A last, affectionate look
Three decades ago, in one of modern musicology’s great labours of love, David Brown began work on his definitive four-volume study of Tchaikovsky. Fifteen years after his initial researches, he laid out the composer on his death-bed and pulled up the sheet, so to speak, in 1991. Brown’s efforts transformed Tchaikovsky’s reputation from that of sentimental tunesmith of the ‘1812’ Overture, the B flat Piano Concerto and a few sugary ballets (as they were perceived) to towering figure of late Romanticism and an opera composer of genius. Even the Russians were startled.