He was born on 1\u00a0November 1935 \u2013 the Christian All Saints\u2019 Day \u2013 in Warsaw, into an assimilated Jewish family. He started his life as Robert Andrzej Krauthammer, the son of two people who had already grown to hate each other and were then attempting to get a divorce. After his father left for France, the boy remained in Warsaw under the care of his mother, Felicja, and his grandmother, Celina. He was an unruly, stubborn and impossibly talkative child \u2013 as often happens with little geniuses. At age three, he could read fluently in three languages and two alphabets. When it emerged that he was assimilating musical notation and recognizing the structure of the notes on the keyboard with equal ease, his grandmother decided that he would become a great pianist. This was by no means the last of her decisions concerning his fortunes.<\/p>\n
Robert Andrzej at age three. Photo: Tchaikovsky Estate.<\/p>\n Two weeks after Andr\u00e9\u2019s fourth birthday, when the Germans had isolated the ghetto from the rest of the city, Celina announced that she was a Christian and demonstratively moved out from the home of her daughter and grandson. We have every reason to believe that this apparently selfish decision was actually a heroic gesture of care for the family. For two years, the grandmother supplied the two of them with food and other provisions. In his childish opinion, Andr\u00e9 was living a quite normal life: he studied, played out in the courtyard, once or twice saw a corpse on the street, but didn\u2019t grasp the meaning of this scene. If he suffered, it was only because sometimes he wasn\u2019t allowed to play the piano. He had a way around that: he would strike the closed cover of the keyboard with his fingers.<\/p>\n Hell began for the boy in the summer of 1942, in the first months of the shutdown of the ghetto. Celina had false papers done up for the family and decided to bring them out beyond the walls. Felicja would not hear of it: she had fallen madly in love and gotten remarried to Albert Rozenbaum, a wealthy dentist and Jewish Ghetto Police functionary. The grandmother took matters into her own hands. In July, she dressed Andr\u00e9 up as a girl, dyed his hair blond and smuggled him out onto the Aryan side. Felicja and Albert stayed. In August, they both went in one of the transports to Treblinka.<\/p>\n Andr\u00e9 lost his mother, not even knowing about her death \u2013 he felt betrayed and conquered by another man. He lost his identity. From that time onward, his name was Andrzej Robert Jan Czajkowski (later becoming known abroad as Andr\u00e9 Tchaikowsky). In order to make him more believable as a Christian, his grandmother taught him not only the catechism, but also the basics of the peculiar pre-war anti-Semitism. He lost his home, in which it is true that he couldn\u2019t practice the piano, but on the other hand he didn\u2019t have to hide in a closet and take blows from a frustrated woman who was expecting an out-of-wedlock child. He lost faith in people when he was subjected to an operation to reverse his circumcision \u2013 in a private apartment, without anesthesia, without the right to scream. He lost everything, but managed to survive.<\/p>\n Andr\u00e9 Tchaikowsky in 1975. Photo: Sophie Baker.<\/p>\n At the beginning of his new life, he came to hate his grandmother \u2013 in his view, the soulless perpetrator of the sufferings dealt to him. The lost bonds and emotions were replaced with a pathological need for acceptance and love. Those who were unwilling or unable to meet that need were repaid as cruelly as he knew how.<\/p>\n Survivor\u2019s syndrome dogged him to his grave. It had its effect on his relationship with his father, with whom Celina put him in contact a few years after the war, among other things in the hope that Krauthammer would finance his son\u2019s studies at the Paris Conservatory. The matter ended in a fight, complete with name-calling and rearranged faces. The syndrome had its effect on the pianistic career\u00a0 of Andr\u00e9 \u2013 the winner of 8th<\/sup>\u00a0place at the 5th<\/sup>\u00a0Chopin Competition in Warsaw and 3rd<\/sup>\u00a0prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels \u2013 an artist who continued to struggle with paralyzing stage fright, neglected his practicing, treated influential protectors with disdain, offended conductors and orchestra musicians. The syndrome had its effect on his personal relationships, among others Anita Halina Janowska, a friend from the piano studio at the Warsaw State Music College, with whom he corresponded for over a quarter century after leaving Poland in 1956.<\/p>\n For this sensitive woman, who felt genuine affection for him, he basically turned out to be a \u2018guardian devil\u2019 (the title borne by a selection of their letters published for the first time six years after Tchaikowsky\u2019s death, still under the pseudonym Halina Sander). A love impossible to fulfill on account of Andr\u00e9\u2019s sexual orientation \u2013 of which he made no secret \u2013 bore fruit in a bulky volume that deserves to be described in equal measure as a masterpiece of epistolography, and as a blood-chilling testimony to emotional blackmail. Tchaikowsky wrote from Paris, \u2018Halinka! I WANT TO HAVE YOU HERE! [\u2026] I so much want to have someone who will be mine always \u2013 always.\u2019 Janowska wrote back. As if these two children of the Holocaust had to hurt each other in order to be sure of their existence.<\/p>\n Tchaikowsky was always an Anglophile. His decision to move to the United Kingdom \u2013 after several years of couch-surfing in the homes of friends in Brussels in Paris \u2013 was reportedly made after reading the Grossmith brothers\u2019 novel The Diary of a Nobody<\/em>, an 1892 satire of the English petty bourgeoisie. He was drawn to a world that was able to make fun of a \u2018a nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement’. He longed for a bit of stability in a country of uninterrupted cultural tradition.<\/p>\n He rented a house in Cumnor near Oxford, where he could finally give himself over to his passions \u2013 composing, reading and long walks \u2013 without exposing himself to constant pressure from his surroundings. He grew fat, ugly and bald, wrote two piano concerti, two quartets and a handful of vocal works. In 1966, he composed music for an Oxford production of Hamlet<\/em>. Two years later, he began work on The Merchant of Venice<\/em> \u2013 his only and, in the end, unfinished opera, which was borne of a fascination with Shakespeare\u2019s praise of music in the fifth and last act of the play. He worked on the bard of Stratford-on-Avon\u2019s masterpiece together with newly-met stage director and dramaturg John O\u2019Brien. They soon decided that they would take on the entire text. The idea came from O\u2019Brien, who from the beginning could not hide his amazement that Tchaikowsky gave in to his suggestion. The Merchant of Venice<\/em> had for decades kept Shakespeare specialists awake until all hours of the night as they argued over the supposed anti-Semitism of Shakespeare\u2019s text.<\/p>\n Lester Lynch as Shylock in the WNO’s production of The Merchant of Venice<\/em>. Photo: Johan Persson.<\/p>\n And there was something to argue about. Anti-Semitism? But the Jews had been driven out of English in 1290, during the reign of Edward\u00a0I! Shakespeare had no idea of the Jews; he was engaging with a myth, perhaps he envied the success of Marlowe and his revenge tragedy The Jew of Malta<\/em>. Really? What about the scandal featuring Roderigo Lopez, court doctor to Elizabeth\u00a0I and child of Jewish converts, who was condemned to death in 1594 for an attempt to poison the queen? There is much reason to believe that it was he who was the prototype for the character of Shylock. Let us add that The Merchant of Venice<\/em> was a favourite play of the Nazis which, between 1933 and the outbreak of the war, had seen over 50\u00a0new productions in Germany.<\/p>\n There is no way to resolve this dispute. Everyone\u2019s eyes, even those of anti-Semites, start to tear up when Shylock cries out in Act\u00a0III: \u2018Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?\u2019 No one can figure out why Andr\u00e9 Tchaikowsky \u2013 an escapee from the Warsaw ghetto \u2013 composed a concise, dramaturgically coherent opera based on this particular play by Shakespeare. Yet another jester\u2019s gesture? Yet another provocation? Or perhaps a conclusion ahead of his time that over 400 years ago, the bard of Stratford-on-Avon had spoken in the name of all excluded persons? In this opera, Tchaikowsky is not only Shylock \u2013 he is also Antonio submerged in depression, Bassanio longing for happiness, Portia pretending to be someone completely different.<\/p>\n In 1978, most of the material was ready. In April 1981, Tchaikowsky wrote a letter to George Lascelles, Lord Harewood, at the time director of the English National Opera, assuring him that in October, he would present to him the final version of the first two acts. In December, he couldn\u2019t find enough words to praise music director Mark Elder, \u2018a blond of angelic beauty\u2019, as well as a \u2018nearly equally beautiful youth\u2019 in the person of artistic director David Pountney. In March 1982, he noted in his diary that ENO had rejected his proposal to produce The Merchant<\/em>.<\/p>\n He died of cancer on 25\u00a0June, at age\u00a046. He left behind the posthumous wish that his opera someday be produced, as well as his own skull \u2013 left in his will to the Royal Shakespeare Company \u2013 which first dried out for two years on the theater\u2019s roof, then took part in a photo session, appeared in a production of Hamlet<\/em> featuring David Tennant in 2008, after which it was consigned once again to the granary of history.<\/p>\n Nothing more was heard of Tchaikowsky\u2019s The Merchant of Venice<\/em>. Pountney\u2019s conscience awakened only in 2011, after a conversation with Russian musicologist Anastasia Belina Johnson, who drew attention to the English stage director\u2019s interest in the \u0153uvre <\/em>of Mieczys\u0142aw Wajnberg, and reminded him of Tchaikowsky\u2019s opera. Two years later, the work saw its world premi\u00e8re, prepared in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute: at the Bregenz festival, with stage director Keith Warner, in an international cast under the baton of Erik Nielsen, with the phenomenal Adri\u00e1n Er\u0151d in the role of Shylock. In 2014, the show came to the stage of the National Opera in Warsaw. I wrote about it over two years ago on the pages of the Tygodnik Powszechny<\/em> (read here: powszech.net\/shylock).<\/p>\n I am returning to The Merchant <\/em>after my vacation experiences at the Royal Opera House, where the work ended up with the ensembles of the Welsh National Opera, in the same, otherwise good staging, and drew applause not much less than that which accompanied the English premi\u00e8re of Szymanowski\u2019s King Roger<\/em>. Tchaikowsky\u2019s music \u2013 suspended halfway between Berg, Shostakovich, Britten and the composer\u2019s personal idiom \u2013 slowly reveals its deficiencies. It also confirms its strong points: erudite compositional work (at moments, ironically, from under the banner of \u2018the first Tchaikovsky\u2019), dramaturgical coherence and believability of the characters. I shall withhold any objective assessment of The Merchant<\/em> as a music theater work until it begins its parade through Polish and foreign opera stages, in the renditions of other directors as well.<\/p>\n It is a good thing, however, that I went to London for this show. For more and more frequently, I find Szymborska\u2019s words knocking about in my head:<\/p>\n It\u2019s time to take my head in hand Tchaikowsky gave his rotten skull over to theater and opera people perhaps precisely because he did not believe in his own innocence and wait-and-see. It is bitter and characteristic that doubts are still the domain of the excluded.<\/p>\n Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The life of Andr\u00e9 Tchaikowsky was like something out of Shakespeare. His story is a loose tangle of tragic threads with comedy reeking of the grotesque. A narrative in which bitter realism collided with fantastic lies, a narrative populated with a whole host of ambiguous characters \u2013 chief among them the protagonist himself, narcissistic and … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-mangusta","4":"post-2431","6":"format-standard","7":"category-miscellanea","8":"category-posts-in-english"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2431"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2438,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431\/revisions\/2438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/atorod.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/01_600.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nand say: Poor Yorick, where\u2019s your ignorance,
\nwhere\u2019s your blind faith, where\u2019s your innocence,
\nyour wait-and-see, your spirit poised
\nbetween the unproved and the proven truth?<\/p>\n