What would tchaikovsky have told me; If...

Gwen HERAT

MUSIC: If I had told him that I was artistically in love with him?

Obviously; he would say: ?Go, find a guy like Rudolf Nureyev who can ?visualise? my music; or still better, Oscar Wilde would summarise our lives better, taken apart. He might replace ?Dorian Grey with your picture; but would he?

And Tchaikovsky whisphered to me again; ?You will and a cropper; we all are gay. This great composer comporomised when he added.

My girl, you can spin down the centuries and you will come across guys like me.

We are not freaks?. Tchaikovsky foretold. You will find the likes of us in movieland Rock Hudson, Peter Chamberlaine and from the music world, Liberace whose fingers flash across the keyboard faster than the Silver Bullet in Japan. Elton John, George Michael etc. to name a few.

I had heard enough; so there is nothing called artistic love. I bounced out of my dream and there was this glorious millennium to wake me up. Music was electronised, computerised.

There was this digital painting. How sad; the joy of playing had been taken out. The years of studying the piano was lost because I found everything menued on my electone.

All imaginable instruments were programmed and I had to only push a button or press a key... and lo and behold I was playing a full orchestra by myself.

Immortal music

Tchaikovsky?s immortal music, twisted and tarnished by technicians who could not read a note and who knew nothing from a major to a minor, controlled the music world.

How disgusting and I had to study for years and sit for examinations; ?Go back to your grave Tchaikovsky and rest in peace and also be happy that George Bush has sanctioned gay marriages,? I told him.

Which leaves me wondering why all great artistes of the bygone era, including William Shakespeare were gay?

So, according to Tchaikovsky, Oscar Wilde was no ?freak? though he was morally condemned and dragged before the law because his fantastic melodrama was widely condemned by his contemporaries who saw the values of a polite society being ?prostituted? by his wild and passionate affair with Lord Alfred Douglas.

Yet before this clandestine affair, he was deeply involved with many partners. However, Arthur Conan Doyle had a different attitude towards The Picture of Dorian Grey that all his contemporaries regarded as morally untouchable.

He was opposed to the critics who called it immoral and condemned a brilliant piece of work while all the time Wilde knew his book would end up as a classic.

Wilde was Dorian Grey and all the passion and fire he held within, he formed into a brilliant plot to narrate his disturbing story with power of flamboyance, wit and a bit of aestheticism.

Marriage

After a brief marriage to Constance Lloyd with whom he had a child in 1885 when he was 29 years old, he met up with a young man, Robert Ross who became his first partner.

For a man whose years at oxford revealed his identity as that of an aesthetist, he tried hard to work out his marriage which seemed perfect at first but collapsed with the entry of Ross.

Wilde engaged in homosexual practices openly and Dorian Grey kept taunting him all the while as he sped in years with a society who ridiculed him, Wilde would gaze upon the picture:

?If I were I was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old....

I would give my soul for that?.

Tchaikovsky was no better. Obsessed with music ever since he could reach his father?s piano, the Tchaikovsky family had to move from place to place though they were wealthy and affluent and as a child, Tchaikovsky was a frail, nervous and sensitive child who suffered the pangs of being separated from his father who was out most of the time due to his job in mining.

Suddenly his world collapsed. His mother died of cholera. This had an everlasting effect on his health as well as on his budding musical career. He withdrew to himself and hardly spoke about the catastrophe.

Tracing his life?s happenings, this may have prompted the beginning of his love for male partners.

Brilliance

Passionately aroused by homosexuality and the brilliance of his music, he became the focus of the then Russian society who ignored his ?dark side? and exposing only his spectacular musical scores.

Like Wilde, he married Antonina Milyukdova in 1877, possibly as a way to escape his homosexual leanings but sadly, the marriage collapsed within weeks. The greatest of scores we hear today, whether in opera, orchestra or ballet, belong to the great Tchaikovsky.

It will take pages and pages to write on his scores but what is most vivid are his scores for The Sleeping Beauty and The Swan Lake. Sadly, he died at 53 years of age from cholera like his mother or was it suicide?

And it was Rudolf Nureyev who ?visualised? his music in The Swan Lake. Yet another famous gay, perhaps the best known in the last century whereas even Robert Kennedy?s name had been linked to his.

After studying ballet at the Kirov, he did a spectacular leap to the west, defecting, creating headlines in the mid-sixties. He was ?rescued? by the French Police from the Russian bullies who vainly attempted to shove him off on a Russia-bound plane with the rest of the dance troupe. Rest is history.

He embarked on a spectacular career that electrified the world, capturing the imagination of all and sundry only to rise and to be acclaimed as the best dancer of the century even replacing, Nijinsky.

Nureyev was responsible for a lot of change in classical ballet. Firstly, he placed the male dancer centre-stage, a position hereto enjoyed by the ballerina. Coloured clothing replaced what was primarily white.

He gave place of prominence to all the classical composers and was very proud of his Russian Maestro, Tchaikovsky whose music he used profusely. He was a dancer of dazzling virtuosity with controlled expressiveness and electrifying charisma.

But his private life which he tried his level best to keep very private, was a miserable failure.

He was never interested in any woman though he and Margot Fonteyn got close to each other.... close enough to fall in love artistically.

He had many partners but the one with whom he spent the better part of his life was an equally reputed dancer, Erik Brauhn who died of AIDS. On his death bed, Braun said ?I wish Nureyev will find someone the way I found Nureyev to spend the rest of his life with?.

While at the Royal Ballet, it was obvious that all the boys were in love with Nureyev while the girl-dancers were in love with them.

Hollywood is full of gays and so is the world of arts. Vercache, the famous courtier was stabbed to death by his partner. He was one of the richest designers in the world and in our little Sri Lanka, the story is the same.

Why is it that ?gayism? (pardon me, that is my own term used) targets brilliant artistes? is it in their own special world where there is no room for women? That is how William Shakespeare looked at them-suicidal, notorious, homicidal, murderous, vain, unfaithful, stupid, crafty, etc.

They were not there in The Dark Lady who boiled down to the Earl of Southampton, perhaps.

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