Tchaikovsky was baptized there. is located in the study-living room, and the other, the Our Lady of Kazan (by which he was blessed in childhood),The icon was painted in Vyatka in 1806. The silver frame is adorned with amethysts, beryl, carnelian, and rhinestones, and the icon itself is also decorated with these stones. It belonged to the composer's godmother and either came into his possession after her death or as a gift during her lifetime. is in the bedroom. Tchaikovsky carefully preserved his mother's Psalter and a collection of stichera and canons, which bear inscriptions in her handwriting.
The composer was raised as an Orthodox Christian.Galina Sizko describes this in detail in her book. Valery Sokolov, a contemporary Russian biographer of Tchaikovsky, devoted a separate article to the composer's clergy ancestors. Several generations of his ancestors were clergy. His godfather, who also taught Catechism and Russian, was archpriest Vasily Blinov of the Kamsko-Votkinsk Annunciation Cathedral. Tchaikovsky's childhood poems in Russian and French were addressed to God. He admired the omnipotence of the Almighty, who created "a beautiful world, Russia, and the Russian people". Worship was perceived as a natural and integral part of his life: "When I was a boy ... for several years I sang the first voice in a trio that, during episcopal services, is sung by three boys in the altar at the beginning and end of the service. The Liturgy, especially during episcopal services, made a profound poetic impression on me...How proud I was then to participate in the service with my singing!"
Some of the composer's childhood literary works have survived, imbued with religious and mystical experiences. Tchaikovsky's first biographer, his brother Modest, when publishing these poems in his own Russian translation, noted that "all these works are completely talentless". Candidate of Art History Georgy Kovalevsky called this judgment overly categorical and traced the influence of Psalm 103 in Tchaikovsky's poems."O eternal God of ours! You have done all this,
Child! Look at these beautiful plants.
These roses and veronicas are so beautiful.
The brilliant sun illuminates the whole world.
It created all of this.
The moon and stars light up our nights.
Without Thee, bread could not grow.
The waves of these beautiful waters...
We would die without them.
The seas whose pull is so great.
The rivers that surround them.
Mother, nourish! Nourish your children.
God created them.
Mighty God, Thee are so worshiped!Modest Tchaikovsky recounted in the first volume of P. I. Tchaikovsky's Life that in the composer's childhood notebooks, letters, and drawings, "the word God appears most frequently, sometimes plainly, sometimes in a vignette". Refuting the idea that this was merely a child's calligraphy exercise, Modest cited his brother's poems addressed to God. One poem begins with an invocation for God to always protect Russia."Lord! Be with our beloved Russia always.
We will never forget you, and we will always believe in the Trinity.
God be with us. You are God.
You are God, and you will always be our God.
You gave us intelligence and everything we need.
So, Lord, to all Russians..."Doctor of Art History Galina Sizko noted that Tchaikovsky's love for God was intertwined with patriotism. She cited Modest Tchaikovsky's account of the composer's French governess Fanny Dürbach. Dürbach caught the young boy kissing the territory of Russia on a geographic map while spitting on other countries. When she remarked that other nations also pray to God with the Lord's Prayer, and that she herself was French, the boy replied that he had covered France with his hand.Modest Tchaikovsky entered into correspondence with his older brother's former governess and met her in person in 1894 to gather materials for a biography of Tchaikovsky. He reworked the content of the letters and the record of the conversations into material he entitled Memories of M-elle Fanny. The governess's stories are told in the third person. This material was used for the book Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Life (according to documents kept in the archive in Klin) in 3 volumes". "Memories of M-elle Fanny" survived and was published in 1983.
Modest Tchaikovsky attributed his brother's interest in religious matters to the influence of Fanny Dürbach. He noted that the governess was a "strict Protestant" who placed great importance on morality. Alexander Poznansky wrote of the significant influence of Protestantism and German culture in Dürbach's hometown of Montbéliard. Her godmother was the daughter of a local pastor.
Youth and maturity
Since 1850, Tchaikovsky studied in the preparatory class of the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, and later in the school itself. The school operated under a strict barracks regime, softened only in 1856: there were solitary confinement and corporal punishment, students used to do military training, and wake up with the sound of drums. Supervisors were officers, and there was a special position of student inspector, whose duties involved "watching, catching, punishing, and flogging". But there was also bullying not only of peers and younger students but also of some teachers. Among older students, smoking, drinking (and even chronic alcoholism), and sexual relationships between students were common. Among the three subjects that the diligent Pyotr Tchaikovsky struggled with were algebra, geometry and Catechism.
A significant figure among the teachers was a religious Doctor of Theology and author of a Sacred History textbook, Mikhail Bogoslovsky. He taught a range of subjects in the lower classes (interpretation of the Old and New Testament, Catechism) and upper classes (church law, logic, and psychology). He combined refined attire with unkemptness, which even caused scandals. He condemned the fashionable disregard for church services among youths and their fascination with the theater, calling it "demonic entertainment" and dances "the devil's amusement". Nevertheless, students attended performances by French troupes at the Mikhailovsky Theatre, ballets, Italian operas, and the Alexandrinsky Theatre. Many students, including Tchaikovsky's close friends Fyodor Maslov, Alexei Apukhtin, and Vladimir Taneyev, held progressive views.
Senior researcher at the Tchaikovsky House-Museum in Klin, Doctor of Art History Galina Sizko, suggested that doubts about religion began to emerge after the death of Tchaikovsky's mother. She found evidence of this in a letter to Viktor Olkhovsky, written in 1854 (a few weeks after his mother's death) in the form of a parody of Church Slavonic. American historian Alexander Poznansky noted that the closest church to the house where Alexandra Andreevna died was the Panteleimon Church, suggesting that a priest was summoned from there for her final rites. This, he argued, explained why Tchaikovsky frequently visited this church while in St. Petersburg. Every year on his mother's birthday, the composer went to church to pray for her. However, citing psychological research, Poznansky believed that a child who loses a parent in early adolescence typically overcomes grief relatively quickly and faces no significant developmental issues thereafter.
Galina Sizko wrote that Tchaikovsky's childhood religiosity had vanished by this time: religious themes disappeared from his letters, as did references to loved ones as my angels, requests for blessings, or mentions of religious holidays in the family. One rare mention of church from 1861 appears as follows: "I deliberately went to the parish church to see the impression that the manifesto had on the peasants".
In the 1860s, the composer entirely lost the need for prayer or fasting, and when he addressed religious topics in conversations, it was with irony or, as Galina Sizko described in her 2003 article, a "blasphemous" tone. In 1863, Tchaikovsky visited Optina Monastery with his friend Alexei Apukhtin, and in 1866, the Valaam Monastery, but nothing is known from the composer about the impact of these visits on his feelings or thoughts regarding religion. While at Valaam, however, Tchaikovsky and Apukhtin witnessed an event that deeply affected the composer: parents, after a year of searching, found their only son in the monastery, but despite their pleas, he refused to leave.